It (17 page)

“Eddie get off there!”
she screamed.
“Get off there! Those machines give you cancer! Get off there! Eddie! Eddieeeeeee—”

He backed away as if the machine had suddenly grown red-hot. In his startled panic he forgot the little flight of stairs behind him. His heels dropped over the top one and he stood there, slowly falling backward, his arms pinwheeling wildly in a losing battle to retain his departing balance. And hadn't he thought with a kind of mad joy
I'm going to fall! I'm going to find out what it feels like to fall and bump my head! Goody for me!
 . . . ? Hadn't he thought that? Or was it only the man imposing his own self-serving adult ideas over whatever his child's mind, always roaring with confused surmises and half-perceived images (images which lost their sense in their very brightness), had thought . . . or tried to think?

Either way, it was a moot question. He had not fallen. His mother had gotten there in time. His mother had caught him. He had burst into tears, but he had not fallen.

Everyone had been looking at them. He remembered that. He remembered Mr. Gardener picking up the shoe-measuring thing and checking the little sliding gadgets on it to make sure they were still okay while another clerk righted the fallen chair and then flapped his arms once, in amused disgust, before putting on his pleasantly neutral salesman's face again. Mostly he remembered his mother's wet cheek and her hot, sour breath. He remembered her whispering over and over in his ear, “Don't you
ever
do that again, don't you
ever
do that again, don't you
ever.”
It was what his mother chanted to ward off trouble. She had chanted the same thing a year earlier when she discovered the baby-sitter had taken Eddie to the public pool in Derry Park one stiflingly hot summer day—this had been when the polio scare of the early fifties was just beginning to wind down. She had dragged him out of the pool, telling him he must
never
do that,
never, never,
and all the kids had looked as all the clerks and customers were looking now, and her breath had had that same sour tang.

She dragged him out of The Shoeboat, shouting at the clerks that she would see them all in court if there was anything wrong with her boy. Eddie's terrified tears had continued off and on for the rest of the morning, and his asthma had been particularly bad all day. That night he had lain awake for hours past the time he was usually asleep, wondering exactly what cancer was, if it was worse than polio, if it killed you, how long it took if it did, and how bad it hurt before you died. He also wondered if he would go to hell afterward.

The threat had been serious, he knew that much.

She had been so scared. That was how he knew.

So terrified.

“Marty,” he said across this gulf of years, “would you give me a kiss?”

She kissed him and hugged him so tightly while she was doing it that the bones in his back groaned.
If we were in water,
he thought,
she'd drown us both.

“Don't be afraid,” he whispered in her ear.

“
I can't help it!”
she wailed.

“I know,” he said, and realized that, even though she was hugging him with rib-breaking tightness, his asthma had eased. That whistling note in his breathing was gone. “I know, Marty.”

The taxi-driver honked again.

“Will you call?” she asked him tremulously.

“If I can.”

“Eddie, can't you please tell me what it is?”

And suppose he did? How far would it go toward setting her mind at rest?

Marty, I got a call from Mike Hanlon tonight, and we talked for awhile, but everything we said boiled down to two things. “It's started again,” Mike said; “Will you come?” Mike said. And now I've got a fever, Marty, only it's a fever you can't damp down with aspirin, and I've got a shortness of breath the goddamned aspirator won't touch, because that shortness of breath isn't in my throat or my lungs—it is around my heart. I'll come back to you if I can, Marty, but I feel like a man standing at the mouth of an old mine-shaft that is full of cave-ins waiting to happen, standing there and saying goodbye to the daylight.

Yes—my, yes! That would surely set her mind at rest!

“No,” he said. “I guess I can't tell you what it is.”

And before she could say more, before she could begin again
(Eddie, get out of that taxi! They give you cancer!),
he was striding away from her, faster and faster. By the time he got to the cab he was almost running.

She was still standing in the doorway when the cab backed into the street, still standing there when they started for the city—a big black woman-shadow cut out of the light spilling from their house. He waved, and thought she raised her hand in return.

