The Body

6

I got to my house at quarter of eleven, after stopping at the drugstore to check out the paperbacks. I did that every couple of days to see if there were any new John D. MacDonalds. I had a quarter and I figured if there was, I’d take it along. But there were only the old ones, and I’d read most of those half a dozen times.

When I got home the car was gone and I remembered that my mom and some of her hen-party friends had gone to Boston to see a concert. A great old concert-goer, my mother. And why not? Her only kid was dead and she had to do something to take her mind off it. I guess that sounds pretty bitter. And I guess if you’d been there, you’d understand why I felt that way.

Dad was out back, passing a fine spray from the hose over his ruined garden. If you couldn’t tell it was a lost cause from his glum face, you sure could by looking at the garden itself. The soil was a light, powdery gray. Everything in it was dead except for the corn, which had never grown so much as a single edible ear. Dad said he’d never known how to water a garden; it had to be mother nature or nobody. He’d water too long in one spot and drown the plants. In the next row, plants were dying of thirst. He could never hit a happy medium. But he didn’t talk about it often. He’d lost a son in April and a garden in August. And if he didn’t want to talk about either one, I guess that was his privilege. It just bugged me that he’d given up talking about everything else, too. That was taking democracy too fucking far.

“Hi, Daddy,” I said, standing beside him. I offered him the Rollos I’d bought at the drugstore. “Want one?”

“Hello, Gordon. No thanks.” He kept on flicking the fine spray over the hopeless gray earth.

“Be okay if I camp out in Vern Tessio’s back field tonight with some of the guys?”

“What guys?”

“Vern. Teddy Duchamp. Maybe Chris.”

I expected him to start right in on Chris—how Chris was bad company, a rotten apple from the bottom of the barrel, a thief, and an apprentice juvenile delinquent.

But he just sighed and said, “I suppose it’s okay.”

“Great! Thanks!”

I turned to go into the house and check out what was on the boob tube when he stopped me with: “Those are the only people you want to be with, aren’t they, Gordon?”

I looked back at him, braced for an argument, but there was no argument in him that morning. It would have been better if there had been, I think. His shoulders were slumped. His face, pointed toward the dead garden and not toward me, sagged. There was a certain unnatural sparkle in his eyes that might have been tears.

“Aw, Dad, they’re okay—”

“Of course they are. A thief and two feebs. Fine company for my son.”

“Vern Tessio isn’t feeble,” I said. Teddy was a harder case to argue.

‘Twelve years old and still in the fifth grade,” my dad said. “And that time he slept over. When the Sunday paper came the next morning, he took an hour and a half to read the funnypages.”

That made me mad, because I didn’t think he was being fair. He was judging Vern the way he judged all my friends, from having seen them off and on, mostly going in and out of the house. He was wrong about them. And when he called Chris a thief I always saw red, because he didn’t know anything about Chris. I wanted to tell him that, but if I pissed him off he’d keep me home. And he wasn’t really mad anyway, not like he got at the supper-table sometimes, ranting so loud that nobody wanted to eat. Now he just looked sad and tired and used. He was sixty-three years old, old enough to be my grandfather.

My mom was fifty-five—no spring chicken, either. When she and dad got married they tried to start a family right away and my mom got pregnant and had a miscarriage. She miscarried two more and the doctor told her she’d never be able to carry a baby to term. I got all of this stuff, chapter and verse, whenever one of them was lecturing me, you understand. They wanted me to think I was a special delivery from God and I wasn’t appreciating my great good fortune in being conceived when my mother was forty-two and starting to gray. I wasn’t appreciating my great good fortune and I wasn’t appreciating her tremendous pain and sacrifices, either.

Five years after the doctor said Mom would never have a baby she got pregnant with Dennis. She carried him for eight months and then he just sort of fell out, all eight pounds of him—my father used to say that if she had carried Dennis to term, the kid would have weighed fifteen pounds. The doctor said: Well, sometimes nature fools us, but he’ll be the only one you’ll ever have. Thank God for him and be content. Ten years later she got pregnant with me. She not only carried me to term, the doctor had to use forceps to yank me out. Did you ever hear of such a fucked-up family? I came into the world the child of two Geritol-chuggers, not to go on and on about it, and my only brother was playing league baseball in the big kids’ park before I even got out of diapers.

In the case of my mom and dad, one gift from God had been enough. I won’t say they treated me badly, and they sure never beat me, but I was a hell of a big surprise and I guess when you get into your forties you’re not as partial to surprises as you were in your twenties. After I was born, Mom got the operation her hen-party friends referred to as “The Band-Aid.” I guess she wanted to make a hundred percent sure that there wouldn’t be any more gifts from God. When I got to college I found out I’d beaten long odds just by not being born retarded… although I think my dad had his doubts when he saw my friend Vern taking ten minutes to puzzle out the dialogue in Beetle Baily.

