Giggles from below, and a flashlight flicker.
'Thees ees the rurales, senhorr,' Richie said, squatting down, twirling an invisible mustache, and speaking in his Pancho Vanilla Voice.
'Yeah?' Beverly asked from below. 'Let's see your badges.'
'Batches'?' Richie cried, delighted. 'We dean need no stinkin batches!'
'Go to hell, Pancho,' Eddie replied, and slammed the big eyelid closed. There were more muffled giggles from below.
'Come out with your hands up!' Bill cried in a low, commanding adult voice. He began to tramp back and forth across the sod-covered cap of the clubhouse. He could see the ground springing up and down with his back-and-forth passage, but just barely; they had built well. 'You haven't got a chance!' he bellowed, seeing himself as fearless Joe Friday of the LAPD in his mind's eye. 'Come on out of there, punks! Or we'll come in SHOOTIN!'
He jumped up and down once to emphasize his point. Screams and giggles from below. Bill was smiling, unaware that Richie was looking at him wisely - looking at him not as one child looks at another but, in that brief moment, as an adult looks at a child.
He doesn't know that he doesn't always, Richie thought.
'Let them in, Ben, before they crash the roof in,' Bev said. A moment later a trapdoor flopped open like the hatch of a submarine. Ben looked out. He was flushed. Richie knew at once that Ben had been sitting next to Beverly.
Bill and Richie dropped down through the hatch and Ben closed it again. Then there they all were, sitting snug against board walls with their legs drawn up, their faces dimly revealed in the beam of Ben's flashlight.
'S-S-So wh-what's g-g-going o-on?' Bill asked.
'Not too much,' Ben said. He was indeed sitting next to Beverly, and his face looked happy as well as flushed. 'We were just - '
'Tell em, Ben,' Eddie interrupted. Tell em the story! See what they think.'
'Wouldn't do much for your asthma,' Stan told Eddie in his best someone-has-to-be-practical-here tone of voice.
Richie sat between Mike and Ben, holding his knees in his linked hands. It was delightfully cool down here, delightfully secret. Following the gleam of the flashlight as it moved from face to face, he temporarily forgot what had so astounded him outside only a minute ago. 'What are you talkin about?'
'Oh, Ben was telling us a story about this Indian ceremony,' Bev said. 'But Stan's right, it wouldn't be very good for your asthma, Eddie.' 'It might not bother it,' Eddie said, sounding - to his credit, Richie thought - only a little uneasy. 'Usually it's only when I get upset. Anyway, I'd like to try it.'
Try w-w-what?' Bill asked him.
'The Smoke-Hole Ceremony,' Eddie said.
'W-W-What's th-that?'
The beam of Ben's flashlight drifted upward and Richie followed it with his eyes. It tracked aimlessly across the wooden roof of their clubhouse as Ben explained. It crossed the gouged and splintered panels of the mahogany door the seven of them had carried back here from the dump three days ago - the day before the body of Jimmy Cullum was discovered. The thing Richie remembered about Jimmy Cullum, a quiet little boy who also wore spectacles, was that he liked to play Scrabble on rainy days. Not going to be playing Scrabble anymore, Richie thought, and shivered a little. In the dimness no one saw the shiver, but Mike Hanlon, sitting shoulder to shoulder with him, glanced at him curiously.
'Well, I got this book out of the library last week,' Ben was saying. 'Ghosts of the Great Plains, it's called, and it's all about the Indian tribes that lived out west a hundred and fifty years ago. The Paiutes and the Pawnees and the Kiowas and the Otoes and the Comanches. It was really a good book. I'd love to go out there sometime to where they lived. Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah . . . '
'Shut up and tell about the Smoke-Hole Ceremony,' Beverly said, elbowing him.
'Sure,' he said. 'Right.' And Richie believed his response would have been the same if Beverly had given him the elbow and said, 'Drink the poison now, Ben, okay?'
'See, almost all those Indians had a special ceremony, and our clubhouse made me think of it. Whenever they had to make a big decision - whether to move on after the buffalo herds, or to find fresh water, or whether or not to fight their enemies - they'd dig a big hole in the ground and cover it up with branches, except for a little vent in the top.'
'The smuh-smuh-smoke-hole,' Bill said.
'Your quick mind never ceases to amaze me, Big Bill,' Richie said gravely. 'You ought to go on Twenty-One. I'll bet you could even beat ole Charlie Van Doren.'
Bill made as if to hit him and Richie recoiled, bumping his head a pretty good one on a piece of shoring.
'Ouch!'
'You d-deserved it,' Bill said.
'I keel you, rotten gringo sumbeesh,' Richie said. 'We doan need no stinkin - '
'Will you guys stop it?' Beverly asked. 'This is interesting.' And she favored Ben with such a warm look that Richie believed steam would start curling out of Haystack's ears in a couple of minutes.
'Okay, B-B-Ben,' Bill said. 'Go o-o-on.'
'Sure,' Ben said. The word came out in a croak. He had to clear his throat and start again. 'When the smoke-hole was finished, they'd start a fire down there. They'd use green wood so it would be a really smoky fire. Then all the braves would go down there and sit around the fire. The place would fill up with smoke. The book said this was a religious ceremony, but it was also kind of a contest, you know? After half a day or so most of the braves would bug out because they couldn't stand the smoke anymore, and only two or three would be left. And they were supposed to have visions.'
'Yeah, if I breathed smoke for five or six hours, I'd probably have some visions, all right,' Mike said, and they all laughed.
'The visions were supposed to tell the tribe what to do,' Ben said. 'And I don't know if this part is true or not, but the book said that most times the visions were right.'
A silence fell and Richie looked at Bill. He was aware that they were all looking at Bill, and he had the feeling - again - that Ben's story of the smoke-hole was more than a thing you read about in a book and then had to try for yourself, like a chemistry experiment or a magic trick. He knew it, they all knew it. Perhaps Ben knew it most of all. This was something they were supposed to do.
They were supposed to have visions . . . Most times the visions were right.
Richie thought: I'll bet if we asked him, Haystack would tell us that book practically jumped into his hand. Like something wanted him to read that one particular book and then tell us about the smoke-hole ceremony. Because there's a tribe right here, isn't there? Yeah. Us. And, yeah, I guess we do need to know what happens next.
This thought led to another: Was this supposed to happen? From the time Ben got the idea for an underground clubhouse instead of a treehouse, was this supposed to happen? How much of this are we thinking up ourselves, and how much is being thought up for us?
In a way, he supposed such an idea should have been almost comforting. It was nice to imagine that something bigger than you, smarter than you, was doing your thinking for you, like the adults that planned your meals, bought your clothes, and managed your time - and Richie was convinced that the force that had brought them together, the force that had used Ben as its messenger to bring them the idea of the smoke-hole - that force wasn't the same as the one killing the children. This was some kind of counterforce to that other . . . to
(oh well you might as well say it)
It. But all the same, he didn't like this feeling of not being in control of his own actions, of being managed, of being run.
They all looked at Bill; they all waited to see what Bill would say.