“Oh, Gordie, hey,” Chris said shakily. “Say-hey, man. What a creepshow for him.”
“I don’t think he knows—”
“Maybe that
was
his ghost we heard. Maybe he knew this was gonna happen. What a fuckin creepshow, I’m sincere.”
Branches crackled behind us. I whirled, sure they had flanked us, but Chris went back to contemplating the body after one short, almost casual glance. It was Vern and Teddy, their jeans soaked black and plastered to their legs, both of them grinning like dogs that have been sucking eggs.
“What are we gonna do, man?” Chris asked, and I felt a weird chill steal through me. Maybe he was talking to me, maybe he was ... but he was still looking down at the body.
“We’re gonna take him back, ain’t we?” Teddy asked, puzzled. “We’re gonna be heroes. Ain’t that right?” He looked from Chris to me and back to Chris again.
Chris looked up as if startled out of a dream. His lip curled. He took big steps toward Teddy, planted both hands on Teddy’s chest, and pushed him roughly backwards. Teddy stumbled, pinwheeled his arms for balance, then sat down with a soggy splash. He blinked up at Chris like a surprised muskrat. Vern was looking warily at Chris, as if he feared madness. Perhaps that wasn’t far from the mark.
“You keep your trap shut,” Chris said to Teddy. “Paratroops over the side my ass. You lousy rubber chicken.”
“It was the
hail
!” Teddy cried out, angry and ashamed. “It wasn’t those guys, Chris! I’m ascared of
storms
! I can’t help it! I would have taken all of em on at once, I swear on my mother’s name! But I’m ascared of
storms
! Shit! I can’t help it!” He began to cry again, sitting there in the water.
“What about you?” Chris asked, turning to Vern. “Are you scared of storms, too?”
Vern shook his head vacuously, still astounded by Chris’s rage. “Hey, man, I thought we was all runnin.”
“You must be a mind-reader then, because you ran first.”
Vern swallowed twice and said nothing.
Chris stared at him, his eyes sullen and wild. Then he turned to me. “Going to build him a litter, Gordie.”
“If you say so, Chris.”
“Sure! Like in Scouts.” His voice had begun to climb into strange, reedy levels. “Just like in the fuckin Scouts. A litter—poles and shirts. Like in the handbook. Right, Gordie?”
“Yeah. If you want. But what if those guys—”
“Fuck those guys!”
he screamed.
“You’re all a bunch of chickens! Fuck off, creeps!”
“Chris, they could call the Constable. To get back at us.”
“He’s ours and we’re gonna take him OUT!”
“Those guys would say anything to get us in dutch,” I told him. My words sounded thin, stupid, sick with the flu. “Say anything and then lie each other up. You know how people can get other people in trouble telling lies, man. Like with the milk-mo—”
“I DON’T CARE!
he screamed, and lunged at me with his fists up. But one of his feet struck Ray Brower’s ribcage with a soggy thump, making the body rock. He tripped and fell full-length and I waited for him to get up and maybe punch me in the mouth but instead he lay where he had fallen, head pointing toward the embankment, arms stretched out over his head like a diver about to execute, in the exact posture Ray Brower had been in when we found him. I looked wildly at Chris’s feet to make sure his sneakers were still on. Then he began to cry and scream, his body bucking in the muddy water, splashing it around, fists drumming up and down in it, head twisting from side to side. Teddy and Vern were staring at him, agog, because nobody had ever seen Chris Chambers cry. After a moment or two I walked back to the embankment, climbed it, and sat down on one of the rails. Teddy and Vern followed me. And we sat there in the rain, not talking, looking like those three Monkeys of Virtue they sell in dime-stores and those sleazy gift-shops that always look like they are tottering on the edge of bankruptcy.
28
It was twenty minutes before Chris climbed the embankment to sit down beside us. The clouds had begun to break. Spears of sun came down through the rips. The bushes seemed to have gone three shades darker green in the last forty-five minutes. He was mud all the way up one side and down the other. His hair was standing up in muddy spikes. The only clean parts of him were the whitewashed circles around his eyes.
“You’re right, Gordie,” he said. “Nobody gets last dibs. Goocher all around, huh?”
