have to be examined (fucking section eight) later. In depth. On long sleepless nights.
Chris rocked him. ‘He was rankin’ you, man,’ he said in soothing cadences that
were almost a lullabye. ‘He was just tryin’ to rank you over that friggin’ fence, you
know it? No strain, man. No fuckin’ strain. He don’t know nothing about your old man.
He don’t know nothin’ but stuff he heard from those rumdums down at the Mellow
Tiger. He’s just dogshit, man. Right, Teddy? Huh? Right?’
Teddy’s crying was down to sniffles. He wiped his eyes, saving two sooty
rings around them, and sat up.
‘I’m okay,’ he said, and the sound of his own voice seemed to convince him.
‘Yeah, I’m okay.” He stood up and put his glasses back on–dressing his naked face, it seemed to me.
He laughed thinly and swiped his bare arm across the snot on his upper lip.
‘Fuckin’ crybaby, right?’
‘No, man,’ Vern said uncomfortably. ‘If anyone was rankin’ out my dad -‘
‘Then you got to kill ’em!’ Teddy said briskly, almost arrogantly. ‘Kill their
asses. Right, Chris?’
‘Right,’ Chris said amiably, and clapped Teddy on the back.
‘Right, Gordie?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said, wondering how Teddy could care so much for his dad
when his dad had practically killed him, and how I couldn’t seem to give much of a
shit one way or the other about my own dad, when so far as I could remember, he had
never laid a hand on me since I was three and got some bleach from under the sink
and started to eat it.
We walked another two hundred yards down the tracks and Teddy said in a
quieter voice: ‘Hey, if I spoiled your good time, I’m sorry. I guess that was pretty
stupid shit back there at that fence.’
‘I ain’t sure I want it to be no good time,’ Vern said suddenly.
Chris looked at him. ‘You sayin’ you want to go back, man?’
‘No, huh-uh!’ Vern’s face knotted in thought. ‘But goin’ to see a dead kid… it
shouldn’t be a party, maybe. I mean, if you can dig it. I mean…’ He looked at us rather wildly. ‘I mean, I could be a little scared. If you get me.’
Nobody said anything and Vern plunged on: ‘I mean, sometimes I get
nightmares. Like… aw, you guys remember the time Danny Naughton left that pile of
old funnybooks, the ones with the vampires and people getting cut up and all that shit?
Jeezum-crow, I’d wake up in the middle of the night dreamin’ about some guy hangin’
in a house with his face all green or somethin’, you know, like that, and it seems like there’s somethin’ under the bed and if I dangled a hand over the side, that thing might, you know, grab me…’
We all began to nod. We knew about the night-sweats. I would have laughed
then, though, if you had told me that one day not too many years from then, I’d parley a simple case of the night-sweats into about a million dollars.
‘And I don’t dare say anything because my friggin’ brother… well, you know
Billy… he’d broadcast it…’ He shrugged miserably. ‘So I’m ascared to look at that kid
’cause if he’s, you know, if he’s really bad…’
I swallowed and glanced at Chris. He was looking gravely at Vern and
nodding for him to go on.
‘If he’s really bad,’ Vern resumed, ‘I’ll have nightmares about him and wake up
thinkin’ it’s him under my bed, all cut up in a pool of blood like he just came out of one of those Saladmaster gadgets they show on TV, just eyeballs and hair, but movin’
somehow, if you can dig that, movin’ somehow, you know, and gettin’ ready to grab -‘
‘Jesus Christ,’ Teddy said thickly. ‘What a fuckin’ bedtime story.’
‘Well I can’t help it,’ Vern said, his voice defensive. ‘But I feel like we hafta
see him, even if there are bad dreams. You know? Like we hafta. But… but maybe it
shouldn’t be no good time.’
‘Yeah,’ Chris said softly. ‘Maybe it shouldn’t.’
Vern said pleadingly: ‘You won’t tell none of the other guys, will you? I don’t