have been sucking eggs.
‘What are we gonna do, man?’ Chris asked, and I felt a weird chill steal through me.
Maybe he was talking to me, maybe he was … but he was still looking down at the body.
‘We’re gonna take him back, ain’t we?’ Teddy asked, puzzled. ‘We’re gonna be heroes.
Ain’t that right?’ He looked from Chris to me and back to Chris again.
Chris looked up as if startled out of a dream. His lip curled. He took big steps towards
Teddy, planted both hands on Teddy’s chest, and pushed him roughly backwards. Teddy
stumbled, pinwheeled his arms for balance, then sat down with a soggy splash. He
blinked up at Chris like a surprised muskrat. Vern was looking warily at Chris, as if he
feared madness. Perhaps that wasn’t far from the mark.
‘You keep your trap shut,’ Chris said to Teddy. ‘Paratroops over the side my ass. You
lousy rubber chicken.’
‘It was the hail!’ Teddy cried out, angry and ashamed. ‘It wasn’t those guys, Chris! I’m ascared of storms! I can’t help it! I would have taken all of ‘em on at once, I swear on my mother’s name! But I’m ascared of storms! Shit! I can’t help it!’ He began to cry again,
sitting there in the water.
‘What about you?’ Chris asked, turning to Vern. ‘Are you ascared of storms too?’
Vern shook his head vacuously, still astounded by Chris’s rage. ‘Hey, man, I thought
we was all runnin’.’
‘You must be a mind-reader then, because you ran first’
Vem swallowed twice and said nothing.
Chris stared at him, his eyes sullen and wild. Then he turned to me. ‘Going to build
him a litter, Gordie.’
‘If you say so, Chris.’
‘Sure! Like in Scouts.’ His voice had begun to climb into strange, reedy levels. ‘Just
like in the fuckin’ Scouts. A litter -poles and shuts. Like in the handbook. Right, Gordie?’
‘Yeah. If you want But what if those guys -‘
‘Fuck those guys!’ he screamed. ‘You’re all a bunch of chickens! Fuck off, creeps?’
‘Chris, they could call the sheriff. To get back at us.’
“He’s ours and we’re gonna take him OUT!’
Those guys would say anything to get us in dutch,’ I told him. My words sounded thin,
stupid, sick with the flu. ‘Say anything and then lie each other up. You know how people
can get other people in trouble telling lies, man. Like with the milk-mo-‘
‘I DONT CARE!” he screamed, and lunged at me with his fists up. But one of his feet struck Ray Brower’s ribcage with a soggy thump, making the body rock. He tripped and
fell full-length and I waited for him to get up and maybe punch me in the mouth but
instead he lay where he had fallen, head pointing towards the embankment, arms
stretched out over his head like a diver about to execute, in the exact posture Ray Brower
had been in when we found him. I looked wildly at Chris’s feet to make sure his sneakers
were still on. Then he began to cry and scream, his body bucking in the muddy-water,
splashing it around, fists drumming up and down in it head twisting from side to side.
Teddy and Vem were staring at him, agog, because nobody had ever seen Chris Chambers
cry. After a moment or two I walked back to the embankment, climbed it, and sat down
on one of the rails. Chris and Vern followed me. And we sat there in the rain, not talking,
looking like those three Monkeys of Virtue they sell in dimestores and those sleazy gift-
shops that always look like they are tottering on the edge of bankruptcy.
28
It was twenty minutes before Chris climbed the embankment to sit down beside us.
The clouds had begun to break. Spears of sun came down through the rips. The bushes
seemed to have gone three shades darker green in the last forty-five minutes. He was mud
ail the way up one side and down the other. His hair was standing up in muddy spikes.
The only clean parts of him were the whitewashed circles around his eyes.
‘You’re right, Gordie,’ he said. ‘Nobody gets last dibs. Goocher all around, huh?’
