Street to meet Chris if he was coming over to my house, or the way Teddy would
walk halfway down Gates Street to meet me if I was going to his. It seemed right to
do it this way, because the rite of passage is a magic corridor and so we always
provide an aisle–it’s what you walk down when you get married, what they carry you
down when you get buried. Our corridor was those twin rails, and we walked between
them, just bopping along towards whatever this was supposed to mean. You don’t
hitchhike your way to a thing like that, maybe.
And maybe we thought it was also right that it should have turned out to be
harder than we had expected. Events surrounding our hike had turned it into what we
had suspected it was all along: serious business.
What we didn’t know as we walked around The Bluffs was that Billy Tessio,
Charlie Hogan, Jack Mudgett, Norman ‘Fuzzy’ Brackowicz, Vince Desjardins, Chris’s
older brother Eyeball, and Ace Merrill himself were all on their way to take a look at the body themselves–in a weird kind of way, Ray Brower had become famous, and
our secret had turned into a regular roadshow. They were piling into Ace’s chopped
and channelled ’52 Ford and Vince’s pink ’54 Studebaker even as we started on the
last leg of our trip. Billy and Charlie had managed to keep their enormous secret for
just about twenty-four hours. Then Charlie spilled it to Ace while they were shooting
pool, and Billy had spilled it to Jack Mudgett while they were fishing for steelies from the Boom Road bridge. Both Ace and Jack had sworn solemnly on their mothers’
names to keep the secret, and that was how everybody in their gang knew about it by
noon. Guess you could tell what those assholes thought about their mothers.
They all congregated down at the pool hall, and Fuzzy Brackowicz advanced a
theory (which you have heard before, Gentle Reader) that they could all become
heroes–not to mention instant radio and TV personalities–by ‘discovering’ the body.
All they had to do, Fuzzy maintained, was to take two cars with a lot of fishing gear in the trunks. After they found the body, their story would be a hundred per cent. We
was just plannin’ to take a few pickerel out of the Royal River, officer. Heh-heh-heh.
Look what we found. They were burning up the road from Castle Rock to the Back
Harlow area just as we started to finally get close.
25
Clouds began to build in the sky around two o’clock, but at first none of us took them seriously. It hadn’t rained since the early days of July, so why should it rain now? But they kept building to the south of us, up and up and up, thunderheads in great pillars as purple as bruises, and they began to move slowly our way. I looked at them closely, checking for that membrane beneath that means it’s already raining twenty miles away,
or fifty. But there was no rain yet. The clouds were still just building.
Vern got a blister on his heel and we stopped and rested while he packed the
back of his left sneaker with moss stripped from the bark of an old oak tree.
‘Is it gonna rain, Gordie?’ Teddy asked.
‘I think so.’
‘Pisser!’ he said, and sighed. ‘The pisser good end to a pisser good day.’
I laughed and he tipped me a wink.
We started to walk again, a little more slowly now out of respect for Vern’s
hurt foot.
And in the hour between two and three, the quality of the day’s light began to
change, and we knew for sure that rain was coming. It was just as hot as ever, and
even more humid, but we knew. And the birds did. They seemed to appear from
nowhere and swoop across the sky, chattering and crying shrilly to each other. And
the light. From a steady, beating brightness it seemed to evolve into something
filtered, almost pearly. Our shadows, which had begun to grow long again, also grew
fuzzy and ill-defined. The sun had begun to sail in and out through the thickening