Richie sympathized and then added in his best Stuttering Bill Voice: “G-G-Give em h-h-hell, Buh-Buh-Big Bih-Bill.”
“Your f-f-face and my buh-buh-butt, T-T-Tozier,” Bill said, and hung up.
He called Eddie Kaspbrak next, but Eddie sounded even more depressed than Bill-his mother had gotten them each a full-day bus-pass, he said, and they were going to visit Eddie’s aunts in Haven and Bangor and Hampden. All three of them were fat, like Mrs Kaspbrak, and all three of them were single.
“They’ll all pinch my cheek and tell me how much I’ve grown,” Eddie said.
“That’s cause they know how cute you are, Eds-just like me. I saw what a cutie you were the first time I met you.”
“Sometimes you’re really a turd, Richie.”
“It takes one to know one, Eds, and you know em all. You gonna be down in the Barrens next week?”
“I guess so, if you guys are. Want to play guns?”
“Maybe. But… I think me and Big Bill have got something to tell you.”
“What?”
“It’s really Bill’s story, I guess. I’ll see you. Enjoy your aunts.”
“Very funny.”
His third call was to Stan the Man, but Stan was in dutch with his folks for breaking their picture window. He had been playing flying-saucer with a pie-plate and it took a bad bank. Kee-rash. He had to do chores all weekend, and probably next weekend, too. Richie commiserated and then asked Stan if he would be coming down to the Barrens next week. Stan said he guessed so, if his father didn’t decide to ground him, or something.
“Jeez, Stan, it was just a window,” Richie said.
“Yeah, but a big one,” Stan said, and hung up.
Richie started to leave the living room, then thought of Ben Hanscom. He thumbed through the telephone book and found a listing for an Arlene Hanscom. Since she was the only lady Hanscom among the four listed, Richie figured it had to be Ben’s number and called.
“I’d like to go, but I already spent my allowance,” Ben said. He sounded depressed and ashamed by the admission-he had, in fact, spent it all on candy, soda, chips, and beef-jerky strips.
Richie, who was rolling in dough (and who didn’t like to go to the movies alone), said: “I got plenty of money. You can gimme owesies.” wooi:”
“Yeah? Really? You’d do that?”
“Sure,” Richie said, puzzled. “Why not?”
“Okay!” Ben said happily. “Okay, that’d be great! Two horror movies! Did you say one was a werewolf picture?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, I love werewolf pictures!”
“Jeez, Haystack, don’t wet your pants.”
Ben laughed. “I’ll see you out in front of the Aladdin, okay?”
“Yeah, great.”
Richie hung up and looked at the phone thoughtfully. It suddenly occurred to him that Ben Hanscom was lonely. And that in turn made him feel rather heroic. He was whistling as he ran upstairs to get some comics to read before the show.
8
The day was sunny, breezy, and cool. Richie jived along Center Street toward the Aladdin, popping his fingers and singing “Rockin” Robin” under his breath. He was feeling good. Going to the movies always made him feel good-he loved that magic world, those magic dreams. He felt sorry for anyone who had dull duties to discharge on such a day-Bill with his speech therapy, Eddie with his aunts, poor old Stan the Man who would be spending the afternoon scraping down the front-porch steps or sweeping the garage because the pie-plate he’d been throwing around swept right when it was supposed to sweep left.
Richie had his yo-yo tucked in his back pocket and now he took it out and tried again to get it to sleep. This was an ability Richie lusted to acquire, but so far, no soap. The crazy l’il fucker just wouldn’t do it. Either it went down and popped right back up or it went down and dropped dead at the end of its string.
Halfway up Center Street Hill he saw a girl in a beige pleated skirt and a white sleeveless blouse sitting on a bench outside Shock’s Drug Store. She was eating what looked like a pistachio ice- cream cone. Bright red-auburn hair, its highlights seeming coppery or sometimes almost blonde, hung down to her shoulderblades. Richie knew only one girl with hair of that particular shade. It was Beverly Marsh.
Richie liked Bev a lot. Well, he liked her, but not that way. He admired her looks (and knew he wasn’t alone-girls like Sally Mueller and Greta Bowie hated Beverly like fire, still too young to understand how they could have everything else so easily… and still have to compete in the matter of looks with a girl who lived in one of those shimmy apartments on Lower Main Street), but mostly he liked her because she was tough and had a really good sense of humor. Also, she usually had cigarettes. He liked her, in short, because she was a good guy. Still, he had once or twice caught himself wondering what color underwear she was wearing under her small selection of rather faded skirts, and that was not the sort of thing you wondered about the other guys, was it?
And, Richie had to admit, she was one hell of a pretty guy.
Approaching the bench where she sat eating her ice cream, Richie belted an invisible topcoat around his middle, pulled down an invisible slouch hat, and pretended to be Humphrey Bogart. Adding the correct Voice, he became Humphrey Bogart-at least to himself. To others he would have sounded like Richie Tozier with a mild headcold.
