Different Seasons(114)
5
“You’re really lucky,” I said. “They would have killed you.”
Teddy said, “I know the Back Harlow Road. It comes to a dead end by the river. We used to fish for cossies out there.”
Chris nodded. “There used to be a bridge, but there was a flood. A long time ago. Now there’s just the train-tracks.”
“Could a kid really have gotten all the way from Chamberlain to Harlow?” I asked Chris. “That’s twenty or thirty miles.”
“I think so. He probably happened on the train-tracks and followed them the whole way. Maybe he thought they’d take him out, or maybe he thought he could flag down a train if he had to. But that’s just a freight run now—GS&WM up to Derry and Brownsville—and not many of those anymore. He’d have to’ve walked all the way to Castle Rock to get out. After dark a train must have finally come along . . . and el smacko.”
Chris drove his right fist down against his left palm, making a flat noise. Teddy, a veteran of many close calls dodging the pulp-trucks on 196, looked vaguely pleased. I felt a little sick, imagining that kid so far away from home, scared to death but doggedly following the GS&WM tracks, probably walking on the ties because of the night-noises from the overhanging trees and bushes . . . maybe even from the culverts underneath the railroad bed. And here comes the train, and maybe the big headlight on the front hypnotized him until it was too late to jump. Or maybe he was just lying there on the tracks in a hunger-faint when the train came along. Either way, any way, Chris had the straight of it: el smacko had been the final result. The kid was dead.
“So anyway, you want to go see it?” Vern asked. He was squirming around like he had to go to the bathroom he was so excited.
We all looked at him for a long second, no one saying anything. Then Chris tossed his cards down and said: “Sure! And I bet you anything we get our pictures in the paper!”
“Huh?” Vem said.
“Yeah?” Teddy said, and grinning his crazy truck-dodging grin.
“Look,” Chris said, leaning across the ratty card-table. “We can find the body and report it! We’ll be on the news!”
“I dunno,” Vern said, obviously taken aback. “Billy will know where I found out. He’ll beat the living shit outta me.”
“No he won’t,” I said, “because it’ll be us guys that find that kid, not Billy and Charlie Hogan in a boosted car. Then they won’t have to worry about it anymore. They’ll probably pin a medal on you, Penny.”
“Yeah?” Vern grinned, showing his bad teeth. It was a dazed sort of grin, as if the thought of Billy being pleased with anything he did had acted on him like a hard shot to the chin. “Yeah, you think so?”
Teddy was grinning, too. Then he frowned and said: “Oh-oh.”
“What?” Vern asked. He was squirming again, afraid that some really basic objection to the idea had just cropped up in Teddy’s mind . . . or what passed for Teddy’s mind.
“Our folks,” Teddy said. “If we find that kid’s body over in South Harlow tomorrow, they’re gonna know we didn’t spend the night campin out in Vern’s back field.”
“Yeah,” Chris said. “They’ll know we went lookin for that kid.”
“No they won’t,” I said. I felt funny—both excited and scared because I knew we could do it and get away with it. The mixture of emotions made me feel heatsick and headachy. I picked up the Bikes to have something to do with my hands and started box-shuffling them. That and how to play cribbage was about all I got for older brother stuff from Dennis. The other kids envied that shuffle, and I guess everyone I knew had asked me to show them how it went . . . everyone except Chris. I guess only Chris knew that showing someone would be like giving away a piece of Dennis, and I just didn’t have so much of him that I could afford to pass pieces around.
I said: “We’ll just tell em we got bored tenting in Vern’s field because we’ve done it so many times before. So we decided to hike up the tracks and have a campout in the woods. I bet we don’t even get hided for it because everybody’ll be so excited about what we found.”
“My dad’ll hide me anyway,” Chris said. “He’s on a really mean streak this time.” He shook his head sullenly. “To hell, it’s worth a hiding.”
“Okay,” Teddy said, getting up. He was still grinning like crazy, ready to break into his high-pitched, cackling laugh at any second. “Let’s all get together at Vern’s house after lunch. What can we tell em about supper?”
Chris said, “You and me and Gordie can say we’re eating at Vern’s.”
“And I’ ll tell my mom I’m eating over at Chris’s,” Vern said.
That would work unless there was some emergency we couldn’t control or unless any of the parents got together. And neither Vern’s folks or Chris’s had a phone. Back then there were a lot of families which still considered a telephone a luxury, especially families of the shirttail variety. And none of us came from the upper crust.
My dad was retired. Vern’s dad worked in the mill and was still driving a 1952 DeSoto. Teddy’s mom had a house on Danberry Street and she took in a boarder whenever she could get one. She didn’t have one that summer; the FURNISHED ROOM TO LET sign had been up in the parlor window since June. And Chris’s dad was always on a “mean streak,” more or less; he was a drunk who got welfare off and on—mostly on—and spent most of his time hanging out in Sukey’s Tavern with Junior Merrill, Ace Merrill’s old man, and a couple of other local rumpots.