UDDITS, PART ONE

1

'Lady', Pete said.

The woman in the duffel coat said nothing. Lay on the sawdusty piece of tarp and said nothing. Pete could see one eye, staring at him, or through him, or at the jellyroll center of the fucking universe, who knew. Creepy. The fire crackled between them, really starting to take hold and throw some heat now. Henry had been gone about fifteen minutes. It would be three hours before he made it back, Pete calculated, three hours at the very least, and that was a long time to spend under this lady's creepy jackalope eye.

'Lady,' he said again. 'You hear me?'

Nothing. But once she had yawned, and he'd seen that half her goddam teeth were gone. What the fuck was up with that? And did he really want to know? The answer, Pete had discovered, was yes and no. He was curious - he supposed a man couldn't help being curious - but at the same time he didn't want to know. Not who she was, not who Rick was or what had happened to him, and not who 'they' were. They're back! the woman had screamed when she saw the lights in the sky, They're back!

'Lady,' he said for the third time.

Nothing.

She'd said that Pick was the only one left, and then she'd said They're back, presumably meaning the lights in the sky, and since then there had been nothing but those unpleasant burps and farts . . . the one yawn, exposing all those missing teeth . . . and the eye. The creepy jackalope eye. Henry had only been gone fifteen minutes ?he'd left at five past twelve and it was now twelve-twenty by Pete's watch - and it felt like an hour and a half This was going to be one long fucking day, and if he was going to get through it without cracking up (he kept thinking of some story they'd had to read in the eighth grade, he couldn't remember who wrote it, only that the guy in the story had killed this old man because he couldn't stand the old man's eye, and at the time Pete hadn't understood that but now he did, yessir), he needed something.

'Lady, do you hear me?'

Nada. Just the creepy jackalope eye.

'I have to go back to the car because I kind of forgot something. But you'll be all right. Won't you?'

No answer - and then she let loose with another of those long buzz-saw farts, her face wrinkling up as she let go, as if it hurt her . . . and probably it did, something that sounded like that just about had to hurt. And even though Pete had been careful to get upwind, some of the smell came to him - hot and rank but somehow not human. Nor did it smell like cow-farts. He had worked for Lionel Sylvester as a kid, he'd milked more than his share of cows, and sometimes they blew gas at you while you were on the stool, sure - a heavy green smell, a marshy smell. This wasn't like that, not a bit. This was like . . . well, like when you were a kid and got your first chemistry set, and after awhile you got tired of the faggy little experiments in the booklet and just went hogwild and mixed all that shit together, just to see if it would explode. And, he realized, that was part of what was troubling him, part of what was making him nervous. Except that was stupid. People didn't just explode, did they? Still, he had to get him a little help here. Because she was giving him the Willies, bigtime.

He got two of the pieces of wood Henry had scrounged, added them to the fire, debated, and added a third. Sparks rose, whirling, and winked out against the sloping piece of corrugated tin. 'I'll be back before that all burns down, but if you want to add on another, be my guest. Okay?'

Nothing. He suddenly felt like shaking her, but he had a mile and a half to walk, up to the Scout and back here again, and he had to save his strength. Besides, she'd probably fart again. Or burp right in his face.

'Okay,' he said. 'Silence gives consent, that's what Mrs White always used to say back in the fourth grade.'

He got to his feet, bracing his knee as he did so, grimacing and slipping, almost falling, but finally getting up because he needed that beer, goddammit, needed it, and there was no one to get it except for him, Probably he was an alcoholic. In fact, there was no probably about it, and he supposed eventually he'd have to do something about it, but for now he was on his own, wasn't he? Yes, because this bitch was gone, nothing left of her but some nasty gas and that creepy jackalope eye. If she needed to put some more wood on the fire she'd just have to do it, but she wouldn't need to, he'd be back long before then. It was only a mile and a half. Surely his leg would hold him that long.

'I'll be back,' he said. He leaned over and massaged his knee. Stiff, but not too bad. Really not too bad. He'd just put the beer in a bag - maybe a box of Hi Ho crackers for the bitch while he was at it - and be right back. 'You sure you're okay?'

