“Hey, asshole, give that back!” Henry yells, and then he snatches Beaver’s. Beav squawks like a chicken and runs after Henry, laughing. So the three of them swoop across the grass and behind the bleachers, graduation robes billowing around their jeans. Jonesy has two hats on his head, the tassels swinging in opposite directions, Henry has one (far too big; it’s sitting on his ears), and Beaver runs bareheaded, his long black hair flowing out behind him and a toothpick jutting from his mouth.
Jonesy is looking back as he runs, taunting Henry (“Come on, Mr Basketball, ya run like a girl”), and almost piles into Pete, who is looking at DERRY DOIN’s, the glassed-in notice-board by the north entrance to the parking lot. Pete, who is graduating from nothing but the Junior class this year, grabs Jonesy, bends him backward like a guy doing a tango with some beautiful chick, and kisses him square on the mouth. Both mortarboards tumble off Jonesy’s head, and he screams in surprise.
“Queerboy!” Jonesy yells, rubbing frantically at his mouth… but he’s starting to laugh, too. Pete’s an oddity-he’ll go along quietly for weeks at a time, Norman Normal, and then he’ll break out and do something nutso. Usually the nutso comes out after a couple of beers, but not this afternoon.
“I’ve always wanted to do that, Gariella,” Pete says sentimentally. “Now you know how I really feel.”
“Fuckin queerboy, if you gave me the syph, I’ll kill you!” Henry arrives, snatches his mortarboard off the grass, and swats Jonesy with it. “There’s grass-stains on this,” Henry says. “If I have to pay for it, I’ll do a lot more than just kiss you, Gariella.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, fuckwad,” Jonesy says.
“Beautiful Gariella,” Henry says solemnly.
The Beav comes steaming up, puffing around his toothpick. He takes Jonesy’s mortarboard, peers into it, and says, “There’s a come-stain in this one. Ain’t I seen enough on my own sheets to know?” He draws in a deep breath and bugles to the departing seniors in their Derry-red graduation gowns: “Gary Jones beats off in his graduation hat! Hey, everybody, listen up, Gary Jones beats off-”
Jonesy grabs him, pulls him to the ground, and the two of them roll over and over in billows of red nylon. Both mortarboards are cast off to one side and Henry grabs them to keep them from getting crushed.
“Get off me!” Beaver cries. “You’re crushin me! Jesus-Christ-bananas! For God’s sake-”
“Duddits knew her,” Pete says. He has lost interest in their foolery, doesn’t feel much of their high spirits anyway (Pete is perhaps the only one of them who senses the big changes that are coming). He’s looking at the notice-board again. “We knew her, too. She was the one who always stood outside The Petard Academy. “Hi, Duddie,” she’d go.” When he says Hi, Duddie, Pete’s voice goes up high, becomes momentarily girlish in a way that is sweet rather than mocking. And although Pete isn’t a particularly good mimic, Henry knows that voice at once. He remembers the girl, who had fluffy blonde hair and great brown eyes and scabbed knees and a white plastic purse which contained her lunch and her BarbieKen. That’s what she always called them, BarbieKen, as if they were a single entity.
Jonesy and Beav also know who Pete’s imitating, and Henry knows, too. There is that bond among them; it’s been among them for years now. Them and Duddits. Jonesy and the Beav can’t remember the little blonde girl’s name any more than Henry can only that her last one was something impossibly long and clunky. And she had a crush on the Dudster, which was why she always waited for him outside The Retard Academy.
The three of them in their graduation gowns gather around Pete and look at the DERRY DOIN’s board.
As always, the board is crammed with notices-bake sales and car washes, tryouts for the Community Players version of The Fantasticks, summer classes at Fenster, the local junior college, plus plenty of hand-printed student ads-buy this, sell that, need ride to Boston after graduation, looking for roommate in Providence.
And, way up in the corner, a photo of a smiling girl with acres of blonde hair (frizzy rather than fluffy now) and wide, slightly puzzled eyes. She’s no longer a little girl-Henry is surprised again and again by how the children he grew up with (including himself) have disappeared-but he would know those dark and puzzled eyes anywhere.
