BILL DENBROUGH SEES A GHOST

 

Bill did not see Pennywise that afternoon-but he did see a ghost. A real ghost. So Bill believed then, and no subsequent event caused him to change his mind.

He had walked up Witcham Street and paused for some time by the drain where George met his end on that rainy October day in 1957. He squatted down and peered into the drain, which was cut into the stonework of the curbing. His heart was beating hard, but he looked anyway.

“Come out, why don’t you,” he said in a low voice, and he had the not-quite-mad idea that his voice was floating along dark and dripping passageways, not dying out but continuing onward and onward, feeding on its own echoes, bouncing off moss-covered stone walls and long-dead machinery. He felt it float over still and sullen waters and perhaps issue softly from a hundred different drains in other parts of the city at the same time.

“Come out of there or we’ll come in and g-get you.”

He waited nervily for a response, crouched down with his hands between his thighs like a catcher between pitches. There was no response.

He was about to stand up when a shadow fell over him.

Bill looked up sharply, eagerly, ready for anything… but it was only a little kid, maybe ten, maybe eleven. He was wearing faded Boy Scout shorts which displayed his scabby knees to good advantage. He had a Freeze-Pop in one hand and a Fiberglas skateboard which looked almost as battered as his knees in the other. The Freeze-Pop was a fluorescent orange. The skateboard was a fluorescent green.

“You always talk into the sewers, mister?” the boy asked.

“Only in Derry,” Bill said.

They looked at each other solemnly for a moment and then burst into laughter at the same time.

“I want to ask you a stupid queh-question,” Bill said.

“Okay,” the kid said.

“You ever h-hear anything down in one of these?”

The kid looked at Bill as though he had flipped out.

“O-Okay,” Bill said, “forget I a-asked.”

He started to walk away and had gotten maybe twelve steps-he was headed up the hill, vaguely thinking he would take a look at the home place-when the kid called, “Mister?”

Bill turned back. He had his sportcoat hooked on his finger and slung over his shoulder. His collar was unbuttoned, his tie loosened. The boy was watching him carefully, as if already regretting his decision to speak further. Then he shrugged, as if saying Oh what the hell.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“What did it say?”

“I don’t know. It talked some foreign language. I heard it coming out of one of those pumpin stations down in the Barrens. One of those pumpin stations, they look like pipes coming out of the ground-”

“I know what you mean. Was it a kid you heard?”

“At first it was a kid, then it sounded like a man.” The boy paused. “I was some scared. I ran home and told my father. He said maybe it was an echo or something, coming all the way down the pipes from someone’s house.”

“Do you believe that?”

The boy smiled charmingly. “I read in my Ripley’s Believe It or Not book that there was this guy, he got music from his teeth. Radio music. His fillings were, like, little radios. I guess if I believed that, I could believe anything.”

“A-Ayuh,” Bill said. “But did you believe it?”

The boy reluctantly shook his head.

“Did you ever hear those voices again?”

“Once when I was taking a bath,” the boy said. “It was a girl’s voice. Just crying. No words. I was ascared to pull the plug when I was done because I thought I might, you know, drownd her.”

Bill nodded again.

The kid was looking at Bill openly now, his eyes shining and fascinated. “You know about those voices, mister?”

“I heard them,” Bill said. “A long, long time ago. Did you know any of the k-kids that have been murdered here, son?”

The shine went out of the kid’s eyes; it was replaced by caution and disquiet. “My dad says I’m not supposed to talk to strangers. He says anybody could be that killer.” He took an additional step away from Bill, moving into the dappled shade of an elm tree that Bill had once driven his bike into twenty-seven years ago. He had taken a spill and bent his handlebars.

“Not me, kid,” he said. “I’ve been in England for the last four months. I just got into Derry yesterday.”

“I still don’t have to talk to you,” the kid replied.

“That’s right,” Bill agreed. “It’s a f-f-free country.”

He paused and then said, “I used to pal around with Johnny Feury some of the time. He was a good kid. I cried,” the boy finished matter-of-factly, and slurped down the rest of his Freeze-Pop. As an afterthought he ran out his tongue, which was temporarily bright orange, and lapped off his arm.

“Keep away from the sewers and drains,” Bill said quietly. “Keep away from empty places and deserted places. Stay out of trainyards. But most of all, stay away from the sewers and the drains.”

