puffy feather bed. Someone turned me over. The touch of hands was faint and
unimportant. Their faces were disembodied balloons looking down at me from miles up.
They looked the way the ref s face must look to a fighter who has been punched silly and
is currently taking a ten-second rest on the canvas. Their words came in gentle
oscillations, fading in and out
‘…him?’
‘…be all…’
‘… if you think the sun …’
‘Gordie, are you …’
Then I must have said something that didn’t make much sense because they began to
look really worried.
‘We better take him back, man,’ Teddy said, and then the whiteness came over
everything again.
When it cleared, I seemed to be all right Chris was squatting next to me, saying: ‘Can
you hear me, Gordie? You there, man?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and sat up. A swarm of black dots exploded in front of my eyes, and then
went away. I waited to see if they’d come back, and when they didn’t, I stood up.
‘You scared the cheesly old shit outta me, Gordie,’ he said. ‘You want a drink of water?’
‘Yeah.’
He gave me his canteen, half-full of water, and I let three warm gulps roll down my
throat
‘Why’d you faint, Gordie?’ Vern asked anxiously.
‘Made a bad mistake and looked at your face,’ I said.
‘Eeee-eee-eeeee!’ Teddy cackled. ‘Fuckin’ Gordie! You wet!’
‘You really okay?’ Vern persisted.
‘Yeah. Sure. It was … bad there for a minute. Thinking about those suckers.’
They nodded soberly. We took five in the shade and then went on walking, me and
Vern on one side of the tracks again, Chris and Teddy on the other. We figured we must
be getting close.
23
We weren’t as close as we thought, and if we’d had the brains to spend two minutes
looking at a roadmap, we would have seen why. We knew that Ray Brewer’s corpse had
to be near the Back Harlow Road, which dead-ends on the bank of the Royal River.
Another trestle carries the GS&WM tracks across the Royal. So this is the way we
figured: Once we got close to the Royal, we’d be getting close to the Back Harlow Road,
where Billy and Charlie had been parked when they saw the boy. And since the Royal
was only ten miles from the Castle River, we figured we had it made in the shade.
But that was ten miles as the crow flies, and the tracks didn’t move on a straight line
between the Castle and the Royal. Instead, they made a very shallow loop to avoid a hilly,
crumbling region called The Bluffs. Anyway, we could have seen that loop quite clearly if
we had looked on a map, and figured out that instead of ten miles, we had about sixteen
to walk.
Chris began to suspect the truth when noon had come and gone and the Royal still
wasn’t in sight. We stopped while he climbed a high pine tree and took a look around. He
came down and gave us a simple enough report: it was going to be at least four in the
afternoon before we got to the Royal, and we would only make it by then if we humped
right along.
‘Ah, shit!’ Teddy cried. ‘So what’re we gonna do now?’
We looked into each other’s tired, sweaty faces. We were hungry and out of temper.
The big adventure had turned into a long slog – dirty and sometimes scary. We would
have been missed back home by now, too, and if Milo Pressman hadn’t already called the
cops on us, the engineer of the train crossing the trestle might have done it. We had been
planning to hitchhike back to Castle Rock, but four o’clock was just three hours from
dark, and nobody gives four kids on a back country road a lift after dark.
I tried to summon up the cool image of my deer, cropping at green morning grass, but
even that seemed dusty and no good, no better than a stuffed trophy over the mantle in
some guy’s hunting lodge, the eyes sprayed to give them that phony lifelike shine.
Finally Chris said: ‘It’s still closer going ahead. Let’s go.’
He turned and started to walk along the tracks in his dusty sneakers, head down, his
shadow only a puddle at his feet. After a minute or so the rest of us followed him, strung
out in Indian file.
24
In the years between then and the writing of this memoir, I’ve thought remarkably little
about those two days in September, at least consciously. The associations the memories
bring to the surface are as unpleasant as week-old rivercorpses brought to the surface by
cannonfire. As a result, I never really questioned our decision to walk down the tracks.
Put another way, I’ve wondered sometimes about what we had decided to do but never
about how we did it.
But now a much simpler scenario comes to mind. I’m confident that if the idea had
come up it would have been shot down – walking down the tracks would have seemed
neater, bosser, as we said then. But if the idea had come up and hadn’t been shot down in flames, none of the things which occurred later would have happened. Maybe Chris and
Teddy and Vern would even be alive today. No, they didn’t die in the woods or on the
railroad tracks; nobody dies in this story except some bloodsuckers and Ray Brower, and
if you want to be completely fair about it, he was dead before it even started. But it is true that, of the four of us who flipped coins to see who would go down to the Florida Market
to get supplies, only the one who actually went is still alive. The Ancient Mariner at
thirty-four, with you, Gentle Reader, in the role of wedding guest (at this point shouldn’t
you flip to the jacket photo to see if my eye holdeth you in its spell?)… If you sense a
certain flipness on my part, you’re right – but maybe I have cause. At an age when all four
of us would be considered too young and immature to be President, three of us are dead.
And if small events really do echo up larger and larger through time, yes, maybe if we had
done the simple thing and simply hitched into Harlow, they would still be alive today.
We could have hooked a ride all the way up Route 7 to the Shiloh Church, which stood
at the intersection of the highway and the Back Harlow Road (at least until 1967, when it
was levelled by a fire attributed to a tramp’s smouldering cigarette butt). With reasonable
luck we could: have been beating the bushes in the area where Billy and Charlie parked
with their skag girlfriends before sundown of the previous day.
But the idea wouldn’t have lived. It wouldn’t have been shot down with tightly
buttressed arguments and debating society rhetoric, but with grunts and scowls and farts
and raised middle fingers. The verbal part of the discussion would have been carried
forward with such trenchant and sparkling contributions as ‘Fuck no’, That sucks’, and that
old reliable standby, ‘Did your mother ever have any kids that lived?’
Unspoken – maybe it was too fundamental to be spoken -was the idea that this was a
big thing. It wasn’t screwing around with firecrackers or trying to look through the
knothole in the back of the girls’ privy at Harrison State Park. This was something on a par with getting laid for the first time, or going into the Army, or buying your first bottle
of legal liquor — just bopping into that state store, if you can dig it, selecting a bottle of
good Scotch, showing the clerk your draft card and drivers’ licence, then walking out with
a grin on your face and that brown bag in your hand, member of a club with just a few
more rights and privileges than our old treehouse with the tin roof.
There’s a high ritual to all fundamental events, the rites of passage, the magic corridor
where the change happens. Buying the condoms. Standing before the minister. Raising
your hand and taking the oath. Or, if you please, walking down the railroad tracks to meet
a fellow your own age halfway, the same as I’d walk halfway up Grand Street to meet
Chris if he was coming over to my house, or the way Teddy would walk halfway down
Gates Street to meet me if I was going to his. It seemed right to do it this way, because the
rite of passage is a magic corridor and so we always provide an aisle – it’s what you walk down when you get married, what they carry you down when you get buried. Our corridor
was those twin rails, and we walked between them, just bopping along towards whatever