Nothing. Just the eye.

'Silence gives consent,' he repeated, and began walking back up the Deep Cut Road, following the wide drag-mark of the tarpaulin and their almost-filled-in tracks. He walked in little hitches, pausing to rest every ten or twelve steps . . . and to massage his knee. He stopped once to look back at the fire. It already looked small and insubstantial in the gray early afternoon light. 'This is fuckin crazy,' he said once, but he kept on going.

2

He got to the end of the straight stretch all right, and halfway up the hill all right. He was just starting to walk a little faster, to trust the knee a little when - ha-ha, asshole, fooled ya - it locked again, turning to something that felt like pig-iron, and he went down, yelling squeezed curses through his clenched teeth.

It was as he sat there cursing in the snow that he realized something very odd was going on out here. A large buck went walking past him on the left, with no more than a quick glance at the human from which it would have fled in great, springy bounds on any other day. Running along almost under its feet was a red squirrel.

Pete sat there in the lessening snow - huge flakes falling in a shifting wave that looked like lace - with his leg stuck out in front of him and his mouth open. There were more deer coming along the road, other animals, too, walking and hopping like refugees fleeing some disaster. There were even more of them in the woods, a wave moving east.

'Where you guys going?' he asked a snowshoe rabbit that went lolloping past him with its ears laid along its back. 'Big coverall game at the rez? Casting call for a new Disney cartoon? Got a - '

He broke off, the spit in his mouth drying up to something that felt like an electric mist. A black bear, fat with its pre-hibernation stuffing, was ambling through the screen of thin second-growth trees to his left. It went with its head down and its rump switching from side to side, and although it never spared Pete so much as a look, Pete's illusions about his place here in the big north woods were for the first time entirely stripped away. He was nothing but a heap of tasty white meat that happened to still be breathing. Without his rifle, he was more defenseless than the squirrel he'd seen scurrying around the buck's feet - if noticed by a bear, the squirrel could at least run up the nearest tree, all the way to the thin top branches where no bear could possibly follow. The fact that this bear never so much as looked at him didn't make Pete feel much better. Where there was one, there would be more, and the next one might not be so preoccupied.

Once he was sure the bear was gone, Pete struggled to his feet again, his heart hammering. He had left that foolish farting woman back there alone, but really, how much protection would he have been able to provide if a bear decided to attack? The thing was, he had to get his rifle. Henry's too, if he could carry it. For the next five minutes - until he got to the top of the hill - Pete thought about firepower first and beer second. By the time he began his cautious descent on the other side, however, he was back to beer. Put it in a bag and hang the bag over his shoulder. And no stopping to drink one on the way back. He'd have one when he was sitting in front of the campfire again. It would be a reward beer, and there was nothing better than a reward beer.

You're an alcoholic. You know that, don't you? Fucking alcoholic.

Yes, and what did that mean? That you couldn't fuck up.

Couldn't get caught leaving a semi-comatose woman alone in the woods, let's say, while you went off in search of the suds. And once he got back to the shelter, he had to remember to toss his empties deep into the woods. Although Henry might know anyway. The way they always seemed to know stuff about each other when they were together. And mental link or no mental link, you had to get up pretty goddam early in the morning to put one over on Henry Devlin.

Yet Pete thought Henry would probably let him alone about the beer. Unless, that was, Pete decided the time had come to talk about it. To maybe ask Henry for help. Which Pete might do, in time. Certainly he didn't like the way he felt about himself right now; leaving that woman alone back there said something about Peter Moore that wasn't so nice. But Henry ... there was something wrong with Henry, too, this November. Pete didn't know if Beaver felt it, but he was pretty sure Jonesy did. Henry was kind of tucked up. He was maybe even -

From behind him there came a wet grunt. Pete screamed and whirled around. His knee locked up again, locked up savagely, but in his fright he barely noticed. It was the bear, the bear had circled back behind him, that bear or another one -

It wasn't a bear. It was a moose, and it walked past Pete with no more than a glance as he fell into the road again, cursing low in his throat and holding his leg, looking up into the lightly falling snow and cursing himself for a fool. An alcoholic fool.

