It was still hot. The sweat rolled off us, slicking our bodies. Its asshole if your friends can drag you down, Chris said finally. I know about you and your folks. They dont give a shit about you. Your big brother was the one they cared about. Like my dad, when Frank got thrown into the stockade in Portsmouth. That was when he started always bein mad at us other kids and hitting us all the time. Your dad doesnt beat on you, but maybe thats even worse. Hes got you asleep. You could tell him you were enrolling in the fuckin shop division and you know what hed do? Hed turn to the next page in his paper and say Well, thats nice, Gordon, go ask your mother whats for dinner. And dont try to tell me different. Ive met him. I didnt try to tell him different. Its scary to find out that someone else, even a friend, knows just how things are with you. Youre just a kid, Gordie Gee, thanks, Dad. I wish to fuck I was your father! he said angrily. You wouldnt go around talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was! Its like God gave you something, all those stories you can make up, and He said This is what we got for you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it then maybe I ought to. His face looked like he was expecting me to take a swing at him; it was set and unhappy in the greengold late afternoon light. He had broken the cardinal rule for kids in those days. You could say anything about another kid, you could rank him to the dogs and back, but you didnt say a bad word ever about his mom and dad. That was the Fabled Automatic, the same way not inviting your Catholic friends home to dinner on Friday unless youd checked first to make sure you werent having meat was the Fabled Automatic. If a kid ranked out your mom and dad, you had to feed him some knuckles. Those stories you tell, theyre no good to anybody but you, Gordie. If you go along with us just because you dont want the gang to break up, youll wind up just another grunt, makin Cs to get on the teams. Youll get to High and take the same fuckin shop courses and throw erasers and pull your meat along with the rest of the grunts. Get detentions. Fuckin suspensions. And after awhile all youll care about is gettin a car so you can take some skag to the hops or down to the fuckin Twin Bridges Tavern. Then youll knock her up and spend the rest of your life in the mill or some fuckin shoeshop in Auburn or maybe even up to Hillcrest pluckin chickens. And that pie story will never get written down. Nothinll get written down. Cause youll just be another wiseguy with shit for brains. Chris Chambers was twelve when he said all that to me. But while he was saying it his face crumpled and folded into something older, oldest, ageless. He spoke tonelessly, colorlessly, but nevertheless, what he said struck terror into my bowels. It was as if he had lived that whole life already, that life where they tell you to step right up and spin the Wheel of Fortune, and it spins so pretty and the guy steps on a pedal and it comes up double zeros, house number, everybody loses. They give you a free pass and then they turn on the rain machine, pretty funny, huh, a joke even Vern Tessio could appreciate. He grabbed my naked arm and his fingers closed tight. They dug grooves in my flesh. They ground at the bones. His eyes were hooded and deadso dead, man, that he might have just fallen out of his own coffin. I know what people think of my family in this town. I know what they think of me and what they expect. Nobody even asked me if I took the milkmoney that time. I just got a threeday vacation. Did you take it? I asked. I had never asked him before, and if you had told me I ever would, I would have called you crazy. The words came out in a little dry bullet. Yeah, he said. Yeah, I took it. He was silent for a moment, looking ahead at Teddy and Vern. You knew I took it, Teddy knew. Everybody knew. Even Vern knew, I think. I started to deny it, and then closed my mouth. He was right. No matter what I might have said to my mother and father about how a person was supposed to be innocent until proved guilty, I had known. Then maybe I was sorry and tried to give it back, Chris said. I stared at him, my eyes widening. You tried to give it back? Maybe, I said. Just maybe. And maybe I took it to old lady Simons and told her, and maybe the money was all there but I got a threeday vacation anyway, because the money never showed up. And maybe the next week old lady Simons had this brandnew skirt on when she came to school. I stared at Chris, speechless with horror. He smiled at me, but it was a crimped, terrible smile that never touched his eyes. Just maybe, he said, but I remembered the new skirta light brown paisley, sort of full. I remembered thinking that it made old lady Simons look younger, almost pretty. Chris, how much was that milkmoney? Almost seven bucks. Christ, I whispered. So just say that I stole the milkmoney but then old lady Simons stole it from me. Just suppose I told that story. Me, Chris Chambers. Kid brother of Frank Chambers and Eyeball Chambers. You think anybody would have believed it? No way, I whispered. Jesus Christ! He smiled his wintry, awful smile. And do you think that bitch would have dared try something like that if it had been one of those dootchbags from up on The View that had taken the money? No, I said. Yeah, If it had been one of them, Simons would have said Kay, kay, well forget it this time, but were gonna spank your wrist real hard and if you ever do it again well have to spank both wrists. But me ... well, maybe she had her eye on that skirt for a long time. Anyway, she saw her chance and she took it. I was the stupid one for even trying to give that money back. But I never thought ... I never thought that a teacher... oh, who gives a fuck, anyway? Why am I even talkin about it? He swiped an arm angrily across his eyes and I realized he was almost crying. Chris, I said, why dont you go into the college courses? Youre smart enough. They decide all of that in the office. And in their smart little conferences. The teachers, they sit around in this big circlejerk and all they say is Yeah, Yeah, Right, Right. All they give a fuck about is whether you behaved yourself in grammar school and what the town thinks of your family. All theyre deciding is whether or not youll contaminate all those precious collegecourse dootchbags. But maybe Ill try to work myself up. I dont know if I could do it, but I might try. Because I want to get out of Castle Rock and go to college and never see my old man or any of my brothers again. I want to go someplace where nobody knows me and I dont have any black marks against me before I start. But I dont know if I can do it. Why not? People. People drag you down. Who? I asked, thinking he must mean the teachers, or adult monsters like Miss Simons, who had wanted a new skirt, or maybe his brother Eyeball who hung around with Ace and Billy and Charlie and the rest, or maybe his own mom and dad. But he said Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Dont you know that? He pointed at Vern and Teddy, who were standing and waiting for us to catch up. They were laughing about something; in fact, Vern was just about busting a gut. Your friends do. Theyre like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You cant save them. You can only drown with them. Come on, you fuckin slowpokes! Vern shouted, still laughing. Yeah, comin! Chris called, and before I could say anything else, he began to run. I ran, too, but he caught up to them before I could catch up to him. 18 We went another mile and then decided to camp for the night. There was still some daylight left, but nobody really wanted to use it. We were pooped from the scene at the dump and from our scare on the train trestle, but it was more than that. We were in Harlow now, in the woods. Somewhere up ahead was a dead kid, probably mangled and covered with flies. Maggots, too, by this time. Nobody wanted to get too close to him with the night coming on. I had read somewherein an Algernon Blackwood story, I thinkthat a guys ghost hangs out around his dead body until that body is given a decent Christian burial, and there was no way I wanted to wake up in the night and confront the glowing, disembodied ghost of Ray Brower, moaning and gibbering and floating among the dark and rustling pines. By stopping here we figured there had to be at least ten miles between us and him, and of course all four of us knew there were no such things as ghosts, but ten miles seemed just about far enough in case what everybody knew was wrong. Vern, Chris, and Teddy gathered wood and got a modest little campfire going on a bed of cinders. Chris scraped a bare patch all around the firethe woods were powderdry, and he didnt want to take any chances. While they were doing that I sharpened some sticks and made what my brother Denny used to call Pioneer Drumstickslumps of hamburger pushed onto the ends of green branches. The three of them laughed and bickered over their woodcraft (which was almost nil; there was a Castle Rock Boy Scout troop, but most of the kids who hung around our vacant lot considered it to be an organization made up mostly of pussies), arguing about whether it was better to cook over flames or over coals (a moot point; we were too hungry to wait for coals), whether dried moss would work as kindling, what they would do if they used up all the matches before they got the fire to stay lit. Teddy claimed he could make a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Chris claimed he was so full of shit he squeaked. They didnt have to try; Vern got the small pile of twigs and dry moss to catch from the second match. The day was perfectly still and there was no wind to puff out the light. We all took turns feeding the thin flames until they began to grow stouter on wristchunks of wood fetched from an old deadfall some thirty yards into the forest. When the flames began to die back a little bit, I stuck the sticks holding the Pioneer Drumsticks firmly into the ground at an angle over the fire. We sat around watching them as they shimmered and dripped and finally began to brown. Our stomachs made predinner conversation. Unable to wait until they were really cooked, we each took one of them, stuck it in a roll, and yanked the hot stick out of the center. They were charred outside, raw inside, and totally delicious. We wolfed them down and wiped the grease from our mouths with our bare arms. Chris opened his pack and took out a tin BandAids box (the pistol was way at the bottom of his pack, and because he hadnt told Vern and Teddy, I guessed it was to be our secret). He opened it and gave each of us a battered Winston. We lit them with flaming twigs from the fire and then leaned back, men of the world, watching the cigarette smoke drift away into the soft twilight. None of us inhaled because we might cough and that would mean a day or two of ragging from the others. And