It (104 page)

“I got enough,” I said. I licked my lips. “Mr. Keene, how could a thing of that . . . that magnitude . . . be covered up?”

“Wasn't no cover-up,” he said, looking honestly surprised. “It was just that no one talked about it much. And really, who cared? It wasn't President and Mrs. Hoover that went down that day. It was no worse than shooting mad dogs that would kill you with a bite if you give them half a chance.”

“But the women?”

“Couple of whores,” he said indifferently. “Besides, it happened in Derry, not in New York or Chicago. The
place
makes it news as much as what
happened
in the place, sonny. That's why there are bigger
headlines when an earthquake kills twelve people in Los Angeles than there are when one kills three thousand in some heathen country in the Mideast.”

Besides, it happened in Derry.

I've heard it before, and I suppose if I continue to pursue this I'll hear it again . . . and again . . . and again. They say it as if speaking patiently to a mental defective. They say it the way they would say
Because of gravity
if you asked them how come you stick to the ground when you walk. They say it as if it were a natural law any natural man should understand. And, of course, the worst of that is I
do
understand.

I had one more question for Norbert Keene.

“Did you see anyone at all that day that you didn't recognize once the shooting started?”

Mr. Keene's answer was quick enough to drop my blood temperature ten degrees—or so it felt. “The clown, you mean? How did you find out about him, sonny?”

“Oh, I heard it somewhere,” I said.

“I only caught a glimpse of him. Once things got hot, I tended pretty much to my own knittin. I glanced around just once and saw him upstreet beyond them Swedes under the Bijou's marquee,” Mr. Keene said. “He wasn't wearing a clown suit or nothing like that. He was dressed in a pair of farmer's biballs and a cotton shirt underneath. But his face was covered with that white greasepaint they use, and he had a big red clown smile painted on. Also had these tufts of fake hair, you know. Orange. Sorta comical.

“Lal Machen never saw that fellow, but Biff did. Only Biff must have been confused, because he thought he saw him in one of the windows of an apartment over somewhere to the left, and once when I asked Jimmy Gordon—he was killed in Pearl Harbor, you know, went down with his ship, the
California,
I think it was—he said he saw the guy behind the War Memorial.”

Mr. Keene shook his head, smiling a little.

“It's funny how people get during a thing like that, and even funnier what they remember after it's all over. You can listen to sixteen different tales and no two of them will jibe together. Take the gun that clown fellow had, for instance—”

“Gun?” I asked. “He was shooting, too?”

“Ayuh,” Mr. Keene said. “The one glimpse I caught of him, it looked like he had a Winchester bolt-action, and it wasn't until later that I figured out I must have thought that because that's what
I
had. Biff Marlow thought he had a Remington, because that was what
he
had. And when I asked Jimmy about it, he said that guy was shooting an old Springfield, just like his. Funny, huh?”

“Funny,” I managed. “Mr. Keene . . . didn't any of you wonder what in hell a clown, especially one in farmer's biballs, was doing there just then?”

“Sure,” Mr. Keene said. “It wasn't no big deal, you understand, but sure we wondered. Most of us figured it was somebody who wanted to attend the party but didn't want to be recognized. A Town Council member, maybe. Horst Mueller, maybe, or even Trace Naugler, who was mayor back then. Or it could just have been a professional man who didn't want to be recognized. A doctor or a lawyer. I wouldn't've recognized my own father in a get-up like that.”

He laughed a little and I asked him what was funny.

“There's also a possibility that it was a real clown,” he said. “Back in the twenties and thirties the county fair in Esty came a lot earlier than it does now, and it was set up and going full blast the week that the Bradley Gang met their end. There were clowns at the county fair. Maybe one of them heard we were going to have our own little carnival and rode down because he wanted to be in on it.”

He smiled at me, dryly.

“I'm about talked out,” he said, “but I'll tell you one more thing, since you 'pear to be so interested and you listen so close. It was something Biff Marlow said about sixteen years later, when we were having a few beers up to Pilot's in Bangor. Right out of a clear blue sky he said it. Said that clown was leanin out of the window so far that Biff couldn't believe he wasn't
fallin
out. It wasn't just his head and shoulders and arms that was out; Biff said he was right out to the knees, hanging there in midair, shooting down at the cars the Bradleys had come in, with that big red grin on his face. ‘He was tricked out like a jackolantern that had got a bad scare,' was how Biff put it.”

“Like he was floating,” I said.

“Ayuh,” Mr. Keene agreed. “And Biff said there was something else, something that bothered him for weeks afterward. One of those things you get right on the tip of your tongue but won't quite come
off, or something that lights on your skin like a mosquito or a noseeum. He said he finally figured out what it was one night when he had to get up and tap a kidney. He stood there whizzing into the bowl, thinking of nothing in particular, when it come to him all at once that it was two-twenty-five in the afternoon when the shooting started and the sun was out but that clown didn't cast any shadow. No shadow at all.”

“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.