“You lethargic, waiting upon me,
waiting for the fire and I
attendant upon you,
shaken by your beauty
Shaken by your beauty
Shaken.”—William Carlos Williams, Paterson
“Well I was born in my birthday suit
The doctor slapped my behind
He said ‘You gonna be special
You sweet little toot toot.’ ”—Sidney Simien, “My Toot Toot”
Bill’s there first. He sits in one of the wing-back chairs just inside the Reading Room door, watching as Mike deals with the library’s last few customers of the night—an old lady with a clutch of paperback gothics, a man with a huge historical tome on the Civil War, and a skinny kid waiting to check out a novel with a seven-day-rental sticker in an upper corner of its plastic cover. Bill sees with no sense of surprise or serendipity at all that it is his own latest novel. He feels that surprise is beyond him, serendipity a believed-in reality that has turned out to be only a dream after all.
A pretty girl, her tartan skirt held together with a big gold safety pin (Christ, I haven’t seen one of those in years, Bill thinks, are they coming back?), is feeding quarters into the Xerox machine and copying an offprint with one eye on the big pendulum clock behind the checkout desk. The sounds are library-soft and library-comforting: the hush-squeak of soles and heels on the red-and-black linoleum of the floor; the steady tock and tick of the clock dropping off dry seconds; the catlike purr of the copying machine.
The boy takes his William Denbrough novel and goes to the girl at the copier just as she finishes and begins to square up her pages.
“You can just leave that offprint on the desk, Mary,” Mike says. “I’ll put it away.”
She flashes a grateful smile. “Thanks, Mr. Hanlon.”
“Goodnight. Goodnight, Billy. The two of you go right home.”
“The boogeyman will get you if you don’t . . . watch . . . out!” Billy, the skinny kid, chants and slips a proprietary arm around the girl’s slim waist.
“Well, I don’t think he’d want a pair as ugly as you two,” Mike says, “but be careful, all the same.”
“We will, Mr. Hanlon,” Mary replies, seriously enough, and punches the boy lightly on the shoulder. “Come on, ugly,” she says, and giggles. When she does this she is transformed from a pretty mildly desirable high-school junior into the coltish not-quite-gawky eleven-year-old that Beverly Marsh had been . . . and as they pass him Bill is shaken by her beauty . . . and he feels fear; he wants to go to the boy and tell him earnestly that he must go home by well-lighted streets and not look around if someone speaks.
You can’t be careful on a skateboard, mister, a phantom voice says inside his head, and Bill smiles a rueful grownup’s smile.
He watches the boy open the door for his girl. They go into the vestibule, moving closer together, and Bill would have bet the royalties of the book the boy named Billy is holding under his arm that he has stolen a kiss before opening the outer door for the girl. More fool you if you didn’t, Billy my man, he thinks. Now see her home safe. For Christ’s sake see her home safe!
Mike calls, “Be right with you, Big Bill. Just let me file this.”
Bill nods and crosses his legs. The paper bag on his lap crackles a little. There’s a pint of bourbon inside and he reckons he has never wanted a drink so badly in his life as he does right now. Mike will be able to supply water, if not ice—and the way he feels right now, a very little water will be enough.
He thinks of Silver, leaning against the wall of Mike’s garage on Palmer Lane. And from that his thoughts progress naturally to the day they had met in the Barrens—all except Mike—and each had told his tale again: lepers under porches; mummies who walked on the ice; blood from drains and dead boys in the Standpipe and pictures that moved and werewolves that chased small boys down deserted streets.
They had gone deeper into the Barrens that day before the Fourth of July, he remembers now. It had been hot in town but cool in the tangled shade on the eastern bank of the Kenduskeag. He remembers one of those concrete cylinders not far away, humming to itself, the way the Xerox machine had hummed for the pretty high-school girl just now. Bill remembers that, and how, when all the stories were done, the others had looked at him.
They had wanted him to tell them what they should do next, how they should proceed, and he simply didn’t know. The not knowing had filled him with a kind of desperation.
Looking at Mike’s shadow now, looming large on the darkly paneled wall in the reference room, a sudden sureness comes to him: he hadn’t known then because they hadn’t been complete when they met that July 3rd afternoon. The completion had come later, at the abandoned gravelpit beyond the dump, where you could climb out of the Barrens easily on either side—Kansas Street or Merit Street. Right around, in fact, where the Interstate overpass was now. The gravel-pit had no name; it was old, its crumbly sides crabby with weeds and bushes. There had still been plenty of ammunition there—more than enough for an apocalyptic rockfight.
