"No, sincerely, I'm gonna throw u--"
The words broke off in my mouth and I forgot all about the smelly garbage cans. Chris had unslung his pack and opened it and reached inside. Now he was holding out a huge pistol with dark wood grips.
"You wanna be the Lone Ranger or the Cisco Kid?" Chris asked, grinning.
"Walking, talking Jesus! Where'd you get that?"
"Hawked it out of my dad's bureau. It's a forty-five."
"Yeah, I can see that," I said, although it could have been a .38 or a .357 for all I knew--in spite of all the John D. MacDonalds and Ed McBains I'd read, the only pistol I'd ever seen up close was the one Constable Bannerman carried ... and although all the kids asked him to take it out of its holster, Bannerman never would. "Man, your dad's gonna hide you when he finds out. You said he was on a mean streak anyway."
His eyes just went on dancing. "That's it, man. He ain't gonna find out nothing. Him and these other rummies are all laid up down in Harrison with six or eight bottles of wine. They won't be back for a week. Fucking rummies." His lip curled. He was the only guy in our gang who would never take a drink, even to show he had, you know, big balls. He said he wasn't going to grow up to be a fucking tosspot like his old man. And he told me once privately--this was after the DeSpain twins showed up with a six-pack they'd hawked from their old man and everybody teased Chris because he wouldn't take a beer or even a swallow--that he was scared to drink. He said his father never got his nose all the way out of the bottle anymore, that his older brother had been drunk out of his tits when he raped that girl, and that Eyeball was always guzzling Purple Jesuses with Ace Merrill and Charlie Hogan and Billy Tessio. What, he asked me, did I think his chances of letting go of the bottle would be once he picked it up? Maybe you think that's funny, a twelve-year-old worrying that he might be an incipient alcoholic, but it wasn't funny to Chris. Not at all. He'd thought about the possibility a lot. He'd had occasion to.
"You got shells for it?"
"Nine of them--all that was left in the box. He'll think he used em himself, shooting at cans while he was drunk."
"Is it loaded?"
"No! Chrissake, what do you think I am?"
I finally took the gun. I liked the heavy way it sat there in my hand. I could see myself as Steve Carella of the 87th Squad, going after that guy The Heckler or maybe covering Meyer Meyer or Kling while they broke into a desperate junkie's sleazy apartment. I sighted on one of the smelly trashcans and squeezed the trigger.
KA-BLAM!
The gun bucked in my hand. Fire licked from the end. It felt as if my wrist had just been broken. My heart vaulted nimbly into the back of my mouth and crouched there, trembling. A big hole appeared in the corrugated metal surface of the trashcan--it was the work of an evil conjuror.
"Jesus!" I screamed.
Chris was cackling wildly--in real amusement or hysterical terror I couldn't tell. "You did it, you did it! Gordie did it!" he bugled. "Hey, Gordon Lachance is shooting up Castle Rock!"
"Shut up! Let's get out of here!" I screamed, and grabbed him by the shirt.
As we ran, the back door of the Blue Point jerked open and Francine Tupper stepped out in her white rayon waitress's uniform. "Who did that? Who's letting off cherry-bombs back here?"
We ran like hell, cutting behind the drugstore and the hardware store and the Emporium Galorium, which sold antiques and junk and dime books. We climbed a fence, spiking our palms with splinters, and finally came out on Curran Street. I threw the .45 at Chris as we ran; he was killing himself laughing but caught it and somehow managed to stuff it back into his knapsack and close one of the snaps. Once around the comer of Curran and back on Carbine Street, we slowed to a walk so we wouldn't look suspicious, running in the heat. Chris was still giggling.
"Man, you shoulda seen your face. Oh man, that was priceless. That was really fine. My fucking-A." He shook his head and slapped his leg and howled.
"You knew it was loaded, didn't you? You wet! I'm gonna be in trouble. That Tupper babe saw me."
"Shit, she thought it was a firecracker. Besides, ole Thunderjugs Tupper can't see past the end of her own nose, you know that. Thinks wearing glasses would spoil her pret-ty face." He put one palm against the small of his back and bumped his hips and got laughing again.
"Well, I don't care. That was a mean trick, Chris. Really."
"Come on, Gordie." He put a hand on my shoulder. "I didn't know it was loaded, honest to God, I swear on my mother's name I just took it out of my dad's bureau. He always unloads it. He must have been really drunk when he put it away the last time."
