day’s first light, and I felt an almost holy tiredness-is-slipping-away sort of feeling. We
were awake and the whole world was asleep and I almost expected to turn the corner and
see my deer standing at the far end of Carbine Street, where the GS&WM tracks pass
through the mill’s loading yard.
Finally Chris spoke. They’ll tell,” he said.
‘You bet they will. But not today or tomorrow, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’ll
be a long time before they tell, I think. Years, maybe.’
He looked at me, surprised.
‘They’re scared, Chris. Teddy especially, that they won’t take him in the army. But
Vern’s scared, too. They’ll lose some sleep over it, and there’s gonna be times this fail
when it’s right on the tips of their tongues to tell somebody, but I don’t think they will.
And then … you know what? It sounds fucking crazy, but … I think they’ll almost forget it
ever happened.’
He was nodding slowly. ‘I didn’t think of it just like that.
You see through people, Gordie.’
‘Man, I wish I did.’
‘You do, though.’
We walked another block in silence.
‘I’m never gonna get out of this town,’ Chris said, and sighed. ‘When you come back
from college on summer vacation, you’ll be able to look me and Vern and Teddy up down
at Sukey’s after the seven-to-three shift’s over. If you want to. Except you’ll probably
never want to.’ He laughed a creepy laugh.
‘Quit jerking yourself off,’ I said, trying to sound tougher than I felt – I was thinking
about being out there in the woods, about Chris saying: And maybe I took it to old lady
Simons and told her, and maybe 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.. . The look. The look in his eyes.
‘No jerk-off, daddy-O,’ Chris said.
I rubbed my first finger against my thumb. ‘This is the world’s smallest violin playing
“My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You”.’
‘He was ours,’ Chris said, his eyes dark in the morning light.
We had reached the corner of my street and we stoppec there. It was quarter past six.
Back towards town we could see the Sunday Telegram truck pulling up in front of
Teddy’s uncle’s stationery shop. A man in bluejeans and a tee-shirt threw off a bundle of
papers. They bounced upside down on the sidewalk, showing the colour funnies (always
Dick Tracey and Blondie on the first page). Then the truck drove on, its driver intent on
delivering the outside world to the rest of the whistlestops up the line – Otisfield, Norway-
South Paris, Waterford, Stoneham. I wanted to say something more to Chris and didn’t
know how to.
‘Gimme some skin, man,’ he said, sounding tired.
‘Chris-‘
‘Skin.’
I gave him some skin. ‘I’ll see you.’
He grinned – that same sweet, sunny grin. ‘Not if I see you
first, fuckface.’
He walked off, still laughing, moving easily and gracefully, as though he didn’t hurt
like me and have blisters like me and like he wasn’t lumped and bumped with mosquito
and chigger and blackfly bites like me. As if he didn’t have a care in the world, as if he
was going to some real boss place instead of just home to a three-room house (shack
would have been closer to the truth) with no indoor plumbing and broken windows
covered with plastic and a brother who was probably laying for him in the front yard.
Even if I’d known the right thing to say, I probably couldn’t have said it. Speech destroys
the functions of love, I think – that’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I
believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a
single flip of its tail. The word is the harm. Love isn’t what these asshole poets like
McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No
word, no combination of words, can close those lovebites. It’s the other way around, that’s
the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them. Take it from me. I’ve made my
life from die words, and I know that is so.
30
The back door was locked so I fished the spare key out from inder the mat and let
myself in. The kitchen was empty, silent, suicidally clean. I could hear the hum the
fluorescent bars over the sink made when I turned on the switch. It had been literally
years since I had been up before my mother; I :ouldn’t even remember the last time such a
thing had happened.
I took off my shirt and put it in the plastic clothes basket behind the washing machine.
I got a clean rag from under the sink and sponged off with it – face, neck, pits, belly. Then
unzipped my pants and scrubbed my crotch – my testicles in particular – until my skin
began to hurt. It seemed I couldn’t get clean enough down there, although the red weal left
by the bloodsucker was rapidly fading. I still have a tiny crescent-shaped scar there. My
wife once asked about it and I told her a lie before I was even aware I meant to do so.
When I was done with the rag, I threw it away. It was filthy.
I got out a dozen eggs and scrambled six of them together. When they were semi-solid
in the pan, I added a side dish of crushed pineapple and half a quart of milk. I was just
sitting down to eat when my mother came in, her grey hair tied in a knot behind her head.
She was wearing a faded pink bathrobe and smoking a Camel.
‘Gordon, where have you been?’
‘Camping,’ I said, and began to eat ‘We started off in Vern’s field and then went up the
Brickyard Hill. Vern’s mom said she would call you. Didn’t she?’
‘She probably talked to your father,’ she said, and glided past me to the sink. She
looked like a pink ghost. The fluorescent bars were less than kind to her face; they made
her complexion look almost yellow. She sighed … almost sobbed. ‘I miss Dennis most in
the mornings,’ she said. ‘I always look in his room and it’s always empty, Gordon.
Always.’
‘Yeah, that’s a bitch,’ I said.
‘He always slept with his window open and the blankets … Gordon? Did you say
something?’
‘Nothing important, Mom.’
‘… and the blankets pulled up to his chin,’ she finished Then she just stared out the
window, her back to me. I went on eating. I was trembling all over.
31
The story never did get out
Oh, I don’t mean that Ray Brower’s body was never found; it was. But neither our gang
nor their gang got the credit In the end, Ace must have decided that an anonymous
phonecall was the safest course, because that’s how the location of the corpse was
reported. What I mean was that none of our parents ever found out what we’d been up to
that Labour Day weekend.
Chris’s dad was still drinking, just as Chris had said he would be. His mom had gone
off to Lewiston to stay with her sister, the way she almost always did when Mr Chambers
was on a bender. She went and left Eyeball in charge of the younger kids. Eyeball had
fulfilled his responsibility by going off with Ace and his jd buddies, leaving nine-year-old
Sheldon, five-year-old Emery, and two-year-old Deborah to sink or swim on their own.
Teddy’s mom got worried the second night and called Vern’s mom. Vern’s mom, who
was also never going to do the gameshow circuit, said we were still out in Vern’s tent.
She knew because she could look right out the kitchen window and see a light on in there.
Teddy’s mom said she sure hoped no one was smoking cigarettes in there and Vern’s mom
said it looked like a flashlight to her, and besides, she was sure that none of Vern’s or
Billy’s friends smoked.
My dad asked me some vague questions, looked mildly troubled at my evasive
answers, said we’d go fishing together sometime, and that was the end of it. If the parents
had fotten together in the week or two afterwards, everything would have fallen down …
but they never did.
Milo Pressman never spoke up, either. My guess is that he thought twice about it being
our word against his, and how we would all swear that he sicced Chopper on me.
So the story never came out – but that wasn’t the end of it.
32
One day near the end of the month, while I was walking some from school, a black