In the beginning, Bill almost did kill himself. The first ride on his new bike ended with Bill dumping it on purpose to keep from running smack into the board fence at the end of Kossuth Lane (he had not been so afraid of running into the fence as he had been of bashing right through it and falling sixty feet into the Barrens). He came away from that one with a five-inch gash running between the wrist and elbow of his left arm. Not even a week later he had found himself unable to brake soon enough and had shot through the intersection of Witcham and Jackson at perhaps thirty-five miles an hour, a little kid on a dusty gray mastodon of a bike (Silver was silver only by the most energetic reach of a willing imagination), playing cards machine-gunning the spokes of the front and back wheels in a steady roar, and if a car had been coming he would have been dead meat. Just like Georgie.
He got control of Silver little by little as the spring advanced. Neither of his parents noticed during that time that he was conning death by bicycle. He thought that, “after the first few days, they had ceased to really see his bike at all-to them it was just a relic with chipped paint which leaned against the garage wall on rainy days.
Silver was a lot more than some dusty old relic, though. He didn’t look like much, but he went like the wind. Bill’s friend-his only real friend-was a kid named Eddie Kaspbrak, and Eddie was good with mechanical things. He had shown Bill how to get Silver in shape-which bolts to tighten and check regularly, where to oil the sprockets, how to tighten the chain, how to put on a bike patch so it would stay if you got a flat.
“You oughtta paint it,” he remembered Eddie saying one day, but Bill didn’t want to paint Silver. For reasons he couldn’t even explain to himself he wanted the Schwinn just the way it was. It looked like a real bow-wow, the sort of bike a careless kid regularly left out on his lawn in the rain, a bike that would be all squeaks and shudders and slow friction. It looked like a bow-wow but it went like the wind. It would -
’It would beat the devil,” he says aloud, and laughs. His fat seatmate looks at him sharply; the laugh has that howling quality that gave Audra the creeps earlier.
Yes, it looked pretty shoddy, with its old paint and the oldfashioned package carrier mounted above the back wheel and the ancient oogah-horn with its black rubber bulb-that horn was permanently welded to the handlebars with a rusty bolt the size of a baby’s fist. Pretty shoddy.
But could Silver go? Could he? Christ!
And it was a damned good thing he could, because Silver had saved Bill Denbrough’s life in the fourth week of June 1958-the week after he met Ben Hanscom for the first lime, the week after he and Ben and Eddie built the dam, the week that Ben and Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier and Beverly Marsh showed up in the Barrens after the Saturday matinee. Richie had been riding behind him, on Silver’s package carrier, the day Silver had saved Bill’s life… so he supposed Silver had saved Richie’s, too. And he remembered the house they had been running from, all right. He remembered that just fine. That damned house on Neibolt Street.
He had raced to beat the devil that day, oh yeah, for sure, don’t you just know it. Some devil with eyes as shiny as old deadly coins. Some hairy old devil with a mouthful of bloody teeth. But all that had come later. If Silver had saved Richie’s life and his own that day, then perhaps he had saved Eddie Kaspbrak’s on the day Bill and Eddie met Ben by the kicked-apart remains of their dam in the Barrens. Henry Bowers-who looked a little bit like someone had run him through a Disposall-had mashed Eddie’s nose and then Eddie’s asthma had come on strong and few aspirator turned up empty. So it had been Silver that day too, Silver to the rescue.
Bill Denbrough, who hasn’t been on a bicycle in almost seventeen years, looks out the window of an airplane that would not have been credited-or even imagined, outside of a science-fiction magazine-in the year 1958. Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYY! he thinks, and has to close his eyes against the sudden needling sting of tears.
What happened to Silver? He can’t remember. That pan of the set is still dark; that klieg has yet to be turned on. Perhaps that is just as well. Perhaps that is a mercy.
Hi-yo.
Hi-yo Silver.
Hi-yo Silver.
2
“AWAYYY!” he shouted. The wind tore the words back over his shoulder like a fluttering crepe streamer. They came out big and strong, those words, in a triumphant roar. They were the only ones that ever did.
He pedaled down Kansas Street toward town, gaining speed slowly at first. Silver rolled once he got going, but getting going was a job and a half. Watching the gray bike pick up speed was a little like watching a big plane roll down the runway. At first you couldn’t believe such a huge waddling gadget could ever actually leave the earth-the idea was absurd. But then you could see its shadow beneath it, and before you even had time to wonder if it was a mirage, the shadow was trailing out long behind it and the plane was up, cutting its way through the air, as sleek and graceful as a dream in a satisfied mind.
Silver was like that.
Bill got a little downhill stretch and began to pedal faster, his legs pumping up and down as he stood forward over the bike’s fork. He had learned very quickly-after being bashed a couple of times by that fork in the worst place a boy can be bashed-to yank his underpants up as high as he could before mounting Silver. Later that summer, observing this process, Richie would say, Bill does that because he thinks he might like to have some kids that live someday. It seems like a bad idea to me, but hey! they might always take after his wife, right?
He and Eddie had lowered the seat as far as it would go, and it now bumped and scraped against the small of his back as he worked the pedals. A woman digging weeds in her flower-garden shaded her eyes to watch him pass. She smiled a little. The boy on the huge bike reminded her of a monkey she had once seen riding a unicycle in the Barnum amp; Bailey Circus. He’s apt to kill himself, though, she thought, turning back to her garden. That bike is too big for him. It was none of her problem, though.