He had a frightening few moments when it seemed that this time the knee wasn't going to let go - he'd torn something in it and here he would lie in the exodus of animals until Henry finally returned on the snowmobile, and Henry would say What the fuck are you doing here? Why did you leave her alone? As if I didn't know.

But at last he was able to get up again. The best he could do was a gimpy sidesaddle hobble, but it was better than lying in the snow a couple of yards from a fresh pile of steaming moose shit. He could now see the overturned Scout, its wheels and undercarriage covered with fresh snow. He told himself that if his latest fall had happened on the other side of the hill, he would have gone back to the woman and the fire, but that now, with the Scout actually in sight, it was better to go on. That the guns were his main objective, the bottles of Bud just an extra added attraction. And almost believed it. As far as getting back . . . well, he would make it somehow. He'd gotten this far, hadn't he?

Fifty yards or so from the Scout, he heard a rapidly approaching whup-whup-whup - the unmistakable sound of a helicopter. He looked skyward eagerly, preparing himself to stand upright long enough to wave - God, if anyone needed a little help from the sky, it was him - but the helicopter never quite broke through the low ceiling. For a moment he saw a dark shape running through the dreck almost directly above him, the bleary flash of its lights, as well - and then the sound of the copter was moving off to the east, in the direction the animals were running. He was dismayed to feel a nasty sense of relief lurking just below his disappointment: if the helicopter had landed, he never would've gotten to the beer, and he had come all this way, all this damn way.

3

Five minutes later he was down on his knees and climbing carefully into the overturned Scout. He quickly learned that his bad knee wouldn't support him for long (it was swelled against his jeans now like a big painful loaf of bread), and more or less swam into the snow-coated interior. He didn't like it; all the smells seemed too strong, all the dimensions too close. It was almost like crawling into a grave, one that smelled of Henry's cologne.

The groceries were sprayed all over the back, but Pete barely gave the bread and cans and mustard and the package of red hot dogs (red dogs were about all Old Man Gosselin carried for meat) a glance. It was the beer he was interested in, and it looked like only one bottle had broken when the Scout turned turtle. Drunk's luck. The smell was strong - of course the one he'd been drinking from had spilled as well - but beer was a smell he liked. Henry's cologne, on the other hand . . . phew, Jesus. In a way it was as bad as the smell of the crazy lady's gas. And he didn't know why the smell of cologne should make him think of coffins and graves and funeral flowers, but it did.

'Why would you want to wear cologne in the woods anyway, old sport?' he asked, the words coming out in little puffs of white vapor. And the answer of course was that Henry hadn't been - the smell wasn't really here at all, just the smell of beer. For the first time in a long time Pete found himself thinking about the pretty real estate lady who had lost her keys outside the Bridgton Pharmacy, and how he had known she wasn't going to meet him for dinner, didn't want to be within ten miles of him. Was smelling nonexistent cologne like that? He didn't know, only that he didn't like the way the smell seemed all mixed up in his mind with the idea of death.

Forget it, numbnuts. You're spooking yourself, that's all. There's a big difference between really seeing the line and just spooking yourself. Forget about it and get what you came for.

'Good fuckin idea,' Pete said.

The store - bags were plastic, not paper, the kind with handles; Old Man Gosselin had marched at least that far into the future. Pete snagged one, and as he did, felt a rip of pain on the pad of his right hand. Only one goddam broken bottle and so naturally he'd cut himself on it, and pretty deep, from the feel. Maybe this was his punishment for leaving the woman alone back there. If so, he'd take it like a man and count himself let off easy.

He gathered up eight bottles, started to work his way back out of the Scout, then thought again. Had he staggered all the way back here for a lousy eight beers? 'I think not,' he muttered, and then got the other seven, taking time to scrounge them all in spite of how creepy the Scout was making him feel. At last he backed out, fighting the panicky idea that something small, but with big teeth, would soon spring at him, taking a great big chomp out of his balls. Pete's Punishment, Part Two.

