Different Seasons(129)
There were movies to go see at the Gem, which has long since been torn down; science fiction movies like Gog with Richard Egan and westerns with Audie Murphy (Teddy saw every movie Audie Murphy made at least three times; he believed Murphy was almost a god) and war movies with John Wayne. There were games and endless bolted meals, lawns to mow, places to run to, walls to pitch pennies against, people to clap you on the back. And now I sit here trying to look through an IBM keyboard and see that time, trying to recall the best and the worst of that green and brown summer, and I can almost feel the skinny, scabbed boy still buried in this advancing body and hear those sounds. But the apotheosis of the memory and the time is Gordon Lachance running down the road to the Florida Market with change in his pockets and sweat running down his back.
I asked for three pounds of hamburger and got some hamburger rolls, four bottles of Coke and a two-cent churchkey to open them with. The owner, a man named George Dusset, got the meat and then leaned by his cash register, one hammy hand planted on the counter by the big bottle of hardcooked eggs, a toothpick in his mouth, his huge beer belly rounding his white tee-shirt like a sail filled with a good wind. He stood right there as I shopped, making sure I didn’t try to hawk anything. He didn’t say a word until he was weighing up the hamburger.
“I know you. You’re Denny Lachance’s brother. Ain’t you?” The toothpick journeyed from one comer of his mouth to the other, as if on ball bearings. He reached behind the cash register, picked up a bottle of S’OK cream soda, and chugged it.
“Yes, sir. But Denny, he—”
“Yeah, I know. That’s a sad thing, kid. The Bible says: ‘In the midst of life, we are in death.’ Did you know that? Yuh. I lost a brother in Korea. You look just like Denny, people ever tell you that? Yuh. Spitting image.”
“Yes, sir, sometimes,” I said glumly.
“I remember the year he was All-Conference. Halfback, he played. Yuh. Could he run? Father God and Sonny Jesus! You’re probably too young to remember.” He was looking over my head, out through the screen door and into the blasting heat, as if he were having a beautiful vision of my brother.
“I remember. Uh, Mr. Dusset?”
“What, kid?” His eyes were still misty with memory; the toothpick trembled a little between his lips.
“Your thumb is on that scales.”
“What?” He looked down, astounded, to where the ball of his thumb was pressed firmly on the white enamel. If I hadn’t moved away from him a little bit when he started talking about Dennis, the ground meat would have hidden it. “Why, so it is. Yuh. I guess I just got thinkin about your brother, God love him.” George Dusset signed a cross on himself. When he took his thumb off the scales, the needle sprang back six ounces. He patted a little more meat on top and then did the package up with white butcher’s paper.
“Okay,” he said past the toothpick. “Let’s see what we got here. Three pounds of hamburg, that’s a dollar forty-four. Hamburg rolls, that’s twenty-seven. Four sodas, forty cents. One churchkey, two pence. Comes to ...” He added it up on the bag he was going to put the stuff in. “Two-twenty-nine.”
“Thirteen,” I said.
He looked up at me very slowly, frowning. “Huh?”
“Two-thirteen. You added it wrong.”
“Kid, are you—”
“You added it wrong,” I said. “First you put your thumb on the scales and then you overcharged on the groceries, Mr. Dusset. I was gonna throw some Hostess Twinkies on top of that order but now I guess I won’t.” I spanged two dollars and thirteen cents down on the Schlitz placemat in front of him.
He looked at the money, then at me. The frown was now tremendous, the lines on his face as deep as fissures. “What are you, kid?” he said in a low voice that was ominously confidential. “Are you some kind of smartass?”
“No, sir,” I said. “But you ain’t gonna jap me and get away with it. What would your mother say if she knew you was japping little kids?”
He thrust our stuff into the paper bag with quick stiff movements, making the Coke bottles clink together. He thrust the bag at me roughly, not caring if I dropped it and broke the sodas or not. His swarthy face was flushed and dull, the frown now frozen in place. “Okay, kid. Here you go. Now what you do is you get the Christ out of my store. I see you in here again and I going to throw you out, me. Yuh. Smartass little sonofawhore.”
“I won’t come in again,” I said, walking over to the screen door and pushing it open. The hot afternoon buzzed somnolently along its appointed course outside, sounding green and brown and full of silent light. “Neither will none of my friends. I guess I got fifty or so.”
“Your brother wasn’t no smartass!” George Dusset yelled.
“Fuck you!” I yelled, and ran like hell down the road.
I heard the screen door bang open like a gunshot and his bull roar came after me: “If you ever come in here again I’ll fat your lip for you, you little punk!”
I ran until I was over the first hill, scared and laughing to myself, my heart beating out a triphammer pulse in my chest. Then I slowed to a fast walk, looking back over my shoulder every now and then to make sure he wasn’t going to take after me in his car, or anything.
He didn‘t, and pretty soon I got to the dump gate. I put the bag inside my shirt, climbed the gate, and monkeyed down the other side. I was halfway across the dump area when I saw something I didn’t like—Milo Pressman’s portholed ’56 Buick was parked behind his tarpaper shack. If Milo saw me I was going to be in a world of hurt. As yet there was no sign of either him or the infamous Chopper, but all at once the chain-link fence at the back of the dump seemed very far away. I found myself wishing I’d gone around the outside, but I was now too far into the dump to want to turn around and go back. If Milo saw me climbing the dump fence, I’d probably be in dutch when I got home, but that didn’t scare me as much as Milo yelling for Chopper to sic would.