'N-N-Not until tuh-ten or ten-thuh-thuh-hirty,' Bill said. 'It's a double f-f-f-feature at the Uh-Uh-Uh - '
'Aladdin,' Stan said.
'Yeah. And they'll stop in for a slice of p-p-pizza after. They a-almost always d-do.'
'So we have plenty of time,' Ben said.
Bill nodded.
'Then let's go in,' Bev said. 'I want to call home. I promised I would. And don't any of you talk. He thinks I'm at Community House and that I'm getting a ride home from there.'
'What if he wants to come down and pick you up early?' Mike asked.
'Then,' Beverly said, 'I'm going to be in a lot of trouble.'
Ben thought: I'd protect you, Beverly. In his mind's eye, an instant daydream unfolded, one with an ending so sweet he shivered. Bev's father started to give her a hard time; to bawl her out and all that (even in his daydream he did not imagine how bad all that could get with Al Marsh). Ben threw himself in front of her and told Marsh to lay off.
If you want trouble, fatboy, you just keep protecting my daughter.
Hanscom, usually a quiet bookish type, can be a ravening tiger when you get him mad. He speaks to Al Marsh with great sincerity. If you want to get to her, you'll have to come through me first.
Marsh starts forward . . . and then the steely glint in Hanscom's eyes stops him.
You'll be sorry, he mumbles, but it's clear all the fight has gone out of him - He's just a paper tiger after all.
Somehow I doubt that, Hanscom says with a tight Gary Cooper smile, and Beverly's father slinks away.
What's happened to you, Ben? Bev cries, but her eyes are shining and full of stars. You looked ready to kill him!
Kill him? Hanscom says, the Gary Cooper smile still lingering on his lips. No way, baby. He may be a creep, but he's still your father. I might have roughed him up a little, but that's only because when someone talks wrong to you I get a little hot under the collar. You know?
She throws her arms around him and kisses him (on the lips! on the LIPS!). I love you, Ben! she sobs. He can feel her small breasts pressing firmly against his chest and -
He shivered a little, throwing this bright, terribly clear picture off with an effort. Richie stood in the doorway, asking him if he was coming, and Ben realized he was all alone in the workroom.
'Yeah,' he said, starting a little. 'Sure I am.'
'You're goin senile, Haystack,' Richie said as Ben went though the door, but he clapped Ben on the shoulder. Ben grinned and hooked an elbow briefly around Richie's neck.
5
There was no problem with Beverly's dad. He had come home late from work, Bev's mother told her over the phone, fallen asleep in front of the TV, and waked up just long enough to get himself into bed.
'You got a ride home, Bevvie?'
'Yes. Bill Denbrough's dad is going to take a whole bunch of us home.'
Mrs Marsh sounded suddenly alarmed. 'You're not on a date, are you, Bevvie?'
'No, of course not,' Bev said, looking through the arched doorway between the darkened hall where she was and the dining room, where the others were sitting down around the Monopoly board. But I sure wish I was. 'Boys, uck. But they have a sign-up sheet down here, and every night a different dad or mom takes kids home.' That much, at least, was true. The rest was a lie so outrageous that she could feel herself blushing hotly in the dark.
'All right,' her mom said. 'I just wanted to be sure. Because if your dad caught you going on dates at your age, he'd be mad.' Almost as an afterthought she added: 'I would be, too.'
'Yeah, I know,' Bev said, still looking into the dining room. She did know; yet here she was, not with one boy but six of them, in a house where the parents were gone. She saw Ben looking at her anxiously, and she sketched a smiling little salute at him. He blushed but gave her the little salute right back.
'Are any of your girlfriends there?'
What girlfriends, Mamma?
'Um, Patty O'Hara's here. And Ellie Geiger, I think. She's playing shuffle-board downstairs.' The facility with which the lies came from her lips made her ashamed. She wished she were talking to her father; she would have been more scared but less ashamed. She supposed she really wasn't a very good girl.
'I love you, Mamma,' she said.
'Same goes back to you, Bev.' Her mother paused briefly and added: 'Be careful. The paper says there may be another one. A boy named Patrick Hockstetter. He's missing. Did you know him, Bevvie?'
She closed her eyes briefly. 'No, Mom.'
'Well . . . goodbye, then.'
'Bye.'
She joined the others at the table and for an hour they played Monopoly. Stan was the big winner.
'Jews are very good at making money,' Stan said, putting a hotel on Atlantic Avenue and two more green houses on Ventnor Avenue. 'Everybody knows that.'
'Jesus, make me Jewish,' Ben said promptly, and everyone laughed. Ben was almost broke.
Beverly glanced across the table from time to time at Bill, noting his clean hands, his blue eyes, the fine red hair. As he moved the little silver shoe he was using as a marker around the board, she thought, If he held my hand, I think I'd be so glad I'd probably die. A warm light seemed to glow briefly in her chest and she smiled secretly down at her hands.
6
The evening's finale was almost anticlirnactic. Ben took one of Zack's chisels from the shelf and used a hammer to strike the molds on the cut-lines. They opened easily. Two small silver balls fell out. In one they could faintly see part of a date: 925. In the other, wavery lines Beverly thought were the remnants of Lady Liberty's hair. They looked at them without speaking for a moment, and then Stan picked one up.
'Pretty small,' he said.
'So was the rock in David's sung when he went up against Goliath,' Mike said. 'They look powerful to me.'
Ben found himself nodding. They did to him, as well.
'We're all d-d-done?' Bill asked.
'All done,' Ben said. 'Here.' He tossed the second slug to Bill, who was so surprised he almost fumbled it.
The slugs went around the circle. Each of them looked closely at both, marvelling at their roundness, weight, actuality. When they came back to Ben, he held them in his hand and then looked at Bill. 'What do we do with them now?'
'G-G-Give them to B-Beverly.'
'No!'
He looked at her. His face was kind enough, but stern. 'B-B-Bev, we've been thruh-through this a-a-already, and - '
'Ill do it,' she said. 'I'll shoot the goddamned things when the time comes, If it comes. I'll probably get us all killed, but I'll do it. I don't want to take them home, though. One of my
(father)
parents might find them. Then I'd be in dutch.'
'Don't you have a secret hiding place?' Richie asked. 'Criminy, I got four or five.'
'I've got a place,' Beverly said. There was a small slit in the bottom of her box-spring where she sometimes stashed cigarettes, comic books, and, just lately, film and fashion magazines. 'But nothing I'd trust for something like this. You keep them, Bill. Until it's time, anyway, you keep them.'
'Okay,' Bill said mildly, and just then lights splashed into the driveway. 'Holy cruh-crow, they're e-e-early. L-Let's get out of h-here.'
They were just sitting down around the Monopoly board again when Sharon Denbrough opened the kitchen door.
Richie rolled his eyes and mimed wiping sweat from his forehead; the others laughed heartily. Richie had Gotten Off A Good One.
A moment later she came in. 'Your dad's waiting for your friends in the car, Bill.'
'O-O-Okay, M-Mom,' Bill said. 'W-We were juh-just f-f-finishing, a-anyway.'
'Who won?' Sharon asked, smiling bright-eyed at Bill's little friends. The girl was going to be very pretty, she thought. She supposed in another year or two the children would have to be chaperoned if there were going to be girls instead of just the regular gang of boys. But surely it was still too soon to worry about sex rearing its ugly head.