"You really didn't load it?"
"No sir."
"You swear it on your mother's name even if she goes to hell for you telling a lie?"
"I swear." He crossed himself and spit, his face as open and repentant as any choirboy's. But when we turned into the vacant lot where our treehouse was and saw Vern and Teddy sitting on their bedrolls waiting for us, he started to laugh again. He told them the whole story, and after everybody had had their yucks, Teddy asked him what Chris thought they needed a pistol for.
"Nothin," Chris said. "Except we might see a bear. Something like that. Besides, it's spooky sleeping out at night in the woods."
Everybody nodded at that. Chris was the biggest, toughest guy in our gang, and he could always get away with saying things like that. Teddy, on the other hand, would have gotten his ass ragged off if he even hinted he was afraid of the dark.
"Did you set your tent up in the field?" Teddy asked Vern.
"Yeah. And I put two turned-on flashlights in it so it'll look like we're there after dark."
"Hot shit!" I said, and clapped Vern on the back. For him, that was thinking. He grinned and blushed.
"So let's go," Teddy said. "Come on, it's almost twelve already!"
Chris got up and we gathered around him.
"We'll walk across Beeman's field and behind that furniture place by Sonny's Texaco," he said. "Then we'll get on the railroad tracks down by the dump and just walk across the trestle into Harlow."
"How far do you think it's gonna be?" Teddy asked.
Chris shrugged. "Harlow's big. We're gonna be walking at least twenty miles. That sound right to you, Gordie?"
"Yeah. It might even be thirty."
"Even if it's thirty we ought to be there by tomorrow afternoon, if no one goes pussy."
"No pussies here," Teddy said at once.
We all looked at each other for a second.
"Miaoww, " Vern said, and we all laughed.
"Come on, you guys," Chris said, and shouldered his pack.
We walked out of the vacant lot together, Chris slightly in the lead.
10
By the time we got across Beeman's field and had struggled up the cindery embankment to the Great Southern and Western Maine tracks, we had all taken our shirts off and tied them around our waists. We were sweating like pigs. At the top of the embankment we looked down the tracks, toward where we'd have to go.
I'll never forget that moment, no matter how old I get. I was the only one with a watch--a cheap Timex I'd gotten as a premium for selling Cloverine Brand Salve the year before. Its hands stood at straight up noon, and the sun beat down on the dry, shadeless vista before us with savage heat. You could feel it working to get in under your skull and fry your brains.
Behind us was Castle Rock, spread out on the long hill that was known as Castle View, surrounding its green and shady common. Further down Castle River you could see the stacks of the woollen mill spewing smoke into a sky the color of gunmetal and spewing waste into the water. The Jolly Furniture Barn was on our left. And straight ahead of us the railroad tracks, bright and heliographing in the sun. They paralleled the Castle River, which was on our left. To our right was a lot of overgrown scrubland (there's motorcycle track there today--they have scrambles every Sunday afternoon at 2:00 P.M.). An old abandoned water tower stood on the horizon, rusty and somehow scary.
We stood there fo
r that one noontime moment and then Chris said impatiently, "Come on, let's get going."
We walked beside the tracks in the cinders, kicking up little puffs of blackish dust at every step. Our socks and sneakers were soon gritty with it. Vern started singing "Roll Me Over in the Clover" but soon quit it, which was a break for our ears. Only Teddy and Chris had brought canteens, and we were all hitting them pretty hard.
"We could fill the canteens again at the dump faucet," I said. "My dad told me that's a safe well. It's a hundred and ninety feet deep."
"Okay," Chris said, being the tough platoon leader. "That'll be a good place to take five, anyway."
"What about food?" Teddy asked suddenly. "I bet nobody thought to bring something to eat. I know I didn't."
Chris stopped. "Shit! I didn't, either. Gordie?"
I shook my head, wondering how I could have been so dumb.
"Vern?"
"Zip," Vem said. "Sorry."
"Well, let's see how much money we got," I said. I untied my shirt, spread it on the cinders, and dropped my own sixty-eight cents onto it. The coins glittered feverishly in the sunlight. Chris had a tattered dollar and two pennies. Teddy had two quarters and two nickels. Vern had exactly seven cents.
"Two-thirty-seven," I said. "Not bad. There's a store at the end of that little road that goes to the dump. Somebody'll have to walk down there and get some hamburger and some tonics while the others rest."
"Who?" Vern asked.
