sense out of it, and then to have it brought home to him that everybody else had merely
dismissed his dad as a loony … that had rocked him. But it changed nothing. Nothing.
‘He still stormed the beaches at Normandy, right?’ Chris said. He picked up one of
Teddy’s sweaty, grimy hands and patted it.
Teddy nodded fiercely, crying. Snot was running out of his nose.
‘Do you think that pile of shit was at Normandy?’
Teddy shook his head violently. ‘Nuh-Nuh-No?
‘Do you think that guy knows you?’
‘Nuh-No!No,b-b-but-‘
‘Or your father? He one of your father’s buddies?’
‘NO!’ Angry, horrified. The thought. Teddy’s chest heaved and more sobs came out of
it. He had pushed his hair away from his ears and I could see the round brown plastic
button of the hearing aid set in the middle of the right one. The shape of the hearing aid
made more sense than the shape of his ear, if you get what I mean.
Chris said calmly: Talk is cheap.’
Teddy nodded, still not looking up.
‘And whatever’s between you and your old man, talk can’t change that.’
Teddy’s head shook without definition, unsure if this was true. Someone had redefined
his pain, and redefined it in shockingly common terms. That would
(loony)
have to be examined
(fucking section eight)
later. In depth. On long sleepless nights.
Chris rocked him. ‘He was rankin’ you, man,’ he said in soothing cadences that were
almost a lullabye. ‘He was just tryin’ to rank you over that friggin’ fence, you know it? No
strain, man. No fuckin’ strain. He don’t know nothing about your old man. He don’t know
nothin’ but stuff he heard from those rumdums down at the Mellow Tiger. He’s just
dogshit, man. Right, Teddy? Huh? Right?’
Teddy’s crying was down to sniffles. He wiped his eyes, saving two sooty rings around
them, and sat up.
‘I’m okay,’ he said, and the sound of his own voice seemed 😮 convince him. ‘Yeah, I’m
okay.” He stood up and put his glasses back on – dressing his naked face, it seemed to me.
He laughed thinly and swiped his bare arm across the snot on his upper lip. ‘Fuckin’
crybaby, right?’
‘No, man,’ Vern said uncomfortably. ‘If anyone was rankin’ out my dad -‘
‘Then you got to kill ’em!’ Teddy said briskly, almost arrogantly. ‘Kill their asses.
Right, Chris?’
‘Right,’ Chris said amiably, and clapped Teddy on the back.
‘Right, Gordie?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said, wondering how Teddy could care so much for his dad when his
dad had practically killed him, and how I couldn’t seem to give much of a shit one way or
the other about my own dad, when so far as I could remember, he had never laid a hand
on me since I was three and got some bleach from under the sink and started to eat it.
We walked another two hundred yards down the tracks and Teddy said in a quieter
voice: ‘Hey, if I spoiled your good time, I’m sorry. I guess that was pretty stupid shit back
there at that fence.’
‘I ain’t sure I want it to be no good time,’ Vern said suddenly.
Chris looked at him. ‘You sayin’ you want to go back, man?’
‘No, huh-uh!’ Vern’s face knotted in thought. ‘But goin’ to see a dead kid … it shouldn’t
be a party, maybe. I mean, if you can dig it. I mean …’ He looked at us rather wildly. ‘I
mean, I could be a little scared. If you get me.’
Nobody said anything and Vern plunged on:
‘I mean, sometimes I get nightmares. Like … aw, you guys remember the time Danny
Naughton left that pile of old funnybooks, the ones with the vampires and people getting
cut up and all that shit? Jeezum-crow, I’d wake up in the middle of the night dreamin’
about some guy hangin’ in a house with his face all green or somethin’, you know, like that, and it seems like there’s somethin’ under the bed and if I dangled a hand over the
side, that thing might, you know, grab me…’
We all began to nod. We knew about the night-sweats. I would have laughed then,
though, if you had told me that one day not too many years from then I’d parley a simple
case of the night-sweats into about a million dollars.
‘And I don’t dare say anything because my friggin’ brother … well, you know Billy …
he’d broadcast it…’ He shrugged miserably. ‘So I’m ascared to look at that kid ’cause if
he’s, you know, if he’s really bad…’
I swallowed and glanced at Chris. He was looking gravely at Vern and nodding for him
to go on.
‘If he’s really bad,’ Vern resumed, ‘111 have nightmares about him and wake up
thinkin’ it’s him under my bed, all cut up in a pool of blood like he just came out of one of those Saladmaster gadgets they show on TV, just eyeballs and hair, but movin’ somehow,
if you can dig that, movin’ somehow, you know, and gettin’ ready to grab -‘
‘Jesus Christ,’ Teddy said thickly. ‘What a fuckin’ bedtime story.’
‘Well I can’t help it,’ Vern said, his voice defensive. ‘But I feel like we hafta see him, even if there are bad dreams. You know? Like we hafta. But … but maybe it shouldn’t be no good time.’
‘Yeah,’ Chris said softly. ‘Maybe it shouldn’t.’
Vern said pleadingly: ‘You won’t tell none of the other guys, will you? I don’t mean
about the nightmares, everybody has those – I mean about wakin’ up and thinkin’ there
might be somethin’ under the bed. I’m too fuckin’ old for the boogeyman.’
We all said we wouldn’t tell, and a glum silence fell over us again. It was only quarter
to three, but it felt much later. It was too hot and too much had happened. We weren’t
even over into Harlow yet. We were going to have to pick them up and lay them down if
we were going to make some real miles before dark.
We passed the railroad junction and a signal on a tall, rusty pole and all of us paused to
chuck cinders at the steel flag on top, but nobody hit it. And around three-thirty we came
to the Castle River and the GS&WM trestle which crossed it.
14
The river was better than a hundred yards across at that point in 1960; I’ve been back to
look at it since then, and found it had narrowed up quite a bit during the years between.
They’re always fooling with the river, trying to make it work better for the mills, and
they’ve put in so many dams that it’s pretty well tamed. But in those days there were only
three dams on the whole length of the river as it ran across all of New Hampshire and half
of Maine. The Castle was still pretty free back then, and every third spring it would
overflow its banks and cover Route 136 in either Harlow or Danvers Junction or both.
Now, at the end of the driest summer western Maine had seen since the depression, it
was still broad. From where we stood on the Castle Rock side, the bulking forest on the
Harlow side looked like a different country altogether. The pines and spruces over there
were bluish in the heat-haze of the afternoon. The rails went across the water fifty feet up,
supported by an underpinning of tarred wooden support posts and crisscrossing beams.
The water was so shallow you could look down and see the tops of the cement plugs
which had been planted ten feet deep in the riverbed to hold up the trestle.
The trestle itself was pretty chintzy – the rails ran over a long, narrow wooden platform
of six-by-fours. There was a four-inch gap between each pair of these beams where you
could look all the way down into the water. On the sides, there was no more than eighteen inches between the rail and the edge of the trestle. If a train came it was maybe enough
room to avoid getting plastered … but the wind generated by a highballing freight would
surely sweep you off to fall to a certain death against the rocks just below the surface of
the shallow running water.
Looking at the trestle, we all felt fear start to crawl around in our bellies … and mixing
uneasily with the fear was the excitement of a boss dare, a really big one, something you
could brag on for weeks after you got home … jf you got home. That queer light was
creeping back into Teddy’s eyes and I thought he wasn’t seeing the GS&WM train trestle
at all but a long sandy beach, a thousand LSTs aground in the foaming waves, ten
thousand GIs charging up the sand, combat boots digging. They were leaping rolls of