THE BODY

1

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get

ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless

when they were In your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But

it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your

secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away.

And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a

funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so

important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When

the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding

ear.

I was twelve going on thirteen when I first saw a dead human being. It happened in 1960,

a long time ago ... although sometimes it doesn't seem that long to me. Especially on the

nights I wake up from those dreams where the hall fell into his open eyes.

2

We had a treehouse in a big elm which overhung a vacant lot in Castle Rock. There's a

moving company on that lot today, and the elm is gone. Progress. It was a sort of social

club, although it had no name. There were five, maybe six steady guys and some other

wet ends who just hung around. We'd let them come up when there was a card game and

we needed some fresh blood. The game was usually blackjack and we played for pennies,

nickel limit But you got double money on blackjack and five-card-under ... triple money

on six-card-under, although Teddy was the only guy crazy enough to go

for that.

The sides of the treehouse were planks scavenged from the shitpile behind Makey

Lumber & Building Supply on Carbine Road - they were splintery and full of knotholes

we plugged with either toilet paper or paper towels. The roof was a corrugated tin sheet

we hawked from the dump, looking over our shoulders all the time we were hustling it

out of there, because the dump custodian's dog was supposed to be a real kid-eating

monster. We found a screen door out there on the same day. It was flyproof but really

rusty -1 mean, that rust was extreme. No matter what time of day you looked out that

screen door, it looked like sunset

Besides playing cards, the club was a good place to go and smoke cigarettes and look at

girly books. There were half a dozen battered tin ashtrays that said CAMELS on the

bottom, a lot of centrefolds tacked to the splintery wails, twenty or thirty dog-eared packs

of Bike cards (Teddy got them from his uncle, who ran the Castle Rock Stationery

Shoppe - when Teddy's unc asked him one day what kind of cards we played, Teddy said

we had cribbage tournaments and Teddy's unc thought that was just fine), a set of plastic

poker chips, and a pile of ancient Master Detective murder magazines to leaf through if

there was nothing else shaking. We also built a 12" x 10" secret compartment under the

floor to hide most of this stuff in on the rare occasions when some kid's father decided it

was time to do the We're Really Good Pals routine. When it rained, being in the club was

like being inside a Jamaican steel drum ... but that summer there had been no rain.

It had been the driest and hottest since 1907 - or so the newspapers said, and on that

Friday preceding the Labour Day weekend and the start of another school year, even the

goldenrod in the fields and the ditches beside the backroads looked parched and poorly.

Nobody's garden had done doodly-squat that year, and the big displays of canning stuff in

the Castle Rock Red & White were still there, gathering dust. No one had anything to put

up that summer, except mavbe dandelion wine.

Teddy and Chris and I were up in the club on that Friday morning, glooming to each

other about school being so near and playing cards and swapping the same old travelling

salesman jokes and Frenchman jokes. How do you know when a Frenchman's been in

your back yard? Well, your garbage cans are empty and your dog is pregnant. Teddy

would try to look offended, but he was the first one to bring in a joke as soon as he heard

it, only switching Frenchman to Polack.

The elm gave good shade, but we already had our shirts off so we wouldn't sweat them

up too bad. We were playing three-penny-scat, the dullest card game ever invented, but it

was too hot to think about anything more complicated. We'd had a pretty fair scratch

ballteam until the middle of August and then a lot of kids just drifted away. Too hot

I was down to my ride and building spades. I'd started with thirteen, gotten an eight to

make twenty-one, and nothing had happened since then. Chris knocked. I took my last

draw and got nothing helpful.

Twenty-nine,' Chris said, laying down diamonds.

Twenty-two,' Teddy said, looking disgusted.

'Piss up a rope,' I said, and tossed my cards onto the table face-down.

'Gordie's out, ole Gordie just bit the bag and stepped out the door,' Teddy bugled, and

then gave out with his patented Teddy Duchamp laugh - Eeee-eee-eee, like a rusty nail

being slowly hauled out of a rotten board. Well, he was weird; we all knew it. Close to

being thirteen tike the rest of us, the thick glasses and the hearing aid he wore sometimes

made him look like an old man. Kids were always trying to cadge smokes off him on the

street, but the bulge in his shirt was just his hearing aid battery.

