The Body

5

“You’re really lucky,” I said. “They would have killed you.”

Teddy said, “I know the Back Harlow Road. It comes to a dead end by the river. We used to fish for cossies out there.”

Chris nodded. “There used to be a bridge, but there was a flood. A long time ago. Now there’s just the train-tracks.”

“Could a kid really have gotten all the way from Chamberlain to Harlow?” I asked Chris. “That’s twenty or thirty miles.”

“I think so. He probably happened on the train-tracks and followed them the whole way. Maybe he thought they’d take him out, or maybe he thought he could flag down a train if he had to. But that’s just a freight run now—GS&WM up to Derry and Brownsville—and not many of those anymore. He’d have to’ve walked all the way to Castle Rock to get out. After dark a train must have finally come along… and el smacko.”

Chris drove his right fist down against his left palm, making a flat noise. Teddy, a veteran of many close calls dodging the pulp-trucks on 196, looked vaguely pleased. I felt a little sick, imagining that kid so far away from home, scared to death but doggedly following the GS&WM tracks, probably walking on the ties because of the night-noises from the overhanging trees and bushes… maybe even from the culverts underneath the railroad bed. And here comes the train, and maybe the big headlight on the front hypnotized him until it was too late to jump. Or maybe he was just lying there on the tracks in a hunger-faint when the train came along. Either way, any way, Chris had the straight of it: el smacko had been the final result. The kid was dead.

“So anyway, you want to go see it?” Vern asked. He was squirming around like he had to go to the bathroom he was so excited.

We all looked at him for a long second, no one saying anything. Then Chris tossed his cards down and said: “Sure! And I bet you anything we get our pictures in the paper!”

“Huh?” Vern said.

“Yeah?” Teddy said, and grinning his crazy truck-dodging grin.

“Look,” Chris said, leaning across the ratty card-table. “We can find the body and report it! We’ll be on the news!”

“I dunno,” Vern said, obviously taken aback. “Billy will know where I found out. He’ll beat the living shit outta me.”

“No he won’t,” I said, “because it’ll be us guys that find that kid, not Billy and Charlie Hogan in a boosted car. Then they won’t have to worry about it anymore. They’ll probably pin a medal on you, Penny.”

“Yeah?” Vern grinned, showing his bad teeth. It was a dazed sort of grin, as if the thought of Billy being pleased with anything he did had acted on him like a hard shot to the chin. “Yeah, you think so?”

Teddy was grinning, too. Then he frowned and said: “Oh-oh.”

“What?” Vern asked. He was squirming again, afraid that some really basic objection to the idea had just cropped up in Teddy’s mind… or what passed for Teddy’s mind.

“Our folks,” Teddy said. “If we find that kid’s body over in South Harlow tomorrow, they’re gonna know we didn’t spend the night campin out in Vern’s back field.”

“Yeah,” Chris said. “They’ll know we went lookin for that kid.”

“No they won’t,” I said. I felt funny—both excited and scared because I knew we could do it and get away with it. The mixture of emotions made me feel heatsick and headachy. I picked up the Bikes to have something to do with my hands and started box-shuffling them. That and how to play cribbage was about all I got for older brother stuff from Dennis. The other kids envied that shuffle, and I guess everyone I knew had asked me to show them how it went… everyone except Chris. I guess only Chris knew that showing someone would be like giving away a piece of Dennis, and I just didn’t have so much of him that I could afford to pass pieces around.

I said: “We’ll just tell em we got bored tenting in Vern’s field because we’ve done it so many times before. So we decided to hike up the tracks and have a campout in the woods. I bet we don’t even get hided for it because everybody’ll be so excited about what we found.”

“My dad’ll hide me anyway,” Chris said. “He’s on a really mean streak this time.” He shook his head sullenly. “To hell, it’s worth a hiding.”

“Okay,” Teddy said, getting up. He was still grinning like crazy, ready to break into his high-pitched, cackling laugh at any second. “Let’s all get together at Vern’s house after lunch. What can we tell em about supper?”

Chris said, “You and me and Gordie can say we’re eating at Vern’s.”

“And I’ll tell my mom I’m eating over at Chris’s,” Vern said.

That would work unless there was some emergency we couldn’t control or unless any of the parents got together. And neither Vern’s folks or Chris’s had a phone. Back then there were a lot of families which still considered a telephone a luxury, especially families of the shirttail variety. And none of us came from the upper crust.

My dad was retired. Vern’s dad worked in the mill and was still driving a 1952 DeSoto. Teddy’s mom had a house on Danberry Street and she took in a boarder whenever she could get one. She didn’t have one that summer; the furnished room to let sign had been up in the parlor window since June. And Chris’s dad was always on a “mean streak,” more or less; he was a drunk who got welfare off and on—mostly on—and spent most of his time hanging out in Sukey’s Tavern with Junior Merrill, Ace Merrill’s old man, and a couple of other local rumpots.

Chris didn’t talk much about his dad, but we all knew he hated him like poison. Chris was marked up every two weeks or so, bruises on his cheeks and neck or one eye swelled up and as colorful as a sunset, and once he came into school with a big clumsy bandage on the back of his head. Other times he never got to school at all. His mom would call him in sick because he was too lamed up to come in. Chris was smart, really smart, but he played truant a lot, and Mr. Halliburton, the town truant officer, was always showing up at Chris’s house, driving his old black Chevrolet with the NO RIDERS sticker in the corner of the windshield. If Chris was being truant and Bertie (as we called him—always behind his back, of course) caught him, he would haul him back to school and see that Chris got detention for a week. But if Bertie found out that Chris was home because his father had beaten the shit out of him, Bertie just went away and didn’t say boo to a cuckoo-bird. It never occurred to me to question this set of priorities until about twenty years later.

The year before, Chris had been suspended from school for three days. A bunch of milk-money disappeared when it was Chris’s turn to be room-monitor and collect it, and because he was a Chambers from those no-account Chamberses, he had to take a hike even though he always swore he never hawked that money. That was the time Mr. Chambers put Chris in the hospital for an overnight stay; when his dad heard Chris was suspended, he broke Chris’s nose and his right wrist. Chris came from a bad family, all right, and everybody thought he would turn out bad… including Chris. His brothers had lived up to the town’s expectations admirably. Frank, the eldest, ran away from home when he was seventeen, joined the Navy, and ended up doing a long stretch in Portsmouth for rape and criminal assault. The next-eldest, Richard (his right eye was all funny and jittery, which was why everybody called him Eyeball), had dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, and chummed around with Charlie and Billy Tessio and their j.d. buddies.

“I think all that’ll work,” I told Chris. “What about John and Marty?” John and Marty DeSpain were two other members of our regular gang.

‘They’re still away,” Chris said. “They won’t be back until Monday.”

“Oh. That’s too bad.”

“So are we set?” Vern asked, still squirming. He didn’t want the conversation sidetracked even for a minute.

“I guess we are,” Chris said. “Who wants to play some more scat?”

No one did. We were too excited to play cards. We climbed down from the treehouse, climbed the fence into the vacant lot, and played three-flies-six-grounders for awhile with Vern’s old friction-taped baseball, but that was no fun, either. All we could think about was that kid Brower, hit by a train, and how we were going to see him, or what was left of him. Around ten o’clock we all drifted away home to fix it with our parents.