“Hello, shweetheart,” he said, gliding up to the bench where she was sitting and looking out at the traffic. “No sensh waitin for a bus here. The Nazish have cut off our retreat. The last plane leavesh at midnight. You be on it. He needsh you, shweetheart. So do I… but I’ll get along shomehow.”
“Hi, Richie,” Bev said, and when she turned toward him he saw a purple-blackish bruise on her right cheek, like the shadow of a crow’s wing. He was again struck by her good looks… only it occurred to him now that she might actually be beautiful. It had never really occurred to him until that moment that there might be beautiful girls outside of the movies, or that he himself might know one. Perhaps it was the bruise that allowed him to see the possibility of her beauty-an essential contrast, a particular flaw which first drew attention to itself and then somehow denned the rest: the gray-blue eyes, the naturally red lips, the creamy unblemished child’s skin. There was a tiny spray of freckles across her nose.
“See anything green?” she asked, tossing her head pertly.
“You, shweetheart,” Richie said. “You’ve turned green ash limberger cheese. But when we get you out of Cashablanca, you’re going into the finesht hoshpital money can buy. We’ll turn you white again. I shwear it on my mother’sh name.”
“You’re an asshole, Richie. That doesn’t sound like Humphrey Bogart at all.” But she smiled a little as she said it.
Richie sat down next to her. “You going to the movies?”
“I don’t have any money,” she said. “Can I see your yo-yo?”
He handed it over, “I oughtta take it back,” he told her. “It’s supposed to sleep but it doesn’t. I got japped.”
She poked her finger through the loop of string and Richie pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose so he could watch what she was doing better. She turned her hand over, palm toward the sky, the Duncan yo-yo tucked neatly into the valley of flesh formed by her cupped hand. She rolled the yo-yo off her index finger. It went down to the end of its string and fell asleep. When she twitched her fingers in a come-on gesture it promptly woke up and climbed its string to her palm again.
“Oh bug-dung, look at that,” Richie said.
“That’s kid stuff,” Bev said. “Watch this.” She snapped the yo-yo down again. She let it sleep for a moment and then walked the dog with it in a smart series of snap jerks up the string to her hand again.
“Oh, stop it,” Richie said. “I hate show-offs.”
“Or how about this?” Bev asked, smiling sweetly. She got the yo-yo going back and front, making the red wooden Duncan look like a Bo-Lo Bouncer Richie had had once. She finished with two Around the Worlds (almost hitting a shuffling old lady, who glared at them). The yo-yo ended up in her cupped palm, its string neatly rolled around its spindle. Bev handed it back to Richie and sat down on the bench again. Richie sat down next to her, his jaw hanging agape in perfectly unaffected admiration. Bev looked at him and giggled.
“Shut your mouth, you’re drawing flies.”
Richie shut his mouth with a snap.
“Besides, that last part was just luck. First time in my life I did two Around the Worlds in a row without fizzing out.”
Kids were walking past them now, on their way to the show. Peter Gordon walked by with Marcia Fadden. They were supposed to be going together, but Richie figured it was just that they lived nest door to each other on West Broadway and were such a couple of assholes that they needed each other’s support and attention. Peter Gordon was already getting a pretty good crop of acne, although he was only twelve. He sometimes hung around with Bowers, Criss, and Huggins, but he wasn’t quite brave enough to try anything on his own.
He glanced over at Richie and Bev sitting together on the bench and chanted, “Richie and Beverly up in a tree! Kay-Eye-Ess-Ess-Eye-En-Gee! First comes love, then comes marriage-”
“-and here comes Richie with a baby carriage!” Marcia finished, cawing laughter.
“Sit on this, dear heart,” Bev said, and whipped the finger on them. Marcia looked away, disgusted, as if she could not believe anyone could be so uncouth. Gordon slipped an arm around her and called back over his shoulder to Richie, “Maybe I’ll see you later, four-eyes.”
“Maybe you’ll see your mother’s girdle,” Richie responded smartly (if a little senselessly). Beverly collapsed with laughter. She leaned against Richie’s shoulder for a moment and Richie had just time to reflect that her touch, and the sensation of her lightly carried weight, was not exactly unpleasant. Then she sat up again.
“What a pair of jerks,” she said.
“Yeah, I think Marcia Fadden pees rosewater,” Richie said, and Beverly got the giggles again.
“Chanel Number Five,” she said, her voice muffled because her hands were over her mouth.
“You bet,” said Richie, although he hadn’t the slightest idea what Chanel Number Five was. “Bev?”
“What?”
“Can you show me how to make it sleep?”
“I guess so. I never tried to show anyone.”
“How did you learn? Who showed you?”
She gave him a disgusted look. “No one showed me. I just figured it out. Like twirling a baton. I’m great at that-”
“No conceit in your family,” Richie said, rolling his eyes.
“Well, I am,” she said. “But I didn’t take classes, or anything.”