In spite of the glasses and the flesh-coloured button always screwed into his ear, Teddy

couldn't see very well and often misunderstood the things people said to him. In baseball

you had to have him play the fences, way beyond Chris in left field and Billy Greer in

right. You just hoped no one would hit one that far because Teddy would go grimly after

it, see it or not. Everv now and then he got bonked a good one, and once he went out cold

when he ran full tilt boogie into the fence by the treehouse. He lay there on his back with

his eyes showing whites for almost five minutes, and I got scared. Then he woke up and

walked around with a bloody nose and a huge purple lump rising on his forehead, trying

to claim that the ball was foul.

His eyesight was just naturally bad, but there was nothing natural about what had

happened to his ears. Back in those days, when it was cool to get your hair cut so that

your ears stuck out like a couple of jug-handles, Teddy had Castle Rock's first Beatle

haircut - four years before anyone in America had even heard of the Beatles. He kept his

ears covered because they looked like two lumps of warm wax.

One day when he was eight, Teddy's father got pissed at him for breaking a plate. His

mother was working at the shoe factory in South Paris when it happened and by the time

she found out about it, everything had happened.

Teddy's dad took Teddy over to the big woodstove at the back of the kitchen and shoved

the side of Teddy's head down against one of the cast-iron burner plates. He held it down

there for about ten seconds. Then he yanked Teddy up by the hair and did the other side.

Then he called the Central Maine General Emergency Unit and told them to come get his

boy. Then he hung up the phone, went into the closet, got his four-ten, and sat down to

watch the daytime stories on TV with the shotgun laid across his knees. When Mrs

Burroughs from next door came over to ask if Teddy was all right - she'd heard the

screaming - Teddy's dad pointed the shotgun at her. Mrs Burroughs went out of the

Duchamp house at roughly the speed of light, locked herself into her own house, and

called the police. When the ambulance came, Mr Duchamp let the orderlies in and then

went out on the back porch to stand guard while they wheeled Teddy to the old portholed

Buick ambulance on a stretcher.

Teddy's dad explained to the orderlies that while the fucking brass hats said the area was

clear, there were still Kraut snipers everywhere. One of the orderlies asked Teddy's Had

if he thought he could hold on. Teddy's dad smiled Frigidaire dealership, if that's what it

took. The orderly saluted, and Teddy's dad snapped it right back at him. A few minutes

after the ambulance left, the state police arrived and relieved Norman Duchamp of duty.

He'd been doing odd things like shooting cats and lighting fires in mailboxes for over a

year, and after the atrocity he had visited upon his son, they had a quick hearing and sent

him to Togus, which is a special sort of V.A. hospital. Togus is where you have to go if

you're a section eight. Teddy's dad had stormed the beach at Normandy, and that's just the

way Teddy always put it. Teddy was proud of his old man in spite of what his old man

had done to him, and Teddy went with his mom to visit him every week.

He was the dumbest guy we hung around with, I guess, and he was crazy. He'd take the

craziest chances you can imagine, and get away with them. His big thing was what he

called Truck Dodging. He'd run out in front of them on 196 and sometimes they'd miss

him by bare inches. God knew how many heart attacks he'd caused, and he'd be laughing

while the windblast from the passing truck rippled his clothes. It scared us because his

vision was so lousy. Coke-bottle glasses or not. It seemed like only a matter of time

before he misjudged one of those trucks. And you had to be careful what you dared him,

because Teddy would do anything on a dare.

'Gordie's out, eeeeee-eee-eee!'

'Screw,' I said, and picked up a Master Detective to read while they played it out. I turned

to 'He Stomped the Pretty Co-Ed to Death in a Stalled Elevator' and got right into it.

Teddy picked up the cards, gave them one brief look, and said: 'I knock.'

'You four-eyed pile of shit!' Chris cried.

'The pile of shit has a thousand eyes,' Teddy said seriously, and both Chris and I cracked

up. Teddy stared at us with a slight frown, as if wondering what had gotten us laughing.

That was another thing about the cat - he was always coming out with weird stuff like

"The pile of shit has a thousand eyes', and you could never be sure if he meant it to he

funnv or if it just happened that way. He'd look at the people who were laughing with that

slight frown on his face, as if to say O Lord what is it this time?

Teddy had a natural thirty - jack, queen, and king of clubs. Chris had only sixteen and

went down to his ride.

