'Good deal!' he said. 'Wow! Great!'
Bill collapsed to the ground. 'Can I h-have my heart a-a-attack now or do I h-have to wuh-wait until luh-hater?'
'Have it later,' Ben said absently. He had brought a few tools of his own down to the Barrens and was now going over the new boards carefully, pounding out nails and removing screws. He tossed one aside because it was splintered. Rapping on another returned a dull punky sound in at least three places, and he also tossed that one aside. Eddie sat on a pile of dirt, watching him. He took a honk on his aspirator as Ben pulled a rusty nail from a board with the claw end of his hammer. The nail squealed like some small unpleasant animal that had been stepped on and didn't like it.
'You can get tetanus if you cut yourself on a rusty nail,' Eddie informed Ben.
'Yeah?' Richie said. 'What's titnuss? Sounds like a woman's disease.'
'You're a bird,' Eddie said. 'It's tetanus, not titnuss, and it means lock jaw. There's these special microbes that grow in rust, see, and if you cut yourself they can get inside your body and, um, fuck up your nerves.' Eddie went an even darker red and took another fast honk on his aspirator.
'Lock jaw, Jesus,' Richie said, impressed. 'That sounds mean.'
'You bet. First your jaw locks up so tight you can't open your mouth, not even to eat. They have to cut a hole in your cheek and feed you liquids through a tube.'
'Oh man,' Mike said, standing up in the hole. His eyes were wide, the corneas very white in his brown face. 'For sure?'
'My mom told me,' Eddie said. 'Then your throat locks up and you can't eat anymore and you starve to death.'
They contemplated this horror in silence.
'There's no cure,' Eddie amplified.
More silence.
'So,' Eddie said briskly, 'I always watch out for rusty nails and shit like that. I had to have a tetanus shot once and it really hurt.'
'So why'd you go to the dump with Bill and bring all this crap back?' Richie asked.
Eddie glanced briefly at Bill, who was looking into the clubhouse, and there was all the love and hero-worship in that gaze needed to answer such a question but Eddie said softly, 'Some stuff has to be done even if there is a risk. That's the first important thing I ever found out I didn't find out from my mother.'
A further silence, not quite uncomfortable, followed. Then Ben went back to pounding out rusty nails, and after awhile Mike Hanlon joined him.
Richie's transistor, robbed of its voice (at least until Richie's allowance came in or he found a lawn to mow), swung from its low branch in a mild breeze. Bill had time to reflect upon how odd all this was, how odd and how perfect, that they should all be here this summer. There were kids he knew visiting relatives. Kids he knew who were off on vacations at Disney land in California or on Cape Cod or, in the case of one chum, an unimaginably distant-sounding place with the queer but somehow evocative name of Gstaad. There were kids at church camp, kids at Scout camp, kids at rich-kid camps where you could learn to swim and play golf, camps where you learned to say 'Hey, good one!' instead of 'Fuck you!' when your opponent got a killer serve past you at tennis; kids whose parents had simply taken them AWAY. Bill could understand that. He knew some kids who wanted to go AWAY, frightened by the boogeyman stalking Derry this summer, but suspected there were more parents frightened by that boogeyman. People who had planned to take their vacations at home suddenly decided to go AWAY
(Gstaad? was that in Sweden? Argentina? Spain?)
instead. It was a little like the polio scare of 1956, when four kids who went swimming in the O'Brian Memorial Pool had gotten the disease. Grownups - word absolutely synonymous in Bill's mind with mothers and fathers - had decided then, as now, that AWAY was better. Safer. Anyone able to clear out had cleared. Bill understood AWAY, and he could muse over a word of such fabulous wonder as Gstaad, but wonder was cold comfort compared with desire; Gstaad was AWAY; Derry was desire.
And none of us have gone AWAY, he thought, watching as Ben and Mike pounded used nails out of used boards, as Eddie strolled off into the bushes to take a whiz (you had to go as soon as you could, in order to avoid seriously straining your bladder, he told Bill once, but you also had to watch out for poison ivy, because who needed a case of that on your pecker). We're all here in Derry. No camp, no relatives, no vacations, no AWAY. All right here. Present and accounted for.
'There's a door down there,' Eddie said, zipping his fly as he came back.
'Hope you shook off, Eds,' Richie said. 'If you don't shake off each time, you can get cancer. My mom told me so.'
Eddie looked startled, thinly worried, and then saw Richie's grin. He withered him (or tried to) with a babies-must-play look and then said, 'It was too big for us to carry. But Bill said if all of us went down we could get it up here.'
'Of course, you can never shake off completely,' Richie went on. 'You want to know what a wise man once told me, Eds?'
'No,' Eddie said, 'and I don't want you to call me Eds anymore, Richie. I mean, I'm sincere. I don't call you Dick, as in "You got any gum on ya, Dick?", so I don't see why - '
'This wise man,' Richie said, 'told me this: "No matter how much you squirm and dance, the last two drops go in your pants." And that's why there's so much cancer in the world, Eddie my love.'
'The reason there's so much cancer in the world is because nerds like you and Beverly Marsh smoke cigarettes,' Eddie said.
'Beverly is not a nerd,' Ben said in a forbidding voice. 'You just watch what you say, Trashmouth.'
'Beep-beep, you g-guys,' Bill said absently. 'And speaking of B-B-Beverly, she's pretty struh-struh-strong. She could h-h-help get that duh-door.'
Ben asked what kind of door it was.
'Muh-Muh-hogany, I th-hink.'
'Somebody threw out a mahogany door?' Ben asked, surprised but not unbelieving.
'People throw out everything,' Mike said. 'That dump? It kills me to go down there. I mean it kills me.'
'Yeah,' Ben agreed. 'A lot of that stuff could be fixed up easy. And there are people in China and South America with nothing. That's what my mother says.'
'There's people with nothing right here in Maine, Sunny Jim,' Richie said grimly.
'W-W-What's th-this?' Bill asked, noticing the album Mike had brought. Mike told him, saying he would show them the picture of the clown when Stan and Beverly got back with the hinges.
Bill and Richie exchanged a look.
'What's wrong?' Mike asked. 'Is it what happened in your brother's room,
'Bill?'
'Y-Yeah,' Bill said, and would say no more.
They took turns working on the hole until Stan and Beverly came back, each with a brown paper bag containing hinges. As Mike talked, Ben sat crosslegged, tailor-fashion, and made glassless windows that would swing open and shut in two of the long boards. Perhaps only Bill noticed how quickly and easily his fingers moved; how adept and knowing they were, like surgeon's fingers. Bill admired that.
'Some of these pictures go back a hundred years, my dad said,' Mike told them, holding the album on his lap. 'He gets them at those sales people have in their yards, and at secondhand shops. Sometimes he buys them or trades other collectors for them. Some of them are stereoscopes - there's two of them just the same on a long card, and when you look at them through this thing like binoculars, it looks like one picture, only in 3-D. Like House of Wax or The Creature from the Black Lagoon.'
'Why does he like all that stuff?' Beverly asked. She was wearing ordinary Levi's but she had done something amusing to the cuffs, blousing them out with a bright paisley material for the final four inches so that they looked like pants out of some sailor's whimsy.