3
Bill had had more sense than to argue with the big boys when they broke out of the bushes, looking like ill-tempered hunters on the track of a beast which had already mauled one of them. Eddie, however, had rashly opened his mouth and Henry Bowers had unloaded on him.
Bill knew who they were, all right; Henry, Belch, and Victor were just about the worst kids in Derry School. They had beaten up on Richie Tozier, who Bill sometimes chummed with, a couple of times. The way Bill looked at it, this was partly Richie’s own fault; he was not known as Trashmouth for nothing.
One day in April Richie had said something about their collars as the three of them passed by in the schoolyard. The collars had all been turned up, just like Vie Morrow’s in The Blackboard Jungle. Bill, who had been sitting against the building nearby and listlessly shooting a few marbles, hadn’t really caught all of it. Neither did Henry and his friends… but they heard enough to turn in Richie’s direction. Bill supposed Richie had meant to say whatever he said in a low voice. The trouble was, Richie didn’t really have a low voice.
“What’d you say, you little four-eyes geek?” Victor Criss enquired.
“I didn’t say nothing,” Richie said, and that disclaimer-along with his face, which looked quite sensibly dismayed and scared-might have ended it. Except that Richie’s mouth was like a half-tamed horse that has a way of bolting for absolutely no reason at all. Now it suddenly added: “You ought to dig the wax out of your ears, big fella. Want some blasting powder?”
They stood looking at him incredulously for a moment, and then they took after him. Stuttering Bill had watched the unequal race from its start to its preordained conclusion from his place against the side of the building. No sense getting involved; those three galoots would be just as happy to beat up on two kids for the price of one.
Richie ran diagonally across the little-kids” playyard, leaping over the teeter-totters and dodging among the swings, realizing he had run into a blind alley only when he struck the chainlink fence between the playyard and the park which abutted the school grounds. So he tried to go up the chainlink, all clutching fingers and pointing seeking sneaker-toes, and he was maybe two-thirds of the way to the top when Henry and Victor Criss hauled him back down again, Henry getting him by the back of the jacket and Victor grabbing the seat of his jeans. Richie was screaming when they peeled him off the fence. He hit the asphalt on his back. His glasses flew off. He reached for them and Belch Huggins kicked them away and that was why one of the bows was mended with adhesive tape this summer.
Bill had winced and walked around to the front of the building. He had observed Mrs Moran, one of the fourth-grade teachers, already hurrying over to break things up, but he knew they would get Richie hard before then, and by the time she actually arrived, Richie would be crying. Bawl-baby, bawl-baby, lookit-the-baby-bawl.
Bill had only had minor problems with them. They made fun of his stutter, of course. An occasional random cruelty came with the jibes; one rainy day as they were going to lunch in the gym, Belch Huggins had knocked Bill’s lunchbag out of his hand and had stomped it flat with one engineer boot, squishing everything inside.
“Oh, juh-juh-gee!” Belch cried in mock horror, raising his hands and fluttering them about his face. “suh-suh-sorry about your l-l-lunch, fuh-huh-huck-face!” And he had strolled off down the hall toward where Victor Criss was leaning against the drinking fountain outside the boys’-room door, just about laughing himself into a hernia. That hadn’t been so bad, though; Bill had cadged half a PB amp; J off Eddie Kaspbrak, and Richie was happy to give him his devilled egg, one of which his mother packed in his lunch about every second day and which made him want to puke, he claimed.
But you had to stay out of their way, and if you couldn’t do that you had to try and be invisible.
Eddie forgot the rules, so they creamed him.
He hadn’t been too bad until the big boys went downstream and splashed across to the other side, even though his nose was bleeding like a fountain. When Eddie’s snotrag was soaked through, Bill had given him his own and made him put a hand on the nape of his neck and lean his head back. Bill could remember his mother getting Georgie to do that, because Georgie sometimes got nosebleeds -
Oh but it hurt to think about George.
It wasn’t until the sound of the big boys” buffalolike progress through the Barrens had died away completely, and Eddie’s nose-bleed had actually stopped, that his asthma got bad. He started heaving for air, his hands opening and then snapping shut like weak traps, his respiration a fluting whistle in his throat.
“Shit!” Eddie gasped. “Asthma! Gripes!”
He scrambled for his aspirator and finally got it out of his pocket. It looked almost like a bottle of Windex, the kind with the sprayer attachment on top. He jammed it into his mouth and punched the trigger.
“Better?” Bill asked anxiously.
“No. It’s empty.” Eddie looked at Bill with panicked eyes that said I’m caught, Bill! I’m caught!
The empty aspirator rolled away from his hand. The stream chuckled on, not caring in the least that Eddie Kaspbrak could barely breathe. Bill thought randomly that the big boys had been right about one thing: it had been a real baby dam. But they had been having fun, dammit, and he felt a sudden dull fury that it should have come to this.
Tuh-tuh-take it easy, Eh-Eddie,” he said.
For the next forty minutes or so Bill sat next to him, his expectation that Eddie’s asthma attack would at any moment let up gradually fading into unease. By the time Ben Hanscom appeared, the unease had become real fear. It not only wasn’t letting up; it was getting worse. And the Center Street Drug, where Eddie got his refills, was three miles away, almost. What il he went to get Eddie’s stuff and came back to rind Eddie unconscious? Unconscious or
(don’t shit please don’t think that)
or even dead, his mind insisted implacably.