Teddy was shuffling the cards in his clumsy way and I was just getting to the gooshy part

of the murder story, where this deranged sailor from New Orleans was doing the Bristol

Stomp all over this college girl from Bryn Mawr because he couldn't stand being in

closed-in spaces, when we heard someone coming fast up the ladder nailed to the side of

the elm. A fist rapped on the underside of the trapdoor.

'Who goes?' Chris yelled.

'Vern!' He sounded excited and out of breath.

I went to the trapdoor and pulled the bolt. The trapdoor banged up and Vern Tessio, one

of the other regulars, pulled himself into the clubhouse. He was sweating buckets and his

hair, which he usually kept combed in a perfect imitation of his rock and roll idol, Bobby

Rydell, was plastered to his bullet head in chunks and strings.

'Wow, man,' he panted. 'Wait'll you hear this.'

'Hear what?' I asked.

'Lemme get my breath. I ran all the way from my house.'

'/ ran all the way home,' Teddy wavered in a dreadful Little Anthony falsetto, 'just to say

I'm soh-ree -

Tuck your hand, man,' Vern said.

'Drop dead in a shed, Fred,' Teddy returned smartly.

'You ran all the way from your place?' Chris asked unbelievingly. 'Man, you're crazy.'

Vern's house was two miles down Grand Street. 'It must be ninety out there.'

'This is worth it,' Vern said. 'Holy Jeezum. You won't believe this. Sincerely.' He slapped

his sweaty forehead to show us how sincere he was.

'Okay, what?' Chris asked.

'Can you guys camp out tonight?' Vern was looking at us earnestly, excitedly. His eyes

looked like raisins pushed into dark circles of sweat 'I mean, if you tell your folks we're

gonna tent out in my back field?'

'Yeah, I guess so,' Chris said, picking up his new hand and y'know.'

'You got to, man,' Vern said. 'Sincerely. You won't believe this. Can you, Gordie?'

'Probably.'

I was able to do most stuff like that - in fact, I'd been like the Invisible Boy that whole

summer. In April my older brother, Dennis, had been killed in a Jeep accident. That was

at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was in basic. He and another guy were on their way

to the PX and an army truck hit them broadside. Dennis was killed instantly and his

passenger had been in a coma ever since. Dennis would have been twenty later that week.

I'd already picked out a birthday card for him at Dahlie's over in Castle Green.

I cried when I heard, and I cried more at the funeral, and I couldn't believe that Dennis

was gone, that anyone that used to knuckle my head or scare me with a rubber spider

until I cried or give me a kiss when I fell down and scraped both knees bloody and

whisper in my ear, 'Now stop cryin', ya baby!' - that a person who had touched me could

be dead. It hurt me and it scared me that he could be dead ... but it seemed to have taken

all the heart out of my parents. For me, Dennis was hardly more than an acquaintance. He

was eight years older than me if you can dig it, and he had his own friends and

classmates. We ate at the same table for a lot of years, and sometimes he was my friend

and sometimes my tormentor, but mostly he was, you know, just a guy. When he died

he'd been gone for a year except for a couple of furloughs. We didn't even look alike. It

took me a long time after that summer to realize that most of the tears I cried were for my

mom and dad. Fat lot of good it did them, or me.

'So what are you pissing and moaning about, Vern-O?' Teddy asked.

'I knock,' Chris said.

'What?' Teddy screamed, immediately forgetting all about Vern. 'You friggin' liar! You

ain't got to pat hand. I didn't deal you no pat hand.'

Chris smirked. 'Make your draw, shitheap.'

Teddy reached for the top card of the pile of Bikes. Chris reached for the Winstons on the

ledge behind him. I bent over to pick up my detective magazine.

Vern Tessio said: 'You guys want to go see a dead body?'

Everybody stopped.

3

We'd all heard about it on the radio, of course. The radio, a Philco with a cracked case

which had also been scavenged from the dump, played all the time. We kept it tuned to

WLAM in Lewiston, which churned out the super-hits and the boss oldies: 'What in the

World's Come Over You' by Jack Scott and 'This Time' by Troy Shondell and 'King

Creole' by Elvis and 'Only the Lonely' by Roy Orbison. When the news came on we

usually switched some mental dial over to Mute. The news was a lot of happy horseshit

about Kennedy and Nixon and Quemoy and Matsu and the missile gap and what a shit

that Castro was turning out to be after all. But we had all listened to the Ray Brower story

a little more closely, because he was a kid our age.

