Different Seasons(144)
“Junior High,” Chris said. “And you know what, Gordie? By next June, we’ll all be quits.”
“What are you talking about? Why would that happen?”
“It’s not gonna be like grammar school, that’s why. You’ll be in the college courses. Me and Teddy and Vern, we’ll all be in the shop courses, playing pocket-pool with the rest of the retards, making ashtrays and birdhouses. Vern might even have to go into Remedial. You’ll meet a lot of new guys. Smart guys. That’s just the way it works, Gordie. That’s how they got it set up.”
“Meet a lot of pussies is what you mean,” I said.
He gripped my arm. “No, man. Don’t say that. Don’t even think that. They’ll get your stories. Not like Vern and Teddy.”
“Fuck the stories. I’m not going in with a lot of pussies. No sir.”
“If you don’t, then you’re an ass**le.”
“What’s ass**le about wanting to be with your friends?” He looked at me thoughtfully, as if deciding whether or not to tell me something. We had slowed down: Vern and Teddy had pulled almost half a mile ahead. The sun, lower now, came at us through the overlacing trees in broken, dusty shafts, turning everything gold—but it was a tawdry gold, dime-store gold, if you can dig that. The tracks stretched ahead of us in the gloom that was just starting to gather—they seemed almost to twinkle. Star-pricks of light stood out on them here and there, as if some nutty rich guy masquerading as a common laborer had decided to embed a diamond in the steel every sixty yards or so. It was still hot. The sweat rolled off us, slicking our bodies.
“It’s ass**le if your friends can drag you down,” Chris said finally. “I know about you and your folks. They don’t give a shit about you. Your big brother was the one they cared about. Like my dad, when Frank got thrown into the stockade in Portsmouth. That was when he started always bein mad at us other kids and hitting us all the time. Your dad doesn’t beat on you, but maybe that’s even worse. He’s got you asleep. You could tell him you were enrolling in the f**kin shop division and you know what he’d do? He’d turn to the next page in his paper and say: Well, that’s nice, Gordon, go ask your mother what’s for dinner. And don’t try to tell me different. I’ve met him.”
I didn’t try to tell him different. It’s scary to find out that someone else, even a friend, knows just how things are with you.
“You’re just a kid, Gordie—”
“Gee, thanks, Dad.”
“I wish to f**k I was your father!” he said angrily. “You wouldn’t go around talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was! It’s like God gave you something, all those stories you can make up, and He said: This is what we got for you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too f**ked up to do it then maybe I ought to.”
His face looked like he was expecting me to take a swing at him; it was set and unhappy in the green-gold late afternoon light. He had broken the cardinal rule for kids in those days. You could say anything about another kid, you could rank him to the dogs and back, but you didn’t say a bad word ever about his mom and dad. That was the Fabled Automatic, the same way not inviting your Catholic friends home to dinner on Friday unless you’d checked first to make sure you weren’t having meat was the Fabled Automatic. If a kid ranked out your mom and dad, you had to feed him some knuckles.
“Those stories you tell, they’re no good to anybody but you, Gordie. If you go along with us just because you don’t want the gang to break up, you’ll wind up just another grunt, makin C’s to get on the teams. You’ll get to High and take the same f**kin shop courses and throw erasers and pull your meat along with the rest of the grunts. Get detentions. Fuckin suspensions. And after awhile all you’ll care about is gettin a car so you can take some skag to the hops or down to the f**kin Twin Bridges Tavern. Then you’ll knock her up and spend the rest of your life in the mill or some f**kin shoeshop in Auburn or maybe even up to Hillcrest pluckin chickens. And that pie story will never get written down. Nothin’ll get written down. Cause you’ll just be another wiseguy with shit for brains.”
Chris Chambers was twelve when he said all that to me. But while he was saying it his face crumpled and folded into something older, oldest, ageless. He spoke tonelessly, colorlessly, but nevertheless, what he said struck terror into my bowels. It was as if he had lived that whole life already, that life where they tell you to step right up and spin the Wheel of Fortune, and it spins so pretty and the guy steps on a pedal and it comes up double zeros, house number, everybody loses. They give you a free pass and then they turn on the rain machine, pretty funny, huh, a joke even Vern Tessio could appreciate.
He grabbed my naked arm and his fingers closed tight. They dug grooves in my flesh. They ground at the bones. His eyes were hooded and dead—so dead, man, that he might have just fallen out of his own coffin.
“I know what people think of my family in this town. I know what they think of me and what they expect. Nobody even asked me if I took the milk-money that time. I just got a three-day vacation.”
“Did you take it?” I asked. I had never asked him before, and if you had told me I ever would, I would have called you crazy. The words came out in a little dry bullet.