it was pleasant enough just to drag and blow, hawking into the fire to hear the sizzle (that was the summer I learned how you can pick out someone who is just learning to smoke if youre new at it you spit a lot). We were feeling good. We smoked the Winstons down to the filters, then tossed them into the fire. Nothin like a smoke after a meal, Teddy said. FuckingA, Vern agreed. Crickets had started to hum in the green gloom. I looked up at the lane of sky visible through the railroad cut and saw that the blue was now bruising toward purple. Seeing that outrider of twilight made me feel sad and calm at the same time, brave but not really brave, comfortably lonely. We tromped down a flat place in the underbrush beside the embankment and laid out our bedrolls. Then, for an hour or so, we fed the fire and talked, the kind of talk you can never quite remember once you get past fifteen and discover girls. We talked about who was the best dragger in Castle Rock, if Boston could maybe stay out of the cellar this year, and about the summer just past. Teddy told about the time he had been at Whites Beach in Brunswick and some kid had hit his head while diving off the float and almost drowned. We discussed at some length the relative merits of the teachers we had had. We agreed that Mr. Brooks was the biggest pussy in Castle Rock Elementaryhe would just about cry if you sassed him back. On the other hand, there was Mrs. Cote (pronounced Cody)she was just about the meanest bitch God had ever set down on the earth. Vern said hed heard she hit a kid so hard two years ago that the kid almost went blind. I looked at Chris, wondering if he would say anything about Miss Simons, but he didnt say anything at all, and he didnt see me looking at himhe was looking at Vem and nodding soberly at Verns story. We didnt talk about Ray Brower as the dark drew down, but I was thinking about him. Theres something horrible and fascinating about the way dark comes to the woods, its coming unsoftened by headlights or streetlights or houselights or neon. It comes with no mothers voices, calling for their kids to leave off and come on in now, to herald it. If youre used to the town, the coming of the dark in the woods seems more like a natural disaster than a natural phenomenon; it rises like the Castle River rises in the spring. And as I thought about the body of Ray Brower in this lightor lack of itwhat I felt was not queasiness or fear that he would suddenly appear before us, a green and gibbering banshee whose purpose was to drive us back the way we had come before we could disturb hisitspeace, but a sudden and unexpected wash of pity that he should be so alone and so defenseless in the dark that was now coming over our side of the earth. If something wanted to eat on him, it would. His mother wasnt here to stop that from happening, and neither was his father, nor Jesus Christ in the company of all the saints. He was dead and he was all alone, flung off the railroad tracks and into the ditch, and I realized that if I didnt stop thinking about it I was going to cry. So I told a Le Dio story, made up on the spot and not very good, and when it ended as most of my Le Dio stories did, with one lone American dogface coughing out a dying declaration of patriotism and love for the girl back home into the sad and wise face of the platoon sergeant, it was not the white, scared face of some pfc from Castle Rock or White River Junction I saw in my minds eye but the face of a much younger boy, already dead, his eyes closed, his features troubled, a rill of blood running from the left comer of his mouth to his jawline. And in back of him, instead of the shattered shops and churches of my Le Dio dreamscape, I saw only dark forest and the cindered railway bed bulking against the starry sky like a prehistoric burial mound. 19 I came awake in the middle of the night, disoriented, wondering why it was so chilly in my bedroom and who had left the windows open. Denny, maybe. I had been dreaming of Denny, something about bodysurfing at Harrison State Park. But it had been four years ago that we had done that. This wasnt my room; this was someplace else. Somebody was holding me in a mighty bearhug, somebody else was pressed against my back, and a shadowy third was crouched beside me, head cocked in a listening attitude. What the fuck? I asked in honest puzzlement. A longdrawnout groan in answer. It sounded like Vern. That brought things into focus, and I remembered where I was ... but what was everybody doing awake in the middle of the night? Or had I only been asleep for seconds? No, that couldnt be, because a thin sliver of moon was floating dead center in an inky sky. Dont let it get me! Vern gibbered. I swear Ill be a good boy, I wont do nothin bad, Ill put the ring up before I take a piss, Ill ... Ill . . . With some astonishment I realized that I was listening to a prayeror at least the Vern Tessio equivalent of a prayer. I sat bolt upright, scared. Chris? Shut up, Vern, Chris said. He was the one crouching and listening. Its nothing. Oh, yes it is, Teddy said ominously. Its something. What is? I asked. I was still sleepy and disoriented, unstrung from my place in space and time. It scared me that I had come in late on whatever had developedtoo late to defend myself properly, maybe. Then, as if to answer my question, a long and hollow scream rose languidly from the woodsit was the sort of scream you might expect from a woman dying in extreme agony and extreme fear. OhdeartoJesus! Vern whimpered, his voice high and filled with tears. He reapplied the bearhug that had awakened me, making it hard for me to breathe and adding to my own terror. I threw him loose with an effort but he scrambled right back beside me like a puppy which cant think of anyplace else to go. Its that Brower kid, Teddy whispered hoarsely. His ghosts out walkin in the woods. Oh God! Vern screamed, apparently not crazy about that idea at all. I promise I wont hawk no more dirty books out of Dahlies Market! I promise I wont give my carrots to the dog no more! I ... I ... I ... He floundered there, wanting to bribe God with everything but unable to think of anything really good in the extremity of his fear. I wont smoke no moreunfiltered cigarettes! I wont say no bad swears! I wont put my Bazooka in the offerin plate! I wont Shut up, Vern, Chris said, and beneath his usual authoritative toughness I could hear the hollow boom of awe. I wondered if his arms and back and belly were as stiff with gooseflesh as my own were, and if the hair on the nape of his neck was trying to stand up in hackles, as mine was. Verns voice dropped to a whisper as he continued to expand the reforms he planned to institute if God would only let him live through this night. Its a bird, isnt it? I asked Chris. No. At least, I dont think so. I think its a wildcat. My dad says they scream bloody murder when theyre getting ready to mate. Sounds like a woman, doesnt it? Yeah, I said. My voice hitched in the middle of the word and two icecubes broke off in the gap. But no woman could scream that loud, Chris said ... and then added helplessly Could she, Gordie? Its his ghost, Teddy whispered again. His eyeglasses reflected the moonlight in weak, somehow dreamy smears. Im gonna go look for it. I dont think he was serious, but we took no chances. When he started to get up, Chris and I hauled him back down. Perhaps we were too rough with him, but our muscles had been turned to cables with fear. Let me up, fuckheads! Teddy hissed, struggling. If I say I wanna go look for it, then Im gonna go look for it! I wanna see it! I wanna see the ghost! I wanna see if The wild, sobbing cry rose into the night again, cutting the air like a knife with a crystal blade, freezing us with our hands on Teddyif hed been a flag, we would have looked like that picture of the Marines claiming Iwo Jima. The scream climbed with a crazy ease through octave after octave, finally reaching a glassy, freezing edge. It hung there for a moment and then whirled back down again, disappearing into an impossible bass register that buzzed like a monstrous honeybee. This was followed by a burst of what sounded like mad laughter ... and then there was silence again. Jesus H Baldheaded Christ, Teddy whispered, and he talked no more of going into the woods to see what was making that screaming noise. All four of us huddled up together and I thought of running. I doubt if I was the only one. If we had been tenting in Verns fieldwhere our folks thought we werewe probably would have run. But Castle Rock was too far, and the thought of trying to run across that trestle in the dark made my blood freeze. Running deeper into Harlow and closer to the corpse of Ray Brower was equally unthinkable. We were stuck. If there was a haant out there in the woods what my dad called a Goosalumand it wanted us, it would probably get us. Chris proposed we keep a guard and everyone was agreeable to that. We flipped for watches and Vem got the first one. I got the last. Vern sat up crosslegged by the husk of the campfire while the rest of us lay down again. We huddled together like sheep. I was positive that sleep would be impossible, but I did sleepa light, uneasy sleep that skimmed through unconsciousness like a sub with its periscope up. My halfsleeping dreams were populated with wild cries that might have been real or might have only been products of my imagination. I sawor thought I sawsomething white and shapeless steal through the trees like a grotesquely ambulatory bedsheet. At last I slipped into something I knew was a dream. Chris and I were swimming at Whites Beach, a gravelpit in Brunswick that had been turned into a miniature lake when the graveldiggers struck water. It was where Teddy had seen the kid hit his head and almost drown. In my dream we were out over our heads, stroking lazily along, with a hot July sun blazing down. From behind us, on the float, came cries and shouts and yells of laughter as kids climbed and dived or climbed and were pushed. I could hear the empty kerosene drums that held the float up clanging and booming togethera sound not unlike that of churchbells, which are so solemn and emptily profound. On the sandandgravel beach, oiled bodies lay face down on blankets, little kids with buckets squatted on the verge of the water or sat happily flipping muck into their hair with plastic shovels, and teenagers clustered in grinning groups, watching the young girls promenade endlessly back and forth in pairs and trios, never alone, the secret places of their bodies wrapped in Jantzen tank suits. People walked up the hot sand on the balls of their feet, wincing, to the snackbar. They came back with chips, Devil Dogs, Red Ball Popsicles. Mrs. Cote drifted past us on an inflatable rubber raft. She was lying on her back, dressed in her typical SeptembertoJune school uniform a gray twopiece suit with a thick sweater instead of a blouse under the jacket, a flower pinned over one almost nonexistent breast, thick support hose the color of Canada Mints on her legs. Her black old ladys highheeled shoes were trailing in the water, making small Vs. Her hair was bluerinsed, like my mothers, and done up in those tight, medicinalsmelling clockspring curls. Her glasses flashed brutally in the sun. Watch your steps, boys, she said. Watch your steps or Ill hit you hard enough to strike you blind. I can do that; I have been given that power by the school board. Now, Mr. Chambers, Mending Wall, if you please. By rote. I tried to give the money back, Chris said. Old lady Simons said okay, but she took it! Do you hear me? She took it! Now what are you going to do about it? Are you going to whack her blind?  