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, duck-bumps 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 blue-white fireball bowling its way up the lefthand rail of the GS&WM 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 sudden--pop!!--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 wouldn't 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 lightning-bolt 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 to--all I have to do is sit back for a minute and close my eyes. He's 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: Vern's imagination just ran away with him, that's all. The suckers, the heat, now this storm... his eyes are dealing wild cards, that's all. But that wasn't 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 four-foot drop-off. The railroad maintenance crews had either not yet gotten around to it in their yellow diesel-operated repair carts, or it had happened so recently it hadn't 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 didn't.
The breeze was now a wind--harsh 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 down--instead 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 John-son's 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.
Dime-sized drops fell on my head and arms. They struck the embankment, turning the fill dark for a moment--and 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 you're 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 stern--an adult's 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 gross-out amount. The ants were grosser. He was wearing a solid color dark green tee-shirt and bluejeans. His feet were bare, and a few feet behind him, caught in tall blackberry brambles, I saw a pair of filthy low-topped Keds. For a moment I was puzzled--why 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 friends--they all think that having an imagination like mine must be quite nice; aside from making all this dough, I can have a little mind-movie whenever things get dull. Mostly they're 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 you'd 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 wasn't sick, the kid wasn't sleeping. The kid wasn't 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 wasn't going to wake up at two o'clock 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 wasn't going to pull a single girl's braid in home room. The kid wasn't going to give a bloody nose, or get one. The kid was can't, don't, won't, never, shouldn't, wouldn't, couldn't. 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 teacher's desk, which al
ways smells of wood-shavings 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, ma'am, 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 thirty-plus inches, it was a googol of light-years. 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 tee-shirt. His eyes were open, but terrifyingly out of sync--one 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 chin--from a bloody nose, I thought--and the right side of his face was lacerated and darkly bruised. Still, I thought, he didn't really look bad. I had once walked into a door my brother Dennis was shoving open, came off with bruises even worse than this kid's, 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 upward-staring 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.
"D'joo see that?" Teddy asked in a high, strange, fainting voice. "I bet he's fuckin fulla bugs! I bet his brains're--"
"Shut up, Teddy," Chris said, and Teddy did, looking relieved.
Lightning forked blue across the sky, making the boy's 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 crackle-crunch 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 Merrill's 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 out--he 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, half-obscured 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 you're 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. "That's 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. We're gonna report 'im."
"No you're not," I said. I was suddenly furious with them, turning up this way at the last minute. If we'd thought about it, we'd have known something like this was going to happen ... but this was one time, somehow, that the older, bigger kids weren't going to steal it--to 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 cars--I think that was what made me angriest. They had come in cars. "There's four of us, Eyeball. You just try."
"Oh, we'll try, don't worry," Eyeball said, and the trees shook behind him and Ace. Charlie Hogan and Vern's 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, my-judgment-cometh-and-that-right-early voice. He made a pair of dripping fists. "You little sonofawhore! You was under the porch! Cock-knocker!"
Vem flinched.
Charlie Hogan waxed positively lyrical: "You little keyhole-peeping cunt-licking 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 didn't need a second invitation. They started forward together and Vern flinched again--no 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 hadn't 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 weren't all standing in a roaring rainstorm. "There's more of us than there are of you. We're bigger. We'll give you one chance to just blow away. I don't give a fuck where. Just make like a tree and leave."
Chris's brother giggled and Fuzzy clapped Ace on the back in appreciation of his great wit. The Sid Caesar of the j.d. set.
"Cause we're 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, we'll take him. If you stay, we'll 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 it's 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--' "
"That's 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 brother's sense. Tell these guys to back off. I'll 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 Charlie's 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 fearless--if stupid--sidekick, Chopper the Wonder-Dog. 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 death-warrant: "Suck my fat one, you cheap dimestore hood."
Ace's mouth formed a perfect O of surprise--the expression was so unexpectedly prissy that under other circumstances it would have been a laff riot, so to speak. All of the others--on both sides of the bog--stared at me, dumbfounded.
Then Teddy screamed gleefully: "That's 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 weren't 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 un-shouldered his knapsack and was digging into it frantically, but I didn't get it--not then, anyway.
"Okay," Ace said softly. "Let's take em. Don't hurt nobody but the Lachance kid. I'm gonna break both his fuckin arms."
I went dead cold. I didn't 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, dove-gray in the afternoon half-light. 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.