But before that, on the bank of the Kenduskeag, he hadn’t been sure what to say—what did they want him to say? What did he want to say? He remembers looking from one face to the next—Ben’s; Bev’s; Eddie’s; Stan’s; Richie’s. And he remembers music. Little Richard. “Whomp-bomp-a-lomp-bomp . . .”
Music. Low. And darts of light in his eyes. He remembers the darts of light because
Richie had hung his transistor radio over the lowermost branch of the tree he was leaning against. Although they were in the shade, the sun bounced off the surface of the Kenduskeag, onto the radio’s chrome facing, and from there into Bill’s eyes.
“T-Take that th-hing d-d-d-own, Ruh-Ruh-Richie,” Bill said. “It’s gonna buh-blind m-m-me.”
“Sure, Big Bill,” Richie said at once, with no smartmouth at all, and removed the radio from the branch. He also turned it off, and Bill wished he hadn’t done that; it made the silence, broken only by the rippling water and the vague hum of the sewage-pumping machinery, seem very loud. Their eyes watched him and he wanted to tell them to look somewhere else, what did they think he was, a freak?
But of course he couldn’t do that, because all they were doing was waiting for him to tell them what to do now. They had come by dreadful knowledge, and they needed him to tell them what to do with it. Why me? he wanted to shout at them, but of course he knew that, too. It was because, like it or not, he had been tapped for the position. Because he was the idea-man, because he had lost a brother to whatever it was, but most of all because he had become, in some obscure way he would never completely understand, Big Bill.
He glanced at Beverly and looked away quickly from the calm trust in her eyes. Looking at Beverly made him feel funny in the pit of his stomach. Fluttery.
“We cuh-can’t go to the p-p-police,” he said at last. His voice sounded harsh to his own ears, too loud. “We c-ca-han’t g-go to our puh-huh-harents, either. Unless . . .” He looked hopefully at Richie. “What a-a-about your m-mom and d-dad, four-eyes? They suh-heem p-pretty reh-reh-regular.”
“My good man,” Richie said in his Toodles the Butler Voice, “you obviously have no understahnding whatsoevah of my mater and pater. They—”
“Talk American, Richie,” Eddie said from his spot by Ben. He was sitting by Ben for the simple reason that Ben provided enough shade for Eddie to sit in. His face looked small and pinched and worried—an old man’s face. His aspirator was in his right hand.
“They’d think I was ready for Juniper Hill,” Richie said. He was wearing an old pair of glasses today. The day before a friend of Henry Bowers’s named Gard Jagermeyer had come up behind Richie as Richie left the Derry Ice Cream Bar with a pistachio cone. “Tag, you’re it!” this Jagermeyer, who outweighed Richie by forty pounds or so, screamed, and slammed Richie full in the back with both hands laced together. Richie flew into the gutter, losing his glasses and his ice-cream cone. The left lens of his glasses had shattered, and his mother was furious with him about it, lending very little credence to Richie’s explanations.
“All I know is that it was a lot of fooling around,” she had said. “Honestly, Richie, do you think there’s a glasses-tree somewhere and we can just pull off a new pair of spectacles for you whenever you break the old pair?”
“But Mom, this kid pushed me, he came up behind me, this big kid, and pushed me—” Richie was by then near tears. This failure to make his mother understand hurt much worse than being slammed into the gutter by Gard Jagermeyer, who was so stupid they hadn’t even bothered to send him to summer-school.
“I don’t want to hear any more about it,” Maggie Tozier said flatly. “But the next time you see your father come in looking whipped after working late three nights in a row, you think a little bit, Richie. You think about it.”
“But Mom—”
“No more, I said.” Her voice was curt and final—worse, it was near tears. She left the room then and the TV went on much too loud. Richie had been left alone sitting miserably at the kitchen table.
It was this memory that caused Richie to shake his head again. “My folks are okay, but they’d never believe something like this.”
“W-What a-a-about other kih-kids?”
And they looked around, Bill would remember years later, as if for someone who wasn’t there.
“Who?” Stan asked doubtfully. “I can’t think of anyone else I trust.”
“Just the suh-suh-same . . .” Bill said in a troubled voice, and a little silence fell among them while Bill thought about what to say next.
If asked, Ben Hanscom would have told you that Henry Bowers hated him more than any of the others in the Losers’ Club, because of what had happened that day when he and Henry had shot the chutes down into the Barrens from Kansas Street, because of what had happened the day he and Richie and Beverly escaped from the Aladdin, but most of all because, by not allowing Henry to copy during examinations, he had caused Henry to be sent to summer-school and incur the wrath of his father, the reputedly insane Butch Bowers.
