kid was laid right out, you know it? Didja see that sonofawhore, Billy?’
‘I seen him,’ Billy said, and a second cigarette butt joined the first in the driveway.
‘Let’s go see if Ace is up. I want some juice.’
‘We gonna tell him?’
‘Charlie, we ain’t gonna tell nobody. Nobody never. You dig me?’
‘I dig you,’ Charlie said. ‘Chrise-Jesus, I wish we never boosted that fuckin’ Dodge.’
‘Aw, shut the fuck up and come on.’
Two pairs of legs clad in tight, wash-faded pegged jeans, two pairs of feet in black
engineer boots with side-buckles, came down the steps. Vern froze on his hands and
knees (‘My balls crawled up so high I thought they was trine to get back home,’ he told
us), sure his brother would sense him beneath the porch and drag him out and kill him –
he and Charlie Hogan would kick the few brains the good Lord had seen fit to give him
right out his jug ears and then stomp him with their engineer boots. But they just kept
going and when Vern was sure they were really gone, he had crawled out from under the
porch and run here.
5
‘You’re really lucky,’ I said. They would have killed you.’
Teddy said, ‘I know the Back Harlow Road. It comes to a dead end by the river. We
used to fish for cossies out there.’
Chris nodded. ‘There used to be a bridge, but there was a flood. A long time ago. Now
there’s just the train-tracks.’
‘Could a kid really have gotten all the way from Chamberlain to Harlow?’ I asked
Chris. That’s twenty or thirty miles.’
‘I think so. He probably happened on the train tracks and followed them the whole
way. Maybe he thought they’d take him out, or maybe he thought he could flag down a
train if he had to. But that’s just a freight run now – GS&WM up to Derry and
Brownsville – and not many of those anymore. He’d had to’ve walked all the way to Castle
Rock to get out. After dark a train must have finally come along … and el smacko.’
Chris drove his right fist down against his left palm, making a flat noise. Teddy, a
veteran of many close calls dodging the pulp-trucks on 196, looked vaguely pleased. I felt
a little sick, imagining the kid so far away from home, scared to death but doggedly
following the GS&WM tracks, probably walking on the ties because of the night-noises
from the overhanging trees and bushes … maybe even from the culverts underneath the
railroad bed. And here comes the train, and maybe the big headlight on the front
hypnotised him until it was too late to jump. Or maybe he was just lying there on the
tracks in a hunger-faint when the train came along. Either way, any way, Chris had the
straight of it: el smacko had been the final result. The kid was dead.
‘So anyway, you want to go see it?’ Vern asked. He was squirming around like he had
to go to the bathroom he was so excited.
We all looked at him for a long second, no one saying anything. Then Chris tossed his
cards down and said, ‘Sure! And I bet you anything we get our pictures in the paper!’
‘Huh?’ Vern said.
‘Yeah?’ Teddy said, and grinned his crazy truck-dodging grin.
‘Look,’ Chris said, leaning across the ratty card-table. ‘We can find the body and report
it! Well be on the news!’
‘I dunno,’ Vern said, obviously taken aback. ‘Billy will know where I found out. He’ll
beat the living shit outta me.’
‘No he won’t,’ I said, ‘because it’ll be us guys that find that kid, not Billy and Charlie Hogan in a boosted car. Then they won’t have to worry about it anymore. They’ll probably
pin a medal on you, Penny.’
‘Yeah?’ Vern grinned, showing his bad teeth. It was a dazed sort of grin, as if the
thought of Billy being pleased with anything he did had acted on him like a hard shot to
the chin. ‘Yeah, you think so?’
Teddy was grinning, too. Then he frowned and said, ‘Oh-oh.’
‘What?’ Vern asked. He was squirming again, afraid that some really basic objection to
the idea had just cropped up in Teddy’s mind … or what passed for Teddy’s mind.
‘Our folks,’ Teddy said. ‘If we find that kid’s body over in South Harlow tomorrow,
they’re gonna know we didn’t spend the night campin* out in Vern’s back field.’
‘Yeah,’ Chris said. They’ll know we went lookin’ for that kid.’
‘No they won’t,’ I said. I felt funny – both excited and scared because I knew we could
do it and get away with it. The mixture of emotions made me feel heatsick and
headachey. I picked up the Bikes to have something to do with my hands and started box-
shuffling them. That and how to play cribbage was about all I got for older brother stuff
from Dennis. The other kids envied that shuffle, and I guess everyone I knew had asked
me to show them how it went… everyone except Chris. I guess only Chris knew that
showing someone would be like giving away a piece of Dennis, and I just didn’t have so
much of him that I could afford to pass pieces around.
I said: ‘We’ll just tell ’em we got bored tenting in Vern’s field because we’ve done it so
many times before. So we decided to hike up the tracks and have a campout in the woods.
I bet we don’t even get hided for it because everybody’ll be so excited about what we
found.’
‘My dad’ll hide me anyway,’ Chris said. ‘He’s on a really mean streak this time.’ He
shook his head sullenly. To hell, it’s worth a hiding.’
‘Okay,’ Teddy said, getting up. He was still grinning like crazy, ready to break into his
high-pitched, cackling laugh at any second. ‘Let’s all get together at Vern’s house after
lunch. What can we tell ’em about supper?’
Chris said, ‘You and me and Gordie can say we’re eating at Vern’s.’
‘And I’ll tell my mom I’m eating over at Chris’s,’ Vern said.
That would work unless there was some emergency we couldn’t control or unless any
of the parents got together. And neither Vern’s folks or Chris’s had a phone. Back then
there were a lot of families which still considered a telephone a luxury, especially
families of the shirttail variety. And none of us came from the upper crust.
My day was retired. Vern’s dad worked in the mill and was still driving a 1952 DeSoto.
Teddy’s mom had a house on Danberry Street and she took in a boarder whenever she
could get one. She didn’t have one that summer; the FURNISHED ROOM TO LET sign
had been up in the parlour window since June. And Chris’s dad was always on a ‘mean
streak’, more or less; he was a drunk who got welfare off and on – mostly on – and spent
most of his time hanging out in Sukey’s Tavern with Junior Merrill, Ace Merrill’s old
man, and a couple of other local rumpots.
Chris didn’t talk much about his dad, but we all knew he hated him like poison. Chris
was marked up every two weeks or so, bruises on his cheeks and neck or one eye swelled
up and as colourful as a sunset, and once he came into school with a big clumsy bandage
on the back of his head. Other times he never got to school at all. His mom would call
him in sick because he was too lamed up to come in. Chris was smart, really smart, but he
played truant a lot, and Mr Halliburton, the town truant officer, was always showing up at
Chris’s house, driving his old black Chevrolet with the NO RIDERS sticker in the corner
of the windshield. If Chris was being truant and Bertie (as we called him – always behind
his back, of course) caught him, he would haul him back to school and see that Chris got
detention for a week. But if Bertie found out that Chris was home because his father had
beaten the shit out of him, Bertie just went away and didn’t say boo to a cuckoo-bird. It
never occurred to me to question this set of priorities until about twenty years later.
The year before, Chris had been suspended from school for two weeks. A bunch of
milk-money disappeared when it was Chris’s turn to be room-monitor and collect it, and
because he was a Chambers from those no-account Chamberses, he had to take a walk
even though he always swore he never hawked that money. That was the time Mr
Chambers put Chris in the hospital for an overnight stay, when his dad heard Chris was
suspended, he broke Chris’s nose and his right wrist. Chris came from a bad family, all