The Body

29

We got back to Castle Rock a little past five o’clock on Sunday morning, the day before Labor Day. We had walked all night. Nobody complained, although we all had blisters and were all ravenously hungry. My head was throbbing with a killer headache, and my legs felt twisted and burning with fatigue. Twice we had to scramble down the embankment to get out of the way of freights. One of them was going our way, but moving far too fast to hop. It was seeping daylight when we got to the trestle spanning the Castle again. Chris looked at it, looked at the river, looked back at us.

“Fuck it. I’m walking across. If I get hit by a train I won’t have to watch out for fuckin Ace Merrill.”

We all walked across it—plodded might be the better verb. No train came. When we got to the dump we climbed the fence (no Milo and no Chopper, not this early, and not on a Sunday morning) and went directly to the pump. Vern primed it and we all took turns sticking our heads under the icy flow, slapping the water over our bodies, drinking until we could hold no more. Then we had to put our shirts on again because the morning seemed chilly. We walked—limped—back into town and stood for a moment on the sidewalk in front of the vacant lot. We looked at our treehouse so we wouldn’t have to look at each other.

“Well,” Teddy said at last, “seeya in school on Wednesday. I think I’m gonna sleep until then.”

“Me too,” Vern said. “I’m too pooped to pop.”

Chris whistled tunelessly through his teeth and said nothing.

“Hey, man,” Teddy said awkwardly. “No hard feelins, okay?”

“No,” Chris said, and suddenly his somber, tired face broke into a sweet and sunny grin. “We did it, didn’t we? We did the bastard.”

“Yeah,” Vern said. “You’re fuckin-A. Now Billy’s gonna do me.”

“So what?” Chris said. “Richie’s gonna tool up on me and Ace is probably gonna tool up on Gordie and somebody else’ll tool up on Teddy. But we did it.”

“That’s right,” Vern said. But he still sounded unhappy.

Chris looked at me. “We did it, didn’t we?” he asked softly. “It was worth it, wasn’t it?”

“Sure it was,” I said.

“Fuck this,” Teddy said in his dry I’m-losing-interest way. “You guys sound like fuckin Meet the Press. Gimme some skin, man. I’m gonna toot home and see if Mom’s got me on the Ten Most Wanted List.”

We all laughed, Teddy gave us his surprised Oh-Lord-what-now look, and we gave him skin. Then he and Vern started off in their direction and I should have gone in mine… but I hesitated for a second.

“Walk with you,” Chris offered.

“Sure, okay.”

We walked a block or so without talking. Castle Rock was awesomely quiet in the day’s first light, and I felt an almost holy tiredness-is-slipping-away sort of feeling. We were awake and the whole world was asleep and I almost expected to turn the corner and see my deer standing at the far end of Carbine Street, where the GS&WM tracks pass through the mill’s loading yard.

Finally Chris spoke. “They’ll tell,” he said.

“You bet they will. But not today or tomorrow, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’ll be a long time before they tell, I think. Years, maybe.”

He looked at me, surprised.

“They’re scared, Chris. Teddy especially, that they won’t take him in the Army. But Vern’s scared, too. They’ll lose some sleep over it, and there’s gonna be times this fall when it’s right on the tips of their tongues to tell somebody, but I don’t think they will. And then… you know what? It sounds fucking crazy, but… I think they’ll almost forget it ever happened.”

He was nodding slowly. “I didn’t think of it just like that. You see through people, Gordie.”

“Man, I wish I did.”

“You do, though.”

We walked another block in silence.

“I’m never gonna get out of this town,” Chris said, and sighed. “When you come back from college on summer vacation, you’ll be able to look me and Vern and Teddy up down at Sukey’s after the seven-to-three shift’s over. If you want to. Except you’ll probably never want to.” He laughed a creepy laugh.

“Quit jerking yourself off,” I said, trying to sound tougher than I felt—I was thinking about being out there in the woods, about Chris saying: And maybe I took it to old lady Simons and told her, and maybe the money was all there but I got a three-day vacation anyway, because the money never showed up. And maybe the next week old lady Simons had this brand-new skirt on when she came to school… The look. The look in his eyes.

“No jerkoff, daddy-O,” Chris said.

I rubbed my first finger against my thumb. “This is the world’s smallest violin playing ‘My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You.’ ”

“He was ours,” Chris said, his eyes dark in the morning light.

We had reached the corner of my street and we stopped there. It was quarter past six. Back toward town we could see the Sunday Telegram truck pulling up in front of Teddy’s uncle’s stationery shop. A man in bluejeans and a tee-shirt threw off a bundle of papers. They bounced upside down on the sidewalk, showing the color funnies (always Dick Tracy and Blondie on the first page). Then the truck drove on, its driver intent on delivering the outside world to the rest of the whistlestops up the line—Otisfield, Norway-South Paris, Waterford, Stoneham. I wanted to say something more to Chris and didn’t know how to.

“Gimme some skin, man,” he said, sounding tired.

“Chris—”

“Skin.”

I gave him some skin. “I’ll see you.”

He grinned—that same sweet, sunny grin. “Not if I see you first, fuckface.”

He walked off, still laughing, moving easily and gracefully, as though he didn’t hurt like me and have blisters like me and like he wasn’t lumped and bumped with mosquito and chigger and blackfly bites like me. As if he didn’t have a care in the world, as if he was going to some real boss place instead of just home to a three-room house (shack would have been closer to the truth) with no indoor plumbing and broken windows covered with plastic and a brother who was probably laying for him in the front yard. Even if I’d known the right thing to say, I probably couldn’t have said it. Speech destroys the functions of love, I think—that’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is the harm. Love isn’t what these asshole poets like McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close those lovebites. It’s the other way around, that’s the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them. Take it from me. I’ve made my life from the words, and I know that is so.