An expression of surprise that would have been comical in other circumstances spread across Mr Gedreau's face as he flew backward, loose gravel spurting out from under his heels. He struck the steps leading up to the screen door and sat down hard.
"Why you-" he began.
Henry's shadow fell on him. "Get inside," he said.
"You-" Mr Gedreau said, and this time he stopped on his own. Mr Gedreau had finally seen it, Eddie realized-the light in Henry's eyes. He got up quickly, apron flapping. He went up the stairs as fast as he could, stumbling on the second one from the top and going briefly to one knee. He was up again at once, but that stumble, as brief as it had been, seemed to rob him of the rest of his grownup authority.
He spun around at the top and yelled: "I'm calling the cops!"
Henry made as if to lunge for him, and Mr Gedreau flinched back. That was the end, Eddie realized. As incredible, as unthinkable as it seemed, there was no protection for him here. It was time to go.
While Henry was standing at the bottom of the steps and glaring up at Mr Gedreau and while the others were staring, transfixed (and, except for Patrick Hockstetter, not a little horrified) by this sudden successful defiance of adult authority, Eddie saw his chance. He whirled, took to his heels, and ran.
He was halfway up the block before Henry turned, his eyes blazing. "Get him!" he bellowed.
Asthma or no asthma, Eddie ran them a good race that day. There were spaces, some of them as long as fifty feet, when he couldn't remember if the soles of his P.P. Flyers had touched the sidewalk or not. For a few moments he even entertained the giddy notion that he might be able to outrun them.
Then, just before he reached Kansas Street and what might have been safety, a little kid on a trike suddenly pedaled out of a driveway and right into Eddie's path. Eddie tried to swerve, but running full-out as he had been, he might have done better to jump over the kid (the kid's name, in fact, was Richard Cowan, and he would grow up, marry, and father a son named Frederick Cowan, who would be drowned in a toilet and then be partially eaten by a thing that rose up from the toilet like black smoke and then took an unthinkable shape), or at least to try.
One of Eddie's feet caught on the trike's back deck, where an adventurous little shit might stand and push the trike along like a scooter. Richard Cowan, whose unborn son would be murdered by It twenty-seven years later, barely rocked on his trike. Eddie, however, went flying. He struck the sidewalk on his shoulder, rebounded, came down again, and skidded ten feet, erasing the skin from his elbows and knees. He was trying to get up when Henry Bowers hit him like a shell from a bazooka and knocked him flat. Eddie's nose connected briskly with the concrete. Blood flew.
Henry did a quick side-roll like a paratrooper and was up again. He grabbed Eddie by the nape of the neck and by his right wrist. His breath, snorting through his swelled and splinted nose, was warm and moist.
"Want rocks, Rock Man? Sure! Shit!" He jerked Eddie's wrist halfway up his back. Eddie yelled. "Rocks for the Rock Man, right, Rock Man?" He jerked Eddie's wrist up even higher. Eddie screamed. Behind him, dimly, he could hear the others approaching, and the little kid on the trike starting to bawl. Join the club, kid, he thought, and in spite of the pain, in spite of the tears and the fear, he brayed a huge donkeylike hee-haw of laughter.
"You think this is funny?" Henry asked, sounding suddenly astounded rather than furious. "You think this is funny?" And did Henry also sound scared? Years later Eddie would think Yes, scared, he sounded scared.
Eddie twisted his wrist in Henry's grip. He was slick with sweat and he almost got away. Perhaps that was why Henry shoved Eddie's wrist up harder this time than before. Eddie heard a crack in his arm like the sound of winterwood giving under an accumulated plate of ice. The pain that rolled out of his fractured arm was gray and huge. He shrieked, but the sound seemed distant. The color was washing out of the world, and when Henry let go of him and pushed, he seemed to float toward the sidewalk. It took a long time to get down to that old sidewalk. He had a good look at every single crack in it as he glided down. He had a chance to admire the way the July sun glinted off the flecks of mica in that old sidewalk. He had a chance to note the remains of a very old hopscotch grid that had been done in pink chalk on that old sidewalk. Then, for just a moment, it swam and looked like something else. It looked like a turtle.
He might have fainted then, but he struck on his newly broken arm, and this fresh pain was sharp, bright, hot, terrible. He felt the splintered ends of the greenstick fracture grind together. He bit his tongue, bringing fresh blood. He rolled over on his back and saw Henry, Victor, Moose, and Patrick standing over him. They looked impossibly tall, impossibly high up, like pallbearers peering into a grave.
