formed an O with his thumb and forefinger, and spat a neat white bullet through it.
‘Eat me raw, Chambers,’ I said.
‘Through a Flavour Straw,’ he said, and we grinned at each other.
Vern yelled: ‘Come on and get your water before it runs back down the piper.’
‘Race you,’ Chris said.
‘In this heat? You’re off your gourd.’
‘Come on,’ he said, still grinning. ‘On my go.’
‘Okay.’
‘Go!’
We raced, our sneakers digging up the hard, sunbaked dirt, our torsos leaning
out ahead of our flying bluejeaned legs, our fists doubled. It was a dead heat, with
both Vern on Chris’s side and Teddy on mine holding up their middle fingers at the
same moment. We collapsed laughing in the still, smoky odour of the place, and Chris
tossed Vern his canteen. When I was full, Chris and I went to the pump and first Chris pumped for me and then I pumped for him, the shockingly cold water sluicing off the
soot and the heat all in a flash, sending our suddenly freezing scalps four months
ahead into January. Then I refilled the lard can and we all walked over to sit down in the shade of the dump’s only tree, a stunted ash forty feet from Milo Pressman’s
tarpaper shack. The tree was hunched slightly to the west, as if what it really wanted to do was pick up its roots the way an old lady would pick up her skirts and just get
the hell out of the dump.
‘The most!’ Chris said, laughing, tossing his tangled hair back from his brow.
‘A blast,’ I said, nodding, still laughing myself.
‘This is really a good time,’ Vern said simply, and he didn’t just mean being
off-limits inside the dump, or fudging our folks, or going on a hike up the railroad
tracks into Harlow; he meant those things but it seems to me now that there was more,
and that we all knew it. Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who
we were and exactly where we were going. It was grand.
We sat under the tree for a while, shooting the shit like we always did–who
had the best ballteam (still the Yankees with Mantle and Maris, of course), what was
the best car (’55 Thunderbird, with Teddy holding out stubbornly for the ’58 Corvette), who was the toughest guy in Castle Rock who wasn’t in our gang (we all agreed it was
Jamie Gallant, who gave Mrs. Ewing the finger and then sauntered out of her class
with his hands in his pockets while she shouted at him), the best TV show (either The
Untouchables or Peter Gunn–both Robert Stack as Eliot Ness and Craig Stevens as
Gunn were cool), all that stuff.
It was Teddy who first noticed that the shade of the ash tree was getting longer
and asked me what time it was. I looked at my watch and was surprised to see it was
quarter past two.
‘Hey, man,’ Vern said. ‘Somebody’s got to go for provisions. Dump opens at
four. I don’t want to still be here when Milo and Chopper make the scene.’
Even Teddy agreed. He wasn’t afraid of Milo, who had a pot belly and was at least forty, but every kid in Castle Rock squeezed his balls between his legs when
Chopper’s name was mentioned.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Odd man goes?’
That’s you, Gordie,’ Chris said, smiling. ‘Odd as a cod.’
‘So’s your mother,’ I said, and gave them each a coin. ‘Flip.’
Four coins glittered up into the sun. Four hands snatched them from the air.
Four flat smacks on four grimy wrists. We uncovered. Two heads and two tails. We
flipped again and this time all four of us had tails.
‘Oh Jesus, that’s a goocher,’ Vern said, not telling us anything we didn’t know.
Four heads, or a moon, was supposed to be extraordinarily good luck. Four tails was a
goocher, and that meant very bad luck.
‘Fuck that shit,’ Chris said. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. Go again.’
‘No, man,’ Vern said earnestly. ‘A goocher, that’s really bad. You remember
when Clint Bracken and those guys got wiped out on Sirois Hill in Durham? Billy tole