the world, watching the cigarette smoke drift away into the soft twilight. None of us
inhaled because we might cough and that would mean a day or two of ragging from
the others. And it was pleasant enough just to drag and blow, hawking into the fire to hear the sizzle (that was the summer I learned how you can pick out someone who is
just learning to smoke: if you’re new at it you spit a lot). We were feeling good. We
smoked the Winstons down to the filters, then tossed them into the fire. ‘Nothin’ like a smoke after a meal,’ Teddy said.
‘Fucking-A,’ Vern agreed.
Crickets had started to hum in the green gloom. I looked up at the lane of sky
visible through the railroad cut and saw that the blue was now bruising towards purple.
Seeing that outrider of twilight made me feel sad and calm at the same: me, brave but
not really brave, comfortably lonely.
We tramped down a flat place in the underbrush beside the embankment and
laid out our bedrolls. Then, for an hour or so, we fed the fire and talked, the kind of talk you can never quite remember once you get past fifteen and discover girls. We
talked about who was the best dragger in Castle Rock, if Boston could maybe stay out
of the cellar this year, and about the summer just past. Teddy told about the time he
had been at White’s Beach in Brunswick and some kid had hit his head while diving
off the float and almost drowned. We discussed at some length the relative merits of
the teachers we had had. We agreed that Mr. Brooks was the biggest pussy in Castle
Rock Elementary–he would just about cry if you sassed him back. On the other hand,
there was Mrs. Cote (pronounced Cody)–she was just about the meanest bitch God
had ever set down on the earth. Vern said he’d heard she hit a kid so hard two years
ago that the kid almost went blind. I looked at Chris, wondering if he would say anything about Miss Simons, but he didn’t say anything at all, and he didn’t see me
looking at him–he was looking at Vern and nodding soberly at Vern’s story.
We didn’t talk about Ray Brower as the dark drew down, but I was thinking
about him. There’s something horrible and fascinating about the way dark comes to
the woods, its coming unsoftened by headlights or streetlights or houselights or neon.
It comes with no mothers’ voices, calling for their kids to leave off and come on in
now, to herald it. If you’re used to the town, the coming of the dark in the woods
seems more like a natural disaster than a natural phenomenon; it rises like the Castle River rises in the spring. And as I thought about the body of Ray Brower in this light–
or lack of it–what I felt was not queasiness or fear that he would suddenly appear
before us, a green and gibbering banshee whose purpose was to drive us back the way
we had come before we could disturb his–its–peace, but a sudden and unexpected
wash of pity that he should be so alone and so defenceless in the dark that was now
coming over our side of the earth. If something wanted to eat him, it would. His
mother wasn’t here to stop that from happening, and neither was his father, nor Jesus
Christ in the company of all the saints. He was dead and he was all alone, flung off
the railroad tracks and into the ditch, and I realized that if I didn’t stop thinking about it, I was going to cry. So I told a Le Dio story, made up on the spot and not very good, and when it ended as most of my Le Dio stories did, with one lone American dogface
coughing out a dying declaration of patriotism and love for the girl back home into
the sad and wise face of the platoon sergeant, it was not the white, scared face of
some pfc from Castle Rock or White River Junction I saw in my mind’s eye but the