towards that place above the freeway where the land fell away and where the dead tree
would give him shelter.
It was five hours later and almost dark before they took him down.
THE BODY
1
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get
ashamed of, because words diminish them – words shrink things that seemed limitless
when they were In your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But
it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your
secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal
away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you
in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so
important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When
the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding
ear.
I was twelve going on thirteen when I first saw a dead human being. It happened in
1960, a long time ago … although sometimes it doesn’t seem that long to me. Especially
on the nights I wake up from those dreams where the hall fell into his open eyes.
2
We had a treehouse in a big elm which overhung a vacant lot in Castle Rock. There’s a
moving company on that lot today, and the elm is gone. Progress. It was a sort of social
club, although it had no name. There were five, maybe six steady guys and some other
wet ends who just hung around. We’d let them come up when there was a card game and
we needed some fresh blood. The game was usually blackjack and we played for pennies,
nickel limit But you got double money on blackjack and five-card-under … triple money
on six-card-under, although Teddy was the only guy crazy enough to go
for that.
The sides of the treehouse were planks scavenged from the shitpile behind Makey
Lumber & Building Supply on Carbine Road – they were splintery and full of knotholes
we plugged with either toilet paper or paper towels. The roof was a corrugated tin sheet
we hawked from the dump, looking over our shoulders all the time we were hustling it
out of there, because the dump custodian’s dog was supposed to be a real kid-eating
monster. We found a screen door out there on the same day. It was flyproof but really
rusty -1 mean, that rust was extreme. No matter what time of day you looked out that
screen door, it looked like sunset
Besides playing cards, the club was a good place to go and smoke cigarettes and look
at girly books. There were half a dozen battered tin ashtrays that said CAMELS on the
bottom, a lot of centrefolds tacked to the splintery wails, twenty or thirty dog-eared packs
of Bike cards (Teddy got them from his uncle, who ran the Castle Rock Stationery
Shoppe – when Teddy’s unc asked him one day what kind of cards we played, Teddy said
we had cribbage tournaments and Teddy’s unc thought that was just fine), a set of plastic
poker chips, and a pile of ancient Master Detective murder magazines to leaf through if
there was nothing else shaking. We also built a 12″ x 10″ secret compartment under the
floor to hide most of this stuff in on the rare occasions when some kid’s father decided it
was time to do the We’re Really Good Pals routine. When it rained, being in the club was
like being inside a Jamaican steel drum … but that summer there had been no rain.
It had been the driest and hottest since 1907 – or so the newspapers said, and on that
Friday preceding the Labour Day weekend and the start of another school year, even the
goldenrod in the fields and the ditches beside the backroads looked parched and poorly.
Nobody’s garden had done doodly-squat that year, and the big displays of canning stuff in
the Castle Rock Red & White were still there, gathering dust. No one had anything to put
up that summer, except mavbe dandelion wine.
Teddy and Chris and I were up in the club on that Friday morning, glooming to each
other about school being so near and playing cards and swapping the same old travelling salesman jokes and Frenchman jokes. How do you know when a Frenchman’s been in
your back yard? Well, your garbage cans are empty and your dog is pregnant. Teddy
would try to look offended, but he was the first one to bring in a joke as soon as he heard
it, only switching Frenchman to Polack.
The elm gave good shade, but we already had our shirts off so we wouldn’t sweat them
up too bad. We were playing three-penny-scat, the dullest card game ever invented, but it
was too hot to think about anything more complicated. We’d had a pretty fair scratch
ballteam until the middle of August and then a lot of kids just drifted away. Too hot
I was down to my ride and building spades. I’d started with thirteen, gotten an eight to
make twenty-one, and nothing had happened since then. Chris knocked. I took my last
draw and got nothing helpful.
Twenty-nine,’ Chris said, laying down diamonds.
Twenty-two,’ Teddy said, looking disgusted.
‘Piss up a rope,’ I said, and tossed my cards onto the table face-down.
‘Gordie’s out, ole Gordie just bit the bag and stepped out the door,’ Teddy bugled, and
then gave out with his patented Teddy Duchamp laugh – Eeee-eee-eee, like a rusty nail
being slowly hauled out of a rotten board. Well, he was weird; we all knew it. Close to
being thirteen tike the rest of us, the thick glasses and the hearing aid he wore sometimes
made him look like an old man. Kids were always trying to cadge smokes off him on the
street, but the bulge in his shirt was just his hearing aid battery.
In spite of the glasses and the flesh-coloured button always screwed into his ear, Teddy
couldn’t see very well and often misunderstood the things people said to him. In baseball
you had to have him play the fences, way beyond Chris in left field and Billy Greer in
right. You just hoped no one would hit one that far because Teddy would go grimly after
it, see it or not. Everv now and then he got bonked a good one, and once he went out cold
when he ran full tilt boogie into the fence by the treehouse. He lay there on his back with
his eyes showing whites for almost five minutes, and I got scared. Then he woke up and
walked around with a bloody nose and a huge purple lump rising on his forehead, trying
to claim that the ball was foul.
His eyesight was just naturally bad, but there was nothing natural about what had
happened to his ears. Back in those days, when it was cool to get your hair cut so that
your ears stuck out like a couple of jug-handles, Teddy had Castle Rock’s first Beatle
haircut – four years before anyone in America had even heard of the Beatles. He kept his
ears covered because they looked like two lumps of warm wax.
One day when he was eight, Teddy’s father got pissed at him for breaking a plate. His
mother was working at the shoe factory in South Paris when it happened and by the time
she found out about it, everything had happened.
Teddy’s dad took Teddy over to the big woodstove at the back of the kitchen and
shoved the side of Teddy’s head down against one of the cast-iron burner plates. He held
it down there for about ten seconds. Then he yanked Teddy up by the hair and did the
other side. Then he called the Central Maine General Emergency Unit and told them to
come get his boy. Then he hung up the phone, went into the closet, got his four-ten, and
sat down to watch the daytime stories on TV with the shotgun laid across his knees.
When Mrs Burroughs from next door came over to ask if Teddy was all right – she’d
heard the screaming – Teddy’s dad pointed the shotgun at her. Mrs Burroughs went out of
the Duchamp house at roughly the speed of light, locked herself into her own house, and
called the police. When the ambulance came, Mr Duchamp let the orderlies in and then
went out on the back porch to stand guard while they wheeled Teddy to the old portholed
Buick ambulance on a stretcher.
Teddy’s dad explained to the orderlies that while the fucking brass hats said the area
was clear, there were still Kraut snipers everywhere. One of the orderlies asked Teddy’s