'Like he was floating,' I said.
'Ayuh,' Mr Keene agreed. 'And Biff said there was something else, something that bothered him for weeks afterward. One of those things you get right on the tip of your tongue but won't quite come off, or something that lights on your skin like a mosquito or a noseeum. He said he finally figured out what it was one night when he had to get up and tap a kidney. He stood there whizzing into the bowl, thinking of nothing in particular, when it come to him all at once that it was two-twenty-five in the afternoon when the shooting started and the sun was out but that clown didn't cast any shadow. No shadow at all.'
PART 4
JULY OF 1958
'You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty, shaken by your beauty, shaken.'
- William Carlos Williams,
Paterson
'Well I was born in my birthday suit
The doctor slapped my behind
He said "You gonna be special
You sweet little toot toot."'
- Sidney Simien,
'My Toot Toot'
C H A P T E R 1 3
The Apocalyptic Rockfight
1
Bill's there first. He sits in one of the wing-back chairs just inside the Reading Room door watching as Mike deals with the library's last few customers of the night - an old lady with a clutch of paperback gothics, a man with a huge historical tome on the Civil War, and a skinny kid waiting to check out a novel with a seven-day-rental sticker in an upper corner of its plastic cover. Bill sees with no sense of surprise or serendipity at all that it is his own latest novel. He feels that surprise is beyond him, serendipity a believed-in reality that has turned out to be only a dream after all.
A pretty girl, her tartan skirt held together with a big gold safety pin (Christ, I haven't seen one of those in years, Bill thinks, are they coming back?), is feeding quarters into the Xerox machine and copying an off print with one eye on the big pendulum clock behind the checkout desk. The sounds are library-soft and library-comforting: the hush-squeak of soles and heels on the red-and-black linoleum of the floor; the steady lock and tick of the clock dropping off dry seconds; the catlike purr of the copying machine.
The boy takes his William Denbrough novel and goes to the girl at the copier just as she finishes and begins to square up her pages.
'You can just leave that off print on the desk, Mary,' Mike says. 'I'll put it away.'
She flashes a grateful smile. 'Thanks, Mr Hanlon.'
'Goodnight. Goodnight, Billy. The two of you go right home.'
'The boogeyman will get you if you don't . . . watch . . . out!' Billy, the skinny kid, chants, and slips a proprietary arm around the girl's slim waist.
'Well, I don't think he'd want a pair as ugly as you two,' Mike says, 'but be careful, all the same.'
'We will, Mr Hanlon,' Mary replies, seriously enough, and punches the boy lightly on the shoulder. 'Come on, ugly,' she says, and giggles. When she does this she is transformed from a pretty mildly desirable high-school junior into the coltish not-quite-gawky eleven-year-old that Beverly Marsh had been . . . and as they pass him Bill is shaken by her beauty . . . and he feels fear; he wants to go to the boy and tell him earnestly that he must go home by well-lighted streets and not look around if someone speaks.
You can't be careful on a skateboard, mister, a phantom voice says inside his head, and Bill smiles a rueful grownup's smile.
He watches the boy open the door for his girl. They go into the vestibule, moving closer together, and Bill would have bet the royalties of the book the boy named Billy is holding under his arm that he has stolen a kiss before opening the outer door for the girl. More fool you if you didn't, Billy my man, he thinks. Now see her home safe. For Christ's sake see her home safe!
Mike calls, 'Be right with you, Big Bill. Just let me file this.' Bill nods and crosses his legs. The paper bag on his lap crackles a little. There's a pint of bourbon inside and he reckons he has never wanted a drink so badly in his life as he does right now. Mike will be able to supply water, if not ice - and the way he feels right now, a very little water will be enough.
He thinks of Silver, leaning against the wall of Mike's garage on Palmer Lane. And from that his thoughts progress naturally to the day they had met in the Barrens - all except Mike - and each had told his tale again: lepers under porches; mummies who walked on the ice; blood from drains and dead boys in the Standpipe and pictures that moved and werewolves that chased small boys down deserted streets.
They had gone deeper into the Barrens that day before the Fourth of July, he remembers now. It had been hot in town but cool in the tangled shade on the eastern bank of the Kenduskeag. He remembers one of those concrete cylinders not far away, humming to itself the way the Xerox machine had hummed for the pretty high-school girl just now. Bill remembers that, and how, when all the stories were done, the others had looked at him.
They had wanted him to tell them what they should do next, how they should proceed, and he simply didn't know. The not knowing had filled him with a kind of desperation.
Looking at Mike's shadow now, looming large on the darkly paneled wall in the reference room, a sudden sureness comes to him: he hadn't known then because they hadn't been complete when they met that July 3rd afternoon. The completion had come later, at the abandoned gravel-pit beyond the dump, where you could climb out of the Barrens easily on either side - Kansas Street or Merit Street. Right around, in fact, where the Interstate overpass was now. The gravel-pit had no name; it was old, its crumbly sides crabby with weeds and bushes. There had still been plenty of ammunition there - more than enough for an apocalyptic rockfight.
But before that, on the bank of the Kenduskeag, he hadn't been sure what to say - what did they want him to say? What did he want to say? He remembers looking from one face to the next - Ben's; Bev's; Eddie's; Stan's; Richie's. And he remembers
music. Little Richard. 'Whomp-bomp-a-lomp-bomp . . . ' Music. Low. And darts of light in his eyes. He remembers the darts of light because.
2
Richie had hung his transistor radio over the lowermost branch of the tree he was leaning against. Although they were in the shade, the sun bounced off the surface of the Kenduskeag, onto the radio's chrome facing, and from there into Bill's eyes.
T-Take that th-hing d-d-d-own, Ruh-Ruh-Richie,' Bill said. 'It's gonna bun-blind m-m-me.'
'Sure, Big Bill,' Richie said at once, with no smartmouth at all, and removed the radio from the branch. He also turned it off, and Bill wished he hadn't done that; it made the silence, broken only by the rippling water and the vague hum of the sewage-pumping machinery, seem very loud. Their eyes watched him and he wanted to tell them to look somewhere else, what did they think he was, a freak?
But of course he couldn't do that, because all they were doing was waiting for him to tell them what to do now. They had come by dreadful knowledge, and they needed him to tell them what to do with it. Why me! he wanted to shout at them, but of course he knew that, too. It was because, like it or not, he had been tapped for the position. Because he was the idea-man, because he had lost a brother to whatever it was, but most of all because he had become, in some obscure way he would never completely understand, Big Bill.