Different Seasons(128)
We sat under the tree for awhile, shooting the shit like we always did—who had the best ballteam (still the Yankees with Mantle and Maris, of course), what was the best car (‘55 Thunderbird, with Teddy holding out stubbornly for the ’58 Corvette), who was the toughest guy in Castle Rock who wasn’t in our gang (we all agreed it was Jamie Gallant, who gave Mrs. Ewing the finger and then sauntered out of her class with his hands in his pockets while she shouted at him), the best TV show (either The Untouchables or Peter Gunn-both Robert Stack as Eliot Ness and Craig Stevens as Gunn were cool), all that stuff.
It was Teddy who first noticed that the shade of the ash tree was getting longer and asked me what time it was. I looked at my watch and was surprised to see it was quarter after two.
“Hey man,” Vern said. “Somebody’s got to go for provisions. Dump opens at four. I don’t want to still be here when Milo and Chopper make the scene.”
Even Teddy agreed. He wasn’t afraid of Milo, who had a pot belly and was at least forty, but every kid in Castle Rock squeezed his balls between his legs when Chopper’s name was mentioned.
“Okay,” I said. “Odd man goes?”
“That’s you, Gordie,” Chris said, smiling. “Odd as a cod.”
“So’s your mother,” I said, and gave them each a coin. “Flip.”
Four coins glittered up into the sun. Four hands snatched them from the air. Four flat smacks on four grimy wrists. We uncovered. Two heads and two tails. We flipped again and this time all four of us had tails.
“Oh Jesus, that’s a goocher,” Vem said, not telling us anything we didn’t know. Four heads, or a moon, was supposed to be extraordinarily good luck. Four tails was a goocher, and that meant very bad luck.
“Fuck that shit,” Chris said. “It doesn’t mean anything. Go again.”
“No, man,” Vern said earnestly. “A goocher, that’s really bad. You remember when Clint Bracken and those guys got wiped out on Sirois Hill in Durham? Billy tole me they was flippin for beers and they came up a goocher just before they got into the car. And bang! they all get f**kin totalled. I don’t like that. Sincerely.”
“Nobody believes that crap about moons and goochers,” Teddy said impatiently. “It’s baby stuff, Vern. You gonna flip or not?”
Vern flipped, but with obvious reluctance. This time he, Chris, and Teddy all had tails. I was showing Thomas Jefferson on a nickel. And I was suddenly scared. It was as if a shadow had crossed some inner sun. They still had a goocher, the three of them, as if dumb fate had pointed at them a second time. Abruptly I thought of Chris saying: I just get a couple of hairs and Teddy screams and down he goes. Weird, huh?
Three tails, one head.
Then Teddy was laughing his crazy, cackling laugh and pointing at me and the feeling was gone.
“I heard that only fairies laugh like that,” I said, and gave him the finger.
“Eeee-eeee-eeee, Gordie,” Teddy laughed. “Go get the provisions, you f**kin morphadite.”
I wasn’t really sorry to be going. I was rested up and didn’t mind going down the road to the Florida Market.
“Don’t call me any of your mother’s pet names,” I said to Teddy.
“Eeee-eee-eeee, what a f**kin wet you are, Lachance.”
“Go on, Gordie,” Chris said. “We’ll wait over by the tracks.”
“You guys better not go without me,” I said.
Vern laughed. “Goin without you’d be like goin with Slitz instead of Budweiser’s, Gordie.”
“Ah, shut up.”
They chanted together: “I don’t shut up, I grow up. And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner and licks it up,” I said, and hauled ass out of there, giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went. I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?
12
Different strokes for different folks, they say now, and that’s cool. So if I say summer to you, you get one set of private, personal images that are all the way different from mine. That’s cool. But for me, summer is always going to mean running down the road to the Florida Market with change jingling in my pockets, the temperature in the g*y nineties, my feet dressed in Keds. The word conjures an image of the GS&WM railroad tracks running into a perspective-point in the distance, burnished so white under the sun that when you closed your eyes you could still see them there in the dark, only blue instead of white.
But there was more to that summer than our trip across the river to look for Ray Brower, although that looms the largest. Sounds of The Fleetwoods singing, “Come Softly to Me” and Robin Luke singing “Susie Darlin” and Little Anthony popping the vocal on “I Ran All the Way Home.” Were they all hits in that summer of 1960? Yes and no. Mostly yes. In the long purple evenings when rock and roll from WLAM blurred into night baseball from WCOU, time shifted. I think it was all 1960 and that the summer went on for a space of years, held magically intact in a web of sounds: the sweet hum of crickets, the machine-gun roar of playing-cards riffling against the spokes of some kid’s bicycle as he pedaled home for a late supper of cold cuts and iced tea, the flat Texas voice of Buddy Knox singing “Come along and be my party doll, and I’ll make love to you, to you,” and the baseball announcer’s voice mingling with the song and with the smell of freshly cut grass: “Count’s three and two now. Whitey Ford leans over ... shakes off the sign ... now he’s got it ... Ford pauses ... pitches ... and there it goes! Williams got all of that one! Kiss it goodbye! RED SOX LEAD, THREE TO ONE!” Was Ted Williams still playing for the Red Sox in 1960? You bet your ass he was—.316 for my man Ted. I remember that very clearly. Baseball had become important to me in the last couple of years, ever since I’d had to face the knowledge that baseball players were as much flesh and blood as I was. That knowledge came when Roy Campanella’s car overturned and the papers screamed mortal news from the front pages: his career was done, he was going to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. How that came back to me, with that same sickening mortal thud, when I sat down to this typewriter one morning two years ago, turned on the radio, and heard that Thurman Munson had died while trying to land his airplane.