Hopkins dance and Denny I want to talk to you man to man about that car we were
looking at. I’d say, ‘Pass the butter’, and Dad would say, Denny, are you sure the army is
what you want? I’d say, ‘Pass the butter someone, okay?’ and Mom would ask Denny if he
wanted her to pick him up one of the Pendleton shirts on sale downtown, and I’d end up
getting the butter myself. One night when I was nine, just to see what would happen, I
said, ‘Please pass those goddam spuds.’ And my Mom said, Denny, Auntie Grace called
today and she asked after you and Gordon.
The night Dennis graduated with honours from Castle Rock High School I played sick
and stayed home. I got Stevie Darabont’s oldest brother Royce to buy me a bottle of Wild
Irish Rose and I drank half of it and puked in my bed in the middle of the night.
In a family situation like that, you’re supposed to either hate the older brother or idolize him hopelessly – at least that’s what they teach you in college psychology. Bullshit, right?
But so far as I can tell, I didn’t feel either way about Dennis. We rarely argued and never had a fist-fight. That would have been ridiculous. Can you see a fourteen-year-old boy
finding something to beat up his four-year-old brother about? And our folks were always
a little too impressed with him to burden him with the care of his kid brother, so he never
resented me the way some older kids come to resent their sibs. When Denny took me with
him somewhere, it was of his own free will, and those were some of the happiest times I
can remember.
‘Hey Lachance, who the fuck is that?’
‘My kid brother and you better watch your mouth, Davis. He’ll beat the crap out of
you. Gordie’s tough.’
They gather around me for a moment, huge, impossibly tall, just a moment of interest
like a patch of sun. They are so big, they are so old.
‘Hey kid! This wet end really your big brother?’
I nod shyly.
‘He’s a real asshole, ain’t he, kid?’
I nod again and everybody, Dennis included, roars with laughter. Then Dennis claps
his hands together twice, briskly, and says: ‘Come on, we gonna have a practice or stand
around here like a bunch of pussies?’
They run to their positions, already peppering the ball around the infield.
‘Go sit over there on the bench, Gordie. Be quiet. Don’t bother anybody.’
I go sit over there on the bench. I am good. I feel impossibly small under the sweet
summer clouds. I watch my brother pitch. I don’t bother anybody.
But there weren’t many times like that
Sometimes he read me bedtime stories that were better than mom’s; mom’s stories
were about the Gingerbread Man and the Three Little Pigs, okay stuff, but Dennis’s were
about stuff like Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper. He also had a version of Billy Goat’s
Gruff where the troll under the bridge ended up the winner. And, as I have already said,
he taught me the game of cribbage and how to do a box-shuffle. Not that much, but hey!
in this world you take what you can get, am I right?
As I grew older, my feelings of love for Dennis were replaced with an almost clinical
awe, the kind of awe so-so Christians feel for God, I guess. And when he died, I was
mildly shocked and mildly sad, the way I imagine those same so-so Christians must have
felt when Time magazine said God was dead. Let me put it this way: I was as sad for
Denny’s dying as I was when I heard on the radio that Dan Blocker had died. I’d seen
them both about as frequently, and Denny never ever got any re-runs.
He was buried in a closed coffin with the American flag on top (they took the flag off
the box before they finally stuck it in the ground and folded it – the flag, not the box – into
a cocked hat and gave it to my mom). My parents just fell to pieces. Six months hadn’t
been long enough to put them back together again; I didn’t know if they’d ever be whole
again. Mr and Mrs Dumpty. Denny’s room was in suspended animation just one door
down from my room, suspended animation or maybe in a time-warp. The ivy-league
college pennants were still on the walls, and the senior pictures of the girls he had dated
were still tucked into the mirror where he had stood for what seemed like hours at a
stretch, combing his hair back into a ducktail like Elvis’s. The stack of Trues and Sports Illustrateds remained on his desk, their dates looking more and more antique as time
passed. It’s the kind of thing you see in sticky-sentimental movies. But it wasn’t
sentimental to me; it was terrible. I didn’t go into Dennis’s room unless I had to because I
kept expecting that he would be behind the door, or under the bed, or in the closet. Mostly
it was the closet that preyed on my mind, and if my mother sent me in to get Denny’s
postcard album or his shoebox of photographs so she could look at them, I would imagine
that door swinging slowly open while I stood rooted to the spot with horror. I would
imagine him pallid and bloody in the darkness, the side of his head walloped in, a grey-veined cake of blood and brains drying on his shirt. I would imagine his arms coming up,
his bloody hands hooking into claws, and he would be croaking: It should have been you,
Gordon. It should have been you.
7
Stud City, by Gordon Lachance. Originally published in Greenspun Quarterly, issue 45, Fall, 1970. Used by permission of the author.
March.
Chico stands at the window, arms crossed, elbows on the ledge that divides upper and
lower panes, naked, looking out, breath fogging the glass. A draught against his belly.
Bottom right pane is gone. Blocked by a piece of cardboard.
‘Chico.’
He doesn’t turn. She doesn’t speak again. He can see a ghost of her in the glass, in his
bed, sitting, blankets pulled up in apparent defiance of gravity. Her eye makeup has
smeared into deep hollows under her eyes.
Chico shifts his gaze beyond her ghost, out beyond the house. Raining. Patches of
snow sloughed away to reveal the bald ground underneath. He sees last year’s dead grass,
a plastic toy – Billy’s – a rusty rake. His brother Johnny’s Dodge is up on blocks, the
detyred wheels sticking out like stumps. He remembers times he and Johnny worked on
it, listening to the superhits and boss oldies from WLAM in Lewiston pour out of
Johnny’s old transistor radio – a couple of times Johnny would give him a beer. She gonna
run fast, Chico, Johnny would say. She gonna eat up everything on this road from Gates Falls to Castle Rock. Wait till we get that Hearst shifter in her!
But that had been then, and this was now.
Beyond Johnny’s Dodge was the highway. Route 14, goes to Portland and New
Hampshire south, all the way to Canada north, if you turned left on US 1 at Thomaston.
‘Stud city,’ Chico says to the glass. He smokes his cigarette.
‘What?’
‘Nothing, babe.’
‘Chico?’ Her voice is puzzled. He will have to change the sheets before Dad gets back.
She bled.
‘What?’
‘I love you, Chico.’
‘That’s right.’
Dirty March. You’re some old whore, Chico thinks. Dirty, staggering old baggy-tits
March with rain in her face.
‘This room used to be Johnny’s,’ he says suddenly.
‘Who?’
‘My brother.’
‘Oh. Where is he?’
‘In the Army,’ Chico says, but Johnny isn’t in the Army. He had been working the
summer before at Oxford Plains Speedway and a car went out of control and skidded
across the infield towards the pit area, where Johnny had been changing the back tyres on a Chevy charger-class stocker. Some guys shouted at him to look out, but Johnny never
heard them. One of the guys who shouted was Johnny’s brother Chico.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asks.
‘No. Well, my feet. A little.’
And he thinks suddenly: Well, my God. Nothing happened to Johnny that isn’t going to
happen to you too, sooner or later. He sees it again, though: the skidding, skating Ford Mustang, the knobs of his brother’s spine picked out in a series of dimpled shadows
against the white of his Haines T-shirt; he had been hunkered down, pulling one of the
Chevy’s back tyres. There had been time to see rubber flaying off the tyres of the runaway
Mustang, to see its hanging muffler scraping up sparks from the infield. It had struck
Johnny even as Johnny tried to get to his feet. Then the yellow shout of flame.