Different Seasons(145)
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I took it.” He was silent for a moment, looking ahead at Teddy and Vern. “You knew I took it, Teddy knew. Everybody knew. Even Vern knew, I think.”
I started to deny it, and then closed my mouth. He was right. No matter what I might have said to my mother and father about how a person was supposed to be innocent until proved guilty, I had known.
“Then maybe I was sorry and tried to give it back,” Chris said.
I stared at him, my eyes widening. “You tried to give it back?”
“Maybe, I said. Just maybe. And maybe I took it to old lady Simons and told her, and maybe the money was all there but I got a three-day vacation anyway, because the money never showed up. And maybe the next week old lady Simons had this brand-new skirt on when she came to school.”
I stared at Chris, speechless with horror. He smiled at me, but it was a crimped, terrible smile that never touched his eyes.
“Just maybe,” he said, but I remembered the new skirt—a light brown paisley, sort of full. I remembered thinking that it made old lady Simons look younger, almost pretty.
“Chris, how much was that milk-money?”
“Almost seven bucks.”
“Christ,” I whispered.
“So just say that I stole the milk-money but then old lady Simons stole it from me. Just suppose I told that story. Me, Chris Chambers. Kid brother of Frank Chambers and Eyeball Chambers. You think anybody would have believed it?”
“No way,” I whispered. “Jesus Christ!”
He smiled his wintry, awful smile. “And do you think that bitch would have dared try something like that if it had been one of those dootchbags from up on The View that had taken the money?”
“No,” I said.
“Yeah, If it had been one of them, Simons would have said: ‘Kay, ’kay, we’ll forget it this time, but we’re gonna spank your wrist real hard and if you ever do it again we’ll have to spank both wrists. But me ... well, maybe she had her eye on that skirt for a long time. Anyway, she saw her chance and she took it. I was the stupid one for even trying to give that money back. But I never thought ... I never thought that a teacher... oh, who gives a f**k, anyway? Why am I even talkin about it?”
He swiped an arm angrily across his eyes and I realized he was almost crying.
“Chris,” I said, “why don’t you go into the college courses? You’re smart enough.”
“They decide all of that in the office. And in their smart little conferences. The teachers, they sit around in this big circle-jerk and all they say is Yeah, Yeah, Right, Right. All they give a f**k about is whether you behaved yourself in grammar school and what the town thinks of your family. All they’re deciding is whether or not you’ll contaminate all those precious college-course dootchbags. But maybe I’ll try to work myself up. I don’t know if I could do it, but I might try. Because I want to get out of Castle Rock and go to college and never see my old man or any of my brothers again. I want to go someplace where nobody knows me and I don’t have any black marks against me before I start. But I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Why not?”
“People. People drag you down.”
“Who?” I asked, thinking he must mean the teachers, or adult monsters like Miss Simons, who had wanted a new skirt, or maybe his brother Eyeball who hung around with Ace and Billy and Charlie and the rest, or maybe his own mom and dad.
But he said: “Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don’t you know that?” He pointed at Vern and Teddy, who were standing and waiting for us to catch up. They were laughing about something; in fact, Vern was just about busting a gut.
“Your friends do. They’re like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You can’t save them. You can only drown with them.”
“Come on, you f**kin slowpokes!” Vern shouted, still laughing.
“Yeah, comin!” Chris called, and before I could say anything else, he began to run. I ran, too, but he caught up to them before I could catch up to him.
18
We went another mile and then decided to camp for the night. There was still some daylight left, but nobody really wanted to use it. We were pooped from the scene at the dump and from our scare on the train trestle, but it was more than that. We were in Harlow now, in the woods. Somewhere up ahead was a dead kid, probably mangled and covered with flies. Maggots, too, by this time. Nobody wanted to get too close to him with the night coming on. I had read somewhere—in an Algernon Blackwood story, I think—that a guy’s ghost hangs out around his dead body until that body is given a decent Christian burial, and there was no way I wanted to wake up in the night and confront the glowing, disembodied ghost of Ray Brower, moaning and gibbering and floating among the dark and rustling pines. By stopping here we figured there had to be at least ten miles between us and him, and of course all four of us knew there were no such things as ghosts, but ten miles seemed just about far enough in case what everybody knew was wrong.
Vern, Chris, and Teddy gathered wood and got a modest little campfire going on a bed of cinders. Chris scraped a bare patch all around the fire—the woods were powder-dry, and he didn’t want to take any chances. While they were doing that I sharpened some sticks and made what my brother Denny used to call “Pioneer Drumsticks”—lumps of hamburger pushed onto the ends of green branches. The three of them laughed and bickered over their woodcraft (which was almost nil; there was a Castle Rock Boy Scout troop, but most of the kids who hung around our vacant lot considered it to be an organization made up mostly of pussies), arguing about whether it was better to cook over flames or over coals (a moot point; we were too hungry to wait for coals), whether dried moss would work as kindling, what they would do if they used up all the matches before they got the fire to stay lit. Teddy claimed he could make a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Chris claimed he was so full of shit he squeaked. They didn’t have to try; Vern got the small pile of twigs and dry moss to catch from the second match. The day was perfectly still and there was no wind to puff out the light. We all took turns feeding the thin flames until they began to grow stouter on wrist-chunks of wood fetched from an old deadfall some thirty yards into the forest.