I nodded. Five minutes passed. No one said anything. And I happened to have a thought—just in case they
did
call Bannerman. I went back down the embankment and over to where Chris had been standing. I got down on my knees and began to comb carefully through the water and marshgrass with my fingers.
“What you doing?” Teddy asked, joining me.
“It’s to your left, I think,” Chris said, and pointed.
I looked there and after a minute or two I found both shell casings. They winked in the fresh sunlight. I gave them to Chris. He nodded and stuffed them into a pocket of his jeans.
“Now we go,” Chris said.
“Hey, come
on
!” Teddy yelled, in real agony. “I wanna
take
’im!”
“Listen, dummy,” Chris said, “if we take him back we could all wind up in the reformatory. It’s like Gordie says. Those guys could make up any story they wanted to. What if they said
we
killed him, huh? How would you like that?”
“I don’t give a damn,” Teddy said sulkily. Then he looked at us with absurd hope. “Besides, we might only get a couple of months or so. As excessories. I mean, we’re only twelve fuckin years old, they ain’t gonna put us in Shawshank.”
Chris said softly: “You can’t get in the Army if you got a record, Teddy.”
I was pretty sure that was nothing but a bald-faced lie—but somehow this didn’t seem the time to say so. Teddy just looked at Chris for a long time, his mouth trembling. Finally he managed to squeak out: “No shit?”
“Ask Gordie.”
He looked at me hopefully.
“He’s right,” I said, feeling like a great big turd. “He’s right, Teddy. First thing they do when you volunteer is to check your name through R&I.”
“Holy
God
!”
“We’re gonna shag ass back to the trestle,” Chris said.
“Then we’ll get off the tracks and come into Castle Rock from the other direction. If people ask where we were, we’ll say we went campin up on Brickyard Hill and got lost.”
“Milo Pressman knows better,” I said. “That creep at the Florida Market does, too.”
“Well, we’ll say Milo scared us and that’s when we decided to go up on the Brickyard.”
I nodded. That might work. If Vern and Teddy could remember to stick to it.
“What about if our folks get together?” Vern asked.
“You worry about it if you want,” Chris said. “My dad’ll still be juiced up.”
“Come on, then,” Vern said, eyeing the screen of trees between us and the Back Harlow Road. He looked like he expected Bannerman, along with a brace of bloodhounds, to come crashing through at any moment. “Let’s get while the gettin’s good.”
We were all on our feet now, ready to go. The birds were singing like crazy, pleased with the rain and the shine and the worms and just about everything in the world, I guess. We all turned around, as if pulled on strings, and looked back at Ray Brower.
He was lying there, alone again. His arms had flopped out when we turned him over and now he was sort of spreadeagled, as if to welcome the sunshine. For a moment it seemed all right, a more natural deathscene than any ever constructed for a viewing-room audience by a mortician. Then you saw the bruise, the caked blood on the chin and under the nose, and the way the corpse was beginning to bloat. You saw that the bluebottles had come out with the sun and that they were circling the body, buzzing indolently. You remembered that gassy smell, sickish but dry, like farts in a closed room. He was a boy our age, he was dead, and I rejected the idea that anything about it could be natural; I pushed it away with horror.
“Okay,” Chris said, and he meant to be brisk but his voice came out of his throat like a handful of dry bristles from an old whiskbroom. “Double-time.”
We started to almost-trot back the way we had come. We didn’t talk. I don’t know about the others, but I was too busy thinking to talk. There were things that bothered me about the body of Ray Brower—they bothered me then and they bother me now.
A bad bruise on the side of his face, a scalp laceration, a bloody nose. No more-at least, no more visible. People walk away from bar-fights in worse condition and go right on drinking. Yet the train
must
have hit him; why else would his sneakers be off his feet that way? And how come the engineer hadn’t seen him? Could it be that the train had hit him hard enough to toss him but not to kill him? I thought that, under just the right combination of circumstances, that could have happened. Had the train hit him a hefty, teeth-rattling side-swipe as he tried to get out of the way? Hit him and knocked him in a flying, backwards somersault over that caved-in banking? Had he perhaps lain awake and trembling in the dark for hours, not just lost now but disoriented as well, cut off from the world? Maybe he had died of fear. A bird with crushed tailfeathers once died in my cupped hands in just that way. Its body trembled and vibrated lightly, its beak opened and closed, its dark, bright eyes stared up at me. Then the vibration quit, the beak froze half-open and the black eyes became lackluster and uncaring. It could have been that way with Ray Brower. He could have died because he was simply too frightened to go on living.
