It (176 page)

“Sure,” Richie said. “Sure, Bill. No sweat.”

He took Audra from Bill. In this light, Bill could see her better than he perhaps wanted to—her pallor masked but not hidden by the dirt and ordure that smeared her forehead and caked her cheeks. Her eyes were still wide open . . . wide open and innocent of all sense. Her hair hung lank and wet. She might as well have been one of those inflatable dollies they sold at the Pleasure Chest in New York or along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. The only difference was her slow, steady respiration . . . and that might have been a clockwork trick, no more than that.

“How are we going to get up from here?” he asked Richie.

“Get Ben to give you ten fingers,” Richie said. “You can yank Bev up, and the two of you can get your wife. Ben can boost me and we'll get Ben. And after that I'll show you how to set up a volleyball tournament for a thousand sorority girls.”

“Beep-beep, Richie.”

“Beep-beep your ass, Big Bill.”

The tiredness was going through him in steady waves. He caught Beverly's level gaze and held it for a moment. She nodded to him slightly, and he made a smile for her.

“Give me ten fingers, B-B-Ben?”

Ben, who also looked unutterably weary, nodded. A deep scratch ran down one cheek. “I think I can handle that.”

He stooped slightly and laced his hands together. Bill hiked one foot, stepped into Ben's hand, and jumped up. It wasn't quite enough. Ben lifted the step he had made with his hands and Bill grabbed the edge of the broken-in tunnel roof. He yanked himself up. The first thing he saw was a white-and-orange crash barrier. The second thing was a crowd of milling men and women beyond the barrier. The third was Freese's Department Store—only it had an oddly bulged-out, foreshortened look. It took him a moment to realize that almost half
of Freese's had sunk into the street and the Canal beneath. The top half had slued out over the street and seemed in danger of toppling over like a pile of badly stacked books.

“Look! Look! There's someone in the street!”

A woman was pointing toward the place where Bill's head had poked out of the crevasse in the shattered pavement.

“Praise God, there's someone else!”

She started forward, an elderly woman with a kerchief tied over her head peasant-style. A cop held her back. “Not safe out there, Mrs. Nelson. You know it. Rest of the street might go any time.”

Mrs. Nelson,
Bill thought.
I remember you. Your sister used to sit George and me sometimes.
He raised his hand to show her he was all right, and when she raised her own hand in return, he felt a sudden surge of good feelings—and hope.

He turned around and lay flat on the sagging pavement, trying to distribute his weight as evenly as possible, the way you were supposed to do on thin ice. He reached down for Bev. She grasped his wrists and, with what seemed to be the last of his strength, he pulled her up. The sun, which had disappeared again, now ran out from behind a brace of mackerel-scale clouds and gave them their shadows back. Beverly looked up, startled, caught Bill's eyes, and smiled.

“I love you, Bill,” she said. “And I pray she'll be all right.”

“Thuh-hank you, Bevvie,” he said, and his kind smile made her start to cry a little. He hugged her and the small crowd gathered behind the crash barrier applauded. A photographer from the Derry
News
snapped a picture. It appeared in the June 1st edition of the paper, which was printed in Bangor because of water damage to the
News
's presses. The caption was simple enough, and true enough for Bill to cut the picture out and keep it tucked away in his wallet for years to come:
SURVIVORS
, the caption read. That was all, but that was enough.

It was six minutes of eleven in Derry, Maine.