"You like that, Rock Man?" Henry asked, his voice drifting down over a distance, floating through clouds of pain. "You like that action, Rock Man? You like that jobba-nobba?"
Patrick Hockstetter giggled.
"Your father's crazy," Eddie heard himself say, "and so are you."
Henry's grin faded so fast it might have been slapped off his face. He drew his foot back to kick... and then a siren rose in the still hot afternoon. Henry paused. Victor and Moose looked around uneasily.
"Henry, I think we better get out of here," Moose said.
"I know damn well I'm getting out of here," Victor said. How far away their voices seemed! Like the clown's balloons, they seemed to float. Victor took off toward the library, cutting into McCarron Park to get off the street.
Henry hesitated a moment longer, perhaps hoping the cop-car was on some other business and he could continue with his own. But the siren rose again, closer. "You got lucky, fuckface," he said. He and Moose took off after Victor.
Patrick Hockstetter waited for a moment. "Here's a little something extra for you," he whispered in his low, husky voice. He inhaled and spat a large green lunger into Eddie's upturned, sweating, bloody face. Splat. "don't eat it all at once if you don't want," Patrick said, smiling his liverish unsettling smile. "save some for later, if you want."
Then he turned slowly and was also gone.
Eddie tried to wipe the lunger off with his good arm, but even that little movement made the pain flare again.
Now when you started off for the drugstore, you never thought you'd end up on the Costello Avenue sidewalk with a busted arm and Patrick Hockstetter's snot running down your face, did you? You never even got to drink your Pepsi. Life's full of surprises, isn't it?
Incredibly, he laughed again. It was a weak sound, and it hurt his broken arm to laugh, but it felt good. And there was something else: no asthma. His breathing was okay, at least for now. A good thing, too. He never would have been able to get to his aspirator. Never in a thousand years.
The siren was very close now, whooping and whooping. Eddie closed his eyes and saw red under his eyelids. Then the red turned black as a shadow fell over him. It was the little kid with the trike.
"You okay?" the little kid asked.
"Do I look okay?" Eddie asked.
"No, you look terrible," the little kid said, and pedaled off, singing "The Farmer in the Dell."
Eddie began to giggle. Here was the cop-car; he could hear the squeal of its brakes. He found himself hoping vaguely that Mr Nell would be in it, even though he knew Mr Nell was a foot patrolman.
Why in the name of God are you giggling?
He didn't know, any more than he knew why he should feel, in spite of the pain, such intense relief. Was it maybe just because he was still alive, that the worst he had suffered was a broken arm, and there were still some pieces to pick up? He settled for that, but years later, sitting in the Derry Library with a glass of gin and prune juice in front of him and his aspirator near at hand, he told the others he thought it was something more than that; he had been old enough to feel that something more, but not to understand or define it.
I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life, he would tell the others. It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. It didn't put an end to me as a person. I think... it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in spite of the pain.
Eddie turned his head weakly to the right and saw large black Firestone tires, blinding chrome hubcaps, and pulsing blue lights. He heard Mr Nell's voice then, thickly Irish, impossibly Irish, more like Richie's Irish Cop Voice than Mr Nell's real voice... but perhaps that was the distance:
"Holy Jaysus, it's the Kaspbrak bye!"
At this point Eddie floated away.
4
And, with one exception, stayed away for quite awhile.
There was a brief period of consciousness in the ambulance. He saw Mr Nell sitting across from him, tipping a drink from his little brown bottle and reading a paperback called The Jury. The girl on the cover had the biggest bosoms Eddie had ever seen. His eyes shifted past Mr Nell to the driver up front. The driver peered around at Eddie with a big leering grin, his skin livid with greasepaint and talcum powder, his eyes shiny as new quarters. It was Pennywise.
"Mr Nell," Eddie husked.
Mr Nell looked up and smiled. "How are you feelin, me bye?"
"... driver... the driver..."
"Yes, we'll be there in a jig," Mr Nell said, and handed him the little brown bottle. "suck some of this. It'll make ye feel better."
Eddie drank what tasted like liquid fire. He coughed, hurting his arm. He looked toward the front and saw the driver again. Just some guy with a crewcut. No clown.
He drifted off again.
Much later there was the Emergency Room and a nurse wiping blood and dirt and snot and gravel off his face with a cold cloth. It stung, but it felt wonderful at the same time. He heard his mother bugling and clarioning outside, and he tried to tell the nurse not to let her in, but no words would come out, no matter how hard he tried.
