‘Holy God!’
‘We’re gonna shag ass back to the trestle,’ Chris said. ‘Then well get off the
tracks and come into Castle Rock from the other direction. If people ask where we
were, we’ll say we went campin’ up on Brickyard Hill and got lost.’
‘Milo Pressman knows better,’ I said. ‘That creep at the Florida Market does,
too.’
‘Well, we’ll say Milo scared us and that’s when we decided to go up on the
Brickyard.’ I nodded. That might work. If Vern and Teddy could remember to stick to
it ‘What about if our folks get together?’ Vern asked. ‘You worry about it if you want,’
Chris said. ‘My dad’ll still be juiced up.’
‘Come on, then,’ Vern said, eyeing the screen of trees between us and the Back
Harlow Road. He looked like he expected Bannerman, along with a brace of
bloodhounds, to come crashing through at any moment ‘Let’s get while the gettin’s
good.’ We were all on our feet now, ready to go. The birds were singing like crazy,
pleased with the rain and the shine and the worms and just about everything in the
world, I guess. We all turned around, as if pulled on strings, and looked back at Ray
Brower. He was lying there, alone again. His arms had flopped out when we turned
him over and now he was sort of spreadeagled, as if to welcome the sunshine. For a
moment it seemed all right a more natural deathscene than any ever constructed for a
viewing-room audience by a mortician. Then you saw the bruise, the caked blood on
the chin and under the nose, and the way the corpse was beginning to bloat. You saw that the bluebottles had come out with the sun and that they were circling the body,
buzzing indolently. You remembered that gassy smell, sickish but dry, like farts in a
closed room. He was a boy our age, he was dead, and I rejected the idea that anything
about it could be natural; I pushed it away with horror.
‘Okay,’ Chris said, and he meant to be brisk but his voice came out of his
throat like a handful of dry bristles from an old whiskbroom. ‘Double time.’
We started to almost-trot back the way we had come. We didn’t talk. I don’t
know about the others, but I was too busy thinking to talk. There were things that
bothered me about the body of Ray Brower–they bothered me then and they bother
me now. A bad bruise on the side of his face, a scalp laceration, a bloody nose. No
more–at least, no more visible. People walk away from bar-fights in worse condition
and go right on drinking. Yet the train must have hit him; why else would his sneakers be off his feet that way? And how come the engineer hadn’t seen him? Could it be that
the train had hit him hard enough to toss him but not to kill him? I thought that, under just the right combination of circumstances, that could have happened. Had the train
hit him a hefty, teeth-rattling sideswipe as he tried to get out of the way? Hit him and knocked him in a flying, backwards somersault over that eaved-in banking? Had he
perhaps lain awake and trembling in the dark for hours, not just lost now but
disorientated as well, cut off from the world? Maybe he had died of fear. A bird with
crushed tailfeathers once died in my cupped hands in just that way. Its body trembled
and vibrated lightly, its beak opened and closed, its dark, bright eyes stared up at me.
Then the vibration quit, the beak froze half-open, and the black eyes became
lacklustre and uncaring. It could have been that way with Ray Brower. He could have
died because he was simply too frightened to go on living.
But there was another thing, and that bothered me most of all, I think. He had
started off to go berrying. I seemed to remember the news reports saying he’d been
carrying a tin pail. When we got back I went to the library and looked it up in the
newspapers just to be sure, and I was right He’d been berrying, and he’d had a pail.