The Body

9

My room was on the second floor, and it must have been at least ninety degrees up there. It would be a hundred and ten by afternoon, even with all the windows open. I was really glad I wasn’t sleeping there that night, and the thought of where we were going made me excited all over again. I made two blankets into a bedroll and tied it with my old belt. I collected all my money, which was sixty-eight cents. Then I was ready to go.

I went down the back stairs to avoid meeting my dad in front of the house, but I hadn’t needed to worry; he was still out in the garden with the hose, making useless rainbows in the air and looking through them.

I walked down Summer Street and cut through a vacant lot to Carbine—where the offices of the Castle Rock Call stand today. I was headed up Carbine toward the clubhouse when a car pulled over to the curb and Chris got out. He had his old Boy Scout pack in one hand and two blankets rolled up and tied with clothesrope in the other.

“Thanks, mister,” he said, and trotted over to join me as the car pulled away. His Boy Scout canteen was slung around his neck and under one arm so that it finally ended up banging on his hip. His eyes were sparkling.

“Gordie! You wanna see something?”

“Sure, I guess so. What?”

“Come on down here first.” He pointed at the narrow space between the Blue Point Diner and the Castle Rock Drugstore.

“What is it, Chris?”

“Come on, I said!”

He ran down the alley and after a brief moment (that’s all it took me to cast aside my better judgment) I ran after him. The two buildings were set slightly toward each other rather than running parallel, and so the alley narrowed as it went back. We waded through trashy drifts of old newspapers and stepped over cruel, sparkly nests of broken beer and soda bottles. Chris cut behind the Blue Point and put his bedroll down. There were eight or nine garbage cans lined up here and the stench was incredible.

“Phew! Chris! Come on, gimme a break!”

“Gimme your arm,” Chris said, by rote.

“No, sincerely, I’m gonna throw u—”

The words broke off in my mouth and I forgot all about the smelly garbage cans. Chris had unslung his pack and opened it and reached inside. Now he was holding out a huge pistol with dark wood grips.

“You wanna be the Lone Ranger or the Cisco Kid?” Chris asked, grinning.

“Walking, talking Jesus! Where’d you get that?”

“Hawked it out of my dad’s bureau. It’s a forty-five.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” I said, although it could have been a .38 or a .357 for all I knew—in spite of all the John D. MacDonalds and Ed McBains I’d read, the only pistol I’d ever seen up close was the one Constable Bannerman carried… and although all the kids asked him to take it out of its holster, Bannerman never would. “Man, your dad’s gonna hide you when he finds out. You said he was on a mean streak anyway.”

His eyes just went on dancing. “That’s it, man. He ain’t gonna find out nothing. Him and these other rummies are all laid up down in Harrison with six or eight bottles of wine. They won’t be back for a week. Fucking rummies.” His lip curled. He was the only guy in our gang who would never take a drink, even to show he had, you know, big balls. He said he wasn’t going to grow up to be a fucking tosspot like his old man. And he told me once privately—this was after the DeSpain twins showed up with a six-pack they’d hawked from their old man and everybody teased Chris because he wouldn’t take a beer or even a swallow—that he was scared to drink. He said his father never got his nose all the way out of the bottle anymore, that his older brother had been drunk out of his tits when he raped that girl, and that Eyeball was always guzzling Purple Jesuses with Ace Merrill and Charlie Hogan and Billy Tessio. What, he asked me, did I think his chances of letting go of the bottle would be once he picked it up? Maybe you think that’s funny, a twelve-year-old worrying that he might be an incipient alcoholic, but it wasn’t funny to Chris. Not at all. He’d thought about the possibility a lot. He’d had occasion to.

“You got shells for it?”

“Nine of them—all that was left in the box. He’ll think he used em himself, shooting at cans while he was drunk.”

“Is it loaded?”

“No! Chrissake, what do you think I am?”

I finally took the gun. I liked the heavy way it sat there in my hand. I could see myself as Steve Carella of the 87th Squad, going after that guy The Heckler or maybe covering Meyer Meyer or Kling while they broke into a desperate junkie’s sleazy apartment. I sighted on one of the smelly trashcans and squeezed the trigger.

