that has just come down, the other extended and pointing.
We ran up beside him and looked. I was thinking to myself: Vern’s
imagination just ran away with him, that’s all. The suckers, the heat, now this storm…
his eyes are dealing wild cards, that’s all. But that wasn’t what it was, although there was a split second when I wanted it to be. In that split second I knew I never wanted
to see a corpse, not even a runover woodchuck.
In the place where we were standing, early spring rains had washed part of the
embankment away, leaving a gravelly, uncertain four-foot drop-off. The railroad
maintenance crews either not yet gotten around to it in their yellow diesel-operated
repair carts, or it had happened so recently it hadn’t yet been reported. At the bottom of this washout was a marshy, mucky tangle of undergrowth that smelled bad. And
sticking out of a wild clockspring of blackberry brambles was a single pale white
hand.
Did any of us breathe? I didn’t.
The breeze was now a wind–harsh and jerky, coming at us from no particular
direction, jumping and whirling, slapping at our sweaty skins and open pores. I hardly noticed. I think part of my mind was waiting for Teddy to cry out Paratroops over the
side!, and I thought if he did that I might just go crazy. It would have been better to see the whole body, all at once, but instead there was only that limp outstretched hand, horribly white, the fingers limply splayed, like the hand of a drowned boy. It told us the truth of the whole matter. It explained every graveyard in the world. The image of that hand came back to me every time I heard or read of an atrocity. Somewhere,
attached to that hand, was the rest of Ray Brower.
Lightning flickered and stroked. Thunder ripped in behind each stroke as if a
drag race had started over our heads.
‘Sheeeee…’ Chris said, the sound not quite a cuss word, not quite the country
version of shit as it is pronounced around a slender stem of timothy grass when the
baler breaks down–instead it was a long, tuneless syllable without meaning; a sigh
that had just happened to pass through the vocal cords.
Vern was licking his lips in a compulsive sort of way, as if he had tasted some
obscure new delicacy, a Howard Johnson’s 29th Flavour, Tibetan Sausage Rolls,
Interstellar Escargot, something so weird that it excited and revolted him at the same time.
Teddy only stood and looked. The wind whipped his greasy, clotted hair first away from his ears and then back over them. His face was a total blank. I could tell
you I saw something there, and perhaps I did, in hindsight… but not then.
There were black ants trundling back and forth across the hand.
A great whispering noise began to rise in the woods on either side of the tracks,
as if the forest had just noticed we were there and was commenting on it. The rain had started.
Dime-sized drops fell on my head and arms. They struck the embankment,
turning the fill dark for a moment–and then the colour changed back again as the
greedy dry ground sucked the moisture up.
Those big drops fell for maybe five seconds and then they stopped. I looked at
Chris and he blinked back at me.
Then the storm came all at once, as if a shower chain had been pulled in the
sky. The whispering sound changed to loud contention. It was as if we were being
rebuked for our discovery, and it was frightening. Nobody tells you about the pathetic fallacy until you’re in college… and even then I noticed that nobody but the total dorks completely believed it was a fallacy.
Chris jumped over the side of the washout, his hair already soaked and
clinging to his head. I followed. Vern and Teddy came close behind, but Chris and I
were first to reach the body of Ray Brower. He was face down. Chris looked into my
eyes, his face set and stern–an adult’s face. I nodded slightly, as if he had spoken