It (7 page)

“No, but—”

“Then why are you bothering with this?”

“Stop cross-examining me!”
Gardener roared. “They both described it the same and neither knew what the other one was saying!”

Boutillier had been sitting at his desk, playing with a pencil. Now he put the pencil down, got up, and walked over to Harold Gardener. Boutillier was five inches shorter, but Gardener retreated a step before the man's anger.

“Do you want us to lose this case, Harold?”

“No. Of course n—”

“Do you want those running sores to walk free?”

“No!”

“Okay. Good. Since we both agree on the basics, I'll tell you exactly what I think. Yes, there was probably a man under the bridge that night. Maybe he was even wearing a clown suit, although I've dealt with enough witnesses to guess maybe it was just a stewbum or
a transient wearing a bunch of cast-off clothes. I think he was probably down there scrounging for dropped change or roadmeat—half a burger someone chucked over the side, or maybe the crumbs from the bottom of a Frito bag. Their
eyes
did the rest, Harold. Now is that possible?”

“I don't know,” Harold said. He wanted to be convinced, but given the exact tally of the two descriptions . . . no. He didn't think it was possible.

“Here's the bottom line. I don't care if it was Kinko the Klown or a guy in an Uncle Sam suit on stilts or Hubert the Happy Homo. If we introduce this fellow into the case, their lawyer is going to be on it before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.' He's going to say those two little innocent lambs out there with their fresh haircuts and new suits didn't do anything but toss that gay fellow Mellon over the side of the bridge for a joke. He'll point out that Mellon was still alive after he took the fall; they have Hagarty's testimony as well as Unwin's for that.

“His
clients didn't commit murder, oh no! It was a psycho in a clown suit. If we introduce this, that's going to happen and you know it.”

“Unwin's going to tell that story anyhow.”

“But Hagarty isn't,” Boutillier said. “Because
he
understands. Without Hagarty, who's going to believe Unwin?”

“Well, there's us,” Harold Gardener said with a bitterness that surprised even himself, “but I guess
we're
not telling.”

“Oh, give me a break!”
Boutillier roared, throwing up his hands,
“They killed him!
They didn't just throw him over the side—Garton had a switchblade. Mellon was stabbed seven times, including once in the left lung and twice in the testicles. The wounds match the blade. Four of his ribs were broken—Dubay did that, bear-hugging him. He was bitten, all right. There were bites on his arms, his left cheek, his neck. I think that was Unwin and Garton, although we've only got one clear match, and that one's probably not clear enough to stand up in court. And so all right, there was a big chunk of meat gone from his right armpit, so what? One of them really liked to bite. Probably even got himself a pretty good bone-on while he was doing it. I'm betting Garton, although we'll never prove it. And Mellon's earlobe was gone.”

Boutillier stopped, glaring at Harold.

“If we let in this clown story we'll
never
bring it home to them. Do you want that?”

“No, I told you.”

“The guy was a fruit, but he wasn't hurting anyone,” Boutillier said. “So hi-ho-the-dairy-o, along come these three pusholes in their engineer boots and they steal his life. I'm going to put them in the slam, my friend, and if I hear they got their puckery little assholes cored down there at Thomaston, I'm gonna send them cards saying I hope whoever did it had AIDS.”

Very fiery,
Gardener thought.
And the convictions will also look very good on your record when you run for the top spot in two years.

But he left without saying more, because he also wanted to see them put away.

John Webber Garton was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to ten to twenty years in Thomaston State Prison.

Steven Bishoff Dubay was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years in Shawshank State Prison.

Christopher Philip Unwin was tried separately as a juvenile and convicted of second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to six months at the South Windham Boys' Training Facility, sentence suspended.

At the time of this writing, all three sentences are under appeal; Garton and Dubay may be seen on any given day girl-watching or playing Penny Pitch in Bassey Park, not far from where Mellon's torn body was found floating against one of the pilings of the Main Street Bridge.

Don Hagarty and Chris Unwin have left town.

