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.
5
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.
In the dream he saw them coming in for the 2:00 P.M. visiting hours and his mother, who had been waiting patiently since eleven, shouting so loudly at them that everyone turned to look at her.
If you think you're going to go in there, you've got another think coming! Eddie's mother shouted, and now the clown, who had been sitting here in the waiting room all along (but way back in one corner, with a copy of Look magazine held up in front of his face until now), jumped up and mimed applause, patting his white-gloved hands together rapidly. He capered and danced, now turning a cartwheel, now executing a neat back-over flip, as Mrs Kaspbrak ranted at Eddie's fellow Losers and as they shrank, one by one, behind Bill, who only stood there, pale but outwardly calm, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans (maybe so no one, including Bill himself, would be able to see if they were shaking or not). No one saw the clown except Eddie... although a baby who had been sleeping peacefully in his mother's arms awoke and began to cry lustily.
You've done enough damage! Eddie's ma shouted. I know who those boys were! They've been in trouble at school, they've even been in trouble with the police! And just because those boys have something against you is no reason for them to have something against him. I told him so, and he agrees with me. He wants me to tell you to go away, he's done with you, he never wants to see any of you again. He doesn't want your so-called friendship anymore! Any of you! I knew it would lead to trouble, and look at this! My Eddie in the hospital! A boy as delicate as he is...
The clown capered and jumped and did splits and stood on one hand. Its smile was real enough now, and in his dream Eddie realized that this was of course what the clown wanted, a nice big wedge to drive among them, splitting them apart and destroying any chance of concerted action. In a kind of filthy ecstasy, the clown did a double barrel-roll and burlesqued kissing his mother's cheek.
Th-Th-Those b-b-b-hoys who dih-did it-Bill began.
Don't you speak back to me! Mrs Kaspbrak shrieked. Don't you dare speak back to me! He's done with you, I say! Done!
Then an intern came running into the waiting room and told Eddie's ma she would have to be quiet or leave the hospital. The clown started to fade, started to wash out, and as it did it began to change. Eddie saw the leper, the mummy, the bird; he saw the werewolf, and a vampire whose teeth were Gillette Blue-Blades set at crazy angles like mirrors in a carnival mirror-maze; he saw Frankenstein, the creature, and something fleshy and shell-like that opened and closed like a mouth; he saw a dozen other terrible things, a hundred. But just before the clown washed out completely, he saw the most terrible thing of all: his ma's face.
Nol he tried to scream. No! No! Not her! Not my ma!
But no one looked around; no one heard. And in the dream's fading moments, he realized with a cold and wormy horror that they couldn't hear nun. He was dead. It had killed him and he was dead. He was a ghost.
6
Sonia Kaspbrak's sour-sweet triumph at sending Eddie's so-called friends away evaporated almost as soon as she stepped into Eddie's private room the next afternoon, on the 21st of July. She could not tell exactly why the feeling of triumph should fade like that, or why it should be displaced by an unfocused fear; it was something in her son's pale face, which was not blurred with pain or anxiety but instead bore an expression she could not remember ever having seen there before. It was sharp, somehow. Sharp and alert and set.
The confrontation between Eddie's friends and Eddie's ma had not occurred in the waiting room, as in Eddie's dream; she had known they would be coming-Eddie's "friends," who were probably teaching him to smoke cigarettes in spite of his asthma, his "friends" who had such an unhealthy hold over him that they were all he talked about when he came home for the evening, his "friends" who got his arm broken. She had told all of this to Mrs Van Prett next door. "The time has come," Mrs Kaspbrak had said grimly, "to slap a few cards down on the table." Mrs Van Prett, who had horrible skin-problems and who could almost always be counted upon to agree eagerly, almost pathetically, with everything Sonia Kaspbrak said, in this case had the temerity to disagree.
I should think you'd be glad he's made some friends, Mrs Van Prett said as they hung out their washes in the early-morning cool before work-this had been during the first week of July. And he's safer if he's with other children, Mrs Kaspbrak, don't you think so? With all that's going on in this town, and all the poor children that have been murdered?
Mrs Kaspbrak's only reply had been an angry sniff (in fact, she couldn't just then think of an adequate verbal response, although she thought of dozens-some of them extremely cutting-later on), and when Mrs Van Prett called her that evening, sounding rather anxious, to ask if Mrs Kaspbrak would be going to the Beano down at Saint Mary's with her like usual, Mrs Kaspbrak had replied coldly that she believed she would just stay home that evening and put her feet up instead.
Well, she hoped Mrs Van Prett was satisfied now. She hoped Mrs Van Prett saw now that the only danger abroad in Derry this summer wasn't the sex-maniac killing children and babies. Here was her son, lying on his bed of pain in Derry Home Hospital, he might never be able to use his good right arm again, she had heard of such things, or, God forbid, loose splinters from the break might work through his bloodstream to his heart and puncture it and kill him, oh of course God would never allow that to happen, but she had heard of it happening, so that meant God could allow such a thing to happen. In certain cases.