Mending Wall, Mr. Chambers, if you please. By rote. Chris threw me a despairing glance, as if to say Didnt I tell you it would be this way?, and then began to tread water. He began  Something there is that doesnt love a wall, that sends the frozengroundswell under it  And then his head went under, his reciting mouth filling with water. He popped back up, crying Help me, Gordie! Help me! Then he was dragged under again. Looking into the clear water I could see two bloated, naked corpses holding his ankles. One was Vern and the other was Teddy, and their open eyes were as blank and pupilless as the eyes of Greek statues. Their small prepubescent penises floated limply up from their distended bellies like albino strands of kelp. Chriss head broke water again. He held one hand up limply to me and voiced a screaming, womanish cry that rose and rose, ululating in the hot sunny summer air. I looked wildly toward the beach but nobody had heard. The lifeguard, his bronzed, athletic body lolling attractively on the seat at the top of his whitewashed cruciform wooden tower, just went on smiling down at a girl in a red bathing suit. Chriss scream turned into a bubbling waterchoked gurgle as the corpses pulled him under again. And as they dragged him down to black water I could see his rippling, distorted eyes turned up to me in a pleading agony; I could see his white starfish hands held helplessly up to the sunburnished roof of the water. But instead of diving down and trying to save him, I stroked madly for the shore, or at least to a place where the water would not be over my head. Before I could get therebefore I could even get closeI felt a soft, rotted, implacable hand wrap itself around my calf and begin to pull. A scream built up in my chest ... but before I could utter it, the dream washed away into a grainy facsimile of reality. It was Teddy with his hand on my leg. He was shaking me awake. It was my watch. Still half in the dream, almost talking in my sleep, I asked him thickly You alive, Teddy? No. Im dead and youre a black nigger, he said crossly. It dispelled the last of the dream. I sat up by the campfire and Teddy lay down. 20 The others slept heavily through the rest of the night. I was in and out, dozing, waking, dozing again. The night was far from silent; I heard the triumphant screechsquawk of a pouncing owl, the tiny cry of some small animal perhaps about to be eaten, a larger something blundering wildly through the undergrowth. Under all of this, a steady tone, were the crickets. There were no more screams. I dozed and woke, woke and dozed, and I suppose if I had been discovered standing such a slipshod watch in Le Dio, I probably would have been courtmartialed and shot. I snapped more solidly out of my last doze and became aware that something was different. It took me a moment or two to figure it out although the moon was down, I could see my hands resting on my jeans. My watch said quarter to five. It was dawn. I stood, hearing my spine crackle, walked two dozen feet away from the limpedtogether bodies of my friends, and pissed into a clump of sumac. I was starting to shake the nightwillies; I could feel them sliding away. It was a fine feeling. I scrambled up the cinders to the railroad tracks and sat on one of the rails, idly chucking cinders between my feet, in no hurry to wake the others. At that precise moment the new day felt too good to share. Morning came on apace. The noise of the crickets began to drop, and the shadows under the trees and bushes evaporated like puddles after a shower. The air had that peculiar lack of taste that presages the latest hot day in a famous series of hot days. Birds that had maybe cowered all night just as we had done now began to twitter selfimportantly. A wren landed on top of the deadfall from which we had taken our firewood, preened itself, and then flew off. I dont know how long I sat there on the rail, watching the purple steal out of the sky as noiselessly as it had stolen in the evening before. Long enough for my butt to start complaining anyway. I was about to get up when I looked to my right and saw a deer standing in the railroad bed not ten yards from me. My heart went up into my throat so high that I think I could have put my hand in my mouth and touched it. My stomach and genitals filled with a hot dry excitement. I didnt move. I couldnt have moved if I had wanted to. Her eyes werent brown but a dark, dusty blackthe kind of velvet you see backgrounding jewelry displays. Her small ears were scuffed suede. She looked serenely at me, head slightly lowered in what I took for curiosity, seeing a kid with his hair in a sleepscarecrow of whirls and manytined cowlicks, wearing jeans with cuffs and a brown khaki shirt with the elbows mended and the collar turned up in the hoody tradition of the day. What I was seeing was some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that was appalling. We looked at each other for a long time ... I think it was a long time. Then she turned and walked off to the other side of the tracks, white bobtail flipping insouciantly. She found grass and began to crop. I couldnt believe it. She had begun to crop. She didnt look back at me and didnt need to; I was frozen solid. Then the rail started to thrum under my ass and bare seconds later the does head came up, cocked back toward Castle Rock. She stood there, her branchblack nose working on the air, coaxing it a little. Then she was gone in three gangling leaps, vanishing into the woods with no sound but one rotted branch, which broke with a sound like a track refs startergun. I sat there, looking mesmerized at the spot where she had been, until the actual sound of the freight came up through the stillness. Then I skidded back down the bank to where the others were sleeping. The freights slow, loud passage woke them up, yawning and scratching. There was some funny, nervous talk about the case of the screaming ghost, as Chris called it, but not as much as you might imagine. In daylight it seemed more foolish than interestingalmost embarrassing. Best forgotten. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell them about the deer, but I ended up not doing it. That was one thing I kept to myself. Ive never spoken or written of it until just now, today. And I have to tell you that it seems a lesser thing written down, damn near inconsequential. But for me it was the best part of that trip, the cleanest part, and it was a moment I found myself returning to, almost helplessly, when there was trouble in my lifemy first day in the bush in Vietnam, and this fellow walked into the clearing where we were with his hand over his nose and when he took his hand away there was no nose there because it had been shot off; the time the doctor told us our youngest son might be hydrocephalic (he turned out just to have an oversized head, thank God); the long, crazy weeks before my mother died. I would find my thoughts turning back to that morning, the scuffed suede of her ears, the white flash of her tail. But eight hundred million Red Chinese dont give a shit, right? The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. Its hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life. 21 The tracks now bent southwest and ran through tangles of secondgrowth 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 thirtyminute option and then begins growling again. We went back to the tracksit was about eight oclock by thenand took five. Our mouths were a dark purple and our naked torsos were scratched from the blackberry brambles. Vem 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 oclock 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 didnt 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 kids bodyI cant 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 ninethirty when Teddy and Chris spotted water up aheadthey 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 largebore 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 damssticks 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 placesthey 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 bonewhite to a height of almost three feet in places. Railroadll clean this shit out pretty soon, Chris said. Why? Vern asked. They cant have a pool here, Chris said. Itd undercut their precious railroad line. Thats why they put that culvert in there to start with. Theyll shoot them some beavers and scare off the rest and then knock out their dam. Then thisll 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, thats for sure. You think its 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. Its 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 thema blackishgrayish 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 breaststroke, turned over, and thrashed back. By then we were all getting undressed. Vern was in next, then me. Hitting the water was fantasticclean 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 others 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 blackishgray lumps, just like the one I had seen on Chriss shoulder. They were slugsbig ones. Chriss 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 Ive had ever since that day in the beaverpool. They carry a local anesthetic and an anticoagulant in their alien saliva, which means that the host never feels a thing when they attach themselves. If you dont happen to see them theyll 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. Vem broke the water and looked at us, puzzled. What the hells wrong with h Leeches! Teddy screamed, pulling two of them off his trembling thighs and throwing them just as far as he could. Dirty motherfuckin 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 littleand 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 blackishgray skin had gone a bruised purplishred. 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 couldnt bring myself to actually touch it. I turned to Chris, tried to speak, couldnt. I pointed instead. His cheeks, already ashy, went whiter still. I cant get it off, I said through numb lips. You ... can you ... But he backed away, shaking his head, his mouth twisted. I cant, Gordie, he said, unable to take his eyes away. Im sorry but I cant. 