The 'Eddie' referred to may well have been Macklin's stepson, brother of the boy Macklin was convicted of killing in 1958. It was the disappearance of Edward Corcoran

which eventually led to Macklin's conviction for the beating death of Edward's younger brother, Dorsey. The elder boy has been missing for nine years. In a brief court proceeding in 1966 the boy's mother had her son declared legally dead so she could enter into possession of Edward Corcoran's savings account. The account contained a sum of sixteen dollars.

3

Eddie Corcoran was dead, all right.

He died on the night of June 19th, and his stepfather had nothing at all to do with it. He died as Ben Hanscom sat home watching TV with his mother, as Eddie Kaspbrak's mother anxiously felt Eddie's forehead for signs of her favorite ailment, 'phantom fever,' as Beverly Marsh's stepfather — a gent who bore, in temperament at least, a remarkable resemblance to Eddie and Dorsey Corcoran's stepfather — Lifted a high-stepping kick into the girl's derriere and told her 'to get out there and dry those goddam dishes like your mummer told you,' as Mike Hanlon got yelled at by some high-school boys (one of whom would some years later sire that fine upstanding young homophobe John 'Webby' Garton) passing in an old Dodge while Mike pulled weeds out of the garden beside the small Hanlon home out on Witcham Road, not far from the farm owned by Henry Bowers's crazy father, as Richie Tozier was sneaking a look at the half-undressed girls in a copy of Gem he had found at the bottom of his father's socks-and-underwear drawer and getting a regular good boner, and as Bill Denbrough was throwing his dead brother's photograph album across the room in horrified unbelief.

Although none of them would remember doing so later, all of them looked up at the. exact moment Eddie Corcoran died . . . as if hearing some distant cry.

The News had been absolutely right about one thing: Eddie's rank –card was just bad enough to make him afraid to go home and face his stepdad. Also, his mother and the old man were fighting a lot this month. That made things even worse. When they got going at it hot and heavy, his mother shouted a lot of mostly incoherent accusations. His stepdad responded to these first with grunts, then yells to shut up, and finally with the enraged bellows of a boar which has gotten a quiver of porcupine needles in its snout. Eddie had never seen the old man use his fists on her, though. Eddie didn't think he quite dared. He had saved his fists for Eddie and Dorsey in the old days, and now that Dorsey was dead, Eddie got his little brother's share as well as his own.

These shouting ma tches came and went in cycles. They were most common at the end of the month, when the bills came in. A policeman, called by a neighbor, might drop by once or twice when things were at their worst and tell them to tone it down. Usually that ended it. His mother was apt to give the cop the finger and dare him to take her in, but his stepdad rarely said boo.

His stepdad was afraid of the cops, Eddie thought.

He lay low during these periods of stress. It was wiser. If you didn't think so, just look at what had happened to Dorsey. Eddie didn't know the specifics and didn't want to, but he had an idea about Dorsey. He thought that Dorsey had been in the wrong place at the wrong time: the garage on the last day of the month. They told Eddie that Dorsey fe loff the stepladder in the garage — 'if i told him once to stay off n it I told him sixty times,' his stepdad had said

— but his mother wouldn't look at him except by accident . . . and when their eyes did meet, Eddie had seen a frightened ratty little gleam in hers that he didn't like. The old man just sat there silently at the kitchen table with a quart of Rheingold, looking at nothing from beneath his heavy lowering eyebrows. Eddie kept out of his reach. When his stepfather was

bellowing, he was usua l l y — not always but usually — all right. It was when he stopped that you had to be careful.

Two nights ago he had thrown a chair at Eddie when Eddie got up to see what was on the other TV channel — just picked up one of the tubular aluminum kitchen chairs, swept it back over his head, and let fly. It hit Eddie in the butt and knocked him over. His butt still ached, but he knew it could have been worse: it could have been his head.

Then there had been the night when the old man had suddenly gotten up and rubbed a handful of mashed potatoes into Eddie's hair for no reason at all. One day last September, Eddie had come in from school and foolishly allowed the screen door to slam shut behind him while his stepdad was taking a nap. Macklin came out of th e bedroom in his billowy boxer shorts, hair standing up in corkscrews, cheeks grizzled with two days of weekend beard, breath grizzled with two days of weekend beer. 'There now, Eddie,' he said, 'I got to take you up for slammin that fuckin door.' In Rich Macklin's lexicon, 'taking you up' was a euphemism for 'beating the shit out of you.' Which was what he then did to Eddie. Eddie had lost consciousness when the old man threw him into the front hall. His mother had mounted a pair of low coathooks out there, especially for him and Dorsey to hang their coats on. These hooks had rammed hard steel fingers into Eddie's lower back, and that was when he passed out. When he came to ten minutes later he heard his mother yelling that she was going to take Eddie to the hospital and he couldn't stop her.

'After what happened to Dorsey?' his stepdad had responded. 'You want to go to jail, woman?'

That was the end of her talk about the hospital. She helped Eddie in to his room, where he lay shivering on his bed, his forehead beaded with sweat. The only time he left the room during the next three days was when they were both gone. Then he would hobble slowly into the kitchen, groaning softly, and get his stepdad's whiskey from under the sink. A few nips dulled the pain. The pain was mostly gone by the fifth day, but he had pissed blood for almost two weeks.

And the hammer wasn't in the garage anymore.

What about that? What about that, friends and neighbors?

Oh, the Craftsman hammer — the ordinary hammer — was still there. It was the Scotti recoilless which was missing. His stepdad's special hammer, the one he and Dorsey had been forbidden to touch. 'If one of you touches that baby,' he had told them the day he bought it, 'you'll both be wearing your guts for earmuffs.' Dorsey had asked timidly if that hammer was very expensive. The old man told him he was damn tooting. He said it was filled with ball­bearings and you couldn't make it bounce back up no matter how hard you brought it down.

Now it was gone.

Eddie's grades weren't the best because he had missed a lot of school since his mother's remarriage, but he was not a stupid boy by any means. He thought he knew what had happened to the Scotti recoilless hammer. He thought maybe his stepfather had used it on Dorsey and then buried it in the garden or maybe thrown it in the Canal. It was the sort of thing that happened frequently in the horror comics Eddie read, the ones he kept on the top shelf of his closet.

He walked closer to the Canal, which rippled between its concrete sides like oiled silk. A swatch of moonlight glimmered across its dark surface in a boomerang shape. He sat down, swinging his sneakers idly against the concrete in an irregular tattoo. The last six weeks had been quite dry a nd the water flowed past perhaps nine feet below the worn soles of his sneakers. But if you looked closely at the Canal's sides, you could read the various levels to which it sometimes rose quite easily. The concrete was stained a dark brown just above the water's current level. This brown stain slowly faded to yellow, then to a color that was almost white at the level where the heels of Eddie's sneakers made contact when he swung them.