The shine was back in the kid’s eyes, and he said nothing for a very long time. Then: “Mister? You want to hear something funny?”

“Sure.”

“You know that movie where the shark ate all the people up?”

“Everyone does. J-J- Jaws”

“Well, I got this friend, you know? His name’s Tommy Vicananza, and he’s not that bright. Toys in the attic, you get what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“He thinks he saw that shark in the Canal. He was up there by himself in Bassey Park a couple of weeks ago, and he said he seen this fin. He says it was eight or nine feet tall. Just the fin was that tall, you get me? He goes, “That’s what killed Johnny and the other kids. It was Jaws, I know because I saw it.” So I go, “That Canal’s so polluted nothing could live in it, not even a minnow. And you think you saw Jaws in there. You got toys in the attic, Tommy.” Tommy says it reared right out of the water like it did at the end of that movie and tried to bite him and he just got back in time. Pretty funny, huh, mister?”

“Pretty funny,” Bill agreed.

“Toys in the attic, right?”

Bill hesitated. “stay away from the Canal too, son. You follow?”

“You mean you believe it?”

Bill hesitated. He meant to shrug. Instead he nodded.

The kid let out his breath in a low, hissing rush. He hung his head as if ashamed. “Yeah. Sometimes I think I must have toys in the attic.”

“I know what you mean.” Bill walked over to the kid, who glanced up at him solemnly but didn’t shy away this time. “You’re killing your knees on that board, son.”

The kid glanced down at his scabby knees and grinned. “Yeah, I guess so. I bail out sometimes.”

“Can I try it?” Bill asked suddenly.

The kid looked at him, gape-mouthed at first, then laughing. “That’d be funny,” he said. “I never saw a grownup on a skateboard.’

’I’ll give you a quarter,” Bill said.

“My dad said-”

“Never take money or c-candy from strangers. Good advice. I’ll still give you a q-quarter. What do you say? Just to the corner of Juh-Jackson Street.”

“Never mind the quarter,” the kid said. He burst into laughter again-a gay and uncomplicated sound. A fresh sound. “I don’t need your quarter. I got two bucks. I’m practically rich. I got to see this, though. Just don’t blame me if you break something.”

“Don’t worry,” Bill said. “I’m insured.”

He turned one of the skateboard’s scuffed wheels with his finger, liking the speedy ease with which it turned-it sounded like there was about a million ball-bearings in there. It was a good sound. It called up something very old in Bill’s chest. Some desire as warm as want, as lovely as love. He smiled.

“What do you think?” the kid asked.

“I think I’m g-gonna kill myself,” Bill said, and the kid laughed.

Bill put the skateboard on the sidewalk and put one foot on it. He rolled it back and forth experimentally. The kid watched. In his mind Bill saw himself rolling down Witcham Street toward Jackson on the kid’s avocado-green skateboard, the tails of his sport-coat ballooning out behind him, his bald head gleaming in the sun, his knees bent in that fragile way snowbunnies bend their knees their first day on the slopes. It was a posture that told you that in their heads they were already falling down. He bet the kid didn’t ride the board like that. He bet the kid rode

(to beat the devil)

like there was no tomorrow.

That good feeling died out of his chest. He saw, all too clearly, the board going out from under his feet, shooting unencumbered down the street, an improbable fluorescent green, a color that only a child could love. He saw himself coming down on his ass, maybe on his back. Slow dissolve to a private room at the Derry Home Hospital, like the one they had visited Eddie in after his arm had been broken. Bill Denbrough in a full body-cast, one leg held up by pullies and wires. A doctor comes in, looks at his chart, looks at him, and then says: “You were guilty of two major lapses, Mr Denbrough. The first was mismanagement of a skateboard. The second was forgetting that you are now approaching forty years of age.”

He bent, picked the skateboard back up, and handed it back to the kid. “I

guess not,” he said.

“Chicken,” the kid said, not unkindly.

Bill hooked his thumbs into his armpits and flapped his elbows. “Buck-buck-

buck,” he said.

The kid laughed. “Listen, I got to get home.”

“Be careful on that,” Bill said.

“You can’t be careful on a skateboard,” the kid replied, looking at Bill as if he might be the one with toys in the attic.

