It (135 page)

Bill made as if to hit him. Richie cowered, shrieking in his Pickaninny Voice.

Ben took very little notice of them. He watched Bill lay out the implements and tools one by one in the light. Part of his mind was wishing that someday he might have such a nice worktable as this himself. Most of it was centered directly on the job ahead. Not as difficult as making silver bullets would have been, but he would still be careful. There was no excuse for sloppy workmanship. This was not something he had been taught or told, just something he knew.

Bill had insisted that Ben make the slugs, just as he continued to insist that Beverly would be the one carrying the Bullseye. These things could have and had been discussed, but it was only twenty-seven years later, telling the story, that Ben realized no one had even suggested that a silver bullet or slug might not stop a monster—they had the weight of what seemed like a thousand horror movies on their side.

“Okay,” Ben said. He cracked his knuckles and then looked at Bill. “You got the molds?”

“Oh!” Bill jumped a little. “H-H-Here.” He reached into his pants pocket and brought out his handkerchief. He put it on the workbench and unfolded it. There were two dull steel balls inside, each with a small hole in it. They were bearing molds.

After deciding on slugs instead of bullets, Bill and Richie had gone back to the library and had researched how bearings were made. “You boys are
so
busy,” Mrs. Starrett had said. “Bullets one week and bearings the next! And it's summer vacation, too!”

“We like to stay sharp,” Richie said. “Right, Bill?”

“Ruh-Ruh-Right.”

It turned out that making bearings was a cinch, once you had the molds. The only real question was where to get them. A couple of discreet questions to Zack Denbrough had taken care of that . . . and none of the Losers were too surprised to find that the only
machine-shop in Derry where such molds might be obtained was Kitchener Precision Tool & Die. The Kitchener who owned and ran it was a great-great-grandnephew of the brothers who had owned the Kitchener Ironworks.

Bill and Richie had gone over together with all the cash the Losers had been able to raise on short notice—ten dollars and fifty-nine cents—in Bill's pocket. When Bill asked how much a couple of two-inch bearing molds might cost, Carl Kitchener—who looked like a veteran boozehound and smelled like an old horse-blanket—asked what a couple of kids wanted with bearing molds. Richie let Bill speak, knowing things would probably go easier that way—children made fun of Bill's stutter; adults were embarrassed by it. Sometimes this was surprisingly helpful.

Bill got halfway through the explanation he and Richie had worked out on the way over—something about a model windmill for next year's science project—when Kitchener waved for him to shut up and quoted them the unbelievable price of fifty cents per mold.

Hardly able to believe their good fortune, Bill forked over a single dollar bill.

“Don't expect me to give you a bag,” Carl Kitchener said, eying them with the bloodshot contempt of a man who believes he has seen everything the world holds, most of it twice. “You don't get no bag unless you spend at least five bucks.”

“That's o-o-okay, suh-sir,” Bill said.

“And don't hang around out front,” Kitchener said. “You both need haircuts.”

Outside Bill said: “Y-Y-You ever nuh-hotice, Ruh-Richie, how guh-guh-grownups w-w-won't sell you a-a-anything except c-candy or cuh-cuh-homic books or m-maybe movie t-t-tickets without first they w-want to know what y-you want it f-for?”

“Sure,” Richie said.

“W-Why? Why ih-is that?”

“Because they think we're dangerous.”

“Y-Yeah? You thuh-thuh-think s-so?”

“Yeah,” Richie said, and then giggled. “Let's hang around out front, want to? We'll put up our collars and sneer at people and let our hair grow.”

“Fuck y-you,” Bill said.

“Okay,” Ben said, looking at the molds carefully and then putting them down. “Good. Now—”

They gave him a little more room, looking at him hopefully, the way a man with engine trouble who knows nothing about cars will look at a mechanic. Ben didn't notice their expressions. He was concentrating on the job.

“Gimme that shell,” he said, “and the blowtorch.”

Bill handed a cut-down mortar shell to him. It was a war souvenir. Zack had picked it up five days after he and the rest of General Patton's army had crossed the river into Germany. There had been a time, when Bill was very young and George was still in diapers, that his father had used it as an ashtray. Later he had quit smoking, and the mortar shell had disappeared. Bill had found it in the back of the garage just a week ago.

