It

His eyes caught Bill’s and with a force so great he could barely deal with it, Bill remembered himself and Richie in the middle of Neibolt Street, after the thing which might have been a clown or which might have been a werewolf had disappeared, embracing each other and weeping. When he picked up his glass, his hand was trembling, and some of his drink spilled on the napery.
Richie rose slowly to his feet, and one by one the others followed suit: Bill first, then Ben and Eddie, Beverly, and finally Mike Hanlon. ‘To us,’ Richie said, and like Bill’s hand, his voice trembled a little. To the Losers’ Club of 1958.’
‘The Losers,’ Beverly said, slightly amused.
The Losers,’ Eddie said. His face was pale and old behind his rimless glasses.
The Losers,’ Ben agreed. A faint and painful smile ghosted at the corners of his mouth.
The Losers,’ Mike Hanlon said softly.
The Losers,’ Bill finished.
Their glasses touched. They drank.
That silence fell again, and this time Richie did not break it. This time the silence seemed necessary.
They sat back down and Bill said, ‘So spill it, Mike. Tell us what’s been happening here, and what we can do.’
‘Eat first,’ Mike said. ‘We’ll talk afterward.’
So they ate . . . and they ate long and well. Like that old joke about the condemned man, Bill thought, but his own appetite was better than it had been in ages . . . since he was a kid, he was tempted to think. The food was not stunningly good, but it was far from bad, and there was a lot of it. The six of them began trading stuff back and forth — spareribs, moo goo gaipan, chicken wings that had been delicately braised, egg rolls, water chestnuts wrapped in bacon, strips of beef that had been threaded onto wooden skewers.
They began with pu-pu platters, and Richie made a childish but amusing business of broiling a little bit of everything over the flaming pot in the center of the platter he was
sharing with Beverly — including half an egg roll and a few red kidney beans. ‘Flambé at my table, I love it,’ he told Ben. ‘I’d eat shit on a shingle if it was flambé at my table.’
‘And probably has,’ Bill remarked. Beverly laughed so hard at this she had to spit a mouthful of food into her napkin.
‘Oh God, I think I’m gonna ralph,’ Richie said in an eerily exact imitation of Don Pardo, and Beverly laughed harder, blushing a bright red.
‘Stop it, Richie,’ she said. ‘I’m warning you.’
‘The warning is taken,’ Richie said. ‘Eat well, dear.’
Rose herself brought them their dessert — a great mound of baked Alaska <vhich she ignited at the head of the table, where Mike sat.
‘More flambé at my table,’ Richie said in the voice of a man who has died and gone to heaven. ‘This may be the best meal I’ve ever eaten in my life.’
‘But of course,’ Rose said demurely.
‘If I blow that out, do I get my wish?’ he asked her.
‘At Jade of the Orient, all wishes are granted, sir.’
Richie’s smile faltered suddenly. ‘I applaud the sentiment,’ he said, ‘but you know, I really doubt the veracity.’
They almost demolished the baked Alaska. As Bill sat back, his belly straining the waistband of his pants, he happened to notice the glasses on the table. There seemed to be hundreds of them. He grinned a little, realizing that he himself had sunk two martinis before the meal and God knew how many bottles of Kirin beer with it. The others had done about as well. In their state, fried chunks of bowling pin would probably have tasted okay. And yet he didn’t feel drunk.
‘I haven’t eaten like that since I was a kid,’ Ben said. They looked at him and a faint flush of color tinged his cheeks. ‘I mean it literally. That may be the biggest meal I’ve eaten since I was a sophomore in high school.’
‘You went on a diet?’ Eddie asked.
‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘I did. The Ben Hanscom Freedom Diet.’
‘What got you going?’ Richie asked.
‘You don’t want to hear all that ancient history . . . ‘ Ben shifted uncomfortably.
‘I don’t know about the rest of them,’ Bill said, ‘but I do. Come on, Ben. Give. What turned Haystack Calhoun into the magazine model we see before us today?’
Richie snorted a little. ‘Haystack, right. I’d forgotten that.’
‘It’s not much of a story,’ Ben said. ‘No story at all, really. After that summer — after 1958 — we stayed in Derry another two years. Then my mom lost her job and we ended up moving to Nebraska, because she had a sister there who offered to take us in until my mother got on her feet again. It wasn’t so great. Her sister, my aunt Jean, was a miserly bitch who had to keep telling you what your place in the great scheme of things was, how lucky we were that my mom had a sister who could give us charity, how