pretty serious run-in with the big kids and comported ourselves like men. A few stories
went around. All of them were wildly wrong.
When the casts came off and the bruises healed, Vern and Teddy just drifted away.
They had discovered a whole new group of contemporaries that they could lord it over.
Most of them were real wets – scabby, scrubby little fifth-grade assholes – but Vern and
Teddy kept bringing them to the treehouse, ordering them around, strutting like Nazi
generals. Chris and I began to drop by there less and less frequently, and after a while the
place was theirs by default I remember going up one time in the spring of 1961 and
noticing that the place smelled like a shootofF in a haymow. I never went there again that
I can recall. Teddy and Vern slowly became just two more faces in the halls or in 3.30
detention. We nodded and said hi. That was all. It happens. Friends come in and out of
your life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that? But when I think of that
dream, the corpses under the water pulling implacably at my legs, it seems right that it
should be that way. Some people drown, that’s all. It’s not fair, but it happens. Some
people drown.
33
Vern Tessio was killed in a housefire that swept a Lewiston apartment building in
1966 – in Brooklyn and the Bronx, they call that sort of apartment building a slum
tenement, I believe. The Fire Department said it started around two in the morning, and
the entire building was nothing but cinders in the cellar-hole by dawn. There had been a
large drunken party; Vern was there. Someone fell asleep in one of the bedrooms with a
live cigarette going. Vern himself, maybe, drifting off, dreaming of his pennies. They
identified him and the four others who died by their teeth.
Teddy went in a squalid car crash. There used to be a saying when I was growing up:
‘If you go out alone you’re a hero. Take somebody else with you and you’re dogpiss.’
Teddy, who had wanted nothing but the service since the time he was old enough to want
anything, was turned down by the Air Force and classified 4-F by the draft Anyone who
had seen his glasses and his hearing aid knew it was going to happen — anyone but
Teddy. In his junior year at high school he got a three-day vacation from school for
calling the guidance counsellor a lying sack of shit The g.o. had observed Teddy coming
in every so often – like every day – and checking over his career-board for new service
literature. He told Teddy that maybe he should think about another career, and that was
when Teddy blew his stack.
He was held back a year for repeated absences, tardies, and the attendant flunked
courses … but he did graduate. He had an ancient Chevrolet Bel Aire, and he used to hang around the places where Ace and Fuzzy and the rest had hung around before him: the
pool hall, the dance hall, Sukey’s Tavern, which is closed now, and the Mellow Tiger,
which isn’t. He eventually got a job with the Castle Rock Public Works Department,
filling up holes with hotpatch.
The crash happened over in Harlow. Teddy’s Bel Aire was full of his friends (two of
them had been part of that group he and Vern took to bossing around way back in 1960), and they were all passing around a couple of joints and a couple of bottles of Popov. They
hit a utility pole and sheared it off and the Chevrolet rolled six times. One girl came out
technically still alive. She lay for six months in what the nurses and orderlies at Central
Maine General call the C&T Ward – Cabbages and Turnips. Then some merciful phantom
pulled the plug on her respirator. Teddy Duchamp was posthumously awarded the
Dogpiss of the Year Award.
Chris enrolled in the college courses in his second year of junior high – he and I both
knew that if he waited any longer it would be too late; he would never catch up. Everyone
jawed at him about it: his parents, who thought he was putting on airs, his friends, most
of whom dismissed him as a pussy, the guidance counsellor, who didn’t believe he could
do the work, and most of all the teachers, who didn’t approve of this duck-tailed, leather-
jacketed, engineer-booted apparition who had materialized without warning in their
classrooms. You could see that the sight of those boots and that many-zippered jacket
offended them in connection with such high-minded subjects as algebra, Latin, and earth
science; such attire was meant for the shop courses only. Chris sat among the well-
dressed, vivacious boys and girls from the middle-class families in Castle View and
Brickyard Hill tike some silent, brooding Grendel that might turn on them at any moment,
produce a horrible roaring like the sound of dual glasspack mufflers, and gobble them up,
penny loafers, Peter Pan collars, button-down paisley shirts and all.
He almost quit a dozen times that year. His father in particular hounded him, accusing
Chris of thinking he was better than his old man, accusing Chris of wanting ‘to go up
there to the college so you can turn me into a bankrupt.’ He once broke a Rhinegold bottle
over the back of Chris’s head and Chris wound up in the CMC Emergency Room again,
where it took four stitches to close his scalp. His old friends, most of whom were now
majoring in Smoking Area, catcalled him on the streets. The guidance counsellor
huckstered him to take at least some shop courses so he wouldn’t flunk the whole slate.
Worst of all, of course, was just this: he’d been fucking off for the entire first seven years
of his public education, and now the bill had come due with a vengeance.
We studied together almost every night, sometimes for as long as six hours at a stretch.
I always came away from those sessions exhausted, and sometimes I came away
frightened as well – frightened by his incredulous rage at just how murderously high that
bill was. Before he could even begin to understand Introductory Algebra, he had to relean
the fractions that he and Teddy and Vern had played pocket pool through in the fifth
grade. Before he could even begin to understand Pater noster qui est in caelis, he had to be told what nouns and prepositions and objects were. On the inside of his English
grammar, neatly lettered, were the words FUCK GERUNDS. His compositional ideas
were good and not badly organized, but his grammar was bad and he approached the
whole business of punctuation as if with a shotgun. He wore out his copy of Warriner’s
and bought another in a Portland bookstore – it was the first hardcover book he actually
owned, and it became a queer sort of Bible to him.
But by our junior year in high school, he had been accepted. Neither of us made top
honours, but I came out seventh and Chris stood nineteenth. We were both accepted at the
University of Maine, but I went to the Orono campus while Chris enrolled at the Portland
campus. Pre-law, can you believe that? More Latin.
We both dated through high school, but no girl ever came between us. Does that sound
like we went faggot? It would have to most of our old friends, Vern and Teddy included.
But it was only survival. We were clinging to each other in deep water. I’ve explained
about Chris, I think; my reasons for clinging to him were less definable. His desire to get
away from Castle Rock and out of the mill’s shadow seemed to me to be my best part, and
I could not just leave him to sink or swim on his own. If he had drowned, that part of me
would have drowned with him, I think.
Near the end of the spring semester in 1968, the year when we all grew our hair long
and cut classes to go to teach-ins about the war in Viet Nam, Chris went into a Chicken
Delight to get a three-piece Snack Bucket Just ahead of him, two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife. Chris, who had always
been the best of us at making peace, stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions; he had been released
from Shawshank Penitentiary only the week before. Chris died almost instantly.
I was out of school when I read about it in the paper -Chris had been finishing his
second year of graduate studies. Me, I had been married a year and a half and was
teaching high school English. My wife was pregnant and I was trying to write a book.