Nothing like that could happen in south-western Maine today; most of the area has
become suburbanized, and the bedroom communities surrounding Portland and Lewiston
have spread out like the tentacles of a giant squid. The woods are still there, and they get
heavier as you work your way west towards the White Mountains, but these days if you
can keep your head long enough to walk five miles in one consistent direction, you’re
certain to cross two-lane blacktop. But in 1960 the whole area between Chamberlain and
Castle Rock was undeveloped, and there were places that hadn’t even been logged since
before World War II. In those days it was still possible to walk into the woods and lose
your direction there and die there.
4
Vern Tessio had been under his porch that morning, digging.
We all understood that right away, but maybe I should take just a minute to explain it
to you. Teddy Duchamp was only about half-bright, but Vern Tessio would never be
spending any of his spare time on Quiz Kids either. Still, his brother Billy was even
dumber, as you will see. But first I have to tell you why Vern was digging under the
porch.
Four years ago, when he was eight, Vern buried a quart jar of pennies under the long
Tessio front porch. Vern called the dark space under the porch his ‘cave’. He was playing
a pirate sort of game, and the pennies were buried treasure -only if you were playing
pirate with Vern, you couldn’t call it buried treasure, you had to call it ‘booty’. So he
buried the jar of pennies deep, filled in the hole, and covered the fresh dirt with some of
the old leaves that had drifted under there over the years. He drew a treasure map which
he put up in his room with the rest of his junk. He forgot all about it for a month or so.
Then, being low on cash for a movie or something, he remembered the pennies and went
to get his map. But his mom had been in to clean two or three times since then, and had
collected all the old homework papers and candy wrappers and comic magazines and joke
books. She burned them in the stove to start the cook-fire one morning, and Vern’s
treasure map went right up the kitchen chimney.
Or so he figured it.
He tried to find the spot from memory and dug there. No luck. To the right and the left
of that spot. Still no luck. He gave up for the day but had tried off and on ever since. Four
years, man. Four years. Isn’t that a pisser? You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
It had gotten to be sort of an obsession with him. The Tessio front porch ran the length
of the house, probably forty feet long and seven feet wide. He had dug through damn near
every inch of that area two, maybe three times and no pennies. The number of pennies
began to grow in his mind. When it first happened he told Chris and me that there had
been maybe three dollars’ worth. A year later he was up to five and just lately it was
running around ten, more or less, depending on how broke he was.
Every so often we tried to tell him what was so clear to us – that Billy had known about
the jar and dug it up himself. Vern refused to believe it, although he hated Billy like the
Arabs hate the Jews and probably would have cheerfully voted the death penalty on his
brother for shoplifting, if the opportunity had ever presented itself. He also refused to ask
Billy point blank. Probably he was afraid Billy would laugh and say Course I got them,
you stupid pussy, and there was twenty bucks’ worth of pennies in that jar and I spent
every fuckin’ cent of it. Instead, Vern went out and dug for the pennies whenever the spirit moved him (and whenever Billy wasn’t around). He always crawled out from under the
porch with his jeans dirty and his hair leafy and his hands empty. We ragged him about it
something wicked, and his nickname was Penny – Penny Tessio. I think he came up to the
club with his news as quick as he did not just to get it out but to show us that some good
had finally come of his penny-hunt
He had been up that morning before anybody, ate his cornflakes, and was out in the
driveway shooting baskets through the old hoop nailed up on the garage, nothing much to
do. no one to play Ghost with or anything, and he decided to have another dig for his
pennies. He was under the porch when the screen door slammed up above. He froze, not
making a sound. If it was his dad, he would crawl out; if it was Billy, he’d stay put until
Billy and his jd friend Charlie Hogan had taken off.
Two pairs of footsteps crossed the porch, and then Charlie Hogan himself said in a
trembling, cry-baby voice: ‘Jesus Christ, Billy, what are we gonna do?’
Vern said that just hearing Charlie Hogan talk like that -Charlie, who was one of the
toughest kids in town – made him prick up his ears. Charlie, after all, hung out with Ace
Merrill and Eyeball Chambers, and if you hung out with cats like that, you had to be
tough.
‘Nuthin’,’ Billy said. “That’s all we’re gonna do. Nuthin’.’
‘We gotta do somethin’? Charlie said, and they sat down on the porch close to where
Vern was hunkered down. ‘Didn’t you see him?’
Vern took a chance and crept a little closer to the steps, practically slavering. At that
point he thought that maybe Billy and Charlie had been really drunked up and had run
somebody down. Vern was careful not to crackle any of the old leaves as he moved. If the
two of them found out he was under the porch and had overheard them, you could have
put what was left of him in a Ken-L-Ration dogfood can.
‘It’s nuthin’ to us,’ Billy Tessio said. “The kid’s dead so it’s nuthin’ to him, neither. Who gives a fuck if they ever find him? I don’t.’
‘It was that kid they been talkin’ about on the radio,’ Charlie said. ‘It was, sure as shit
Brocker, Brower, Flowers, whatever his name is. Fuckin’ train must have hit him.’
‘Yeah,’ Billy said. Sound of a scratched match. Vern saw it flicked into the gravel
driveway and then smelled cigarette smoke. ‘It sure did. And you puked.’
No words, but Vern sensed emotional waves of shame radiating off Charlie Hogan.
‘Well, the girls didn’t see it,’ Billy said after a while. ‘Lucky break.’ From the sound, he
clapped Charlie on the back to buck him up. “They’d blab it from here to Portland. We
tore out of there fast, though. You think they knew there was something wrong?’
‘No,’ Charlie said, ‘Marie don’t like to go down that Back Harlow Road past the
cemetery, anyway. She’s afraid of ghosts.’ Then again in that scared cry-baby voice:
‘Jesus, I wish we’d never boosted no car last night! Just gone to the show like we was gonna!’
Charlie and Billy went with a couple of scags named Marie Daughtery and Beverly
Thomas; you never saw such gross-looking broads outside of a carnival show – pimples,
moustaches, the whole works. Sometimes the four of them -or maybe six or eight if Fuzzy
Brackowicz or Ace Merrill were along with their girls – would boost a car from a
Lewiston parking lot and go joyriding out into the country with two or three bottles of
Wild Irish Rose wine and a six-pack of ginger ale. They’d take the girls parking
somewhere in Castle View or Harlow or Shiloh, drink Purple Jesuses, and make out.
Then they’d dump the car somewhere near home. Cheap thrills in the monkeyhouse, as
Chris sometimes said. They’d never been caught at it, but Vern kept hoping. He really dug
the idea of visiting Billy on Sundays at the reformatory.
‘If we told the cops, they’d want to know how we got way the hell out in Harlow,’ Billy
said. ‘We ain’t got no car, neither of us. It’s better if we just keep our mouths shut. Then
they can’t touch us.’
‘We could make a nonnamus call,’ Charlie said.
“They trace those fuckin* calls,’ Billy said ominously. ‘I seen it on Highway Patrol.
And Dragnet.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Charlie said miserably. ‘Jesus. I wish Ace’d been with us. We could have
told the cops we was in his car.’
‘Well, he wasn’t’
‘Yeah,’ Charlie said. He sighed. ‘I guess you’re right’ A cigarette butt flicked into the
driveway. ‘We hadda walk up and take a piss by the tracks, didn’t we? Couldn’t walk the
other way, could we? And I got puke on my new Keds.’ His voice sank a little. ‘Fuckin’