“Right,” Bill said. “Okay. As we say in the movie biz, I hear you. But stay away from drams and sewers. And stay with your friends.”

The kid nodded. “I’m right near home.”

So was my brother, Bill thought.

“It’ll be over soon, anyway,” Bill told the kid.

’Will it?” the kid asked.

“I think so,” Bill said.

“Okay. See you later… chicken!”

The kid put one foot on the board and pushed off with the other. Once he was rolling he put the other foot on the board as well and went thundering down the street at what seemed to Bill a suicidal pace. But he rode as Bill had suspected he would: with lazy hipshot grace. Bill felt love for the boy, and exhilaration, and a desire to be the boy, along with an almost suffocating fear. The boy rode as if there were no such things as death or getting older. The boy seemed somehow eternal and ineluctable in his khaki Boy Scout shorts and scuffed sneakers, his ankles sockless and quite dirty, his hair flying back behind him.

Watch out, kid, you’re not going to make the comer! Bill thought, alarmed, but the kid shot his hips to the left like a break-dancer, his toes revolved on the green Fiberglas board, and he zoomed effortlessly around the corner and onto Jackson Street, simply assuming no one would be there to get in his way. Kid, Bill thought, it won’t always be that way.

He walked up to his old house but did not stop; he only slowed his walk down to an idler’s pace. There were people on the lawn-a mother in a lawn chair, a sleeping baby in her arms, watching two kids, maybe ten and eight, play badminton in grass that was still wet from the rain earlier. The younger of the two, a boy, managed to hit the bird back over the net and the woman called, “Good one, Scan!”

The house was the same dark-green color and the fanlight was still over the door, but his mother’s flower-beds were gone. So, from what he could see, was the jungle-gym his father had built from scavenged pipes in the back yard. He remembered the day Georgie had fallen off the top and chipped a tooth. How he had screamed!

He saw these things (the ones there and the ones gone), and thought of walking over to the woman with the sleeping baby in her arms. He thought of saying Hello, my name is Bill Denbrough. I used to live here. And the woman saying, That’s nice. What else could there be? Could he ask her if the face he had carved carefully in one of the attic beams-the face he and Georgie sometimes used to throw darts at-was still there? Could he ask her if her kids sometimes slept on the screened-in back porch when the summer nights were especially hot, talking together in low tones as they watched heat-lightning dance on the horizon? He supposed he might be able to ask some of those things, but he felt he would stutter quite badly if he tried to be charming… and did he really want to know the answers to any of those questions? After Georgie died it had become a cold house, and whatever he had come back to Derry for was not here.

So he went on to the corner and turned right, not looking back.

Soon he was on Kansas Street, headed back downtown. He paused for awhile at the fence which bordered the sidewalk, looking down into the Barrens. The fence was the same, rickety wood covered with fading whitewash, and the Barrens looked the same… wilder, if anything. The only differences he could see were that the dirty smudge of smoke which had always marked the town dump was gone (the dump had been replaced with a modern waste-treatment plant), and a long overpass marched across the tangled greenery now-the turnpike extension. Everything else was so similar that he might last have seen it the previous summer: weeds and bushes sloping down to that flat marshy area on the left and to dense copses of junky-scrubby trees on the right. He could see the stands of what they had called bamboo, the silvery-white stalks twelve and fourteen feet high. He remembered that Richie had once tried to smoke some of it, claiming it was like the stuff jazz musicians smoked and could get you high. All Richie had gotten was sick.

Bill could hear the trickle of water running in many small streams, could see the sun heliographing off the broader expanse of the Kenduskeag. And the smell was the same, even with the dump gone. The heavy perfume of growing things at the height of their spring strut did not quite mask the smell of waste and human offal. It was faint but unmistakable. A smell of corruption; a whiff of the underside.

That’s where it ended before, and that’s where it’s going to end this time, Bill thought with a shiver. In there… under the city.

He stood awhile longer, convinced that he must see something-some manifestation-of the evil he had come back to Derry to fight. There was nothing. He heard water running, a springlike and vital sound that reminded him of the dam they had built down there. He could see trees and bushes ruffling in the faint breeze. There was nothing else. No sign. He walked on, dusting a faint whitewash stain from his hands as he went.

He kept heading downtown, half-remembering, half-dreaming, and here came another kid-this one a little girl of about ten in high-waisted corduroy pants and a faded red blouse. She was bouncing a ball with one hand and holding a babydoll by its blonde Arnel hair in the other.