He didn't exactly freak, but he wiggled back out faster than he'd wiggled in, and his knee locked up again just as he got entirely clear. He rolled over on his back, whimpering, looking up into the snow - the last of it, now coming down in great big flakes as lacy as a woman's best underwear - and massaging the knee, telling it to come on, now, honey, come on now, sweetie, let go, you fucking bitch. And just as he was starting to think that this time it wouldn't, it did. He hissed through his teeth, sat up, and looked at the bag 'THANKS FOR SHOPPING AT OUR PLACE! printed on the side in red.

'Where else would I shop, you old bastard?' he asked. He decided to allow himself one beer after all before starting back to the woman. Hell, it would lighten the load.

Pete fished one out, twisted the cap, and poured the top half down his throat in four big gulps. It was cold and the snow he was sitting in was even colder, but he still felt better. That was the magic of beer. The magic of scotch, vodka, and gin as well, but when it came to alcohol, he was with Tom T. Hall: he liked beer.

Looking at the bag, he thought again of the carrot-top back in the store - the mystified grin, the Chinese eyes that had originally earned such people the term mongoloids, as in mongoloid idiot. That led him to Duddits again, Douglas Cavell if you wanted to be formal about it. Why Duds had been on his mind so much lately Pete couldn't say, but he had, and Pete made himself a promise: when this was over, he was going to stop in Derry and see old Duddits. He'd make the others go with him, and somehow he didn't think he'd have to try very hard to convince them. Duddits was probably the reason they were still friends after so many years. Hell, most kids never so much as thought of their college or high - school buddies again, let alone those they'd chummed with in junior high . . . what was now known as middle school, although Pete had no doubt it was the same sad jungle of insecurities, confusion, smelly armpits, crazy fads, and half - baked ideas. They hadn't known Duddits from school, of course, because Duddits didn't go to Derry junior High. Duds went to The Mary M. Snowe School for the Exceptional, which was known to the neighborhood kids as The Retard Academy or sometimes just The Dumb School. In the ordinary course of events their paths never would have crossed, but there was this vacant lot out on Kansas Street, and the abandoned brick building that went with it. Facing the street you could still read TRACKER BROTHERS SHIPPING TRUCKING AND STORAGE in fading white paint on the old red brick. And on the other side, in the big alcove where the trucks had once backed up to unload . . . something else was painted there.

Now, sitting in the snow but no longer feeling it melting to cold slush under his ass, drinking his second beer without even being aware he had opened it (the first empty he had cast into the woods where he could still see animals moving east), Pete remembered the day they had met Duds. He remembered Beaver's stupid jacket that the Beav had loved so much, and Beaver's voice, thin but somehow powerful, announcing the end of something and the beginning of something else, announcing in some ungraspable but perfectly real and knowable way that the course of their lives had changed one Tuesday afternoon when all they had been planning was some two-on-two in Jonesy's driveway and then maybe a game of Parcheesi in front of the TV; now, sitting here in the woods beside the overturned Scout, still smelling the cologne Henry hadn't been wearing, drinking his life's happy poison with a hand wearing a bloodstained glove, the car salesman remembered the boy who had not quite given up his dreams of being an astronaut in spite of his increasing problems with math (Jonesy had helped him, and then Henry had helped him and then, in tenth grade, he'd been beyond help), and he remembered the other boys as well, mostly the Beav, who had turned the world upside down with a high yell in his just-beginning-to-change voice: Hey you guys, quit it! Just fucking QUIT it!

'Beaver,' Pete said, and toasted the dark afternoon as he sat with his back propped against the overturned Scout's hood. 'You were beautiful, man.' But hadn't they all been?

Hadn't they all been beautiful?

4

Because he is in the eighth grade and his last class of the day is music, on the ground floor, Pete is always out before his three best friends, who always finish the day on the second floor, Jonesy and Henry in American Fiction, which is a reading class for smart kids, and Beaver next door in Math for Living, which is actually Math for Stupid Boys and Girls. Pete is fighting hard not to have to take that one next year, but he thinks it's a fight he will ultimately lose. He can add, subtract, multiply, and divide; he can do fractions, too, although it takes him too much time. But now there is something new, now there is the x. Pete does not understand the x, and fears it.

