Bill Denbrough, who hasn't been on a bicycle in almost seventeen years, looks out the window of an airplane that would not have been credited-or even imagined, outside of a science-fiction magazine-in the year 1958. Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYY! he thinks, and has to close his eyes against the sudden needling sting of tears.
What happened to Silver? He can't remember. That pan of the set is still dark; that klieg has yet to be turned on. Perhaps that is just as well. Perhaps that is a mercy.
Hi-yo.
Hi-yo Silver.
Hi-yo Silver.
2
"AWAYYY!" he shouted. The wind tore the words back over his shoulder like a fluttering crepe streamer. They came out big and strong, those words, in a triumphant roar. They were the only ones that ever did.
He pedaled down Kansas Street toward town, gaining speed slowly at first. Silver rolled once he got going, but getting going was a job and a half. Watching the gray bike pick up speed was a little like watching a big plane roll down the runway. At first you couldn't believe such a huge waddling gadget could ever actually leave the earth-the idea was absurd. But then you could see its shadow beneath it, and before you even had time to wonder if it was a mirage, the shadow was trailing out long behind it and the plane was up, cutting its way through the air, as sleek and graceful as a dream in a satisfied mind.
Silver was like that.
Bill got a little downhill stretch and began to pedal faster, his legs pumping up and down as he stood forward over the bike's fork. He had learned very quickly-after being bashed a couple of times by that fork in the worst place a boy can be bashed-to yank his underpants up as high as he could before mounting Silver. Later that summer, observing this process, Richie would say, Bill does that because he thinks he might like to have some kids that live someday. It seems like a bad idea to me, but hey! they might always take after his wife, right?
He and Eddie had lowered the seat as far as it would go, and it now bumped and scraped against the small of his back as he worked the pedals. A woman digging weeds in her flower-garden shaded her eyes to watch him pass. She smiled a little. The boy on the huge bike reminded her of a monkey she had once seen riding a unicycle in the Barnum amp; Bailey Circus. He's apt to kill himself, though, she thought, turning back to her garden. That bike is too big for him. It was none of her problem, though.
3
Bill had had more sense than to argue with the big boys when they broke out of the bushes, looking like ill-tempered hunters on the track of a beast which had already mauled one of them. Eddie, however, had rashly opened his mouth and Henry Bowers had unloaded on him.
Bill knew who they were, all right; Henry, Belch, and Victor were just about the worst kids in Derry School. They had beaten up on Richie Tozier, who Bill sometimes chummed with, a couple of times. The way Bill looked at it, this was partly Richie's own fault; he was not known as Trashmouth for nothing.
One day in April Richie had said something about their collars as the three of them passed by in the schoolyard. The collars had all been turned up, just like Vie Morrow's in The Blackboard Jungle. Bill, who had been sitting against the building nearby and listlessly shooting a few marbles, hadn't really caught all of it. Neither did Henry and his friends... but they heard enough to turn in Richie's direction. Bill supposed Richie had meant to say whatever he said in a low voice. The trouble was, Richie didn't really have a low voice.
"What'd you say, you little four-eyes geek?" Victor Criss enquired.
"I didn't say nothing," Richie said, and that disclaimer-along with his face, which looked quite sensibly dismayed and scared-might have ended it. Except that Richie's mouth was like a half-tamed horse that has a way of bolting for absolutely no reason at all. Now it suddenly added: "You ought to dig the wax out of your ears, big fella. Want some blasting powder?"
They stood looking at him incredulously for a moment, and then they took after him. Stuttering Bill had watched the unequal race from its start to its preordained conclusion from his place against the side of the building. No sense getting involved; those three galoots would be just as happy to beat up on two kids for the price of one.
Richie ran diagonally across the little-kids" playyard, leaping over the teeter-totters and dodging among the swings, realizing he had run into a blind alley only when he struck the chainlink fence between the playyard and the park which abutted the school grounds. So he tried to go up the chainlink, all clutching fingers and pointing seeking sneaker-toes, and he was maybe two-thirds of the way to the top when Henry and Victor Criss hauled him back down again, Henry getting him by the back of the jacket and Victor grabbing the seat of his jeans. Richie was screaming when they peeled him off the fence. He hit the asphalt on his back. His glasses flew off. He reached for them and Belch Huggins kicked them away and that was why one of the bows was mended with adhesive tape this summer.
Bill had winced and walked around to the front of the building. He had observed Mrs Moran, one of the fourth-grade teachers, already hurrying over to break things up, but he knew they would get Richie hard before then, and by the time she actually arrived, Richie would be crying. Bawl-baby, bawl-baby, lookit-the-baby-bawl.