“Hey!” Bill said.

She looked up. “What!”

“What’s the best store in Derry?”

She thought about it.” For me or for anyone?’

“For you,” Bill said.

“Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes,” she said with no hesitation whatsoever.

“I beg your pardon?” Bill asked.

“You beg what?

“I mean, is that a store name?”

“Sure,” she said, looking at Bill as though he might well be enfeebled. “secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. My mom says it’s a junkshop, but I like it. They have old things. Like records you never heard of. Also postcards. It smells like a attic. I have to go home now. Bye.”

She walked on, not looking back, bouncing her ball and holding her dolly by the hair.

“Hey!” he shouted after her.

She looked back whimsically. “I beg your whatchamacallit?”

The store! Where is it?”

She looked back over her shoulder and said, “Just the way you’re going. It’s at the bottom of Up-Mile Hill.”

Bill felt that sense of the past folding in on itself, folding in on him. He hadn’t meant to ask that little girl anything; the question had popped out of his mouth like a cork flying from the neck of a champagne bottle.

He descended Up-Mile Hill toward downtown. The warehouses and packing plants he remembered from childhood-gloomy brick buildings with duty windows from which titanic meaty smells issued-were mostly gone, although the Armour and the Star Beef meat-packing plants were still there. But Hemphill was gone and there was a drive-in bank and a bakery where Eagle Beef and Kosher Meats had been. And there, where the Tracker Brothers” Annex had stood, was a sign painted in oldfashioned letters which read, just as the girl with the doll had said, SECONDHAND ROSE, SECONDHAND CLOTHES. The red brick had been painted a yellow which had perhaps been jaunty ten or twelve years ago, but was now dingy-a color Audra called urine-yellow.

Bill walked slowly toward it, feeling that sense of deja vu settle over nun again. Later he told the others he knew what ghost he was going to see before he actually saw it.

The show-window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes was more than dingy; it was filthy. No Downcast antique shop this, with nifty little spool-beds and Hoosier cabinets and sets of Depression glassware highlighted by hidden spotlights; this was what his mother called with utter disdain “a Yankee pawnshop.” The items were strewn in rickrack profusion, heaped aimlessly here, there, and everywhere. Dresses slumped off coathangers. Guitars hung from their necks like executed criminals. There was a box of 45 rpm records-10 c APIECE, the sign read. TWELVE FOR A BUCK. ANDREWS SISTERS, PERRY COMO, JIMMY ROGERS, OTHERS. There were kids” outfits and dreadful-looking shoes with a card in front of them which read SECONDS, BUT NOT BAD! $1.00 A PAIR. There were two TVs that looked blind. A third was casting bleared images of The Brady Bunch out toward the street. A box of old paperbacks, most with stripped covers (2 FOR A QUARTER, 10 FOR A DOLLAR, more inside, SOME “HOT’) sat atop a large radio with a filthy white plastic case and a tuning dial as big as an alarm clock. Bunches of plastic flowers sat in dirty vases on a chipped, gouged, dusty dining-room table.

All of these things Bill saw as a chaotic background to the thing his eyes had fixed upon immediately. He stood staring at it with wide unbelieving eyes. Gooseflesh ran madly up and down his body. His forehead was hot, his hands cold, and for a moment it seemed that all the doors inside would swing wide and he would remember everything.

Silver was in the righthand window.

His kickstand was still gone and rust had flowered on the front and back fenders, but the oogah-horn was still there on the handlebars, its rubber bulb now glazed with cracks and age. The horn itself, which Bill had always kept neatly polished, was dull and pitted. The flat package carrier where Richie had often ridden double was still on the back fender, but it was bent now, hanging by a single bolt. At some point someone had covered the seat with imitation tiger-skin which was now rubbed and frayed to a point where the stripes were almost indistinguishable.

Silver.

Bill raised an absent hand to wipe away the tears that were running slowly down his cheeks. After he had done a better job with his handkerchief, he went inside.

The atmosphere of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes was musty with age. It was, as the girl had said, a attic smell-but not a good smell, as some attic smells are. This was not the smell of linseed oil rubbed lovingly into the surface of old tables or of ancient plush and velvet. In here was a smell of rotting book-bindings, dirty vinyl cushions that had been half-cooked in the hot suns of summers past, dust, mouse-turds.

