as if some nutty rich guy masquerading as a common labourer had decided to embed a
diamond in the steel every sixty yards or so. It was still hot. The sweat rolled off us, slicking our bodies.
‘It’s asshole if your friends can drag you down,’ Chris said finally. ‘I know
about you and your folks. They don’t give a shit about you. Your big brother was the
one they cared about. Like my dad, when Frank got thrown into the stockade in
Portsmouth. That was when he started always bein’ mad at us other kids and hitting us
all the time. Your dad doesn’t beat on you, but maybe that’s even worse. He’s got you
asleep. You could tell him you were enrolling in the fuckin’ shop division and you
know what he’d do? He’d turn to the next page in his paper and say, Well, that’s nice, Gordon, go ask your mother what’s for dinner. And don’t try to tell me different I’ve
met him.’
I didn’t try to tell him different. It’s scary to find out that someone else, even a
friend, knows just how things are with you. ‘You’re just a kid, Gordie -‘
‘Gee, thanks, Dad.’
‘I wish to fuck I was your father!’ he said angrily. ‘You wouldn’t go around
talking about taking those stupid shop courses if I was! It’s like God gave you
something, all those stories you can make up, and He said, This is what we got for
you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for
them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it then maybe I ought to.’
His face looked like he was expecting me to take a swing at him; it was set
and unhappy in the green-gold late afternoon light. He had broken the cardinal rule
for kids in those days. You could say anything about another kid, you could rank him
to the dogs and back, but you didn’t say a bad word ever about his mom and dad. That
was the Fabled Automatic, the same way not inviting your Catholic friends home to
dinner on Friday unless you’d checked first to make sure you weren’t having meat was
the Fabled Automatic. If a kid ranked out your Mom and Dad, you had to feed him a
knuckle sandwich.
“Those stories you tell, they’re no good to anybody but you, Gordie. If you go
along with us just because you don’t want the gang to break up, you’ll wind up just
another grunt, making Cs to get on the teams. You’ll get to High and take the same
fuckin’ shop courses and throw erasers and pull your meat along with the rest of the
grunts. Get detentions. Fuckin’ suspensions. And after a while all you’ll care about is gettin’ a car so you can take some skag to the hops or down to the fuckin’ Twin
Bridges Tavern. Then you’ll knock her up and spend the rest of your life in the mill or
some fuckin’ shoeshop in Auburn or maybe even up to Hillcrest pluckin’ chickens.
And that pie story will never get written down. Nothin’ll get written down. ‘Cause
you’ll just be another wiseguy with shit for brains.’
Chris Chambers was twelve when he said all that to me. But while he was
saying it his face crumpled and folded into something older, oldest, ageless. He spoke tonelessly, colourlessly, but nevertheless, what he said struck terror into my bowels. It was as if he had lived that whole life already, -that life where they tell you to step right up and spin the Wheel of Fortune, and it spins so pretty and the guy steps on a
pedal and it comes up double zeros, house number, everybody loses. They give you a
free pass and then turn on the rain machine, pretty funny, huh, a joke even Vern
Tessio could appreciate.
He grabbed my naked arm and his fingers closed tight. They dug grooves in
my flesh.
They ground at the bones. His eyes were hooded and dead–so dead, man, that
he might have just fallen out of his own coffin.
‘I know what people think of my family in this town. I know what they think