with my knee and knock him flat on his back before he could get all the way up. I landed,
gasping and sprawling, and Teddy grabbed me around the neck. We went rolling all the
way to the bottom of the embankment, hitting and clawing at each other while Chris and
Vern stared at us, stupidly surprised.
‘You little son of a bitch!’ Teddy was screaming at me. ‘You fucker! Don’t you throw
your weight around on me! I’ll kill you, you dipshit!’
I was getting my breath back now, and I made it to my feet. I backed away as Teddy
advanced, holding my open hands up to slap away his punches, half laughing and half
scared. Teddy was no one to fool around with when he went into one of his screaming
fits. He’d take on a big kid in that state, and after the big kid broke both of his arms, he’d
bite.
‘Teddy, you can dodge anything you want after we see what we’re going to see but’
whack on the shoulder as one wildly-swinging fist got past me
‘until then no one’s supposed to see us, you’
whack on the side of the face, and then we might have had a real fight if Chris and
Vern
‘stupid wet end!’
hadn’t grabbed us and kept us apart. Above us, the train roared by in a thunder of diesel
exhaust and the great heavy clacking of boxcar wheels. A few cinders bounced down the
embankment and the argument was over … at least until we could hear ourselves talk
again.
It was only a short freight, and when the caboose had trailed by, Teddy said: ‘I’m gonna
kill him. At least give him a fat lip.’ He struggled against Chris, but Chris only grabbed
him tighter.
‘Calm down, Teddy,’ Chris said quietly, and he kept saying it until Teddy stopped
struggling and just stood there, his glasses hanging askew and his hearing-aid cord
dangling limply against his chest on its way down to the battery, which he had shoved
into the pocket of his jeans.
When he was completely still, Chris turned to me and said: ‘What the hell are you
fighting with him about, Gordon?’
‘He wanted to dodge the train. I figured the engineer would see him and report it They might send a cop out.’
‘Ahhh, he’d be too busy makin’ chocolate in his drawers,’ Teddy said, but he didn’t
seem angry anymore. The storm had passed.
‘Gordie was just trying to do the right thing,’ Vern said. ‘Come on, peace.’
‘Peace, you guys,’ Chris agreed.
‘Yeah, okay,’ I said, and held out my hand, palm up. ‘Peace, Teddy?’
‘I coulda dodged it,’ he said to me. ‘You know that, Gordie?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, although the thought turned me cold inside. ‘I know it.’
‘Okay. Peace, then.’
‘Skin it, man,’ Chris ordered, and let go of Teddy.
Teddy slapped his hand down on mine hard enough to sting and then turned it over. I
slapped his.
‘Fucking pussy Lachance,’ Teddy said.
‘Meeiowww,’ I said.
‘Come on, you guys,’ Vern said. ‘Let’s go, okay?’
‘Go anywhere you want, but don’t go here,’ Chris said solemnly, and Vern drew back as
if to hit him.
11
We got to the dump around one-thirty, and Vern led the way down the embankment
with a Paratroops over the side! We went to the bottom in big jumps and leaped over the
brackish trickle of water oozing listlessly out of the culvert which pocked out of the
cinders. Beyond this small boggy area was the sandy, trash-littered verge of the dump.
There was a six-foot security fence surrounding it. Every twenty feet weather-faded
signs were posted. They said:
CASTLE ROCK DUMP
HOURS 4-8 PM
CLOSED MONDAYS
TRESPASSING STRICTLY FORBIDDEN
We climbed to the top of the fence, swung over, and jumped down. Teddy and Vern
led the way towards the well, which you tapped with an old-fashioned pump – the kind
from which you had to call the water with elbow-grease. There was a Crisco can filled
with water next to the pump handle, and the great sin was to forget to leave it filled for
the next guy to come along. The iron handle stuck off at an angle, looking like a one-
winged bird that was trying to fly. It had once been green, but almost all of the paint had
been rubbed off by the thousands of hands that had worked that handle since 1940.
The dump is one of my strongest memories of Castle Rock. It always reminds me of
the surrealist painters when I think of it – those fellows who were always painting pictures
of clockfaces lying limply in the crotches of trees or Victorian living rooms standing in
the middle of the Sahara or steam engines coming out of fireplaces. To my child’s eye,
nothing in the Castle Rock Dump looked as if it really belonged there.
We had entered from the back. If you came from the front, a wide dirt road came in
through the gate, broadened out into a semicircular area that had been bulldozed as flat as a dirt landing-strip, and then ended abruptly at the edge of the dumping-pit. The pump
(Teddy and Vern were currently standing there and squabbling about who was going to
prime it) was at the back of this great pit It was maybe eighty feet deep and filled with all
the American things that get empty, wear out, or just don’t work anymore. There was so
much stuff that my eyes hurt just looking at it – or maybe it was your brain that actually
hurt, because it could never quite decide what your eye should stop on. Then your eye
would stop, or be stopped, by something that seemed as out of place as those limp clock-
faces or the living room in the desert. A brass bedstead leaning drunkenly in the sun. A
little girl’s dolly looking amazedly between her thighs as she gave birth to stuffing. An
overturned Studebaker automobile with its chrome bullet nose glittering in the sun like
some Buck Rogers missile. One of those giant water bottles they have in office buildings,
transformed by the summer sun into a hot, blazing sapphire.
There was plenty of wildlife there, too, although it wasn’t the kind you see in the Walt
Disney nature films or at those tame zoos where you can pet the animals. Plump rats,
woodchucks grown sleek and lumbering on such rich chow as rotting hamburger and
maggoty vegetables, seagulls by the thousands, and stalking among the gulls like
thoughtful, introspective ministers, an occasional huge crow. It was also the place where
the town’s stray dogs came for a meal when they couldn’t find any trashcans to knock over
or any deer to run. They were a miserable, ugly-tempered, mongrel lot; slat-sided and
grinning bitterly, they would attack each other over a flyblown piece of bologna or a pile
of chicken guts fuming in the sun.
But these dogs never attacked Milo Pressman, the dump-keeper, because Milo was
never without Chopper at his heel. Chopper was – at least until Camber’s dog Cujo went
rabid twenty years later – the most feared and least seen dog in Castle Rock. He was the
meanest dog for forty miles around (or so we heard), and ugly enough to stop a striking
clock. The kids whispered legends about Chopper’s meanness. Some said he was half
German Shepherd, some said he was mostly Boxer, and a kid from Castle View with the
unfortunate name of Harry Horr claimed that Chopper was a Doberman Pinscher whose
vocal cords had been surgically removed so you couldn’t hear him when he was on the
attack. There were other kids who claimed Chopper was a maniacal Irish Wolfhound and
Milo Pressman fed him a special mixture of Gaines Meal and chicken blood. These same
kids claimed that Milo didn’t dare take Chopper out of his shack unless the dog was
hooded like a hunting falcon.
The most common story was that Pressman had trained Chopper not just to sic but to
sic specific parts of the human anatomy. Thus an unfortunate kid who had illegally scaled the dump fence to pick for illicit treasures might hear Milo Pressman cry: ‘Chopper! Sic!
Hand!’ And Chopper would grab that hand and hold on, ripping skin and tendons,
powdering bones between his slavering jaws, until Milo told him to quit. It was rumoured
that Chopper could take an ear, an eye, a foot, or a leg … and that a second offender who
was surprised by Milo and the ever-loyal Chopper would hear the dread cry: ‘Chopper!
Sic! Pecker!’ And that kid would be a soprano for the rest of his life. Milo himself was
more commonly seen and thus more commonly regarded. He was just a half-bright
working joe who supplemented his small town salary by fixing things people threw away
and selling them around town.