It

and made a baby there.
Do girls like that’? Eddie had asked Boogers Taliendo. He himself was sort of appalled.
I guess they must, Boogers had replied, looking mystified himself.
‘Now listen up, Eds,’ Richie said, ‘because there may be questions later. Some women have got this disease. Some men, too, but mostly it’s women. A guy can get it from a woman — ‘
‘Or another g-g-guy if they’re kwuh –kwuh –queer,’ Bill added.
‘Right. The important thing is you get the Syph from screwing someone who’s already got it.’
‘What does it do?’ Eddie asked.
‘Makes you rot,’ Richie said simply.
Eddie stared at him, horrified.
‘It’s bad, I know, but it’s true,’ Richie said. ‘Your nose is the first thing to go. Some guys with the Syph, their noses fall right off. Then their cocks.’
‘Puh-Puh-Puh-leeze,’ Bill said. ‘I just a-a-ate.’
‘Hey, ma n, this is science,’ Richie said.
‘So what’s the difference between leprosy and the Syph?’ Eddie asked.
‘You don’t get leprosy from fucking,’ Richie said promptly, and then went off into a gale of laughter that left both Bill and Eddie mystified.
7
Following that day the house at 29 Neibolt Street had taken on a kind of glow in Eddie’s imagination. Looking at its weedy yard and its slumped porch and the boards nailed across its windows, he would feel an unhealthy fascination take hold of him. And six weeks ago he had parked his bike on the gravelly verge of the street (the sidewalk ended four houses farther back) and walked across the lawn toward the porch of that house.
His heart had been beating hard in his chest, and his mouth had that dry taste again — listening to Bill’s story of the dreadful picture, he knew that what he had felt when approaching that house was about the same as what Bill had felt going into George’s room. He did not feel as if he was in control of himself. He felt pushed.
It did not seem as if his feet were moving; instead the house itself, brooding and silent, seemed to draw closer to where he stood.
Faintly, he could hear a diesel engine in the trainyard — that and the liquid –metallic slam of couplings being made. They were shunting some cars onto sidings, picking up others. Making a train.
His hand gripped his aspirator, but, oddly, his asthma had not closed down as it had on the day he fled from the hobo with the rotted nose. There was only that sense of st anding still and watching the house slide stealthily toward him, as if on a hidden track.
Eddie looked under the porch. There was no one there. It was not really surprising. This was spring, and hobos showed up most frequently in Derry from late September to early
November. During those six weeks or so a man could pick up day-work on one of the outlying farms if he looked even half-decent. There were potatoes and apples to pick, snowfence to string, barn and shed roofs which needed to be patched before December came along, whistling up winter.
No hobos under the porch, but plenty of sign they had been there. Empty beer cans, empty beer bottles, empty liquor bottles. A dirt-crusted blanket lay against the brick foundation like a dead dog. There were drifts of crumpled newspapers and one old shoe and a smell like garbage. There were thick layers of old leaves under there.
Not wanting to do it but unable to help himself, Eddie had crawled under the porch. He could feel his heartbeat slamming in his head now, driving white spots of light across his field of vision.
The smell was worse underneath — booze and sweat and the dark brown perfume of decaying leaves. The old leaves didn’t even crackle under his hands and knees. They and the old newspapers only sighed.
I’m a hobo, Eddie thought incoherently. I’m a hobo and I ride the rods. That’s what I do. Ain’t got no money, ain’t got no home, but I got me a bottle and a dollar and a place to sleep. I’ll pick apples this week and potatoes the week after that and when the frost locks up the ground like money inside a bank vault, why, I’ll hop a GS&WM box that smells of sugar-beets and I’ll sit in the corner and pull some hay over me if there is some and I’ll drink me a little drink and chew me a link chew and sooner or later I’ll get to Portland or Beantown, and if I don’t get busted by a railroad security dick I’ll hop one of those ‘Bama Star boxes and head down south and when I get there I’ll pick lemons or limes or oranges. And if I get nagged I’ll build roads for tourists to ride on. Hell, I done it before, ain’t I? I’m just a lonesome old hobo, ain’t got no money, ain’t got no home, but I got me one thing; I got me a disease that’s eating me up. My skin’s cracking open, my teeth are falling out, and yo u know what? I can feel myself turning bad like an apple that’s going soft, I can