It

Little Richard, Shep and the Limelights, La Verne Baker, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Hank Ballard
and the Midnighters, the Coasters, the Isley Brothers, the Crests, the Chords, Stick McGhee — ‘
They were looking at him with such amazement that Mike laughed.
‘You lost me after Little Richard,’ Richie said. He liked Little Richard, but if he had a secret rock-and –roll hero that summer it was Jerry Lee Lewis. His mom had happened to come into the living room while Jerry Lee was performing on American Bandstand. This was at the point in his act where Jerry Lee actually climbed onto his piano and played it upside down with his hair hanging in his face. He had been singing ‘High School Confidential.’ For a moment Richie believed his mom was going to faint. She didn’t, but she was so traumatized by what she had seen that she talked at dinner that night about sending Richie to one of those military-type camps for the rest of the summer. Now Richie shook his hair down over his eyes and began to sing: ‘Come on over baby all the cats are at the high school rockin — ‘
Ben began to stagger around the hole, grasping his large belly and pretending to puke. Mike held his nose, but he was laughing so hard tears squirted out of his eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ Richie demanded. ‘I mean, what ails you guys? That was good! I mean, that was really good!’
‘Oh man,’ Mike said, and now he was laughing so hard he could barely talk. ‘That was priceless. I mean, that was really priceless.’
‘Negroes have no taste,’ Richie said. ‘I think it even says so in the Bible.’
‘Yo mamma,’ Mike said, laughing harder than ever. When Richie asked, with honest bewilderment, what that meant, Mike sat down with a thump and rocked back and forth, howling and holding his stomach.
‘You probably think I’m jealous,’ Richie said. ‘You probably think I want to be a Negro.’
Now Ben also fell down, laughing wildly. His whole body rippled and quaked alarmingly. His eyes bulged. ‘No more, Richie,’ he managed. ‘I’m gonna shit my pants. I’m gonna d-d-die if you don’t stub-stop — ‘
‘I don’t want to be a Negro,’ Richie said. ‘Who wants to wear pink pants and live in Boston and buy pizza by the slice? I want to be Jewish like Stan. I want to own a pawnshop and sell people switchblades and plastic dog-puke and used guitars.’
Ben and Mike were now actually screaming with laughter. Their laughter echoed through the green and jungly ravine that was the misnamed Barrens, causing birds to take wing and squirrels to freeze momentarily on limbs. It was a young sound, penetrating, lively, vital, unsophisticated, free. Almost every living thing within range of that sound reacted to it in some way, but the thing which had tumbled out of a wide concrete drain and into the upper Kenduskeag was not living. The previous afternoon there had been a sudden driving thunderstorm (the clubhouse-to-be had not been much affected — since digging operations had begun, Ben had covered the hole carefully each evening with a ragged piece of tarpaulin Eddie had scrounged from behind Wally’s Spa; it smelled painty but it did the job), and the stormdrains under Derry had run with violent water for two or three hours. It was that spate of water that had pushed this unpleasant baggage into the sun for the flies to find.
It was the body of a nine-year old named Jimmy Cullum. Except for the nose, his face was gone. There was a churned and featureless mess where it had been. This raw meat was dotted with deep black marks that perhaps only Stan Uris would have recognized for what they were: pecks. Pecks made by a very large beak.
Water rilled over Jimmy Cullum’s muddy chino pants. His white hands floated like dead fish. They had also been pecked, although not as badly. His paisley shirt ballooned out and collapsed back, ballooned out and collapsed back, like a bladder.
Bill and Eddie, loaded down with boards scrounged from the dump, crossed the Kenduskeag by stepping-stones less than forty yards from the body. They heard Richie, Ben,
and Mike laughing, smiled a little themselves, and hurried past the unseen ruin of Jimmy Cullum to see what was so funny.
6
They were still laughing as Bill and Eddie came into the clearing, sweating under their load of lumber. Even Eddie, usually as pale as cheese, had some color in his face. They dropped the new boards on the almost depleted supply-pile. Ben climbed out of the hole to inspect them.
‘Good deal!’ he said. ‘Wow! Great!’
Bill collapsed to the ground. ‘Can I h-have my heart a-a-attack now or do I h-have to wuh-wait until luh-hater?’
‘Have it later,’ Ben said absently.