That silence, sudden, awkward, and perplexing, fell again. They looked at
each other.
"Well?" Beverly asked in her sweet, slightly husky voice. "What do we drink to?"
"To us," Richie said suddenly. And now he wasn't smiling. His eyes caught Bill's and with a force so great he could barely deal with it, Bill remembered himself and Richie in the middle of Neibolt Street, after the thing which might have been a clown or which might have been a werewolf had disappeared, embracing each other and weeping. When he picked up his glass, his hand was trembling, and some of his drink spilled on the napery.
Richie rose slowly to his feet, and one by one the others followed suit: Bill first, then Ben and Eddie, Beverly, and finally Mike Hanlon. "To us," Richie said, and like Bill's hand, his voice trembled a little. To the Losers" Club of 1958."
"The Losers," Beverly said, slightly amused.
The Losers," Eddie said. His face was pale and old behind his rimless glasses.
The Losers," Ben agreed. A faint and painful smile ghosted at the corners of his mouth.
The Losers," Mike Hanlon said softly.
The Losers," Bill finished.
Their glasses touched. They drank.
That silence fell again, and this time Richie did not break it. This time the silence seemed necessary.
They sat back down and Bill said, "so spill it, Mike. Tell us what's been happening here, and what we can do."
"Eat first," Mike said. "We'll talk afterward."
So they ate... and they ate long and well. Like that old joke about the condemned man, Bill thought, but his own appetite was better than it had been in ages... since he was a kid, he was tempted to think. The food was not stunningly good, but it was far from bad, and there was a lot of it. The six of them began trading stuff back and forth-spareribs, moo goo gaipan, chicken wings that had been delicately braised, egg rolls, water chestnuts wrapped in bacon, strips of beef that had been threaded onto wooden skewers.
They began with pu-pu platters, and Richie made a childish but amusing business of broiling a little bit of everything over the flaming pot in the center of the platter he was sharing with Beverly-including half an egg roll and a few red kidney beans. "Flambe at my table, I love it," he told Ben. "I'd eat shit on a shingle if it was flambe at my table."
"And probably has," Bill remarked. Beverly laughed so hard at this she had to spit a mouthful of food into her napkin.
"Oh God, I think I'm gonna ralph," Richie said in an eerily exact imitation of Don Pardo, and Beverly laughed harder, blushing a bright red.
"Stop it, Richie," she said. "I'm warning you."
"The warning is taken," Richie said. "Eat well, dear."
Rose herself brought them their dessert-a great mound of baked Alaska ?vhich she ignited at the head of the table, where Mike sat.
"More flambe at my table," Richie said in the voice of a man who has died and gone to heaven. "This may be the best meal I've ever eaten in my life."
"But of course," Rose said demurely.
"If I blow that out, do I get my wish?" he asked her.
"At Jade of the Orient, all wishes are granted, sir."
Richie's smile faltered suddenly. "I applaud the sentiment," he said, "but you know, I really doubt the veracity."
They almost demolished the baked Alaska. As Bill sat back, his belly straining the waistband of his pants, he happened to notice the glasses on the table. There seemed to be hundreds of them. He grinned a little, realizing that he himself had sunk two martinis before the meal and God knew how many bottles of Kirin beer with it. The others had done about as well. In their state, fried chunks of bowling pin would probably have tasted okay. And yet he didn't feel drunk.
"I haven't eaten like that since I was a kid," Ben said. They looked at him and a faint flush of color tinged his cheeks. "I mean it literally. That may be the biggest meal I've eaten since I was a sophomore in high school."
"You went on a diet?" Eddie asked.
"Yeah," Ben said. "I did. The Ben Hanscom Freedom Diet."
"What got you going?" Richie asked.
"You don't want to hear all that ancient history... " Ben shifted uncomfortably.
"I don't know about the rest of them," Bill said, "but I do. Come on, Ben. Give. What turned Haystack Calhoun into the magazine model we see before us today?"
Richie snorted a little. "Haystack, right. I'd forgotten that."
