He turned the muzzle toward him, being careful to keep his hands far away from the trigger. One look into the Walther's black lidless eye made him understand Bill's peculiar smile perfectly. He remembered his father saying, If you remember there is no such thing asan unloaded gun, you'll be okay with firearms all your life, Richie. He handed the gun back to Bill, glad to be rid of it.

Bill stowed it in his duffel coat again. Suddenly the house on Neibolt Street seemed less frightening to Richie . . . but the possibility that blood might actually be spilled — that seemed much stronger.

He looked at Bill, perhaps meaning to appeal this idea again, but he saw Bill's face, read it, and only said, 'You ready?'

13

As always, when Bill finally pulled his second foot up from the ground, Richie felt sure that they would crash, splitting their silly skulls on unyielding cement. The big bike wavered crazily from side to side. The cards clothespinned to the fender-struts stopped firing single shots and started machine –gunning. The bike's drunken wavers became more pronounced. Richie closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable.

Then Bill bellowed, 'Hi-yo Silver, AWWAYYYYY! '

The bike picked up more speed and finally stopped that seasick side-to-side wavering. Richie loosened his deathgrip on Bill's middle and held the front of the package carrier over the rear wheel instead. Bill crossed Kansas Street on a slant, raced down sidestreets at an ever-quickening pace, heading for Witcham as if racing down a set of geographical steps. They came bulleting out of Strapham Street and onto Witcham at an exorbitant rate of speed. Bill laid Silver damn near over on his side and bellowed 'Hi-yo Silver!' again.

'Ride it, Big Bill!' Richie screamed, so scared he was nearly creaming his jeans but laughing wildly all the same. 'Stand on this baby!'

Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going –on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable . . . they would live forever and ever. Well . . . perhaps not they, but Bill would. Bill had no idea of how strong he was, how somehow sure and perfect.

They sped along, the houses thinning out a little now, the streets crossing Witcham at longer intervals.

'Hi-yo Silver!' Bill yelled, and Richie hollered in his Nigger Jim Voice, high and shrill, 'Hi-yo Silvuh, massa, thass rant! You is rahdin disyere bike fo sho! Lawks-a-mussy! Hi-yo Silvuh AWWAYYY!'

Now they were passing green fields that looked flat and depthless under the gray sky. Richie could see the old brick train station up ahead in the distance. To the right of it quonset warehouses marched off in a row. Silver bumped over one set of train tracks, then another.

And here was Neibolt Street, cutting off to the right. DERRY TRAINYARDS, a blue sign under the street-sign read. It was rusty and hung askew. Below this was a much bigger sign, yellow field, black letters. It was almost like a comment on the trainyards themselves: DEAD END, it read.

Bill turned onto Neibolt Street, coasted to the sidewalk, and put his foot back down. 'Let's w-w-walk from here.'

Richie slipped off the package carrier with mingled feelings of relief and regret. 'Okay.'

They walked along the sidewalk, which was cracked and weedy. Up ahead of them, in the trainyards, a diesel engine revved slowly up, faded off, and then began all over again. Once or twice they heard the metallic music of couplings being smashed together.

'You scared?' Richie asked Bill.

Bill, walking Silver by the handlebars, looked over at Richie briefly and then nodded. 'Y-Yeah. You?'

'I sure am,' Richie said.

Bill told Richie he had asked his father about Neibolt Street the night before. His father said that a lot of trainmen had lived out this way until the end of World War II — engineers, conductors, signalmen, yardworkers, baggage handlers. The street had declined with the trainyards, and as Bill and Richie moved farther along it, the houses became farther apart,

seedier, dirtier. The last three or four on both sides were empty and boarded up, their yards overgrown. A FOR SALE sign flapped forlornly from the porch of one. To Richie the sign looked about a thousand years old. The sidewalk stopped, and now they were walking along a beaten track from which weeds grew half-heartedly.

Bill stopped and pointed. 'Th-there it i-i-is,' he said softly.

Twenty-nine Neibolt Street had once been a trim red Cape Cod. Maybe, .Richie thought, an engineer used to live there, a bachelor with no pants but jeans and lots of those gloves with the big stiff cuffs and four or five pillowtick caps — a fellow who would come home once or twice a month for stretches of three or four days and listen to the radio while he pottered in the garden; a fellow who would eat mostly fried foods (and no vegetables, although he would grow them for his friends) and who would, on windy nights, think about the Girl He Left Behind.

Now the red paint had faded to a wishy-washy pink that was peeling away in ugly patches that looked like sores. The windows were blind eyes, boarded up. Most of the shingles were gone. Weeds grew rankly down both sides of the house and the lawn was covered with the season's first bumper crop of dandelions. To the left, a high board fence, perhaps once a neat white but now faded to a dull gray that almost matched the lowering sky, lurched drunkenly in and out of the dank shrubbery. About halfway down this fence Richie could see a monstrous grove of sunflowers — the tallest looked five feet tall or more. They had a bloated, nasty look he didn't like. A breeze rustled them and they seemed to nod together: The boysare here, isn't that nice? More boys. Our boys. Richie shivered.

While Bill leaned Silver carefully against an elm, Richie surveyed the house. He saw a wheel sticking out of the thick grass near the porch, and pointed it out to Bill. Bill nodded; it was the overturned trike Eddie had mentioned.

They looked up and down Neibolt Street. The chug of the diesel engine rose and fell off, then began again. The sound seemed to hang in the overcast like a charm. The street was utterly deserted. Richie could hear occasional cars passing on Route 2, but could not see them.

The diesel engine chugged and faded, chugged and faded.

The huge sunflowers nodded sagely together. Fresh boys. Good boys. Our boys.

'Y-Y-You r-ruh-ready?' Bill asked, and Richie jumped a little.

'You know, I was just thinking that maybe the last bunch of library books I took out are due today,' Richie said. 'Maybe I ought to — '

'Cuh-Cuh-Cut the c-crap, R-R-Richie. Are y-you ready or n-n-not?'

'I guess I am,' Richie said, knowing he was not ready at all — he was never going to be ready for this scene.

They crossed the overgrown lawn to the porch.

'Luh-look th-th-there,' Bill said.

At the far lefthand side, the porch's latticework skirt leaned out against a tangle of bushes. Both boys could see the rusty nails that had been pulled free. There were old rosebushes here, and while the roses both to the right and the left of the unanchored stretch of latticework were blooming in a lackadaisical way, those directly around and in front of it were skeletal and dead.

Bill and Richie looked at each other grimly. Everything Eddie said seemed true enough; seven weeks later, the evidence was still here.

'You don't really want to go under there, do you?' Richie asked. He was almost pleading.