Bill had only had minor problems with them. They made fun of his stutter, of course. An occasional random cruelty came with the jibes; one rainy day as they were going to lunch in the gym, Belch Huggins had knocked Bill's lunchbag out of his hand and had stomped it flat with one engineer boot, squishing everything inside.
"Oh, juh-juh-gee!" Belch cried in mock horror, raising his hands and fluttering them about his face. "suh-suh-sorry about your l-l-lunch, fuh-huh-huck-face!" And he had strolled off down the hall toward where Victor Criss was leaning against the drinking fountain outside the boys'-room door, just about laughing himself into a hernia. That hadn't been so bad, though; Bill had cadged half a PB amp; J off Eddie Kaspbrak, and Richie was happy to give him his devilled egg, one of which his mother packed in his lunch about every second day and which made him want to puke, he claimed.
But you had to stay out of their way, and if you couldn't do that you had to try and be invisible.
Eddie forgot the rules, so they creamed him.
He hadn't been too bad until the big boys went downstream and splashed across to the other side, even though his nose was bleeding like a fountain. When Eddie's snotrag was soaked through, Bill had given him his own and made him put a hand on the nape of his neck and lean his head back. Bill could remember his mother getting Georgie to do that, because Georgie sometimes got nosebleeds -
Oh but it hurt to think about George.
It wasn't until the sound of the big boys" buffalolike progress through the Barrens had died away completely, and Eddie's nose-bleed had actually stopped, that his asthma got bad. He started heaving for air, his hands opening and then snapping shut like weak traps, his respiration a fluting whistle in his throat.
"Shit!" Eddie gasped. "Asthma! Gripes!"
He scrambled for his aspirator and finally got it out of his pocket. It looked almost like a bottle of Windex, the kind with the sprayer attachment on top. He jammed it into his mouth and punched the trigger.
"Better?" Bill asked anxiously.
"No. It's empty." Eddie looked at Bill with panicked eyes that said I'm caught, Bill! I'm caught!
The empty aspirator rolled away from his hand. The stream chuckled on, not caring in the least that Eddie Kaspbrak could barely breathe. Bill thought randomly that the big boys had been right about one thing: it had been a real baby dam. But they had been having fun, dammit, and he felt a sudden dull fury that it should have come to this.
Tuh-tuh-take it easy, Eh-Eddie," he said.
For the next forty minutes or so Bill sat next to him, his expectation that Eddie's asthma attack would at any moment let up gradually fading into unease. By the time Ben Hanscom appeared, the unease had become real fear. It not only wasn't letting up; it was getting worse. And the Center Street Drug, where Eddie got his refills, was three miles away, almost. What il he went to get Eddie's stuff and came back to rind Eddie unconscious? Unconscious or
(don't shit please don't think that)
or even dead, his mind insisted implacably.
(like Georgie dead like Georgie]
Don't be such an asshole! He's not going to die!
No, probably not. But what if he came back and found Eddie in a comber? Bill knew all about combers; he had even deduced they were named after those great big waves guys surfed on in Hawaii, and that seemed right enough-after all, what was a comber but a wave that drowned your brain? On doctor shows like Ben Casey, people were always going into combers, and sometimes they stayed there in spite of all Ben Casey's ill-tempered shouting.
So he sat there, knowing he ought to go, he couldn't do Eddie any good staying here, but not wanting to leave him alone. An irrational, superstitious part of him felt sure Eddie would slip into a comber the minute he, Bill, turned his back. Then he looked upstream and saw Ben Hanscom standing there. He knew who Ben was, of course; the fattest kid in any school has his or her own sort of unhappy notoriety. Ben was in the other fifth grade. Bill sometimes saw him at recess, standing by himself-usually in a corner-looking at a book and eating his lunch out of a bag about the size of a laundry sack.
Looking at Ben now, Bill thought he looked even worse than Henry Bowers. It was hard to believe, but true. Bill could not begin to imagine the cataclysmic fight these two must have been in. Ben's hair stood up in wild, dirt-clotted spikes. His sweater or sweat-shirt-it was hard to tell which it had started the day as and it sure as shit didn't matter now-was a matted ruin, smeared with a sicko mixture of blood and grass. His pants were out at the knees.
He saw Bill looking at him and recoiled a bit, eyes going wary.
