It

guys chasing you?’ Eddie asked at last.
‘They’re a-a-always chuh-hasing s –someone,’ Bill said. ‘I h-hate those fuckers.’
Ben was silent a moment — mostly in admiration — before Bill’s use of what Ben’s mother sometimes called The Really Bad Word. Ben had never said The Really Bad Word out loud in his whole life, although he had written it (in extremely small letters) on a telephone pole the Halloween before last.
‘Bowers ended up sitting next to me during the exams,’ Ben said at last. ‘He wanted to copy off my paper. I wouldn’t let him.’
‘You must want to die young, kid,’ Eddie said admiringly.
Stuttering Bill burst out laughing. Ben looked at him sharply, decided he wasn’t being laughed at, exactly (it was hard to say how he knew it, but he did), and grinned.
‘I guess I must,’ he said. ‘Anyway, he’s got to take summer-school, and he and those other two guys were laying for me, and that’s what happened.’
‘Y-You look like t-t-they kuh-hilled you,’ Bill said.
‘I fell down here from Kansas Street. Down the side of the hill.’ He looked at Eddie. ‘I’ll probably see you in the Mergency Room, now that I think about it. When my mom gets a look at my clothes, she’ll put me there.’
Both Bill and Eddie burst out laughing this time, and Ben joined them. It hurt his stomach to laugh but he laughed anyway, shrilly and a little hysterically. Finally he had to sit down on the bank, and the plopping sound his butt made when it hit the dirt got him going all over again. He liked the way his laughter sounded with theirs. It was a sound he had never heard before: not mingled laughter — he had heard that lots of times — b u t m i n g l e d l a u g h t e r o f which his own was a part.
He looked up at Bill Denbrough, their eyes met, and that was all it took to get both of them laughing again.
Bill hitched up his pants, flipped up the collar of his shirt, and began to slouch around in a kind of moody, hoody strut. His voice dropped down low and he said, ‘I’m gonna killya, kid. Don’t gimme no crap. I’m dumb but I’m big. I can crack walnuts with my forehead. I can piss vinegar and shit cement. My name’s Honeybunch Bowers and I’m the boss prick round dese-yere Derry parts.’
Eddie had collapsed to the stream-bank now and was rolling around, clutching his stomach and howling. Ben was doubled up, head between his knees, tears spouting from his eyes, snot hanging from his nose in long white runners, laughing like a hyena.
Bill sat down with them, and little by little the three of them quieted.
‘There’s one really good thing about it,’ Eddie said presently. ‘If Bowers is in summer school, we won’t see him much down here.’
‘You play in the Barrens a lot?’ Ben asked. It was an idea that never would have crossed his own mind in a thousand years — not with the reputation the Barrens had — but now that he was down here, it didn’t seem bad at all. In fact, this stretch of the low bank was very pleasant as the afternoon made its slow way toward dusk.
‘S-S-Sure. It’s n-neat. M-Mostly n-nobody b-buh-bothers u-us down h-here. We guh-guh-hoof off a lot. B-B-Bowers and those uh-other g-guys don’t come d-down here eh-eh-anyway.’
‘You and Eddie?’
‘Ruh-Ruh-Ruh — ‘ Bill shook his head. His face knotted up like a wet dishrag when he stuttered, Ben noticed, and suddenly an odd thought occurred to him: Bill hadn’t stuttered at all when he was mocking the way Henry Bowers talked. ‘Richie!’ Bill exclaimed now, paused a moment, and then went on. ‘Richie T-Tozier usually c-comes down, too. But h-him and his d– dad were going to clean out their ah– ah– ah — ‘
‘Attic,’ Eddie translated, and tossed a stone into the water. Plonk.
‘Yeah, I know him,’ Ben said. ‘You guys come down here a lot, huh?’ The idea fascinated him — and made him feel a stupid sort of longing as well.
‘Puh-Puh-Pretty much,’ Bill said. ‘Wuh-Why d-don’t you c-c-come back down tuh-huh-morrow? M-Me and E-E-Eddie were tub-trying to make a duh-duh-ham.’
Ben could say nothing. He was astounded not only by the offer but by the simple and unstudied casualness with which it had come.
‘Maybe we ought to do something else,’ Eddie said. ‘The dam wasn’t working so hot anyway.’
Ben got up and walked down to the stream, brushing the dirt from his huge hams. There were still matted piles of small branches at either side of the stream, but anything else they’d put together had washed away.
‘You ought to have some boards,’ Ben said. ‘Get boards and put em in a row . . . facing each other . . . like the bread of a sandwich.’
Bill and Eddie were looking at him, puzzled. Ben dropped to one knee. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Boards here and here. You stick em in the streambed facing each other. Okay? Then, before the