suffocatingly against the roof of my mouth. All my muscles were locked. That was the
worst My works were limp but my muscles were in a kind of dreadful lockbolt and I
couldn’t move at all. It was only for a moment, but in the subjective timestream, it seemed
forever.
All sensory input became intensified, as if some powersurge had occurred in the
electrical flow of my brain, cranking everything up from a hundred and ten volts to two-
twenty. I could hear a plane passing in the sky somewhere near and had time to wish I
was on it, just sitting in a window seat with a Coke in my hand and gazing idly down at
the shining line of a river whose name I did not know. I could see every little splinter and
gouge in the tarred crosstie I was squatting on. And out of the corner of my eye I could
see the rail itself with my hand still clutched around it, glittering insanely. The vibration
from that rail sank so deeply into my hand that when I took it away it still vibrated, the
nerve-endings kicking each other over again and again, tingling the way a hand or a foot
tingles when it has been asleep and is starting to wake up. I could taste my saliva,
suddenly all electric and sour and thickened to curds along my gums. And worst,
somehow most horrible of all, I couldn’t hear the train yet, could not know if it was
rushing at me from ahead or behind, or how close it was. It was invisible. It was
unannounced, except for that shaking rail in my hand. There was only that to advertise its
imminent arrival. An image of Ray Brower, dreadfully mangled and thrown into a ditch
somewhere like a ripped-open laundry bag, reeled before my eyes. We would join him, or
at least Vern and I would, or at least I would. We had invited ourselves to our own
funerals.
The last thought broke the paralysis and I shot to my feet. I probably would have
looked like a jack-in-the-box to anyone watching, but to myself I felt like a boy in
underwater slow motion, shooting up not through five feet of air but rather up through
five hundred feet of water, moving slowly, moving with a dreadful languidness as the
water parted grudgingly.
But at last I did break the surface.
I screamed: ‘TRAIN!’
The last of the paralysis fell from me and I began to run.
Vern’s head jerked back over his shoulder. The surprise that distorted his face was
almost comically exaggerated, written as large as the letters in a Dick and Jane primer. He
saw me break into my clumsy, shambling run, dancing from one horribly high crosstie to
the next, and knew I wasn’t joking. He began to run himself.
Far ahead, I could see Chris stepping off the ties and onto the solid safe embankment
and I hated him with a sudden bright green hate as juicy and as bitter as the sap in an
April leaf. He was safe. That fucker was safe. I watched him drop to his knees and grab a rail..
My left foot almost slipped into the yaw beneath me. I flailed with my arms, my eyes as hot as ball bearings in some runaway piece of machinery, got my balance, and ran on.
Now I was right behind Vern. We were past the halfway point and for the first time I
heard the train. It was coming from behind us, coming from the Castle Rock side of the
river. It was a low rumbling noise that began to rise slightly and sort itself into the diesel
thrum of the engine and the higher, more sinister sound of big grooved wheels turning
heavily on the rails.
‘Awwwwwwww, shit!’ Vern screamed.
‘Run, you pussy!’ I yelled, and thumped him on the back.
‘I can’t! I’ll fall!’
‘Runfaster!’
ia wwwwwwwwwww-SHIT!’
But he ran faster, a shambling scarecrow with a bare, sunburnt back, the collar of his
shirt swinging and dangling below his butt. I could see the sweat standing out on his
peeling shoulderblades, standing out in perfect little beads. I could see the fine down on
the nape of his neck. His muscles clenched and loosened, clenched and loosened,
clenched and loosened. His spine stood out in a series of knobs, each knob casting its own
crescent-shaped shadow – I could see that these knobs grew closer together as they
approached his neck. He was still holding his bedroll and I was still holding mine. Vern’s
feet thudded on the crossties. He almost missed one, lunged forward with his arms out,
and I whacked him on the back again to keep him going.
‘Gordeeee I can’t AWWWWWWWWWWW-SHE-EEEEYIT—’
‘RUN FASTER, DICKFACE!’ I bellowed and was I enjoying this!
Yeah – in some peculiar, self-destructive way that I have experienced since only when
completely and utterly drunk, I was. I was driving Vern Tessio like a drover getting a
particularly fine cow to market. And maybe he was enjoying his own fear in that same
way, bawling like that self-same cow, hollering and sweating, his ribcage rising and
falling like the bellows of a blacksmith on a speed-trip, clumsily keeping his footing,
lurching ahead.
The train was very loud now, its engine deepening to a steady rumble. Its whistle
sounded as it crossed the junction point where we had paused to chuck cinders at the rail-
flag. I had finally gotten my hellhound, like it or not. I kept waiting for the trestle to start
shaking under my feet. When that happened, it would be right behind us.
‘GO FASTER, VERN! FAAASTER!’
‘Oh Gawd Gordie oh Gawd Gordie oh Gawd AWWWWWWW-SHEEEEEEEYIT!’
The freight’s electric horn suddenly spanked the air into a hundred pieces with one
long loud blast, making everything you ever saw in a movie or a comic book or one of
your own daydreams fly apart, letting you know what both the heroes and the cowards
really heard when death flew at them:
WHHHHHHHONNNNNNK!
WHHHHHHHHHONNNNNNNNK!
And then Chris was below us and to the right, and Teddy was behind him, his glasses
flashing back arcs of sunlight, and they were both mouthing a single word and the word
was jump! but the train had sucked all the blood out of the word, leaving only its shape in their mouths. The trestle began to shake as the train charged across it. We jumped.
Vern landed full-length in the dust and the cinders and I landed right beside him,
almost on top of him. I never did see that train, nor do I know if its engineer saw us –
when I mentioned the possibility that he hadn’t seen us to Chris a couple of years later, he said: ‘They don’t blow the electric horn like that just for chucks, Gordie.’ But he could
have; he could have been blowing it just for the hell of it. I suppose. Right then, such fine
points didn’t much matter. I clapped my hands over my ears and dug my face into the hot
dirt as the freight went by, metal squalling against metal, the air buffeting us. I had no
urge to look at it. It was a long freight bu; I never looked at all. Before it had passed
completely, I felt a warm hand on my neck and knew it was Chris’s.
When it was gone – when I was sure it was gone -1 raised my head like a soldier
coming out of his foxhole at the end of a day-long artillery barrage. Vern was still
plastered into the dirt, shivering. Chris was sitting cross-legged between us, one hand on
Vern’s sweaty neck, the other still on mine.
When Vern finally sat up, shaking all over and licking his lips compulsively, Chris
said, ‘What you guys think if we drink those Cokes? Could anybody use one besides me?’
We all thought we could use one.
15
About a quarter of a mile along on the Harlow side, the GS&WM tracks plunged
directly into the woods. The heavily wooded land sloped down to a marshy area. It was
full of mosquitoes almost as big as fighter-planes, but it was cool… blessedly cool.
We sat down in the shade to drink our Cokes. Vern and I threw our shirts over our
shoulders to keep the bugs off, but Chris and Teddy just sat naked to the waist, looking as
cool and collected as two Eskimos in an icehouse. We hadn’t been there five minutes
when Vern had to go off into the bushes and take a squat, which led to a good deal of
joking and elbowing when he got back.
‘Train scare you much, Vern?’
‘No,’ Vern said. ‘I was gonna squat when we got across, anyway. I hadda take a squat,
you know?’
‘Verrrrrrrn!’ Chris and Teddy chorused.
‘Come on, you guys, I did. Sincerely.’
‘Then you won’t mind if we examine the seat of your Jockeys for Hershey-squirts,