He was from Chamberlain, a town forty miles or so east of Castle Rock. Three days

before Vern came busting into the clubhouse after a two-mile run up Grand Street, Ray

Brower had gone out with one of his mother's pots to pick blueberries. When dark came

and he still wasn't back, the Browers called the county sheriff and a search started - first

just around the kid's house and then spreading to the surrounding towns of Motton and

Durham and Pownal. Everybody got into the act - cops, deputies, game wardens,

volunteers. But three days later the kid was still missing. You could tell, hearing about it

on the radio, that they were never going to find that poor sucker alive; eventually the

search would just peter away into nothing. He might have gotten smothered in a gravel

pit slide or drowned in a brook, and ten years from now some hunter would find his

bones. They were already dragging the ponds in Chamberlain, and the Motton Reservoir.

Nothing like that could happen in south-western Maine today; most of the area has

become suburbanized, and the bedroom communities surrounding Portland and Lewiston

have spread out like the tentacles of a giant squid. The woods are still there, and they get

heavier as you work your way west towards the White Mountains, but these days if you

can keep your head long enough to walk five miles in one consistent direction, you're

certain to cross two-lane blacktop. But in 1960 the whole area between Chamberlain and

Castle Rock was undeveloped, and there were places that hadn't even been logged since

before World War II. In those days it was still possible to walk into the woods and lose

your direction there and die there.

4

Vern Tessio had been under his porch that morning, digging.

We all understood that right away, but maybe I should take just a minute to explain it to

you. Teddy Duchamp was only about half-bright, but Vern Tessio would never be

spending any of his spare time on Quiz Kids either. Still, his brother Billy was even

dumber, as you will see. But first I have to tell you why Vern was digging under the

porch.

Four years ago, when he was eight, Vern buried a quart jar of pennies under the long

Tessio front porch. Vern called the dark space under the porch his 'cave'. He was playing

a pirate sort of game, and the pennies were buried treasure -only if you were playing

pirate with Vern, you couldn't call it buried treasure, you had to call it 'booty'. So he

buried the jar of pennies deep, filled in the hole, and covered the fresh dirt with some of

the old leaves that had drifted under there over the years. He drew a treasure map which

he put up in his room with the rest of his junk. He forgot all about it for a month or so.

Then, being low on cash for a movie or something, he remembered the pennies and went

to get his map. But his mom had been in to clean two or three times since then, and had

collected all the old homework papers and candy wrappers and comic magazines and

joke books. She burned them in the stove to start the cook-fire one morning, and Vern's

treasure map went right up the kitchen chimney.

Or so he figured it.

He tried to find the spot from memory and dug there. No luck. To the right and the left of

that spot. Still no luck. He gave up for the day but had tried off and on ever since. Four

years, man. Four years. Isn't that a pisser? You didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

It had gotten to be sort of an obsession with him. The Tessio front porch ran the length of

the house, probably forty feet long and seven feet wide. He had dug through damn near

every inch of that area two, maybe three times and no pennies. The number of pennies

began to grow in his mind. When it first happened he told Chris and me that there had

been maybe three dollars' worth. A year later he was up to five and just lately it was

running around ten, more or less, depending on how broke he was.

Every so often we tried to tell him what was so clear to us - that Billy had known about

the jar and dug it up himself. Vern refused to believe it, although he hated Billy like the

Arabs hate the Jews and probably would have cheerfully voted the death penalty on his

brother for shoplifting, if the opportunity had ever presented itself. He also refused to ask

Billy point blank. Probably he was afraid Billy would laugh and say Course I got them,

you stupid pussy, and there was twenty bucks' worth of pennies in that jar and I spent

every fuckin' cent of it. Instead, Vern went out and dug for the pennies whenever the

spirit moved him (and whenever Billy wasn't around). He always crawled out from under

the porch with his jeans dirty and his hair leafy and his hands empty. We ragged him

about it something wicked, and his nickname was Penny - Penny Tessio. I think he came

up to the club with his news as quick as he did not just to get it out but to show us that

some good had finally come of his penny-hunt

He had been up that morning before anybody, ate his cornflakes, and was out in the

driveway shooting baskets through the old hoop nailed up on the garage, nothing much to

do. no one to play Ghost with or anything, and he decided to have another dig for his

pennies. He was under the porch when the screen door slammed up above. He froze, not

making a sound. If it was his dad, he would crawl out; if it was Billy, he'd stay put until

Billy and his jd friend Charlie Hogan had taken off.

