It

reason Mike ran afoul of Henry Bowers and his not-so-merry band on that same day was because the next day was the Glorious Fourth. The Church School had a band in which Mike played the trombone. On the Fourth, the band would march in the annual holiday parade, playing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ and ‘America the Beautiful.’ This was an occasion that Mike had been looking forward to for over a month. He walked to the final rehearsal because his bike had a busted chain. The rehearsal was not scheduled until two-thirty, but he left at one because he wanted to polish his trombone, which was stored in the school’s music room, until it glowed. Although his trombone-playing was really not much better than Richie’s Voices, he was fond of the instrument, and whenever he felt blue a half an hour of foghorning Sousa marches, hymns, or patriotic airs cheered hun right up again. There was a can of Saddler’s brass polish in one of the flap pockets of his khaki shirt and two or three clean rags were dangling from the hip pocket of his jeans. The thought of Henry Bowers was the furthest thing from his mind. A glance behind as he approached Neibolt Street and the Church School would have changed his mind in a hurry, because Henry, Victor, Belch, Peter Gordon, and Moose Sadler were spread across the road behind him. If they had left the Bowers house five minutes later, Mike would have been out of sight over the crest of the next hill; the apocalyptic rockfight and everything that followed it might have happened differently, or not at all.
But it was Mike himself, years later, who advanced the idea that perhaps none of them were entirely their own masters in the events of that summer; that if luck and free will had played parts, then their roles had been narrow ones. He would point out a number of these suspicious coincidences to the others at their reunion lunch, but there was at least one of which he was unaware. The meeting in the Barrens that day broke up when Stan Uris produced the Black Cats and the Losers’ Club headed toward the dump to shoot them off. And Victor, Belch, and the others had come out to the Bowers farm because Henry had firecrackers, cherry-bombs, and M-80s (the possession of these last would a few years hence become a felony). The big boys were planning to go down beyond the trainyard coalpit and explode Henry’s treasur es.
None of them, not even Belch, went out to the Bowers farm under ordinary circumstances — primarily because of Henry’s crazy father but also because they always ended up helping Henry do his chores: the weeding, the endless rock-picking, the lugging of wood, the toting of water, the pitching of hay, the picking of whatever happened to be ripe at the time of the season — peas, cukes, tomatoes, potatoes. These boys were not exactly allergic to work, but they had plenty to do at their own places without sweating for Henry’s kooky father, who didn’t much care who he hit (he had once taken a length of stovewood to Victor Criss when the boy dropped a basket of tomatoes he was lugging out to the roadside stand). Getting whopped with a chunk of birch was bad enough; what made it worse was that Butch Bowers had chanted ‘I’m gonna kill all the Nips! I’m gonna kill all the fuckin Nips!’ when he did it.
Dumb as he was, Belch Huggins had expressed it best: ‘I don’t fuck with crazy people,’ he told Victor one day two years before. Victor had laughed and agreed.
But the siren-song of all those firecrackers had been too great to be withstood.
Tell you what, Henry,’ Victor said when Henry called him up that morning at nine and invited him out. ‘I’ll meet you at the coalpit around one o’clock, what do you say?’
‘You show up at the coalpit around one and I’m not gonna be there,’ Henry replied. ‘I got too many chores. If you show up at the coalpit around three, I will be there. And the first M-80 is going to go right up your old tan track, Vie.’
Vie hesitated, then agreed to come over and help with the chores.
The others came as well, and with the five of them, all big boys, working like fiends around the Bowers place, they got all the chores finished by early afternoon. When Henry asked his father if he could go, Bowers the elder simply waved a languid hand at his son. Butch was settled in for the afternoon on the back porch, a quart milk-bottle filled with exquisitely hard cider by his rocker, his Philco portable radio on the porch rail (later that afternoon the Red Sox would be playing the Washington Senators, a prospect that would have given a man who was not crazy a bad case of cold chills). An unsheathed Japanese sword lay across Butch’s lap, a war souvenir which, Butch said, he had taken off the body of a dying Nip on the island of Tarawa (he had actually