The Body

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, it 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 curb 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.

“Lissen, 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 he must have gone over and over in his mind while he was lying awake in bed and looking at the moon off-center in one windowpane, something he must have thought about in his slow and broken way until it seemed almost holy, trying to make 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 beach 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 his 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 ranking you, man,” he said in soothing cadences that were almost a lullaby. “He was tryin to rank you over that friggin fence, you know it? No strain, man. No fuckin strain. He don’t know nothin 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, leaving two sooty rings around them, and sat up.

“I’m okay,” he said, and the sound of his own voice seemed to 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 of 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 going 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 gettin 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 shift. I would have laughed then, though, if you had told me that one day not too many years from then I’d parlay all those childhood fears and 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, “I’ll 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, mooovin 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 boogey-man.”

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.