Two pairs of footsteps crossed the porch, and then Charlie Hogan himself said in a

trembling, cry-baby voice: 'Jesus Christ, Billy, what are we gonna do?'

Vern said that just hearing Charlie Hogan talk like that -Charlie, who was one of the

toughest kids in town - made him prick up his ears. Charlie, after all, hung out with Ace

Merrill and Eyeball Chambers, and if you hung out with cats like that, you had to be

tough.

'Nuthin',' Billy said. "That's all we're gonna do. Nuthin'.'

'We gotta do somethin'? Charlie said, and they sat down on the porch close to where Vern

was hunkered down. 'Didn't you see him?'

Vern took a chance and crept a little closer to the steps, practically slavering. At that

point he thought that maybe Billy and Charlie had been really drunked up and had run

somebody down. Vern was careful not to crackle any of the old leaves as he moved. If

the two of them found out he was under the porch and had overheard them, you could

have put what was left of him in a Ken-L-Ration dogfood can.

'It's nuthin' to us,' Billy Tessio said. "The kid's dead so it's nuthin' to him, neither. Who

gives a fuck if they ever find him? I don't.'

'It was that kid they been talkin' about on the radio,' Charlie said. 'It was, sure as shit

Brocker, Brower, Flowers, whatever his name is. Fuckin' train must have hit him.'

'Yeah,' Billy said. Sound of a scratched match. Vern saw it flicked into the gravel

driveway and then smelled cigarette smoke. 'It sure did. And you puked.'

No words, but Vern sensed emotional waves of shame radiating off Charlie Hogan.

'Well, the girls didn't see it,' Billy said after a while. 'Lucky break.' From the sound, he

clapped Charlie on the back to buck him up. "They'd blab it from here to Portland. We

tore out of there fast, though. You think they knew there was something wrong?'

'No,' Charlie said, 'Marie don't like to go down that Back Harlow Road past the cemetery,

anyway. She's afraid of ghosts.' Then again in that scared cry-baby voice: 'Jesus, I wish

we'd never boosted no car last night! Just gone to the show like we was gonna!'

Charlie and Billy went with a couple of scags named Marie Daughtery and Beverly

Thomas; you never saw such gross-looking broads outside of a carnival show - pimples,

moustaches, the whole works. Sometimes the four of them -or maybe six or eight if

Fuzzy Brackowicz or Ace Merrill were along with their girls - would boost a car from a

Lewiston parking lot and go joyriding out into the country with two or three bottles of

Wild Irish Rose wine and a six-pack of ginger ale. They'd take the girls parking

somewhere in Castle View or Harlow or Shiloh, drink Purple Jesuses, and make out.

Then they'd dump the car somewhere near home. Cheap thrills in the monkeyhouse, as

Chris sometimes said. They'd never been caught at it, but Vern kept hoping. He really

dug the idea of visiting Billy on Sundays at the reformatory.

'If we told the cops, they'd want to know how we got way the hell out in Harlow,' Billy

said. 'We ain't got no car, neither of us. It's better if we just keep our mouths shut. Then

they can't touch us.'

'We could make a nonnamus call,' Charlie said.

"They trace those fuckin* calls,' Billy said ominously. 'I seen it on Highway Patrol. And

Dragnet.'

'Yeah, right,' Charlie said miserably. 'Jesus. I wish Ace'd been with us. We could have

told the cops we was in his car.'

'Well, he wasn't'

'Yeah,' Charlie said. He sighed. 'I guess you're right' A cigarette butt flicked into the

driveway. 'We hadda walk up and take a piss by the tracks, didn't we? Couldn't walk the

other way, could we? And I got puke on my new Keds.' His voice sank a little. 'Fuckin'

kid was laid right out, you know it? Didja see that sonofawhore, Billy?'

'I seen him,' Billy said, and a second cigarette butt joined the first in the driveway. 'Let's

go see if Ace is up. I want some juice.'

'We gonna tell him?'

'Charlie, we ain't gonna tell nobody. Nobody never. You dig me?'

