It
Page 158"Get Ben to give you ten fingers," Richie said. "You can yank Bev up, and the two of you can get your wife. Ben can boost me and we'll get Ben. And after that I'll show you how to set up a volleyball tournament for a thousand sorority girls."
"Beep-beep, Richie."
"Beep-beep your ass, Big Bill."
The tiredness was going through him in steady waves. He caught Beverly's level gaze and held it for a moment. She nodded to him slightly, and he made a smile for her.
"Give me ten fingers, B-B-Ben?"
Ben, who also looked unutterably weary, nodded. A deep scratch ran down one cheek. "I think I can handle that."
He stooped slightly and laced his hands together. Bill hiked one foot, stepped into Ben's hand, and jumped up. It wasn't quite enough. Ben lifted the step he had made with his hands and Bill grabbed the edge of the broken-in tunnel roof. He yanked himself up. The first thing he saw was a white-and-orange crash barrier. The second thing was a crowd of milling men and women beyond the barrier. The third was Freese's Department Store-only it had an oddly bulged-out, foreshortened look. It took him a moment to realize that almost half of Freese's had sunk into the street and the Canal beneath. The top half had slued out over the street and seemed in danger of toppling over like a pile of badly stacked books.
"Look! Look! There's someone in the street!"
A woman was pointing toward the place where Bill's head had poked out of the crevasse in the shattered pavement.
"Praise God, there's someone else!"
She started forward, an elderly woman with a kerchief tied over her head peasant-style. A cop held her back. "Not safe out there, Mrs Nelson. You know it. Rest of the street might go any time."
Mrs Nelson, Bill thought. I remember you. Your sister used to sit George and me sometimes. He raised his hand to show her he was all right, and when she raised her own hand in return, he felt a sudden surge of good feelings-and hope.
He turned around and lay flat on the sagging pavement, trying to distribute his weight as evenly as possible, the way you were supposed to do on thin ice. He reached down for Bev. She grasped his wrists and, with what seemed to be the last of his strength, he pulled her up. The sun, which had disappeared again, now ran out from behind a brace of mackerel-scale clouds and gave them their shadows back. Beverly looked up, startled, caught Bill's eyes, and smiled.
"I love you, Bill," she said. "And I pray she'll be all right."
"Thuh-hank you, Bevvie," he said, and his kind smile made her start to cry a little. He hugged her and the small crowd gathered behind the crash barrier applauded. A photographer from the Derry News snapped a picture. It appeared in the June 1st edition of the paper, which was printed in Bangor because of water damage to the News's presses. The caption was simple enough, and true enough for Bill to cut the picture out and keep it tucked away in his wallet for years to come: SURVIVORS, the caption read. That was all, but that was enough.
It was six minutes of eleven in Derry, Maine.
7
DERRY / LATER THE SAME DAY
He wasn't the only one. Derry was falling apart.
8
They watched the orderly slam the back doors of the ambulance and go around to the passenger seat. The ambulance started up the hill toward the Derry Home Hospital. Richie had flagged it down at severe risk of life and limb, and had argued the irate driver to a draw when the driver insisted he just didn't have any more room. He had ended up stretching Audra out on the floor.
"Now what?" Ben asked. There were huge brown circles under his eyes and a grimy ring of dirt around his neck.
"I'm g-going back to the Town House," Bill said. "G-Gonna sleep for about suh-hixteen hours."
"I second that," Richie said. He looked hopefully at Bev. "Got any cigarettes, purty lady?"
"No," Beverly said. "I think I'm going to quit again."
"Sensible enough idea."
They began to walk slowly up the hill, the four of them side by side.
"It's o-o-over," Bill said.
Ben nodded. "We did it. You did it, Big Bill."
"We all did it," Beverly said. "I wish we could have brought Eddie up. I wish that more than anything."
They reached the corner of Upper Main and Point Street. A kid in a red rainslicker and green rubber boots was sailing a paper boat along the brisk run of water in the gutter. He looked up, saw them looking at him, and waved tentatively. Bill thought it was the boy with the skateboard-the one whose friend had seen Jaws in the Canal. He smiled and stepped toward the boy.
"It's all right n-n-now," he said.
The boy studied him gravely, and then grinned. The smile was sunny and hopeful. "Yeah," he said. "I think it is."
"Bet your a-a-ass."
The kid laughed.
"Not really," the kid said, and this time Bill laughed. He restrained an urge to ruffle the kid's hair-that probably would have been resented-and returned to the others.
"Who was that?" Richie asked.
"A friend," Bill said. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. "do you remember it? When we came out before?"
Beverly nodded. "Eddie got us back to the Barrens. Only we ended up on the other side of the Kenduskeag somehow. The Old Cape side."
"You and Haystack pushed the lid off one of those pumping-stations," Richie said to Bill, "because you had the most weight."
"Yeah," Ben said. "We did. The sun was out, but it was almost down."
