It (130 page)

What in the
world
can they be doing?

She peeked again, seeing more of the details this time. There was a careless scatter of books and papers nearby—schoolbooks. They had just come from their summer classes, then, what most of the kids called Dummy School or Make-up School. And, because Henry and Victor were facing her way, she could see their
things.
They were the first
things
she had ever seen in her life, other than pictures in a smudgy little book that Brenda Arrowsmith had showed her the year before, and in those pictures you really couldn't see very much. Bev observed now that their things were little tubes that hung down between their legs. Henry's was small and hairless, but Victor's was quite big, and there was a cloudy fuzz of fine black hair just over it.

Bill has one of those,
she thought, and suddenly her whole body seemed to flush at once—heat rushed through her in a wave that made her feel giddy and faint and almost sick to her stomach. In that moment she felt much the way Ben Hanscom had felt on the last day of school, looking down at her ankle bracelet and observing the way it flashed in the sun . . . but he had not felt the intermixed sense of terror she felt now.

She looked behind her once more. Now the pathway between the cars leading to the shelter of the Barrens seemed much longer. She was scared to move. If they knew she had seen their
things,
they
would
probably hurt her. And not just a little. They would hurt her badly.

Belch Huggins bellowed suddenly, making her jump, and Henry yelled: “Three feet! No shit, Belch! It was three
feet!
Wasn't it, Vic?”

Vic agreed it was, and they all roared with troll-like laughter.

Beverly tried another look around the junked Studebaker.

Patrick Hockstetter had turned and half-risen so that his butt was nearly in Henry's face. In Henry's hand was a silvery, glinting object. After a moment's study she made it out as a lighter.

“I thought you said you felt one coming on,” Henry said.

“I do,” Patrick said. “I'll tell you when. Get ready! . . . Get ready, it's coming! Get . . .
now!”

Henry flicked the lighter. At the same moment there was the unmistakable ripping sound of a really good fart. There was no mistaking that sound; Beverly had heard it enough in her own house, usually on Saturday night, after the beans and franks. A regular bear for his beans was her father. As Patrick blew off and Henry flicked the lighter, she saw something that made her jaw drop. A bright blue jet of flame appeared to roar directly out of Patrick's bum. To Bev it looked like the pilot-light on a gas-burner.

The boys roared their troll-like laughter and Beverly withdrew behind the sheltering car, stifling mad giggles again. She was laughing, but not because she was amused. In some very weird way it was funny, yes, but mostly she was laughing because she felt a deep revulsion accompanied by a sort of horror. She was laughing because she knew of no other way to cope with what she had seen. It had something to do with seeing the boys'
things,
but that was by no means all or even the great part of what she felt. She had known, after all, that boys had
things,
the same way she knew that girls had different
things;
this was only what you might call a confirmed sighting. But the rest of what they were doing seemed so strange, so ludicrous and yet at the same time so deadly-primitive that she found herself, in spite of the giggling fit, groping for the core of herself with some desperation.

Stop,
she thought, as if this were the answer,
stop, they'll hear you, so just you stop it, Bevvie!

But that was impossible. The best she could do was to laugh without engaging her vocal cords, so that the sounds came out of her in a series of almost inaudible chuffs, her hands pasted over her mouth, her cheeks as red as Mac apples, her eyes swimming with tears.

“Holy
shit,
that
hurts!”
Victor roared.

“Twelve
feet!”
Henry bellowed. “I swear to God, Vic,
twelve fuckin feet!
I swear it on my mother's
name!”

“I don't care if it was
twenty
fuckin feet, you burned my ass off!” Victor howled, and there was more bellowing laughter; still trying to giggle silently from behind the sheltering car, Beverly thought of a movie she had seen on TV. Jon Hall had been in it. It was about this jungle tribe, they had a secret rite, and if you saw it, you got sacrificed to their god, which was this big stone idol. This did not stop her giggles, but infused them with a nearly frantic quality. They were becoming more and more like silent screams. Her belly hurt. Tears streamed down her face.