But there was another thing, and that bothered me most of all, I think. He had started off to go berrying. I seemed to remember the news reports saying he’d been carrying a pot to put his berries in. When we got back I went to the library and looked it up in the newspapers just to be sure, and I was right. He’d been berrying, and he’d had a pail, or a pot—something like that. But we hadn’t found it. We found him, and we found his sneakers. He must have thrown it away somewhere between Chamberlain and the boggy patch of ground in Harlow where he died. He perhaps clutched it even tighter at first, as though it linked him to home and safety. But as his fear grew, and with it that sense of being utterly alone, with no chance of rescue except for whatever he could do by himself, as the real cold terror set in, he maybe threw it away into the woods on one side of the tracks or the other, hardly even noticing it was gone.
I’ve thought of going back and looking for it—how does that strike you for morbid? I’ve thought of driving to the end of the Back Harlow Road in my almost new Ford van and getting out of it some bright summer morning, all by myself, my wife and children far off in another world where, if you turn a switch, lights come on in the dark. I’ve thought about how it would be. Pulling my pack out of the back and resting it on the customized van’s rear bumper while I carefully remove my shirt and tie it around my waist. Rubbing my chest and shoulders with Muskol insect repellent and then crashing through the woods to where that boggy place was, the place where we found him. Would the grass grow up yellow there, in the shape of his body? Of course not, there would be no sign, but still you wonder, and you realize what a thin film there is between your rational man costume—the writer with leather elbow-patches on his corduroy jacket—and the capering, Gorgon myths of childhood. Then climbing the embankment, now overgrown with weeds, and walking slowly beside the rusted tracks and rotted ties toward Chamberlain.
Stupid fantasy. An expedition looking for a twenty-year-old blueberry bucket, which was probably cast deep into the woods or plowed under by a bulldozer readying a half-acre plot for a tract house or so deeply overgrown by weeds and brambles it had become invisible. But I feel sure it is still there, somewhere along the old discontinued GS&WM line, and at times the urge to go and look is almost a frenzy. It usually comes early in the morning, when my wife is showering and the kids are watching
Batman
and
Scooby-Doo
on channel 38 out of Boston, and I am feeling the most like the pre-adolescent Gordon Lachance that once strode the earth, walking and talking and occasionally crawling on his belly like a reptile. That boy was
me,
I think. And the thought which follows, chilling me like a dash of cold water, is:
Which boy do you mean?
Sipping a cup of tea, looking at sun slanting through the kitchen windows, hearing the TV from one end of the house and the shower from the other, feeling the pulse behind my eyes that means I got through one beer too many the night before, I feel sure I could find it. I would see clear metal winking through rust, the bright summer sun reflecting it back to my eyes. I would go down the side of the embankment, push aside the grasses that had grown up and twined toughly around its handle, and then I would ... what? Why, simply pull it out of time. I would turn it over and over in my hands, wondering at the feel of it, marvelling at the knowledge that the last person to touch it had been long years in his grave. Suppose there was a note in it?
Help me, I’m lost.
Of course there wouldn’t be—boys don’t go out to pick blueberries with paper and pencil—but just suppose. I imagine the awe I’d feel would be as dark as an eclipse. Still, it’s mostly just the idea of holding that pail in my two hands, I guess—as much a symbol of my living as his dying, proof that I really do know which boy it was—which boy of the five of us. Holding it. Reading every year in its cake of rust and the fading of its bright shine. Feeling it, trying to understand the suns that shone on it, the rains that fell on it, and the snows that covered it. And to wonder where I was when each thing happened to it in its lonely place, where I was, what I was doing, who I was loving, how I was getting along, where I was. I’d hold it, read it, feel it ... and look at my own face in whatever reflection might be left. Can you dig it?