He stands outside the gate by the chainlink fence as the rest of the eighth-graders and the babyass seventh-graders stream by, stands there kicking his boots and pretending to smoke, one hand cupped to his mouth and the other concealed beneath it - the concealed hand the one with the hypothetical hidden butt.

And now here come the ninth-graders from the second floor, and walking among them like royalty - like uncrowned kings, almost, although Pete would never say such a corny thing out loud - are his friends, Jonesy and Beaver and Henry. And if there is a king of kings it is Henry, whom all the girls love even if he does wear glasses. Pete is lucky to have such friends, and he knows it - is probably the luckiest eighth-grader in Derry, x or no x. The fact that having friends in the ninth grade keeps him from getting beaten up by any of the eighth - grade badasses is the very least of it.

'Hey, Pete!' Henry says as the three of them come sauntering out through the gate. As always, Henry seems surprised to see him there, but absolutely delighted. 'What you up to, my man?'

'Nothin much,' Pete replies as always. 'What's up with you?'

'SSDD,' Henry says, whipping off his glasses and giving them a polish. If they had been a club, SSDD likely would have been their motto; eventually they will even teach Duddits to say it - it came out Say shih, iffa deh in Duddits-ese, and is one of the few things Duddits says that his parents can't understand. This of course will delight Pete and his friends.

Now, however, with Duddits still half an hour in their future, Pete just echoes Henry: 'Yeah, man, SSDD.'

Same shit, different day. Except in their hearts, the boys only believe the first half, because in their hearts they believe it's the same day, day after day. It's Derry, it's 1978, and it win always be 1978. They say there will be a future, that they will live to see the twenty-first century - Henry will be a lawyer, Jonesy win be a writer, Beaver will be a long-haul truck-driver, Pete will be an astronaut with a NASA patch on his shoulder - but this is just what they say, as they chant the Apostle's Creed in church with no real idea of what's coming out of their mouths; what they're really interested in is Maureen Chessman's skirt, which was short to begin with and has ridden a pretty good way up her thighs as she shifted around. They believe in their hearts that one day Maureen's skirt will ride up high enough for them to see the color of her panties, and they similarly believe that Derry is forever and so are they. It will always be junior high school and quarter of three, they will always be walking up Kansas Street together to play basketball in Jonesy's driveway (Pete also has a hoop in his driveway but they like Jonesy's better because his father has posted it low enough so you can dunk), talking about the same old things: classes and teachers and which kid got into a fuckin pisser with which kid, or which kid is going to get into a fuckin pisser with which kid, whether or not so-and-so could take so-and-so if they got into a fuckin pisser (except they never will because so-and-so and so-and-so are tight), who did something gross lately (their favorite so far this year has to do with a seventh-grader named Norm Parmeleau, now known as Macaroni Parmeleau, a nickname that will pursue him for years, even into the new century of which these boys speak but do not in their hearts actually believe; to win a fifty-cent bet, Norm Parmeleau had one day in the cafeteria firmly plugged both nostrils with macaroni and cheese, then hawked it back like snot and swallowed it; Macaroni Parmeleau who, like so many junior-high-school kids, has mistaken notoriety for celebrity), who is going out with whom (if a girl and a guy are observed going home together after school, they are presumed to be probably going out; if they are observed ban in onto hands or suckin face it is a certainty), who is going to win the Super Bowl (fuckin Patriots, fuckin Boston Patriots, only they never do, having to root for the Patriots is a fuckin pisser). All these topics are the same and yet endlessly fascinating as they walk from the same school (I believe in God the father almighty) on the same street (maker of heaven and earth) under the same white everlasting October sky (world without end) with the same friends (amen). Same shit, same day, that is the truth in their hearts, and they're down with K.C. and the Sunshine Band on this one, even though they will all tell you RIR-DS (rock is rolling, disco sucks): that's the way they like it. Change will come upon them sudden and unannounced, as it always does with children of this age; if change needed permission from Junior-high-school students, it would cease to exist.

