‘How deep?’ Teddy called back. He had never learned to swim.
Chris stood up in the water and his shoulders broke the surface. I saw something on
one of them – a blackish-greyish something. I decided it was a piece of mud and
dismissed it. If I had looked more closely I could have saved myself a lot of nightmares
later on. ‘Come on in, you chickens!’
He turned and thrashed off across the pool in a clumsy breast-stroke, turned over, and
thrashed back. By then we were all getting undressed. Vern was in next, then me.
Hitting the water was fantastic – clean and cool. I swam icross to Chris, loving the
silky feel of having nothing on but water. I stood up and we grinned into each other’s
faces.
‘Boss!’ We said it at exactly the same instant.
‘Fuckin’ jerkoff,’ he said, splashed water in my face, and swam off the other way.
We goofed off in the water for almost half an hour before we realized that the pond
was full of bloodsuckers. We dived, swam under water, ducked each other. We never
knew a thing. Then Vern swam into the shallower part, went under, and stood on his
hands. When his legs broke water in a shaky but triumphant V, I saw that they were
covered with blackish-grey lumps, just like the one I had seen on Chris’s
shoulder. They were slugs — big ones.
Chris’s mouth dropped open, and I felt all the blood in my body go as cold as dry ice.
Teddy screamed, his face going Dale. Then all three of us were thrashing for the bank,
going just as fast as we could. I know more about freshwater slugs now than I did then,
but the fact that they are mostly harmless has done nothing to allay the almost insane
horror of them I’ve had ever since that day in the beaver-pool. They carry a local
anaesthetic and an anticoagulant in their alien saliva, which means that the host never
feels a thing when they attach themselves. If you don’t happen to see them they’ll go on
feeding until their swelled, loathsome bodies fall off you, sated, or until they actually
burst.
We pulled ourselves up on the bank and Teddy went into a hysterical paroxysm as he
looked down at himself. He was sreaming as he picked the leeches off his naked body.
Vern broke the water and looked at us, puzzled. ‘What the hell’s wrong with hi —’
‘Leeches!’ Teddy screamed, pulling two of them off his rrembling thighs and throwing
them just as far as he could. Dirty motherfuckin’ bloodsuckers? His voice broke shrilly on the last word.
‘OhGodOhGodOhGod!’ Vern cried. He paddled across the pool and stumbled out.
I was still cold; the heat of the day had been suspended. I sept telling myself to catch
hold. Not to get screaming. Not to be a pussy. I picked half a dozen off my arms and
several more off my chest.
Chris turned his back to me. ‘Gordie? Are there any more? Take ’em off if there are,
please, Gordie!’ There were more, five or six, running down his back like grotesque black buttons. I pulled their soft, boneless bodies off him.
I brushed even more off my legs, then got Chris to do my back.
I was starting to relax a little … and that was when I looked down at myself and saw
the granddaddy of them all clinging to my testicles, its body swelled to four times its
normal size. Its blackish-grey skin had gone a bruised purplish-red. That was when I
began to lose control. Not outside, at least not in any big way, but inside, where it counts.
I brushed its slick, glutinous body with the back of my hand. It held on. I tried to do it
again and couldn’t bring myself to actually touch it I turned to Chris, tried to speak,
couldn’t I pointed instead. His cheeks, already ashy, went whiter still.
‘I can’t get it off,’ I said through numb lips. ‘You … can you…’
But he backed away, shaking his head, his mouth twisted ‘I can’t, Gordie,’ he said,
unable to take his eyes away. ‘I’m sorry but I can’t No. Oh. No.’ He turned away, bowed
with one hand pressed to his midsection like the butler in a musical comedy, and was sick
in a stand of juniper bushes.
You got to hold onto yourself, I thought, looking at the leech that hung off me like a
crazy beard. Its body was still visibly swelling. You got to hold onto yourself and get him.
Be tough. It’s the last one. The. Last. One.
I reached down again and picked it off and it burst between my fingers. My own blood
ran across my palm and inner wrist in a warm flood. I began to cry.
Still crying, I walked back to my clothes and put them or. I wanted to stop crying, but I
just didn’t seem able to turn off the waterworks. Then the shakes set in, making it worse.
Vern ran up to me, still naked.
‘They off, Gordie? They off me? They off me?’
He twirled in front of me like an insane dancer on carnival stage.
They.off? Huh? Huh? They off me, Gordie?’
His eyes kept going past me, as wide and white as the eyes of a plaster horse on a
merry-go-round.
I nodded that they were and just kept on crying. It seemed that crying was going to be
my new career. I tucked my shirt in and then buttoned it all the way to the neck. I put on
my socks and my sneakers. Little by little the tears began to slow down. Finally there was
nothing left but a few hitches and moans, and then they stopped, too.
Chris walked over to me, wiping his mouth with a handful of elm leaves. His eyes
were wide and mute and apologetic.
When we were all dressed we just stood there looking at each other for a moment, and
then we began to climb the railroad embankment. I looked back once at the burst leech
lying on top of the tramped-down bushes where we had danced and screamed and
groaned them off. It looked deflated … but still ominous.
Fourteen years later I sold my first novel and made my first trip to New York. ‘It’s
going to be a three-day celebration,’ my new editor told me over the phone. ‘People
slinging bullshit will be summarily shot’ But of course it was three days of unmitigated
bullshit. I went away thinking the publishing house believed me to be the reincarnation of
Thomas Wolfe; they saw me off with perhaps other things in mind – paperback sales in
the millions, for instance.
While I was there I wanted to do all the standard out-of-towner things – see a stage
show at Radio City Music Hall, go to the top of the Empire State Building (fuck the
World Trade Center; the building King Kong climbed in 1933 is always gonna be the
tallest one in the world for me), visit Times Square by night. Keith, my editor, seemed
more than pleased to show his city off. The last touristy thing we did was to take a ride on
the Staten Island Ferry, and while leaning on the rail I happened to look down and see
scores of used condoms floating on the mild swells. And I had a moment of almost total
recall – or perhaps it was an actual incidence of time-travel. Either way, for one second I
was Literally in the past, pausing halfway up that embankment and looking back at the
burst leech: dead, deflated … but still ominous.
Keith must have seen something in my face because he said: ‘Not very pretty, are
they?’
I only shook my head, wanting to tell him not to apologize, wanting to tell him that
you didn’t have to come to the Apple and ride the ferry to see used rubbers, wanting to
say: The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get
ready for some future mortality; that’s why all the verbs in stories have -ed endings, Keith
my good man, even the ones that sell millions of paperbacks. The only two useful
artforms are religion and stories.
I was pretty drunk that night, as you may have guessed.
What I did tell him was: ‘I was thinking of something else, that’s all.’ The most
important things are the hardest things to say.
22
We walked further down the tracks – I don’t know just how far – and I was starting to
think: Well, okay, I’m going to be able to handle it, it’s all over anyway, just a bunch of
leeches, what the fuck; I was still thinking it when waves of whiteness suddenly began to come over my sight and I fell down.
I must have fallen hard, but landing on the crossties was like plunging into a warm and