“Where we headed tonight, my friend?” the cabbie asked.

“Penn Station,” Eddie said, and his hand relaxed on the aspirator. His asthma had gone to wherever it went to brood between its assaults on his bronchial tubes. He felt . . . almost well.

But he needed the aspirator worse than ever four hours later, coming out of a light doze all in a single spasmodic jerk that caused the fellow in the business suit across the way to lower his paper and look at him with faintly apprehensive curiosity.

I'm back, Eddie!
the asthma yelled gleefully.
I'm back and oh, I dunno, this time I just might killya! Why not? Gotta do it sometime, you know! Can't fuck around with you forever!

Eddie's chest surged and pulled. He groped for the aspirator, found it, pointed it down his throat, and pulled the trigger. Then he sat back in the tall Amtrak seat, shivering, waiting for relief, thinking of the dream from which he had just awakened. Dream? Christ, if that was all. He was afraid it was more memory than dream. In it there had been a green light like the light inside a shoe-store X-ray machine, and a rotting leper had pursued a screaming boy named Eddie Kaspbrak through tunnels under the earth. He ran and ran

(he runs quite fast
Coach Black had told his mother and he ran plenty fast with that rotting thing after him oh yes you better believe it you bet your fur)

in this dream where he was eleven years old, and then he had smelled something like the death of time, and someone lit a match and he had looked down and seen the decomposing face of a boy named Patrick Hockstetter, a boy who had disappeared in July of 1958, and there were worms crawling in and out of Patrick Hockstetter's cheeks, and that gassy, awful smell was coming from
inside
of Patrick Hockstetter, and in that dream that was more memory than dream he had looked to one side and had seen two schoolbooks that were fat with moisture and overgrown with green mold:
Roads to Everywhere,
and
Understanding Our America.
They were in their current condition because it was a foul wetness down here (“How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” a theme by Patrick Hockstetter—“I spent it dead in a tunnel! Moss grew on my books and they swelled up to the size of Sears catalogues!”). Eddie opened his mouth to scream and that was when the scabrous fingers of the leper clittered around his cheek and plunged themselves into his mouth and that was when he
woke up with that back-snapping jerk to find himself not in the sewers under Derry, Maine, but in an Amtrak club-car near the head of a train speeding across Rhode Island under a big white moon.

The man across the aisle hesitated, almost thought better of speaking, and then did. “Are you all right, sir?”

“Oh yes,” Eddie said. “I fell asleep and had a bad dream. It got my asthma going.”

“I see.” The paper went up again. Eddie saw it was the paper his mother had sometimes referred to as
The Jew York Times.

Eddie looked out the window at a sleeping landscape lit only by the fairy moon. Here and there were houses, or sometimes clusters of them, most dark, a few showing lights. But the lights seemed little, and falsely mocking, compared to the moon's ghostglow.

He thought the moon talked to him,
he thought suddenly.
Henry Bowers. God, he was so crazy.
He wondered where Henry Bowers was now. Dead? In prison? Drifting across empty plains somewhere in the middle of the country like an incurable virus, sticking up Seven-Elevens in the deep slumbrous hours between one and four in the morning or maybe killing some of the people stupid enough to slow down for his cocked thumb in order to transfer the dollars in their wallets to his own?

Possible, possible.

In a state asylum somewhere? Looking up at this moon, which was approaching the full? Talking to it, listening to answers which only he could hear?

Eddie considered this somehow even more possible. He shivered.
I am remembering my boyhood at last,
he thought.
I am remembering how I spent my own summer vacation in that dim dead year of 1958.
He sensed that now he could fix upon almost any scene from that summer he wanted to, but he did not want to.
Oh God if I could only forget it all again.

He leaned his forehead against the dirty glass of the window, his aspirator clasped loosely in one hand like a religious artifact, watching as the night flew apart around the train.

Going north,
he thought, but that was wrong.

Not going north. Because it's not a train; it's a time machine. Not north; back. Back in time.

He thought he heard the moon mutter.