"... if he's dying, I want to know!" his mother was bellowing. "You hear me? It's my right to know, and it's my right to see him! I can sue you, you know! I know lawyers, plenty of lawyers! Some of my best friends are lawyers!"
"Don't try to talk," the nurse said to Eddie. She was young, and he could feel her bosoms pressing against his arm. For a moment he had this crazy idea that the nurse was Beverly Marsh, and then he drifted away again.
When he came back his mother was in the room, talking to Dr Handor at a mile-a-minute clip. Sonia Kaspbrak was a huge woman. Her legs, encased in support hose, were trunklike but weirdly smooth. Her face was pale now except for hectic flaring blots of rouge.
"Ma," Eddie managed,"... all right... I'm all right..."
"You're not, you're not," Mrs Kaspbrak moaned. She wrung her hands. Eddie heard her knuckles crack and grind. He began to feel his breath shorten up as he looked at her, seeing what a state she was in, how this latest escapade of his had hurt her. He wanted to tell her to take it easy or she'd have a heart attack, but he couldn't. His throat was too dry. "You're not all right, you've had a serious accident, a very serious accident, but you will be all right, I promise you that, Eddie, you will be all right, even if we need to bring in every specialist in the book, oh Eddie... Eddie... your poor arm..."
She burst into honking sobs. Eddie saw that the nurse who had washed his face was looking at her without much sympathy.
All through this aria, Dr Handor had been stuttering, "sonia... please, Sonia... Sonia...?" He was a skinny, limp-looking man with a little mustache that hadn't grown very well and which, in addition, had been clipped unevenly, so it was longer on the left side than on the right. He looked nervous. Eddie remembered what Mr Keene had told him that morning and felt a certain sorrow for Dr Handor.
At last, gathering himself, Russ Handor managed to say: "If you can't control yourself, you'll have to leave, Sonia."
She whirled on him and he drew back. "I'll do no such thing! Don't you even suggest it! This is my son lying here in agony! My son lying here on his bed of pain!"
Eddie astounded them all by finding his voice. "I want you to leave, Ma. If they're going to do something that'll make me yell, and I think they are, you'll feel better if you go."
She turned to him, astonished... and hurt. At the sight of the hurt on her face, he felt his chest begin to tighten down inexorably. "I certainly will not!" she cried. "What an awful thing to say, Eddie! You're delirious! You don't understand what you're saying, that's the only explanation!"
"I don't know what the explanation is, and I don't care," the nurse said. "All I know is that we're standing here doing nothing while we should be setting your son's arm."
"Are you suggesting-" Sonia began, her voice rising toward the high, bugling note it took on when she was most upset.
"Please, Sonia," Dr Handor said. "Let's not have an argument here. Let's help Eddie."
Sonia stood back, but her glowering eyes-the eyes of a mother bear whose cub has been threatened-promised the nurse that there would be trouble later. Possibly even a suit. Then her eyes misted, extinguishing the glower or at least hiding it. She took Eddie's good hand and squeezed it so painfully that he winced.
"It's bad, but you'll be well again soon," she said. "Well again soon, I promise you that."
"Sure, Ma," Eddie wheezed. "Could I have my aspirator?"
"Of course," she said. Sonia Kaspbrak looked at the nurse triumphantly, as if vindicated of some ridiculous criminal charge. "My son has asthma," she said. "It's quite serious, but he copes with it beautifully."
"Good," the nurse said flatly.
His ma held the aspirator for him so he could inhale. A moment later Dr Handor was feeling Eddie's broken arm. He was as gentle as possible but the pain was still enormous. Eddie felt like screaming and gritted his teeth against it. He was afraid if he screamed his mother would scream, too. Sweat stood out on his forehead in large clear drops.
"You're hurting him," Mrs Kaspbrak said. "I know you are! There's no need of that! Stop it! There's no need for you to hurt him! He's very delicate, he can't stand that sort of pain!"
Eddie saw the nurse lock her furious eyes with Dr Handor's tired, worried ones. He saw the wordless conversation that passed between them: Send that woman out of here, doctor. And in the drop of his eyes: I can't. I don't dare.
There was great clarity inside the pain (although, in truth, this was not a clarity that Eddie would want to experience often: the price was too high), and in that unspoken conversation, Eddie accepted everything Mr Keene had told him. His HydrOx aspirator was filled with nothing more than flavored water. The asthma wasn't in his throat or his chest or his lungs but in his head. Somehow or other he was going to have to deal with that truth.