It

wound their way through the bamboo in the Barrens in this order: Bill; Richie; Beverly behind Richie, walking slim and pretty in bluejeans and a white sleeveless blouse, zoris on her feet; then Ben, trying not to puff too loudly (although it was eighty-one that day, he was wearing one of his baggy sweatshirts); Stan; Eddie bringing up the rear, the snout of his aspirator poking out of his right front pants pocket. Bill had fallen into a ‘jungle –safari’ fantasy, as he often did when walking through this part of the Barrens. The bamboo was high and white, limiting visibility to the path they had made through here. The earth was black and squelchy, with sodden patches that had to be avoided or jumped over if you didn’t want to get mud in your shoes. The puddles of standing water had oddly flat rainbow colors. The air had a reeky smell that was half the dump and half rotting vegetation.
Bill halted one turn away from the Kenduskeag and turned back to Richie. T-T-Tiger up ahead, T-T-Tozier.’
Richie nodded and turned back to Beverly. ‘Tiger,’ he breathed.
‘Tiger,’ she told Ben. :
‘Man-eater?’ Ben asked, holding his breath to keep from panting.
‘There’s blood all over him,’ Beverly said.
‘Man-eating tiger,’ Ben muttered to Stan, and he passed the news back to Eddie, whose thin face was hectic with excitement.
They faded into the bamboo, leaving the path of black earth that looped through it magically bare. The tiger passed in front of them and all of them nearly saw it: heavy,
perhaps four hundred pounds, its muscles moving with grace and power beneath the silk of its striped pelt. They nearly saw its green eyes, and the flecks of blood around its snout from the last batch of pygmy warriors it had eaten alive.
The bamboo rattled faintly, a noise both musical and eerie, and then was still again. It might have been a breath of summer breeze . . . or it might have been the passage of an African tiger on its way toward the Old Cape side of the Barrens.
‘Gone,’ Bill said. He let out a pent-up breath and stepped out onto the path again. The others followed suit.
Richie was the only one who had come armed: he produced a cap-pistol with a friction-taped handgrip. ‘I could have had a clear shot at him if you’d moved, Big Bill,’ he said grimly. He pushed the bridge of his old glasses up on his nose with the muzzle of the gun.
‘There’s Wuh-Wuh-Watusis around h-h-here,’ Bill said. ‘C –C-Can’t rih-risk a shot. Y-You w-want them down on t-t-top of us?’
‘Oh,’ Richie said, convinced.
B i l l m a d e a c o m e – on gesture with his arm and they were back on the path again, which narrowed into a neck at the end of the bamboo patch. They stepped out onto the bank of the Kenduskeag, where a series of stepping-stones led across the river. Ben had shown them how to place them. You got a big rock and plopped it in the water, then you got a second and plopped it in the water while you were stepping on the first, then you got a third and plopped it in the water while you were stepping on the second, and so on until you were all the way across the river (which here, and at this time of year, was less than a foot deep and shaled with tawny sandbars) with your feet still dry. The trick was so simple it was damn near babyish, but none of them had seen it until Ben pointed it out. He was good at stuff like that, but when he showed you he never made you feel like a dummy.
They went down the bank in single file and started across the dry backs of the rocks they had planted.
‘Bill!’ Beverly called urgently.
He froze at once, not looking back, arms held out. The water chuckled and rilled around him. ‘What?’
‘There’s piranha fish in here! I saw them eat a whole cow two days ago. A minute after it fell in, there was nothing but bones. Don’t fall off!’
‘Right,’ Bill said. ‘Be careful, men.’
They teetered their way across the rocks. A freight-train charged by on the railway embankment as Eddie Kaspbrak neared the halfway point, and the sudden blast of its airhorn caused him to jiggle on the edge of balance. He looked into the bright water and for one moment, between the sunnxx1 ashes that darted arrows of light into his eyes, he actually saw the cruising piranhas. They were not part of the make-believe that went with Bill’s jungle safari fantasy; he was quite sure of that. The fish he saw looked like oversized goldfish with the great ugly jaws of catfish or groupers. Sawteeth protruded between their thick lips and, like goldfish, they were orange. As orange as the fluffy pompoms you sometimes saw on the suits the clowns wore at the circus.
They circled in the shallow water, gnashing.
Eddie pin wheeled his arms. I’m going in, he thought. I’m going in and they’ll eat me alive —