barbed wire! Tossing grenades at pillboxes! Overrunning machine-gun nests!
We were standing beside the tracks where the cinders sloped away towards the river’s
cut – the place where the embankment stopped and the trestle began. Looking down, I
could see where the slope started to get steep. The cinders gave way to straggly, tough-
looking bushes and slabs of grey rock. Further down there were a few stunted firs with
exposed roots writhing their way out of fissures in the plates of rock; they seemed to be
looking down at their own miserable reflections in the running water.
At this point, the Castle River actually looked fairly clean; at Castle Rock it was just
entering Maine’s textile-mill belt. But there were no fish jumping out there, although the
river was clear enough to see the bottom – you had to go another ten miles upstream and
towards New Hampshire before you could see any fish in the Castle. There were no fish,
and along the edges of the river you could see dirty collars of foam around some of the
rocks – the foam was the colour of old ivory. The river’s smell was not particularly
pleasant, either; it smelled like a laundry hamper full of mildewy towels. Dragonflies
stitched at the surface of the water and laid their eggs with impunity. There were no trout
to eat them. Hell, there weren’t even any shiners.
‘Man,’ Chris said softly.
‘Come on,’ Teddy said in that brisk, arrogant way. ‘Let’s go.’ He was already edging his
way out, walking on the six-by-fours between the shining rails.
‘Say,’ Vern said uneasily, ‘any of you guys know when the next train’s due?’
We all shrugged.
I said: There’s the Route 136 bridge…’
‘Hey, come on, gimme a break!’ Teddy cried. ‘That means walkin’ five miles down the
river on this side and then five miles back up on the other side … it’ll take us until dark! If we use the trestle, we can get to the same place in ten minutes?
‘But if a train comes, there’s nowheres to go,’ Vern said. He wasn’t looking at Teddy.
He was looking down at the fast, bland river.
‘Fuck there isn’t!’ Teddy said indignantly. He swung over the edge and held one of the
wooden supports between the rails. He hadn’t gone out very far – his sneakers were almost
touching the ground – but die thought of doing that same thing above the middle of the
river with a fifty-foot drop beneath and a train bellowing by just over my head, a train that
would probably be dropping some nice hot sparks into my hair and down the back of my
neck … none of that actually made me feel like Queen for a Day.
‘See how easy it is?’ Teddy said. He dropped to the embankment, dusted his hands, and
climbed back up beside us.
‘You tellin’ me you’re gonna hang on that way if it’s a two hundred car freight?’ Chris
asked. ‘Just sorta hang there by your hands for five or ten minutes?’
‘You chicken?’ Teddy shouted.
‘No, just askin’ what you’d do,’ Chris said, grinning. ‘Peace, man.’
‘Go around if you want to!’ Teddy brayed. ‘Who gives a fuck? I’ll wait for you! I’ll take a nap!’
‘One train already went by,’ I said reluctantly. ‘And there probably isn’t any more than
one, two trains a day that go through Harlow. Look at this.’ I kicked the weeds growing
up through the railroad ties with one sneaker. There were no weeds growing between the
tracks which ran between Castle Rock and Lewiston.
‘There. See?’ Teddy was triumphant.
‘But still, there’s a chance,’ I added.
‘Yeah,’ Chris said. He was looking only at me, his eyes sparkling. ‘Dare you, Lachance.’
‘Dares go first.’
‘Okay,’ Chris said. He widened his gaze to take in Teddy and Vern. ‘Any pussies here?’
‘NO? Teddy shouted.
Vern cleared his throat, croaked, cleared it again, and said ‘no’ in a very small voice.
He smiled a weak, sick smile.
‘Okay,’ Chris said … but we hesitated for a moment, even Teddy, looking warily up and
down the tracks. I knelt down and took one of the steel rails firmly in my hand, never
minding that it was almost hot enough to blister the skin. The rail was mute.
‘Okay,’ I said, and as I said it some guy pole-vaulted in my stomach. He dug his pole all
the way into my balls, it felt like, and ended up sitting astride my heart.
We went out onto the trestle single-file: Chris first, then Teddy, then Vern, and me
playing tail-end Charlie because I was the one who said dares go first. We walked on the
platform crossties between the rails, and you had to look at your feet whether you were
scared of heights or not. A misstep and you would go down to your crotch, probably with
a broken ankle to pay.
The embankment dropped away beneath me, and every step further out seemed to seal
our decision more firmly … and to make it feel more suicidally stupid. I stopped to look
up when I saw the rocks giving way to water far beneath me. Chris and Teddy were a long
way ahead, almost out over the middle, and Vern was tottering slowly along behind them,
peering studiously down at his feet. He looked like an old lady trying out stilts with his
head poked downward, his back hunched, his arms held out for balance. I looked back
over my shoulder. Too far, man, I had to keep going now, and not only because a train
might come. If I went back, I’d be a pussy for life.
So I got walking again. After looking down at that endless series of crossties for a
while, with a glimpse of running water between each pair, I started to feel dizzy and
disoriented. Each time I brought my foot down, part of my brain assured me it was going
to plunge through into space, even though I could see it was not.
I became acutely aware of all the noises inside me and outside me, like some crazy
orchestra tuning up to play. The steady thump of my heart, the bloodbeat in my ears like a
drum being played with brushes, the creak of sinews like the strings of a violin that has
been tuned radically upward, the steady hiss of the river, the hot hum of a locust digging
into tight bark, the monotonous cry of a chickadee, and somewhere, far away, a barking
dog. Chopper, maybe. The mildewy smell of the Castle River was strong in my nose. The
long muscles in my thighs were trembling. I kept thinking how much safer it would be
(probably faster, as well) if I just got down on my hands and knees and scuttered along
that way. But I wouldn’t do that – none of us would. If the Saturday matinee movies down
to the Gem had taught us anything, it was that Only Losers Crawl. It was one of the
central tenets of the Gospel According to Hollywood. Good guys walk firmly upright, and
if your sinews are creaking like overtuned violin strings because of the adrenalin rush
going on in your body, and if the long muscles in your thighs are trembling for the same
reason, why, so be it.
I had to stop in the middle of the trestle and look up at the sky for a while. That dizzy
feeling had been getting worse. I saw phantom crossties – they seemed to float right in front of my nose. Then they faded out and I began to feel okay again. I looked ahead and
saw I had almost caught up with Vern, who was slowpoking along worse than ever. Chris
and Teddy were almost all the way across.
And although I’ve since written seven books about people who can do such exotic
things as read minds and precognit the future, that was when I had my first and last
psychic flash. I’m sure that’s what it was; how else to explain it? I squatted and made a fist
around the rail on my left. It thrummed in my hand. It was thrumming so hard that it was
like gripping a bundle of deadly metallic snakes.
You’ve heard it said ‘His bowels turned to water’? I know what that phrase means –
exactly what it means. It may be the most accurate cliche ever coined. I’ve been scared
since, badly scared, but I’ve never been as scared as I was in that moment, holding that
hot live rail. It seemed that for a moment all my works below throat level just went limp
and lay there in an internal faint. A thin stream of urine ran listlessly down the inside of
one thigh. My mouth opened. I didn’t open it, it opened by itself, the jaw dropping like a
trapdoor from which the hingepins had suddenly been moved. My tongue was plastered