From the TV in the window the Brady Bunch cackled and whooped. Competing with them from somewhere in the back was the radio voice of a disc jockey identifying himself as “your pal Bobby Russell” promising the new album by Prince to the caller who could give the name of the actor who had played Wally on Leave It to Beaver. Bill knew-it had been a kid named Tony Dow-but he didn’t want the new Prince album. The radio was sitting on a high shelf amid a number of nineteenth-century portraits. Below it and them sat the proprietor, a man of perhaps forty who was wearing designer jeans and a fishnet tee-shirt. His hair was slicked back and he was thin to the point of emaciation. His feet were cocked up on his desk, which was piled high with ledgers and dominated by an old scrolled cash register. He was reading a paperback novel which Bill thought had never been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It was called Construction Site Studs. On the floor in front of the desk was a barber pole, its stripe revolving up and up into infinity. Its frayed cord wound across the floor to a baseboard plug like a tired snake. The sign in front of it read: A DYEING BREED! $250.

When the bell over the door jingled, the man behind the desk marked his place with a matchbook cover and looked up. “Help you?”

“Yes,” Bill said, and opened his mouth to ask about the bike in the window. But before he could speak, his mind was suddenly filled with a single haunting sentence, words that drove away all other thought:

He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.

What in the name of God?

(thrusts)

“Looking for anything in particular?” the proprietor asked. His voice was polite enough, but he was looking at Bill closely.

He’s looking at me, Bill thought, amused in spite of his distress, as if he’s got an idea I’ve been smoking some of that stuff that gets the jazz musicians high.

“Yes, I was ih-ih-interested ih-in-”

(his fists against the posts)

“-in that puh-puh-post-”

“The barber pole, you mean?” The proprietor’s eyes now showed Bill something which, even in his present confused state, he remembered and hated from his childhood: the anxiety of a man or woman who must listen to a stutterer, the urge to jump in quickly and finish the thought, thus shutting the poor bastard up. But I don’t stutter! I beat it! I DON’T FUCKING STUTTER! I-

(and still insists)

The words were so clear in his mind that it seemed someone else must be speaking in there, that he was like a man possessed by demons in Biblical times-a man invaded by some presence from Outside. And yet he recognized the voice and knew it was his own. He felt sweat pop out warmly on his face.

“I could give you

(he sees the ghosts)

a deal on that post,” the proprietor was saying. “Tell you the truth, I can’t move it at two-fifty. I’d give it to you for one-seventy-five, how’s that? It’s the only real antique in the place.”

(post)

“POLE,” Bill almost screamed, and the proprietor recoiled a little. “Not the pole I’m interested in.”

“Are you okay, mister?” the proprietor asked. His solicitous tone belied the expression of hard wariness in his eyes, and Bill saw his left hand leave the desk. He knew, with a flash of something that was really more inductive reasoning than intuition that there was an open drawer below Bill’s own sight-line, and that the proprietor had almost surely put his hand on a pistol of some type. He was maybe worried about robbery; more likely he was just worried. He was, after all, clearly gay, and this was the town where the local juveniles had given Adrian Mellon a terminal bath.

(he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts)

It drove out all thought; it was like being insane. Where had it come from?

(he thrusts)

Repeating and repeating.

With a sudden titanic effort, Bill attacked it. He did this by forcing his mind to translate the alien sentence into French. It was the same way he had beaten the stutter as a teenager. As the words marched across his field of thought, he changed them… and suddenly he felt the grip of the stutter loosen.

He realized that the proprietor had been saying something.

“P-P-Pardon me?”

“I said if you’re going to have a fit, take it out on the street. I don’t need shit like that in here.”

Bill drew in a deep breath.

“Let’s start o-over,” he said. “Pretend I just came i-in.”

“Okay,” the proprietor said, agreeably enough. “You just came in. Now what?”

“The b-bike in the window,” Bill said. “How much do you want for the bike?”

“Take twenty bucks.” He sounded easier now, but his left hand still hadn’t come back into view. “I think it was a Schwinn at one time, but it’s a mongrel now.” His eye measured Bill. “Big bike. You could ride it yourself.”

Thinking of the kid’s green skateboard, Bill said, “I think my bike-riding days are o-o-over.”

