'How do you like that, Niggerdog?' Henry asked it, and it rolled its dying eyes up at the sound of Henry's voice and tried to wag its tail. 'Did you like your lunch, you shitty mutt?'
When the dog was dead, Henry removed the clothesline, went home, and told his father what he had done. Oscar Bowers was extremely crazy by that time; a year later his wife would leave him after he beat her nearly to death. Henry was likewise frightened of his father and felt a terrible hate for him sometimes, but he also loved him. And that afternoon, after he had told, he felt he had finally found the key to his father's affections, because his father had clapped him on the back (so hard that Henry almost fell over), taken him in the living room, and given him a beer. It was the first beer Henry had ever had, and for all the rest of his years he would associate that taste with positive emotions: victory and love.
'Here's to a good job well done,' Henry's crazy father had said. They clicked their brown bottles together and drank them down. So far as Henry knew, the niggers had never found out who killed their dog, but he supposed they had their suspicions. He hoped they did.
The others in the Losers' Club knew Mike by sight - in a town where he was the only Negro child, it would have been strange if they had not - but that was all, because Mike didn't go to Derry Elementary School. His mother was a devout Baptist and Mike was therefore sent to the Neibolt Street Church School. In between geography, reading, and arithuaetic there were Bible drills, lessons on such subjects as The Meaning of the Ten Commandments in a Godless World, and discussion-groups on how to handle everyday moral problems (if you saw a buddy shoplifting, for instance, or heard a teacher taking the name of God in vain).
Mike thought the Church School was okay. There were times when he suspected, in a vague way, that he was missing some things - a wider communication with kids his own age perhaps - but he was willing to wait until high school for these things to happen. The prospect made him a little nervous because his skin was brown, but both his mother and father had been well treated in town as far as Mike could see, and Mike believed he would be treated well if he treated others the same way.
The exception to this rule, of course, was Henry Bowers.
Although he tried to show it as little as possible, Mike went in constant terror of Henry. In 1958 Mike was slim and well built, taller than Stan Uris but not quite as tall as Bill Denbrough. He was fast and agile, and that had saved him from several beatings at Henry's hands. And, of course, he went to a different school. Because of that and the age difference, their paths rarely coincided. Mike took pains to keep things that way. So the irony was this: although Henry hated Mike Hanlon more than any other kid in Derry, Mike had been the least hurt of any of them.
Oh, he had taken his lumps. The spring after he had killed Mike's dog, Henry sprang out of the bushes one day while Mike was walking toward town to go to the library. It was late March, warm enough for bike-riding, but in those days Witcham Road turned to dirt just beyond the Bowers place, which meant that it was a quagmire of mud - no good for bikes.
'Hello, nigger,' Henry had said, emerging from the bushes, grinning.
Mike backed off, eyes flicking warily right and left, watching for a chance to get away. He knew that if he could buttonhook around Henry, he could outdistance him. Henry was big and Henry was strong, but Henry was also slow.
'Gonna make me a tarbaby,' Henry said, advancing on the smaller boy. 'You're not black enough, but I'll fix that.'
Mike cut his eyes to the left and twitched his body in that direction. Henry took the bait and broke that way - too fast and too far to pull himself back. Reversing with a sweet and natural speed, Mike took off to the right (in high school he would make the varsity football team as a tailback his sophomore year, and was only kept from breaking the school's all-time scoring record by a broken leg halfway through his senior season). He would have made it easily past Henry but for the mud. It was greasy, and Mike slipped to his knees. Before he could get up, Henry was upon him.
'Niggerniggernigger!' Henry cried in a kind of religious ecstasy as he rolled Mike over. Mud went up the back of Mike's shirt and down the back of his pants. He could feel it squeezing into his shoes. But he did not begin to cry until Henry slathered mud across his face, plugging up both of his nostrils.
'Now you're black!' Henry had screamed gleefully, rubbing mud in Mike's hair. 'Now you're REEEELY black!' He ripped up Mike's poplin jacket and the tee-shirt beneath and slammed a poultice of mud down over the boy's bellybutton. 'Now you're as black as midnight in a MINESHAFT!' Henry screamed triumphantly, and slammed mudplugs into both of Mike's ears. Then he stood back, muddy hands hooked into his belt, and yelled: 'I killed your dog, black boy!' But Mike did not hear this because of the mud in his ears and his own terrified sobs.
Henry kicked a final sticky clot of mud onto Mike and then turned and walked home, not looking back. A few moments later, Mike got up and did the same, still weeping.
His mother was of course furious; she wanted Will Hanlon to call Chief Borton and have him out to the Bowers house before the sun went down. 'He's been after Mikey before,' Mike heard her say. He was sitting in the bathtub and his parents were in the kitchen. This was his second tub of water; the first had turned black almost the moment he had stepped into it and sat down. In her fury, his mother had lapsed into a thick Texas patois Mike could barely understand. 'You put the law on him, Will Hanlon! Both the dog and the pup! You law em, hear me?'
Will heard, but did not do as his wife asked. Eventually, when she cooled down (by then it was that night and Mike two hours asleep), he refreshed her on the facts of life. Chief Borton was not Sheriff Sullivan. If Borton had been sheriff when the incident of the poisoned chickens occurred, Will would never have gotten his two hundred dollars and would have had to be content with that state of affairs. Some men would stand behind you and some men wouldn't; Borton was of the latter type. He was, in fact, a jellyfish.
'Mike has had trouble with that kid before, yes,' he told Jessica. 'But he hasn't had much because he's careful around Henry Bowers. This will serve to make him more careful.'
'You mean you're just going to let it go?'
'Bowers has told his son stories about his dealings with me, I guess,' Will said, 'and his son hates the three of us because of them, and because his father has also told him that hating niggers is what men are supposed to do. It all comes back to that. I can't change the fact that our son is a Negro any more than I can sit here and tell you that Henry Bowers is going to be the last one to take after him because his skin's brown. He's going to have to deal with it all the rest of his life, as I have dealt with it, and you have dealt with it. Why, right there in that Christian school you were bound he was going to go to the teacher told them blacks weren't as good as whites because Noah's son Ham looked at his father while he was drunk and naked and Noah's other two boys cast their eyes aside. That's why the sons of Ham were condemned to always be hewers of wood and drawers of water, she said. And Mikey said she was lookin right at him while she told that story to them.'
Jessica looked at her husband, mute and miserable. Two tears fell, one from each eye, and tracked slowly down her face. 'Isn't there ever any getting away from it?'