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. Its 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 didnt 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 merrygoround. 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 trompeddown 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. Its going to be a threeday 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 outoftowner thingssee 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 recallor perhaps it was an actual incidence of timetravel. 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 didnt 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; thats 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, thats all. The most important things are the hardest things to say. 22 We walked further down the tracksI dont know just how farand I was starting to think Well, okay, Im going to be able to handle it, its all over anyway, just a bunch of leeches, what the fuck; I was still thinking it when waves of whiteness suddenly began to come over my sight and I fell down. I must have fallen hard, but landing on the crossties was like plunging into a warm and puffy feather bed. Someone turned me over. The touch of hands was faint and unimportant. Their faces were disembodied balloons looking down at me from miles up. They looked the way the refs face must look to a fighter who has been punched silly and is currently taking a tensecond rest on the canvas. Their words came in gentle oscillations, fading in and out. . . . him? . . . be all . . . . . . if you think the sun ... Gordie, are you ... Then I must have said something that didnt make much sense because they began to look really worried. We better take him back, man, Teddy said, and then the whiteness came over everything again. When it cleared, I seemed to be all right. Chris was squatting next to me, saying Can you hear me, Gordie? You there, man? Yes, I said, and sat up. A swarm of black dots exploded in front of my eyes, and then went away. I waited to see if theyd come back, and when they didnt, I stood up. You scared the cheesly old shit outta me, Gordie, he said. You want a drink of water? Yeah. He gave me his canteen, halffull of water, and I let three warm gulps roll down my throat. Whyd you faint, Gordie? Vern asked anxiously. Made a bad mistake and looked at your face, I said. Eeeeeeeeeee! Teddy cackled. Fuckin Gordie! You wet! You really okay? Vern persisted. Yeah. Sure. It was ... bad there for a minute. Thinking about those suckers. They nodded soberly. We took five in the shade and then went on walking, me and Vern on one side of the tracks again, Chris and Teddy on the other. We figured we must be getting close. 23 We werent as close as we thought, and if wed had the brains to spend two minutes looking at a roadmap, we would have seen why. We knew that Ray Browers corpse had to be near the Back Harlow Road, which deadends on the bank of the Royal River. Another trestle carries the GSWM tracks across the Royal. So this is the way we figured Once we got close to the Royal, wed be getting close to the Back Harlow Road, where Billy and Charlie had been parked when they saw the boy. And since the Royal was only ten miles from the Castle River, we figured we had it made in the shade. But that was ten miles as the crow flies, and the tracks didnt move on a straight line between the Castle and the Royal. Instead, they made a very shallow loop to avoid a hilly, crumbling region called The Bluffs. Anyway, we could have seen that loop quite clearly if we had looked on a map, and figured out that, instead of ten miles, we had about sixteen to walk. Chris began to suspect the truth when noon had come and gone and the Royal still wasnt in sight. We stopped while he climbed a high pine tree and took a look around. He came down and gave us a simple enough report it was going to be at least four in the afternoon before we got to the Royal, and we would only make it by then if we humped right along. Ah, shit! Teddy cried. So whatre we gonna do now? We looked into each others tired, sweaty faces. We were hungry and out of temper. The big adventure had turned into a long slogdirty and sometimes scary. We would have been missed back home by now, too, and if Milo Pressman hadnt already called the cops on us, the engineer of the train crossing the trestle might have done it. We had been planning to hitchhike back to Castle Rock, but four oclock was just three hours from dark, and nobody gives four kids on a back country road a lift after dark. I tried to summon up the cool image of my deer, cropping at green morning grass, but even that seemed dusty and no good, no better than a stuffed trophy over the mantel in some guys hunting lodge, the eyes sprayed to give them that phony lifelike shine. Finally Chris said Its still closer out going ahead. Lets go. He turned and started to walk along the tracks in his dusty sneakers, head down, his shadow only a puddle at his feet. After a minute or so the rest of us followed him, strung out in Indian file. 24 In the years between then and the writing of this memoir, Ive thought remarkably little about those two days in September, at least consciously. The associations the memories bring to the surface are as unpleasant as weekold rivercorpses brought to the surface by cannonfire. As a result, I never really questioned our decision to walk down the tracks. Put another way, Ive wondered sometimes about what we had decided to do but never how we did it. But now a much simpler scenario comes to mind. Im confident that if the idea had come up it would have been shot downwalking down the tracks would have seemed neater, bosser, as we said then. But if the idea had come up and hadnt been shot down in flames, none of the things which occurred later would have happened. Maybe Chris and Teddy and Vern would even be alive today. No, they didnt die in the woods or on the railroad tracks; nobody dies in this story except some bloodsuckers and Ray Brower, and if you want to be completely fair about it, he was dead before it even started. But it is true that, of the four of us who flipped coins to see who would go down to the Florida Market to get supplies, only the one who actually went is still alive. The Ancient Mariner at thirtyfour, with you, Gentle Reader, in the role of Wedding Guest (at this point shouldnt you flip to the jacket photo to see if my eye holdeth you in its spell?). If you sense a certain flipness on my part, youre rightbut maybe I have cause. At an age when all four of us would be considered too young and immature to be President, three of us are dead. And if small events really do echo up larger and larger through time, yes, maybe if we had done the simple thing and simply hitched into Harlow, they would still be alive today. We could have hooked a ride all the way up Route 7 to the Shiloh Church, which stood at the intersection of the highway and the Back Harlow Road (at least until 1967, when it was levelled by a fire attributed to a tramps smouldering cigarette butt). With reasonable luck we could have gotten to where the body was by sundown of the previous day. But the idea wouldnt have lived. It wouldnt have been shot down with tightly buttressed arguments and debating society rhetoric, but with grunts and scowls and farts and raised middle fingers. The verbal part of the discussion would have been carried forward with such trenchant and sparkling contributions as Fuck no, That sucks, and that old reliable standby, Did your mother ever have any kids that lived? Unspokenmaybe it was too fundamental to be spokenwas the idea that this was a big thing. It wasnt screwing around with firecrackers or trying to look through the knothole in the back of the girls privy at Harrison State Park. This was something on a par with getting laid for the first time, or going into the Army, or buying your first bottle of legal liquorjust bopping into that state store, if you can dig it, selecting a bottle of good Scotch, showing the clerk your draftcard and drivers license, then walking out with a grin on your face and that brown bag in your hand, member of a club with just a few more rights and privileges than our old treehouse with the tin roof. Theres a high ritual to all fundamental events, the rites of passage, the magic corridor where the change happens. Buying the condoms. Standing before the minister. Raising your hand and taking the oath. Or, if you please, walking down the railroad tracks to meet a fellow your own age halfway, the same as Id walk halfway over to Pine Street to meet Chris if he was coming over to my house, or the way Teddy would walk halfway down Gates Street to meet me if I was going to his. It seemed right to do it this way, because the rite of passage is a magic corridor and so we always provide an aisleits what you walk down when you get married, what they carry you down when you get buried. Our corridor was those twin rails, and we walked between them, just hopping along toward whatever this was supposed to mean. You dont hitchhike your way to a thing like that, maybe. And maybe we thought it was also right that it should have turned out to be harder than we had expected. Events surrounding our hike had turned it into what we had suspected it was all along serious business. What we didnt know as we walked around The Bluffs was that Billy Tessio, Charlie Hogan, Jack Mudgett, Norman Fuzzy Bracowicz, Vince Desjardins, Chriss older brother Eyeball, and Ace Merrill himself were all on their way to take a look at the body themselvesin a weird kind of way, Ray Brower had become famous, and our secret had turned into a regular roadshow. They were piling into Aces chopped and channelled 52 Ford and Vinces pink 54 Studebaker even as we started on the last leg of our trip. Billy and Charlie had managed to keep their enormous secret for just about thirtysix hours. Then Charlie spilled it to Ace while they were shooting pool, and Billy had spilled it to Jack Mudgett while they were fishing for steelies from the Boom Road Bridge. Both Ace and Jack had sworn solemnly on their mothers names to keep the secret, and that was how everybody in their gang knew about it by noon. Guess you could tell what those assholes thought about their mothers. They all congregated down at the pool hall, and Fuzzy Bracowicz advanced a theory (which you have heard before, Gentle Reader) that they could all become heroesnot to mention instant radio and TV personalitiesby discovering the body. All they had to do, Fuzzy maintained, was to take two cars with a lot of fishing gear in the trunks. After they found the body, their story would be a hundred per cent. We was just plannin to take a few pickerel out of the Royal River, officer. Hehhehheh. Look what we found. They were burning up the road from Castle Rock to the Back Harlow area just as we started to finally get close. 