It (125 page)

“You like that, Rock Man?” Henry asked, his voice drifting down over a distance, floating through clouds of pain. “You like that action, Rock Man? You like that jobbanobba?”

Patrick Hockstetter giggled.

“Your father's crazy,” Eddie heard himself say, “and so are you.”

Henry's grin faded so fast it might have been slapped off his face. He drew his foot back to kick . . . and then a siren rose in the still hot afternoon. Henry paused. Victor and Moose looked around uneasily.

“Henry, I think we better get out of here,” Moose said.

“I know damn well
I'm
getting out of here,” Victor said. How far
away their voices seemed! Like the clown's balloons, they seemed to float. Victor took off toward the library, cutting into McCarron Park to get off the street.

Henry hesitated a moment longer, perhaps hoping the cop-car was on some other business and he could continue with his own. But the siren rose again, closer. “You got lucky, fuckface,” he said. He and Moose took off after Victor.

Patrick Hockstetter waited for a moment. “Here's a little something extra for you,” he whispered in his low, husky voice. He inhaled and spat a large green lunger into Eddie's upturned, sweating, bloody face.
Splat.
“Don't eat it all at once if you don't want,” Patrick said, smiling his liverish unsettling smile. “Save some for later, if you want.”

Then he turned slowly and was also gone.

Eddie tried to wipe the lunger off with his good arm, but even that little movement made the pain flare again.

Now when you started off for the drugstore, you never thought you'd end up on the Costello Avenue sidewalk with a busted arm and Patrick Hockstetter's snot running down your face, did you? You never even got to drink your Pepsi. Life's full of surprises, isn't it?

Incredibly, he laughed again. It was a weak sound, and it hurt his broken arm to laugh, but it felt good. And there was something else: no asthma. His breathing was okay, at least for now. A good thing, too. He never would have been able to get to his aspirator. Never in a thousand years.

The siren was very close now, whooping and whooping. Eddie closed his eyes and saw red under his eyelids. Then the red turned black as a shadow fell over him. It was the little kid with the trike.

“You okay?” the little kid asked.

“Do I look okay?” Eddie asked.

“No, you look
terrible,”
the little kid said, and pedaled off, singing “The Farmer in the Dell.”

Eddie began to giggle. Here was the cop-car; he could hear the squeal of its brakes. He found himself hoping vaguely that Mr. Nell would be in it, even though he knew Mr. Nell was a foot patrolman.

Why in the name of God are you giggling?

He didn't know, any more than he knew why he should feel, in spite of the pain, such intense relief. Was it maybe just because he
was still alive, that the worst he had suffered was a broken arm, and there were still some pieces to pick up? He settled for that, but years later, sitting in the Derry Library with a glass of gin and prune juice in front of him and his aspirator near at hand, he told the others he thought it was something more than that; he had been old enough to feel that something more, but not to understand or define it.

I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life,
he would tell the others.
It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. It didn't put an end to me as a person. I think . . . it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in
spite
of the pain.

Eddie turned his head weakly to the right and saw large black Firestone tires, blinding chrome hubcaps, and pulsing blue lights. He heard Mr. Nell's voice then, thickly Irish, impossibly Irish, more like Richie's Irish Cop Voice than Mr. Nell's real voice . . . but perhaps that was the distance:

“Holy Jaysus, it's the Kaspbrak bye!”

At this point Eddie floated away.

And, with one exception, stayed away for quite awhile.

There was a brief period of consciousness in the ambulance. He saw Mr. Nell sitting across from him, tipping a drink from his little brown bottle and reading a paperback called
I the Jury.
The girl on the cover had the biggest bosoms Eddie had ever seen. His eyes shifted past Mr. Nell to the driver up front. The driver peered around at Eddie with a big leering grin, his skin livid with greasepaint and talcum powder, his eyes shiny as new quarters. It was Pennywise.

“Mr. Nell,” Eddie husked.

Mr. Nell looked up and smiled. “How are you feelin, me bye?”

“. . . driver . . . the driver . . .”

“Yes, we'll be there in a jig,” Mr. Nell said, and handed him the little brown bottle. “Suck some of this. It'll make ye feel better.”