Today they also have hunting to talk about, because next month Mr Clarendon is for the first time going to take them up to Hole in the Wall. They'll be gone for three days, two of them schooldays (there is no problem getting permission for this trip from the school, and absolutely no need to lie about the trip's purpose; southern Maine may have gotten citified, but up here in God's country, hunting is still considered part of a young person's education, especially if the young person is a boy). The idea of creeping through the woods with loaded rifles while their friends are back at dear old DJHS, just droning away, strikes them as incredibly, delightfully boss, and they walk past The Retard Academy on the other side of the street without even seeing it. The retards get out at the same time as the kids at Derry junior High, but most of them go home with their mothers on the special retard bus, which is blue instead of yellow and is reputed to have a bumper sticker on it that says SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH OR I'LL KILL YOU. As Henry, Beaver, Jonesy, and Pete walk past Mary M. Snowe on the other side, a few high-functioning retards who are allowed to go home by themselves are still walking along, goggling around themselves with those weird expressions of perpetual wonder. Pete and his friends see them without seeing them, as always. They are just part of the world's wallpaper.

Henry, Jonesy, and Pete are listening closely to the Beav, who's telling them that when they get to Hole in the Wall they have to get down in The Gulch, because that's where the big ones always go, there's bushes down there that they like. 'Me and my Dad have seen about a billion deer in there,' he says. The zippers on his old motorcycle jacket jingle agreeably.

They argue about who's going to get the biggest deer and where is the best place to shoot one so you can bring it down with one shot and it won't suffer. ('Except my father says that animals don't suffer the way people do when they get hurt,' Jonesy tells them. 'He says God made them different that way so it would be okay for us to hunt them.') They laugh and squabble and argue over who is the most likely to blow lunch when it comes time to gut their kills, and The Retard Academy falls farther and farther behind. Ahead of them, on their side of the street, looms the square red brick building where Tracker Brothers used to do business.

'If anyone hurls, it won't be me,' Beaver boasts. 'I seen deerguts a thousand times and they don't bother me at all. I remember once - '

'Hey you guys,' Jonesy breaks in, suddenly excited. 'You want to see Tina Jean Schlossinger's pussy?'

'Who's Tina Jean Sloppinger?' Pete asks, but he is already intrigued. Seeing any pussy seems like a great idea to him; he is always looking at his Dad's Penthouse and Playboy magazines, which his Dad keeps out in his workshop, behind the big Craftsman toolbox. Pussy is very interesting. It doesn't give him a boner and make him feel sexy the way bare tits do, but he guesses that's because he's still a kid.

And pussy is interesting.

'Schlossinger,' Jonesy says, laughing. 'Schlossinger, Petesky. The Schlossingers live two blocks over from me, and - ' He stops sud?denly, struck by an important question which must be answered immediately. He turns to Henry. 'Are the Schlossingers Jews or Republicans?'

Now it's Henry laughing at Jonesy, but without any malice. 'Technically, I think it's possible to be both at the same time . . . or neither one.' Henry pronounces the word nyther instead of neether, which impresses Pete. It sounds smart as a motherfucker, and he reminds himself to say it that way from now on - nyther, nyther, nyther, he tells himself . . . but knows somehow that he win forget, that he is one of those people condemned to say neether all his life.

'Never mind religion and politics,' Henry says, still laughing. 'If you've got a picture of Tina Jean Schlossinger showing her pussy, I want to see it.'

The Beav, meanwhile, has become visibly excited - cheeks flushed, eyes bright, and he goes to stick a fresh toothpick in his mouth before the old one is even half finished. The zippers on his jacket, the one Beaver's older brother wore during his four or five years of Fonzie-worship, jingle faster.

'Is she blonde?' the Beav asks. 'Blonde, and in high school? Super good-looking? Got - ' He holds his hands out in front of his chest, and when Jonesy nods, grinning, Beaver turns to Pete and blurts: 'This year's Homecoming Queen up at the high school, ringmeat! Her picture was in the fuckin paper! Up on that float with Richie Grenadeau?'