Eddie Kaspbrak held his aspirator tightly and closed his eyes against sudden vertigo.

Tom was nearly asleep when the phone rang. He struggled halfway up, leaning toward it, and then felt one of Beverly's breasts press against his shoulder as she reached over him to get it. He flopped back on his pillow, wondering dully who was calling on their unlisted home phone number at this hour of the night. He heard Beverly say hello, and then he drifted off again. He had put away nearly three sixpacks during the baseball game, and he was shagged.

Then Beverly's voice, sharp and curious—
“Whaaat?”—
drilled into his ear like an ice-pick and he opened his eyes again. He tried to sit up and the phone cord dug into his thick neck.

“Get that fucking thing off me, Beverly,” he said, and she got up quickly and walked around the bed, holding the phone cord up with tented fingers. Her hair was a deep red, and it flowed over her nightgown in natural waves almost to her waist. Whore's hair. Her eyes did not stutter to his face to read the emotional weather there, and Tom Rogan didn't like that. He sat up. His head was starting to ache. Shit, it had probably already been aching, but when you were asleep you didn't know it.

He went into the bathroom, urinated for what felt like three hours, and then decided that as long as he was up he ought to get another beer and try to take the curse off the impending hangover.

Passing back through the bedroom on his way to the stairs, a man in white boxer shorts that flapped like sails below his considerable belly, his arms like slabs (he looked more like a dock-walloper than the president and general manager of Beverly Fashions, Inc.), he looked over his shoulder and yelled crossly: “If it's that bull dyke Lesley, tell her to go eat out some model and let us sleep!”

Beverly glanced up briefly, shook her head to indicate it wasn't Lesley, and then looked back at the phone. Tom felt the muscles at the back of his neck tighten up. It felt like a dismissal. Dismissed by Milady. Mifuckinlady. This was starting to look like it might turn
into a situation. It might be that Beverly needed a short refresher course on who was in charge around here. It was possible. Sometimes she did. She was a slow learner.

He went downstairs and padded along the hall to the kitchen, absently picking the seat of his shorts out of the crack of his ass, and opened the refrigerator. His reaching hand closed on nothing more alcoholic than a blue Tupperware dish of leftover noodles Romanoff. All the beer was gone. Even the can he kept way in the back (much as he kept a twenty-dollar bill folded up behind his driver's license for emergencies) was gone. The game had gone fourteen innings, and all for nothing. The White Sox had lost. Bunch of candy-asses this year.

His eyes drifted to the bottles of hard stuff on the glassed-in shelf over the kitchen bar and for a moment he saw himself pouring a splash of Beam over a single ice-cube. Then he walked back toward the stairs, knowing that was asking for even more trouble than his head was currently in. He glanced at the face of the antique pendulum clock at the foot of the stairs and saw it was past midnight. This intelligence did nothing to improve his temper, which was never very good even at the best of times.

He climbed the stairs with slow deliberation, aware—too aware—of how hard his heart was working. Ka-boom, ka-thud. Ka-boom, ka-thud. Ka-boom, ka-thud. It made him nervous when he could feel his heart beating in his ears and wrists as well as in his chest. Sometimes when that happened he would imagine it not as a squeezing and loosening organ but as a big dial on the left side of his chest with the needle edging ominously into the red zone. He did not like that shit; he did not need that shit. What he needed was a good night's sleep.

But the numb cunt he was married to was still on the phone.

“I understand that, Mike. . . . yes . . . yes, I
am
 . . . I know . . . but . . .”

A longer pause.

“Bill
Denbrough?”
she exclaimed, and that ice-pick drilled into his ear again.

He stood outside the bedroom door until he got his breath back. Now it was ka-thud, ka-thud, ka-thud again: the booming had stopped. He briefly imagined the needle edging out of the red and then willed the picture away. He was a man, for Christ's sake, and a
damned good one, not a furnace with a bad thermostat. He was in great shape. He was iron. And if she needed to relearn that, he would be happy to teach her.