If asked, Richie Tozier would have told you Henry hated him more than any of the others, because of the day he had fooled Henry and his two other musketeers in Freese’s.
Stan Uris would have told you that Henry hated him most of all because he was a Jew (when Stan had been in the third grade and Henry the fifth, Henry had once washed Stan’s face with snow until it bled and he was screaming hysterically with pain and fear).
Bill Denbrough believed that Henry hated him the most because he was skinny, because he stuttered, and because he liked to dress well (“L-L-Look at the f-f-f-fucking puh-puh-PANSY!” Henry had cried when the Derry School had had Careers Day in April and Bill had come wearing a tie; before the day was over, the tie had been ripped off and flung into a tree halfway down Charter Street).
He did hate all four of them, but the boy in Derry who was number one on Henry’s personal Hate Parade was not in the Losers’ Club at all on that July 3rd; he was a black boy named Michael Hanlon, who lived a quarter of a mile down the road from the shirttail Bowers farm.
Henry’s father, who was every bit as crazy as he was reputed to be, was Oscar “Butch” Bowers. Butch Bowers associated his financial, physical, and mental decline with the Hanlon family in general and with Mike’s father in particular. Will Hanlon, he was fond of telling his few friends and his son, had had him thrown in the county jail when all of his, Hanlon’s, chickens died. “So’s he could get the insurance money, don’t you know,” Butch would say, eying his audience with all the baleful interrupt-if-you-dare pugnacity of Captain Billy Bones in the Admiral Benbow. “He got some of his friends to lie him up, and that’s why I had to sell my Merc’ry.”
“Who lied him up, Daddy?” Henry had asked when he was eight, burning at the injustice that had been done to his father. He thought to himself that when he was a grownup he would find liar-uppers and coat them with honey and stake them out over anthills, like in some of those Western movies they showed at the Bijou Theater on Saturday afternoons.
And because his son was a tireless listener (although, if asked, Butch would have maintained that was only as it should be), Bowers Senior filled his son’s ears with a litany of hate and hard luck. He explained to his son that while all niggers were stupid, some were cunning as well—and down deep they all hated white men and wanted to plow a white woman’s furrow. Maybe it wasn’t just the insurance money after all, Butch said; maybe Hanlon had decided to lay the blame for the dead chickens at his door because Butch had the next produce stand down the road. He done it, anyway, and that was just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket. He done it and then got a bunch of white nigger bleeding hearts from town to lie him up and threaten Butch with state prison if he didn’t pay that nigger off. “And why not?” Butch would ask his round-eyed dirty-necked silent son. “Why not? I was just a man who fought the Japs for his country. There was lots of guys like us, but he was the only nigger in the county.”
The chicken business had been followed by one unlucky incident after another—his Deere tractor had blown a rod; his good harrow got busted in the north field; he got a boil on his neck which became infected, had to be lanced, then became infected again and had to be removed surgically; the nigger started using his foully gotten money to undercut Butch’s prices so they lost custom.
In Henry’s ears, it was a constant litany: the nigger, the nigger, the nigger. Everything was the nigger’s fault. The nigger had a nice white house with an upstairs and an oil furnace while Butch and his wife and his son lived in what was not much better than a tarpaper shack. When Butch couldn’t make enough money farming and had to go to work in the woods for awhile, it was the nigger’s fault. When their well went dry in 1956, it was the nigger’s fault.
Later that same year Henry, who was then ten years old, started to feed Mike’s dog Mr. Chips old stewbones and bags of potato-chips. It got so Mr. Chips would wag his tail and come running when Henry called. When the dog was well used to Henry and Henry’s treats, Henry one day fed him a pound of hamburger laced with insect poison. The bug-killer he found in the back shed; he had saved three weeks to buy the meat at Costello’s.
Mr. Chips ate half the poisoned meat and then stopped. “Go on, finish your treat, Niggerdog,” Henry had said. Mr. Chips wagged his tail. Since Henry had called him this from the beginning, he believed it was his other name. When the pains started, Henry produced a piece of clothesline and tied Mr. Chips to a birch so he couldn’t get away and run home. He then sat on a flat sunwarmed rock, put his chin in his palms, and watched the dog die. It took a good long time, but Henry considered it time well spent. At the end Mr. Chips began to convulse and a thin green foam ran from between his jaws.
“How do you like that, Niggerdog?” Henry asked it, and it rolled its dying eyes up at the sound of Henry’s voice and tried to wag its tail. “Did you like your lunch, you shitty mutt?”
