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.

2

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 bun-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.

He glanced at Beverly and looked away quickly from the calm trust in her eyes. Looking at Beverly made him feel funny in the pit of his stomach. Fluttery.

'We cuh-can't go to the p-p-police,' he said at last. His voice sounded harsh to his own ears, too loud. 'We c-ca-han't g-go to our puh-huh-harents, either. Unless . . . ' He looked hopefully at Richie. 'What a-a-about your m-mom and d-dad, four-eyes? They suh-heem p-pretty reh-reh-regular.'

'My good man,' Richie said in his Toodles the Butler Voice, 'you obviously have no understahnding whatsoevah of my mater and pater. They — '

'Talk American, Richie,' Eddie said from his spot by Ben. He was sitting by Ben for the simple reason that Ben provided enough shade for Eddie to sit in. His face looked small and pinched and worried — an old man's face. His aspirator was in his right hand.

'They'd think I was ready for Juniper Hill,' Richie said. He was wearing an old pair of glasses today. The day before a friend of Henry Bowers's named Card Jagermeyer had come up behind Richie as Richie left the Derry Ice Cream Bar with a pistachio cone. 'Tag, you're it!' this Jagermeyer, who outweighed Richie by forty pounds or so, screamed, and slammed Richie full in the back with both hands laced together. Richie flew into the gutter, losing his glasses and his ice-cream cone. The left lens of his glasses had shattered, and his mother was furious with him about it, lending very little credence to Richie's explanations.

'All I know is that it was a lot of fooling around,' she had said. 'Honestly, Richie, do you think there's a glasses-tree somewhere and we can just pull off a new pair of spectacles for you whenever you break the old pair?'

'But Mom, this kid pushed me, he came up behind me, this big kid, and pushed me — ' Richie wa s by then near tears. This failure to make his mother understand hurt much worse than being slammed into the gutter by Card Jagermeyer, who was so stupid they hadn't even bothered to send him to summer-school.

'I don't want to hear any more about it,' Maggie Tozier said flatly. 'But the next time you see your father come in looking whipped after working late three nights in a row, you think a little bit, Richie. You think about it.'

'But Mom — '

'No more, I said.' Her voice was curt and final — worse, it was near tears. She left the room then and the TV went on much too loud. Richie had been left alone sitting miserably at the kitchen table.

It was this memory that caused Richie to shake his head again. 'My folks are okay, but they'd never believe something like this.'

'W-What a-a-about other kih-kids?'

And they looked around, Bill would remember years later, as if for someone who wasn't there.

'Who?' Stan asked doubtfully. 'I can't think of anyone else I trust.'

'Just the suh-suh –same . . . ' Bill said in a troubled voice, and a little silence fell among them while Bill thought about what to say next.

3

If asked, Ben Hanscom would have told you that Henry Bowers hated him more than any of the others in the Losers' Club, because of what had happened that day when he and Henry had shot the chutes down into the Barrens from Kansas Street, because of what had happened the day he and Richie and Beverly escaped from the Aladdin, but most of all because, by not allowing Henry to copy during examinations, he had caused Henry to be sent to summerschool and incur the wrath of his father, the reputedly insane Butch Bowers.

If asked, Richie Tozier would have told you Henry hated him more than any of the others, because of the day he had fooled Henry and his two other musketeers in Freese's.

Stan Uris would have told you that Henry hated him most of all because he was a Jew (when Stan had been in the third grade and Henry the fifth, Henry had once washed Stan's face with snow until it bled and he was screaming hysterically with pain and fear).

Bill Denbrough believed that Henry hated him the most because he was skinny, because he stuttered, and because he liked to dress well ('L-L-Look at the f-f-f-fucking puh-puh-PANSY! ' Henry had cried when the Derry School had had Careers Day in April and Bill had come

wearing a tie; before the day was over, the tie had been ripped off and flung into a tree halfway down Charter Street).

He did hate all four of them, but the boy in Derry who was number one on Henry's personal Hate Parade was not in the Losers' Club at all on that July 3rd; he was a black boy named Michael Hanlon, who lived a quarter of a mile down the road from the shirttail Bowers farm.

Henry's father, who was every bit as crazy as he was reputed to be, was Oscar 'Butch' Bowers. Butch Bowers associated his financial, physical, and mental decline with the Hanlon family in general and with Mike's father in particular. Will Hanlon, he was fond of telling his few friends and his son, had had him thrown in the county jail when all of his, Hanlon's, chickens died. 'So's he could get the insurance money, don't you know,' Butch would say, eying his audience with all the baleful interrupt-if-you-dare pugnacity of Captain Billy Bones in the Admiral Benbow. 'He got some of his friends to lie him up, and that's why I had to sell my Merc'ry.'

'Who lied him up, Daddy?' Henry had asked when he was eight, burning at the injustice that had been done to his father. He thought to himself that when he was a grownup he would find liar-uppers and coat them with honey and stake them out over anthills, like in some of those Western movies they showed at the Bijou Theater on Saturday afternoons.

And because his son was a tireless listener (although, if asked, Butch would have maintained that was only as it should be), Bowers Senior filled his son's ears with a litany of hate and hard luck. He explained to his son that while all niggers were stupid, some were cunning as well — and down deep they all hated white men and wanted to plow a white woman's furrow. Maybe it wasn't just the insurance money after all, Butch said; maybe Hanlon had decided to lay the blame for the dead chickens at his door because Butch had the next produce stand down the road. He done it, anyway, and that was just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket. He done it and then got a bunch of white nigger bleeding hearts from town to lie him up and threaten Butch with state prison if he didn't pay that nigger off. 'And why not?' Butch would ask his round-eyed dirty-necked silent son. 'Why not? I was just a man who fought the Japs for his country. There was lots of guys like us, but he w a s t h e o n l y n i g g e r i n the county.'