At this, Milo himself went almost berserk with rage. His complexion darkened to a scary plum color—even his scalp was purple under the short hedgehog bristles of his flattop haircut. Sitting stunned in the dirt, both knees of my jeans torn out, my heart still thudding from the nearness of my escape, I thought that Milo looked like a human version of Chopper.
“I know you!” Milo raved. “You’re Teddy Duchamp! I know
all
of you! Sonny, I’ll beat your ass, teasing my dawg like that!”
“Like to see you try!” Teddy raved right back. “Let’s see you climb over this fence and get me, fatass!”
“WHAT? WHAT DID YOU CALL ME?”
“FATASS!”
Teddy screamed happily.
“LARD-BUCKET! TUBBAGUTS! COME ON! COME ON!”
He was jumping up and down, fists clenched, sweat flying from his hair.
“TEACH YOU TO SIC YOUR STUPID DOG ON PEOPLE! COME ON! LIKE TO SEE YOU TRY!”
“You little tin-weasel peckerwood loony’s son! I’ll see your mother gets an invitation to go down and talk to the judge in court about what you done to my dawg!”
“What did you call me?” Teddy asked hoarsely. He had stopped jumping up and down. His eyes had gone huge and glassy, and his skin was the color of lead.
Milo had called Teddy a lot of things, but he was able to go back and get the one that had struck home with no trouble at all—since then I have noticed again and again what a genius people have for that ... for finding the LOONY button down inside and not just pressing it but hammering on the fucker.
“Your dad was a loony,” he said, grinning. “Loony up in Togus, that’s what. Crazier’n a shithouse rat. Crazier’n a buck with tickwood fever. Nuttier’n a long-tailed cat in a room fulla rockin chairs. Loony. No wonder you’re actin the way you are, with a loony for a f—”
“YOUR MOTHER BLOWS DEAD RATS!”
Teddy screamed.
“AND IF YOU CALL MY DAD A LOONY AGAIN, I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU COCKSUCKER!”
“Loony,” Milo said smugly. He’d found the button, all right. “Loony’s kid, loony’s kid, your father’s got toys in the attic, kid, tough break.”
Vern and Chris had been getting over their laughing fit, perhaps getting ready to appreciate the seriousness of the situation and call Teddy off, but when Teddy told Milo that his mother blew dead rats, they went back into hysterics again, lying there on the bank, rolling from side to side, their feet kicking, holding their bellies. “No more,” Chris said weakly. “No more, please, no more, I swear to God I’m gonna
bust!”
Chopper was walking around in a large, dazed figure-eight behind Milo. He looked like the losing fighter about ten seconds after the ref has ended the match and awarded the winner a TKO. Meanwhile, Teddy and Milo continued their discussion of Teddy’s father, standing nose to nose, with the wire fence Milo was too old and too fat to climb between them.
“Don’t you say nothing else about my dad! My dad stormed the beach at Normandy, you fucking wet end!”
“Yeah, well, where is he now, you ugly little four-eyed turd? He’s up to Togus, ain’t he? He’s up to Togus because
HE WENT FUCKING SECTION EIGHT!”
“Okay, that’s it,” Teddy said. “That’s it, that’s the end, I’m gonna kill you.” He threw himself at the fence and started up.
“You come on and try it, you slimy little bastard.” Milo stood back, grinning and waiting.
“No!” I shouted. I got to my feet, grabbed Teddy by the loose seat of his jeans, and pulled him off the fence. We both staggered back and fell over, him on top. He squashed my balls pretty good and I groaned. Nothing hurts like having your balls squashed, you know it? But I kept my arms locked around Teddy’s middle.
“Lemme up!” Teddy sobbed, writhing in my arms. “Lemme up, Gordie! Nobody ranks out my old man.
LEMME UP GODDAMMIT LEMME UP!”
“That’s just what he wants!” I shouted in his ear. “He wants to get you over there and beat the piss out of you and then take you to the cops!”
“Huh?” Teddy craned around to look at me, his face dazed.
“Never mind your smartmouth, kid,” Milo said, advancing to the fence again with his hands curled into ham-sized fists. “Let’im fight his own battles.”
“Sure,” I said. “You only outweigh him by five hundred pounds.”
