Different Seasons(151)
Still crying, I walked back to my clothes and put them on. I wanted to stop crying, but I just didn’t seem able to turn off the waterworks. Then the shakes set in, making it worse. Vern ran up to me, still naked.
“They off, Gordie? They off me? They off me?”
He twirled in front of me like an insane dancer on a carnival stage.
“They off? Huh? Huh? They off me, Gordie?”
His eyes kept going past me, as wide and white as the eyes of a plaster horse on a merry-go-round.
I nodded that they were and just kept on crying. It seemed that crying was going to be my new career. I tucked my shirt in and then buttoned it all the way to the neck. I put on my socks and my sneakers. Little by little the tears began to slow down. Finally there was nothing left but a few hitches and moans, and then they stopped, too.
Chris walked over to me, wiping his mouth with a handful of elm leaves. His eyes were wide and mute and apologetic.
When we were all dressed we just stood there looking at each other for a moment, and then we began to climb the railroad embankment. I looked back once at the burst leech lying on top of the tromped-down bushes where we had danced and screamed and groaned them off. It looked deflated ... but still ominous.
Fourteen years later I sold my first novel and made my first trip to New York. “It’s going to be a three-day celebration,” my new editor told me over the phone. “People slinging bullshit will be summarily shot.” But of course it was three days of unmitigated bullshit.
While I was there I wanted to do all the standard out-oftowner things—see a stage show at the Radio City Music Hall, go to the top of the Empire State Building (f*ck the World Trade Center; the building King Kong climbed in 1933 is always gonna be the tallest one in the world for me), visit Times Square by night. Keith, my editor, seemed more than pleased to show his city off. The last touristy thing we did was to take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, and while leaning on the rail I happened to look down and see scores of used condoms floating on the mild swells. And I had a moment of almost total recall—or perhaps it was an actual incidence of time-travel. Either way, for one second I was literally in the past, pausing halfway up that embankment and looking back at the burst leech: dead, deflated ... but still ominous.
Keith must have seen something in my face because he said: “Not very pretty, are they?”
I only shook my head, wanting to tell him not to apologize, wanting to tell him that you didn’t have to come to the Apple and ride the ferry to see used rubbers, wanting to say: The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality; that’s why all the verbs in stories have -ed endings, Keith my good man, even the ones that sell millions of paperbacks. The only two useful artforms are religion and stories.
I was pretty drunk that night, as you may have guessed.
What I did tell him was: “I was thinking of something else, that’s all.” The most important things are the hardest things to say.
22
We walked further down the tracks—I don’t know just how far—and I was starting to think: Well, okay, I’m going to be able to handle it, it’s all over anyway, just a bunch of leeches, what the f**k; I was still thinking it when waves of whiteness suddenly began to come over my sight and I fell down.
I must have fallen hard, but landing on the crossties was like plunging into a warm and puffy feather bed. Someone turned me over. The touch of hands was faint and unimportant. Their faces were disembodied balloons looking down at me from miles up. They looked the way the ref’s face must look to a fighter who has been punched silly and is currently taking a ten-second rest on the canvas. Their words came in gentle oscillations, fading in and out.
“. . . him?”
“. . . be all . . .”
“. . . if you think the sun ...”
“Gordie, are you ...”
Then I must have said something that didn’t make much sense because they began to look really worried.
“We better take him back, man,” Teddy said, and then the whiteness came over everything again.
When it cleared, I seemed to be all right. Chris was squatting next to me, saying: “Can you hear me, Gordie? You there, man?”
“Yes,” I said, and sat up. A swarm of black dots exploded in front of my eyes, and then went away. I waited to see if they’d come back, and when they didn’t, I stood up.
“You scared the cheesly old shit outta me, Gordie,” he said. “You want a drink of water?”
“Yeah.”
He gave me his canteen, half-full of water, and I let three warm gulps roll down my throat.
“Why’d you faint, Gordie?” Vern asked anxiously.
“Made a bad mistake and looked at your face,” I said.
“Eeee-eee-eeee!” Teddy cackled. “Fuckin Gordie! You wet!”
“You really okay?” Vern persisted.
“Yeah. Sure. It was ... bad there for a minute. Thinking about those suckers.”
They nodded soberly. We took five in the shade and then went on walking, me and Vern on one side of the tracks again, Chris and Teddy on the other. We figured we must be getting close.
23
We weren’t as close as we thought, and if we’d had the brains to spend two minutes looking at a roadmap, we would have seen why. We knew that Ray Brower’s corpse had to be near the Back Harlow Road, which dead-ends on the bank of the Royal River. Another trestle carries the GS&WM tracks across the Royal. So this is the way we figured: Once we got close to the Royal, we’d be getting close to the Back Harlow Road, where Billy and Charlie had been parked when they saw the boy. And since the Royal was only ten miles from the Castle River, we figured we had it made in the shade.