"It's not much of a story," Ben said. "No story at all, really. After that summer-after 1958-we stayed in Derry another two years. Then my mom lost her job and we ended up moving to Nebraska, because she had a sister there who offered to take us in until my mother got on her feet again. It wasn't so great. Her sister, my aunt Jean, was a miserly bitch who had to keep telling you what your place in the great scheme of things was, how lucky we were that my mom had a sister who could give us charity, how lucky we were not to be on welfare, all that sort of thing. I was so fat I disgusted her. She couldn't leave it alone. "Ben, you ought to get more exercise. Ben, you'll have a heart attack before you're forty if you don't lose weight. Ben, with little children starving in the world, you ought to be ashamed of yourself." He paused for a moment and sipped some water.
The thing was, she also trotted the starving children out if I didn't clean my plate."
Richie laughed and nodded.
"Anyway, the country was just pulling out of a recession and my mother was almost a year finding steady work. By the time we moved out of aunt Jean's place in La Vista and got our own in Omaha, I'd put on about ninety pounds over when you guys knew me. I think I put on most of it just to spite my Aunt Jean."
Eddie whistled. "That would have put you at about-"
"At about two hundred and ten," Ben said gravely. "Anyway, I was going to East Side High School in Omaha, and the physedPeriods were... well, pretty bad. The other kids called me Jugs. That ought to give you the idea.
"The ragging went on for about seven months, and then one day, while we were getting dressed in the locker room after the period, two or three of the guys started to... to kind of slap my gut. They called it "fat-paddling." Pretty soon two or three others got in on it. Then four or five more. Pretty soon it was all of them, chasing me around the locker room and up the hall, whacking my gut, my butt, my back, my legs. I got scared and started to scream. That made the rest of them laugh like crazy.
"You know," he said, looking down and carefully rearranging his silverware, "that's the last time I can remember thinking of Henry Bowers until Mike called me two days ago. The kid who started it was a farmboy with these big old hands, and while they were chasing after me I remember thinking that Henry had come back. I think-no, I know-that's when I panicked.
They chased me up the hall past the lockers where the guys who played sports kept their stuff. I was naked and red as a lobster. I'd lost any sense of dignity or... or of myself, I guess you'd say. Where myself was. I was screaming for help. And here they came after me, screaming "Fat-paddling! Fat-paddling! Fat-paddling!" There was a bench-"
"Ben, you don't have to put yourself through this," Beverly said suddenly. Her face had gone ashy-pale. She toyed with her water-glass, and almost spilled it.
"Let him finish," Bill said.
Ben looked at him for a moment and then nodded. There was a bench at the end of the corridor. I fell over it and hit my head. They were all around me in another minute or two, and then this voice said: "Okay. That's enough. You guys go change up."
"It was Coach, standing there in the doorway, wearing his blue sweatpants with the white stripe up the sides and his white tee-shirt. There was no way of telling how long he'd been standing there. They all looked at him, some of them grinning, some of them guilty, some of them just looking sort of vacant. They went away. And I burst into tears.
'Coach just stood there in the doorway leading back to the gym, watching me, watching this naked fat boy with his skin all red from the fat-paddling, watching this fat kid crying on the floor.
"And finally he said, "Benny, why don't you just fucking shut up?"
"It shocked me so much to hear a teacher use that word that I did. I looked up at him, and he came over and sat down on the bench I'd fallen over. He leaned over me, and the whistle around his neck swung out and bonked me on the forehead. For a second I thought he was going to kiss me or something, and I shrank back from him, but what he did was grab one of my tits in each hand and squeeze. Then he took his hands away and rubbed them on his pants like he'd touched something dirty.
"You think I'm going to comfort you?" he asked me. "I'm not. You disgust them and you disgust me as well. We got different reasons, but that's because they're kids and I'm not. They don't know why you disgust them. I do know. It's because I see you burying the good body God gave you in a great big mess of fat. It's a lot of stupid self-indulgence, and it makes me want to puke. Now listen to me, Benny, because this is the only tune I'm going to say it to you. I got a football team to coach, and basketball, and track, and somewhere in between I've got swimming team. So I'll just say it once. You're fat up here." And he tapped my forehead right where his damned whistle had bonked me. "That's where everybody's fat. You put what's between your ears on a diet and you're going to lose weight. But guys like you never do.'"
"What a bastardl" Beverly said indignantly.