At the major trial—that of Garton and Dubay—no one mentioned a clown.

Patricia Uris later told her mother she should have known something was wrong. She should have known it, she said, because Stanley
never
took baths in the early evening. He showered early each morning and sometimes soaked late at night (with a magazine in one hand and a cold beer in the other), but baths at 7:00
P.M.
were not his style.

And then there was the thing about the books. It should have delighted him; instead, in some obscure way she did not understand, it seemed to have upset and depressed him. About three months before that terrible night, Stanley had discovered that a childhood friend of his had turned out to be a writer—not a
real
writer, Patricia told her mother, but a novelist. The name on the books was William Denbrough, but Stanley had sometimes called him Stuttering Bill. He had worked his way through almost all of the man's books; had, in fact, been reading the last on the night of the bath—the night of May 28th, 1985. Patty herself had picked up one of the earlier ones, out of curiosity. She had put it down after just three chapters.

It had not just been a novel, she told her mother later; it had been a horrorbook. She said it just that way, all one word, the way she would have said sexbook. Patty was a sweet, kind woman, but not terribly articulate—she had wanted to tell her mother how much that book had frightened her and why it had upset her, but had not been able. “It was full of monsters,” she said. “Full of monsters chasing after little children. There were killings, and . . . I don't know . . . bad feelings and hurt. Stuff like that.” It had, in fact, struck her
as almost pornographic; that was the word which kept eluding her, probably because she had never in her life spoken it, although she knew what it meant. “But Stan felt as if he'd rediscovered one of his childhood chums. . . . He talked about writing to him, but I knew he wouldn't. . . . I knew those stories made
him
feel bad, too . . . and . . . and . . .”

And then Patty Uris began to cry.

That night, lacking roughly six months of being twenty-eight years from the day in 1957 when George Denbrough had met Pennywise the Clown, Stanley and Patty had been sitting in the den of their home in a suburb of Atlanta. The TV was on. Patty was sitting in the love-seat in front of it, dividing her attention between a pile of sewing and her favorite game-show,
Family Feud.
She simply
adored
Richard Dawson and thought the watch-chain he always wore was terribly sexy, although wild horses would not have drawn this admission out of her. She also liked the show because she almost always got the most popular answers (there were no
right
answers on
Family Feud,
exactly; only the most popular ones). She had once asked Stan why the questions that seemed so easy to her usually seemed so hard to the families on the show. “It's probably a lot tougher when you're up there under those lights,” Stanley had replied, and it seemed to her that a shadow had drifted over his face. “Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real.”

That was probably very true, she decided. Stanley had really fine insights into human nature sometimes. Much finer, she considered, than his old
friend
William Denbrough, who had gotten rich writing a bunch of horrorbooks which appealed to people's baser natures.

Not that the Urises were doing so badly themselves! The suburb where they lived was a fine one, and the home which they had purchased for $87,000 in 1979 would probably now sell quickly and painlessly for $165,000—not that she wanted to sell, but such things were good to know. She sometimes drove back from the Fox Run Mall in her Volvo (Stanley drove a Mercedes diesel—teasing him, she called it Sedanley) and saw her house, set tastefully back behind low yew hedges, and thought:
Who lives there? Why, I do! Mrs. Stanley Uris does!
This was not an entirely happy thought; mixed with it was a pride so fierce that it sometimes made her feel a bit ill. Once upon a time, you see, there had been a lonely eighteen-year-old girl named
Patricia Blum who had been refused entry to the after-prom party that was held at the country club in the upstate town of Glointon, New York. She had been refused admission, of course, because her last name rhymed with
plum.
That was her, just a skinny little kike plum, 1967 that had been, and such discrimination was against the law, of course, har-de-har-har-har, and besides, it was all over now. Except that for part of her it was
never
going to be over. Part of her would always be walking back to the car with Michael Rosenblatt, listening to the crushed gravel under her pumps and his rented formal shoes, back to his father's car, which Michael had borrowed for the evening, and which he had spent the afternoon waxing. Part of her would always be walking next to Michael in his rented white dinner jacket—how it had glimmered in the soft spring night! She had been in a pale green evening gown which her mother declared made her look like a mermaid, and the idea of a kike mermaid was pretty funny, har-de-har-har-har. They had walked with their heads up and she had not wept—not then—but she had understood they weren't
walking
back, no, not really; what they had been doing was
slinking
back,
slinking,
rhymes with
stinking,
both of them feeling more Jewish than they had ever felt in their lives, feeling like pawnbrokers, feeling like cattle-car riders, feeling oily, long-nosed, sallow-skinned; feeling like mockies sheenies kikes; wanting to feel angry and not being able to feel angry—the anger came only later, when it didn't matter. At that moment she had only been able to feel ashamed, had only been able to ache. And then someone had laughed. A high shrill tittering laugh like a fast run of notes on a piano, and in the car she had been able to weep, oh you bet, here is the kike mermaid whose name rhymes with
plum
just weeping away like crazy. Mike Rosenblatt had put a clumsy, comforting hand on the back of her neck and she had twisted away from it, feeling ashamed, feeling dirty, feeling
Jewish.