This business about being ignored: I could never really pin it down until I did a book report in high school on this novel called The Invisible Man. When I agreed to do the book for Miss Hardy I thought it was going to be the science fiction story about the guy in bandages and Foster Grants—Claude Rains played him in the movies. When I found out this was a different story I tried to give the book back but Miss Hardy wouldn’t let me off the hook. I ended up being real glad. This Invisible Man is about a Negro. Nobody ever notices him at all unless he fucks up. People look right through him. When he talks, nobody answers. He’s like a black ghost. Once I got into it, I ate that book up like it was a John D. MacDonald, because that cat Ralph Ellison was writing about me. At the supper-table it was Denny how many did you strike out and Denny who asked you to the Sadie Hawkins dance and Denny I want to talk to you man to man about that car we were looking at. I’d say: “Pass the butter,” and Dad would say: Denny, are you sure the Army is what you want? I’d say: “Pass the butter someone, okay?” and Mom would ask Denny if he wanted her to pick him up one of the Pendleton shirts on sale downtown, and I’d end up getting the butter myself. One night when I was nine, just to see what would happen: I said, “Please pass those goddam spuds.” And my mom said: Denny, Auntie Grace called today and she asked after you and Gordon.

The night Dennis graduated with honors from Castle Rock High School I played sick and stayed home. I got Stevie Darabont’s oldest brother Royce to buy me a bottle of Wild Irish Rose and I drank half of it and puked in my bed in the middle of the night.

In a family situation like that, you’re supposed to either hate the older brother or idolize him hopelessly—at least that’s what they teach you in college psychology. Bullshit, right? But so far as I can tell, I didn’t feel either way about Dennis. We rarely argued and never had a fist-fight. That would have been ridiculous. Can you see a fourteen-year-old boy finding something to beat up his four-year-old brother about? And our folks were always a little too impressed with him to burden him with the care of his kid brother, so he never resented me the way some older kids come to resent their sibs. When Denny took me with him somewhere, it was of his own free will, and those were some of the happiest times I can remember.

“Hey Lachance, who the fuck is that?”

“My kid brother and you better watch your mouth, Davis. He’ll beat the crap out of you. Gordie’s tough.”

They gather around me for a moment, huge, impossibly tall, just a moment of interest like a patch of sun. They are so big, they are so old.

“Hey kid! This wet end really your big brother?”

I nod shyly.

“He’s a real asshole, ain’t he, kid?”

I nod again and everybody, Dennis included, roars with laughter. Then Dennis claps his hands together twice, briskly, and says: “Come on, we gonna have a practice or stand around here like a bunch of pussies?”

They run to their positions, already peppering the ball around the infield.

“Go sit over there on the bench, Gordie. Be quiet. Don’t bother anybody.”

I go sit over there on the bench. I am good. I feel impossibly small under the sweet summer clouds. I watch my brother pitch. I don’t bother anybody.

But there weren’t many times like that.

Sometimes he read me bedtime stories that were better than Mom’s; Mom’s stories were about The Gingerbread Man and The Three Little Pigs, okay stuff, but Dennis’s were about stuff like Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper. He also had a version of Billy Goat’s Gruff where the troll under the bridge ended up the winner. And, as I have already said, he taught me the game of cribbage and how to do a box-shuffle. Not that much, but hey! in this world you take what you can get, am I right?

As I grew older, my feelings of love for Dennis were replaced with an almost clinical awe, the kind of awe so-so Christians feel for God, I guess. And when he died, I was mildly shocked and mildly sad, the way I imagine those same so-so Christians must have felt when Time magazine said God was dead. Let me put it this way: I was as sad for Denny’s dying as I was when I heard on the radio that Dan Blocker had died. I’d seen them both about as frequently, and Denny never even got any re-runs.

He was buried in a closed coffin with the American flag on top (they took the flag off the box before they finally stuck it in the ground and folded it—the flag, not the box—into a cocked hat and gave it to my mom). My parents just fell to pieces. Four months hadn’t been long enough to put them back together again; I didn’t know if they’d ever be whole again. Mr. and Mrs. Dumpty. Denny’s room was in suspended animation just one door down from my room, suspended animation or maybe in a time-warp. The Ivy League college pennants were still on the walls, and the senior pictures of the girls he had dated were still tucked into the mirror where he had stood for what seemed like hours at a stretch, combing his hair back into a ducktail like Elvis’s. The stack of Trues and Sports Illustrated remained on his desk, their dates looking more and more antique as time passed. It’s the kind of thing you see in sticky-sentimental movies. But it wasn’t sentimental to me; it was terrible. I didn’t go into Dennis’s room unless I had to because I kept expecting that he would be behind the door, or under the bed, or in the closet. Mostly it was the closet that preyed on my mind, and if my mother sent me in to get Denny’s postcard album or his shoebox of photographs so she could look at them, I would imagine that door swinging slowly open while I stood rooted to the spot with horror. I would imagine him pallid and bloody in the darkness, the side of his head walloped in, a gray-veined cake of blood and brains drying on his shirt. I would imagine his arms coming up, his bloody hands hooking into claws, and he would be croaking: It should have been you, Gordon. It should have been you.