'Yes, but the fucking Tigers lost the Homecoming game and Grenadeau ended up with a broken nose,' Henry says. 'First Derry High team ever to play a Class-A team from southern Maine and those fools - '

'Fuck the Tigers,' Pete breaks in. He has more interest in high school football than he does in the dreaded x, but not much. Anyway, he's got the girl placed now, remembers the newspaper photo of her standing on the flower-decked bed of a pulp truck next to the Tiger quarterback, both of them wearing tinfoil crowns, smiling, and waving to the crowd. The girl's hair fell around her face in big blowy Farrah Fawcett waves, and her gown was strapless, showing the tops of her breasts.

For the first time in his life, Pete feels real lust - it is a meaty feeling, red and heavy, that stiffens his prick, dries up the spit in his mouth, and makes it hard for him to think. Pussy is interesting; the idea of seeing local pussy, Homecoming Queen pussy . . . that is a lot more than exciting. That is, as the Derry News's film critic sometimes says about movies she especially likes, 'a must-see.'

'Where?' he asks Jonesy breathlessly. He is imagining seeing this girl, this Tina Jean Schlossinger, waiting on the corner for the school bus, just standing there giggling with her girlfriends, not having the slightest idea that the boy walking past has seen what is under her skirt or her jeans, that he knows if the hair on her pussy is the same color as the hair on her head. Pete is on fire. 'Where is it?'

'There,' Jonesy says, and points at the red brick box that is Tracker Brothers old freight and storage depot. There is ivy crawling up the sides, but this has been a cold fall and most of the leaves have already died and turned black. Some of the windows are broken and the rest are bleary. Looking at the place gives Pete a little chin. Partly because the big kids, the high-school kids and even some that are beyond high school, play baseball in the vacant lot behind the building, and big kids like to beat up little kids, who knows why, it relieved the monotony or something. But this isn't the big deal, because baseball is over for the year and the big kids have probably moved on to Strawford Park, where they will play two-hand touch football until the snow flies. (Once the snow flies, they will beat each others' brains in playing hockey with old friction-taped sticks.) No, the big deal is that kids sometimes disappear in Derry, Derry is funny that way, and when they do disappear, they are often last seen in out-of-the-way places like the deserted Tracker Brothers depot. No one talks about this unpleasant fact, but everyone knows about it.

Yet a pussy . . . not some fictional Penthouse pussy but the actual muff of an actual girl from town . . . that would be something to see, all right. That would be a fuckin pisser.

'Tracker Brothers?' Henry says with frank disbelief They have stopped now, are standing together in a little clump not far from the building while the last of the retards go moaning and goggling by on the other side of the street. 'I think the world of you, Jonesy, don't get me wrong - the fucking world - but why would there be a picture of Tina Jean's pussy in there?'

'I don't know,' Jonesy said, 'but Davey Trask saw it and said it was her.'

'I dunno about goin in there, man,' Beaver says. 'I mean, I'd love to see Tina Jean Slophanger's pussy - '

'Schlossinger - '

' - but that place has been empty at least since we were in the fifth grade - '

'Beav - '

' - and I bet it's full of rats.'

'Beav - '

But Beav intends to have his entire say. 'Rats get rabies,' he says. 'They get rabies up the old wazoo.'

'We don't have to go in,' Jonesy says, and all three look at him with renewed interest. This is, as the fellow said when he saw the black-haired Swede, a Norse of a different color.

Jonesy sees he has their full attention, nods, goes on. 'Davey says all you have to do is go around on the driveway side and look in the third or fourth window. It used to be Phil and Tony Tracker's office. There's still a bulletin board on the wall. And Davey said the only two things on the bulletin board are a map of New England showing all the truck routes, and a picture of Tina jean Schlossinger showing all of her pussy.'

They look at him with breathless interest, and Pete asks the question which has occurred to all of them. 'Is she bollocky?'

'No,' Jonesy admits. 'Davey says you can't even see her tits, but she's holding her skirt up and she isn't wearing pants and you can see it, just as clear as day.'

