without warning in their classrooms. You could see that the sight of those boots and
that many-zippered jacket offended them in connection with such high-minded
subjects as algebra, Latin, and earth science; such attire was meant for the shop
courses only. Chris sat among the well-dressed, vivacious boys and girls from the
middle-class families in Castle View and Brickyard Hill like some silent, brooding
Grendel that might turn on them at any moment, produce a horrible roaring like the
sound of dual glasspack mufflers, and gobble them up, penny loafers, Peter Pan
collars, button-down paisley shirts and all. He almost quit a dozen times that year. His father in particular hounded him, accusing Chris of thinking he was better than his old man, accusing Chris of wanting ‘to go up there to the college so you can turn me into
a bankrupt.’ He once broke a Rhinegold bottle over the back of Chris’s head and Chris
wound up in the CMC Emergency Room again, where it took four stitches to close his
scalp. His old friends, most of whom were now majoring in Smoking Area, catcalled
him on the streets. The guidance counsellor huckstered him to take at least some shop
courses so he wouldn’t flunk the whole slate. Worst of all, of course, was just this:
he’d been fucking off for the entire first seven years of his public education, and now the bill had come due with a vengeance. We studied together almost every night,
sometimes for as long as six hours at a stretch. I always came away from those
sessions exhausted, and sometimes I came away frightened as well–frightened by his
incredulous rage at just how murderously high that bill was. Before he could even
begin to understand Introductory Algebra, he had to relearn the fractions that he and
Teddy and Vern had played pocket pool through in the fifth grade. Before he could
even begin to understand Pater noster qui est in caelis, he had to be told what nouns
and prepositions and objects were. On the inside of his English grammar, neatly
lettered, were the words FUCK GERUNDS. His compositional ideas were good and
not badly organized, but his grammar was bad and he approached the whole business
of punctuation as if with a shotgun. He wore out his copy of Warriner’s and bought
another in a Portland bookstore–it was the first hardcover book he actually owned,
and it became a queer sort of Bible to him.
But by our junior year in high school, he had been accepted. Neither of us
made top honours, but I came out seventh and Chris stood nineteenth. We were both
accepted at the University of Maine, but I went to the Orono campus while Chris
enrolled at the Portland campus. Pre-law, can you believe that? More Latin. We both
dated through high school, but no girl ever came between us. Does that sound like we
went faggot? It would have to most of our old friends, Vern and Teddy included. But
it was only survival. We were clinging to each other in deep water. I’ve explained
about Chris, I think; my reasons for clinging to him were less definable. His desire to get away from Castle Rock and out of the mill’s shadow seemed to me to be my best
part, and I could not just leave him to sink or swim on his own. If he had drowned,
that part of me would have drowned with him, I think.
Near the end of the spring semester in 1968, the year when we all grew our
hair long and cut classes to go to teach-ins about the war in Viet Nam, Chris went into a Chicken Delight to get a three-piece Snack Bucket Just ahead of him, two men
started arguing about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris, who had always been the best of us at making peace, stepped between them
and was stabbed in the throat The man with the knife had spent time in four different
institutions; he had been released from Shawshank Penitentiary only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly. I was out of school when I read about it in the paper –