shot onstage at the critical moment and declaimed lines that weren’t even in the play.
Telling a guy to suck was as bad as you could get without resorting to his mother. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Chris had unshouldered his knapsack and was
digging into it frantically, but I didn’t get it–not then, anyway.
‘Okay,’ Ace said softly. ‘Let’s take ’em. Don’t hurt nobody but the Lachance kid.
I’m gonna break both his fuckin’ arms.’
I went dead cold. I didn’t piss myself the way I had on the railroad trestle, but
it must have been because I had nothing inside to let out. He meant it, you see; the
years between then and now have changed my mind about a lot of things, but not
about that. When Ace said he was going to break both of my arms, he absolutely
meant it.
They started to walk towards us through the slackening rain. Jackie Mudgett
took a DeMano switchknife out of his pocket and hit the chrome. Six inches of steel
flicked out, dove-grey in the afternoon half-light Vern and Teddy dropped suddenly
into fighting crouches on either side of me. Teddy did so eagerly, Vern with a
desperate, cornered grimace on his face.
The big kids advanced in a line, their feet splashing through the bog, which
was now one big sludgy puddle because of the storm. The body of Ray Brower lay at
our feet like a waterlogged barrel. I got ready to fight… and that was when Chris fired the pistol he had hawked out of his old man’s dresser.
KA-BLAM!
God, what a wonderful sound that was! Charlie Hogar jumped right up into the air. Ace Merrill, who had been staring straight at me, now jerked around and looked at Chris. His mouth made that O again. Eyeball looked absolutely astounded.
‘Hey, Chris, that’s Daddy’s,’ he said. ‘You’re gonna get the tar whaled out of
you -‘
“That’s nothing to what you’ll get,’ Chris said. His face was horribly pale, and
all the life in him seemed to have been sucked upward, into his eyes. They blazed out
of his face.
‘Gordie was right, you’re nothing but a bunch of cheap hoods. Vern and Billy
didn’t want their fuckin’ dibs and you all know it. We wouldn’t have walked way to
fuck out here if they said they did. They just went someplace and puked the story up
and let Ace Merrill do their thinkin’ for them.’ His voice rose to a scream. ‘But you
ain’t gonna get him, do you hear me?
‘Now listen,’ Ace said. ‘You better put that down before you take your foot off
with it. You ain’t got the sack to shoot a woodchuck.’ He began to walk forward again, smiling his gentle smile as he came. ‘You’re just a sawed-off pint-sized pissy-assed
little runt and I’m gonna make you eat that fuckin’ gun.’
‘Ace, if you don’t stand still I’m going to shoot you. I swear to God.’
‘You’ll go to jayyy-ail’ Ace crooned, not even hesitating. He was still smiling.
The others watched him with horrified fascination… much the same way as Teddy and
Vern and I were looking at Chris. Ace Merrill was the hardest case for miles around
and I didn’t think Chris could bluff him down. And what did that leave? Ace didn’t
think a twelve-year-old punk would actually shoot him. I thought he was wrong; I
thought Chris would shoot Ace before he let Ace take his father’s pistol away from
him. In those few seconds I was sure there was going to be bad trouble, the worst I’d
ever known. Killing trouble, maybe. And all of it over who got dibs on a dead body.
Chris said softly, with great regret: ‘Where do you want it, Ace? Arm or leg? I
can’t pick. You pick for me.’ And Ace stopped.
27
His face sagged, and I saw sudden terror on it. It was Chris’s tone rather than his
actual words, I think; the real regret that things were going to go from bad to worse. If it was a bluff, it’s still the best I’ve ever seen. The other big kids were totally