The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing at all supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on. Easy. Burn it up or blow it away, then just take a powder.
Behind the papers, which were only currency's second cousins, was the real stuff. The cash. Four thousand dollars in tens, twenties, and fifties.
Taking it now, stuffing it into the pocket of his jeans, he wondered if he hadn't somehow known what he was doing when he put the money in here — fifty bucks one month, a hundred and twenty the next, maybe only ten the month after that. Rathole money. Taking-a-powder money.
'Man, that's scary,' he said, barely aware he had spoken. He was looking blankly out the big window at the beach. It was deserted now, the surfers gone, the honeymooners (if that was what they had been) gone, too.
Ah, yes, doc — it all comes back to me now. Remember Stanley Uris, for instance? Bet your fur I do . . . . Remember how we used to say that, and think it was so cool? Stanley Urine, the big kids called him. 'Hey, Urine! Hey, you fuckin Christ-killer! Where ya goin? One of ya fag friends gonna give you a bee jay?'
He slammed the safe door shut and swung the picture back into place. When had he last thought of Stan Uris? Five years ago? Ten? Twenty? Rich and his family had moved away from Derry in the spring of 1960, and how fast all of their faces faded, his gang, that pitiful bunch of losers with their little clubhouse in what had been known then as the Barrens — funny name for an area as lush with growth as that place had been. Kidding themselves that they were jungle explorers, or Seabees carving out a landing strip on a Pacific atoll while they held off the Japs, kidding themselves that they were dam– builders, cowboys, spacemen on a jungle world, you name it, but whatever you name it, don't let's forget what it really was: it was hiding. Hiding from the big kids. Hiding from Henry Bowers and Victor Criss and Belch Huggins and the rest of them. What a bunch of losers they had been — Stan Uris with his big Jew-boy nose, Bill Denbrough who could say nothing but 'Hi-yo, Silver!' without stuttering so badly that it drove you almost dogshit, Beverly Marsh with her bruises and her cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of her blouse, Ben Hanscom who had been so big he looked like a human version of Moby Dick, and Richie Tozier with his thick glasses and his A averages and his wise mouth and his face which just begged to be pounded into new and
exciting shapes. Was there a word for what they had been? Oh yes. There always was. Le mot juste. In this case le mot juste was wimps.
How it came back, how all of it came back . . . and now he stood here in his den shivering as helplessly as a homeless mutt caught in a thunderstorm, shivering because the guys he had run with weren't all he remembered. There were other things, things he hadn't thought of in years, trembling just below the surface.
Bloody things.
A darkness. Some darkness.
The house on Neibolt Street, and Bill screaming: You k-kitted my brother, you fuh-fuh-fucker!
Did he remember? Just enough not to want to remember any more, and you could bet your fu r on that.
A smell of garbage, a smell of shit, and a smell of something else. Something worse than either. It was the stink of the beast, the stink of It, down there in the darkness under Derry where the machines thundered on and on. He remembered George —
But that was too much and he ran for the bathroom, blundering into his Eames chair on his way and almost falling. He made it . . . barely. He slid across the slick tiles to the toilet on his knees like some weird break-dancer, gripped the edges, and vomited everything in his guts. Even then it wouldn't stop; suddenly he could see Georgie Denbrough as if he had last seen him yesterday, Georgie who had been the start of it all, Georgie who had been murdered in the fall of 1957. Georgie had died right after the flood, one of his arms had been ripped from its socket, and Rich had blocked all of that out of his memory. But sometimes those things come back, oh yes indeedy, they come back, sometimes they come back.
The spasm passed and Rich groped blindly for the flush. Water roared. His early supper, regurgitated in hot chunks, vanished tastefully down the drain.
Into the sewers.
Into the pound and stink and darkness of the sewers.
He closed the lid, laid his forehead against it, and began to cry. It was the first time he had cried since his mother died in 1975. Without even thinking of what he was doing, he cupped his hands under his eyes, and the contact lenses he wore slipped out and lay glistening in his palms.
Forty minutes later, feeling husked-out and somehow cleansed, he threw his suitcases into the trunk of his MG and backed it out of the garage. The light was fading. He looked at his house with the new plantings, he looked at the beach, at the water, which had taken on the cast of pale emeralds broken by a narrow track of beaten gold. And a conviction stole over him that he would never see any of this again, that he was a dead man walking.
'Going home now,' Rich Tozier whispered to himself. 'Going home, God help me, going home.'
He put the car in gear and went, feeling again how easy it had been to slip through an unsuspected fissure in what he had considered a solid life — how easy it was to get over onto the dark side, to sail out of the blue and into the black.
Out of the blue and into the black, yes, that was it. Where anything might be waiting.
3
Ben Hanscom Takes a Drink
If, on that night of May 28th, 1985, you had wanted to find the man Time magazine had called 'perhaps the most promising young architect in America' ('Urban Energy Conservation and the Young Turks,' Time, October 15,1984), you would have had to drive west out of
Omaha on Interstate 80 to do it. You'd have taken the Swedholm exit and then Highway 81 to downtown Swedholm (of which there isn't much). There you'd turn off on Highway 92 at Bucky's Hi-Hat Eat-Em-Up ('Chicken Fried Steak Our Specialty') and once out in the country again you'd hang a right on Highway 63, which runs straight as a string through the deserted little town of Gatlin and finally into Hemingford Home. Downtown Hemingford Home made downtown Swedholm look like New York City; the business district consisted of eight buildings, five on one side and three on the other. There was the Kleen Kut barber shop (propped in the window a yellowing hand –lettered sign fully fifteen years old read IF YOUR A 'HIPPY' GET YOUR HAIR CUT SOMEWHERE ELSE ), the second –run movie house, the five –and –dime. There was a branch of the Nebraska Homeowners' Bank, a 76 gas station, a Rexall Drug, and the National Farmstead & Hardware Supply — which was the only business in town which looked halfway prosperous.
And, near the end of the main drag, set off a little way from the other buildings like a pariah and resting on the edge of the big empty, you had your basic roadhouse — the Red Wheel. If you had gotten that far, you would have seen in the potholed dirt parking lot an aging 1968 Cadillac convertible with double CB antennas on the back. The vanity plate on the front read simply: BEN 's CADDY . And inside, walking toward the bar, you would have found your man — lanky, sunburned, dressed in a chambray shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of scuffed engineer boots. There were faint squint-lines around the corners of his eyes, but nowhere else. He looked perhaps ten years younger than his actual age, which was thirty-eight.
'Hello, Mr Hanscom,' Ricky Lee said, putting a paper napkin on the bar as Ben sat down. Ricky Lee sounded a trifle surprised, and he was. He had never seen Hanscom in the Wheel on a week– n i g h t before. He came in regularly every Friday night for two beers, and every Saturday night for four or five: he always asked after Ricky Lee's three boys; he always left the same five –dollar tip under his beer stein when he took off. In terms of both professional conversation and personal regard, he was far and away Ricky Lee's favorite customer. The ten dollars a week (and the fifty left under the stem at each Christmas-time over the last five years) was fine enough, but the man's company was worth far more. Worthwhile company was always a rarity, but in a honkytonk like this, where talk always came cheap, it was scarcer than hen's teeth.