Different Seasons(133)
Chris said calmly: “Talk is cheap.”
Teddy nodded, still not looking up.
“And whatever’s between you and your old man, talk can’t change that.”
Teddy’s head shook without definition, unsure if this was true. Someone had redefined his pain, and redefined it in shockingly common terms. That would
(loony)
have to be examined
(f*cking section eight)
later. In depth. On long sleepless nights.
Chris rocked him. “He was ranking you, man,” he said in soothing cadences that were almost a lullaby. “He was tryin to rank you over that friggin fence, you know it? No strain, man. No f**kin strain. He don’t know nothin about your old man. He don’t know nothin but stuff he heard from those rumdums down at The Mellow Tiger. He’s just dogshit, man. Right, Teddy? Huh? Right?”
Teddy’s crying was down to sniffles. He wiped his eyes, leaving two sooty rings around them, and sat up.
“I’m okay,” he said, and the sound of his own voice seemed to convince him. “Yeah, I’m okay.” He stood up and put his glasses back on—dressing his naked face, it seemed to me. He laughed thinly and swiped his bare arm across the snot of his upper lip. “Fuckin crybaby, right?”
“No, man,” Vern said uncomfortably. “If anyone was rankin out my dad—”
“Then you got to kill em!” Teddy said briskly, almost arrogantly. “Kill their asses. Right, Chris?”
“Right,” Chris said amiably, and clapped Teddy on the back.
“Right, Gordie?”
“Absolutely,” I said, wondering how Teddy could care so much for his dad when his dad had practically killed him, and how I couldn’t seem to give much of a shit one way or the other about my own dad, when so far as I could remember, he had never laid a hand on me since I was three and got some bleach from under the sink and started to eat it.
We walked another two hundred yards down the tracks and Teddy said in a quieter voice: “Hey, if I spoiled your good time, I’m sorry. I guess that was pretty stupid shit back there at that fence.”
“I ain’t sure I want it to be no good time,” Vern said suddenly.
Chris looked at him. “You sayin you want to go back, man?”
“No, huh-uh!” Vern’s face knotted in thought. “But going to see a dead kid—it shouldn’t be a party, maybe. I mean, if you can dig it. I mean ...” He looked at us rather wildly. “I mean, I could be a little scared. If you get me.”
Nobody said anything and Vern plunged on:
“I mean, sometimes I get nightmares. Like ... aw, you guys remember the time Danny Naughton left that pile of old funnybooks, the ones with the vampires and people gettin cut up and all that shit? Jeezum-crow, I’d wake up in the middle of the night dreamin about some guy hangin in a house with his face all green or somethin, you know, like that, and it seems like there’s somethin under the bed and if I dangled a hand over the side, that thing might, you know, grab me ...”
We all began to nod. We knew about the night shift. I would have laughed then, though, if you had told me that one day not too many years from then I’d parlay all those childhood fears and night-sweats into about a million dollars.
“And I don’t dare say anything because my friggin brother ... well, you know Billy ... he’d broadcast it ...” He shrugged miserably. “So I’m ascared to look at that kid cause if he’s, you know, if he’s really bad ...”
I swallowed and glanced at Chris. He was looking gravely at Vem and nodding for him to go on.
“If he’s really bad,” Vern resumed, “I’ll have nightmares about him and wake up thinkin it’s him under my bed, all cut up in a pool of blood like he just came out of one of those Saladmaster gadgets they show on TV, just eyeballs and hair, but movin somehow, if you can dig that, mooovin somehow, you know, and gettin ready to grab—”
“Jesus Christ,” Teddy said thickly. “What a f**kin bedtime story.”
“Well I can’t help it,” Vern said, his voice defensive. “But I feel like we hafta see him, even if there are bad dreams. You know? Like we hafta. But ... but maybe it shouldn’t be no good time.”
“Yeah,” Chris said softly. “Maybe it shouldn’t.”
Vern said pleadingly: “You won’t tell none of the other guys, will you? I don’t mean about the nightmares, everybody has those—I mean about wakin up and thinkin there might be somethin under the bed. I’m too f**kin old for the boogeyman.”
We all said we wouldn’t tell, and a glum silence fell over us again. It was only quarter to three, but it felt much later. It was too hot and too much had happened. We weren’t even over into Harlow yet. We were going to have to pick them up and lay them down if we were going to make some real miles before dark.
We passed the railroad junction and a signal on a tall, rusty pole and all of us paused to chuck cinders at the steel flag on top, but nobody hit it. And around three-thirty we came to the Castle River and the GS&WM trestle which crossed it.
14
The river was better than a hundred yards across at that point in 1960; I’ve been back to look at it since then, and found it had narrowed up quite a bit during the years between. They’re always fooling with the river, trying to make it work better for the mills, and they’ve put in so many dams that it’s pretty well tamed. But in those days there were only three dams on the whole length of the river as it ran across New Hampshire and half of Maine. The Castle was still almost free back then, and every third spring it would overflow its banks and cover Route 136 in either Harlow or Danvers Junction or both.