The Body

21

The tracks now bent southwest and ran through tangles of second-growth fir and heavy underbrush. We got a breakfast of late blackberries from some of these bushes, but berries never fill you up; your stomach just gives them a thirty-minute option and then begins growling again. We went back to the tracks—it was about eight o’clock by then—and took five. Our mouths were a dark purple and our naked torsos were scratched from the blackberry brambles. Vern wished glumly aloud for a couple of fried eggs with bacon on the side.

That was the last day of the heat, and I think it was the worst of all. The early scud of clouds melted away and by nine o’clock the sky was a pale steel color that made you feel hotter just looking at it. The sweat rolled and ran from our chests and backs, leaving clean streaks through the accumulated soot and grime. Mosquitoes and blackflies whirled and dipped around our heads in aggravating clouds. Knowing that we had long miles to go didn’t make us feel any better. Yet the fascination of the thing drew us on and kept us walking faster than we had any business doing, in that heat. We were all crazy to see that kid’s body—I can’t put it any more simply or honestly than that. Whether it was harmless or whether it turned out to have the power to murder sleep with a hundred mangled dreams, we wanted to see it. I think that we had come to believe we deserved to see it.

It was about nine-thirty when Teddy and Chris spotted water up ahead—they shouted to Vern and me. We ran over to where they were standing. Chris was laughing, delighted. “Look there! Beavers did that!” He pointed.

It was the work of beavers, all right. A large-bore culvert ran under the railroad embankment a little way ahead, and the beavers had sealed the right end with one of their neat and industrious little dams—sticks and branches cemented together with leaves, twigs, and dried mud. Beavers are busy little fuckers, all right. Behind the dam was a clear and shining pool of water, brilliantly mirroring the sunlight. Beaver houses humped up and out of the water in several places—they looked like wooden igloos. A small creek trickled into the far end of the pool, and the trees which bordered it were gnawed a clean bone-white to a height of almost three feet in places.

“Railroad’ll clean this shit out pretty soon,” Chris said.

“Why?” Vern asked.

“They can’t have a pool here,” Chris said. “It’d undercut their precious railroad line. That’s why they put that culvert in there to start with. They’ll shoot them some beavers and scare off the rest and then knock out their dam. Then this’ll go back to being a bog, like it probably was before.”

“I think that eats the meat,” Teddy said.

Chris shrugged. “Who cares about beavers? Not the Great Southern and Western Maine, that’s for sure.”

“You think it’s deep enough to swim in?” Vern asked, looking hungrily at the water.

“One way to find out,” Teddy said.

“Who goes first?” I asked.

“Me!” Chris said. He went running down the bank, kicking off his sneakers and untying his shirt from around his waist with a jerk. He pushed his pants and undershorts down with a single shove of his thumbs. He balanced, first on one leg and then on the other, to get his socks. Then he made a shallow dive. He came up shaking his head to get his wet hair out of his eyes. “It’s fuckin great!” he shouted.

“How deep?” Teddy called back. He had never learned to swim.

Chris stood up in the water and his shoulders broke the surface. I saw something on one of them—a blackish-grayish something. I decided it was a piece of mud and dismissed it. If I had looked more closely I could have saved myself a lot of nightmares later on. “Come on in, you chickens!”

He turned and thrashed off across the pool in a clumsy breast-stroke, turned over, and thrashed back. By then we were all getting undressed. Vern was in next, then me.

Hitting the water was fantastic—clean and cool. I swam across to Chris, loving the silky feel of having nothing on but water. I stood up and we grinned into each other’s faces.

“Boss!” We said it at exactly the same instant.

“Fuckin jerkoff,” he said, splashed water in my face, and swam off the other way.

We goofed off in the water for almost half an hour before we realized that the pond was full of bloodsuckers. We dived, swam under water, ducked each other. We never knew a thing. Then Vern swam into the shallower part, went under, and stood on his hands. When his legs broke water in a shaky but triumphant V, I saw that they were covered with blackish-gray lumps, just like the one I had seen on Chris’s shoulder. They were slugs—big ones.

Chris’s mouth dropped open, and I felt all the blood in my body go as cold as dry ice. Teddy screamed, his face going pale. Then all three of us were thrashing for the bank, going just as fast as we could. I know more about freshwater slugs now than I did then, but the fact that they are mostly harmless has done nothing to allay the almost insane horror of them I’ve had ever since that day in the beaver-pool. They carry a local anesthetic and an anti-coagulant in their alien saliva, which means that the host never feels a thing when they attach themselves. If you don’t happen to see them they’ll go on feeding until their swelled, loathsome bodies fall off you, sated, or until they actually burst.

