of a wild clockspring of blackberry brambles was a single pale white hand.
Did any of us breathe? I didn’t.
The breeze was now a wind – harsh and jerky, coming at us from no particular
direction, jumping and whirling, slapping at our sweaty skins and open pores. I hardly
noticed. I think part of my mind was waiting for Teddy to cry out Paratroops over the
side!, and I thought if he did that I might just go crazy. It would have been better to see the whole body, ail at once, but instead there was only that limp outstretched hand,
horribly white, the fingers limply splayed, like the hand of a drowned boy. It told us the
truth of the whole matter. It explained every graveyard in the world. The image of that
hand came back to me every time I heard or read of an atrocity. Somewhere, attached to
that hand, was the rest of Ray Brower.
Lightning flickered and stroked. Thunder ripped in behind each stroke as if a drag race
had started over our heads.
‘Sheeeee …’ Chris said, the sound not quite a cuss word, not quite the country version
of shit as it is pronounced around a slender stem of timothy grass when the baler breaks down – instead it was a long, tuneless syllable without meaning; a sigh that had just
happened to pass through the vocal cords.
Vern was licking his lips in a compulsive sort of way, as if he had tasted some obscure
new delicacy, a Howard Johnson’s 29th Flavour, Tibetan Sausage Rolls, Interstellar
Escargot, something so weird that it excited and revolted him at the same time.
Teddy only stood and looked. The wind whipped his greasy, clotted hair first away
from his ears and then back over them. His face was a total blank. I could tell you I saw
something there, and perhaps I did, in hindsight … but not then.
There were black ants trundling back and forth across the hand.
A great whispering noise began to rise in the woods on either side of the tracks, as if
the forest had just noticed we were there and was commenting on it. The rain had started.
Dime-sized drops fell on my head and arms. They struck the embankment, turning the
fill dark for a moment – and then the colour changed back again as the greedy dry ground
sucked the moisture up.
Those big drops fell for maybe five seconds and then they stopped. I looked at Chris
and he blinked back at me.
Then the storm came all at once, as if a shower chain had been pulled in the sky. The
whispering sound changed to loud contention. It was as if we were being rebuked for our discovery, and it was frightening. Nobody tells you about the pathetic fallacy until you’re
in college … and even then I noticed that nobody but the total dorks completely believed
it was a fallacy.
Chris jumped over the side of the washout, his hair already soaked and clinging to his
head. I followed. Vern and Teddy came close behind, but Chris and I were first to reach
the body of Ray Brower. He was face down. Chris looked into my eyes, his face set and
stern – an adult’s face. I nodded slightly, as if he had spoken aloud.
I think he was down here and relatively intact instead of up there between the rails and
completely mangled because be was trying to get out of the way when the train hit him,
knocking him head over heels. He had landed with his head pointed towards the tracks,
arms over his head like a diver about to execute. He had landed in this boggy cup of land
that was becoming a small swamp. His hair was a dark reddish colour. The moisture in
the air had made it curt slightly at the ends. There was blood in it, but not a great deal, not
a gross-out amount. The ants were grosser. He was wearing a solid colour dark green tee-
shirt and bluejeans. His feet were bare, and a few feet behind him, caught in tat
blackberry brambles, I saw a pair of filthy low-topped Keds. For a moment I was puzzled
– why was he here and his tennies there… Then I realized, and the realization was like a
dirty punch below the belt. My wife, my kids, my friends – they all think that having an
imagination like mine must be quite nice; aside from making all this dough, I can have a
little mind-movie whenever things get dull. Mostly they’re right But every now and then it
turns around and bites the shit out of you with these long teeth, teeth that have been filed
to points like the teeth of a cannibal. You see things you’d just as soon not see, things that
keep you awake until first light. I saw one of those things now, saw it with absolute
clarity and certainty. He had been knocked spang out of his Keds. The train had knocked
him out of his Keds just as it had knocked the life out of his body.
That finally rammed it all the way home for me. The kid was dead. The kid wasn’t
sick, the kid wasn’t sleeping. The kid wasn’t going to get up in the morning anymore or
get the runs from eating too many apples or catch poison ivy or wear out the eraser on the
end of his Ticonderoga No 2 during a hard math test The kid was dead; stone dead. The
kid was never going to go out bottling with his friends in the spring, gunnysack over his
shoulder to pick up the returnables the retreating snow uncovered The kid wasn’t going to
wake up at two o’clock a.m. on the morning of 1 November this year, run to the
bathroom, and vomit up a big glurt of cheap Halloween candy. The kid wasn’t going to
pull a single girl’s braid in home room. The kid wasn’t going to give a bloody nose, or get
one. The kid was can’t, don’t, won’t, never, shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t. He was the side of the battery where the terminal says NEG. The fuse you have to put a penny in. The
wastebasket by the teacher’s desk, which always smells of wood-shavings from the
sharpener and dead orange-peels from lunch. The haunted house outside of town where
the windows are crashed out, the NO TRESPASSING signs whipped away across the
fields, the attic full of bats, the cellar full of worms. The kid was dead, mister, ma’am,
young sir, little miss. I could go on all day and never get it right about the distance
between his bare feet on the ground and his dirty Keds hanging in the bushes. It was
thirty-plus inches, it was a googol of light-years. The kid was disconnected from his Keds
beyond all hope of reconciliation. He was dead.
We turned him face up into the pouring rain, the lightning, the steady crack of thunder.
There were ants and bugs all over his face and neck. They ran briskly in and out of the
round collar of his tee-shirt. His eyes were open, but terrifyingly out of sync – one was
rolled back so far that we could see only a tiny arc of pupil; the other stared straight up
into the storm. There was a dried froth of blood above his mouth and on his chin – from a
bloody nose, I thought – and the right side of his face was lacerated and darkly bruised.
Still, I thought, he didn’t really look bad. I had once walked into a door my brother Dennis
was shoving open, came off with bruises even worse than this kid’s, plus the bloody nose, and still had two helpings of everything for supper after it happened.
Teddy and Vern stood behind us and if there had been any sight at all left in that one
upward-staring eye, I suppose we would have looked to Ray Brower like pallbearers in a
horror movie.
A beetle came out of his mouth, trekked across his fuzzless cheek, stepped onto a
nettle, and was gone.
‘D’joo see that?’ Teddy asked in a high, strange, fainting voice. ‘I bet he’s fuckin’ fulla
bugs! I bet his brains’ re –
‘Shut up, Teddy,’ Chris said, and Teddy did, looking relieved.
Lightning forked blue across the sky, making the boy’s single eye light up. You could
almost believe he was glad to be found, and found by boys his own age. His torso had
swelled up and there was a faint gassy odour about him, like the smell of old farts.
I turned away, sure I was going to be sick, but my stomach was dry, hard, steady. I
suddenly rammed two fingers down my throat, trying to make myself heave, needing to
do it, as if I could sick it up and get rid of it. But my stomach only hitched a little and then