"We'll match for it when we get to the dump. Come on."
I slid all the money into my pants pocket and was just tying my shirt around my waist again when Chris hollered: "Train!"
I put my hand out on one of the rails to feel it, even though I could already hear it. The rail was thrumming crazily; for a moment it was like holding the train in my hand.
"Paratroops over the side!" Vern bawled, and leaped halfway down the embankment in one crazy, clownish stride. Vern was nuts for playing paratroops anyplace the ground was soft--a gravel pit, a haymow, an embankment like this one. Chris jumped after him. The train was really loud now, probably headed straight up our side of the river toward Lewiston. Instead of jumping, Teddy turned in the direction from which it was coming. His thick glasses glittered in the sun. His long hair flopped untidily over his brow in sweat-soaked stringers.
"Go on, Teddy," I said.
"No, huh-uh, I'm gonna dodge it." He looked at me, his magnified eyes frantic with excitement. "A train-dodge, dig it? What's trucks after a fuckin train-dodge?"
"You're crazy, man. You want to get killed?"
"Just like the beach at Normandy!" Teddy yelled, and strode out into the middle of the tracks. He stood on one of the crossties, lightly balanced.
I stood stunned for a moment, unable to believe stupidity of such width and breadth. Then I grabbed him, dragged him fighting and protesting to the embankment, and pushed him over. I jumped after him and Teddy caught me a good one in the guts while I was still in the air. The wind whooshed out of me, but I was still able to hit him in the sternum with my knee and knock him flat on his back before he could get all the way up. I landed, gasping and sprawling, and Teddy grabbed me around the neck. We went rolling all the way to the bottom of the embankment, hitting and clawing at each other while Chris and Vern stared at us, stupidly surprised.
"You little son of a bitch!" Teddy was screaming at me. "You fucker! Don't you throw your weight around on me! I'll kill you, you dipshit!"
I was getting my breath back now, and I made it to my feet. I backed away as Teddy advanced, holding my open hands up to slap away his punches, half-laughing and half-scared. Teddy was no one to fool around with when he went into one of his screaming fits. He'd take on a big kid in that state, and after the big kid broke both of his arms, he'd bite.
"Teddy, you can dodge anything you want after we see what we're going to see but whack on the shoulder as one wildly swinging fist got past me
"until then no one's supposed to see us, you whack on the side of the face, and then we might have had a real fight if Chris and Vern
"stupid wet end!" hadn't grabbed us and kept us apart. Above us, the train roared by in a thunder of diesel exhaust and the great heavy clacking of boxcar wheels. A few cinders bounced down the embankment and the argument was over ... at least until we could hear ourselves talk again.
It was only a short freight, and when the caboose had trailed by, Teddy said: "I'm gonna kill him. At least give him a fat lip." He struggled against Chris, but Chris only grabbed him tighter.
"Calm down, Teddy," Chris said quietly, and he kept saying it until Teddy stopped struggling and just stood there, his glasses hanging askew and his hearing-aid cord dangling limply against his chest on its way down to the battery, which he had shoved into the pocket of his jeans.
When he was completely still, Chris turned to me and said: "What the hell are you fighting with him about, Gordon?"
"He wanted to dodge the train. I figured the engineer would see him and report it. They might send a cop out."
"Ahhh, he'd be too busy makin chocolate in his drawers," Teddy said, but he didn't seem angry anymore. The storm had passed.
"Gordie was just trying to do the right thing," Vern said. "Come on, peace."
"Peace, you guys," Chris agreed.
"Yeah, okay," I said, and held out my hand, palm up. "Peace, Teddy?"
"I coulda dodged it," he said to me. "You know that, Gordie?"
"Yeah," I said, although the thought turned me cold inside. "I know it."
"Okay. Peace, then."
"Skin it, man," Chris ordered, and let go of Teddy.
Teddy slapped his hand down on mine hard enough to sting and then turned it over. I slapped his.
"Fuckin pussy Lachance," Teddy said.
"Meeiowww," I said.
"Come on, you guys," Vern said. "Let's go, okay?"
"Go anywhere you want, but don't go here," Chris said solemnly, and Vern drew back as if to hit him.
11
We got to the dump around one-thirty, and Vern led the way down the embankment with a Paratroops over the side! We went to the bottom in big jumps and leaped over the brackish trickle of water oozing listlessly out of the culvert which poked out of the cinders. Beyond this small boggy area was the sandy, trash-littered verge of the dump.