“I know you, too,” Milo said ominously. “Your name’s Lachance.” He pointed to where Vern and Chris were finally picking themselves up, still breathing fast from laughing so hard. “And those guys are Chris Chambers and one of those stupid Tessio kids. All your fathers are going to get calls from me, except for the loony up to Togus. You’ll go to the ’formatory, every one of you. Juvenile delinquents!”
He stood flat on his feet, big freckled hands held out like a guy who wanted to play One Potato Two Potato, breathing hard, eyes narrow, waiting for us to cry or say we were sorry or maybe give him Teddy so he could feed Teddy to Chopper.
Chris made an O out of his thumb and index finger and spat neatly through it.
Vern hummed and looked at the sky.
Teddy said: “Come on, Gordie. Let’s get away from this asshole before I puke.”
“Oh, you’re gonna get it, you foulmouthed little whoremaster. Wait’ll I get you to the Constable.”
“We heard what you said about his father,” I told him. “We’re all witnesses. And you sicced that dog on me. That’s against the law.”
Milo looked a trifle uneasy. “You was trespassin.”
“The hell I was. The dump’s public property.”
“You climbed the fence.”
“Sure I did, after you sicced your dog on me,” I said, hoping that Milo wouldn’t recall that I’d also climbed the gate to get in. “What’d you think I was gonna do? Stand there and let ’im rip me to pieces? Come on, you guys. Let’s go. It stinks around here.”
“’Formatory,” Milo promised hoarsely, his voice shaking. “ ’Formatory for you wiseguys.”
“Can’t wait to tell the cops how you called a war vet a fuckin loony,” Chris called back over his shoulder as we moved away. “What did you do in the war, Mr. Pressman?”
“NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS!”
Milo shrieked.
“YOU HURT MY DAWG!”
“Put it on your t.s. slip and send it to the chaplain,” Vern muttered, and then we were climbing the railroad embankment again.
“Come back here!” Milo shouted, but his voice was fainter now and he seemed to be losing interest.
Teddy shot him the finger as we walked away. I looked back over my shoulder when we got to the top of the embankment. Milo was standing there behind the security fence, a big man in a baseball cap with his dog sitting beside him. His fingers were hooked through the small chain-link diamonds as he shouted at us, and all at once I felt very sorry for him—he looked like the biggest third-grader in the world, locked inside the playground by mistake, yelling for someone to come and let him out. He kept on yelling for awhile and then he either gave up or we got out of range. No more was seen or heard of Milo Pressman and Chopper that day.
13
There was some discussion—in righteous tones that were actually kind of forced-sounding—about how we had shown that creepy Milo Pressman we weren’t just another bunch of pussies. I told how the guy at the Florida Market had tried to jap us, and then we fell into a gloomy silence, thinking it over.
For my part, I was thinking that maybe there was something to that stupid goocher business after all. Things couldn’t have turned out much worse—in fact, I thought, it might be better to just keep going and spare my folks the pain of having one son in the Castle View Cemetery and one in South Windham Boys’ Correctional. I had no doubt that Milo would go to the cops as soon as the importance of the dump having been closed at the time of the incident filtered into his thick skull. When that happened, he would realize that I really
had
been trespassing, public property or not. Probably that gave him every right in the world to sic his stupid dog on me. And while Chopper wasn’t the hellhound he was cracked up to be, he sure would have ripped the sitdown out of my jeans if I hadn’t won the race to the fence. All of it put a big dark crimp in the day. And there was another gloomy idea rolling around inside my head—the idea that this was no lark after all, and maybe we deserved our bad luck. Maybe it was even God warning us to go home. What were we doing, anyway, going to look at some kid that had gotten himself all mashed up by a freight train?
But we were doing it, and none of us wanted to stop.
We had almost reached the trestle which carried the tracks across the river when Teddy burst into tears. It was as if a great inner tidal wave had broken through a carefully constructed set of mental dykes. No bullshit—it was that sudden and that fierce. The sobs doubled him over like punches and he sort of collapsed into a heap, his hands going from his stomach to the mutilated gobs of flesh that were the remains of his ears. He went on crying in hard, violent bursts.
None of us knew what the fuck to do. It wasn’t crying like when you got hit by a line drive while you were playing shortstop or smashed on the head playing tackle football on the common or when you fell off your bike. There was nothing physically wrong with him. We walked away a little and watched him, our hands in our pockets.
“Hey, man ...” Vern said in a very thin voice. Chris and I looked at Vern hopefully. “Hey, man” was always a good start. But Vern couldn’t follow it up.