So she lingered on the Home Hospital's long and shady front porch, knowing they would show up, coldly determined to put paid to this so-called "friendship," this camaraderie that ended in broken arms and beds of pain, once and for all.
Eventually they came, as she had known they would, and to her horror she saw that one of them was a nigger. Not that she had anything against niggers; she thought they had every right to ride where they wanted to on the buses down south, and eat at white lunch-counters, and should not be made to sit in nigger heaven at the movies unless they bothered white
(women)
people, but she also believed firmly in what she called the Bird Theory: Blackbirds flew with other blackbirds, not with the robins. Crackles roosted with grackles; they did not mix in with the bluebirds or the nightingales. To each his own was her motto, and seeing Mike Hanlon pedal up with the others just as if he belonged there caused her resolution, like her anger and her dismay, to grow apace. She thought reproachfully, as if Eddie were here and could listen to her: You never told me that one of your "friends" was a nigger.
Well, she thought, twenty minutes later, stepping into the hospital room where her son lay with his arm in a huge cast that was strapped to his chest (it hurt her heart just to look at it), she had sent them packing in jig time... no pun intended. None of them except for the Denbrough boy, the one who had such a horrible stutter, had had the nerve to so much as speak back to her. The girl, whoever she was, had flashed a pair of decidedly slutty jade's eyes at Sonia-from Lower Main Street or someplace even worse, had been Sonia Kaspbrak's opinion-but she had wisely kept her mouth shut. If she had dared so much as to let out a peep, Sonia would have given her a piece of her mind; would have told her what sort of girls ran with the boys. There were names for girls like that, and she would not have her son associated, now or ever, with the girls who bore them.
The others had done no more than look down at their shuffling feet. That was about what she had expected. When she was done saying what she had to say, they had gotten on their bikes and ridden away. The Denbrough boy had the Tozier boy riding double behind him on a huge, unsafe-looking bike, and with an interior shudder Mrs Kaspbrak had wondered how many times her Eddie had ridden on that dangerous bike, risking his arms and his legs and his neck and his life.
I did this for you, Eddie, she thought as she walked into the hospital with her head firmly up. I know you may feel a bit disappointed at first; that's natural enough. But parents know better than their children; the reason God made parents in the first place was to guide, instruct... and protect. After his initial disappointment, he would understand. And if she felt a certain relief now, it was of course on Eddie's behalf and not on her own. Relief was only to be expected when you had saved your son from bad companions.
Except that her sense of relief was marred by fresh unease now, looking into Eddie's face. He was not asleep, as she had thought he would be. Instead of a drugged doze from which he would wake disoriented, dimwitted, and psychologically vulnerable, there was this sharp, watchful look, so different from Eddie's usual soft tentative glance. Like Ben Hanscom (although Sonia did not know this), Eddie was the sort of boy who would look quickly into a face, as if to test the emotional weather brewing there, and glance just as quickly away. But he was looking at her steadily now (perhaps it's the medication, she thought, of course that's it; I'll have to consult with Dr Handor about his medication), and she was the one who felt a need to glance aside. He looks like he's been waiting for me, she thought, and it was a thought that should have made her happy-a boy waiting for his mother must surely be one of God's most favored creations -
'You sent my friends away." The words came out flatly, with no doubt or question in them.
She flinched almost guiltily, and certainly the first thought to flash through her mind was a guilty one-How does he know that? He can't know that!-and she was immediately furious with herself (and him) for feeling that way. So she smiled at him.
"How are we feeling today, Eddie?"
That was the right response. Someone-some foolish candy-striper, or perhaps even that incompetent and antagonistic nurse from the day before-had been carrying tales. Someone.
"How are we feeling?" she asked again when he didn't respond. She thought he hadn't heard her. She'd never read in any of her medical literature of a broken bone affecting the sense of hearing, but she supposed it was possible, anything was possible.
Eddie still didn't respond.
She came farther into the room, hating the tentative, almost timid feeling inside her, distrusting it because she had never felt tentative or timid around Eddie before. She felt anger as well, although that was still nascent. What right did he have to make her feel that way, after all she had done for him, after all she had sacrificed for him?
"I've talked to Dr Handor, and he assures me that you're going to be perfectly all right," Sonia said briskly, sitting down in the straight-backed wooden chair by the bed. "Of course if there's the slightest problem, we'll go to see a specialist in Portland. In Boston, if that's what it takes." She smiled, as if conferring a great favor. Eddie did not smile back. And still he did not reply.
"Eddie, are you hearing me?"
"You sent my friends away," he repeated.
"Yes," she said, dropping the pretense, and said no more. Two could play at that game. She simply looked back at him.
But a strange thing happened; a terrible thing, really. Eddie's eyes seemed to... to grow, somehow. The flecks of gray in them seemed actually to be moving, like racing stormclouds. She became aware suddenly that he was not "in a snit," or "having a poopie," or any of those things. He was furious with her... and Sonia was suddenly scared, because something more than her son seemed to be in this room. She dropped her eyes and fumbled her purse open. She began searching for a Kleenex.