25 Clouds began to build in the sky around two oclock, but at first none of us took them seriously. It hadnt rained since the early days of July, so why should it rain now? But they kept building to the south of us, up and up and up, thunderheads in great pillars as purple as bruises, and they began to move slowly our way. I looked at them closely, checking for that membrane beneath that means its already raining twenty miles away, or fifty. But there was no rain yet. The clouds were still just building. Vern got a blister on his heel and we stopped and rested while he packed the back of his left sneaker with moss stripped from the bark of an old oak tree. Is it gonna rain, Gordie? Teddy asked. I think so. Pisser! he said, and sighed. The pisser good end to a pisser good day. I laughed and he tipped me a wink. We started to walk again, a little more slowly now out of respect for Verns hurt foot. And in the hour between two and three, the quality of the days light began to change, and we knew for sure that rain was coming. It was just as hot as ever, and even more humid, but we knew. And the birds did. They seemed to appear from nowhere and swoop across the sky, chattering and crying shrilly to each other. And the light. From a steady, beating brightness it seemed to evolve into something filtered, almost pearly. Our shadows, which had begun to grow long again, also grew fuzzy and illdefined. The sun had begun to sail in and out through the thickening decks of clouds, and the southern sky had gone a coppery shade. We watched the thunderheads lumber closer, fascinated by their size and their mute threat. Every now and then it seemed that a giant flashbulb had gone off inside one of them, turning their purplish, bruised color momentarily to a light gray. I saw a jagged fork of lightning lick down from the underside of the closest. It was bright enough to print a blue tattoo on my retinas. It was followed by a long, shaking blast of thunder. We did a little bitching about how we were going to get caught out in the rain, but only because it was the expected thingof course we were all looking forward to it. It would be cold and refreshing ... and leechfree. At a little past threethirty, we saw running water through a break in the trees. Thats it! Chris yelled jubilantly. Thats the Royal! We began to walk faster, taking our second wind. The storm was getting close now. The air began to stir, and it seemed that the temperature dropped ten degrees in a space of seconds. I looked down and saw that my shadow had disappeared entirely. We were walking in pairs again, each two watching a side of the railroad embankment. My mouth was dry, throbbing with a sickish tension. The sun sailed behind another cloudbank and this time it didnt come back out. For a moment the banks edges were embroidered with gold, like a cloud in an Old Testament Bible illustration, and then the winecolored, dragging belly of the thunderhead blotted out all traces of the sun. The day became gloomythe clouds were rapidly eating up the last of the blue. We could smell the river so clearly that we might have been horsesor perhaps it was the smell of rain impending in the air as well. There was an ocean above us, held in by a thin sac that might rupture and let down a flood at any second. I kept trying to look into the underbrush, but my eyes were continually drawn back to that turbulent, racing sky; in its deepening colors you could read whatever doom you liked water, fire, wind, hail. The cool breeze became more insistent, hissing in the firs. A sudden impossible bolt of lightning flashed down, seemingly from directly overhead, making me cry out and clap my hands to my eyes. God had taken my picture, a little kid with his shirt tied around his waist, duckbumps on his bare chest and cinders on his cheeks. I heard the rending fall of some big tree not sixty yards away. The crack of thunder which followed made me cringe. I wanted to be at home reading a good book in a safe place ... like down in the potato celler. Jeezis! Vern screamed in a high, fainting voice. Oh my Jeezis Chrise, lookit that! I looked in the direction Vern was pointing and saw a bluewhite fireball bowling its way up the lefthand rail of the GSWM tracks, crackling and hissing for all the world like a scalded cat. It hurried past us as we turned to watch it go, dumbfounded, aware for the first time that such things could exist. Twenty feet beyond us it made a suddenpop!!and just disappeared, leaving a greasy smell of ozone behind. What am I doin here, anyway? Teddy muttered. What a pisser! Chris exclaimed happily, his face upturned. This is gonna be a pisser like you wouldnt believe! But I was with Teddy. Looking up at that sky gave me a dismaying sense of vertigo. It was more like looking into some deeply mysterious marbled gorge. Another lightningbolt crashed down, making us duck. This time the ozone smell was hotter, more urgent. The following clap of thunder came with no perceptible pause at all. My ears were still ringing from it when Vern began to screech triumphantly THERE! THERE HE IS! RIGHT THERE! I SEE HIM! I can see Vern right this minute, if I want toall I have to do is sit back for a minute and close my eyes. Hes standing there on the lefthand rail like an explorer on the prow of his ship, one hand shielding his eyes from the silver stroke of lightning that has just come down, the other extended and pointing. We ran up beside him and looked. I was thinking to myself Verns imagination just ran away with him, thats all. The suckers, the heat, now this storm... his eyes are dealing wild cards, thats all. But that wasnt what it was, although there was a split second when I wanted it to be. In that split second I knew I never wanted to see a corpse, not even a runover woodchuck. In the place where we were standing, early spring rains had washed part of the embankment away, leaving a gravelly, uncertain fourfoot dropoff. The railroad maintenance crews had either not yet gotten around to it in their yellow dieseloperated repair carts, or it had happened so recently it hadnt yet been reported. At the bottom of this washout was a marshy, mucky tangle of undergrowth that smelled bad. And sticking out of a wild clockspring of blackberry brambles was a single pale white hand. Did any of us breathe? I didnt. The breeze was now a windharsh and jerky, coming at us from no particular direction, jumping and whirling, slapping at our sweaty skins and open pores. I hardly noticed. I think part of my mind was waiting for Teddy to cry out Paratroops over the side!, and I thought if he did that I might just go crazy. It would have been better to see the whole body, all at once, but instead there was only that limp outstretched hand, horribly white, the fingers limply splayed, like the hand of a drowned boy. It told us the truth of the whole matter. It explained every graveyard in the world. The image of that hand came back to me every time I heard or read of an atrocity. Somewhere, attached to that hand, was the rest of Ray Brower. Lightning flickered and stroked. Thunder ripped in behind each stroke as if a drag race had started over our heads. Sheeeee ... Chris said, the sound not quite a cuss word, not quite the country version of shit as it is pronounced around a slender stem of timothy grass when the baler breaks downinstead it was a long, tuneless syllable without meaning; a sigh that had just happened to pass through the vocal cords. Vern was licking his lips in a compulsive sort of way, as if he had tasted some obscure new delicacy, a Howard Johnsons 29th flavor, Tibetan Sausage Rolls, Interstellar Escargot, something so weird that it excited and revolted him at the same time. Teddy only stood and looked. The wind whipped his greasy, clotted hair first away from his ears and then back over them. His face was a total blank. I could tell you I saw something there, and perhaps I did, in hindsight ... but not then. There were black ants trundling back and forth across the hand. A great whispering noise began to rise in the woods on either side of the tracks, as if the forest had just noticed we were there and was commenting on it. The rain had started. Dimesized drops fell on my head and arms. They struck the embankment, turning the fill dark for a momentand then the color changed back again as the greedy dry ground sucked the moisture up. Those big drops fell for maybe five seconds and then they stopped. I looked at Chris and he blinked back at me. Then the storm came all at once, as if a shower chain had been pulled in the sky. The whispering sound changed to loud contention. It was as if we were being rebuked for our discovery, and it was frightening. Nobody tells you about the pathetic fallacy until youre in college ... and even then I noticed that nobody but the total dorks completely believed it was a fallacy. Chris jumped over the side of the washout, his hair already soaked and clinging to his head. I followed. Vern and Teddy came close behind, but Chris and I were first to reach the body of Ray Brower. He was face down. Chris looked into my eyes, his face set and sternan adults face. I nodded slightly, as if he had spoken aloud. I think he was down here and relatively intact instead of up there between the rails and completely mangled because he was trying to get out of the way when the train hit him, knocking him head over heels. He had landed with his head pointed toward the tracks, arms over his head like a diver about to execute. He had landed in this boggy cup of land that was becoming a small swamp. His hair was a dark reddish color. The moisture in the air had made it curl slightly at the ends. There was blood in it, but not a great deal, not a grossout amount. The ants were grosser. He was wearing a solid color dark green teeshirt and bluejeans. His feet were bare, and a few feet behind him, caught in tall blackberry brambles, I saw a pair of filthy lowtopped Keds. For a moment I was puzzledwhy was he here and his tennies there? Then I realized, and the realization was like a dirty punch below the belt. My wife, my kids, my friendsthey all think that having an imagination like mine must be quite nice; aside from making all this dough, I can have a little mindmovie whenever things get dull. Mostly theyre right. But every now and then it turns around and bites the shit out of you with these long teeth, teeth that have been filed to points like the teeth of a cannibal. You see things youd just as soon not see, things that keep you awake until first light. I saw one of those things now, saw it with absolute clarity and certainty. He had been knocked spang out of his Keds. The train had knocked him out of his Keds just as it had knocked the life out of his body. That finally rammed it all the way home for me. The kid was dead. The kid wasnt sick, the kid wasnt sleeping. The kid wasnt going to get up in the morning anymore or get the runs from eating too many apples or catch poison ivy or wear out the eraser on the end of his Ticonderoga No. 2 