When the dog was dead, Henry removed the clothesline, went home, and told his father what he had done. Oscar Bowers was extremely crazy by that time; a year later his wife would leave him after he beat her nearly to death. Henry was likewise frightened of his father and felt a terrible hate for him sometimes, but he also loved him. And that afternoon, after he had told, he felt he had finally found the key to his father’s affections, because his father had clapped him on the back (so hard that Henry almost fell over), taken him in the living room, and given him a beer. It was the first beer Henry had ever had, and for all the rest of his years he would associate that taste with positive emotions: victory and love.
“Here’s to a good job well done,” Henry’s crazy father had said. They clicked their brown bottles together and drank them down. So far as Henry knew, the niggers had never found out who killed their dog, but he supposed they had their suspicions. He hoped they did.
The others in the Losers’ Club knew Mike by sight—in a town where he was the only Negro child, it would have been strange if they had not—but that was all, because Mike didn’t go to Derry Elementary School. His mother was a devout Baptist and Mike was therefore sent to the Neibolt Street Church School. In between geography, reading, and arithmetic there were Bible drills, lessons on such subjects as The Meaning of the Ten Commandments in a Godless World, and discussion-groups on how to handle everyday moral problems (if you saw a buddy shoplifting, for instance, or heard a teacher taking the name of God in vain).
Mike thought the Church School was okay. There were times when he suspected, in a vague way, that he was missing some things—a wider communication with kids his own age perhaps—but he was willing to wait until high school for these things to happen. The prospect made him a little nervous because his skin was brown, but both his mother and father had been well treated in town as far as Mike could see, and Mike believed he would be treated well if he treated others the same way.
The exception to this rule, of course, was Henry Bowers.
Although he tried to show it as little as possible, Mike went in constant terror of Henry. In 1958 Mike was slim and well built, taller than Stan Uris but not quite as tall as Bill Denbrough. He was fast and agile, and that had saved him from several beatings at Henry’s hands. And, of course, he went to a different school. Because of that and the age difference, their paths rarely coincided. Mike took pains to keep things that way. So the irony was this: although Henry hated Mike Hanlon more than any other kid in Derry, Mike had been the least hurt of any of them.
Oh, he had taken his lumps. The spring after he had killed Mike’s dog, Henry sprang out of the bushes one day while Mike was walking toward town to go to the library. It was late March, warm enough for bike-riding, but in those days Witcham Road turned to dirt just beyond the Bowers place, which meant that it was a quagmire of mud—no good for bikes.
“Hello, nigger,” Henry had said, emerging from the bushes, grinning.
Mike backed off, eyes flicking warily right and left, watching for a chance to get away. He knew that if he could buttonhook around Henry, he could outdistance him. Henry was big and Henry was strong, but Henry was also slow.
“Gonna make me a tarbaby,” Henry said, advancing on the smaller boy. “You’re not black enough, but I’ll fix that.”
Mike cut his eyes to the left and twitched his body in that direction. Henry took the bait and broke that way—too fast and too far to pull himself back. Reversing with a sweet and natural speed, Mike took off to the right (in high school he would make the varsity football team as a tailback his sophomore year, and was only kept from breaking the school’s all-time scoring record by a broken leg halfway through his senior season). He would have made it easily past Henry but for the mud. It was greasy, and Mike slipped to his knees. Before he could get up, Henry was upon him.
“Niggerniggernigger!” Henry cried in a kind of religious ecstasy as he rolled Mike over. Mud went up the back of Mike’s shirt and down the back of his pants. He could feel it squoozing into his shoes. But he did not begin to cry until Henry slathered mud across his face, plugging up both of his nostrils.
“Now you’re black!” Henry had screamed gleefully, rubbing mud in Mike’s hair. “Now you’re REEEELY black!” He ripped up Mike’s poplin jacket and the tee-shirt beneath and slammed a poultice of mud down over the boy’s bellybutton. “Now you’re as black as midnight in a MINE-SHAFT!” Henry screamed triumphantly, and slammed mudplugs into both of Mike’s ears. Then he stood back, muddy hands hooked into his belt, and yelled: “I killed your dog, black boy!” But Mike did not hear this because of the mud in his ears and his own terrified sobs.
Henry kicked a final sticky clot of mud onto Mike and then turned and walked home, not looking back. A few moments later, Mike got up and did the same, still weeping.
