lifelike shine. Finally Chris said: ‘It’s still closer going ahead. Let’s go.’
He turned and started to walk along the tracks in his dusty sneakers, head down, his shadow only a puddle at his feet. After a minute or so the rest of us
followed him, strung out in Indian file.
24
In the years between then and the writing of this memoir, I’ve thought remarkably
little about those two days in September, at least consciously. The associations the
memories bring to the surface are as unpleasant as week-old river corpses brought to
the surface by cannonfire. As a result, I never really questioned our decision to walk down the tracks. Put another way, I’ve wondered sometimes about what we had
decided to do but never about how we did it. But now a much simpler scenario comes
to mind. I’m confident that if the idea had come up it would have been shot down–
walking down the tracks would have seemed neater, bosser, as we said then. But if the
idea had come up and hadn’t been shot down in flames, none of the things which
occurred later would have happened. Maybe Chris and Teddy and Vern would even
be alive today. No, they didn’t die in the woods or on the railroad tracks; nobody dies in this story except some bloodsuckers and Ray Brower, and if you want to be
completely fair about it, he was dead before it even started. But it is true that, of the four of us who flipped coins to see who would go down to the Florida Market to get
supplies, only the one who actually went is still alive. The Ancient Mariner at thirty-four, with you, Gentle Reader, in the role of wedding guest (at this point shouldn’t you flip to the jacket photo to see if my eye holdeth you in its spell?)… If you sense a certain flipness on my part, you’re right–but maybe I have cause. At an age when all
four of us would be considered too young and immature to be President, three of us
are dead. And if small events really do echo up larger and larger through time, yes,
maybe if we had done the simple thing and simply hitched into Harlow, they would
still be alive today. We could have hooked a ride all the way up Route 7 to the Shiloh Church, which stood at the intersection of the highway and the Back Harlow Road (at
least until 1967, when it was levelled by a fire attributed to a tramp’s smouldering
cigarette butt). With reasonable luck we could have been beating the bushes in the
area where Billy and Charlie parked with their skag girlfriends before sundown of the
previous day.
But the idea wouldn’t have lived. It wouldn’t have been shot down with tightly
buttressed arguments and debating society rhetoric, but with grunts and scowls and
farts and raised middle fingers. The verbal part of the discussion would have been
carried forward with such trenchant and sparkling contributions as ‘Fuck no’, ‘That
sucks’, and that old reliable standby, ‘Did your mother ever have any kids that lived?’
Unspoken–maybe it was too fundamental to be spoken -was the idea that this
was a big thing. It wasn’t screwing around with firecrackers or trying to look through the knothole in the back of the girls’ privy at Harrison State Park. This was something on a par with getting laid for the first time, or going into the Army, or buying your
first bottle of legal liquor–just bopping into that state store, if you can dig it, selecting a bottle of good Scotch, showing the clerk your draft card and drivers’ licence, then
walking out with a grin on your face and that brown bag in your hand, member of a
club with just a few more rights and privileges than our old treehouse with the tin roof.
There’s a high ritual to all fundamental events, the rites of passage, the magic corridor where the change happens. Buying the condoms. Standing before the minister.
Raising your hand and taking the oath. Or, if you please, walking down the railroad
tracks to meet a fellow your own age halfway, the same as I’d walk halfway up Grand