during a hard math test. The kid was dead; stone dead. The kid was never going to go out bottling with his friends in the spring, gunnysack over his shoulder to pick up the returnables the retreating snow uncovered. The kid wasnt going to wake up at two oclock A.M. on the morning of November 1st this year, run to the bathroom, and vomit up a big glurt of cheap Holloween candy. The kid wasnt going to pull a single girls braid in home room. The kid wasnt going to give a bloody nose, or get one. The kid was cant, dont, wont, never, shouldnt, wouldnt, couldnt. He was the side of the battery where the terminal says NEG. The fuse you have to put a penny in. The wastebasket by the teachers desk, which always smells of woodshavings from the sharpener and dead orange peels from lunch. The haunted house outside of town where the windows are crashed out, the NO TRESPASSING signs whipped away across the fields, the attic full of bats, the cellar full of rats. The kid was dead, mister, maam, young sir, little miss. I could go on all day and never get it right about the distance between his bare feet on the ground and his dirty Keds hanging in the bushes. It was thirtyplus inches, it was a googol of lightyears. The kid was disconnected from his Keds beyond all hope of reconciliation. He was dead. We turned him face up into the pouring rain, the lightning, the steady crack of thunder. There were ants and bugs all over his face and neck. They ran briskly in and out of the round collar of his teeshirt. His eyes were open, but terrifyingly out of syncone was rolled back so far that we could see only a tiny arc of iris; the other stared straight up into the storm. There was a dried froth of blood above his mouth and on his chinfrom a bloody nose, I thoughtand the right side of his face was lacerated and darkly bruised. Still, I thought, he didnt really look bad.


I had once walked into a door my brother Dennis was shoving open, came off with bruises even worse than this kids, plus the bloody nose, and still had two helpings of everything for supper after it happened. Teddy and Vern stood behind us, and if there had been any sight at all left in that one upwardstaring eye, I suppose we would have looked to Ray Brower like pallbearers in a horror movie. A beetle came out of his mouth, trekked across his fuzzless cheek, stepped onto a nettle, and was gone. Djoo see that? Teddy asked in a high, strange, fainting voice. I bet hes fuckin fulla bugs! I bet his brainsre Shut up, Teddy, Chris said, and Teddy did, looking relieved. Lightning forked blue across the sky, making the boys single eye light up. You could almost believe he was glad to be found, and found by boys his own age. His torso had swelled up and there was a faint gassy odor about him, like the smell of old farts. I turned away, sure I was going to be sick, but my stomach was dry, hard, steady. I suddenly rammed two fingers down my throat, trying to make myself heave, needing to do it, as if I could sick it up and get rid of it. But my stomach only hitched a little and then was steady again. The roaring downpour and the accompanying thunder had completely covered the sound of cars approaching along the Back Harlow Road, which lay bare yards beyond this boggy tangle. It likewise covered the cracklecrunch of the underbrush as they blundered through it from the dead end where they had parked. And the first we knew of them was Ace Merrills voice raised above the tumult of the storm, saying Well what the fuck do you know about this? 26 We all jumped like we had been goosed and Vern cried outhe admitted later that he thought, for just a second, that the voice had come from the dead boy. On the far side of the boggy patch, where the woods took up again, masking the butt end of the road, Ace Merrill and Eyeball Chambers stood together, halfobscured by a pouring gray curtain of rain. They were both wearing red nylon high school jackets, the kind you can buy in the office if youre a regular student, the same kind they give away free to varsity sports players. Their d.a. haircuts had been plastered back against their skulls and a mixture of rainwater and Vitalis ran down their cheeks like ersatz tears. Sumbitch! Eyeball said. Thats my little brother! Chris was staring at Eyeball with his mouth open. His shirt, wet, limp, and dark, was still tied around his skinny middle. His pack, stained a darker green by the rain, was hanging against his naked shoulderblades. You get away, Rich, he said in a trembling voice. We found him. We got dibs. Fuck your dibs. Were gonna report im. No youre not, I said. I was suddenly furious with them, turning up this way at the last minute. If wed thought about it, wed have known something like this was going to happen ... but this was one time, somehow, that the older, bigger kids werent going to steal itto take something they wanted as if by divine right, as if their easy way was the right way, the only way. They had come in carsI think that was what made me angriest. They had come in cars. Theres four of us, Eyeball. You just try. Oh, well try, dont worry, Eyeball said, and the trees shook behind him and Ace. Charlie Hogan and Verns brother Billy stepped through them, cursing and wiping water out of their eyes. I felt a lead ball drop into my belly. It grew bigger as Jack Mudgett, Fuzzy Bracowicz and Vince Desjardins stepped out behind Charlie and Billy. Here we all are, Ace said, grinning. So you just VERN!! Billy Tessio cried in a terrible, accusing, myjudgmentcomethandthatrightearly voice. He made a pair of dripping fists. You little sonofawhore! You was under the porch! Cockknocker! Vem flinched. Charlie Hogan waxed positively lyrical You little keyholepeeping cuntlicking bungwipe! I ought to beat the living shit out of you! Yeah? Well, try it! Teddy brayed suddenly. His eyes were crazily alight behind his rainspotted glasses. Come on, fightcha for im! Come on! Come on, big men! Billy and Charlie didnt need a second invitation. They started forward together and Vern flinched againno doubt visualizing the ghosts of Beatings Past and Beatings Yet to Come. He flinched ... but hung tough. He was with his friends, and we had been through a lot, and we hadnt got here in a couple of cars. But Ace held Billy and Charlie back, simply by touching each of them on the shoulder. Now listen, you guys, Ace said. He spoke patiently, just as if we werent all standing in a roaring rainstorm. Theres more of us than there are of you. Were bigger. Well give you one chance to just blow away. I dont give a fuck where. Just make like a tree and leave. Chriss brother giggled and Fuzzy clapped Ace on the back in appreciation of his great wit. The Sid Caesar of the j.d. set. Cause were takin him. Ace smiled gently, and you could imagine him smiling that same gentle smile just before breaking his cue over the head of some uneducated punk who had made the terrible mistake of lipping off while Ace was lining up a shot. If you go, well take him. If you stay, well beat the piss outta you and still take him. Besides, he added, trying to gild the thuggery with a little righteousness, Charlie and Billy found him, so its their dibs anyway. They was chicken! Teddy shot back. Vern told us about it! They was fuckin chicken right outta their fuckin minds! He screwed his face up into a terrified, snivelling parody of Charlie Hogan.  I wish we never boosted that car! I wish we never went out on no Back Harlow Road to whack off a piece! Oh, Billee, what are we gonna do? Oh Billee, I think I just turned my Fruit of the Looms into a fudge factory! Oh Billee  Thats it, Charlie said, starting forward again. His face was knotted with rage and sullen embarrassment. Kid, whatever your name is, get ready to reach down your fuckin throat the next time you need to pick your nose. I looked wildly down at Ray Brower. He stared calmly up into the rain with his one eye, below us but above it all. The thunder was still booming steadily, but the rain had begun to slack off. What do you say, Gordie? Ace asked. He was holding Charlie lightly by the arm, the way an accomplished trainer would restrain a vicious dog. You must have at least some of your brothers sense. Tell these guys to back off. Ill let Charlie beat up the foureyes el punko a little bit and then we all go about our business. What do you say? He was wrong to mention Denny. I had wanted to reason with him, to point out what Ace knew perfectly well, that we had every right to take Billy and Charlies dibs since Vern had heard them giving said dibs away. I wanted to tell him how Vern and I had almost gotten run down by a freight train on the trestle which spans the Castle River. About Milo Pressman and his fearlessif stupidsidekick, Chopper the WonderDog. About the bloodsuckers, too. I guess all I really wanted to tell him was Come on, Ace, fair is fair. You know that. But he had to bring Denny into it, and what I heard coming out of my mouth instead of sweet reason was my own deathwarrant Suck my fat one, you cheap dimestore hood. Aces mouth formed a perfect O of surprisethe expression was so unexpectedly prissy that under other circumstances it would have been a laff riot, so to speak. All of the otherson both sides of the bogstared at me, dumbfounded. Then Teddy screamed gleefully Thats telling im, Gordie! Oh boy! Too cool! I stood numbly, unable to believe it. It was like some crazed understudy had shot onstage at the critical moment and declaimed lines that werent even in the play. Telling a guy to suck was as bad as you could get without resorting to his mother. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Chris had unshouldered his knapsack and was digging into it frantically, but I didnt get itnot then, anyway. Okay, Ace said softly. Lets take em. Dont hurt nobody but the Lachance kid. Im gonna break both his fuckin arms. I went dead cold. I didnt piss myself the way I had on the railroad trestle, but it must have been because I had nothing inside to let out. He meant it, you see; the years between then and now have changed my mind about a lot of things, but not about that. When Ace said he was going to break both of my arms, he absolutely meant it. They started to walk toward us through the slackening rain. Jackie Mudgett took a switchknife out of his pocket and hit the chrome. Six inches of steel flicked out, dovegray in the afternoon halflight. Vern and Teddy dropped suddenly into fighting crouches on either side of me. Teddy did so eagerly, Vern with a desperate, cornered grimace on his face. The big kids advanced in a line, their feet splashing through the bog, which was now one big sludgy puddle because of the storm. The body of Ray Brower lay at our feet like a waterlogged barrel. I got ready to fight ... and that was when Chris fired the pistol he had hawked out of his old mans dresser. KABLAM! God, what a wonderful sound that was! Charlie Hogan jumped right up into the air. Ace Merrill, who had been staring straight at me, now jerked around and looked at Chris. His mouth made that O again. Eyeball looked absolutely astounded. Hey, Chris, thats Daddys, he said. Youre gonna get the tar whaled out of you Thats nothing to what youll get, Chris said. His face was horribly pale, and all the life in him seemed to have been sucked upward, into his eyes. They blazed out of his face. Gordie was right, youre nothing but a bunch of cheap hoods. Charlie and Billy didnt want their fuckin dibs and you all know it. We wouldnt have walked way to fuck out here if they said they did. They just went someplace and puked the story up and let Ace Merrill do their thinkin for them. His voice rose to a scream. But you aint gonna get him, do you hear me? Now listen, Ace said. You better put that down before you take your foot off with it. You aint got the sack to shoot a woodchuck. He began to walk forward again, smiling his gentle smile as he came. Youre just a sawedoff pintsized pissyassed little runt and Im gonna make you eat that fuckin gun. Ace, if you dont stand still Im going to shoot you. I swear to God. Youll go to jayyail, Ace crooned, not even hesitating. He was still smiling. The others watched him with horrified fascination ... much the same way as Teddy and Vern and I were looking at Chris. Ace Merrill was the hardest case for miles around and I didnt think Chris could bluff him down. And what did that leave? Ace didnt think a twelveyearold punk would actually shoot him. I thought he was wrong; I thought Chris would shoot Ace before he let Ace take his fathers pistol away from him. In those few seconds I was sure there was going to be bad trouble, the worst Id ever known. Killing trouble, maybe. And all of it over who got dibs on a dead body. Chris said softly, with great regret Where do you want it, Ace? Arm or leg? I cant pick. You pick for me. And Ace stopped. 27 His face sagged, and I saw sudden terror on it. It was Chriss tone rather than his actual words, I think; the real regret that things were going to go from bad to worse. If it was a bluff, its still the best Ive ever seen. The other big kids were totally convinced; their faces were squinched up as if someone had just touched a match to a cherrybomb with a short fuse. Ace slowly got control of himself. The muscles in his face tightened again, his lips pressed together, and he looked at Chris the way youd look at a man who has made a serious business propositionto merge with your company, or handle your line of credit, or shoot your balls off. It was a waiting, almost curious expression, one that made you know that the terror was either gone or tightly lidded. Ace had recomputed the odds on not getting shot and had decided that they werent as much in his favor as he had thought. But he was still dangerousmaybe more than before. Since then Ive thought it was the rawest piece of brinkmanship Ive ever seen. Neither of them was bluffing, they both meant business. All right, Ace said softly, speaking to Chris. But I know how youre going to come out of this, motherfuck. No you dont, Chris said. You little prick! Eyeball said loudly. Youre gonna wind up in traction for this! Bite my bag, Chris told him. With an inarticulate sound of rage Eyeball started forward and Chris put a bullet into the water about ten feet in front of him. It kicked up a splash. Eyeball jumped back, cursing. Okay, now what? Ace asked. Now you guys get into your cars and bomb on back to Castle Rock. After that I dont care. But you aint getting him. He touched Ray Brower lightly, almost reverently, with the toe of one sopping sneaker. You dig me? But well get you, Ace said. He was starting to smile again. Dont you know that? You might. You might not. Well get you hard, Ace said, smiling. Well hurt you. I cant believe you dont know that. Well put you all in the fuckin hospital with fuckin ruptures. Sincerely. Oh, why dont you go home and fuck your mother some more? I hear she loves the way you do it. Aces smile froze. Ill kill you for that. Nobody ranks my mother. I heard your mother fucks for bucks, Chris informed him, and as Ace began to pale, as his complexion began to approach Chriss own ghastly whiteness, he added In fact, I heard she throws blowjobs for jukebox nickels. I heard Then the storm came back, viciously, all at once. Only this time it was hail instead of rain. Instead of whispering or talking, the woods now seemed alive with hokey Bmovie jungle drumsit was the sound of big icy hailstones honking off treetrunks. Stinging pebbles began to hit my shouldersit felt as if some sentient, malevolent force were throwing them. Worse than that, they began to strike Ray Browers upturned face with an awful splatting sound that reminded us of him again, of his terrible and unending patience. Vern caved in first, with a wailing scream. He fled up the embankment in huge, gangling strides. Teddy held out a minute longer, then ran after Vern, his hands held up over his head. On their side, Vince Desjardins floundered back under some nearby trees and Fuzzy Bracowicz joined him. But the others stood pat, and Ace began to grin again. Stick with me, Gordie, Chris said in a low, shaky voice. Stick with me, man. Im right here. Go on, now, Chris said to Ace, and he was able, by some magic, to get the shakiness out of his voice. He sounded as if he were instructing a stupid infant. Well get you, Ace said. Were not going to forget it, if thats what youre thinking. This is big time, baby. Thats fine. You just go on and do your getting another day. Well fuckin ambush you, Chambers. Well Get out! Chris screamed, and levelled the gun. Ace stepped back. He looked at Chris a moment longer, nodded, then turned around. Come on, he said to the others. He looked back over his shoulder at Chris and me once more. Be seeing you. They went back into the screen of trees between the bog and the road. Chris and I stood perfectly still in spite of the hail that was welting us, reddening our skins, and piling up all around us like summer snow. We stood and listened and above the crazy calypso sound of the hail hitting the treetrunks we heard two cars start up. Stay right here, Chris told me, and he started across the bog. Chris! I said, panicky. I got to. Stay here. It seemed he was gone a very long time. I became convinced that either Ace or Eyeball had lurked behind and grabbed him. I stood my ground with nobody but Ray Brower for company and waited for somebodyanybodyto come back. After a while, Chris did. We did it, he said. Theyre gone. You sure? Yeah. Both cars. He held his hands up over his head, locked together with the gun between them, and shook the double fist in a wry championship gesture. Then he dropped them and smiled at me. I think it was the saddest scaredest smile I ever saw.  Suck my fat onewhoever told you you had a fat one, Lachance? Biggest one in four counties, I said. I was shaking all over. We looked at each other warmly for a second, and then, maybe embarrassed by what we were seeing, looked down together. A nasty thrill of fear shot through me, and the sudden splashsplash as Chris shifted his feet let me know that he had seen, too. Ray Browers eyes had gone wide and white, starey and pupilless, like the eyes that look out at you from Grecian statuary. It only took a second to understand what had happened, but understanding didnt lessen the horror. His eyes had filled up with round white hailstones. Now they were melting and the water ran down his cheeks as if he were weeping for his own grotesque positiona tatty prize to be fought over by two bunches of stupid hick kids. His clothes were also white with hail. He seemed to be lying in his own shroud. Oh, Gordie, hey, Chris said shakily. Sayhey, man. What a creepshow for him. I dont think he knows Maybe that was his ghost we heard. Maybe he knew this was gonna happen. What a fuckin creepshow, Im sincere. Branches crackled behind us. I whirled, sure they had flanked us, but Chris went back to contemplating the body after one short, almost casual glance. It was Vern and Teddy, their jeans soaked black and plastered to their legs, both of them grinning like dogs that have been sucking eggs. What are we gonna do, man? Chris asked, and I felt a weird chill steal through me. Maybe he was talking to me, maybe he was ... but he was still looking down at the body. Were gonna take him back, aint we? Teddy asked, puzzled. Were gonna be heroes. Aint that right? He looked from Chris to me and back to Chris again. Chris looked up as if startled out of a dream. His lip curled. He took big steps toward Teddy, planted both hands on Teddys chest, and pushed him roughly backwards. Teddy stumbled, pinwheeled his arms for balance, then sat down with a soggy splash. He blinked up at Chris like a surprised muskrat. Vern was looking warily at Chris, as if he feared madness. Perhaps that wasnt far from the mark. You keep your trap shut, Chris said to Teddy. Paratroops over the side my ass. You lousy rubber chicken. It was the hail! Teddy cried out, angry and ashamed. It wasnt those guys, Chris! Im ascared of storms! I cant help it! I would have taken all of em on at once, I swear on my mothers name! But Im ascared of storms! Shit! I cant help it! He began to cry again, sitting there in the water. What about you? Chris asked, turning to Vern. Are you scared of storms, too? Vern shook his head vacuously, still astounded by Chriss rage. Hey, man, I thought we was all runnin. You must be a mindreader then, because you ran first. Vern swallowed twice and said nothing. Chris stared at him, his eyes sullen and wild. Then he turned to me. Going to build him a litter, Gordie. If you say so, Chris. Sure! Like in Scouts. His voice had begun to climb into strange, reedy levels. Just like in the fuckin Scouts. A litterpoles and shirts. Like in the handbook. Right, Gordie? Yeah. If you want. But what if those guys Fuck those guys! he screamed. Youre all a bunch of chickens! Fuck off, creeps! Chris, they could call the Constable. To get back at us. Hes ours and were gonna take him OUT! Those guys would say anything to get us in dutch, I told him. My words sounded thin, stupid, sick with the flu. Say anything and then lie each other up. You know how people can get other people in trouble telling lies, man. Like with the milkmo I DONT CARE! he screamed, and lunged at me with his fists up. But one of his feet struck Ray Browers ribcage with a soggy thump, making the body rock. He tripped and fell fulllength and I waited for him to get up and maybe punch me in the mouth but instead he lay where he had fallen, head pointing toward the embankment, arms stretched out over his head like a diver about to execute, in the exact posture Ray Brower had been in when we found him. I looked wildly at Chriss feet to make sure his sneakers were still on. Then he began to cry and scream, his body bucking in the muddy water, splashing it around, fists drumming up and down in it, head twisting from side to side. Teddy and Vern were staring at him, agog, because nobody had ever seen Chris Chambers cry. After a moment or two I walked back to the embankment, climbed it, and sat down on one of the rails. Teddy and Vern followed me. And we sat there in the rain, not talking, looking like those three Monkeys of Virtue they sell in dimestores and those sleazy giftshops that always look like they are tottering on the edge of bankruptcy. 