We all looked at him for a long second, no one saying anything. Then Chris tossed his cards down and said, ‘Sure! And I bet you anything we get our pictures in
the paper!’
‘Huh?’ Vern said.
‘Yeah?’ Teddy said, and grinned his crazy truck-dodging grin. ‘Look,’ Chris
said, leaning across the ratty card-table. ‘We can find the body and report it!
Well be on the news!’
‘I dunno,’ Vern said, obviously taken aback. ‘Billy will know where I found out.
He’ll beat the living shit outta me.’
‘No he won’t,’ I said, ‘because it’ll be us guys that find that kid, not Billy and
Charlie Hogan in a boosted car. Then they won’t have to worry about it anymore.
They’ll probably pin a medal on you, Penny.’
‘Yeah?’ Vern grinned, showing his bad teeth. It was a dazed sort of grin, as if
the thought of Billy being pleased with anything he did had acted on him like a hard
shot to the chin.
‘Yeah, you think so?’
Teddy was grinning, too. Then he frowned and said, ‘Oh-oh.’
‘What?’ Vern asked. He was squirming again, afraid that some really basic
objection to the idea had just cropped up in Teddy’s mind… or what passed for
Teddy’s mind.
‘Our folks,’ Teddy said. ‘If we find that kid’s body over in South Harlow
tomorrow, they’re gonna know we didn’t spend the night campin* out in Vern’s back
field.’
‘Yeah,’ Chris said. They’ll know we went lookin’ for that kid.’
‘No they won’t,’ I said. I felt funny–both excited and scared because I knew we
could do it and get away with it. The mixture of emotions made me feel heatsick and
headachey. I picked up the Bikes to have something to do with my hands and started
box-shuffling them. That and how to play cribbage was about all I got for older
brother stuff from Dennis. The other kids envied that shuffle, and I guess everyone I
knew had asked me to show them how it went… everyone except Chris. I guess only
Chris knew that showing someone would be like giving away a piece of Dennis, and I
just didn’t have so much of him that I could afford to pass pieces around.
I said: ‘We’ll just tell ’em we got bored tenting in Vern’s field because we’ve
done it so many times before. So we decided to hike up the tracks and have a campout
in the woods. I bet we don’t even get hided for it because everybody’ll be so excited
about what we found.’
‘My dad’ll hide me anyway,’ Chris said. ‘He’s on a really mean streak this time.’
He shook his head sullenly. ‘To hell, it’s worth a hiding.’
‘Okay,’ Teddy said, getting up. He was still grinning like crazy, ready to break
into his high-pitched, cackling laugh at any second. ‘Let’s all get together at Vern’s house after lunch. What can we tell ’em about supper?’
Chris said, ‘You and me and Gordie can say we’re eating at Vern’s.’
‘And I’ll tell my mom I’m eating over at Chris’s,’ Vern said.
That would work unless there was some emergency we couldn’t control or
unless any of the parents got together. And neither Vern’s folks or Chris’s had a phone.
Back then there were a lot of families which still considered a telephone a luxury,
especially families of the shirttail variety. And none of us came from the upper crust.
My dad was retired. Vern’s dad worked in the mill and was still driving a 1952
DeSoto.
Teddy’s mom had a house on Danberry Street and she took in a boarder
whenever she could get one. She didn’t have one that summer; the FURNISHED
ROOM TO LET sign had been up in the parlour window since June. And Chris’s dad
was always on a ‘mean streak’, more or less; he was a drunk who got welfare off and
on–mostly on–and spent most of his time hanging out in Sukey’s Tavern with Junior
Merrill, Ace Merrill’s old man, and a couple of other local rumpots.
Chris didn’t talk much about his dad, but we all knew he hated him like poison.
Chris was marked up every two weeks or so, bruises on his cheeks and neck or one