His mother was of course furious; she wanted Will Hanlon to call Chief Borton and have him out to the Bowers house before the sun went down. “He’s been after Mikey before,” Mike heard her say. He was sitting in the bathtub and his parents were in the kitchen. This was his second tub of water; the first had turned black almost the moment he had stepped into it and sat down. In her fury, his mother had lapsed into a thick Texas patois Mike could barely understand. “You put the law on him, Will Hanlon! Both the dog and the pup! You law em, hear me?”
Will heard, but did not do as his wife asked. Eventually, when she cooled down (by then it was that night and Mike two hours asleep), he refreshed her on the facts of life. Chief Borton was not Sheriff Sullivan. If Borton had been sheriff when the incident of the poisoned chickens occurred, Will would never have gotten his two hundred dollars and would have had to be content with that state of affairs. Some men would stand behind you and some men wouldn’t; Borton was of the latter type. He was, in fact, a jellyfish.
“Mike has had trouble with that kid before, yes,” he told Jessica. “But he hasn’t had much because he’s careful around Henry Bowers. This will serve to make him more careful.”
“You mean you’re just going to let it go?”
“Bowers has told his son stories about his dealings with me, I guess,” Will said, “and his son hates the three of us because of them, and because his father has also told him that hating niggers is what men are supposed to do. It all comes back to that. I can’t change the fact that our son is a Negro any more than I can sit here and tell you that Henry Bowers is going to be the last one to take after him because his skin’s brown. He’s going to have to deal with it all the rest of his life, as I have dealt with it, and you have dealt with it. Why, right there in that Christian school you were bound he was going to go to the teacher told them blacks weren’t as good as whites because Noah’s son Ham looked at his father while he was drunk and naked and Noah’s other two boys cast their eyes aside. That’s why the sons of Ham were condemned to always be hewers of wood and drawers of water, she said. And Mikey said she was lookin right at him while she told that story to them.”
Jessica looked at her husband, mute and miserable. Two tears fell, one from each eye, and tracked slowly down her face. “Isn’t there ever any getting away from it?”
His reply was kind but implacable; it was a time when wives believed their husbands, and Jessica had no reason to doubt her Will.
“No. There is no getting away from the word nigger, not now, not in the world we’ve been given to live in, you and me. Country niggers from Maine are still niggers. I have thought, times, that the reason I came back to Derry was that there is no better place to remember that. But I’ll have a talk with the boy.”
The next day he called Mike out of the barn. Will sat on the yoke of his harrow and patted a place next to him for Mike.
“You want to stay out of that Henry Bowers’s way,” he said.
Mike nodded.
“His father is crazy.”
Mike nodded again. He had heard as much around town. His few glimpses of Mr. Bowers had reinforced the notion.
“I don’t mean just a little crazy,” Will said, lighting a home-rolled Bugler cigarette and looking at his son. “He’s about three steps away from the boobyhatch. He came back from the war that way.”
“I think Henry’s crazy too,” Mike said. His voice was low but firm, and that strengthened Will’s heart . . . although he was, even after a checkered life whose incidents had included almost being burned alive in a juryrigged speakeasy called the Black Spot, unable to believe a kid like Henry could be crazy.
“Well, he’s listened to his father too much, but that is only natural,” Will said. Yet on this his son was closer to the truth. Henry Bowers, either because of his constant association with his father or because of something else—some interior thing—was indeed slowly but surely going crazy.
“I don’t want you to make a career out of running away,” his father said, “but because you’re a Negro, you’re apt to be put upon a good deal. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes, Daddy,” Mike said, thinking of Bob Gautier at school, who had tried to explain to Mike that nigger could not be a bad word, because his father used it all the time. In fact, Bob told Mike earnestly, it was a good word. When a fighter on the Friday Night Fights took a bad beating and managed to stay on his feet, his daddy said, “His head is as hard as a nigger’s,” and when someone was really putting out at his work (which, for Mr. Gautier, was Star Beef in town), his daddy said, “That man works like a nigger.” “And my daddy is just as much a Christian as your daddy,” Bob had finished. Mike remembered that, looking at Bob Gautier’s white earnest pinched face, surrounded by the mangy fur of his handmedown snowsuit-hood, he had felt not anger but a terrible sadness that made him feel like crying. He had seen honesty and good intent in Bob’s face, but what he had felt was loneliness, distance, a great whistling emptiness between himself and the other boy.
“I see that you do know what I mean,” Will said, and ruffled his son’s hair. “And what it all comes down to is that you have to be careful where you take your stand. You have to ask yourself if Henry Bowers is worth the trouble. Is he?”
“No,” Mike said. “No, I don’t think so.” It would be yet awhile before he changed his mind; July 3rd, 1958, in fact.