IT [en]

    The proprietor shrugged. His left hand finally came up again. 'Got a boy?'

    'Y-Yes.'

    'How old is he?'

    'Eh-Eh-Eleven.'

    'Big bike for an eleven-year-old.'

    'Will you take a traveller's check?'

    'Long as it's no more than ten bucks over the amount of the purchase.'

    'I can give you a twenty,' Bill said. 'Mind if I make a phone call?'

    'Not if it's local.'

    'It is.'

    'Be my guest.'

    Bill called the Derry Public Library. Mike was there. 'Where are you, Bill?' he asked, and then immediately: 'Are you all right?'

    'I'm fine. Have you seen any of the others?'

    'No. We'll see them tonight.' There was a brief pause. That is, I presume. What can I do you for, Big Bill?'

    'I'm buying a bike,' Bill said calmly. 'I wondered if I could wheel it up to your house. Do you have a garage or something I could store it in?'

    There was silence.

    'Mike? Are you - '

    'I'm here,' Mike said. 'Is it Silver?'

    Bill looked at the proprietor. He was reading his book again . . . or maybe

just looking at it and listening carefully.

    'Yes,' he said.

    'Where are you?'

    'It's called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes.'

    'All right,' Mike said. 'My place is 61 Palmer Lane. You'd want to go up

MainStreet - '

    'I can find it.'

    'All right, I'll meet you there. Want some supper?' 

    'That would be nice. Can you get off work?'

    'No problem. Carole will cover for me.' Mike hesitated again. 'She said that a fellow was in about an hour before I got back here. Said he left looking like a ghost. I got her to describe him. It was Ben.'

    'You sure?'

    'Yeah. And the bike. That's part of it, too, isn't it?'

    'Shouldn't wonder,' Bill said, keeping an eye on the proprietor, who still

appeared to be absorbed in his book.

    'I'll see you at my place,' Mike said. 'Number 61. Don't forget.'

    'I won't. Thank you, Mike.'

    'God bless, Big Bill.'

    Bill hung up. The proprietor promptly closed his book again. 'Got you some storage space, my friend?'

    'Yeah.' Bill took out his traveller's checks and signed his name to a twenty. The proprietor examined the two signatures with a care that, in less distracted mental circumstances, Bill would have found rather insulting.

    At last the proprietor scribbled a bill of sale and popped the traveller's check into his old cash register. He got up, put his hands on the small of his back and stretched, then walked to the front of the store. He picked his way around the heaps of junk and almost-junk merchandise with an absent delicacy Bill found fascinating.

    He lifted the bike, swung it around, and rolled it to the edge of the display space. Bill laid hold of the handlebars to help him, and as he did another shudder whipped through him. Silver. Again. It was Silver in his hands and

    (he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts)

    he had to force the thought away because it made him feel faint and strange.

    'That back tire's a little soft,' the proprietor said (it was, in fact, as flat as a pancake). The front tire was up, but so bald the cord was showing through in places.

    'No problem,' Bill said.

    'You can handle it from here?'

    (I used to be able to handle it just fine; now I don't know)

    'I guess so,' Bill said. 'Thanks.'

    'Sure. And if you want to talk about that barber pole, come back.'

    The proprietor held the door for him. Bill walked the bike out, turned left, and started toward Main Street. People glanced with amusement and curiosity at the man with the bald head pushing the huge bike with the flat rear tire and the oogah-horn protruding over the rusty bike-basket, but Bill hardly noticed them. He was marvelling at how well his grownup hands still fitted the rubber handgrips, was remembering how he had always meant to knot some thin strips of plastic, different colors, into the holes in each grip so they would flutter in the wind. He had never gotten around to that.

    He stopped at the corner of Center and Main, outside of Mr Paperback. He leaned the bike against the building long enough to strip off his sportcoat. Pushing a bike with a flat tire was hard work, and the afternoon had come off hot. He tossed the coat into the basket and went on.

    Chain's rusty, he thought. Whoever had it didn't take very good care of

    (him)

    it.

    He stopped for a moment, frowning, trying to remember just what had happened to Silver. Had he sold it? Given it away? Lost it, perhaps? He couldn't remember. Instead, that idiotic sentence

    (his fists against the posts and still insists)

    resurfaced, as strange and out of place as an easy chair on a battlefield, a record-player in a fireplace, a row of pencils protruding from a cement sidewalk.

    Bill shook his head. The sentence broke up and dispersed like smoke. He pushed Silver on to Mike's place.

 

 

6

Mike Hanlon Makes a Connection

 

But first he made supper - hamburgers with sauteed mushrooms and onions and a spinach salad. They had finished working on Silver by then and were more than ready to eat.

    The house was a neat little Cape Cod, white with green trim. Mike had just been arriving when Bill pushed Silver up Palmer Lane. He was behind the wheel of an old Ford with rusty rocker panels and a cracked rear window, and Bill remembered the fact Mike had so quietly pointed out: the six members of the Losers' Club who left Derry had quit being losers. Mike had stayed behind and was still behind.

    Bill rolled Silver into Mike's garage, which was floored with oiled dirt and was every bit as neat as the house proved to be. Tools hung from pegs, and the lights, shielded with tin cones, looked like the lights which hang over pool tables. Bill leaned the bike against the wall. The two of them looked at it without speaking for a bit, hands in pockets.

    'It's Silver, all right,' Mike said at last. 'I thought you might have been wrong. But it's him. What are you going to do with him?'

    'Fucked if I know. Have you got a bicycle pump?'

    'Yeah. I think I've got a tire-patching kit, too. Are those tubeless tires?'

    'They always were.' Bill bent down to look at the flat tire. 'Yeah. Tubeless.'

    'Getting ready to ride it again?'

    'Of c-course not,' Bill said sharply. 'I just don't like to see it si-hi-hitting there on a flat.'

    'Whatever you say, Big Bill. You're the boss.'

    Bill looked around sharply at that, but Mike had gone to the garage's back wall and was taking down a tire-pump. He got a tin tire-patching kit from one of the cabinets and handed it to Bill, who looked at it curiously. It was as he remembered such things from his childhood: a small tin box of about the same size and shape as those kept by men who roll their own cigarettes, except the top was bright and pebbled - you used it for roughing the rubber around the hole before you put on the patch. The box looked brand-new, and there was a Woolco price sticker on it that said $7.23. It seemed to him that when he was a kid such a kit had gone for about a buck-twenty-five.

    'You didn't just have this hanging around,' Bill said. It wasn't a question.

    'No,' Mike agreed. 'I bought it last week. Out at the mall, as a matter of fact.'         

    'You've got a bike of your own?'

    'No,' Mike said, meeting his eyes.

    'You just happened to buy this kit.'

    'Just got the urge,' Mike agreed, his eyes still on Bill's. 'Woke up thinking it might come in handy. The thought kept coming back all day. So . . . I got the kit. And here you are to use it.'