I nodded. Five minutes passed. No one said anything. And I happened to have a
thought … just in case they did call Bannerman. I went back down the embankment and
over to where Chris had been standing. I got down on my knees and began to comb
carefully through the water and marshgrass with my fingers.
‘What you doing?’ Teddy asked, joining me.
‘It’s to your left, I think,’ Chris said, and pointed.
I looked there and after a minute or two I found both shell casings. They winked in the
fresh sunlight. I gave them to Chris. He nodded and stuffed them into a pocket of his
jeans.
‘Now we go,’ Chris said.
‘Hey, come on!’ Teddy yelled, in real agony. ‘I wanna take ‘im!’
‘Listen, dummy,’ Chris said, ‘if we take him back we could all wind up in the
reformatory. It’s like Gordie says. Those guys could make up any story they wanted to.
What if they said we killed him, huh? How would you like that?’
‘I don’t give a damn,’ Teddy said sulkily. Then he looked at us with absurd hope.
‘Besides, we might only get a couple of months or so. As excessories. I mean, we’re only
twelve fuckin’ years old, they ain’t gonna put us in Shawshank.’
Chris said softly: ‘You can’t get in the army if you got a record, Teddy.’
I was pretty sure that was nothing but a bald-faced lie -but somehow this didn’t seem
the time to say so. Teddy just looked at Chris for a long time, his mouth trembling.
Finally he managed to squeak out: ‘No shit?’
‘Ask Gordie.’
He looked at me hopefully.
‘He’s right,’ I said, feeling like a great big turd. ‘He’s right, Teddy. First thing they do
when you volunteer is to check your name through R&I.’
‘Holy God?’
‘We’re gonna shag ass back to the trestle,’ Chris said. ‘Then well get off the tracks and
come into Castle Rock from the other direction. If people ask where we were, we’ll say
we went campin’ up on Brickyard Hill and got lost.’
‘Milo Pressman knows better,’ I said. ‘That creep at the Florida Market does, too.’
‘Well, we’ll say Milo scared us and that’s when we decided to go up on the Brickyard.’
I nodded. That might work. If Vern and Teddy could remember to stick to it
‘What about if our folks get together?’ Vern asked.
‘You worry about it if you want,’ Chris said. ‘My dad’ll still be juiced up.’
‘Come on, then,’ Vern said, eyeing the screen of trees between us and the Back Harlow
Road. He looked like he expected Bannerman, along with a brace of bloodhounds, to
come crashing through at any moment ‘Let’s get while the gettin’s good.’
We were all on our feet now, ready to go. The birds were singing like crazy, pleased
with the rain and the shine and the worms and just about everything in the world, I guess.
We all turned around, as if pulled on strings, and looked back at Ray Brower.
He was lying there, alone again. His arms had flopped out when we turned him over
and now he was sort of spreadeagled, as if to welcome the sunshine. For a moment it
seemed all right a more natural deathscene than any ever constructed for a viewing-room
audience by a mortician. Then you saw the bruise, the caked blood on the chin and under
the nose, and the way the corpse was beginning to bloat. You saw that the bluebottles had
come out with the sun and that they were circling the body, buzzing indolently. You
remembered that gassy smell, sickish but dry, like farts in a closed room. He was a boy
our age, he was dead, and I rejected the idea that anything about it could be natural; I
pushed it away with horror.
‘Okay,’ Chris said, and he meant to be brisk but his voice came out of his throat like a
handful of dry bristles from an old whiskbroom. ‘Double time.’
We started to almost-trot back the way we had come. We didn’t talk. I don’t know
about the others, but I was too busy thinking to talk. There were things that bothered me
about the body of Ray Brower – they bothered me then and they bother me now.
A bad bruise on the side of his face, a scalp laceration, a bloody nose. No more – at
least, no more visible. People walk away from bar-fights in worse condition and go right
on drinking. Yet the train must have hit him; why else would his sneakers be off his feet that way? And how come the engineer hadn’t seen him? Could it be that the train had hit