Duchamp let the orderlies in and then went out on the back porch to stand guard while
they wheeled Teddy to the old portholed Buick ambulance on a stretcher.
Teddy’s dad explained to the orderlies that while the fucking brass hats said
the area was clear, there were still Kraut snipers everywhere. One of the orderlies
asked Teddy’s Dad if he thought he could hold on. Teddy’s dad smiled. Frigidaire
dealership, if that’s what it took. The orderly saluted, and Teddy’s dad snapped it right back at him. A few minutes after the ambulance left, the state police arrived and
relieved Norman Duchamp of duty. He’d been doing odd things like shooting cats and
lighting fires in mailboxes for over a year, and after the atrocity he had visited upon his son, they had a quick hearing and sent him to Togus, which is a special sort of V.
A. hospital. Togus is where you have to go if you’re a section eight. Teddy’s dad had
stormed the beach at Normandy, and that’s just the way Teddy always put it. Teddy
was proud of his old man in spite of what his old man had done to him, and Teddy
went with his mom to visit him every week. He was the dumbest guy we hung around
with, I guess, and he was crazy. He’d take the craziest chances you can imagine, and
get away with them. His big thing was what he called Truck Dodging. He’d run out in
front of them on 196 and sometimes they’d miss him by bare inches. God knew how
many heart attacks he’d caused, and he’d be laughing while the windblast from the
passing truck rippled his clothes. It scared us because his vision was so lousy. Coke-
bottle glasses or not. It seemed like only a matter of time before he misjudged one of those trucks. And you had to be careful what you dared him, because Teddy would do
anything on a dare. ‘Gordie’s out, eeeeee-eee-eee!’
‘Screw,’ I said, and picked up a Master Detective to read while they played it
out. I turned to ‘He Stomped the Pretty Co-Ed to Death in a Stalled Elevator’ and got
right into it. Teddy picked up the cards, gave them one brief look, and said: ‘I knock.’
‘You four-eyed pile of shit!’ Chris cried.
‘The pile of shit has a thousand eyes,’ Teddy said seriously, and both Chris and
I cracked up. Teddy stared at us with a slight frown, as if wondering what had gotten
us laughing. That was another thing about the cat–he was always coming out with
weird stuff like “The pile of shit has a thousand eyes’, and you could never be sure if he meant it to he funny or if it just happened that way. He’d look at the people who
were laughing with that slight frown on his face, as if to say O Lord what is it this
time? Teddy had a natural thirty–jack, queen, and king of clubs. Chris had only
sixteen and went down to his ride.
Teddy was shuffling the cards in his clumsy way and I was just getting to the
gooshy part of the murder story, where this deranged sailor from New Orleans was
doing the Bristol Stomp all over this college girl from Bryn Mawr because he couldn’t
stand being in closed-in spaces, when we heard someone coming fast up the ladder nailed to the side of the elm. A fist rapped on the underside of the trapdoor.
‘Who goes?’ Chris yelled.
‘Vern!’ He sounded excited and out of breath.
I went to the trapdoor and pulled the bolt. The trapdoor banged up and Vern
Tessio, one of the other regulars, pulled himself into the clubhouse. He was sweating
buckets and his hair, which he usually kept combed in a perfect imitation of his rock
and roll idol, Bobby Rydell, was plastered to his bullet head in chunks and strings.
‘Wow, man,’ he panted. ‘Wait’ll you hear this.’
‘Hear what?’ I asked.
‘Lemme get my breath. I ran all the way from my house.’
‘I ran all the way home,’ Teddy wavered in a dreadful Little Anthony falsetto,
‘just to say I’m soh-ree–