this was supposed to mean. You don’t hitchhike your way to a thing like that, maybe.
And maybe we thought it was also right that it should have turned out to be harder than
we had expected. Events surrounding our hike had turned it into what we had suspected it
was all along: serious business.
What we didn’t know as we walked around The Bluffs was that Billy Tessio, Charlie
Hogan, Jack Mudgett, Norman ‘Fuzzy’ Brackowicz, Vince Desjardins, Chris’s older
brother Eyeball, and Ace Merrill himself were all on their way to take a look at the body
themselves — in a weird kind of way, Ray Brower had become famous, and our secret
had turned into a regular roadshow. They were piling into Ace’s chopped and channelled
’52 Ford and Vince’s pink ’54 Studebaker even as we started on the last leg of our trip.
Billy and Charlie had managed to keep their enormous secret for just about twenty-
four hours. Then Charlie spilled it to Ace while they were shooting pool, and Billy had
spilled it to Jack Mudgett while they were fishing for steelies from the Boom Road
bridge. Both Ace and Jack had sworn solemnly on their mothers’ names to keep the
secret, and that was how everybody in their gang knew about it by noon. Guess you could
tell what those assholes thought about their mothers.
They all congregated down at the pool hall, and Fuzzy Brackowicz advanced a theory
(which you have heard before, Gentle Reader) that they could all become heroes – not to
mention instant radio and TV personalities – by ‘discovering’ the body. All they had to do,
Fuzzy maintained, was to take two cars with a lot of fishing gear in the trunks. After they
found the body, their story would be a hundred per cent. We was just plannin’ to take a
few pickerel out of the Royal River, officer. Heh-heh-heh. Look what we found.
They were burning up the road from Castle Rock to the Back Harlow area just as we
started to finally get close.
25
Clouds began to build in the sky around two o’clock, but at first none of us took them
seriously. It hadn’t rained since the early days of July, so why should it rain now? But they
kept building to the south of us, up and up and up, thunderheads in great pillars as purple
as bruises, and they began to move slowly our way. I looked at them closely, checking for
that membrane beneath that means it’s already raining twenty miles away, or fifty. But
there was no rain yet. The clouds were still just building.
Vern got a blister on his heel and we stopped and rested while he packed the back of
his left sneaker with moss stripped from the bark of an old oak tree.
‘Is it gonna rain, Gordie?’ Teddy asked.
‘I think so.’
‘Pisser!’ he said, and sighed. ‘The pisser good end to a pisser good day.’
I laughed and he tipped me a wink.
We started to walk again, a little more slowly now out of respect for Vern’s hurt foot.
And in the hour between two and three, the quality of the day’s light began to change, and
we knew for sure that rain was coming. It was just as hot as ever, and even more humid,
but we knew. And the birds did. They seemed to appear from nowhere and swoop across
the sky, chattering and crying shrilly to each other. And the light. From a steady, beating
brightness it seemed to evolve into something filtered, almost pearly. Our shadows, which
had begun to grow long again, also grew fuzzy and ill-defined. The sun had begun to sail
in and out through the thickening decks of clouds, and the southern sky had gone a copper
shade. We watched the thunderheads lumber closer, fascinated by their size and their
mute threat. Every now and then it seemed that a giant flashbulb had gone off inside one
of them, turning their purplish, bruised colour momentarily to a light grey. I saw a jagged
fork of lightning lick down from the underside of the closest. It was bright enough to print
a blue tattoo on my retinas. It was followed by a long, shaking blast of thunder.
We did a little bitching about how we were going to get caught out in the rain, but only
because it was the expected thing – of course we were all looking forward to it. It would
be cold and refreshing … and leech-free.
At a little past three-thirty, we saw running water through a break in the trees.
“That’s it!’ Chris yelled jubilantly. That’s the Royal!’
We began to walk faster, taking our second wind. The storm was getting close now.
The air began to stir, and it seemed that the temperature dropped ten degrees in a space of
seconds. I looked down and saw that my shadow had disappeared entirely.
We were walking in pairs again, each two watching a side of the railroad embankment.
My mouth was dry, throbbing with a sickish tension. The sun sailed behind another
cloudbank and this time it didn’t come back out. For a moment the bank’s edges were
embroidered with gold, like a cloud hi an Old Testament Bible illustration, and then the
wine-coloured, dragging belly of the thunderhead blotted out all traces of the sun. The
day became gloomy – the clouds were rapidly eating up the last of the blue. We could
smell the river so clearly that we might have been horses – or perhaps it was the smell of
rain impending in the air as well. There was an ocean above us, held in by a thin sac that
might rupture and let down a flood at any second.
I kept trying to look into the underbrush, but my eyes were continually drawn back to
that turbulent, racing sky; in its deepening colours you could read whatever doom you
liked: water, fire, wind, hail. The cool breeze became more insistent, hissing in the firs. A
sudden impossible bolt of lightning flashed down, seemingly from directly overhead,
making me cry out and clap my hands to my eyes. God had taken my picture, a little kid
with his shirt tied around his waist, duckbumps on his bare chest and cinders on his
cheeks. I heard the rending fall of some big tree not sixty yards away. The crack of
thunder which followed made me cringe. I wanted to be at home reading a good book in a
safe place … like down in the potato cellar.
‘Jeezis!’ Vern screamed in a high, fainting voice. ‘Oh my Jeezis Chrise, lookit that!’
I looked in the direction Vern was pointing and saw a blue-white fireball bowling its
way up the lefthand rail of the GS&WM tracks, crackling and hissing for all the world
like a scalded cat. It hurried past us as we turned to watch it go, dumbfounded, aware for
the first time that such things could exist. Twenty feet beyond us it made a sudden -pop!!
— and just disappeared, leaving a greasy smell of ozone behind.
‘What am I doin’ here, anyway?’ Teddy muttered.
‘What a pisser!’ Chris exclaimed happily, his face upturned. This is gonna be a pisser
like you wouldn’t believer But I was with Teddy. Looking up at that sky gave me a
dismaying sense of vertigo. It was more like looking into some deeply mysterious
marbled gorge. Another lightning-bolt crashed down, making us duck. This time the ozone smell was hotter, more urgent. The following clap of thunder came with no
perceptible pause at all.
My ears were still ringing from it when Vern began to screech triumphantly: ‘THERE!
THERE HE IS! RIGHT THERE! I SEE HIM?
I can see Vern right this minute, if I want to – all I have to do is sit back for a minute
and close my eyes. He’s standing there on the lefthand rail like an explorer on the prow of
his ship, one hand shielding his eyes from the silver stroke of lightning that has just come
down, the other extended and pointing.
We ran up beside him and looked. I was thinking to myself: Vern’s imagination just
ran away with him, that’s all. The suckers, the heat, now this storm … his eyes are dealing
wild cards, that’s all. But that wasn’t what it was, although there was a split second when I
wanted it to be. In that split second I knew I never wanted to see a corpse, not even a
runover woodchuck.
In the place where we were standing, early spring rains had washed part of the
embankment away, leaving a gravelly, uncertain four-foot drop-off. The railroad
maintenance crews either not yet gotten around to it in their yellow diesel-operated repair
carts, or it had happened so recently it hadn’t yet been reported. At the bottom of this
washout was a marshy, mucky tangle of undergrowth that smelled bad. And sticking out