Stephen King – The Body
THE BODY
1
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get
ashamed of, because words diminish them–words shrink things that seemed limitless
when they were In your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.
But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to
steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people
look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you
thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for
want of an understanding ear.
I was twelve going on thirteen when I first saw a dead human being. It
happened in 1960, a long time ago… although sometimes it doesn’t seem that long to
me. Especially on the nights I wake up from those dreams where the hail fell into his
open eyes.
2
We had a treehouse in a big elm which overhung a vacant lot in Castle Rock. There’s
a moving company on that lot today, and the elm is gone. Progress. It was a sort of
social club, although it had no name. There were five, maybe six steady guys and
some other wet ends who just hung around. We’d let them come up when there was a
card game and we needed some fresh blood. The game was usually blackjack and we
played for pennies, nickel limit. But you got double money on blackjack and five-
card-under… triple money on six-card-under, although Teddy was the only guy crazy
enough to go for that.
The sides of the treehouse were planks scavenged from the shitpile behind
Makey Lumber & Building Supply on Carbine Road–they were splintery and full of
knotholes we plugged with either toilet paper or paper towels. The roof was a
corrugated tin sheet we hawked from the dump, looking over our shoulders all the
time we were hustling it out of there, because the dump custodian’s dog was supposed
to be a real kid-eating monster. We found a screen door out there on the same day. It
was flyproof but really rusty -I mean, that rust was extreme. No matter what time of
day you looked out that screen door, it looked like sunset Besides playing cards, the
club was a good place to go and smoke cigarettes and look at girly books. There were
half a dozen battered tin ashtrays that said CAMELS on the bottom, a lot of
centerfolds tacked to the splintery walls, twenty or thirty dog-eared packs of Bike
cards (Teddy got them from his uncle, who ran the Castle Rock Stationery Shoppe–
when Teddy’s unc asked him one day what kind of cards we played, Teddy said we
had cribbage tournaments and Teddy’s unc thought that was just fine), a set of plastic poker chips, and a pile of ancient Master Detective murder magazines to leaf through
if there was nothing else shaking. We also built a 12″ x 10″ secret compartment under the floor to hide most of this stuff in on the rare occasions when some kid’s father
decided it was time to do the We’re Really Good Pals routine. When it rained, being
in the club was like being inside a Jamaican steel drum… but that summer there had
been no rain.
It had been the driest and hottest since 1907–or so the newspapers said, and
on that Friday preceding the Labour Day weekend and the start of another school year,
even the goldenrod in the fields and the ditches beside the backroads looked parched
and poorly.
Nobody’s garden had done doodly-squat that year, and the big displays of
canning stuff in the Castle Rock Red & White were still there, gathering dust. No one had anything to put up that summer, except maybe dandelion wine.
Teddy and Chris and I were up in the club on that Friday morning, glooming