sandwich.
“Those stories you tell, they’re no good to anybody but you, Gordie. If you go along
with us just because you don’t want the gang to break up, you’ll wind up just another
grunt, making Cs to get on the teams. You’ll get to High and take the same fuckin’ shop
courses and throw erasers and pull your meat along with the rest of the grunts. Get
detentions. Fuckin’ suspensions. And after a while all you’ll care about is gettin’ a car so you can take some skag to the hops or down to the fuckin’ Twin Bridges Tavern. Then
you’ll knock her up and spend the rest of your life in the mill or some fuckin’ shoeshop in
Auburn or maybe even up to Hillcrest pluckin’ chickens. And that pie story will never get
written down. N’othin’ll get written down. ‘Cause you’ll just be another wiseguy with shit for brains.’
Chris Chambers was twelve when he said all that to me. But while he was saying it his
face crumpled and folded into something older, oldest, ageless. He spoke tonelessly,
colourlessly, but nevertheless, what he said struck terror into my bowels. It was as if he
had lived that whole life already, -nat life where they tell you to step right up and spin the
Wheel of Fortune, and it spins so pretty and the guy steps on i pedal and it comes up
double zeros, house number, r/erybody loses. They give you a free pass and then turn on
ae rain machine, pretty funny, huh, a joke even Vern Tessio could appreciate.
He grabbed my naked arm and his fingers closed tight. They dug grooves in my flesh.
They ground at the bones. His ryes were hooded and dead – so dead, man, that he might –
ave just fallen out of his own coffin.
‘I know what people think of my family in this town. I mow what they think of me and
what they expect. Nobody even asked me if I took the milk-money that time. I just got a
three-day vacation.’
‘Did you take it?’ I asked. I had never asked him before, and if you had told me I ever
would, I would have called you crazy. The words came out in a little dry bullet.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I took it.’ He was silent for a moment, looking ahead at Teddy
and Vern. ‘You knew I took it, Teddy knew, everybody knew. Even Vern knew, I think.’
I started to deny it, and then closed my mouth. He was right. No matter what I might
have said to my mother and father about how a person was supposed to be innocent until
proved guilty, I had known.
‘Then maybe I was sorry and tried to give it back,’ Chris said.
I stared at him, my eyes widening. ‘You tried to give it back!’
‘Maybe, I said. Just maybe. And maybe I took it to old lady Simons and told her, and maybe the money was all there and I got a three-day vacation anyway, because the money
never showed up. And maybe the next week old lady Simons had this brand-new skirt on
when she came to. school.’
I stared at Chris, speechless with horror. He smiled at me, but it was a crimped, terrible
smile that never touched his eyes.
‘Just maybe,’ he said, but I remembered the new skirt – a light brown paisley, sort of
full. I remembered thinking that it made old lady Simons look younger, almost pretty.
‘Chris, how much was that milk-money?’
‘Almost seven bucks.’
‘Christ,’ I whispered.
‘So I just say that / stole the milk-money but then old lady Simons stole it from me.
Just suppose. Then suppose I told that story. Me, Chris Chambers. Kid brother of Frank
Chambers and Eyeball Chambers. You think anybody would have believed it?’
‘No way,’ I whispered. ‘Jesus, Chris!’
He smiled his wintry, awful smile. ‘And do you think that bitch would have dared try
something like that if it had been one of those dootchbags from up on The View that had
taken the money?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Yeah. If it had been one of them, Simons would have said ‘kay, ‘kay, we’ll forget it this
time, but we’re gonna spank your wrist real hard and if you ever do it again we’ll have to
spank both wrists. But me … well, maybe she had her eye or that skirt for a long time.
Anyway, she saw her chance and she took it. I was the stupid one for even trying to give
that -money back. But I never thought … I never thought that a teacher … oh who gives a fuck, anyway? Why am I even -talkin’ about it?’
He swiped an arm angrily across his eyes and I realized he was almost crying.
‘Chris,’ I said, ‘why don’t you go into the college courses? You’re smart enough.’
They decide all of that in the office. And in their smart little conferences. The teachers,
they sit around in this big circle-jerk and all they say is Yeah, Yeah, Right, Right All. they
give a fuck about is whether you behaved yourself in grammar school and what the town
thinks of your family. All they’re deciding is whether or not you’ll contaminate all those
precious college-course dootchbags. But maybe I’l1 try to work -myself up. I don’t know
if I could do it, but I might try. Because I want to get out of Castle Rock and go to college
and never see my old man or any of my brothers again. I -want to go someplace where
nobody knows me and I don’t have any black marks against me before I start. But I don’t
know if I can do it.’
‘Why not?’
‘People. People drag you down.’
‘Who?’ I asked, thinking he must mean the teachers, or adult monsters like Miss
Simons, who had wanted a new skirt, or maybe his brother Eyeball who hung around with
Ace and Billy and Charlie and the rest, or maybe his own Mom and Dad.
But he said: ‘Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don’t you know that?’ He pointed at
Vern and Teddy, who were
standing and waiting for us to catch up. They were laughing
about something; in fact, Vern was just about busting a gut.
Your friends do. They’re like drowning guys that are holding
on to your legs. You can’t save them. You can only drown
with them.’
‘Come on, you fuckin’ slowpokes!’ Vern shouted, still laughing.
‘Yeah, comin’!’ Chris called, and before I could say anything else, he began to run. I
ran, too, but he caught up to them before I could catch up to him.
18
We went another mile and then decided to camp for the night. There was still some
daylight left, but nobody really wanted to use it. We were pooped from the scene at the
dump and from our scare on the train trestle, but it was more than that We were in
Harlow now, in the woods. Somewhere up ahead was a dead kid, probably mangled and
covered with flies. Maggots, too, by this time. Nobody wanted to get too close to him
with the night coming on. I had read somewhere – in an Algernon Blackwood story, I
think — that a guy’s ghost hangs out around his dead body until that body is given a
decent Christian burial, and there was no way I wanted to wake up in the night and
confront the glowing, disembodied ghost of Ray Brower, moaning and gibbering and
floating among the dark and rustling pines. By stopping here we figured there had to be at
least ten miles between us and him, and of course all four of us knew there were no such
things as ghosts, but ten miles seemed just about far enough in case what everybody knew
was wrong.
Vern, Chris, and Teddy gathered wood and got a modest little campfire going on a bed
of cinders. Chris scraped a bare patch all around the fire – the woods were powder-dry,
and he didn’t want to take any chances. While they were doing that I sharpened some
sticks and made what my brother Denny used to call ‘Pioneer Drumsticks’ – lumps of
hamburger pushed into the ends of green branches. The three of them laughed and
bickered over their woodcraft (which was almost nil; there was a Castle Rock Boy Scout
troop, but most of the kids who hung around our vacant lot considered it to be an
organization made up mostly of pussies), arguing about whether it was better to cook over
flames or over coals (a moot point; we were too hungry to wait for coals), whether dried
moss would work as kindling, what they would do if they used up all the matches before
they got the fire to stay lit. Teddy claimed he could make a fire by rubbing two sticks