We pulled ourselves up on the bank and Teddy went into a hysterical paroxysm as he looked down at himself. He was screaming as he picked the leeches off his naked body.

Vern broke the water and looked at us, puzzled. “What the hell’s wrong with h—”

“Leeches!” Teddy screamed, pulling two of them off his trembling thighs and throwing them just as far as he could. “Dirty mother-fuckin bloodsuckers!” His voice broke shrilly on the last word.

“OhGodOhGodOhGod!” Vern cried. He paddled across the pool and stumbled out.

I was still cold; the heat of the day had been suspended. I kept telling myself to catch hold. Not to get screaming. Not to be a pussy. I picked half a dozen off my arms and several more off my chest.

Chris turned his back to me. “Gordie? Are there any more? Take em off if there are, please, Gordie!” There were more, five or six, running down his back like grotesque black buttons. I pulled their soft, boneless bodies off him.

I brushed even more off my legs, then got Chris to do my back.

I was starting to relax a little—and that was when I looked down at myself and saw the granddaddy of them all clinging to my testicles, its body swelled to four times its normal size. Its blackish-gray skin had gone a bruised purplish-red. That was when I began to lose control. Not outside, at least not in any big way, but inside, where it counts.

I brushed its slick, glutinous body with the back of my hand. It held on. I tried to do it again and couldn’t bring myself to actually touch it. I turned to Chris, tried to speak, couldn’t. I pointed instead. His cheeks, already ashy, went whiter still.

“I can’t get it off,” I said through numb lips. “You… can you…”

But he backed away, shaking his head, his mouth twisted. “I can’t, Gordie,” he said, unable to take his eyes away. “I’m sorry but I can’t. No. Oh. No.” He turned away, bowed with one hand pressed to his midsection like the butler in a musical comedy, and was sick in a stand of juniper bushes.

You got to hold onto yourself, I thought, looking at the leech that hung off me like a crazy beard. Its body was still visibly swelling. You got to hold onto yourself and get him. Be tough. It’s the last one. The. Last. One.

I reached down again and picked it off and it burst between my fingers. My own blood ran across my palm and inner wrist in a warm flood. I began to cry.

Still crying, I walked back to my clothes and put them on. I wanted to stop crying, but I just didn’t seem able to turn off the waterworks. Then the shakes set in, making it worse. Vern ran up to me, still naked.

“They off, Gordie? They off me? They off me?”

He twirled in front of me like an insane dancer on a carnival stage.

“They off? Huh? Huh? They off me, Gordie?”

His eyes kept going past me, as wide and white as the eyes of a plaster horse on a merry-go-round.

I nodded that they were and just kept on crying. It seemed that crying was going to be my new career. I tucked my shirt in and then buttoned it all the way to the neck. I put on my socks and my sneakers. Little by little the tears began to slow down. Finally there was nothing left but a few hitches and moans, and then they stopped, too.

Chris walked over to me, wiping his mouth with a handful of elm leaves. His eyes were wide and mute and apologetic.

When we were all dressed we just stood there looking at each other for a moment, and then we began to climb the railroad embankment. I looked back once at the burst leech lying on top of the tromped-down bushes where we had danced and screamed and groaned them off. It looked deflated… but still ominous.

Fourteen years later I sold my first novel and made my first trip to New York. “It’s going to be a three-day celebration,” my new editor told me over the phone. “People slinging bullshit will be summarily shot.” But of course it was three days of unmitigated bullshit.

While I was there I wanted to do all the standard out-of-towner things—see a stage show at the Radio City Music Hall, go to the top of the Empire State Building (fuck the World Trade Center; the building King Kong climbed in 1933 is always gonna be the tallest one in the world for me), visit Times Square by night. Keith, my editor, seemed more than pleased to show his city off. The last touristy thing we did was to take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, and while leaning on the rail I happened to look down and see scores of used condoms floating on the mild swells. And I had a moment of almost total recall—or perhaps it was an actual incidence of time-travel. Either way, for one second I was literally in the past, pausing halfway up that embankment and looking back at the burst leech: dead, deflated… but still ominous.

Keith must have seen something in my face because he said: “Not very pretty, are they?”

I only shook my head, wanting to tell him not to apologize, wanting to tell him that you didn’t have to come to the Apple and ride the ferry to see used rubbers, wanting to say: The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality; that’s why all the verbs in stories have -ed endings, Keith my good man, even the ones that sell millions of paperbacks. The only two useful artforms are religion and stories.

I was pretty drunk that night, as you may have guessed.

What I did tell him was: “I was thinking of something else, that’s all.” The most important things are the hardest things to say.