There was no sign of either Milo or Chopper today.
Chris and I watched Vern prime the pump while Teddy worked the handle frantically.
At last he was rewarded with a flood of clear water. A moment later both of them had
their heads under the trough, Teddy still pumping away a mile a minute.
Teddy’s crazy,’ I said softly.
‘Oh yeah,’ Chris said matter-of-factly. ‘He won’t live to be twice the age he is now, I bet
His dad burnin’ his ears like that That’s what did it He’s crazy to dodge trucks the way he
does. He can’t see worth a shit, glasses or no glasses.’
‘You remember that time in the tree?’
‘Yeah.’
The year before, Teddy and Chris had been climbing the big pine tree behind my
house. They were almost to the top and Chris said they couldn’t go any further because all
of the branches up there were rotten. Teddy got that crazy stubborn look on his face and
said fuck that, he had pine tar all over his hands and he was gonna go up until he could
touch the top. Nothing Chris said could talk him out of it. So up he went, and he actually
made it – he only weighed seventy-five pounds or so, remember. He stood there, clutching
the top of the pine in one tar-gummy hand, shouting that he was king of the world or
some stupid thing like that, and then there was a sickening, rotted crack as the branch he
was standing on gave way and he plummeted. What happened next was one of those
things that makes you sure there must be a God. Chris reached out, purely on reflex, and
what he caught was a fistful of Teddy Duchamp’s hair. And although his wrist swelled up
fat and he was unable to use his right hand very well for almost two weeks, Chris held
him until Teddy, screaming and cursing, got his foot on a live branch thick enough to
support his weight. Except for Chris’s blind grab, he would have turned and crashed and
smashed all the way to the foot of the tree, a hundred and twenty feet below. When they
got down, Chris was grey-faced and almost puking with the fear reaction. And Teddy
wanted to fight him for pulling his hair. They would have gone at it, too, if I hadn’t been
there to make peace.
‘I dream about that every now and then,’ Chris said, and looked at me with strangely
defenceless eyes. ‘Except in this dream I have, I always miss him. I just get a couple of
hairs and Teddy screams and down he goes. Weird, huh?’
‘Weird,’ I agreed, and for just one moment we looked in each other’s eyes and saw
some of the true things that made us friends. Then we looked away again and watched
Teddy and Vern throwing water at each other, screaming and laughing and calling each
other pussies.
‘Yeah, but you didn’t miss him,’ I said. ‘Chris Chambers never misses, am I right?’
‘Not even when the ladies leave the seat down,’ he said. He winked at me, formed an O
with his thumb and forefinger, and spat a neat white bullet through it
‘Eat me raw, Chambers,’ I said.
Through a Flavour Straw,’ he said, and we grinned at each other.
Vern yelled: ‘Come on and get your water before it runs back down the piper
‘Race you,’ Chris said.
‘In this heat? You’re off your gourd.’
‘Come on,’ he said, still grinning. ‘On my go.’
‘Okay.’
‘Go!’
We raced, our sneakers digging up the hard, sunbaked dirt, our torsos leaning out
ahead of our flying bluejeaned legs, our – sts doubled. It was a dead heat, with both Vern
on Chris’s .. .de and Teddy on mine holding up their middle fingers at the same moment.
We collapsed laughing in the still, smoky odour of the place, and Chris tossed Vern his
canteen. When i was full, Chris and I went to the pump and first Chris pumped for me
and then I pumped for him, the shockingly cold water sluicing off the soot and the heat all
in a flash, sending our suddenly freezing scalps four months ahead into January. Then I
refilled the lard can and we all walked over to sit down in the shade of the dump’s only
tree, a stunted ash forty feet from Milo Pressman’s tarpaper shack. The tree was hunched
slightly to the west, as if what it really wanted to do was pick up its roots the way an old
lady would pick up her skirts and just get the hell out of the dump.
“The most!’ Chris said, laughing, tossing his tangled hair back from his brow.
