Had if he thought he could hold on. Teddy’s dad smiled Frigidaire dealership, if that’s what it took. The orderly saluted, and Teddy’s dad snapped it right back at him. A few
minutes after the ambulance left, the state police arrived and relieved Norman Duchamp
of duty.
He’d been doing odd things like shooting cats and lighting fires in mailboxes for over a
year, and after the atrocity he had visited upon his son, they had a quick hearing and sent
him to Togus, which is a special sort of V.A. hospital. Togus is where you have to go if
you’re a section eight. Teddy’s dad had stormed the beach at Normandy, and that’s just the
way Teddy always put it. Teddy was proud of his old man in spite of what his old man
had done to him, and Teddy went with his mom to visit him every week.
He was the dumbest guy we hung around with, I guess, and he was crazy. He’d take the
craziest chances you can imagine, and get away with them. His big thing was what he
called Truck Dodging. He’d run out in front of them on 196 and sometimes they’d miss
him by bare inches. God knew how many heart attacks he’d caused, and he’d be laughing
while the windblast from the passing truck rippled his clothes. It scared us because his
vision was so lousy. Coke-bottle glasses or not. It seemed like only a matter of time
before he misjudged one of those trucks. And you had to be careful what you dared him,
because Teddy would do anything on a dare.
‘Gordie’s out, eeeeee-eee-eee!’
‘Screw,’ I said, and picked up a Master Detective to read while they played it out. I
turned to ‘He Stomped the Pretty Co-Ed to Death in a Stalled Elevator’ and got right into
it.
Teddy picked up the cards, gave them one brief look, and said: ‘I knock.’
‘You four-eyed pile of shit!’ Chris cried.
‘The pile of shit has a thousand eyes,’ Teddy said seriously, and both Chris and I
cracked up. Teddy stared at us with a slight frown, as if wondering what had gotten us
laughing. That was another thing about the cat – he was always coming out with weird
stuff like “The pile of shit has a thousand eyes’, and you could never be sure if he meant it to he funnv or if it just happened that way. He’d look at the people who were laughing
with that slight frown on his face, as if to say O Lord what is it this time?
Teddy had a natural thirty – jack, queen, and king of clubs. Chris had only sixteen and
went down to his ride.
Teddy was shuffling the cards in his clumsy way and I was just getting to the gooshy
part of the murder story, where this deranged sailor from New Orleans was doing the
Bristol Stomp all over this college girl from Bryn Mawr because he couldn’t stand being
in closed-in spaces, when we heard someone coming fast up the ladder nailed to the side
of the elm. A fist rapped on the underside of the trapdoor.
‘Who goes?’ Chris yelled.
‘Vern!’ He sounded excited and out of breath.
I went to the trapdoor and pulled the bolt. The trapdoor banged up and Vern Tessio,
one of the other regulars, pulled himself into the clubhouse. He was sweating buckets and
his hair, which he usually kept combed in a perfect imitation of his rock and roll idol,
Bobby Rydell, was plastered to his bullet head in chunks and strings.
‘Wow, man,’ he panted. ‘Wait’ll you hear this.’
‘Hear what?’ I asked.
‘Lemme get my breath. I ran all the way from my house.’
‘/ ran all the way home,’ Teddy wavered in a dreadful Little Anthony falsetto, ‘just to say I’m soh-ree –
Tuck your hand, man,’ Vern said.
‘Drop dead in a shed, Fred,’ Teddy returned smartly.
‘You ran all the way from your place?’ Chris asked unbelievingly. ‘Man, you’re crazy.’
Vern’s house was two miles down Grand Street. ‘It must be ninety out there.’
‘This is worth it,’ Vern said. ‘Holy Jeezum. You won’t believe this. Sincerely.’ He
slapped his sweaty forehead to show us how sincere he was.
‘Okay, what?’ Chris asked.
‘Can you guys camp out tonight?’ Vern was looking at us earnestly, excitedly. His eyes
looked like raisins pushed into dark circles of sweat ‘I mean, if you tell your folks we’re
gonna tent out in my back field?’
‘Yeah, I guess so,’ Chris said, picking up his new hand and y’know.’
‘You got to, man,’ Vern said. ‘Sincerely. You won’t believe this. Can you, Gordie?’
‘Probably.’
I was able to do most stuff like that – in fact, I’d been like the Invisible Boy that whole
summer. In April my older brother, Dennis, had been killed in a Jeep accident. That was
at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was in basic. He and another guy were on their way to
the PX and an army truck hit them broadside. Dennis was killed instantly and his
passenger had been in a coma ever since. Dennis would have been twenty later that week.
I’d already picked out a birthday card for him at Dahlie’s over in Castle Green.
I cried when I heard, and I cried more at the funeral, and I couldn’t believe that Dennis
was gone, that anyone that used to knuckle my head or scare me with a rubber spider until
I cried or give me a kiss when I fell down and scraped both knees bloody and whisper in
my ear, ‘Now stop cryin’, ya baby!’ – that a person who had touched me could be dead. It hurt me and it scared me that he could be dead … but it seemed to have taken all the heart
out of my parents. For me, Dennis was hardly more than an acquaintance. He was eight
years older than me if you can dig it, and he had his own friends and classmates. We ate
at the same table for a lot of years, and sometimes he was my friend and sometimes my
tormentor, but mostly he was, you know, just a guy. When he died he’d been gone for a
year except for a couple of furloughs. We didn’t even look alike. It took me a long time
after that summer to realize that most of the tears I cried were for my mom and dad. Fat
lot of good it did them, or me.
‘So what are you pissing and moaning about, Vern-O?’ Teddy asked.
‘I knock,’ Chris said.
‘What?’ Teddy screamed, immediately forgetting all about Vern. ‘You friggin’ liar!
You ain’t got to pat hand. I didn’t deal you no pat hand.’
Chris smirked. ‘Make your draw, shitheap.’
Teddy reached for the top card of the pile of Bikes. Chris reached for the Winstons on
the ledge behind him. I bent over to pick up my detective magazine.
Vern Tessio said: ‘You guys want to go see a dead body?’
Everybody stopped.
3
We’d all heard about it on the radio, of course. The radio, a Philco with a cracked case
which had also been scavenged from the dump, played all the time. We kept it tuned to
WLAM in Lewiston, which churned out the super-hits and the boss oldies: ‘What in the
World’s Come Over You’ by Jack Scott and ‘This Time’ by Troy Shondell and ‘King
Creole’ by Elvis and ‘Only the Lonely’ by Roy Orbison. When the news came on we
usually switched some mental dial over to Mute. The news was a lot of happy horseshit
about Kennedy and Nixon and Quemoy and Matsu and the missile gap and what a shit
that Castro was turning out to be after all. But we had all listened to the Ray Brower story
a little more closely, because he was a kid our age.
He was from Chamberlain, a town forty miles or so east of Castle Rock. Three days
before Vern came busting into the clubhouse after a two-mile run up Grand Street, Ray
Brower had gone out with one of his mother’s pots to pick blueberries. When dark came
and he still wasn’t back, the Browers called the county sheriff and a search started – first
just around the kid’s house and then spreading to the surrounding towns of Motton and
Durham and Pownal. Everybody got into the act – cops, deputies, game wardens,
volunteers. But three days later the kid was still missing. You could tell, hearing about it
on the radio, that they were never going to find that poor sucker alive; eventually the
search would just peter away into nothing. He might have gotten smothered in a gravel pit
slide or drowned in a brook, and ten years from now some hunter would find his bones.
They were already dragging the ponds in Chamberlain, and the Motton Reservoir.