Teddy leaned forward onto the crossties and put a hand over his eyes. Now he looked like he was doing the Allah bit—“Salami, salami, baloney,” as Popeye says. Except it wasn’t funny.
At last, when the force of his crying had trailed off a little, it was Chris who went to him. He was the toughest guy in our gang (maybe even tougher than Jamie Gallant, I thought privately), but he was also the guy who made the best peace. He had a way about it. I’d seen him sit down on the curb next to a little kid with a scraped knee, a kid he didn’t even fucking
know,
and get him talking about something—the Shrine Circus that was coming to town or Huckleberry Hound on TV—until the kid forgot he was supposed to be hurt. Chris was good at it. He was tough enough to be good at it.
“Lissen, Teddy, what do you care what a fat old pile of shit like him said about your father? Huh? I mean, sincerely! That don’t change nothing, does it? What a fat old pile of shit like him says? Huh? Huh? Does it?”
Teddy shook his head violently. It changed nothing. But to hear it spoken of in bright daylight, something he must have gone over and over in his mind while he was lying awake in bed and looking at the moon off-center in one windowpane, something he must have thought about in his slow and broken way until it seemed almost holy, trying to make sense out of it, and then to have it brought home to him that everybody else had merely dismissed his dad as a loony ... that had rocked him. But it changed nothing. Nothing.
“He still stormed the beach at Normandy, right?” Chris said. He picked up one of Teddy’s sweaty, grimy hands and patted it.
Teddy nodded fiercely, crying. Snot was running out of his nose.
“Do you think that pile of shit was at Normandy?”
Teddy shook his head violently.
“Nuh-Nuh-No!”
“Do you think that guy knows you?”
“Nuh-No! No, b-b-but—”
“Or your father? He one of your father’s buddies?”
“NO!”
Angry, horrified. The thought. Teddy’s chest heaved and more sobs came out of it. He had pushed his hair away from his ears and I could see the round brown plastic button of the hearing aid set in the middle of his right one. The shape of the hearing aid made more sense than the shape of his ear, if you get what I mean.
Chris said calmly: “Talk is cheap.”
Teddy nodded, still not looking up.
“And whatever’s between you and your old man, talk can’t change that.”
Teddy’s head shook without definition, unsure if this was true. Someone had redefined his pain, and redefined it in shockingly common terms. That would
(loony)
have to be examined
(fucking section eight)
later. In depth. On long sleepless nights.
Chris rocked him. “He was ranking you, man,” he said in soothing cadences that were almost a lullaby. “He was tryin to rank you over that friggin fence, you know it? No strain, man. No fuckin strain. He don’t know nothin about your old man. He don’t know nothin but stuff he heard from those rumdums down at The Mellow Tiger. He’s just dogshit, man. Right, Teddy? Huh? Right?”
Teddy’s crying was down to sniffles. He wiped his eyes, leaving two sooty rings around them, and sat up.
“I’m okay,” he said, and the sound of his own voice seemed to convince him. “Yeah, I’m okay.” He stood up and put his glasses back on—dressing his naked face, it seemed to me. He laughed thinly and swiped his bare arm across the snot of his upper lip. “Fuckin crybaby, right?”
“No, man,” Vern said uncomfortably. “If anyone was rankin out my dad—”
“Then you got to kill em!” Teddy said briskly, almost arrogantly. “Kill their asses. Right, Chris?”
“Right,” Chris said amiably, and clapped Teddy on the back.
“Right, Gordie?”
“Absolutely,” I said, wondering how Teddy could care so much for his dad when his dad had practically killed him, and how I couldn’t seem to give much of a shit one way or the other about my own dad, when so far as I could remember, he had never laid a hand on me since I was three and got some bleach from under the sink and started to eat it.
We walked another two hundred yards down the tracks and Teddy said in a quieter voice: “Hey, if I spoiled your good time, I’m sorry. I guess that was pretty stupid shit back there at that fence.”
“I ain’t sure I want it to be no good time,” Vern said suddenly.
Chris looked at him. “You sayin you want to go back, man?”
“No, huh-uh!” Vern’s face knotted in thought. “But going to see a dead kid—it shouldn’t be a party, maybe. I mean, if you can dig it. I mean ...” He looked at us rather wildly. “I mean, I could be a little scared. If you get me.”