"Yeah," Bill said. "And we were all there."
"But nothing lasts forever," Richie said. He looked back down the hill they had just climbed and sighed. "Look at this, for instance."
He held his hands out. The tiny scars in the palms were gone. Beverly put her hands out; Ben did the same; Bill added his. All were dirty but unmarked.
"Nothing lasts forever," Richie repeated. He looked up at Bill, and Bill saw tears cut slowly through the dirt on Richie's cheeks.
"Except maybe for love," Ben said.
"And desire," Beverly said.
"How about friends?" Bill asked, and smiled. "What do you think, Trashmouth?"
"Well," Richie said, smiling and rubbing his eyes, "Ah got to thank about it, boy; Ah say, Ah say Ah got to thank about it."
Bill put his hands out and they joined theirs with his and stood there for a moment, seven who had been reduced to four but who could still make a circle. They looked at each other. Ben was crying now too, the tears spilling from his eyes. But he was smiling.
"I love you guys so much," he said. He squeezed Bev's and Richie's hands tight-tight-tight for a moment, and then dropped them. "Now could we see if they've got such a thing as breakfast in this place? And we ought to call Mike. Tell him we're okay."
"Good thinnin, senhorr," Richie said. "Every now an then I theenk you might turn out okay. Watchoo theenk, Beeg Beel?"
They walked into the Town House on a wave of laughter, and as Bill pushed through the glass door, Beverly caught sight of something which she never spoke of but never forgot. For just a moment she saw their reflections in the glass-only there were six, not four, because Eddie was behind Richie and Stan was behind Bill, that little half-smile on his face.
9
OUT / DUSK, AUGUST 10TH, 1958
The sun sits neatly on the horizon, a slightly oblate red ball that throws a flat feverish light over the Barrens. The iron cover on top of one of the pumping-stations rises a little, settles, rises again, and begins to slide.
"P-P-Push it, Buh-Ben, it's bruh-breaking my shoulder -
The cover slides farther, tilts, and falls into the shrubbery that has grown up around the concrete cylinder. Seven children come out one by one and look around, blinking owlishly in silent wonder. They are like children who have never seen daylight before.
"It's so quiet," Beverly says softly.
The only sounds are the loud rush of water and the somnolent hum of insects. The storm is over but the Kenduskeag is still very high. Closer to town, not far from the place where the river is corseted in concrete and called a canal, it has overflowed its banks, although the flooding is by no means serious-a few wet cellars is the worst of it. This time.
Stan moves away from them, his face blank and thoughtful. Bill looks around and at first he thinks Stan has seen a small fire on the riverbank-fire is his first impression: a red glow almost too bright to look at. But when Stan picks the fire up in his right hand the angle of the light changes, and Bill sees it's nothing but a Coke bottle, one of the new clear ones, which someone has dropped by the river. He watches as Stan reverses it, holds it by the neck, and brings it down on a shelf of rock jutting out of the bank. The bottle breaks, and Bill is aware they are all watching Stan now as he pokes through the shattered remains of the bottle, his face sober and studious and absorbed. At last he picks up a narrow wedge of glass. The westering sun throws red glints from it, and Bill thinks again: Like a fire.
Stan looks up at him and Bill suddenly understands: it is perfectly clear to him, and perfectly right. He steps forward toward Stan with his hands held out, palms up. Stan backs away, into the water. Small black bugs stitch along just above the surface, and Bill can see an iridescent dragonfly go bussing off into the reeds along the far bank like a small flying rainbow. A frog begins a steady bass thud, and as Stan takes his left hand and draws the edge of glass down his palm, peeling skin and bringing thin blood, Bill thinks in a kind of ecstasy: There's so much life down here!
"Bill?"
"Sure. Both."
Stan cuts his other hand. There is pain, but not much. A whippoorwill has begun to call somewhere, a cool sound, peaceful. Bill thinks: That whippoorwill is raising the moon.
He looks at his hands, both of them bleeding now, and then around him. The others are there-Eddie with his aspirator clutched tightly in one hand; Ben with his big belly pushing palely out through the tattered remains of his shirt; Richie, his face oddly naked without his glasses; Mike, silent and solemn, his normally full lips compressed to a thin line. And Beverly, her head up, her eyes wide and clear, her hair still somehow lovely in spite of the dirt that mats it.
All of us. All of us are here.
And he sees them, really sees them, for the last time, because in some way he understands that they will never all be together again, the seven of them-not this way. No one talks. Beverly holds out her hands, and after a moment Richie and Ben hold out theirs. Mike and Eddie do the same. Stan cuts them one by one as the sun begins to slip behind the horizon, cooling that red furnace-glow to a dusky rose-pink. The whippoorwill cries again, Bill can see the first faint swirls of mist on the water, and he feels as if he has become a part of everything-this is a brief ecstasy which he will no more talk about than Beverly will later talk about the brief reflection she sees of two dead men who were, as boys, her friends.