‘A blast,’ I said, nodding, still laughing myself.
“This is really a good time,’ Vern said simply, and he didn’t just mean being off-limits inside the dump, or fudging our folks, or going on a hike up the railroad tracks into
Harlow; he meant those things but it seems to me now that there was more, and that we
all knew it. Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who we were and
exactly where we were going. It was grand.
We sat under the tree for a while, shooting the shit like we always did – who had the
best ballteam (still the Yankees with Mantle and Maris, of course), what was the best car
(’55 Thunderbird, with Teddy holding out stubbornly for the ’58 Corvette), who was the
toughest guy in Castle Rock who wasn’t in our gang (we all agreed it was Jamie Gallant,
who gave Mrs Ewing the finger and then sauntered out of her class with his hands in his
pockets while she shouted at him), the best TV show (either The Untouchables or Peter Gunn – both Robert Stack as Eliot Ness and Craig Stevens as Gunn were cool), all that
stuff.
It was Teddy who first noticed that the shade of the ash tree was getting longer and
asked me what time it was. I looked at my watch and was surprised to see it was quarter
past two.
‘Hey, man,’ Vern said. ‘Somebody’s got to go for provisions. Dump opens at four. I
don’t want to still be here when Milo and Chopper make the scene.’
Even Teddy agreed. He wasn’t afraid of Milo, who had a pot belly and was at least
forty, but every kid in Castle Rock squeezed his balls between his legs when Chopper’s
name was mentioned.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Odd man goes?’
That’s you, Gordie,’ Chris said, smiling. ‘Odd as a cod.’
‘So’s your mother,’ I said, and gave them each a coin. ‘Flip.’
Four coins glittered up into the sun. Four hands snatched them from the air. Four flat
smacks on four grimy wrists. We uncovered. Two heads and two tails. We flipped again
and this time all four of us had tails.
‘Oh Jesus, that’s a goocher,’ Vern said, not telling us anything we didn’t know. Four
heads, or a moon, was supposed to be extraordinarily good luck. Four tails was a goocher,
and that meant very bad luck.
‘Fuck that shit,’ Chris said. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. Go again.’
‘No, man,’ Vern said earnestly. ‘A goocher, that’s really bad. You remember when Clint
Bracken and those guys got wiped out on Sirois Hill in Durham? Billy tole me they was
flippin’ for beers and they came up a goocher just before they got into the car. And bang!
they all get fuckin’ totalled. I don’t like that. Sincerely.’
‘Nobody believes that crap about moons and goochers,’ Teddy said impatiently. ‘It’s
baby stuff, Vern. You gonna flip or not?’
Vern flipped, but with obvious reluctance. This time he, Chris and Teddy all had tails.
I was showing Thomas Jefferson on a nickle. And I was suddenly scared. It was as if a
shadow had crossed some inner sun. They still had a goocher, the three of them, as if
dumb fate had pointed at them a second time. Abruptly I thought of Chris saying: / just
get a couple of hairs and Teddy screams and down he goes. Weird, huh?
Three tails, one head.
Then Teddy was laughing his crazy, cackling laugh and pointing at me and the feeling
was gone.
‘I heard that only fairies laugh like that,’ I said, and gave aim the finger.
‘Eeee-eeee-eeee, Gordie,’ Teddy laughed. ‘Go get the : rovisions, you fuckin’
morphadite.’
I wasn’t really sorry to be going. I was rested up and didn’t mind going down the road
to the Florida Market.
‘Don’t call me any of your mother’s pet names,’ I said to Teddy.
‘Eeee-eee-eeee, what a fuckin’ wet you are, Lachance.’
‘Go on, Gordie,’ Chris said. ‘We’ll wait over by the tracks.’
‘You guys better not go without me,’ I said.
Vern laughed. ‘Coin’ without you’d be like goin’ with Schlitz instead of Budweiser’s,
Gordie.’
‘Ah, shut up.’