CHAPTER 1 6

Eddie's Bad Break

1

By the time Richie finishes, they're all nodding. Eddie is nodding along with them, remembering along with them, when the pain suddenly races up his left arm. Races up? No. Rips through: it feels as if someone is trying to sharpen a rusty saw on the bone in there. He grimaces and reaches into the pocket of his sport jacket, sorts through a number of bottles by feel, and takes out the Excedrin. He swallows two with a gulp of gin-and-prune juice. The arm has been paining him off and on all day. At first he dismissed it as the twinges of bursitis he sometimes gets when the weather is damp. But halfway through Richie's story, a new memory clicks into place for him and he understands the pain. This isn't Memory Lane we're wandering down anymore, he thinks; it's getting more and more like the Long Island Expressway.

Five years ago, during a routine check-up (Eddie has a routine check –up every six weeks), the doctor said matter-of-factly: 'There's an old break here, Ed . . . Did you fall out of a tree when you were a kid?'

'Something like that,' Eddie agreed, not bothering to tell Dr Robbins that his mother undoubtedly would have fallen down dead of a brain hemorrhage if she had seen or heard of her Eddie climbing trees. The truth was, he hadn't been able to remember exactly how he broke the arm. It didn't seem important (although, Eddie thinks now, that lack of interest was in itself very odd — he is, after all, a man who attaches importance to a sneeze or a slight change in the color of his stools). But it was an old break, a minor irritation, something that happened a long time ago in a boyhood he could barely remember and didn't care to recall. It pained him a little when he had to drive long hours on rainy days. A couple of aspirin took care of it nicely. No big deal.

But now it is not just a minor irritation; it is some madman sharpening that rusty saw, playing bone-tunes, and he remembers that was how it felt in the hospital, especially late at night, in the first three or four days after it happened. Lying there in bed, sweating in the summer heat, waiting for the nurse to bring him a pill, tears running silently down his cheeks into the bowls of his ears, thinking It's like some kook's sharpening a saw in there.

If this is Memory Lane, Eddie thinks, I'd trade it for one great big brain enema: a mental high colonic.

Unaware he is going to speak, he says: 'It was Henry Bowers who broke my arm. Do you remember that?'

Mike nods. 'That was just before Patrick Hockstetter disappeared. I don't remember the date.'

'I do,' Eddie says flatly. 'It was the 20th of July. The Hockstetter kid was reported missing on . . . what? . . . the 23rd?'

'Twenty-second,' Beverly Rogan says, although she doesn't tell them why she is so sure of the date: it is because she saw It take Hockstetter. Nor does she tell them that she believed then and believes now that Patrick Hockstetter was crazy, perhaps even crazier than Henry Bowers. She will tell them, but this is Eddie's turn. She will speak next, and then she supposes that Ben will narrate the climax of that July's events . . . the silver bullet they had never quite

dared to make. A nightmare agenda if ever there was one, she thinks — but that crazy exhilaration persists. When did she last feel this young? She can hardly sit still.

'The 20th of July,' Eddie muses, rolling his aspirator along the table from one hand to the other. 'Three or four days after the smoke-hole thing. I spent the rest of the summer in a cast, remember?'

Richie slaps his forehead in a gesture they all remember from the old days and Bill thinks, with a mixture of amusement and unease, that for a moment there Richie looked just like Beaver Cleaver. 'Sure, of course! You were in a cast when we went to the house on Neibolt Street, weren't you? And later . . . i n the dark . . . ' But now Richie shakes his head a little, puzzled.

'What, R-Richie?' Bill asks.

'Can't remember that part yet,' Richie admits. 'Can you?' Bill shakes his head slowly.

'Hockstetter was with them that day,' Eddie says. 'It was the last time I ever saw him alive. Maybe he was a replacement for Peter Gordon. I guess Bowers didn't want Peter around anymore after he ran the day of the rockfight.'

'They all died, didn't they?' Beverly asks quietly. 'After Jimmy Cullum, the only ones who died were Henry Bowers's friends . . . or his ex-friends.'

'All but Bowers,' Mike agrees, glancing toward the balloons tethered to the microfilm recorder. 'And he's in Juniper Hill. A private insane asylum in Augusta.'

Bill says, 'W-W –What about when they broke your arm, E –E –Eddie?'

'Your stutter's getting worse, Big Bill,' Eddie says solemnly, and finishes his drink in one gulp.

'Never mind that,' Bill says. 'T-Tell us.'

'Tell us,' Beverly repeats, and puts her hand lightly on his arm. The pain flares there again.

'All right,' Eddie says. He pours himself a fresh drink, studies it, and says, 'It was a couple of days after I came home from the hospital that you guys came over to the house and showed me those silver ball-bearings. You remember, Bill?'

Bill nods.

Eddie looks at Beverly. 'Bill asked you if you'd shoot them, if it came to that . . . because you had the best eye. I think you said you wouldn't . . . that you'd be too afraid. And you told us something else, but I just can't remember what it was. It's like — ' Eddie sticks his tongue out and plucks the end of it, as if something were stuck there. Richie and Ben both grin. 'Was it something about Hockstetter?'

'Yes,' Beverly says. 'I'll tell when you're done. Go ahead.'

'It was after that, after all you guys left, that my mother came in and we had a big fight. She didn't want me to hang around with any of you guys again. And she might have gotten me to agree — she had a way, a way of working on a guy, you know . . . '

Bill nods again. He remembers Mrs Kaspbrak, a huge woman with a strange schizophrenic face, a face capable of looking stony and furious and miserable and frightened all at the same time.

'Yeah, she might have gotten me to agree,' Eddie says. 'But something else happened the same day Bowers broke my arm. Something that really shook me up.'

He utters a little laugh, thinking: It shook me up, all right . . . Is that all you can say? What good's talking when you can never tell people how you really feel? In a book or a movie what I found out that day before Bowers broke my arm would have changed my life forever and nothing would have happened the way it did . . . in a book or a movie it would have set me free. In a book or a movie I wouldn't have a whole suitcase full of pills back in my room at the Town House, I wouldn't be married to Myra, I wouldn't have this stupid fucking aspirator here right now. In a book or a movie. Because —

Suddenly, as they all watch, Eddie's aspirator rolls across the table by itself. As it rolls it makes a dry rattling sound, a little like maracas, a little like bones . . . a little like laughter. As it reaches the far side, between Richie and Ben, it flips itself up into the air and falls on the floor. Richie makes a startled half-grab and Bill cries sharply, 'Don't t –t-touch it!'

'The balloons!' Ben yells, and they all turn.

Both balloons tethered to the microfilm recorder now read ASTHMA MEDICINE GIVES YOUCANCER! Below the slogan are grinning skulls.

They explode with twin bangs.

Eddie looks at this, mouth dry, the familiar sensation of suffocation starting to tighten down in his chest like locking bolts.