away. They had discovered a whole new group of contemporaries that they could lord
it over. Most of them were real wets–scabby, scrubby little fifth-grade assholes–but Vern and Teddy kept bringing them to the treehouse, ordering them around, strutting
like Nazi generals. Chris and I began to drop by there less and less frequently, and
after a while the place was theirs by default I remember going up one time in the
spring of 1961 and noticing that the place smelled like a shootoff in a haymow. I
never went there again that I can recall. Teddy and Vern slowly became just two more
faces in the halls or in 3:30 detention. We nodded and said hi. That was all. It happens.
Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that? But when I think of that dream, the corpses under the water pulling implacably
at my legs, it seems right that it should be that way. Some people drown, that’s all. It’s not fair, but it happens. Some people drown.
33
Vern Tessio was killed in a housefire that swept a Lewiston apartment building in
1966 -in Brooklyn and the Bronx, they call that sort of apartment building a slum
tenement, I believe. The Fire Department said it started around two in the morning,
and the entire building was nothing but cinders in the cellar-hole by dawn. There had
been a large drunken party; Vern was there. Someone fell asleep in one of the
bedrooms with a live cigarette going. Vern himself, maybe, drifting off, dreaming of
his pennies. They identified him and the four others who died by their teeth.
Teddy went in a squalid car crash. There used to be a saying when I was
growing up: ‘If you go out alone you’re a hero. Take somebody else with you and
you’re dogpiss. ‘ Teddy, who had wanted nothing but the service since the time he was
old enough to want anything, was turned down by the Air Force and classified 4-F by
the draft. Anyone who had seen his glasses and his hearing aid knew it was going to
happen–anyone but Teddy. In his junior year at high school he got a three-day
vacation from school for calling the guidance counsellor a lying sack of shit. The g. o.
had observed Teddy coming in every so often–like every day–and checking over his
career-board for new service literature. He told Teddy that maybe he should think
about another career, and that was when Teddy blew his stack.
He was held back a year for repeated absences, tardies, and the attendant
flunked courses… but he did graduate. He had an ancient Chevrolet Bel Aire, and he
used to hang around the places where Ace and Fuzzy and the rest had hung around
before him: the pool hall, the dance hall, Sukey’s Tavern, which is closed now, and
the Mellow Tiger, which isn’t. He eventually got a job with the Castle Rock Public
Works Department, filling up holes with hotpatch. The crash happened over in
Harlow. Teddy’s Bel Aire was full of his friends (two of them had been part of that
group he and Vern took to bossing around way back in 1960), and they were all
passing around a couple of joints and a couple of bottles of Popov. They hit a utility pole and sheared it off and the Chevrolet rolled six times. One girl came out
technically still alive. She lay for six months in what the nurses and orderlies at
Central Maine General call the C&T Ward–Cabbages and Turnips. Then some
merciful phantom pulled the plug on her respirator. Teddy Duchamp was
posthumously awarded the Dogpiss of the Year Award.
Chris enrolled in the college courses in his second year of junior high–he and
I both knew that if he waited any longer it would be too late; he would never catch up.
Everyone jawed at him about it: his parents, who thought he was putting on airs, his
friends, most of whom dismissed him as a pussy, the guidance counsellor, who didn’t
believe he could do the work, and most of all the teachers, who didn’t approve of this duck-tailed, leather-jacketed, engineer-booted apparition who had materialized