Meal and chicken blood. These same kids claimed that Milo didn’t dare take Chopper
out of his shack unless the dog was hooded like a hunting falcon.
The most common story was that Pressman had trained Chopper not just to sic
but to sic specific parts of the human anatomy. Thus an unfortunate kid who had
illegally scaled the dump fence to pick for illicit treasures might hear Milo Pressman cry: ‘Chopper! Sic! Hand!’ And Chopper would grab that hand and hold on, ripping
skin and tendons, powdering bones between his slavering jaws, until Milo told him to
quit. It was rumoured that Chopper could take an ear, an eye, a foot, or a leg… and
that a second offender who was surprised by Milo and the ever-loyal Chopper would
hear the dread cry: ‘Chopper! Sic! Pecker!’ And that kid would be a soprano for the
rest of his life. Milo himself was more commonly seen and thus more commonly
regarded. He was just a half-bright working joe who supplemented his small town
salary by fixing things people threw away and selling them around town. There was
no sign of either Milo or Chopper today.
Chris and I watched Vern prime the pump while Teddy worked the handle
frantically. At last he was rewarded with a flood of clear water. A moment later both
of them had their heads under the trough, Teddy still pumping away a mile a minute.
‘Teddy’s crazy,’ I said softly.
‘Oh yeah,’ Chris said matter-of-factly. ‘He won’t live to be twice the age he is
now, I bet. His dad burnin’ his ears like that. That’s what did it. He’s crazy to dodge trucks the way he does. He can’t see worth a shit, glasses or no glasses.’
‘You remember that time in the tree?’
‘Yeah.’
The year before, Teddy and Chris had been climbing the big pine tree behind
my house. They were almost to the top and Chris said they couldn’t go any further
because all of the branches up there were rotten. Teddy got that crazy stubborn look
on his face and said fuck that, he had pine tar all over his hands and he was gonna go up until he could touch the top. Nothing Chris said could talk him out of it. So up he went, and he actually made it–he only weighed seventy-five pounds or so, remember.
He stood there, clutching the top of the pine in one tar-gummy hand, shouting that he
was king of the world or some stupid thing like that, and then there was a sickening,
rotted crack as the branch he was standing on gave way and he plummeted. What
happened next was one of those things that makes you sure there must be a God.
Chris reached out, purely on reflex, and what he caught was a fistful of Teddy
Duchamp’s hair. And although his wrist swelled up fat and he was unable to use his
right hand very well for almost two weeks, Chris held him until Teddy, screaming and
cursing, got his foot on a live branch thick enough to support his weight. Except for
Chris’s blind grab, he would have turned and crashed and smashed all the way to the
foot of the tree, a hundred and twenty feet below. When they got down, Chris was
grey-faced and almost puking with the fear reaction. And Teddy wanted to fight him
for pulling his hair. They would have gone at it, too, if I hadn’t been there to make
peace.
‘I dream about that every now and then,’ Chris said, and looked at me with
strangely defenceless eyes. ‘Except in this dream I have, I always miss him. I just get a couple of hairs and Teddy screams and down he goes. Weird, huh?’
‘Weird,’ I agreed, and for just one moment we looked in each other’s eyes and saw some of the true things that made us friends. Then we looked away again and
watched Teddy and Vern throwing water at each other, screaming and laughing and
calling each other pussies.
‘Yeah, but you didn’t miss him,’ I said. ‘Chris Chambers never misses, am I
right?’
‘Not even when the ladies leave the seat down,’ he said. He winked at me,