MISSING, says the single block-capital word under the photo.
And below that, in slightly smaller type: JOSETTE RINKENHAUER, LAST SEEN STRAWFORD PARK SOFTBALL FIELD, JUNE 7, 1982. Below this there is more copy, but Henry doesn’t bother reading it. Instead he reflects on how odd Derry is about missing children-not like other towns at all. This is June eighth, which means the Rinkenhauer girl has only been gone a day, and vet this poster has been tacked way up in the comer of the notice-board (or moved there), like somebody’s afterthought. Nor is that all. There was nothing in the paper this morning-Henry knows, because he read it. Skimmed through it, anyway, while he was slurping up his cereal. Maybe it was buried way back in the Local section, he thinks, and knows at once that’s it. The key word is buried. Lots of things are buried in Derry. Talk of missing children, for instance. There have been a lot of child disappearances here over the years-these boys know it, it certainly crossed their minds on the day they met Duddits Cavell, but nobody talks much about it. It’s as if the occasional missing kid is the price of living in such a nice, quiet place. At this idea Henry feels a dawning indignation stealing in first to mix with and then replace his former goofy happiness. She was sweet, too, with her BarbieKen. Sweet like Duddits.
He remembers how the four of them would deliver Duddits to school-all those walks-and how often she’d be outside, Josie Rinkenhauer with her scabby knees and her great big plastic purse: “Hi, Duddie.” She was sweet.
And still is, Henry thinks. She’s-’she’s alive,” Beaver says flatly. He takes the chewed-up toothpick out of his mouth, looks at it, and drops it to the grass. “Alive and still around. Isn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Pete says. He’s still looking at the picture, fascinated, and Henry knows what Pete is thinking, almost the same thing as he is: she grew up. Even Josie, who in a fairer life might have been Doug Cavell’s girlfriend. “But I think she’s… you know…”
“She’s in deep shit,” Jonesy says. He has stepped out of his gown and now folds it over his arm.
“She’s stuck,” Pete says dreamily, still looking at the picture. His finger has begun to go back and forth, tick-tock, tick-tock.
“Where?” Henry asks, but Pete shakes his head. So does Jonesy.
“Let’s ask Duddits,” Beaver says suddenly. And they all know why. There is no need of discussion. Because Duddits sees the line. Duddits
11
“-sees the line!” Henry shouted suddenly, and jerked upright in the passenger seat of the Humvee. It scared the bell out of Owen, who was deep in some private place where there was only him and the storm and the endless line of reflectors to tell him he was still on the road. “Duddits sees the line!”
The Humvee swerved, skidded, came back under control. “Jesus, man!” Owen said. “Give me a little warning next time before you blow your top, would you?”
Henry ran a hand down his face, drew in a deep breath, and let it out. “I know where we’re going and what we have to do-”
“Well, good-”
“-but I have to tell you a story so you’ll understand.”
Owen glanced at him. “Do you understand?”
“Not everything, but more than I did.”
“Go ahead. We’ve got an hour before Derry. Is that time enough?”
Henry thought it would be more than enough, especially talking mind to mind. He started at the beginning-what he now understood the beginning to be. Not the coming of the grays, not the byrus or the weasels, but four boys who had been hoping to see a picture of the Homecoming Queen with her skirt pulled up, no more than that. As Owen drove, his mind filled with a series of connected images, more like a dream than a movie. Henry told him about Duddits, about their first trip to Hole in the Wall, and Beaver puking in the snow. He told Owen about all those walks to school, and about the Duddits version of the game: they played and Duddits pegged. About the time they had taken Duddits to see Santa Claus-what a fuckin pisser that had been. And about how they had seen Josie Rinkenhauer’s picture on the DERRY DOIN’s board the day before the three older boys graduated. Owen saw them going to Duddits’s house on Maple Lane in Henry’s car, the gowns and mortarboard caps piled in back; saw them saying hi to Mr and Mrs Cavell, who were in the living room with an ashy-pale man in a Derry Gas coverall and a weeping woman-Roberta Cavell has her arm around Ellen Rinkenhauer’s shoulders and is telling her it will be all right, she knows that God won’t let anything happen to dear little Josie.