"Yeah," Ben said, grinning. "But he didn't know he was a bastard, that's how dumb he was. He'd probably seen Jack Webb in that movie The D.I. about sixty times, and he actually thought he was doing me a favor. And as it turned out, he was. Because I thought of something right then. I thought..."
He looked away, frowning-and Bill had the strangest feeling that he knew what Ben was going to say before he said it.
"I told you that the last time I can remember thinking of Henry Bowers was when the other boys were chasing after me and fat-paddling. Well, when the Coach was getting up to go, that was the last time I really thought of what we'd done in the summer of '58. I thought-"
He hesitated again, looking at each of them in turn, seeming to search their faces. He went on carefully.
"I thought of how good we were together. I thought of what we did and how we did it, and all at once it hit me that if Coach had to face anything like that, his hair would probably have turned white all at once and his heart would have stopped dead in his chest like an old watch. It wasn't fair, of course, but he hadn't been fair to me. What happened was simple enough-"
"You got mad," Bill said.
Ben smiled. "Yeah, that's right," he said. "I called, "Coach!"
"He turned around and looked at me. "You say you coach track?" I asked him.
"That's right," he said. "Not that it's anything to you."
"You listen to me, you stupid stone-brained son of a bitch," I said, and his mouth dropped open and his eyes bugged out. "I'll be out there for the track team in March. What do you think about that?"
"I think you better shut your mouth before it gets you into big trouble," he said.
"I'm going to run down everyone you get out," I said. "I'm going to run down your best. And then I want a fucking apology from you."
"His fists clenched, and for a minute I thought he was going to come back in there and let me have it. Then they unclenched again. "You just keep talking, fatboy," he said softly. "You got the motormouth. But the day you can outrun my best will be the day I quit this place and go back to picking corn on the circuit." And he left."
"You lost the weight?" Richie asked.
"Well, I did," Ben said. "But Coach was wrong. It didn't start in my head. It started with my mother. I went home that night and told her I wanted to lose some weight. We ended up having a hell of a fight, both of us crying. She started out with that same old song and dance: I wasn't really fat, I just had big bones, and a big boy who was going to be a big man had to eat big just to stay even. It was a... a kind of security thing with her, I think. It was scary for her, trying to raise a boy on her own. She had no education and no real skills, just a willingness to work hard. And when she could give me a second helping... or when she could look across the table at me and see that I was looking solid..."
"She felt like she was winning the battle," Mike said.
"Uh-huh." Ben drank off the last of his beer and wiped a small mustache of foam off his upper lip with the heel of his hand. "so the biggest fight wasn't with my head; it was with her. She just wouldn't accept it, not for months. She wouldn't take in my clothes and she wouldn't buy me new ones. I was running by then, I ran everywhere, and sometimes my heart pounded so hard I felt like I was going to pass out. The first of my mile runs I finished by puking and then fainting. Then for awhile I just puked. And after awhile I was holding up my pants while I ran.
"I got a paper-route and I ran with the bag around my neck, bouncing against my chest, while I held up my pants. My shirts started to look like sails. And nights when I went home and would only eat half the stuff on my plate my mother would burst into tears and say that I was starving myself, killing myself, that I didn't love her anymore, that I didn't care about how hard she had worked for me."
"Christ," Richie muttered, lighting a cigarette. "I don't know how you handled it, Ben."
"I just kept the Coach's face in front of me," Ben said. "I just kept remembering the way he looked after he grabbed my tits in the hallway to the boys" locker room that time. That's how I did it. I got myself some new jeans and stuff with the paper-route money, and the old guy in the first-floor apartment used his awl to punch some new holes in my belt-about five of them, as I remember. I think that I might have remembered the other time I had to buy a pair of new jeans-that was when Henry pushed me into the Barrens that day and they just about got torn off my body."
"Yeah," Eddie said, grinning. "And you told me about the chocolate milk. Remember that?"
Ben nodded. "If I did remember," he went on, "it was just for a second-there and gone. About that same time I started taking Health and Nutrition at school, and I found out you could eat just about all the raw green stuff you wanted and not gain weight. So one night my mother put on a salad with lettuce and raw spinach in it, chunks of apple and maybe a little leftover ham. Now I've never liked rabbit-food that much, but I had three helpings and just raved on and on to my mother about how good it was.