It

then looked at Bill. ‘You got the molds?’
‘Oh!’ Bill jumped a little. ‘H-H-Here.’ He reached into his pants pocket and brought out his handkerchief. He put it on the workbench and unfolded it. There were two dull steel balls inside, each with a small hole in it. They were bearing molds.
After deciding on slugs instead of bullets, Bill and Richie had gone back to the library and had researched how bearings were made. ‘You boys are so busy,’ Mrs Starrett had said. ‘Bullets one week and bearings the next! And it’s summer vacation, too!’
‘We like to stay sharp,’ Richie said. ‘Right, Bill?’
‘Ruh-Ruh-Right.’
It turned out that making bearings was a cinch, once you had the molds. The only real question was where to get them. A couple of discreet questions to Zack Denbrough had taken care of that . . . and none of the Losers were too surprised to find that the only machine-shop in Derry where such molds might be obtained was Kitchener Precision Tool & Die. The Kitchener who owned and ran it was a great-great-grandnephew of the brothers who had owned the Kitchener Ironworks.
Bill and Richie had gone over together with all the cash the Losers had been able to raise on short notice — ten dollars and fifty-nine cents — in Bill’s pocket. When Bill asked how much a couple of two-inch bearing molds might cost, Carl Kitchener — who looked like a veteran boozehound and smelled like an old horse-blanket — asked what a couple of kids wanted with bearing molds. Richie let Bill speak, knowing things would probably go easier that way — children made fun of Bill’s stutter; adults were embarrassed by it. Sometimes this was surprisingly helpful.
Bill got halfway through the explanation he and Richie had worked out on the way over — something about a model windmill for next year’s science project — when Kitchener waved for him to shut up and quoted them the unbelievable price of fifty cents per mold.
Hardly able to believe their good fortune, Bill forked over a single dollar bill.
‘Don’t expect me to give you a bag,’ Carl Kitchener said, eying them with the bloodshot contempt of a man who believes he has seen everything the world holds, most of it twice. ‘You don’t get no bag unless you spend at least five bucks.’
That’s o-o-okay, suh-sir,’ Bill said.
‘And don’t hang around out front,’ Kitchener said. ‘You both need haircuts.’
Outside Bill said: ‘Y-Y-You ever nuh-hotice, Ruh-Richie, how guh-guh-grownups w-w-won’t sell you a-a-anything except c-candy or cuh-cuh-homic books or m-maybe movie t– t-tickets without first they w-want to know what y-you want it f-for?’
‘Sure,’ Richie said.
‘W-Why? Why ih-is that?’
‘Because they think we’re dangerous.’ ‘Y-Yeah? You thuh-thuh-think s-so?’
‘Yeah,’ Richie said, and then giggled. ‘Let’s hang around out front, want to? We’ll put up our collars and sneer at people and let our hair grow.’ ‘Fuck y-you,’ Bill said.
3
‘Okay,’ Ben said, looking at the molds carefully and then putting them down. ‘Good. Now — ‘
They gave him a little more room, looking at him hopefully, the way a man with engine trouble who knows nothing about cars will look at a mechanic. Ben didn’t notice their expressions. He was concentrating on the job.
‘Gimme that shell,’ he said, ‘and the blowtorch.’
Bill handed a cut-down mortar shell to him. It was a war souvenir. Zack had picked it up five days after he and the rest of General Patton’s army had crossed th e river into Germany. There had been a time, when Bill was very young and George was still in diapers, that his father had used it as an ashtray. Later he had quit smoking, and the mortar shell had disappeared. Bill had found it in the back of the garage just a week ago.
Ben put the mortar shell into Zack’s vise, tightened it, and then took the blowtorch from Beverly. He reached into his pocket, brought out a silver dollar, and dropped it into the makeshift crucible. It made a hollow sound.
‘Your father gave you that, didn’t he?’ Beverly asked.
‘Yes,’ Ben said, ‘but I don’t remember him very well.’
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
He looked at her and smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said.
She smiled back. It was enough for Ben. If she had smiled at him twice, he would gladly have made enough silver bearings to shoot a platoon of werewolves. He looked hastily away. ‘Okay. Here we go. No problem. Easy as pie, right?’
They nodded hesitantly.
Years later, recounting all of this, Ben would think: These days a kid could just run out andbuy a propane torch . . . or his dad would have one in the workshop.
There