28 It was twenty minutes before Chris climbed the embankment to sit down beside us. The clouds had begun to break. Spears of sun came down through the rips. The bushes seemed to have gone three shades darker green in the last fortyfive minutes. He was mud all the way up one side and down the other. His hair was standing up in muddy spikes. The only clean parts of him were the whitewashed circles around his eyes. Youre right, Gordie, he said. Nobody gets last dibs. Goocher all around, huh? I nodded. Five minutes passed. No one said anything. And I happened to have a thoughtjust in case they did call Bannerman. I went back down the embankment and over to where Chris had been standing. I got down on my knees and began to comb carefully through the water and marshgrass with my fingers. What you doing? Teddy asked, joining me. Its to your left, I think, Chris said, and pointed. I looked there and after a minute or two I found both shell casings. They winked in the fresh sunlight. I gave them to Chris. He nodded and stuffed them into a pocket of his jeans. Now we go, Chris said. Hey, come on! Teddy yelled, in real agony. I wanna take im! Listen, dummy, Chris said, if we take him back we could all wind up in the reformatory. Its like Gordie says. Those guys could make up any story they wanted to. What if they said we killed him, huh? How would you like that? I dont give a damn, Teddy said sulkily. Then he looked at us with absurd hope. Besides, we might only get a couple of months or so. As excessories. I mean, were only twelve fuckin years old, they aint gonna put us in Shawshank. Chris said softly You cant get in the Army if you got a record, Teddy. I was pretty sure that was nothing but a baldfaced liebut somehow this didnt seem the time to say so. Teddy just looked at Chris for a long time, his mouth trembling. Finally he managed to squeak out No shit? Ask Gordie. He looked at me hopefully. Hes right, I said, feeling like a great big turd. Hes right, Teddy. First thing they do when you volunteer is to check your name through RI. Holy God! Were gonna shag ass back to the trestle, Chris said. Then well get off the tracks and come into Castle Rock from the other direction. If people ask where we were, well say we went campin up on Brickyard Hill and got lost. Milo Pressman knows better, I said. That creep at the Florida Market does, too. Well, well say Milo scared us and thats when we decided to go up on the Brickyard. I nodded. That might work. If Vern and Teddy could remember to stick to it. What about if our folks get together? Vern asked. You worry about it if you want, Chris said. My dadll still be juiced up. Come on, then, Vern said, eyeing the screen of trees between us and the Back Harlow Road. He looked like he expected Bannerman, along with a brace of bloodhounds, to come crashing through at any moment. Lets get while the gettins good. We were all on our feet now, ready to go. The birds were singing like crazy, pleased with the rain and the shine and the worms and just about everything in the world, I guess. We all turned around, as if pulled on strings, and looked back at Ray Brower. He was lying there, alone again. His arms had flopped out when we turned him over and now he was sort of spreadeagled, as if to welcome the sunshine. For a moment it seemed all right, a more natural deathscene than any ever constructed for a viewingroom audience by a mortician. Then you saw the bruise, the caked blood on the chin and under the nose, and the way the corpse was beginning to bloat. You saw that the bluebottles had come out with the sun and that they were circling the body, buzzing indolently. You remembered that gassy smell, sickish but dry, like farts in a closed room. He was a boy our age, he was dead, and I rejected the idea that anything about it could be natural; I pushed it away with horror. Okay, Chris said, and he meant to be brisk but his voice came out of his throat like a handful of dry bristles from an old whiskbroom. Doubletime. We started to almosttrot back the way we had come. We didnt talk. I dont know about the others, but I was too busy thinking to talk. There were things that bothered me about the body of Ray Browerthey bothered me then and they bother me now. A bad bruise on the side of his face, a scalp laceration, a bloody nose. No moreat least, no more visible. People walk away from barfights in worse condition and go right on drinking. Yet the train must have hit him; why else would his sneakers be off his feet that way? And how come the engineer hadnt seen him? Could it be that the train had hit him hard enough to toss him but not to kill him? I thought that, under just the right combination of circumstances, that could have happened. Had the train hit him a hefty, teethrattling sideswipe as he tried to get out of the way? Hit him and knocked him in a flying, backwards somersault over that cavedin banking? Had he perhaps lain awake and trembling in the dark for hours, not just lost now but disoriented as well, cut off from the world? Maybe he had died of fear. A bird with crushed tailfeathers once died in my cupped hands in just that way. Its body trembled and vibrated lightly, its beak opened and closed, its dark, bright eyes stared up at me. Then the vibration quit, the beak froze halfopen and the black eyes became lackluster and uncaring. It could have been that way with Ray Brower. He could have died because he was simply too frightened to go on living. But there was another thing, and that bothered me most of all, I think. He had started off to go berrying. I seemed to remember the news reports saying hed been carrying a pot to put his berries in. When we got back I went to the library and looked it up in the newspapers just to be sure, and I was right. Hed been berrying, and hed had a pail, or a potsomething like that. But we hadnt found it. We found him, and we found his sneakers. He must have thrown it away somewhere between Chamberlain and the boggy patch of ground in Harlow where he died. He perhaps clutched it even tighter at first, as though it linked him to home and safety. But as his fear grew, and with it that sense of being utterly alone, with no chance of rescue except for whatever he could do by himself, as the real cold terror set in, he maybe threw it away into the woods on one side of the tracks or the other, hardly even noticing it was gone. Ive thought of going back and looking for ithow does that strike you for morbid? Ive thought of driving to the end of the Back Harlow Road in my almost new Ford van and getting out of it some bright summer morning, all by myself, my wife and children far off in another world where, if you turn a switch, lights come on in the dark. Ive thought about how it would be. Pulling my pack out of the back and resting it on the customized vans rear bumper while I carefully remove my shirt and tie it around my waist. Rubbing my chest and shoulders with Muskol insect repellent and then crashing through the woods to where that boggy place was, the place where we found him. Would the grass grow up yellow there, in the shape of his body? Of course not, there would be no sign, but still you wonder, and you realize what a thin film there is between your rational man costumethe writer with leather elbowpatches on his corduroy jacketand the capering, Gorgon myths of childhood. Then climbing the embankment, now overgrown with weeds, and walking slowly beside the rusted tracks and rotted ties toward Chamberlain. Stupid fantasy. An expedition looking for a twentyyearold blueberry bucket, which was probably cast deep into the woods or plowed under by a bulldozer readying a halfacre plot for a tract house or so deeply overgrown by weeds and brambles it had become invisible. But I feel sure it is still there, somewhere along the old discontinued GSWM line, and at times the urge to go and look is almost a frenzy. It usually comes early in the morning, when my wife is showering and the kids are watching Batman and ScoobyDoo on channel 38 out of Boston, and I am feeling the most like the preadolescent Gordon Lachance that once strode the earth, walking and talking and occasionally crawling on his belly like a reptile. That boy was me, I think. And the thought which follows, chilling me like a dash of cold water, is Which boy do you mean? Sipping a cup of tea, looking at sun slanting through the kitchen windows, hearing the TV from one end of the house and the shower from the other, feeling the pulse behind my eyes that means I got through one beer too many the night before, I feel sure I could find it. I would see clear metal winking through rust, the bright summer sun reflecting it back to my eyes. I would go down the side of the embankment, push aside the grasses that had grown up and twined toughly around its handle, and then I would ... what? Why, simply pull it out of time. I would turn it over and over in my hands, wondering at the feel of it, marvelling at the knowledge that the last person to touch it had been long years in his grave. Suppose there was a note in it? Help me, Im lost. Of course there wouldnt beboys dont go out to pick blueberries with paper and pencilbut just suppose. I imagine the awe Id feel would be as dark as an eclipse. Still, its mostly just the idea of holding that pail in my two hands, I guessas much a symbol of my living as his dying, proof that I really do know which boy it waswhich boy of the five of us. Holding it. Reading every year in its cake of rust and the fading of its bright shine. Feeling it, trying to understand the suns that shone on it, the rains that fell on it, and the snows that covered it. And to wonder where I was when each thing happened to it in its lonely place, where I was, what I was doing, who I was loving, how I was getting along, where I was. Id hold it, read it, feel it ... and look at my own face in whatever reflection might be left. Can you dig it? 29 We got back to Castle Rock a little past five oclock 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. Im walking across. If I get hit by a train I wont have to watch out for fuckin Ace Merrill. We all walked across itplodded 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 walkedlimpedback into town and stood for a moment on the sidewalk in front of the vacant lot. We looked at our treehouse so we wouldnt have to look at each other. Well, Teddy said at last, seeya in school on Wednesday. I think Im gonna sleep until then. Me too, Vern said. Im too pooped to pop. Chris whistled tunelessly through his teeth and said nothing.