Ben put the mortar shell into Zack's vise, tightened it, and then took the blowtorch from Beverly. He reached into his pocket, brought out a silver dollar, and dropped it into the makeshift crucible. It made a hollow sound.

“Your father gave you that, didn't he?” Beverly asked.

“Yes,” Ben said, “but I don't remember him very well.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

He looked at her and smiled. “Yes,” he said.

She smiled back. It was enough for Ben. If she had smiled at him twice, he would gladly have made enough silver bearings to shoot a platoon of werewolves. He looked hastily away. “Okay. Here we go. No problem. Easy as pie, right?”

They nodded hesitantly.

Years later, recounting all of this, Ben would think:
These days a kid could just run out and buy a propane torch . . . or his dad would have one in the workshop.

There had been no such things in 1958, however; Zack Denbrough had a tank-job, and it made Beverly nervous. Ben could tell she was nervous, wanted to tell her not to worry, but was afraid his voice would tremble.

“Don't worry,” he said to Stan, who was standing next to her.

“Huh?” Stan said, looking at him and blinking.

“Don't
worry.”

“I'm
not.”

“Oh. I thought you were. And I just wanted you to know this is perfectly safe.
If
you were. Worrying, I mean.”

“Are you okay, Ben?”

“Fine,” Ben muttered. “Gimme the matches, Richie.”

Richie gave him a book of matches. Ben twisted the valve on the tank and lit a match under the nozzle of the torch. There was a
flump!
and a bright blue-orange glare. Ben tuned the flame to a blue edge and began to heat the base of the mortar shell.

“You got the funnel?” he asked Bill.

“R-R-Right here.” Bill handed over a homemade funnel that Ben had made earlier. The tiny hole at its base fit the hole in the bearing molds almost exactly. Ben had done this without taking a single measurement. Bill had been amazed—almost flabbergasted—but did not know how to say so without embarrassing Ben.

Absorbed in what he was doing, Ben could talk to Beverly—he spoke with the dry precision of a surgeon addressing a nurse.

“Bev, you got the steadiest hands. Stick the funnel in the hole. Use one of those gloves so you don't get burned.”

Bill handed her one of his father's work gloves. Beverly put the tin funnel in the mold. No one spoke. The hissing of the blowtorch flame seemed very loud. They watched it, eyes squinted almost shut.

“Wuh-wuh-wait,” Bill said suddenly, and dashed into the house. He came back a minute later with a pair of cheap Turtle wraparound sunglasses that had been languishing in a kitchen drawer for a year or more. “Better p-put these uh-on, H-H-Haystack.”

Ben took them, grinned, and slipped them on.

“Shit, it's Fabian!” Richie said. “Or Frankie Avalon, or one of those
Bandstand
wops.”

“Fuck you, Trashmouth,” Ben said, but he started giggling in spite of himself. The idea of him being Fabian or someone like that was just too weird. The flame wavered and he stopped laughing; his concentration narrowed to a point again.

Two minutes later he handed the torch to Eddie, who held it gingerly in his good hand. “It's ready,” he said to Bill. “Gimme that other glove. Fast! Fast!”

Bill gave it to him. Ben put it on and held the mortar shell with the gloved hand while he turned the vise lever with the other.

“Hold it steady, Bev.”

“I'm ready, don't wait for me,” she rapped back at him.

Ben tilted the shell over the funnel. The others watched as a rivulet of molten silver flowed between the two receptacles. Ben poured precisely; not a drop was spilled. And for a moment, he felt galvanized. He seemed to see everything magnified through a strong white glow. For that one moment he did not feel like plain fat old Ben Hanscom, who wore sweatshirts to disguise his gut and his tits; he felt like Thor, working thunder and lightning at the smithy of the gods.

Then the feeling was gone.

“Okay,” he said. “I'm gonna have to reheat the silver. Someone shove a nail or something up the spout of the funnel before the goop hardens in there.”

Stan did it.