Eddie drank what tasted like liquid fire. He coughed, hurting his arm. He looked toward the front and saw the driver again. Just some guy with a crewcut. No clown.

He drifted off again.

Much later there was the Mergency Room and a nurse wiping blood and dirt and snot and gravel off his face with a cold cloth. It stung, but it felt wonderful at the same time. He heard his mother bugling and clarioning outside, and he tried to tell the nurse not to let her in, but no words would come out, no matter how hard he tried.

“. . . if he's dying, I want to know!” his mother was bellowing. “You hear me? It's my right to know, and it's my right to see him! I can sue you, you know! I know lawyers, plenty of lawyers! Some of my best friends are lawyers!”

“Don't try to talk,” the nurse said to Eddie. She was young, and he could feel her bosoms pressing against his arm. For a moment he had this crazy idea that the nurse was Beverly Marsh, and then he drifted away again.

When he came back his mother
was
in the room, talking to Dr. Handor at a mile-a-minute clip. Sonia Kaspbrak was a huge woman. Her legs, encased in support hose, were trunklike but weirdly smooth. Her face was pale now except for hectic flaring blots of rouge.

“Ma,” Eddie managed, “. . . all right . . . I'm all right. . . .”

“You're
not,
you're
not,”
Mrs. Kaspbrak moaned. She wrung her hands. Eddie heard her knuckles crack and grind. He began to feel his breath shorten up as he looked at her, seeing what a state she was in, how this latest escapade of his had hurt her. He wanted to tell her to take it easy or she'd have a heart attack, but he couldn't. His throat was too dry. “You're
not
all right, you've had a serious accident, a
very serious
accident, but you
will
be all right, I promise you that, Eddie, you
will
be all right, even if we need to bring in every specialist in the book, oh Eddie . . . Eddie . . . your poor
arm
 . . .”

She burst into honking sobs. Eddie saw that the nurse who had washed his face was looking at her without much sympathy.

All through this aria, Dr. Handor had been stuttering, “Sonia . . . please, Sonia . . . Sonia . . . ?” He was a skinny, limp-looking man with a little mustache that hadn't grown very well and which, in addition, had been clipped unevenly, so it was longer on the left side than on the right. He looked nervous. Eddie remembered what Mr. Keene had told him that morning and felt a certain sorrow for Dr. Handor.

At last, gathering himself, Russ Handor managed to say: “If you can't control yourself, you'll have to leave, Sonia.”

She whirled on him and he drew back. “I'll do no such thing! Don't you even suggest it! This is my
son
lying here in agony!
My son lying here on his bed of pain!”

Eddie astounded them all by finding his voice. “I want you to leave, Ma. If they're going to do something that'll make me yell, and I think they are, you'll feel better if you go.”

She turned to him, astonished . . . and hurt. At the sight of the hurt on her face, he felt his chest begin to tighten down inexorably. “I certainly will
not!”
she cried. “What an awful thing to
say,
Eddie! You're delirious! You don't
understand
what you're saying, that's the
only
explanation!”

“I don't know what the explanation is, and I don't care,” the nurse said. “All I know is that we're standing here doing nothing while we should be setting your son's arm.”

“Are you suggesting—” Sonia began, her voice rising toward the high, bugling note it took on when she was most upset.

“Please, Sonia,” Dr. Handor said. “Let's not have an argument here. Let's help Eddie.”

Sonia stood back, but her glowering eyes—the eyes of a mother bear whose cub has been threatened—promised the nurse that there would be trouble later. Possibly even a suit. Then her eyes misted, extinguishing the glower or at least hiding it. She took Eddie's good hand and squeezed it so painfully that he winced.

“It's bad, but you'll be well again
soon,”
she said. “Well again
soon,
I promise you
that.”

“Sure, Ma,” Eddie wheezed. “Could I have my aspirator?”

“Of course,” she said. Sonia Kaspbrak looked at the nurse triumphantly, as if vindicated of some ridiculous criminal charge. “My son has asthma,” she said. “It's quite serious, but he copes with it
beautifully.”

“Good,” the nurse said flatly.

