Different Seasons(113)
He had been up that morning before anybody, ate his comflakes, and was out in the driveway shooting baskets through the old hoop nailed up on the garage, nothing much to do, no one to play Ghost with or anything, and he decided to have another dig for his pennies. He was under the porch when the screen door slammed up above. He froze, not making a sound. If it was his dad, he would crawl out; if it was Billy, he’d stay put until Billy and his j.d. friend Charlie Hogan had taken off.
Two pair of footsteps crossed the porch, and then Charlie Hogan himself said in a trembling, crybaby voice: “Jesus Christ, Billy, what are we gonna do?”
Vern said that just hearing Charlie Hogan talk like that—Charlie, who was one of the toughest kids in town—made him prick up his ears. Charlie, after all, hung out with Ace Merrill and Eyeball Chambers, and if you hung out with cats like that, you had to be tough.
“Nuthin,” Billy said. “That’s all we’re gonna do. Nuthin.”
“We gotta do somethin,” Charlie said, and they sat down on the porch close to where Vern was hunkered down.
“Didn’t you see him?”
Vern took a chance and crept a little closer to the steps, practically slavering. At that point he thought that maybe Billy and Charlie had been really drunked up and had run somebody down. Vern was careful not to crackle any of the old leaves as he moved. If the two of them found out he was under the porch and had overheard them, you could have put what was left of him in a Ken-L Ration dogfood can.
“It’s nuthin to us,” Billy Tessio said. “The kid’s dead so it’s nuthin to him, neither. Who gives a f**k if they ever find him? I don’t.”
“It was that kid they been talkin about on the radio,” Charlie said. “It was, sure as shit. Brocker, Brower, Flowers, whatever his name is. Fuckin train must have hit him.”
“Yeah,” Billy said. Sound of a scratched match. Vern saw it flicked into the gravel driveway and then smelled cigarette smoke. “It sure did. And you puked.”
No words, but Vern sensed emotional waves of shame radiating off Charlie Hogan.
“Well, the girls didn’t see it,” Billy said after awhile. “Lucky break.” From the sound, he clapped Charlie on the back to buck him up. “They’d blab it from here to Portland. We tore out of there fast, though. You think they knew there was something wrong?”
“No,” Charlie said. “Marie don’t like to go down that Back Harlow Road past the cemetery, anyway. She’s afraid of ghosts.” Then again in that scared crybaby voice: “Jesus, I wish we’d never boosted no car last night! Just gone to the show like we was gonna!”
Charlie and Billy went with a couple of scags named Marie Dougherty and Beverly Thomas; you never saw such gross-looking broads outside of a carnival show—pimples, moustaches, the whole works. Sometimes the four of them—or maybe six or eight if Fuzzy Bracowicz or Ace Merrill were along with their girls—would boost a car from a Lewiston parking lot and go joyriding out into the country with two or three bottles of Wild Irish Rose wine and a six-pack of ginger ale. They’d take the girls parking somewhere in Castle View or Harlow or Shiloh, drink Purple Jesuses, and make out. Then they’d dump the car somewhere near home. Cheap thrills in the monkey-house, as Chris sometimes said. They’d never been caught at it, but Vern kept hoping. He really dug the idea of visiting Billy on Sundays at the reformatory.
“If we told the cops, they’d want to know how we got way the hell out in Harlow,” Billy said. “We ain’t got no car, neither of us. It’s better if we just keep our mouths shut. Then they can’t touch us.”
“We could make a nonnamus call,” Charlie said.
“They trace those f**kin’ calls,” Billy said ominously. “I seen it on Highway Patrol. And Dragnet.”
“Yeah, right,” Charlie said miserably. “Jesus. I wish Ace’d been with us. We could have told the cops we was in his car.”
“Well, he wasn’t.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. He sighed. “I guess you’re right.” A cigarette butt flicked into the driveway. “We hadda walk up and take a piss by the tracks, didn’t we? Couldn’t walk the other way, could we? And I got puke on my new P.F. Fliers.” His voice sank a little. “Fuckin kid was laid right out, you know it? Didja see that sonofawhore, Billy?”
“I seen him,” Billy said, and a second cigarette butt joined the first in the driveway. “Let’s go see if Ace is up. I want some juice.”
“We gonna tell him?”
“Charlie, we ain’t gonna tell nobody. Nobody never. You dig me?”
“I dig you,” Charlie said. “Christ Jesus, I wish we never boosted that f**king Dodge.”
“Aw, shut the f**k up and come on.”
Two pairs of legs clad in tight, wash-faded pegged jeans, two pairs of feet in black engineer boots with side-buckles, came down the steps. Vern froze on his hands and knees (“My balls crawled up so high I thought they was trine to get back home,” he told us), sure his brother would sense him beneath the porch and drag him out and kill him—he and Charlie Hogan would kick the few brains the good Lord had seen fit to give him right out his jug ears and then stomp him with their engineer boots. But they just kept going and when Vem was sure they were really gone, he had crawled out from under the porch and ran here.