It

a quart of Rheingold, looking at nothing from beneath his heavy lowering eyebrows. Eddie kept out of his reach. When his stepfather was
bellowing, he was usua l l y — not always but usually — all right. It was when he stopped that you had to be careful.
Two nights ago he had thrown a chair at Eddie when Eddie got up to see what was on the other TV channel — just picked up one of the tubular aluminum kitchen chairs, swept it back over his head, and let fly. It hit Eddie in the butt and knocked him over. His butt still ached, but he knew it could have been worse: it could have been his head.
Then there had been the night when the old man had suddenly gotten up and rubbed a handful of mashed potatoes into Eddie’s hair for no reason at all. One day last September, Eddie had come in from school and foolishly allowed the screen door to slam shut behind him while his stepdad was taking a nap. Macklin came out of th e bedroom in his billowy boxer shorts, hair standing up in corkscrews, cheeks grizzled with two days of weekend beard, breath grizzled with two days of weekend beer. ‘There now, Eddie,’ he said, ‘I got to take you up for slammin that fuckin door.’ In Rich Macklin’s lexicon, ‘taking you up’ was a euphemism for ‘beating the shit out of you.’ Which was what he then did to Eddie. Eddie had lost consciousness when the old man threw him into the front hall. His mother had mounted a pair of low coathooks out there, especially for him and Dorsey to hang their coats on. These hooks had rammed hard steel fingers into Eddie’s lower back, and that was when he passed out. When he came to ten minutes later he heard his mother yelling that she was going to take Eddie to the hospital and he couldn’t stop her.
‘After what happened to Dorsey?’ his stepdad had responded. ‘You want to go to jail, woman?’
That was the end of her talk about the hospital. She helped Eddie in to his room, where he lay shivering on his bed, his forehead beaded with sweat. The only time he left the room during the next three days was when they were both gone. Then he would hobble slowly into the kitchen, groaning softly, and get his stepdad’s whiskey from under the sink. A few nips dulled the pain. The pain was mostly gone by the fifth day, but he had pissed blood for almost two weeks.
And the hammer wasn’t in the garage anymore.
What about that? What about that, friends and neighbors?
Oh, the Craftsman hammer — the ordinary hammer — was still there. It was the Scotti recoilless which was missing. His stepdad’s special hammer, the one he and Dorsey had been forbidden to touch. ‘If one of you touches that baby,’ he had told them the day he bought it, ‘you’ll both be wearing your guts for earmuffs.’ Dorsey had asked timidly if that hammer was very expensive. The old man told him he was damn tooting. He said it was filled with ball­bearings and you couldn’t make it bounce back up no matter how hard you brought it down.
Now it was gone.
Eddie’s grades weren’t the best because he had missed a lot of school since his mother’s remarriage, but he was not a stupid boy by any means. He thought he knew what had happened to the Scotti recoilless hammer. He thought maybe his stepfather had used it on Dorsey and then buried it in the garden or maybe thrown it in the Canal. It was the sort of thing that happened frequently in the horror comics Eddie read, the ones he kept on the top shelf of his closet.
He walked closer to the Canal, which rippled between its concrete sides like oiled silk. A swatch of moonlight glimmered across its dark surface in a boomerang shape. He sat down, swinging his sneakers idly against the concrete in an irregular tattoo. The last six weeks had been quite dry a nd the water flowed past perhaps nine feet below the worn soles of his sneakers. But if you looked closely at the Canal’s sides, you could read the various levels to which it sometimes rose quite easily. The concrete was stained a dark brown just above the water’s current level. This brown stain slowly faded to yellow, then to a color that was almost white at the level where the heels of Eddie’s sneakers made contact when he swung them.
The water flowed smoothly and silently out of a concrete arch that wa s cobbled on the inside, past the place where Eddie sat, and then down to the covered wooden footbridge between Bassey Park and Derry High School. The bridge’s sides and plank footing — even the beams under the roof — were covered with an intaglio of initials, phone numbers, and declarations. Declarations of love; declarations that So-and –so was willing to ‘suck’ or ‘blow’; declarations that those discovered sucking or blowing would lose their foreskins or have their assholes plugged with hot tar; occasional eccentric declarations that defied definition. One that