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 like 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. Every 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.