The gun bucked in my hand. Fire licked from the end. It felt as if my wrist had just been broken. My heart vaulted nimbly into the back of my mouth and crouched there, trembling. A big hole appeared in the corrugated metal surface of the trashcan—it was the work of an evil conjuror.

“Jesus!” I screamed.

Chris was cackling wildly—in real amusement or hysterical terror I couldn’t tell. “You did it, you did it! Gordie did it!” he bugled. “Hey, Gordon Lachance is shooting up Castle Rock!”

“Shut up! Let’s get out of here!” I screamed, and grabbed him by the shirt.

As we ran, the back door of the Blue Point jerked open and Francine Tupper stepped out in her white rayon waitress’s uniform. “Who did that? Who’s letting off cherry-bombs back here?”

We ran like hell, cutting behind the drugstore and the hardware store and the Emporium Galorium, which sold antiques and junk and dime books. We climbed a fence, spiking our palms with splinters, and finally came out on Curran Street. I threw the .45 at Chris as we ran; he was killing himself laughing but caught it and somehow managed to stuff it back into his knapsack and close one of the snaps. Once around the corner of Curran and back on Carbine Street, we slowed to a walk so we wouldn’t look suspicious, running in the heat. Chris was still giggling.

“Man, you shoulda seen your face. Oh man, that was priceless. That was really fine. My fucking-A.” He shook his head and slapped his leg and howled.

“You knew it was loaded, didn’t you? You wet! I’m gonna be in trouble. That Tupper babe saw me.”

“Shit, she thought it was a firecracker. Besides, ole Thunderjugs Tupper can’t see past the end of her own nose, you know that. Thinks wearing glasses would spoil her pret-ty face.” He put one palm against the small of his back and bumped his hips and got laughing again.

“Well, I don’t care. That was a mean trick, Chris. Really.”

“Come on, Gordie.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t know it was loaded, honest to God, I swear on my mother’s name I just took it out of my dad’s bureau. He always unloads it. He must have been really drunk when he put it away the last time.”

“You really didn’t load it?”

“No sir.”

“You swear it on your mother’s name even if she goes to hell for you telling a lie?”

“I swear.” He crossed himself and spit, his face as open and repentant as any choirboy’s. But when we turned into the vacant lot where our treehouse was and saw Vern and Teddy sitting on their bedrolls waiting for us, he started to laugh again. He told them the whole story, and after everybody had had their yucks, Teddy asked him what Chris thought they needed a pistol for.

“Nothin,” Chris said. “Except we might see a bear. Something like that. Besides, it’s spooky sleeping out at night in the woods.”

Everybody nodded at that. Chris was the biggest, toughest guy in our gang, and he could always get away with saying things like that. Teddy, on the other hand, would have gotten his ass ragged off if he even hinted he was afraid of the dark.

“Did you set your tent up in the field?” Teddy asked Vern.

“Yeah. And I put two turned-on flashlights in it so it’ll look like we’re there after dark.”

“Hot shit!” I said, and clapped Vern on the back. For him, that was thinking. He grinned and blushed.

“So let’s go,” Teddy said. “Come on, it’s almost twelve already!”

Chris got up and we gathered around him.

“We’ll walk across Beeman’s field and behind that furniture place by Sonny’s Texaco,” he said. “Then we’ll get on the railroad tracks down by the dump and just walk across the trestle into Harlow.”

“How far do you think it’s gonna be?” Teddy asked.

Chris shrugged. “Harlow’s big. We’re gonna be walking at least twenty miles. That sound right to you, Gordie?”

“Yeah. It might even be thirty.”

“Even if it’s thirty we ought to be there by tomorrow afternoon, if no one goes pussy.”

“No pussies here,” Teddy said at once.

We all looked at each other for a second.

“Miaoww,” Vern said, and we all laughed.

“Come on, you guys,” Chris said, and shouldered his pack.

We walked out of the vacant lot together, Chris slightly in the lead.