Ben clamped the mortar shell in the vise again and took the torch from Eddie.

“Okay,” he said, “number two.”

And went back to work.

Ten minutes later it was done.

“Now what?” Mike asked.

“Now we play Monopoly for an hour,” Ben said, “while they harden in the molds. Then I clip em open with a chisel along the cut-lines and we're done.”

Richie looked uneasily at the cracked face of his Timex, which had taken a great many lickings and kept on ticking. “When will your folks be back, Bill?”

“N-N-Not until tuh-ten or ten-thuh-thuh-hirty,” Bill said. “It's a double f-f-f-feature at the Uh-Uh-Uh—”

“Aladdin,” Stan said.

“Yeah. And they'll stop in for a slice of p-p-pizza after. They a-almost always d-do.”

“So we have plenty of time,” Ben said.

Bill nodded.

“Then let's go in,” Bev said. “I want to call home. I promised I would. And don't any of you talk. He thinks I'm at Community House and that I'm getting a ride home from there.”

“What if he wants to come down and pick you up early?” Mike asked.

“Then,” Beverly said, “I'm going to be in a lot of trouble.”

Ben thought:
I'd protect you, Beverly.
In his mind's eye, an instant daydream unfolded, one with an ending so sweet he shivered. Bev's father started to give her a hard time; to bawl her out and all that (even in his daydream he did not imagine how bad all that could get with Al Marsh). Ben threw himself in front of her and told Marsh to lay off.

If you want trouble, fat boy, you just keep protecting my daughter.

Hanscom, usually a quiet bookish type, can be a ravening tiger when you get him mad. He speaks to Al Marsh with great sincerity.
If you want to get to her, you'll have to come through me first.

Marsh starts forward . . . and then the steely glint in Hanscom's eyes stops him.

You'll be sorry,
he mumbles, but it's clear all the fight has gone out of him. He's just a paper tiger after all.

Somehow I doubt that,
Hanscom says with a tight Gary Cooper smile, and Beverly's father slinks away.

What's happened to you, Ben?
Bev cries, but her eyes are shining and full of stars.
You looked ready to kill him!

Kill him?
Hanscom says, the Gary Cooper smile still lingering on his lips.
No way, baby. He may be a creep, but he's still your father. I might have roughed him up a little, but that's only because when someone talks wrong to you I get a little hot under the collar. You know?

She throws her arms around him and kisses him (on the
lips!
on the
LIPS!). I love you, Ben!
she sobs. He can feel her small breasts pressing firmly against his chest and—

He shivered a little, throwing this bright, terribly clear picture off with an effort. Richie stood in the doorway, asking him if he was coming, and Ben realized he was all alone in the workroom.

“Yeah,” he said, starting a little. “Sure I am.”

“You're goin senile, Haystack,” Richie said as Ben went though
the door, but he clapped Ben on the shoulder. Ben grinned and hooked an elbow briefly around Richie's neck.

There was no problem with Beverly's dad. He had come home late from work, Bev's mother told her over the phone, fallen asleep in front of the TV, and waked up just long enough to get himself into bed.

“You got a ride home, Bevvie?”

“Yes. Bill Denbrough's dad is going to take a whole bunch of us home.”

Mrs. Marsh sounded suddenly alarmed. “You're not on a
date,
are you, Bevvie?”

“No, of course not,” Bev said, looking through the arched doorway between the darkened hall where she was and the dining room, where the others were sitting down around the Monopoly board.
But I sure wish I was.
“Boys, uck. But they have a sign-up sheet down here, and every night a different dad or mom takes kids home.” That much, at least, was true. The rest was a lie so outrageous that she could feel herself blushing hotly in the dark.

“All right,” her mom said. “I just wanted to be sure. Because if your dad caught you going on dates at your age, he'd be mad.” Almost as an afterthought she added: “I would be, too.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bev said, still looking into the dining room. She
did
know; yet here she was, not with one boy but six of them, in a house where the parents were gone. She saw Ben looking at her anxiously, and she sketched a smiling little salute at him. He blushed but gave her the little salute right back.

“Are any of your girlfriends there?”

What
girlfriends, Mamma?