PART 3 - GROWNUPS

CHAPTER 1 0

The Reunion

1

Bill Denbrough Gets a Cab

The telephone was ringing, bringing him up and out of a sleep too deep for dreams. He groped for it without opening his eyes, without coming more than halfway awake. If it had stopped ringing just then he would have slipped back down into sleep without a hitch; he would have done ti as simply and easily as he had once slipped down the snow-covered hills in McCarron Park on his Flexible Flyer. You ran with the sled, threw yourself onto it, and down you went — seemingly at the speed of sound. You couldn't do that as a grownup; it racked the hell out of your balls.

His fingers walked over the telephone's dial, slipped off, climbed it again. He had a dim premonition that it would be Mike Hanlon, Mike Hanlon calling from Derry, telling him he had to come back, telling him he had to remember, telling him they had made a promise, Stan Uris had cut their palms with a sliver of Coke bottle and they had made a promise —

Except all of that had already happened.

He had gotten in late yesterday afternoon — just before 6 P .M ., actually. He supposed that, if he had been the last call on Mike's list, all of them must have gotten in at varying times; some might even have spent most of the day here. He himself had seen none of them, felt no urge to see any of them. He had simply checked in, gone up to his room, ordered a meal from room service which he found he could not eat once it was laid out before him, and then had tumbled into bed and slept dreamlessly until now.

Bill cracked one eye open and fumbled for the telephone's handset. It fell off onto the table and he groped for it, opening his other eye. He felt totally blank inside his head, totally unplugged, running on batteries.

He finally managed to scoop up the phone. He got up on one elbow and put it against his ear. 'Hello?'

'Bill?' It was Mike Hanlon's voice — he'd had at least that much right. Last week he didn't remember Mike at all, and now a single word was enough to identify him. It was rather marvellous . . . but in an ominous way.

'Yeah, Mike.'

'Woke you up, huh?'

'Yeah, you did. That's okay.' On the wall above the TV was an abysmal painting of lobstermen in yellow slickers and rainhats pulling lobster traps. Looking at it, Bill remembered where he was: the Derry Town House on Upper Main Street. Half a mile farther up and across the street was Bassey Park . . . the Kissing Bridge . . . the Canal. 'What time is it, Mike?'

'Quarter of ten.'

'What day?'

'The 30th.' Mike sounded a little amused.

'Yeah. 'Kay.'

'I've arranged a little reunio n,' Mike said. He sounded diffident now.

'Yeah?' Bill swung his legs out of bed. They all came?'

'All but Stan Uris,' Mike said. Now there was something in his voice that Bill couldn't read. 'Bev was the last one. She got in late last evening.'

'Why do you say the last one, Mike? Stan might show up today.'

'Bill, Stan's dead.'

'What? How? Did his plane — '

'Nothing like that,' Mike said. 'Look, if it's all the same to you, I think it ought to wait until we get together. It would be better if I could tell all of you at the same time.'

'It has to do with this?'

'Yes, I think so.' Mike paused briefly. 'I'm sure it does.'

Bill felt the familiar weight of dread settle around his heart again — was it something you could get used to so quickly, then? Or had it been something he had carried all along, simply unfelt and unthought-of, like the inevitable fact of his own death?

He reached for his cigarettes, lit one, and blew out the match with the first drag.

'None of them got together, yesterday?'

'No — I don't believe so.'

'And you haven't seen any of us yet?'

'No — just talked to you on the phone.'

'Okay,' he said. 'Where's the reunion?'

'You remember where the old Ironworks used to be?

'Pasture Road, sure.'

'You're behind the times, old chum. That's Mall Road these days. We've got the third-biggest shopping mall in the state out there. Forty-eight Different Merchants Under One Roof for Your Shopping Convenience.'

'Sounds really A-A-American, all right.'

'Bill?'

'What?'

'You all right?'

'Yes.' But his heart was beating too fast, the tip of his cigarette jittering a tiny bit. He had stuttered. Mike had heard it.

There was a moment of silence and then Mike said, 'Just out past the mall, there's a restaurant called Jade of the Orient. They have private rooms for parties. I arranged for one of them yesterday. We can have it the whole afternoon, if we want it.'

'You think this might take that long?'

'I just don't know.'

'A cab will know how to get there?'

'Sure.' 'All right,' Bill said. He wrote the name of the restaurant down on the pad by the phone. 'Why there?'

'Because it's new, I guess,' Mike said slowly. 'It seemed like . . . I don't know . . . '

'Neutral ground?' Bill suggested.

'Yes. I guess that's it.'

'Food any good?'

'I don't know,' Mike said. 'How's your appetite?'

Bill chuffed out smoke and half-laughed, half-coughed. 'It ain't so good, ole pal.'

'Yeah,' Mike said. 'I hear you.'

'Noon?'

'More like one, I guess. We'll let Beverly catch a few more z's.'

Bill snuffed the cigarette. 'She married?'

Mike hesitated again. 'We'll catch up on everything,' he said.

'Just like when you go back to your high-school reunion ten years later, huh?' Bill said. 'You get to see who got fat, who got bald, who got k-kids.'

'I wish it was like that,' Mike said.

'Yeah. Me too, Mikey. Me too.'

He hung up the phone, took a long shower, and ordered a breakfast that he didn't want and which he only picked at. No; his appetite was really not much good at all.

Bill dialed the Big Yellow Cab Company and asked to be picked up at quarter of one, thinking that fifteen minutes would be plenty of time to get him out to Pasture Road (he found himself totally unable to think of it as Mall Road, even when he actually saw the mall), but he had underestimated the lunch-hour traffic –flow . . . and how much Derry had grown.

In 1958 it had been a big town, not much more. There were maybe thirty thousand people inside the Derry incorporated city limits and maybe another seven thousand beyond that in the surrounding burgs.

Now it had become a city — a very small city by London or New York standards, but doing just fine by Maine standards, where Portland, the state's largest, could boast barely three hundred thousand.

As the cab moved slowly down Main Street (we're over the Canal now, Bill thought; can'tsee it, but it's down there, running in the dark) and then turned up Center, his first thought was predictable enough: how much had changed. But the predictable thought was accompanied by a deep dismay that he never would have expected. He remembered his childhood here as a fearful, nervous time . . . not only because of the summer of '58, when the seven of them had faced the terror, but because of George's death, the deep dream his parents seemed to have fallen into following that death, the constant ragging about his stutter, Bowers and Huggins and Criss constantly on the prod for them after the rockfight in the Barrens