Стивен Кинг - It

“Ta-ta, love!” Adrian called cheekily over his shoulder.

“Shut up, candy-ass,” Machen said. “Get out of here.”

Garton made a lunge at Mellon, and Machen grabbed him.

“I can run you in, my friend,” Machen said, “and the way you’re acting, it might not be such a bad idea.”

“Next time I see you I’m gonna hurt you!” Garton bellowed after the departing pair, and heads turned to stare at him. “And if you’re wearing that hat, I’m gonna kill you! This town don’t need no faggots like you!”

Without turning, Mellon waggled the fingers of his left hand—the nails were painted cerise—and put an extra little wiggle in his walk. Garton lunged again.

“One more word or one more move and in you go,” Machen said mildly. “Trust me, my boy, for I mean exactly what I say.”

“Come on, Webby,” Chris Unwin said uneasily. “Mellow out.”

“You like guys like that?” Webby asked Machen, ignoring Chris and Steve completely. “Huh?”

“About the bum-punchers I’m neutral,” Machen said. “What I’m really in favor of is peace and quiet, and you are upsetting what I like, pizza face. Now do you want to go a round with me or what?”

“Come on, Webby,” Steve Dubay said quietly. “Let’s go get some hot dogs.”

Webby went, straightening his shirt with exaggerated moves and brushing the hair out of his eyes. Machen, who also gave a statement on the morning following Adrian Mellon’s death, said: The last thing I heard him say as him and his buddies walked off was, “Next time I see him he’s going to be in serious hurt.”

6

“Please, I got to talk to my mother,” Steve Dubay said for the third time. “I’ve got to get her to mellow out my stepfather, or there is going to be one hell of a punching-match when I get home.”

“In a little while,” Officer Charles Avarino told him. Both Avarino and his partner, Barney Morrison, knew that Steve Dubay would not be going home tonight and maybe not for many nights to come. The boy did not seem to realize just how heavy this particular bust was, and Avarino would not be surprised when he learned, later on, that Dubay had left school at age sixteen. At that time he had still been in Water Street Junior High. His IQ was 68, according to the Wechsler he had taken during one of his three trips through the seventh grade.

“Tell us what happened when you saw Mellon coming out of the Falcon,” Morrison invited.

“No, man, I better not.”

“Well, why not?” Avarino asked.

“I already talked too much, maybe.”

“You came in to talk,” Avarino said. “Isn’t that right?”

“Well . . . yeah . . . but . . .”

“Listen,” Morrison said warmly, sitting down next to Dubay and shooting him a cigarette. “You think me and Chick here like fags?”

“I don’t know—”

“Do we look like we like fags?”

“No, but . . .”

“We’re your friends, Steve-o,” Morrison said solemnly. “And believe me, you and Chris and Webby need all the friends you can get just about now. Because tomorrow every bleeding heart in this town is going to be screaming for you guys’s blood.”

Steve Dubay looked dimly alarmed. Avarino, who could almost read this hairbag’s pussy little mind, suspected he was thinking about his stepfather again. And although Avarino had no liking for Derry’s small gay community—like every other cop on the force, he would enjoy seeing the Falcon shut up forever—he would have been delighted to drive Dubay home himself. He would, in fact, have been delighted to hold Dubay’s arms while Dubay’s stepfather beat the creep to oatmeal. Avarino did not like gays, but this did not mean he believed they should be tortured and murdered. Mellon had been savaged. When they brought him up from under the Canal bridge, his eyes had been open, bulging with terror. And this guy here had absolutely no idea of what he had helped do.

“We didn’t mean to hurt im,” Steve repeated. This was his fallback position when he became even slightly confused.

“That’s why you want to get out front with us,” Avarino said earnestly. “Get the true facts of the matter out in front, and this maybe won’t amount to a pisshole in the snow. Isn’t that right, Barney?”

“As rain,” Morrison agreed.

“One more time, what do you say?” Avarino coaxed.

“Well . . .” Steve said, and then, slowly, began to talk.

7

When the Falcon was opened in 1973, Elmer Curtie thought his clientele would consist mostly of bus-riders—the terminal next door serviced three different lines: Trailways, Greyhound, and Aroostook County. What he failed to realize was how many of the passengers who ride buses are women or families with small children in tow. Many of the others kept their bottles in brown bags and never got off the bus at all. Those who did were usually soldiers or sailors who wanted no more than a quick beer or two—you couldn’t very well go on a bender during a ten-minute rest-stop.

Curtie had begun to realize some of these home truths by 1977, but by then it was too late: he was up to his tits in bills and there was no way that he could see out of the red ink. The idea of burning the place down for the insurance occurred to him, but unless he hired a professional to torch it, he supposed he would be caught . . . and he had no idea where professional arsonists hung out, anyway.

He decided in February of that year that he would give it until July 4th; if things didn’t look as if they were turning around by then, he would simply walk next door, get on ’hound, and see how things looked down in Florida.

But in the next five months, an amazing quiet sort of prosperity came to the bar, which was painted black and gold inside and decorated with stuffed birds (Elmer Curtie’s brother had been an amateur taxidermist who specialized in birds, and Elmer had inherited the stuff when he died). Suddenly, instead of drawing sixty beers and pouring maybe twenty drinks a night, Elmer was drawing eighty beers and pouring a hundred drinks . . . a hundred and twenty . . . sometimes a hundred and sixty.

His clientele was young, polite, almost exclusively male. Many of them dressed outrageously, but those were years when outrageous dress was still almost the norm, and Elmer Curtie did not realize that his patrons were just about almost exclusively gay until 1981 or so. If Derry residents had heard him say this, they would have laughed and said that Elmer Curtie must think they had all been born yesterday—but his claim was perfectly true. Like the man with the cheating wife, he was practically the last to know . . . and by the time he did, he didn’t care. The bar was making money, and while there were four other bars in Derry which turned a profit, the Falcon was the only one where rambunctious patrons did not regularly demolish the whole place. There were no women to fight over, for one thing, and these men, fags or not, seemed to have learned a secret of getting along with each other which their heterosexual counterparts did not know.

Once he became aware of the sexual preference of his regulars, he seemed to hear lurid stories about the Falcon everywhere—these stories had been circulating for years, but until ’81 Curtie simply hadn’t heard them. The most enthusiastic tellers of these tales, he came to realize, were men who wouldn’t be dragged into the Falcon with a chainfall for fear all the muscles would go out of their wrists, or something. Yet they seemed privy to all sorts of information.

According to the stories, you could go in there any night and see men close-dancing, rubbing their cocks together right out on the dancefloor; men french-kissing at the bar; men getting blowjobs in the bathrooms. There was supposedly a room out back where you went if you wanted to spend a little time on the Tower of Power—there was a big old fellow in a Nazi uniform back there who kept his arm greased most of the way to the shoulder and who would be happy to take care of you.