Henry, Victor, Belch, and Patrick Hockstetter ended up in the dump lighting each others' farts on that hot July afternoon because of Rena Davenport.

Henry knew what resulted from consuming large amounts of baked beans. This result was perhaps best expressed in a little ditty he had learned at his father's knee when he was still in short pants:
Beans, beans, the musical fruit! The more you eat, the more you toot! The more you toot, the better you feel! Then you're ready for another meal!

Rena Davenport and his father had been courting for nearly eight years. She was fat, forty, and usually filthy. Henry supposed that Rena and his father sometimes fucked, although he could not imagine anyone squashing his body down on Rena Davenport's.

Rena's beans were her pride. She soaked them Saturday nights and baked them over a slow fire all day Sunday. Henry supposed they were okay—they were something to shovel into your mouth and chew up, anyway—but after eight years
anything
lost its charm.

Nor was Rena content to make just a few beans; she cooked them in job lots. When she turned up Sunday evenings in her old green De Soto (a naked rubber babydoll hung from the rearview mirror, looking like the world's youngest lynch-mob victim), she usually had the Bowerses' beans steaming on the seat beside her in a twelve-gallon galvanized-steel pail. The three of them would eat the beans that
night (Rena raving about her own cooking all the while, crazy Butch Bowers grunting and mopping up bean juice with a piece of Sonny Boy bread or simply telling her to shut up if there was a ballgame on the radio, Henry just eating, staring out the window, thinking his own thoughts—-it was over a plate of Sunday-night beans that he had conceived the idea of poisoning Mike Hanlon's dog Mr. Chips), and Butch would reheat a mess of them the next night. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays Henry would take a Tupperware box full of them to school. By Thursday or Friday, neither Henry nor his father could eat any more. The house's two bedrooms would smell of stale farts in spite of the open windows. Butch would take the remains and mix them into the other slops and feed them to Bip and Bop, the Bowerses' two pigs. Rena would like as not show up the following Sunday with another steaming pail, and the cycle would start all over again.

That morning Henry had put up an enormous quantity of leftover beans, and the four of them had eaten the whole lot at noon, sitting out on the playground in the shade of a big old elm. They had eaten until they were nearly bursting.

It had been Patrick who suggested they go down to the dump, which would be fairly quiet in the middle of a working-day summer afternoon. By the time they arrived, the beans were doing their work quite nicely.

Little by little, Beverly got herself under control again. She knew she had to get out; beating a retreat was ultimately less dangerous than hanging around. They were absorbed in what they were doing, and even if worse came to worst, she could get a head-start (and in the back of her mind she had also decided that, if worst came to terrible, a few shots from the Bullseye might discourage them).

She was about to begin creeping away when Victor said, “I gotta go, Henry. My dad wants me to help him pick corn this afternoon.”

“Oh shit,” Henry said. “He'll live.”

“No, he's mad at me. Because of what happened the other day.”

“Fuck him if he can't take a joke.”

Beverly listened more closely now, suspecting it might be the
scuffle which had ended with Eddie's broken arm that they were talking about.

“No, I gotta go.”

“I think his ass hurts,” Patrick said.

“Watch your mouth, fuckface,” Victor said. “It might grow on you.”

“I got to go too,” Belch said.

“Your father want you to pick corn?” Henry asked angrily. This was what might have passed for a jest in Henry's mind; Belch's father was dead.

“No. But I got a job delivering the
Weekly Shopper.
I gotta do that tonight.”

“What's this
Weekly Shopper
crap?” Henry asked, now sounding upset as well as angry.

“It's a
job,”
Belch said with ponderous patience. “I make
money.”

Henry made a disgusted sound, and Beverly risked another peek around the car. Victor and Belch were standing, buckling their belts. Henry and Patrick were still squatting with their pants down. The lighter glinted in Henry's hand.

“You're
not chickening out, are you?” Henry asked Patrick.

“Nope,” Patrick said.