'I dig you,' Charlie said. 'Chrise-Jesus, I wish we never boosted that fuckin' Dodge.'

'Aw, shut the fuck up and come on.'

Two pairs of legs clad in tight, wash-faded pegged jeans, two pairs of feet in black

engineer boots with side-buckles, came down the steps. Vern froze on his hands and

knees ('My balls crawled up so high I thought they was trine to get back home,' he told

us), sure his brother would sense him beneath the porch and drag him out and kill him -

he and Charlie Hogan would kick the few brains the good Lord had seen fit to give him

right out his jug ears and then stomp him with their engineer boots. But they just kept

going and when Vern was sure they were really gone, he had crawled out from under the

porch and run here.

5

'You're really lucky,' I said. They would have killed you.'

Teddy said, 'I know the Back Harlow Road. It comes to a dead end by the river. We used

to fish for cossies out there.'

Chris nodded. 'There used to be a bridge, but there was a flood. A long time ago. Now

there's just the train-tracks.'

'Could a kid really have gotten all the way from Chamberlain to Harlow?' I asked Chris.

That's twenty or thirty miles.'

'I think so. He probably happened on the train tracks and followed them the whole way.

Maybe he thought they'd take him out, or maybe he thought he could flag down a train if

he had to. But that's just a freight run now - GS&WM up to Derry and Brownsville - and

not many of those anymore. He'd had to've walked all the way to Castle Rock to get out.

After dark a train must have finally come along ... and el smacko.'

Chris drove his right fist down against his left palm, making a flat noise. Teddy, a veteran

of many close calls dodging the pulp-trucks on 196, looked vaguely pleased. I felt a little

sick, imagining the kid so far away from home, scared to death but doggedly following

the GS&WM tracks, probably walking on the ties because of the night-noises from the

overhanging trees and bushes ... maybe even from the culverts underneath the railroad

bed. And here comes the train, and maybe the big headlight on the front hypnotised him

until it was too late to jump. Or maybe he was just lying there on the tracks in a hungerfaint

when the train came along. Either way, any way, Chris had the straight of it: el

smacko had been the final result. The kid was dead.

'So anyway, you want to go see it?' Vern asked. He was squirming around like he had to

go to the bathroom he was so excited.

We all looked at him for a long second, no one saying anything. Then Chris tossed his

cards down and said, 'Sure! And I bet you anything we get our pictures in the paper!'

'Huh?' Vern said.

'Yeah?' Teddy said, and grinned his crazy truck-dodging grin.

'Look,' Chris said, leaning across the ratty card-table. 'We can find the body and report it!

Well be on the news!'

'I dunno,' Vern said, obviously taken aback. 'Billy will know where I found out. He'll beat

the living shit outta me.'

'No he won't,' I said, 'because it'll be us guys that find that kid, not Billy and Charlie

Hogan in a boosted car. Then they won't have to worry about it anymore. They'll

probably pin a medal on you, Penny.'

'Yeah?' Vern grinned, showing his bad teeth. It was a dazed sort of grin, as if the thought

of Billy being pleased with anything he did had acted on him like a hard shot to the chin.

'Yeah, you think so?'

Teddy was grinning, too. Then he frowned and said, 'Oh-oh.'

'What?' Vern asked. He was squirming again, afraid that some really basic objection to

the idea had just cropped up in Teddy's mind ... or what passed for Teddy's mind.

'Our folks,' Teddy said. 'If we find that kid's body over in South Harlow tomorrow,

they're gonna know we didn't spend the night campin* out in Vern's back field.'

'Yeah,' Chris said. They'll know we went lookin' for that kid.'

'No they won't,' I said. I felt funny - both excited and scared because I knew we could do

it and get away with it. The mixture of emotions made me feel heatsick and headachey. I

picked up the Bikes to have something to do with my hands and started box-shuffling

them. That and how to play cribbage was about all I got for older brother stuff from

Dennis. The other kids envied that shuffle, and I guess everyone I knew had asked me to

show them how it went... everyone except Chris. I guess only Chris knew that showing

someone would be like giving away a piece of Dennis, and I just didn't have so much of

him that I could afford to pass pieces around.

I said: 'We'll just tell 'em we got bored tenting in Vern's field because we've done it so

many times before. So we decided to hike up the tracks and have a campout in the woods.

