ended up banging on his hip. His eyes were sparkling.
‘Gordie! You wanna see something?’
‘Sure, I guess so. What?’
‘Come on down here first.’ He pointed at the narrow space between the Blue
Point Diner and the Castle Rock Drug Store.
‘What is it, Chris?’
‘Come on, I said!’
He ran down the alley and after a brief moment (that’s all it took me to cast
aside my better judgment) I ran after him. The two buildings were set slightly towards each other rather than running parallel, and so the alley narrowed as it went back. We waded through trashy drifts of old newspapers and stepped over cruel, sparkly nests of broken beer and soda bottles. Chris cut behind the Blue Point and put his bedroll
down. There were eight or nine garbage cans lined up here and the stench was
incredible.
‘Phew! Christ Come on, gimme a break!’
‘Gimme your arm,’ Chris said, by rote.
‘No, sincerely, I’m gonna throw u -‘
The words broke off in my mouth and I forgot all about the smelly garbage
cans. Chris had unslung his pack and opened it and reached inside. Now he was
holding out a huge pistol with dark wood grips.
‘You wanna be the Lone Ranger or the Cisco Kid?’ Chris asked, grinning.
‘Walking, talking Jesus! Where’d you get that?’
‘Hawked it out of my dad’s bureau. It’s a .45.’
‘Yeah, I can see that,’ I said, although it could have been a .38 or a .357 for all
I knew–in spite of all the John D MacDonalds and Ed McBains I’d read, the only
pistol I’d ever seen up close was the one Constable Bannerman carried… and although
all the kids asked him to take it out of its holster, Banner never would. ‘Man, your
dad’s gonna hide you when he finds out. You said he was on a mean streak anyway.’
His eyes just went on dancing. ‘That’s it, man. He ain’t gonna find out nothing.
Him and these other rummies are all laid up down in Harrison with six or eight bottles of wine. They won’t be back for a week. Fucking rummies.’ His lips curled. He was
the only guy in our gang who would never take a drink, even to show he had, you
know, big balls. He said he wasn’t going to grow up to be a fucking tosspot like his
old man. And he told me once privately–this was after the DeSpain twins showed up
with a six-pack they’d hawked from their old man and everybody teased Chris
because he wouldn’t take a beer or even a swallow–that he was scared to drink. He
said his father never got his nose all the way out of the bottle anymore, that his older brother had been drunk out of his tits when he raped that girl, and that Eyeball was
always guzzling purple Jesuses with Ace Merrill and Charlie Hogan and Billy Tessio.
What, he asked me, did I think his chances of letting go of the bottle would be once he picked it up? Maybe you think that’s funny, a twelve-year-old worrying that he might
be an incipient alcoholic, but it wasn’t funny to Chris. Not at all. He’d thought about the possibility a lot. He’d had occasion to.
‘You got shells for it?’
‘Nine of them–all that was left in the box. He’ll think he used ’em himself,
shooting at cans while he was drunk.’
‘Is it loaded?’
‘No! Chrissake, what do you think I am?’
I finally took the gun. I liked the heavy way it sat there in my hand. I could see
myself as Steve Carella of the 87th precinct, going after that guy The Heckler or
maybe covering Myer Myer or Kling while they broke into a desperate junkie’s sleazy
apartment. I sighted on one of the smelly trashcans and squeezed the trigger.
KA-BLAM!
The gun bucked in my hand. Fire licked from the end. It felt as if my wrist had
just been broken. My heart vaulted nimbly into the back of my mouth and crouched
there, trembling. A big hole appeared in the corrugated metal surface of the trash can-
-it was the work of an evil conjuror.