His ma held the aspirator for him so he could inhale. A moment later Dr. Handor was feeling Eddie's broken arm. He was as gentle as possible but the pain was still enormous. Eddie felt like screaming and gritted his teeth against it. He was afraid if he screamed his
mother would scream, too. Sweat stood out on his forehead in large clear drops.

“You're hurting him,” Mrs. Kaspbrak said. “I
know
you are! There's no need of that! Stop it! There's no need for you to hurt him! He's very delicate, he can't stand that sort of pain!”

Eddie saw the nurse lock her furious eyes with Dr. Handor's tired, worried ones. He saw the wordless conversation that passed between them:
Send that woman out of here, doctor.
And in the drop of his eyes:
I can't. I don't dare.

There was great clarity inside the pain (although, in truth, this was not a clarity that Eddie would want to experience often: the price was too high), and in that unspoken conversation, Eddie accepted everything Mr. Keene had told him. His HydrOx aspirator was filled with nothing more than flavored water. The asthma wasn't in his throat or his chest or his lungs but in his head. Somehow or other he was going to have to deal with that truth.

He looked at his mother, seeing her clear in his pain: each flower on her Lane Bryant dress, the sweat-stains under her arms where the pads she wore had soaked through, the scuff-marks on her shoes. He saw how small her eyes were in their pockets of flesh, and now a terrible thought came to him: those eyes were almost predatory, like the eyes of the leper that had crawled out of the basement at 29 Neibolt Street.
Here I come, that's all right . . . it won't do you any good to run, Eddie. . . .

Dr. Handor put his hands gently around Eddie's broken arm and squeezed. The pain exploded.

Eddie drifted away.

They gave him some liquid to drink and Dr. Handor set the fracture. He heard Dr. Handor telling his ma that it was a greenstick fracture, no more serious than any childhood break: “It's the sort of break kids get falling out of trees,” he said, and Eddie heard his ma respond furiously: “Eddie doesn't
climb
trees! Now I want the truth! How bad is he?”

Then the nurse was giving him a pill. He felt her bosoms against
his shoulder again and was grateful for their comforting pressure. Even through the haze he could see that the nurse was angry and he thought he said,
She's not the leper, please don't think that, she's only eating me because she loves me,
but perhaps nothing came out because the nurse's angry face didn't change.

He had a faint recollection of being pushed up a corridor in a wheelchair and his mother's voice somewhere behind, fading: “What do you mean,
visiting hours?
Don't talk to me about
visiting hours,
that's my
son!”

Fading. He was glad she was fading, glad he was fading. The pain was gone and the clarity was gone with it. He didn't want to think. He wanted to drift. He was aware that his right arm felt very heavy. He wondered if they had put it in a cast yet. He couldn't seem to see if they had or not. He was vaguely aware of radios playing from rooms, of patients who looked like ghosts in their hospital johnnies walking up and down the wide halls, and that it was hot . . . so very hot. When he was wheeled into his room, he could see the sun going down in an angry orange boil of blood and thought incoherently:
Like a great big clown-button.

“Come on, Eddie, you can walk,” a voice was saying, and he found that he could. He was slid between crisp cool sheets. The voice told him that he would have some pain in the night, but not to ring for a pain-killer unless it got very bad. Eddie asked if he could have a drink of water. The water came with a straw that had an accordion middle so you could bend it. It was cool and good. He drank it all.

There was pain in the night, a good deal of it. He lay awake in bed, holding the call-button in his left hand but not pressing it. A thunderstorm was going on outside, and when the lightning flashed blue-white, he turned his head away from the windows, afraid he might see a monstrous, grinning face etched across the sky in that electric fire.

At last he slept again, and in his sleep he had a dream. In it he saw Bill, Ben, Richie, Stan, Mike, and Bev—his friends—arriving at the hospital on their bikes (Bill was riding Richie double on Silver). He was surprised to see that Beverly was wearing a dress—it was a lovely green, the color of the Caribbean in a
National Geographic
plate. He couldn't remember if he had ever seen her in a dress before; all he remembered were jeans and pedal-pushers and what the girls called
“school-sets”: skirts and blouses, the blouses usually white with round collars, the skirts usually brown and pleated and hemmed at mid-shin, so that the scabs on their knees didn't show.