'Mr Hanscom, that's very kind, but I couldn't — '
'There used to be four, but I gave one of them to Stuttering Bill and the others. Bill Denbrough, that was his real name. Stuttering Bill's just what we used to call him . . . just a thing we used to say, like "You bet your fur." He was one of the best friends I ever had — I did have a few, you know, even a fat kid like me had a few. Stuttering Bill's a writer now.'
Ricky Lee barely heard him. He was looking at the cartwheels, fascinated. 1921, 1923, and 1924. God knew what they were worth now, just in terms of the pure silver they contained.
'I couldn't,' he said again.
'But I insist.' Mr Hanscom took hold of the stein and drained it. He should have been flat on his keister, but his eyes never left Ricky Lee's. Those eyes were watery, and very bloodshot, but Ricky Lee would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that they were also the eyes of a sober man.
'You're scaring me a little, Mr Hanscom,' Ricky Lee said. Two years ago Gresham Arnold, a rumdum of some local repute, had come into the Red Wheel with a roll of quarters in his hand and a twenty dollar bill stuck into the band of his hat. He handed the roll to Annie with instructions to feed the quarters into the juke-box by fours. He put the twenty on the bar and instructed Ricky Lee to set up drinks for the house. This rumdum, this Gresham Arnold, had
long ago been a star basketball player for the Hemingford Rams, leading them to their first (and most likely last) high-school team championship. In 1961 that had been. An almost unlimited future seemed to lie ahead of the young man. But he had flunked out of LSU his first semester, a victim of drink, drugs, and all-night parties. He came home, cracked up the yellow convertible his folks had given him as a graduation present, and got a job as head salesman in his daddy's John Deere dealership. Five years passed. His father could not bear to fire him, and so he finally sold the dealership and retired to Arizona, a man haunted and made old before h is tune by the inexplicable and apparently irreversible degeneration of his son. While the dealership still belonged to his daddy and he was at least pretending to work, Arnold had made some effort to keep the booze at arm's length; afterward, it got him completely. He could get mean, but he had been just as sweet as horehound candy the night he brought in the quarters and set up drinks for the house, and everyone had thanked him kindly, and Annie kept playing Moe Bandy songs because Gresham Arnold liked ole Moe Bandy. He sat there at the bar — on the very stool where Mr Hanscom was sitting now, Ricky Lee realized with steadily deepening unease — and drank three or four bourbon-and –bitters, and sang along with the juke, and caused no trouble, and went home when Ricky Lee closed the Wheel up, and hanged himself with his belt in an upstairs closet. Gresham Arnold's eyes that night had looked a little bit like Ben Hanscom's eyes looked right now.
'Scaring you a bit, am I?' Hanscom asked, his eyes never leaving Ricky Lee's. He pushed the stein away and then folded his hands neatly in front of those three silver cartwheels. 'I probably am. But you're not as scared as I am, Ricky Lee. Pray to Jesus you never are.'
'Well, what's the matter?' Ricky Lee asked. 'Maybe — ' He wet his lips. 'Maybe I can give you a help.'
'The matter?' Ben Hanscom laughed. 'Why, not too much. I had a call from an old friend tonight. Guy named Mike Hanlon. I'd forgotten all about him, Ricky Lee, but that didn't scare me much. After all, I was just a kid when I knew him, and kids forget things, don't they? Sure they do. You bet your fur. What scared me was getting about halfway over here and realizing that it wasn't just Mike I'd forgotten about — I'd forgotten everything about being a kid.'
Ricky Lee only looked at him. He had no idea what Mr Hanscom was talking about — but the man was scared, all right. No question about that. It sat funny on Ben Hanscom, but it was real.
'I mean I'd forgotten all about it,' he said, and ra pped his knuckles lightly on the bar for emphasis. 'Did you ever hear, Ricky Lee, of having an amnesia so complete you didn't even know you had amnesia?'
Ricky Lee shook his head.
'Me either. But there I was, tooling along in the Caddy tonight, and all of a sudden it hit me. I remembered Mike Hanlon, but only because he called me on the phone. I remembered Derry, but only because that was where he was calling from.'
'Derry?'
'But that was all. It hit me that I hadn't even thought about being a kid since . . . since I don't even know when. And then, just like that, it all started to flood back in. Like what we did with the fourth silver dollar.'
'What did you do with it, Mr Hanscom?'
Hanscom looked at his watch, and suddenly slipped down from his stool. He staggered a bit — the slightest bit. That was all. 'Can't let the time get away from me,' he said. 'I'm flying tonight.'
Ricky Lee looked instantly alarmed, and Hanscom laughed.
'Flying but not driving the plane. Not this time . United Airlines, Ricky Lee.'
'Oh.' He supposed his relief showed on his face, but he didn't care. 'Where are you going?'
Hanscom's shirt was still open. He looked thoughtfully down at the puckered white lines of the old scar on his belly and then began to button the shirt over it.
'Thought I told you that, Ricky Lee. Home. I'm going home. Give those cartwheels to your kids.' He started toward the door, and something about the way he walked, even the way he hitched at the sides of his pants, terrified Ricky Lee. The resemblance to the late and mostly unlamented Gresham Arnold was suddenly so acute it was nearly like seeing a ghost.
'Mr Hanscom!' he cried in alarm.
Hanscom turned back, and Ricky Lee stepped quickly backward. His ass hit th e backbar and glassware gossiped briefly as the bottles knocked together. He stepped back because he was suddenly convinced that Ben Hanscom was dead. Yes, Ben Hanscom was lying dead someplace, in a ditch or an attic or possibly in a closet with a belt noosed around his neck and the toes of his four-hundred-dollar cowboy boots dangling an inch or two above the floor, and this thing standing near the juke and staring back at him was a ghost. For a moment — just a moment, but it was plenty long enough to cover his working heart with a rime of ice — he was convinced he could see tables and chairs right through the man.
'What is it, Ricky Lee?'
'Nuh-n-nuh. Nothin.'
Ben Hanscom looked out at Ricky Lee from eyes which had dark-purple crescents beneath them. His cheeks burned with liquor; his nose looked red and sore.
'Nothin,' Ricky Lee whispered again, but he couldn't take his eyes from that face, the face of a man who has died deep in sin and now stands hard by hell's smoking side door.
'I was fat and we were poor,' Ben Hanscom said. 'I remember that now. And I remember that either a girl named Beverly or Stuttering Bill saved my life with a silver dollar. I'm scared almost insane by whatever else I may remember before tonight's over, but how scared I am doesn't matter, because it's going to come anyway. It's all there, like a great big bubble that's growing in my mind. But I'm going, because all I've ever gotten and all I have now is somehow due to what we did then, and you pay for what you get in this world. Maybe that's why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground, because He knows you got to fall down a lot and bleed a lot before you learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for . . . and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.'
'You gonna be back this weekend, though, ain't you?' Ricky Lee asked through numbed lips. In his increasing distress this was all he could find to hold on to. 'You gonna be back this weekend just like always, ain't you?'
'I don't know,' Mr Hanscom said, and smiled a terrible smile. 'I'm going a lot farther than London this time, Ricky Lee.'