Derry/Later the Same Day

The glass corridor between the Children's Library and the adult library had exploded at 10:30
A.M.
At 10:33, the rain stopped. It didn't taper off; it stopped all at once, as if Someone Up There had flicked a toggle switch. The wind had already begun to fall, and it fell so rapidly that people stared at each other with uneasy, superstitious faces. The sound was like the wind-down of a 747's engines after it has been safely parked at the gate. The sun peeked out for the first time at 10:47. By midafternoon the clouds had burned away entirely, and the day had come off fair and hot. By 3:30
P.M.
the mercury in the Orange Crush thermometer outside the door of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes read eighty-three—the highest reading of the young season. People walked through the streets like zombies, not talking much. Their expressions were remarkably similar: a kind of stupid wonder that would have been funny if it was not also so frankly pitiable. By evening reporters from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN had arrived in Derry, and the network news reporters would bring some version of the truth home to most people; they would make it real . . . although there were those who might have suggested that reality is a highly untrustworthy concept, something perhaps no more solid than a piece of canvas stretched over an interlacing of cables like the strands of a spiderweb. The following morning Bryant Gumble and Willard Scott of the
Today
show would be in Derry. During the course of the program, Gumble would interview Andrew Keene. “Whole Standpipe just crashed over and rolled down the hill,” Andrew said. “It was like wow. You know what I mean? Like Steven Spielberg eat your heart out, you know? Hey, I always got the idea looking at you on TV that you were, you know, a lot bigger.” Seeing themselves and their neighbors on TV—that would make it real. It would give them a place from which to grasp this terrible, ungraspable thing. It had been a
FREAK STORM
. In the days following,
THE DEATH-COUNT
would rise in
THE WAKE OF THE KILLER STORM
. It was, in fact,
THE WORST SPRING STORM IN MAINE HISTORY
. All of these headlines, as terrible as they were, were useful—they helped to blunt the essential strangeness of what
had happened . . . or perhaps
strangeness
was too mild a word.
Insanity
might have been better. Seeing themselves on TV would help make it concrete, less insane. But in the hours before the news crews arrived, there were only the people from Derry, walking through their rubble-strewn, mud-slicked streets with expressions of stunned unbelief on their faces. Only the people from Derry, not talking much, looking at things, occasionally picking things up and then tossing them down again, trying to figure out what had happened during the last seven or eight hours. Men stood on Kansas Street, smoking, looking at houses lying upside down in the Barrens. Other men and women stood beyond the white-and-orange crash barriers, looking into the black hole that had been downtown until ten that morning. The headline of that Sunday's paper read:
WE WILL REBUILD
, vows
DERRY MAYOR
, and perhaps they would. But in the weeks that followed, while the City Council wrangled over how the rebuilding should begin, the huge crater that had been downtown continued to grow in an unspectacular but steady way. Four days after the storm, the office building of the Bangor Hydroelectric Company collapsed into the hole. Three days after that, the Flying Doghouse, which sold the best kraut- and chili-dogs in eastern Maine, fell in. Drains backed up periodically in houses, apartment buildings, and businesses. It got so bad in the Old Cape that people began to leave. June 10th was the first evening of horse-racing at Bassey Park; the first pace was scheduled for 8:00
P.M.
and that seemed to cheer everyone up. But a section of bleachers collapsed as the trotters in the first race turned into the home stretch, and half a dozen people were hurt. One of them was Foxy Foxworth, who had managed the Aladdin Theater until 1973. Foxy spent two weeks in the hospital, suffering from a broken leg and a punctured testicle. When he was released, he decided to go to his sister's in Somersworth, New Hampshire.

He wasn't the only one. Derry was falling apart.

They watched the orderly slam the back doors of the ambulance and go around to the passenger seat. The ambulance started up the hill toward the Derry Home Hospital. Richie had flagged it down at
severe risk of life and limb, and had argued the irate driver to a draw when the driver insisted he just didn't have any more room. He had ended up stretching Audra out on the floor.

“Now what?” Ben asked. There were huge brown circles under his eyes and a grimy ring of dirt around his neck.

“I'm g-going back to the Town House,” Bill said. “G-Gonna sleep for about suh-hixteen hours.”

“I second that,” Richie said. He looked hopefully at Bev. “Got any cigarettes, purty lady?”

“No,” Beverly said. “I think I'm going to quit again.”

“Sensible enough idea.”

They began to walk slowly up the hill, the four of them side by side.

“It's o-o-over,” Bill said.

Ben nodded. “We did it.
You
did it, Big Bill.”

“We all did it,” Beverly said. “I wish we could have brought Eddie up. I wish that more than anything.”

They reached the corner of Upper Main and Point Street. A kid in a red rainslicker and green rubber boots was sailing a paper boat along the brisk run of water in the gutter. He looked up, saw them looking at him, and waved tentatively. Bill thought it was the boy with the skateboard—the one whose friend had seen Jaws in the Canal. He smiled and stepped toward the boy.

