It

“But Stan’s got a regular nose and he’s always broke,” Eddie said.

“Yeah,” Bill said, and broke into a real grin for the first time that day.

Ben grinned.

Eddie grinned.

Bill tossed the board aside, got up and brushed off the seat of his jeans. He walked to the edge of the stream and the other two boys joined him. Bill shoved his hands in his back pockets and sighed deeply. Eddie was sure Bill was going to say something serious. He looked from Eddie to Ben and then back to Eddie again, not smiling now. Eddie was suddenly afraid.

But all Bill said then was, “You got your ah-ah-aspirator, E-Eddie?”

Eddie slapped his pocket. “I’m loaded for bear.”

“Say, how’d it work with the chocolate milk?” Ben asked.

Eddie laughed. “Worked great!” he said. He and Ben broke up while Bill looked at them, smiling but puzzled. Eddie explained and Bill nodded, grinning again.

“E-E-Eddie’s muh-hum is w-w-worried that h-he’s g-gonna break and sh-she wuh-hon’t be able to g-get a re-re-refund.”

Eddie snorted and made as if to push him into the stream.

“Watch it, fuckface,” Bill said, sounding uncannily like Henry Bowers. “I’ll twist your head so far around you’ll be able to watch when you wipe yourself.”

Ben collapsed, shrieking with laughter. Bill glanced at him, still smiling, hands still in the back pockets of his jeans, smiling, yeah, but a little distant again, a little vague. He looked at Eddie and then cocked his head toward Ben.

“Kid’s suh-suh-soft,” he said.

“Yeah,” Eddie agreed, but he felt somehow that they were only going through the motions of having a good time. Something was on Bill’s mind. He supposed Bill would spill it when he was ready; the question was, did Eddie want to hear what it was? “Kid’s mentally retarded.”

“retreaded,” Ben said, still giggling.

“Y-You g-g-gonna sh-show us how to b-build a dam or a-are you g-g-gonna si-hit there on your b-big c-c-can all d-day?”

Ben got to his feet again. He looked first at the stream, flowing past them at moderate speed. The Kenduskeag was not terribly wide this far up in the Barrens, but it had defeated them yesterday just the same. Neither Eddie nor Bill had been able to figure out how to get a foothold on the current. But Ben was smiling, the smile of one who contemplates doing something new… something that will be fun but not very hard. Eddie thought: He knows how-I really think he does.

“Okay,” he said. “You guys want to take your shoes off, because you’re gonna get your little footsies wet.”

The mind-mother in Eddie’s head spoke up at once, her voice as stern and commanding as the voice of a traffic cop: Don’t you dare do it, Eddie! Don’t you dare! Wet feet, that’s one way-one of the thousands of ways-that colds start, and colds lead to pneumonia, so don’t you do it!

Bill and Ben were sitting on the bank, pulling off their sneakers and socks. Ben was fussily rolling up the legs of his jeans. Bill looked up at Eddie. His eyes were clear and warm, sympathetic. Eddie was suddenly sure Big Bill knew exactly what he had been thinking, and he was ashamed.

“Y-You c-c-comin?”

“Yeah, sure,” Eddie said. He sat down on the bank and undressed his feet while his mother ranted inside his head… but her voice was growing steadily more distant and echoey, he was relieved to note, as if someone had stuck a heavy fishhook through the back of her blouse and was now reeling her away from him down a very long corridor.

3

It was one of those perfect summer days which, in a world where everything was on track and on the beam, you would never forget. A moderate breeze kept the worst of the mosquitoes and blackflies away. The sky was a bright, crisp blue. Temperatures were in the low seventies. Birds sang and went about their birdy-business in the bushes and second-growth trees. Eddie had to use his aspirator once, and then his chest lightened and his throat seemed to widen magically to the size of a freeway. He spent the rest of the morning with it stuffed forgotten into his back pocket.

Ben Hanscom, who had seemed so timid and unsure the day before, became a confident general once he was fully involved in the actual construction of the dam. Every now and then he would climb the bank and stand there with his muddy hands on his hips, looking at the work in progress and muttering to himself. Sometimes he would run a hand through his hair, and by eleven o’clock it was standing up in crazy, comical spikes.

Eddie felt uncertainty at first, then a sense of glee, and finally an entirely new feeling-one that was at the same time weird, terrifying, and exhilarating. It was a feeling so alien to his usual state of being that he was not able to put a name to it until that night, lying in bed and looking at the ceiling and replaying the day. Power. That was what that feeling had been. Power. It was going to work, by God, and it was going to work better than he and Bill-maybe even Ben himself-had dreamed it could.

He could see Bill getting involved, too-only a little at first, still mulling over whatever it was he had on his mind, and then, bit by bit, committing himself fully. Once or twice he clapped Ben on one meaty shoulder and told him he was unbelievable. Ben flushed with pleasure each time.