The house set so tastefully back behind the yew hedges made that better . . . but not
all
better. The hurt and shame were still there, and not even being accepted in this quiet, sleekly well-to-do neighborhood could quite make that endless walk with the sound of grating stones beneath their shoes stop happening. Not even being members of
this
country club, where the
maître d'
always greeted them with a quietly respectful “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Uris.” She would
come home, cradled in her 1984 Volvo, and she would look at her house sitting on its expanse of green lawn, and she would often—all too often, she supposed—think of that shrill titter. And she would hope that the girl who had tittered was living in a shitty tract house with a
goy
husband who beat her, that she had been pregnant three times and had miscarried each time, that her husband cheated on her with diseased women, that she had slipped discs and fallen arches and cysts on her dirty tittering tongue.

She would hate herself for these thoughts, these uncharitable thoughts, and promise to do better—to stop drinking these bitter gall-and-wormwood cocktails. Months would go by when she did not think such thoughts. She would think:
Maybe all of that is finally past me. I am not that girl of eighteen anymore. I am a woman of thirty-six; the girl who heard the endless click and grate of those driveway stones, the girl who twisted away from Mike Rosenblatt's hand when he tried to comfort her because it was a Jewish hand, was half a life ago. That silly little mermaid is dead. I can forget her now and just be myself.
Okay. Good. Great. But then she would be somewhere—at the supermarket, maybe—and she would hear sudden tittering laughter from the next aisle and her back would prickle, her nipples would go hard and hurtful, her hands would tighten on the bar of the shopping cart or just on each other, and she would think:
Someone just told someone else that I'm Jewish, that I'm nothing but a bignose mockie kike, that Stanley's nothing but a bignose mockie kike, he's an accountant, sure, Jews are good with numbers, we let them into the country club, we had to, back in 1981 when that bignose mockie gynecologist won his suit, but we laugh at them, we laugh and laugh and laugh.
Or she would simply hear the phantom click and grate of stones and think
Mermaid! Mermaid!

Then the hate and shame would come flooding back like a migraine headache and she would despair not only for herself but for the whole human race. Werewolves. The book by Denbrough—the one she had tried to read and then put aside—was about werewolves. Werewolves, shit. What did a man like that know about werewolves?

Most of the time, however, she felt better than that—felt she
was
better than that. She loved her man, she loved her house, and she was usually able to love her life and herself. Things were good. They had not always been that way, of course—were things ever? When she accepted Stanley's engagement ring, her parents had been both angry
and unhappy. She had met him at a sorority party. He had come over to her school from New York State University, where he was a scholarship student. They had been introduced by a mutual friend, and by the time the evening was over, she suspected that she loved him. By the mid-term break, she was sure. When spring came around and Stanley offered her a small diamond ring with a daisy pushed through it, she had accepted it.