“It's all right n-n-now,” he said.

The boy studied him gravely, and then grinned. The smile was sunny and hopeful. “Yeah,” he said. “I think it is.”

“Bet your a-a-ass.”

The kid laughed.

“You g-gonna be careful on thuh-hat skateboard?”

“Not really,” the kid said, and this time Bill laughed. He restrained an urge to ruffle the kid's hair—that probably would have been resented—and returned to the others.

“Who was that?” Richie asked.

“A friend,” Bill said. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Do you remember it? When we came out before?”

Beverly nodded. “Eddie got us back to the Barrens. Only we ended up on the other side of the Kenduskeag somehow. The Old Cape side.”

“You and Haystack pushed the lid off one of those pumping-stations,” Richie said to Bill, “because you had the most weight.”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “We did. The sun was out, but it was almost down.”

“Yeah,” Bill said. “And we were all there.”

“But nothing lasts forever,” Richie said. He looked back down the hill they had just climbed and sighed. “Look at this, for instance.”

He held his hands out. The tiny scars in the palms were gone. Beverly put her hands out; Ben did the same; Bill added his. All were dirty but unmarked.

“Nothing lasts forever,” Richie repeated. He looked up at Bill, and Bill saw tears cut slowly through the dirt on Richie's cheeks.

“Except maybe for love,” Ben said.

“And desire,” Beverly said.

“How about friends?” Bill asked, and smiled. “What do you think, Trashmouth?”

“Well,” Richie said, smiling and rubbing his eyes, “Ah got to thank about it, boy; Ah say, Ah say Ah got to
thank
about it.”

Bill put his hands out and they joined theirs with his and stood there for a moment, seven who had been reduced to four but who could still make a circle. They looked at each other. Ben was crying now too, the tears spilling from his eyes. But he was smiling.

“I love you guys so much,” he said. He squeezed Bev's and Richie's hands tight-tight-tight for a moment, and then dropped them. “Now could we see if they've got such a thing as breakfast in this place? And we ought to call Mike. Tell him we're okay.”

“Good thinnin, senhorr,” Richie said. “Every now an then I theenk you might turn out okay. Watchoo theenk, Beeg Beel?”

“I theenk you ought to go fuck yourself,” Bill said.

They walked into the Town House on a wave of laughter, and as Bill pushed through the glass door, Beverly caught sight of something which she never spoke of but never forgot. For just a moment she saw their reflections in the glass—only there were six, not four, because Eddie was behind Richie and Stan was behind Bill, that little half-smile on his face.

Out/Dusk, August 10th 1958

The sun sits neatly on the horizon, a slightly oblate red ball that throws a flat feverish light over the Barrens. The iron cover on top of one of the pumping-stations rises a little, settles, rises again, and begins to slide.

“P-P-Push it, Buh-Ben, it's bruh-breaking my
shoulder—”

The cover slides farther, tilts, and falls into the shrubbery that has grown up around the concrete cylinder. Seven children come out one by one and look around, blinking owlishly in silent wonder. They are like children who have never seen daylight before.

“It's so
quiet,”
Beverly says softly.

The only sounds are the loud rush of water and the somnolent hum of insects. The storm is over but the Kenduskeag is still very high. Closer to town, not far from the place where the river is corseted in concrete and called a canal, it has overflowed its banks, although the flooding is by no means serious—a few wet cellars is the worst of it. This time.

Stan moves away from them, his face blank and thoughtful. Bill looks around and at first he thinks Stan has seen a small fire on the riverbank—fire is his first impression: a red glow almost too bright to look at. But when Stan picks the fire up in his right hand the angle of the light changes, and Bill sees it's nothing but a Coke bottle, one of the new clear ones, which someone has dropped by the river. He watches as Stan reverses it, holds it by the neck, and brings it down on a shelf of rock jutting out of the bank. The bottle breaks, and Bill is aware they are all watching Stan now as he pokes through the shattered remains of the bottle, his face sober and studious and absorbed. At last he picks up a narrow wedge of glass. The westering sun throws red glints from it, and Bill thinks again:
Like a fire.