Ben got Eddie and Bill to set one of the boards across the stream and hold it as he used the sledgehammer to seat it in the streambed. There-it’s in, but you’ll have to hold it or the current’ll just pull it loose,” he told Eddie, so Eddie stood in the middle of the stream holding the board while water sluiced over its top and made his hands into wavering starfish shapes.

Ben and Bill located a second board two feet downstream of the first. Ben used the sledge again to seat it and Bill held it while Ben began to fill up the space between the two boards with sandy earth from the stream-bank. At first it only washed away around the ends of the boards in gritty clouds and Eddie didn’t think it was going to work at all, but when Ben began adding rocks and muddy gook from the streambed, the clouds of escaping silt began to diminish. In less than twenty minutes he had created a heaped brown canal of earth and stones between the two boards in the middle of the stream. To Eddie it looked like an optical illusion.

“If we had real cement… instead of just… mud and rocks, they’d have to move the whole city… over to the Old Cape side by the middle of next week,” Ben said, slinging the shovel aside at last and sitting on the bank until he got his breath back. Bill and Eddie laughed, and Ben grinned at them. When he grinned, there was a ghost of the handsome man he would become in the lines of his face. Water had begun to pile up behind the upstream board now.

Eddie asked what they were going to do about the water escaping around the sides.

“Let it go. It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t explain exactly. You gotta let some out, though.”

“How do you know?”

Ben shrugged. I just do, the shrug said, and Eddie was silenced.

When he was rested, Ben got a third board-the thickest of the four or five he had carried laboriously across town to the Barrens-and placed it carefully against the downstream board, wedging one end firmly into the streambed and socking the other against the board Bill had been holding, creating the strut he had put in his little drawing the day before.

“Okay,” he said, standing back. He grinned at them. “You guys should be able to let go now. The gook in between the two boards will take most of the water pressure. The strut will take the rest.”

“Won’t the water wash it away?” Eddie asked.

“Nope. The water is just gonna push it in deeper.’

’And if you’re ruh-ruh-wrong, we g-get to k-k-kill yuh-you,” Bill said.

“That’s cool,” Ben said amiably.

Bill and Eddie stepped back. The two boards that formed the basis of the dam creaked a little, tilted a little… and that was all.

“Hot shit!” Eddie screamed, excited.

“It’s g-g-great,” Bill said, grinning.

“Yeah,” Ben said. “Let’s eat.”

4

They sat on the bank and ate, not talking much, watching the water stack up behind the dam and sluice around the ends of the boards. They had already done something to the geography of the streambanks, Eddie saw: the diverted current was cutting scalloped hollows into them. As he watched, the new course of the stream undercut the bank enough on the far side to cause a small avalanche.

Upstream of the dam the water formed a roughly circular pool, and at one place it had actually overflowed the bank. Bright, reflecting rills ran off into the grass and the underbrush. Eddie slowly began to realize what Ben had known from the first: the dam was already built. The gaps between the boards and the banks were sluiceways. Ben had not been able to tell Eddie this because he did not know the word. Above the boards the Kenduskeag had taken on a swelled look. The chuckling sound of shallow water babbling its way over stones and gravel was now gone; all the stones upstream of the dam were underwater. Every now and then more sod and dirt, undercut by the widening stream, would fall into the water with a splash.

Downstream of the dam the watercourse was nearly empty; thin trickles ran restlessly down its center, but that was about all. Stones which had been underwater for God knew how long were drying in the sun. Eddie looked at these drying stones with mild wonder… and that weird other feeling. They had done this. They. He saw a frog hopping along and thought maybe old Mr Froggy was wondering just where the water had gone. Eddie laughed out loud.

Ben was neatly stowing his empty wrappers in the lunchbag he had brought. Both Eddie and Bill had been amazed by the size of the repast Ben had laid out with businesslike efficiency: two PB amp;J sandwiches, one baloney sandwich, a hardcooked egg (complete with a pinch of salt twisted up in a small piece of waxed paper), two fig-bars, three large chocolate chip cookies, and a Ring- Ding.

“What did your ma say when she saw how bad you got racked?” Eddie asked him.

“Hmmmm?” Ben looked up from the spreading pool of water behind the dam and belched gently against the back of his hand. “Oh! Well, I knew she’d be grocery-shopping yesterday afternoon, so I was able to beat her home. I took a bath and washed my hair. Then I threw away the jeans and the sweatshirt I was wearing. I don’t know if she’ll notice they’re gone or not. Probably not the sweatshirt, I got lots of sweatshirts, but I guess I ought to buy myself a new pair of jeans before she gets nosing through my drawers.”

The thought of wasting his money on such a nonessential item cast momentary gloom across Ben’s face.