There was a six-foot security fence surrounding it. Every twenty feet weather-faded signs were posted. They said: CASTLE ROCK DUMP
HOURS 4-8 P.M.
CLOSED MONDAYS
TRESPASSING STRICTLY FORBIDDEN
We climbed to the top of the fence, swung over, and jumped down. Teddy and Vern led the way toward the well, which you tapped with an old-fashioned pump--the kind from which you had to call the water with elbow-grease. There was a Crisco can filled with water next to the pump handle, and the great sin was to forget to leave it filled for the next guy to come along. The iron handle stuck off at an angle, looking a one-winged bird that was trying to fly. It had once been green, but almost all of the paint had been rubbed off by the thousands of hands that had worked that handle since 1940.
The dump is one of my strongest memories of Castle Rock. It always reminds me of the surrealist painters when I think of it--those fellows who were always painting pictures of clockfaces lying limply in the crotches of trees or Victorian living rooms standing in the middle of the Sahara or steam engines coming out of fireplaces. To my child's eye, nothing in the Castle Rock Dump looked as if it really belonged there.
We had entered from the back. If you came from the front, a wide dirt road came in through the gate, broadened out into a semicircular area that had been bulldozed as flat as a dirt landing-strip, and then ended abruptly at the edge of the dumping-pit. The pump (Teddy and Vern were currently standing there and squabbling about who was going to prime it) was at the back of this great pit. It was maybe eighty feet deep and filled with all the American things that get empty, wear out, or just don't work anymore. There was so much stuff that my ey
es hurt just looking at it--or maybe it was your brain that actually hurt, because it could never quite decide what your eye should stop on. Then your eye would stop, or be stopped, by something that seemed as out of place as those limp clockfaces or the living room in the desert. A brass bedstead leaning drunkenly in the sun. A little girl's dolly looking amazedly between her thighs as she gave birth to stuffing. An overturned Studebaker automobile with its chrome bullet nose glittering in the sun like some Buck Rogers missile. One of those giant water bottles they have in office buildings, transformed by the summer sun into a hot, blazing sapphire.
There was plenty of wildlife there, too, although it wasn't the kind you see in the Walt Disney nature films or at those tame zoos where you can pet the animals. Plump rats, woodchucks grown sleek and lumbering on such rich chow as rotting hamburger and maggoty vegetables, seagulls by the thousands, and stalking among the gulls like thoughtful, introspective ministers, an occasional huge crow. It was also the place where the town's stray dogs came for a meal when they couldn't find any trashcans to knock over or any deer to run. They were a miserable, ugly-tempered, mongrel lot; slat-sided and grinning bitterly, they would attack each other over a fly-blown piece of bologna or a pile of chicken guts fuming in the sun.
But these dogs never attacked Milo Pressman, the dump-keeper, because Milo was never without Chopper at his heel. Chopper was--at least until Joe Camber's dog Cujo went rabid twenty years later--the most feared and least seen dog in Castle Rock. He was the meanest dog for forty miles around (or so we heard), and ugly enough to stop a striking clock. The kids whispered legends about Chopper's meanness. Some said he was half German shepherd, some said he was mostly boxer, and a kid from Castle View with the unfortunate name of Harry Horr claimed that Chopper was a Doberman pinscher whose vocal cords had been surgically removed so you couldn't hear him when he was on the attack. There were other kids who claimed Chopper was a maniacal Irish wolfhound and Milo Pressman fed him a special mixture of Gaines Meal and chicken blood. These same kids claimed that Milo didn't dare take Chopper out of his shack unless the dog was hooded like a hunting falcon.
The most common story was that Pressman had trained Chopper not just to sic but to sic specific parts of the human anatomy. Thus an unfortunate kid who had illegally scaled the dump fence to pick up illicit treasures might hear Milo Pressman cry: "Chopper! Sic! Hand!" And Chopper would grab that hand and hold on, ripping skin and tendons, powdering bones between his slavering jaws, until Milo told him to quit. It was rumored that Chopper could take an ear, an eye, a foot, or a leg ... and that a second offender who was surprised by Milo and the ever-loyal Chopper would hear the dread cry: "Chopper! Sic! Balls!" And that kid would be a soprano for the rest of his life. Milo himself was more commonly seen and thus more commonly regarded. He was just a half-bright working joe who supplemented his small town salary by fixing things people threw away and selling them around town.