eye swelled up and as colourful as a sunset, and once he came into school with a big
clumsy bandage on the back of his head. Other times he never got to school at all. His mom would call him in sick because he was too lamed up to come in. Chris was smart,
really smart, but he played truant a lot, and Mr. Halliburton, the town truant officer, was always showing up at Chris’s house, driving his old black Chevrolet with the NO
RIDERS sticker in the corner of the windshield. If Chris was being truant and Bertie
(as we called him–always behind his back, of course) caught him, he would haul him
back to school and see that Chris got detention for a week. But if Bertie found out that Chris was home because his father had beaten the shit out of him, Bertie just went
away and didn’t say boo to a cuckoo-bird. It never occurred to me to question this set of priorities until about twenty years later. The year before, Chris had been suspended from school for two weeks. A bunch of milk-money disappeared when it was Chris’s
turn to be room-monitor and collect it, and because he was a Chambers from those no-
account Chamberses, he had to take a walk even though he always swore he never
hawked that money. That was the time Mr Chambers put Chris in the hospital for an
overnight stay, when his dad heard Chris was suspended, he broke Chris’s nose and
his right wrist. Chris came from a bad family, all right, and everybody thought he
would turn out bad… including Chris. His brothers had lived up to the town’s
expectations admirably. Dave, the eldest, ran away from home when he was
seventeen, joined the Navy, and ended up doing a long stretch in Portsmouth for rape
and criminal assault. The next eldest, Richard (his right eye was all funny and jittery, which was why everybody called him Eyeball), had dropped out of high school in the
tenth grade, and chummed around with Charlie and Billy Tessio and their buddies.
‘I think all that’ll work,’ I told Chris. ‘What about John and Marty?’ John and
Marty DeSpain were two other members of our regular gang. ‘They’re still away,’
Chris said. ‘They won’t be back until Monday.’
‘Oh. That’s too bad.’
‘So are we set?’ Vern asked, still squirming. He didn’t want the conversation
sidetracked even for a minute.
‘I guess we are,’ Chris said. ‘Who wants to play some more scat?’ No one did.
We were too excited to play cards. We climbed down from the treehouse, climbed the
fence into the vacant lot, and played three-flies-six-grounders for a while with Vein’s old friction-taped baseball, but that was no fun, either. All we could think about was that kid Brower, hit by a train, and how we were going to see him, or what was left of him. Around ten o’clock we all drifted away home to fix it with our parents.
6
I got to my house at quarter to eleven, after stopping at the drugstore to check out the paperbacks. I did that every couple of days to see if there were any new John D
MacDonalds. I had a quarter and I figured if there was, I’d take it along. But there
were only the old ones, and I’d read most of those half a dozen times.
When I got home the car was gone and I remembered that my mom and some
of her henparty friends had gone to Boston to see a concert. A great old concert-goer, my mother. And why not? Her only kid was dead and she had to do something to take
her mind off it.
I guess that sounds pretty bitter. And I guess if you’d been there, you’d
understand why I felt that way.
Dad was out back, passing a fine spray from the hose over his ruined garden.
If you couldn’t tell it was a lost cause from his glum face, you sure could by looking at the garden itself. The soil was light, powdery grey. Everything in it was dead except
for the corn, which had never grown so much as a single edible ear. Dad said he’d