important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It’s hard to
make strangers care about the good things in your life.
21
The tracks now bent south-west and ran through tangles of second-growth fir and
heavy underbrush. We got a breakfast of late blackberries from some of these bushes,
but berries never fill you up; your stomach just gives them a thirty-minute option and then begins growling again. We went back to the tracks–it was about eight o’clock by
then–and took five. Our mouths were a dark purple and our naked torsos were
scratched from the blackberry brambles. Vern wished glumly aloud for a couple of
fried eggs with bacon on the side.
That was the last day of the heat, and I think it was the worst of all. The early
scud of clouds melted away and by nine o’clock the sky was a pale steel colour that
made you feel hotter just looking at it The sweat rolled and ran from our chests and
backs, leaving clean streaks through the accumulated soot and grime. Mosquitoes and
blackflies whirled and dipped around our heads in aggravating clouds. Knowing that
we had eight, maybe ten miles to go didn’t make us feel any better. Yet the fascination of the thing drew us on and kept us walking faster than we had any business doing, in
that heat. We were all crazy to see that kid’s body -I can’t put it any more simply or honestly than that. Whether it was harmless or whether it turned out to have the power to murder sleep with a hundred mangled dreams, we wanted to see it. I think that we
had come to believe we deserved to see it.
It was about nine-thirty when Teddy and Chris spotted water up ahead–they
shouted to Vern and me. We ran over to where they were standing. Chris was
laughing, delighted.
‘Look there! Beavers did that!’ He pointed.
It was the work of beavers, all right. A large-bore culvert ran under the
railroad embankment a little way ahead, and the beavers had sealed the right end with
one of their neat and industrious little dams–sticks and branches cemented together
with leaves, twigs, and dried mud. Beavers are busy little fuckers, all right Behind the dam was a clear and shining pool of water, brilliantly mirroring the sunlight Beaver
houses humped up and out of the water in several places–they looked like wooden
igloos. A small creek trickled into the far end of the pool, and the trees which
bordered it were gnawed a clean bone-white to a height of almost three feet in places.
‘Railroad’ll clean this shit out pretty soon,’ Chris said.
‘Why?’ Vern asked.
“They can’t have a pool here,’ Chris said, ‘it’d undercut their previous railroad line. That’s why they put that culvert in there to start with. They’ll shoot them some beavers and scare off the rest and then knock out their dam. Then this’ll go back to
being a bog, like it probably was before.’
‘I think that eats the meat,’ Teddy said.
Chris shrugged. ‘Who cares about beavers? Not the Great Western and
Southern Maine, that’s for sure.’
‘You think it’s deep enough to swim in?’ Vern asked, looking hungrily at the
water.
‘One way to find out,’ Teddy said.
‘Who goes first?’ I asked.
‘Me!’ Chris said. He went running down the bank, kicking off his sneakers and
untying his shirt from around his waist with a jerk. He pushed his pants and
undershorts down with a single shove of his thumbs. He balanced, first on one leg and
them on the other, to get his socks. Then he made a shallow dive. He came up shaking
his head to get his wet hair out of his eyes. ‘It’s fuckin’ great!’ he shouted.
‘How deep?’ Teddy called back. He had never learned to swim.
Chris stood up in the water and his shoulders broke the surface. I saw
something on one of them–a blackish-greyish something. I decided it was a piece of
mud and dismissed it.
If I had looked more closely I could have saved myself a lot of nightmares
later on.
‘Come on in, you chickens!’