“You
don't have to pick corn or go do some pussy job?”

“Nope,” Patrick said again.

“Well,” Belch said uncertainly, “see you around, Henry,”

“Sure,” Henry said, and spat near one of Belch's clodhopping workshoes.

Vic and Belch started off together toward the two rows of wrecked cars . . . toward the Studebaker behind which Beverly was crouching. At first she could only cringe, frozen with fear like a rabbit. Then she slid around the left side of the Studebaker and backed down the gap between it and the battered, doorless Ford next to it. For a moment she paused, looking from side to side, hearing them approach. She hesitated, her mouth cottony-dry, her back itchy with sweat; a part of her mind was numbly wondering how she'd look in a cast like Eddie's, with the Losers' names signed on it. Then she dived into the Ford on the passenger side. She curled up on the filthy floormat, making herself as small as possible. It was boiling hot inside the junked-out Ford, and it smelled so thickly of dust, rotting uphol
stery, and elderly rat-crap that she had to struggle grimly to keep from sneezing or coughing. She heard Belch and Victor pass close by, talking in low voices. Then they were gone.

She sneezed three times, quickly and quietly, into her cupped hands.

She supposed she could go now, if she was careful. The best way to do it would be to shift over to the driver's side of the Ford, sneak back to the aisle, and then just do a fade. She believed she could manage it, but the shock of almost being discovered had robbed her of her courage, at least for the time being. She felt safer here in the Ford. And maybe, now that Victor and Belch had gone, the other two would also go soon. Then she could go back to the clubhouse. She had lost all interest in target-shooting.

Also, she had to pee.

Come on,
she thought.
Come on, hurry up and go, hurry up and go, puh-LEEZE!

A moment later she heard Patrick roar with mixed laughter and pain.

“Six feet!” Henry bellowed. “Just like a fuckin blowtorch! Swear to God!”

Silence then for awhile. Sweat trickling down her back. The sun beating through the Ford's cracked windshield on the nape of her neck. Heaviness in her bladder.

Henry bellowed so loud that Beverly, who had been close to dozing in spite of her discomfort, almost cried out herself.
“Damn
it, Hockstetter! You burned my frigging ass! What are you doing with that lighter?”

“Ten feet,” Patrick giggled (just the sound of it made Bev feel cold and revolted, as if she had seen a worm squirm its way out of her salad). “Ten feet if it was an inch, Henry. Bright blue. Ten feet if it was an inch. Swear to God!”

“Gimme that,” Henry grunted.

Come on, come on, you stupidniks, go, get out!

When Patrick spoke again his voice was so low Bev could barely hear it. If there had been the slightest breath of wind on the air that baking afternoon, she would not have done.

“Let me show you something,” Patrick said.

“What?” Henry asked.

“Just something.” Patrick paused. “It feels good.”

“What?” Henry asked again.

Then there was silence.

I don't want to look, I don't want to see what they're doing now, and besides, they might see me, in fact they probably will because you've used up all your luck today, girly-o. So just stay right here. No peeking . . .

But her curiosity had overcome her good sense. There was something strange in that silence, something a little bit scary. She raised her head inch by inch until she could look through the Ford's cracked cloudy windshield. She needn't have worried about being seen; both of the boys were concentrating on what Patrick was doing. She didn't understand what she was seeing, but she knew it was nasty . . . not that she would have expected anything else from Patrick, who was just so
weird.

He had one hand between Henry's thighs and one hand between his own. One hand was flogging Henry's
thing
gently; with his other hand Patrick was rubbing his own. Except he wasn't exactly rubbing it—he was kind of . . .
squoozing
it, pulling it, letting it flop back down.

What is he
doing? Beverly wondered, dismayed.

She didn't know, not for sure, but it scared her. She didn't think she had been this scared since the blood had vomited out of the bathroom drain and splattered all over everything. Some deep part of her cried out that if they discovered she had seen this, whatever it was, they might do more than hurt her; they might actually kill her.