“You stop messing around,” he said softly, “or I’m going to change your face.” He went out. Everybody was looking at me and I wanted to sink right down through the floor until I saw there was a kind of grudging admiration on most of their faces. So I brushed myself off, unconcerned, and put another dime in the pinball machine. The TILT light went out.
A couple of guys came over and clapped me on the back before they went out, not saying anything.
At eleven, when the place closed, Billy offered me a ride home.
“You’re going to take a fall if you don’t watch out.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
Two or three nights later Betsy came in by herself around seven. There was one other kid there, this weird little four-eyes named Vern Tessio, who flunked out of school a couple of years before. I hardly noticed him. He was even more invisible than I was.
She came right over to where I was shooting, close enough so I could smell the cleansoap smell on her skin. It made me feel dizzy.
“I heard about what Ace did to you,” she said. “I’m not supposed to talk to you anymore and I’m not going to, but I’ve got something to make it all better.” She kissed me. Then she went out, before I could even get my tongue down from the roof of my mouth. I went back to my game in a daze. I didn’t even see Tessio when he went out to spread the word. I couldn’t see anything but her dark, dark eyes.
So later that night I ended up in the parking lot with Ace Merrill, and he beat the living Jesus out of me. It was cold, bitterly cold, and at the end I began to sob, not caring who was watching or listening, which by then was everybody. The single sodium arc lamp looked down on all of it mercilessly. I didn’t even land a punch on him.
“Okay,” he said, squatting down next to me. He wasn’t even breathing hard. He took a switchblade out of his pocket and pressed the chrome button. Seven inches of moon-drenched silver sprang into the world. “This is what you get next time. I’ll carve my name on your balls.” Then he got up, gave me one last kick, and left. I just lay there for maybe ten minutes, shivering on the hard-packed dirt. No one came to help me up or pat me on the back, not even Bill. Betsy didn’t show up to make it all better.
Finally I got up by myself and hitchhiked home. I told Mrs. Hollis I’d hitched a ride with a drunk and he drove off the road. I never went back to the bowling alley again.
I understand that Ace dropped Betsy not long after, and from then on she went downhill at a rapidly increasing rate of speed—like a pulp truck with no brakes. She picked up a case of the clap on the way. Billy said he saw her one night in the Manor up in Lewiston, hustling guys for drinks. She had lost most of her teeth, and her nose had been broken somewhere along the line, he said. He said I would never recognize her. By then I didn’t much care one way or the other.
The pickup had no snow tires, and before we got to the Lewiston exit I had begun to skid around in the new powder. It took us over forty-five minutes to make the twenty-two miles.
The man at the Lewiston exit point took my toll card and my sixty cents. “Slippery traveling?” Neither of us answered him. We were getting close to where we wanted to go now. If I hadn’t had that odd kind of wordless contact with her, I would have been able to tell just by the way she sat on the dusty seat of the pickup, her hands folded tightly over her purse, those eyes fixed straight ahead on the road with fierce intensity. I felt a shudder work through me.
We took Route I36. There weren’t many cars on the road; the wind was freshening and the snow was coming down harder than ever. On the other side of Harlow Village we passed a big Buick Riviera that had slewed around sideways and climbed the curb. Its four-way flashers were going and I had a ghostly double image of Norman Blanchette’s Impala. It would be drifted in with snow now, nothing but a ghostly lump in the darkness.
The Buick’s driver tried to flag me down but I went by him without slowing, spraying him with slush. My wipers were clogging with snow and I reached out and snapped at the one on my side. Some of the snow loosened and I could see a little better.
Harlow was a ghost town, everything dark and closed. I signaled right to go over the bridge into Castle Rock. The rear wheels wanted to slide out from under me, but I handled the skid. Up ahead and across the river I could see the dark shadow that was the Castle Rock Youth League building. It looked shut up and lonely. I felt suddenly sorry, sorry that there had been so much pain. And death. That was when Nona spoke for the first time since the Gardiner exit.
“There’s a policeman behind you.”
“Is he—?”
“No. His flasher is off.” But it made me nervous and maybe that’s why it happened. Route I36 makes a ninetydegree turn on the Harlow side of the river and then it’s straight across the bridge into Castle Rock. I made the first turn, but there was ice on the Rock side.
‘ ‘Damn—” The rear end of the truck flirted around and before I could steer clear, it had smashed into one of the heavy steel bridge stanchions. We went sliding all the way around like kids on a Flexible Flyer, and the next thing I saw was the bright headlights of the police car behind us. He put on his brakes—I could see the red reflections in the falling snow—but the ice got him, too.
He plowed right into us. There was a grinding, jarring shock as we went into the supporting girders again. I was jolted into Nona’s lap, and even in that confused split second I had time to relish the smooth firmness of her thigh. Then everything stopped. Now the cop had his flasher on. It sent blue, revolving shadows chasing across the hood of the truck and the snowy steel crosswork of the Harlow-Castle Rock bridge. The dome light inside the cruiser came on as the cop got out.
If he hadn’t been behind us it wouldn’t have happened. That thought was playing over and over in my mind, like a phonograph needle stuck in a single flawed groove. I was grinning a strained, frozen grin into the dark as I groped on the floor of the truck’s cab for something to hit him with.
There was an open toolbox. I came up with a socket wrench and laid it on the seat between Nona and me. The cop leaned in the window, his face changing like a devil’s in the light from his flasher.
“Traveling a little fast for the conditions, weren’t you, guy?”
“Following a little close, weren’t you?” I asked. “For the conditions?” He might have flushed. It was hard to tell in the flickering light.
“Are you lipping off to me, son?”
“I am if you’re trying to pin the dents in your cruiser on me.”
“Let’s see your driver’s license and your registration.” I got out my wallet and handed him my license.
“Registration?”
“It’s my brother’s truck. He carries the registration in his wallet.”
“That right?” He looked at me hard, trying to stare me down. When he saw it would take a while, he looked past me at Nona. I could have ripped his eyes out for what I saw in them.
“What’s your name?”
“Cheryl Craig, sir.”
“What are you doing riding around in his brother’s pickup in the middle of a snowstorm, Cheryl?”
“We’re going to see my uncle.”
“In the Rock.”
“That’s right, yes.”
“I don’t know any Craigs in Castle Rock.”
“His name is Emonds. On Bowen Hill.”
“That right?” He walked around to the back of the truck to look at the plate. I opened the door and leaned out. Hfe was writing it down. He came back while I was still leaning out, spotlighted from the waist up in the glare of his headlights. “I’m going to… What’s that all over you, boy?” I didn’t have to look down to know what was all over me. I used to think that leaning out like that was just absentmindedness, but writing all of this has changed my mind. I don’t think it was absentminded at all. I think I wanted him to see it. I held on to the socket wrench.