The Body

4

Vern Tessio had been under his porch that morning, digging.

We all understood that right away, but maybe I should take just a minute to explain it to you. Teddy Duchamp was only about half-bright, but Vern Tessio would never be spending any of his spare time on College Bowl either. Still his brother Billy was even dumber, as you will see. But first I have to tell you why Vern was digging under the porch.

Four years ago, when he was eight, Vern buried a quart jar of pennies under the long Tessio front porch. Vern called the dark space under the porch his “cave.” He was playing a pirate sort of game, and the pennies were buried treasure—only if you were playing pirate with Vern, you couldn’t call it buried treasure, you had to call it “booty.” So he buried the jar of pennies deep, filled in the hole, and covered the fresh dirt with some of the old leaves that had drifted under there over the years. He drew a treasure map which he put up in his room with the rest of his junk. He forgot all about it for a month or so. Then, being low on cash for a movie or something, he remembered the pennies and went to get his map. But his mom had been in to clean two or three times since then, and had collected all the old homework papers and candy wrappers and comic magazines and joke books. She burned them in the stove to start the cook-fire one morning, and Vern’s treasure map went right up the kitchen chimney.

Or so he figured it.

He tried to find the spot from memory and dug there. No luck. To the right and the left of that spot. Still no luck. He gave up for the day but had tried off and on ever since. Four years, man. Four years. Isn’t that a pisser? You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It had gotten to be sort of an obsession with him. The Tessio front porch ran the length of the house, probably forty feet long and seven feet wide. He had dug through damn near every inch of that area two, maybe three times and no pennies. The number of pennies began to grow in his mind. When it first happened he told Chris and me that there had been maybe three dollars’ worth. A year later he was up to five and just lately it was running around ten, more or less, depending on how broke he was.

Every so often we tried to tell him what was so clear to us—that Billy had known about the jar and dug it up himself. Vern refused to believe it, although he hated Billy like the Arabs hate the Jews and probably would have cheerfully voted the death-penalty on his brother for shoplifting, if the opportunity had ever presented itself. He also refused to ask Billy point blank. Probably he was afraid Billy would laugh and say Course I got them, you stupid pussy, and there was twenty bucks’ worth of pennies in that jar and I spent every fuckin cent of it. Instead, Vern went out and dug for the pennies whenever the spirit moved him (and whenever Billy wasn’t around). He always crawled out from under the porch with his jeans dirty and his hair leafy and his hands empty. We ragged him about it something wicked, and his nickname was Penny—Penny Tessio. I think he came up to the club with his news as quick as he did not just to get it out but to show us that some good had finally come of his penny-hunt.

He had been up that morning before anybody, ate his cornflakes, and was out in the driveway shooting baskets through the old hoop nailed up on the garage, nothing much to do, no one to play Ghost with or anything, and he decided to have another dig for his pennies. He was under the porch when the screen door slammed up above. He froze, not making a sound. If it was his dad, he would crawl out; if it was Billy, he’d stay put until Billy and his j.d. friend Charlie Hogan had taken off.

Two pairs of footsteps crossed the porch, and then Charlie Hogan himself said in a trembling, crybaby voice: “Jesus Christ, Billy, what are we gonna do?”

Vern said that just hearing Charlie Hogan talk like that—Charlie, who was one of the toughest kids in town—made him prick up his ears. Charlie, after all, hung out with Ace Merrill and Eyeball Chambers, and if you hung out with cats like that, you had to be tough.

“Nuthin,” Billy said. “That’s all we’re gonna do. Nuthin.”

“We gotta do somethin,” Charlie said, and they sat down on the porch close to where Vern was hunkered down. “Didn’t you see him?”

Vern took a chance and crept a little closer to the steps, practically slavering. At that point he thought that maybe Billy and Charlie had been really drunked up and had run somebody down. Vern was careful not to crackle any of the old leaves as he moved. If the two of them found out he was under the porch and had overheard them, you could have put what was left of him in a Ken-L Ration dogfood can.

“It’s nuthin to us,” Billy Tessio said. “The kid’s dead so it’s nuthin to him, neither. Who gives a fuck if they ever find him? I don’t.”

“It was that kid they been talkin about on the radio,” Charlie said. “It was, sure as shit. Brocker, Brower, Flowers, whatever his name is. Fuckin train must have hit him.”

“Yeah,” Billy said. Sound of a scratched match. Vern saw it flicked into the gravel driveway and then smelled cigarette smoke. “It sure did. And you puked.”

No words, but Vern sensed emotional waves of shame radiating off Charlie Hogan.

“Well, the girls didn’t see it,” Billy said after awhile. “Lucky break.” From the sound, he clapped Charlie on the back to buck him up. “They’d blab it from here to Portland. We tore out of there fast, though. You think they knew there was something wrong?”

“No,” Charlie said. “Marie don’t like to go down that Back Harlow Road past the cemetery, anyway. She’s afraid of ghosts.” Then again in that scared crybaby voice: “Jesus, I wish we’d never boosted no car last night! Just gone to the show like we was gonna!”

Charlie and Billy went with a couple of scags named Marie Dougherty and Beverly Thomas; you never saw such gross-looking broads outside of a carnival show—pimples, moustaches, the whole works. Sometimes the four of them—or maybe six or eight if Fuzzy Bracowicz or Ace Merrill were along with their girls—would boost a car from a Lewiston parking lot and go joyriding out into the country with two or three bottles of Wild Irish Rose wine and a six-pack of ginger ale. They’d take the girls parking somewhere in Castle View or Harlow or Shiloh, drink Purple Jesuses, and make out. Then they’d dump the car somewhere near home. Cheap thrills in the monkey-house, as Chris sometimes said. They’d never been caught at it, but Vern kept hoping. He really dug the idea of visiting Billy on Sundays at the reformatory.

“If we told the cops, they’d want to know how we got way the hell out in Harlow,” Billy said. “We ain’t got no car, neither of us. It’s better if we just keep our mouths shut. Then they can’t touch us.”

“We could make a nonnamus call,” Charlie said.

“They trace those fuckin calls,” Billy said ominously. “I seen it on Highway Patrol. And Dragnet.”

“Yeah, right,” Charlie said miserably. “Jesus. I wish Ace’d been with us. We could have told the cops we was in his car.”

“Well, he wasn’t.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. He sighed. “I guess you’re right.” A cigarette butt flicked into the driveway. “We hadda walk up and take a piss by the tracks, didn’t we? Couldn’t walk the other way, could we? And I got puke on my new P. F. Fliers.” His voice sank a little. “Fuckin kid was laid right out, you know it? Didja see that sonofawhore, Billy?”

“I seen him,” Billy said, and a second cigarette butt joined the first in the driveway. “Let’s go see if Ace is up. I want some juice.”

“We gonna tell him?”

“Charlie, we ain’t gonna tell nobody. Nobody never. You dig me?”

“I dig you,” Charlie said. “Christ Jesus, I wish we never boosted that fucking Dodge.”

“Aw, shut the fuck up and come on.”

Two pairs of legs clad in tight, wash-faded pegged jeans, two pairs of feet in black engineer boots with side-buckles, came down the steps. Vern froze on his hands and knees (“My balls crawled up so high I thought they was trine to get back home,” he told us), sure his brother would sense him beneath the porch and drag him out and kill him—he and Charlie Hogan would kick the few brains the good Lord had seen fit to give him right out his jug ears and then stomp him with their engineer boots. But they just kept going and when Vern was sure they were really gone, he had crawled out from under the porch and ran here.