The proprietor shrugged. His left hand finally came up again. “Got a boy?”

“Y-Yes.”

“How old is he?”

“Eh-Eh-Eleven.”

“Big bike for an eleven-year-old.”

“Will you take a traveller’s check?”

“Long as it’s no more than ten bucks over the amount of the purchase.”

“I can give you a twenty,” Bill said. “Mind if I make a phone call?”

“Not if it’s local.”

“It is.”

“Be my guest.”

Bill called the Derry Public Library. Mike was there. “Where are you, Bill?” he asked, and then immediately: “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Have you seen any of the others?”

“No. We’ll see them tonight.” There was a brief pause. That is, I presume. What can I do you for, Big Bill?”

“I’m buying a bike,” Bill said calmly. “I wondered if I could wheel it up to your house. Do you have a garage or something I could store it in?”

There was silence.

“Mike? Are you-”

“I’m here,” Mike said. “Is it Silver?”

Bill looked at the proprietor. He was reading his book again… or maybe

just looking at it and listening carefully.

“Yes,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“It’s called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes.”

“All right,” Mike said. “My place is 61 Palmer Lane. You’d want to go up

MainStreet-”

“I can find it.”

“All right, I’ll meet you there. Want some supper?’

“That would be nice. Can you get off work?”

“No problem. Carole will cover for me.” Mike hesitated again. “she said that a fellow was in about an hour before I got back here. Said he left looking like a ghost. I got her to describe him. It was Ben.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. And the bike. That’s part of it, too, isn’t it?”

“Shouldn’t wonder,” Bill said, keeping an eye on the proprietor, who still

appeared to be absorbed in his book.

“I’ll see you at my place,” Mike said. “Number 61. Don’t forget.”

“I won’t. Thank you, Mike.”

“God bless, Big Bill.”

Bill hung up. The proprietor promptly closed his book again. “Got you some storage space, my friend?”

“Yeah.” Bill took out his traveller’s checks and signed his name to a twenty. The proprietor examined the two signatures with a care that, in less distracted mental circumstances, Bill would have found rather insulting.

At last the proprietor scribbled a bill of sale and popped the traveller’s check into his old cash register. He got up, put his hands on the small of his back and stretched, then walked to the front of the store. He picked his way around the heaps of junk and almost-junk merchandise with an absent delicacy Bill found fascinating.

He lifted the bike, swung it around, and rolled it to the edge of the display space. Bill laid hold of the handlebars to help him, and as he did another shudder whipped through him. Silver. Again. It was Silver in his hands and

(he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts)

he had to force the thought away because it made him feel faint and strange.

“That back tire’s a little soft,” the proprietor said (it was, in fact, as flat as a pancake). The front tire was up, but so bald the cord was showing through in places.

“No problem,” Bill said.

“You can handle it from here?”

(I used to be able to handle it just fine; now I don’t know)

“I guess so,” Bill said. “Thanks.”

“Sure. And if you want to talk about that barber pole, come back.”

The proprietor held the door for him. Bill walked the bike out, turned left, and started toward Main Street. People glanced with amusement and curiosity at the man with the bald head pushing the huge bike with the flat rear tire and the oogah-horn protruding over the rusty bike-basket, but Bill hardly noticed them. He was marvelling at how well his grownup hands still fitted the rubber handgrips, was remembering how he had always meant to knot some thin strips of plastic, different colors, into the holes in each grip so they would flutter in the wind. He had never gotten around to that.

He stopped at the corner of Center and Main, outside of Mr Paperback. He leaned the bike against the building long enough to strip off his sportcoat. Pushing a bike with a flat tire was hard work, and the afternoon had come off hot. He tossed the coat into the basket and went on.

Chain’s rusty, he thought. Whoever had it didn’t take very good care of

(him)

it.

He stopped for a moment, frowning, trying to remember just what had happened to Silver. Had he sold it? Given it away? Lost it, perhaps? He couldn’t remember. Instead, that idiotic sentence

(his fists against the posts and still insists)

resurfaced, as strange and out of place as an easy chair on a battlefield, a record-player in a fireplace, a row of pencils protruding from a cement sidewalk.

Bill shook his head. The sentence broke up and dispersed like smoke. He pushed Silver on to Mike’s place.

 

6

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