‘Tuck your hand, man,’ Vern said.
‘Drop dead in a shed, Fred,’ Teddy returned smartly.
‘You ran all the way from your place?’ Chris asked unbelievingly. ‘Man, you’re
crazy.’
Vern’s house was two miles down Grand Street. ‘It must be ninety out there.’
‘This is worth it,’ Vern said. ‘Holy Jeezum. You won’t believe this. Sincerely.’
He slapped his sweaty forehead to show us how sincere he was.
‘Okay, what?’ Chris asked.
‘Can you guys camp out tonight?’ Vern was looking at us earnestly, excitedly.
His eyes looked like raisins pushed into dark circles of sweat ‘I mean, if you tell your folks we’re gonna tent out in my back field?’
‘Yeah, I guess so,’ Chris said, picking up his new hand and y’know.’
‘You got to, man,’ Vern said. ‘Sincerely. You won’t believe this. Can you,
Gordie?’
‘Probably.’
I was able to do most stuff like that–in fact, I’d been like the Invisible Boy that
whole summer. In April my older brother, Dennis, had been killed in a Jeep accident.
That was at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was in basic. He and another guy were
on their way to the PX and an army truck hit them broadside. Dennis was killed
instantly and his passenger had been in a coma ever since. Dennis would have been
twenty later that week.
I’d already picked out a birthday card for him at Dahlie’s over in Castle Green.
I cried when I heard, and I cried more at the funeral, and I couldn’t believe that
Dennis was gone, that anyone that used to knuckle my head or scare me with a rubber
spider until I cried or give me a kiss when I fell down and scraped both knees bloody
and whisper in my ear, ‘Now stop cryin’, ya baby!’–that a person who had touched me
could be dead. It hurt me and it scared me that he could be dead… but it seemed to
have taken all the heart out of my parents. For me, Dennis was hardly more than an
acquaintance. He was eight years older than me if you can dig it, and he had his own
friends and classmates. We ate at the same table for a lot of years, and sometimes he
was my friend and sometimes my tormentor, but mostly he was, you know, just a guy.
When he died he’d been gone for a year except for a couple of furloughs. We didn’t
even look alike. It took me a long time after that summer to realize that most of the
tears I cried were for my mom and dad. Fat lot of good it did them, or me.
‘So what are you pissing and moaning about, Vern-O?’ Teddy asked.
‘I knock,’ Chris said.
‘What?’ Teddy screamed, immediately forgetting all about Vern. ‘You friggin’
liar! You ain’t got to pat hand. I didn’t deal you no pat hand.’
Chris smirked. ‘Make your draw, shitheap.’
Teddy reached for the top card of the pile of Bikes. Chris reached for the
Winstons on the ledge behind him. I bent over to pick up my detective magazine.
Vern Tessio said: ‘You guys want to go see a dead body?’
Everybody stopped.
3
We’d all heard about it on the radio, of course. The radio, a Philco with a cracked case which had also been scavenged from the dump, played all the time. We kept it tuned
to WLAM in Lewiston, which churned out the super-hits and the boss oldies: ‘What in
the World’s Come Over You’ by Jack Scott and ‘This Time’ by Troy Shondell and
‘King Creole’ by Elvis and ‘Only the Lonely’ by Roy Orbison. When the news came on
we usually switched some mental dial over to Mute. The news was a lot of happy
horseshit about Kennedy and Nixon and Quemoy and Matsu and the missile gap and
what a shit that Castro was turning out to be after all. But we had all listened to the Ray Brower story a little more closely, because he was a kid our age.
He was from Chamberlain, a town forty miles or so east of Castle Rock. Three
days before Vern came busting into the clubhouse after a two-mile run up Grand