It

tossed the board aside, got up and brushed off the seat of his jeans. He walked to the edge of the stream and the other two boys joined him. Bill shoved his hands in his back pockets and sighed deeply. Eddie was sure Bill was going to say something serious. He looked from Eddie to Ben and then back to Eddie again, not smiling now. Eddie was suddenly afraid.
But all Bill said then was, ‘You got your ah-ah-aspirator, E-Eddie?’
Eddie slapped his pocket. ‘I’m loaded for bear.’
‘Say, how’d it work with the chocolate milk?’ Ben asked.
Eddie laughed. ‘Worked great!’ he said. He and Ben broke up while Bill looked at them, smiling but puzzled. Eddie explained and Bill nodded, grinning again.
‘E-E-Eddie’s muh-hum is w-w-worried that h-he’s g-gonna break and sh-she wuh-hon’t be able to g-get a re-re-refund.’
Eddie snorted and made as if to push him into the stream.
‘Watch it, fuckface,’ Bill said, sounding uncannily like Henry Bowers. ‘I’ll twist your head so far around you’ll be able to watch when you wipe yourself.’
Ben collapsed, shrieking with laughter. Bill glanced at him, still smiling, hands still in the back pockets of his jeans, smiling, yeah, but a little distant again, a little vague. He looked at Eddie and then cocked his head toward Ben.
‘Kid’s suh-suh –soft,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ Eddie agreed, but he felt somehow that they were only going through the motions of having a good time. Something was on Bill’s mind. He supposed Bill would spill it when he was ready; the question was, did Eddie want to hear what it was? ‘Kid’s mentally retarded.’
‘Retreaded,’ Ben said, still giggling.
‘Y-You g-g-gonna sh-show us how to b-build a dam or a-are you g-g-gonna si-hit there on your b-big c-c-can all d-day?’
Ben got to his feet again. He looked first at the stream, flowing past them at moderate speed. The Kenduskeag was not terribly wide this far up in the Barrens, but it had defeated them yesterday just the same. Neither Eddie nor Bill had been able to figure out how to get a foothold on the current. But Ben was smiling, the smile of one who contemplates doing something new . . . something that will be fun but not very hard. Eddie thought: He knowshow — I really think he does.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You guys want to take your shoes off, because you’re gonna get your little footsies wet.’
The mind-mother in Eddie’s head spoke up at once, her voice as stern and commanding as the voice of a traffic cop: Don’t you dare do it, Eddie! Don’t you dare! Wet feet, that’s one way — one of the thousands of ways — that colds start, and colds lead to pneumonia, so don’t you do it!
Bill and Ben were sitting on the bank, pulling off their sneakers and socks. Ben was fussily rolling up the legs of his jeans. Bill looked up at Eddie. His eyes were clear and warm, sympathetic. Eddie was suddenly sure Big Bill knew exactly what he had been thinking, and he was ashamed.
‘Y-You c-c-comin?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Eddie said. He sat down on the bank and undressed his feet while his mother ranted inside his head . . . but her voice was growing steadily more distant and echoey, he was relieved to note, as if someone had stuck a heavy fishhook through the back of her blouse and was now reeling her away from him down a very long corridor.
3
It was one of those perfect summer days which, in a world where everything was on track and on the beam, you would never forget. A moderate breeze kept the worst of the mosquitoes and blackflies away. The sky was a bright, crisp blue. Temperatures were in the low seventies. Birds sang and went about their birdy-business in the bushes an d second –growth trees. Eddie had to use his aspirator once, and then his chest lightened and his throat seemed to widen magically to the size of a freeway. He spent the rest of the morning with it stuffed forgotten into his back pocket.
Ben Hanscom, who had seemed so timid and unsure the day before, became a confident general once he was fully involved in the actual construction of the dam. Every now and then he would climb the bank and stand there with his muddy hands on his hips, looking at the work in progress and muttering to himself. Sometimes he would run a hand through his hair, and by eleven o’clock it was standing up in crazy, comical spikes.
Eddie felt uncertainty at first, then a sense of glee, and finally an entirely new feeling — one that was at the same time weird, terrifying, and exhilarating. It was a feeling so alien to his