lacerated and darkly bruised. Still, I thought, he didn’t really look bad. I had once
walked into a door my brother Dennis was shoving open, came off with bruises even
worse than this kid’s, plus the bloody nose, and still had two helpings of everything
for supper after it happened. Teddy and Vern stood behind us and if there had been
any sight at all left in that one upward-staring eye, I suppose we would have looked to Ray Brower like pallbearers in a horror movie.
A beetle came out of his mouth, trekked across his fuzzless cheek, stepped
onto a nettle, and was gone.
‘D’joo see that?’ Teddy asked in a high, strange, fainting voice. ‘I bet he’s
fuckin’ fulla bugs! I bet his brains’re-
‘Shut up, Teddy,’ Chris said, and Teddy did, looking relieved. Lightning
forked blue across the sky, making the boy’s single eye light up. You could almost
believe he was glad to be found, and found by boys his own age. His torso had
swelled up and there was a faint gassy odour about him, like the smell of old farts. I turned away, sure I was going to be sick, but my stomach was dry, hard, steady. I
suddenly rammed two fingers down my throat, trying to make myself heave, needing
to do it, as if I could sick it up and get rid of it. But my stomach only hitched a little and then was steady again.
The roaring downpour and the accompanying thunder had completely covered
the sound of cars approaching along the Back Harlow Road, which lay bare yards
beyond this boggy tangle. It likewise covered the crackle-crunch of the underbrush as
they blundered through it from the dead end where they had parked.
And the first we knew of them was Ace Merrill’s voice raised above the tumult
of the storm, saying: ‘Well what the fuck do you know about this?’
26
We all jumped like we had been goosed and Vern cried out -he admitted later that he
thought, for just a second, that the voice had come from the dead boy.
On the far side of the boggy patch, where the woods took up again, masking
the butt end of the road, Ace Merrill and Eyeball Chambers stood together, half-
obscured by a pouring grey curtain of rain. They were both wearing red nylon high school jackets, the kind you can buy in the office if you’re a regular student, the same kind they give away free to varsity sports players. Their da haircuts had been
plastered back against their skulls and a mixture of rainwater and Vitalis ran down
their cheeks like ersatz tears.
‘Sumbitch!’ Eyeball said. That’s my little brother!’
Chris was staring at Eyeball with his mouth open. His shirt, wet, limp and dark,
was still tied around his skinny middle. His pack, stained a darker green by the rain, was hanging against his naked shoulderblades.
‘You get away, Rich,’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘We found him. We got
dibs.’
‘Fuck your dibs. We’re gonna report ‘im.’
‘No you’re not,’ I said. I was suddenly furious with them, turning up this way at
the last minute. If we’d thought about it, we’d have known something just like this was going to happen… but this was one time, somehow, that the older, bigger kids weren’t going to steal it–to take something they wanted as if by divine right, as if their easy way was the right way, the only way. They had come in cars -I think that was what
made me angriest. They had come in cars. ‘There’s four of us, Eyeball. You just try.’
‘Oh, we’ll try, don’t worry,’ Eyeball said, and the trees shook behind him and
Ace, Charlie Hogan and Vern’s brother Billy stepped through them, cursing and
wiping water out of their eyes. I felt a lead ball drop into my belly. It grew bigger as Jack Mudgett and Fuzzy Brackowicz stepped out behind Charlie and Billy. ‘Here we
all are,’ Ace said, grinning. ‘So you just -‘
‘VERN!!’ Billy Tessio cried in a terrible, accusing, my-justice-cometh-and-
that-right-early voice. He made a pair of dripping fists. ‘You little sonofawhore! You was under the porch! Cock-knocker!’ Vern flinched.