Pete is disappointed that this year's Tiger Homecoming Queen isn't bollocky bare-ass, but the thing about how she's holding her skirt up inflames them all, feeding some primal, semi-secret notion of how sex really works. A girl could hold her skirt up, after all; any girl could.

Not even Henry asks any more questions. The only question comes from the Beav, who asks if Jonesy is sure they won't have to go inside in order to see. And they are already moving in the direction of the driveway running down the far side of the building toward the vacant lot, powerful as a spring tide in their nearly mindless motion.

5

Pete finished the second beer and heaved the bottle deep into the woods. Feeling better now, he got cautiously to his feet and dusted the snow from his ass. And was his knee a little bit looser? He thought maybe it was. Looked awful, of course - looked like he had a little model of the Minnesota goddam Metrodome under there - but felt a bit better. Still, he walked carefully, swinging his plastic sack of beer in short arcs beside him. Now that the small but powerful voice insisting that he had to have a beer, just goddam had to, had been silenced, he thought of the woman with new solicitude, hoping she hadn't noticed he was gone. He would walk slowly, he would stop to massage his knee every five minutes or so (and maybe talk to it, encourage it, a crazy idea, but he was out here on his own and it couldn't hurt), and he would get back to the woman. Then he would have another beer. He did not look back at the overturned Scout, did not see that he had written DUDDITS in the snow, over and over again, as he sat thinking of that day back in 1978.

Only Henry had asked why the Schlossinger girl's picture would be there in the empty office of an empty freight depot, and Pete thought now that Henry had only asked because he had to fulfill his role as Group Skeptic. Certainly he'd only asked once; as for the rest of them, they had simply believed, and why not? At thirteen, Pete had still spent half his life believing in Santa Claus. And besides -

Pete stopped near the top of the big hill, not because he was out of breath or because his leg was cramping up, but because he could suddenly feel a low humming sound in his head, sort of like an electrical transformer, only with a kind of cycling quality to it, a low thud-thud-thud. And no, it wasn't 'suddenly' as in 'suddenly started up'; he had an idea the sound had been there for awhile and he was just becoming aware of it. And he had started to think some funny stuff. All that about Henry's cologne, for instance . . . and Marcy. Someone named Marcy. He didn't think he knew anyone named Marcy but the name was suddenly in his head, as in Marcy I need you or Marcy I want you or maybe Zounds, Marcy, bring the gasogene.

He stood where he was, licking his dry lips, the bag of beer hanging straight down from his hand now, its pendulum motion stilled. He looked up in the sky, suddenly sure the lights would be there . . . and they were there, only just two of them now, and very faint.

'Tell Marcy to make them give me a shot,' Pete said, enunciating each word carefully in the stillness, and knew they were exactly the right words. Right why or right how he couldn't say, but yes, those were the words in his head. Was it the click, or had the lights caused those thoughts? Pete couldn't say for sure.

'Maybe nyther,' he said.

Pete realized the last of the snow had stopped. The world around him was only three colors: the deep gray of the sky, the deep green of the firs, and the perfect unblemished white of the new snow. And hushed.

Pete cocked his head first to one side and then to the other, listening. Yes, hushed. Nothing. No sound in the world and the humming noise had stopped as completely as the snow. When he looked up, he saw that the pale, mothlike glow of the lights was also gone.

'Marcy?' he said, as if calling someone. It occurred to him that Marcy might be the name of the woman who had caused them to wreck, but he dismissed the idea. That woman's name was Becky, he knew it as surely as he had known the name of the real estate woman that time. Marcy was just a word now, and nothing about it called to him. Probably he'd just had a brain-cramp. Wouldn't be the first time.

He finished climbing the hill and started down the other side, his thoughts returning to that day in the fall of 1978, the day they had met Duddits.

He was almost back to the place where the road leveled when his knee abruptly let go, not locking up this time but seeming to explode like a pine knot in a hot fire.

Pete pitched forward into the snow. He didn't hear the Bud bottles break inside the bag - all but two of them. He was screaming too loudly.