I bet we don't even get hided for it because everybody'll be so excited about what we

found.'

'My dad'll hide me anyway,' Chris said. 'He's on a really mean streak this time.' He shook

his head sullenly. To hell, it's worth a hiding.'

'Okay,' Teddy said, getting up. He was still grinning like crazy, ready to break into his

high-pitched, cackling laugh at any second. 'Let's all get together at Vern's house after

lunch. What can we tell 'em about supper?'

Chris said, 'You and me and Gordie can say we're eating at Vern's.'

'And I'll tell my mom I'm eating over at Chris's,' Vern said.

That would work unless there was some emergency we couldn't control or unless any of

the parents got together. And neither Vern's folks or Chris's had a phone. Back then there

were a lot of families which still considered a telephone a luxury, especially families of

the shirttail variety. And none of us came from the upper crust.

My day was retired. Vern's dad worked in the mill and was still driving a 1952 DeSoto.

Teddy's mom had a house on Danberry Street and she took in a boarder whenever she

could get one. She didn't have one that summer; the FURNISHED ROOM TO LET sign

had been up in the parlour window since June. And Chris's dad was always on a 'mean

streak', more or less; he was a drunk who got welfare off and on - mostly on - and spent

most of his time hanging out in Sukey's Tavern with Junior Merrill, Ace Merrill's old

man, and a couple of other local rumpots.

Chris didn't talk much about his dad, but we all knew he hated him like poison. Chris was

marked up every two weeks or so, bruises on his cheeks and neck or one eye swelled up

and as colourful as a sunset, and once he came into school with a big clumsy bandage on

the back of his head. Other times he never got to school at all. His mom would call him in

sick because he was too lamed up to come in. Chris was smart, really smart, but he

played truant a lot, and Mr Halliburton, the town truant officer, was always showing up at

Chris's house, driving his old black Chevrolet with the NO RIDERS sticker in the corner

of the windshield. If Chris was being truant and Bertie (as we called him - always behind

his back, of course) caught him, he would haul him back to school and see that Chris got

detention for a week. But if Bertie found out that Chris was home because his father had

beaten the shit out of him, Bertie just went away and didn't say boo to a cuckoo-bird. It

never occurred to me to question this set of priorities until about twenty years later.

The year before, Chris had been suspended from school for two weeks. A bunch of milkmoney

disappeared when it was Chris's turn to be room-monitor and collect it, and

because he was a Chambers from those no-account Chamberses, he had to take a walk

even though he always swore he never hawked that money. That was the time Mr

Chambers put Chris in the hospital for an overnight stay, when his dad heard Chris was

suspended, he broke Chris's nose and his right wrist. Chris came from a bad family, all

right, and everybody thought he would turn out bad ... including Chris. His brothers had

lived up to the town's expectations admirably. Dave, the eldest, ran away from home

when he was seventeen, joined the Navy, and ended up doing a long stretch in

Portsmouth for rape and criminal assault. The next-eldest, Richard (his right eye was all

funny and jittery, which was why everybody called him Eyeball), had dropped out of

high school in the tenth grade, and chummed around with Charlie and Billy Tessio and

their jd buddies.

'I think all that'll work,' I told Chris. 'What about John and Marty?' John and Marty

DeSpain were two other members of our regular gang.

'They're still away,' Chris said. 'They won't be back until Monday.'

'Oh. That's too bad.'

'So are we set?' Vern asked, still squirming. He didn't want the conversation sidetracked

even for a minute.

'I guess we are,' Chris said. 'Who wants to play some more scat?'

No one did. We were too excited to play cards. We climbed down from the treehouse,

climbed the fence into the vacant lot, and played three-flies-six-grounders for a while

with Vein's old friction-taped baseball, but that was no fun, either. All we could think

about was that kid Brower, hit by a train, and how we were going to see him, or what was

left of him. Around ten o'clock we all drifted away home to fix it with our parents.

6

I got to my house at quarter to eleven, after stopping at the drugstore to check out the

paperbacks. I did that every couple of days to see if there were any new John D

MacDonalds. I had a quarter and I figured if there was, I'd take it along. But there were

only the old ones, and I'd read most of those half a dozen times.

When I got home the car was gone and I remembered that my mom and some of her henparty

friends had gone to Boston to see a co
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