pointed at Vern and Teddy, who were standing and waiting for us to catch up. They
were laughing about something; in fact, Vern was just about busting a gut.
‘Your friends do. They’re like drowning guys that are holding on to your legs.
You can’t save them. You can only drown with them.’
‘Come on, you fuckin’ slowpokes!’ Vern shouted, still laughing.
‘Yeah, comin’!’ Chris called, and before I could say anything else, he began to
run. I ran, too, but he caught up to them before I could catch up to him.
18
We went another mile and then decided to camp for the night. There was still some
daylight left, but nobody really wanted to use it. We were pooped from the scene at
the dump and from our scare on the train trestle, but it was more than that. We were in Harlow now, in the woods. Somewhere up ahead was a dead kid, probably mangled
and covered with flies. Maggots, too, by this time. Nobody wanted to get too close to
him with the night coming on. I had read somewhere–in an Algernon Blackwood
story, I think–that a guy’s ghost hangs out around his dead body until that body is
given a decent Christian burial, and there was no way I wanted to wake up in the night and confront the glowing, disembodied ghost of Ray Brower, moaning and gibbering
and floating among the dark and rustling pines. By stopping here we figured there had
to be at least ten miles between us and him, and of course all four of us knew there
were no such things as ghosts, but ten miles seemed just about far enough in case
what everybody knew was wrong.
Vern, Chris, and Teddy gathered wood and got a modest little campfire going on a bed of cinders. Chris scraped a bare patch all around the fire–the woods were
powder-dry, and he didn’t want to take any chances. While they were doing that I
sharpened some sticks and made what my brother Denny used to call ‘Pioneer
Drumsticks’–lumps of hamburger pushed into the ends of green branches. The three
of them laughed and bickered over their woodcraft (which was almost nil; there was a
Castle Rock Boy Scout troop, but most of the kids who hung around our vacant lot
considered it to be an organization made up mostly of pussies), arguing about whether
it was better to cook over flames or over coals (a moot point; we were too hungry to
wait for coals), whether dried moss would work as kindling, what they would do if
they used up all the matches before they got the fire to stay lit. Teddy claimed he
could make a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Chris claimed he was so full of shit he squeaked. They didn’t have to try; Vern got the small pile of twigs and dry moss to catch from the second match. The day was perfectly still and there was no wind to
puff out the light. We all took turns feeding the thin flames until they began to grow stouter on wrist-thick chunks of wood fetched from an old deadfall some thirty yards
into the forest When the flames began to die back a little bit, I stuck the sticks holding the Pioneer Drumsticks firmly into the ground at an angle over the fire. We sat around watching them as they shimmered and dripped and finally began to brown. Our
stomachs made pre-dinner conversation.
Unable to wait until they were really cooked, we each took one of them, stuck
it in a roll, and yanked the hot stick out of the centre. They were charred outside, raw inside, and totally delicious. We wolfed them down and wiped the grease from our
mouths with our bare arms. Chris opened his pack and took out a tin Band-Aids box
(the pistol was way at the bottom of his pack, and because he hadn’t told Vern and
Teddy, I guessed it was to be our secret). He opened it and gave each of us a battered Winston. We lit them with flaming twigs from the fire and then leaned back, men of