winner a TKO Meanwhile, Teddy and Milo continued their discussion of Teddy’s father,
standing nose to nose, with the wire fence Milo was too old and too fat to climb between
them.
‘Don’t you say nothing else about my dad! My dad stormed the beaches at Normandy,
you fucking wet end!’
‘Yeah, well, where is he now, you ugly little four-eyed turd? He’s up to Togus, ain’t he?
He’s up to Togus because HE WENT FUCKING SECTION EIGHT!’
‘Okay, that’s it,’ Teddy said. ‘That’s it, that’s the end, I’m gonna kill you.’ He threw
himself at the fence and started up.
‘You come on and try it, you slimy little bastard.’ Milo stood back, grinning and
waiting.
‘No!’ I shouted. I got to my feet, grabbed Teddy by the loose seat of his jeans, and
pulled him off the fence. We both staggered back and fell over, him on top. He squashed
my balls pretty good and I groaned. Nothing hurts like having your balls squashed, you
know it? But I kept my arms locked around Teddy’s middle.
‘Lemme up!’ Teddy sobbed, writhing in my arms. ‘Lemme up, Gordie! Nobody ranks
out my old man. LEMME UP GODDAMMIT LEMME UP!’
‘That’s just what he wants!’ I shouted in his ear. ‘He wants to get you over there and
beat the piss out of you and then take you to the cops!’
‘Huh?’ Teddy craned around to look at me, his face dazed.
‘Never mind your smartmouth, kid,’ Milo said, advancing to the fence again with his
hands curled into ham-sized fists. ‘Let ‘im fight his own battles.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘You only outweigh him by five hundred pounds.’
‘I know you, too,’ Milo said ominously. ‘Your name’s Lachance.’ He pointed to where
Vern and Chris were finally picking themselves up, still breathing fast from laughing so hard. ‘And those guys are Chris Chambers and one of those stupid Tessio kids. All your
fathers are going to get calls from me, except for the loony up to Togus. You’ll go to the
‘formatory, every one of you. Juvenile delinquents!’
He stood flat on his feet, big freckled hands held out like a guy who wanted to play
One Potato Two Potato, breathing hard, eyes narrow, waiting for us to cry or say we were
sorry or maybe give him Teddy so he could feed Teddy to Chopper.
Chris made an O out of his thumb and index finger and spat neatly through it.
Vern hummed and looked to the sky.
Teddy said: ‘Come on, Gordie. Let’s get away from this asshole before I puke.’
‘Oh, you’re gonna get it, you foulmouthed little whoremaster. Wait’ll I get you to the
constable.’
‘We heard what you said about his father,’ I told him. ‘We’re all witnesses. And you
sicced that dog on me. That’s against the law.’
Milo looked a trifle uneasy. ‘You was trespassin’.’
“The hell I was. The dump’s public property.’
‘You climbed the fence?’
‘Sure I did, after you sicced your dog on me,’ I said, hoping that Milo wouldn’t recall
that I’d also climbed the gate to get in.’ What’d you think I was gonna do? Stand there and
et ‘im rip me to pieces? Come on, you guys. Let’s go. It stinks around here.’
“Formatory,’ Milo promised hoarsely, his voice shaking. ‘Formatory for you wiseguys.’
‘Can’t wait to tell the cops how you called a war vet a fuckin’ loony,’ Chris called back
over his shoulder as we moved away. ‘What did you do in the war, Mr Pressman?’
‘NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESSr Milo shrieked. YOU HURT MY DA WG!’
‘Put it on your t.s. slip and send it to the chaplain,’ Vern -uttered, and then we were
climbing the railroad embankment again.
‘Come back here!’ Milo shouted, but his voice was fainter now and he seemed to be
losing interest.
Teddy shot him the finger as we walked away. I looked back over my shoulder when
we got to the top of the embankment. Milo was standing there behind the security fence, a
big man in a baseball cap with his dog sitting beside him. His fingers were hooked
through the small chain-link diamonds as he shouted at us, and all at once I felt sorry for
him – he looked like the biggest third-grader in the world, locked inside the playground by
mistake, yelling for someone to let him out. He kept yelling for a while and then he either
gave up or we got out of range. No more was seen or heard of Milo Pressman and
Chopper that day.
13
There was some discussion – in righteous tones that were actually kind of forced-
sounding – about how we had shown that creepy Milo Pressman we weren’t just another
bunch of pussies. I told how the guy at the Florida Market had tried to jap us, and then we
fell into a gloomy silence, thinking it over. For my part, I was thinking that maybe there
was something to that stupid goocher business after all. Things couldn’t have turned out
much worse – in fact, I thought, it might be better to just keep going and spare my folks
the pain of having one son in the Castle View Cemetery and one in South Windham
Boys’ Correctional. I had no doubt that Milo would go to the cops as soon as the
importance of the dump having been closed at the time of the incident filtered into his thick skull. When that happened, he would realize that I really had been trespassing,
public property or not. Probably that gave him every right in the world to sic his stupid
dog on me. And while Chopper wasn’t the hellhound he was cracked up to be, he sure
would have ripped the sitdown out of my jeans if I hadn’t won the race to the fence. All of
it put a big dark crimp in the day. And there was another gloomy idea rolling around
inside my head – the idea that this was no lark after all, and maybe we deserved our bad
luck. Maybe it was even God warning us to go home. What were we doing, anyway,
going to look at some kid that had gotten himself all mashed up by a freight train?
But we were doing it, and none of us wanted to stop.
We had almost reached the trestle which carried the tracks across the river when Teddy
burst into tears. It was as if a great inner tidal wave had broken through a carefully
constructed set of mental dykes. No bullshit – it was that sudden and that fierce. The sobs
doubled him over like punches and he sort of collapsed into a heap, his hands going from
his stomach to the mutilated gobs of flesh that were the remains of his ears. He went on
crying in hard, violent bursts. None of us knew what the fuck to do. It wasn’t crying like
when you got hit by a line drive while you were playing shortstop or smashed on the head
playing tackle football on the common or when you fell off your bike. There was nothing
physically wrong with him. We walked away a little and watched him, our hands in our
pockets.
‘Hey, man …’ Vern said in a very thin voice. Chris and I looked at Vern hopefully.
‘Hey, man’ was always a good start. But Vern couldn’t follow it up.
Teddy leaned forward onto the crossties and put a hand over his eyes. Now he looked
like he was doing the Allah bit
-‘Salami, salami, baloney,’ as Popeye says. Except it wasn’t
funny.
At last, when the force of his crying had trailed off a little, t was Chris who went to
him. He was the toughest guy in our gang (maybe even tougher than Jamie Gallant, I
thought privately), but he was also the guy who made the best peace. He had a way about
it I’d seen him sit down on the kerb next to a little kid with a scraped knee, a kid he didn’t
even fucking know, and get him talking about something – the Shrine
Circus that was coming to town or Huckleberry Hound on
TV – until the kid forgot he was supposed to be hurt Chris
was good at it. He was tough enough to be good at it.
‘Listen, Teddy, what do you care what a fat old pile of shit like him said about your
father? Huh? I mean, sincerely! That don’t change nothing, does it? What a fat old pile of
shit like him says? Huh? Huh? Does it?’
Teddy shook his head violently. It changed nothing. But to hear it spoken of in bright
daylight, something must have gone over and over in his mind while he was lying awake
in bed and looking at the moon offcentre in one windowpane, something he must have
thought about in his slow and broken way until it seemed almost holy, trying to make