It

twenty minutes later with his body wrapped in a bloodstained quilt; his mother’s agonized shriek. All behind him. He was the Lone Ranger, he was John Wayne, he was Bo Diddley, he was anybody he wanted to be and nobody who cried and got scared and wanted his muh-muh-mother.
Silver flew and Stuttering Bill Denbrough flew with him; their gantry-like shadow fled behind them. They raced down Up-Mile Hill together; the playing cards roared. Bill’s feet found the pedals again and he began to pump, wanting to go even faster, wanting to reach some hypothetical speed — not of sound but of memory — and crash through the pain barrier.
He raced on, bent over his handlebars; he raced to beat the devil.
The three-way intersection of Kansas, Center, and Main was coming up fast. It was a horror of one-way traffic and conflicting signs and stoplights which were supposed to be timed but really weren’t. The result, a Derry News editorial had proclaimed the year before, was a traffic-rotary conceived in hell.
As always, Bill’s eyes flicked right and left, fast, gauging the traffic flow, looking for the holes. If his judgment was mistaken — if he stuttered, you might say — he would be badly hurt or killed.
He arrowed into the slow-moving traffic which dogged the intersection, running a red light and fading to the right to avoid a lumbering portholed Buick. He shot a bullet of a glance back over his shoulder to make sure the middle lane was empty. He looked forward again and saw that in roughly five seconds he was going to crash into the rear end of a pick-up truck that had stopped squarely in the middle of the intersection while the Uncle Ike type behind the wheel craned his neck to read all the signs and make sure he hadn’t taken a wrong turn and somehow ended up in Miami Beach.
The lane on Bill’s right was full of a Derry-Bangor intercity bus. He slipped in that direction just the same and shot the gap between the stopped pick-up and the bus, still moving at forty miles an hour. At the last second he snapped his head hard to one side, like a soldier doing an over-enthusiastic eyes-right, to keep the mirror mounted on the passenger side of the pick-up from rearranging his teeth. Hot diesel from the bus laced his throat like a kick of strong liquor. He heard a thin gasping squeal as one of his bike-grips kissed a line up the coach’s aluminum side. He got just a glimpse of the bus driver, his face paper-white under his peaked Hudson Bus Company cap. The driver was shaking his fist at Bill and shouting something. Bill doubted it was happy birthday.
Here was a trio of old ladies crossing Main Street from the New England Bank side to the Shoeboat side. They heard the harsh burr of the playing cards and looked up. Their mouths dropped open as a boy on a huge bike passed within half a foot of them like a mirage.
The worst — and the best — of the trip was behind him now. He had looked at the very real possibility of his own death again and again had found himself able to look away. The bus had not crushed him; he had not killed himself and the three old ladies with their Freese’s shopping bags and their Social Security checks; he had not been splattered across the tailgate of Uncle Ike’s old Dodge pick-up. He was going uphill again now, speed bleeding away. S o m e t h i n g — oh, call it desire, that was good enough, wasn’t it? — was bleeding away with it. All the thoughts and memories were catching up — in Bill, gee, we almost lost sight of you for awhile there, but here we are — rejoining him, climbing up his shirt and jumping into his ear and whooshing into his brain like little kids going down a slide. He could feel them settling int o their accustomed places, their feverish bodies jostling each other. Gosh! Wow! Here we are inside Bill’s head again! Let’s think about George! Okay! Who wants to start?
You think too much, Bill.
No — that wasn’t the problem. The problem was, he imagined too much.
He turned into Richard’s Alley and came out on Center Street a few moments later, pedaling slowly, feeling the sweat on his back and in his hair. He dismounted Silver in front of the Center Street Drug Store and went inside.
6
Before George’s death, Bill would have gotten the salient points across to Mr Keene by speaking to him. The druggist was not exactly kind — or at least Bill had an idea he was not — but he was patient enough, and he did not tease or make fun. But now Bill’s stutter was much worse, and he really was afraid something bad might happen to Eddie if he didn’t move fast.
So when Mr Keene said, ‘Hello, Billy Denbrough, can I help you?,’ Bill took a folder advertising vitamins, turned it over, and wrote on the back: Eddie Kaspbrak and I were