I must have fallen hard, but landing on the crossties was like plunging into a
warm and puffy feather bed. Someone turned me over. The touch of hands was faint
and unimportant. Their faces were disembodied balloons looking down at me from
miles up.
They looked the way the ref s face must look to a fighter who has been
punched silly and is currently taking a ten-second rest on the canvas. Their words
came in gentle oscillations, fading in and out ‘… him?’
‘… be all…’
‘… if you think the sun…’
‘Gordie, are you…’
Then I must have said something that didn’t make much sense because they
began to look really worried.
‘We better take him back, man,’ Teddy said, and then the whiteness came over
everything again.
When it cleared, I seemed to be all right Chris was squatting next to me,
saying: ‘Can you hear me, Gordie? You there, man?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and sat up. A swarm of black dots exploded in front of my eyes, and then went away. I waited to see if they’d come back, and when they didn’t, I stood up.
‘You scared the cheesly old shit outta me, Gordie,’ he said. ‘You want a drink
of water?’
‘Yeah.’
He gave me his canteen, half-full of water, and I let three warm gulps roll
down my throat ‘Why’d you faint, Gordie?’ Vern asked anxiously.
‘Made a bad mistake and looked at your face,’ I said.
‘Eeee-eee-eeeee!’ Teddy cackled. ‘Fuckin’ Gordie! You wet!’
‘You really okay?’ Vern persisted.
‘Yeah. Sure. It was… bad there for a minute. Thinking about those suckers.’
They nodded soberly. We took five in the shade and then went on walking, me
and Vern on one side of the tracks again, Chris and Teddy on the other. We figured
we must be getting close.
23
We weren’t as close as we thought, and if we’d had the brains to spend two minutes
looking at a roadmap, we would have seen why. We knew that Ray Brewer’s corpse
had to be near the Back Harlow Road, which dead-ends on the bank of the Royal
River. Another trestle carries the GS&WM tracks across the Royal. So this is the way we figured: Once we got close to the Royal, we’d be getting close to the Back Harlow
Road, where Billy and Charlie had been parked when they saw the boy. And since the
Royal was only ten miles from the Castle River, we figured we had it made in the
shade. But that was ten miles as the crow flies, and the tracks didn’t move on a
straight line between the Castle and the Royal. Instead, they made a very shallow loop to avoid a hilly, crumbling region called The Bluffs. Anyway, we could have seen that
loop quite clearly if we had looked on a map, and figured out that instead of ten miles, we had about sixteen to walk.
Chris began to suspect the truth when noon had come and gone and the Royal
still wasn’t in sight. We stopped while he climbed a high pine tree and took a look
around. He came down and gave us a simple enough report: it was going to be at least
four in the afternoon before we got to the Royal, and we would only make it by then if we humped right along. ‘Ah, shit!’ Teddy cried. ‘So what’re we gonna do now?’
We looked into each other’s tired, sweaty faces. We were hungry and out of
temper. The big adventure had turned into a long slog–dirty and sometimes scary. We
would have been missed back home by now, too, and if Milo Pressman hadn’t already
called the cops on us, the engineer of the train crossing the trestle might have done it.
We had been planning to hitchhike back to Castle Rock, but four o’clock was just
three hours from dark, and nobody gives four kids on a back country road a lift after
dark. I tried to summon up the cool image of my deer, cropping at green morning
grass, but even that seemed dusty and no good, no better than a stuffed trophy over
the mantle in some guy’s hunting lodge, the eyes sprayed to give them that phony