"Duh-duh-duh-hon't g-g-go!" Bill cried. He put his empty hands up in the air, palms out, to show he was harmless. "W-W-We need some huh-huh-help."
Ben came closer, eyes still wary. He walked as if one or both of his legs was killing him. "Are they gone? Bowers and those guys?"
"Yuh-Yes," Bill said. "Listen, cuh-han y-y-you stay with my fruhhend while I go get his muh-medicine? He's got a-a-a-a-"
"Asthma?"
Bill nodded.
Ben came all the way down to the remains of the dam and dropped painfully to one knee beside Eddie, who was lying back with his eyes mostly closed and his chest heaving.
"Which one hit him?" Ben asked finally. He looked up, and Bill saw the same frustrated anger he had been feeling himself on the fat kid's face. "Was it Henry Bowers?"
Bill nodded.
"It figures. Sure, go on. I'll stay with him."
Thuh-thuh-hanks."
"Oh, don't thank me," Ben said. "I'm the reason they landed on you in the first place. Go on. Hurry it up. I have to be home for supper."
Bill went without saying anything else. It would have been good to tell Ben not to take it to heart-what had happened hadn't been Ben's fault any more than it had been Eddie's for stupidly opening his mouth. Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen; the little kids" version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones. It would have been good to say that, but he was so tightly wound right now it would have taken him about twenty minutes or so, and by then Eddie might have slipped into a comber (that was another thing Bill had learned from Drs Casey and Kildare; you never went into a comber; you always slipped into one).
He trotted downstream, glancing back once. He saw Ben Hanscom grimly collecting rocks from the edge of the water. For a moment Bill couldn't figure out what he was doing, and then he understood. It was an ammo dump. Just in case they came back.
4
The Barrens were no mystery to Bill. He had played here a lot this spring, sometimes with Richie, more frequently with Eddie, sometimes all by himself. He had by no means explored the whole area, but he could find his way back to Kansas Street from the Kenduskeag with no trouble, and now did. He came out at a wooden bridge where Kansas Street crossed one of the little no-name streams that flowed out of the Derry drainage system and into the Kenduskeag down below. Silver was stashed under this bridge, his handlebars tied to one of the bridge supports with a hank of rope to keep his wheels out of the water.
Bill untied the rope, stuck it in his shirt, and hauled Silver up to the sidewalk by main force, panting and sweating, losing his balance a couple of times and landing on his tail.
But at last it was up. Bill swung his leg over the high fork.
And as always, once he was on Silver he became someone else.
5
"Hi-yo Silver AW A YYY!"
The words came out deeper than his normal speaking voice-it was almost the voice of the man he would become. Silver gained speed slowly, the quickening clickety-ciack of the Bicycle playing cards clothespinned to the spokes marking the increase. Bill stood on the pedals, his hands clamped on the bike-grips with the wrists turned up. He looked like a man trying to lift a stupendously heavy barbell. Cords stood out on his neck. Veins pulsed in his temples. His mouth was turned down in a trembling sneer of effort as he fought the familiar battle against weight and inertia, busting his brains to get Silver moving.
As always, it was worth the effort.
Silver began to roll along more briskly. Houses slid past smoothly instead of just poking by. On his left, where Kansas Street crossed Jackson, the unfettered Kenduskeag became the Canal. Past the intersection Kansas Street headed swiftly downhill toward Center and Main, Berry's business district.
Streets crossed frequently here but they were all stop-signed in Bill's favor, and the possibility that a driver might one day blow by one of those stop signs and flatten him to a bleeding shadow on the street had never crossed Bill's mind. It is unlikely he would have changed his ways even if it had. He might have done so either earlier or later in his life, but this spring and early summer had been a strange thundery time for him. Ben would have been astounded if someone were to ask him if he was lonely; Bill would have been likewise astounded if someone asked him if he was courting death. Of cuh-cuh-course n-not! he would have responded immediately (and indignantly), but that did not change the fact that his runs down Kansas Street to town had become more and more like banzai charges as the weather warmed.
This section of Kansas Street was known as Up-Mile Hill. Bill took it at full speed, bent over Silver's handlebars to cut down the wind resistance, one hand poised over the cracked rubber bulb of his oogah-horn to warn the unwary, his red hair blowing back from his head in a rippling wave. The click of the playing cards had mounted to a steady roar. The effortful sneer had become a big goofball grin. The residences on the right had given way to business buildings (warehouses and meat-packing plants, most of them) which blurred by in a scary but satisfying rush. To his left the Canal was a wink of fire in the corner of his eye.