Different Seasons(156)
“Here we all are,” Ace said, grinning. “So you just—”
“VERN!!” Billy Tessio cried in a terrible, accusing, my-judgment-cometh-and-that-right-early voice. He made a pair of dripping fists. “You little sonofawhore! You was under the porch! Cock-knocker!”
Vem flinched.
Charlie Hogan waxed positively lyrical: “You little keyhole-peeping cunt-licking bungwipe! I ought to beat the living shit out of you!”
“Yeah? Well, try it!” Teddy brayed suddenly. His eyes were crazily alight behind his rainspotted glasses. “Come on, fightcha for ’im! Come on! Come on, big men!”
Billy and Charlie didn’t need a second invitation. They started forward together and Vern flinched again—no doubt visualizing the ghosts of Beatings Past and Beatings Yet to Come. He flinched ... but hung tough. He was with his friends, and we had been through a lot, and we hadn’t got here in a couple of cars.
But Ace held Billy and Charlie back, simply by touching each of them on the shoulder.
“Now listen, you guys,” Ace said. He spoke patiently, just as if we weren’t all standing in a roaring rainstorm. “There’s more of us than there are of you. We’re bigger. We’ll give you one chance to just blow away. I don’t give a f**k where. Just make like a tree and leave.”
Chris’s brother giggled and Fuzzy clapped Ace on the back in appreciation of his great wit. The Sid Caesar of the j.d. set.
“Cause we’re takin him.” Ace smiled gently, and you could imagine him smiling that same gentle smile just before breaking his cue over the head of some uneducated punk who had made the terrible mistake of lipping off while Ace was lining up a shot. “If you go, we’ll take him. If you stay, we’ll beat the piss outta you and still take him. Besides,” he added, trying to gild the thuggery with a little righteousness, “Charlie and Billy found him, so it’s their dibs anyway.”
“They was chicken!” Teddy shot back. “Vern told us about it! They was f**kin chicken right outta their f**kin minds!” He screwed his face up into a terrified, snivelling parody of Charlie Hogan. “ ‘I wish we never boosted that car! I wish we never went out on no Back Harlow Road to whack off a piece! Oh, Billee, what are we gonna do? Oh Billee, I think I just turned my Fruit of the Looms into a fudge factory! Oh Billee—’ ”
“That’s it,” Charlie said, starting forward again. His face was knotted with rage and sullen embarrassment. “Kid, whatever your name is, get ready to reach down your f**kin throat the next time you need to pick your nose.”
I looked wildly down at Ray Brower. He stared calmly up into the rain with his one eye, below us but above it all. The thunder was still booming steadily, but the rain had begun to slack off.
“What do you say, Gordie?” Ace asked. He was holding Charlie lightly by the arm, the way an accomplished trainer would restrain a vicious dog. “You must have at least some of your brother’s sense. Tell these guys to back off. I’ll let Charlie beat up the foureyes el punko a little bit and then we all go about our business. What do you say?”
He was wrong to mention Denny. I had wanted to reason with him, to point out what Ace knew perfectly well, that we had every right to take Billy and Charlie’s dibs since Vern had heard them giving said dibs away. I wanted to tell him how Vern and I had almost gotten run down by a freight train on the trestle which spans the Castle River. About Milo Pressman and his fearless—if stupid—sidekick, Chopper the Wonder-Dog. About the blood-suckers, too. I guess all I really wanted to tell him was Come on, Ace, fair is fair. You know that. But he had to bring Denny into it, and what I heard coming out of my mouth instead of sweet reason was my own death-warrant: “Suck my fat one, you cheap dimestore hood.”
Ace’s mouth formed a perfect O of surprise—the expression was so unexpectedly prissy that under other circumstances it would have been a laff riot, so to speak. All of the others—on both sides of the bog—stared at me, dumbfounded.
Then Teddy screamed gleefully: “That’s telling ’im, Gordie! Oh boy! Too cool!”
I stood numbly, unable to believe it. It was like some crazed understudy had shot onstage at the critical moment and declaimed lines that weren’t even in the play. Telling a guy to suck was as bad as you could get without resorting to his mother. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Chris had un-shouldered his knapsack and was digging into it frantically, but I didn’t get it—not then, anyway.
“Okay,” Ace said softly. “Let’s take em. Don’t hurt nobody but the Lachance kid. I’m gonna break both his f**kin arms.”
I went dead cold. I didn’t piss myself the way I had on the railroad trestle, but it must have been because I had nothing inside to let out. He meant it, you see; the years between then and now have changed my mind about a lot of things, but not about that. When Ace said he was going to break both of my arms, he absolutely meant it.
They started to walk toward us through the slackening rain. Jackie Mudgett took a switchknife out of his pocket and hit the chrome. Six inches of steel flicked out, dove-gray in the afternoon half-light. Vern and Teddy dropped suddenly into fighting crouches on either side of me. Teddy did so eagerly, Vern with a desperate, cornered grimace on his face.
The big kids advanced in a line, their feet splashing through the bog, which was now one big sludgy puddle because of the storm. The body of Ray Brower lay at our feet like a waterlogged barrel. I got ready to fight ... and that was when Chris fired the pistol he had hawked out of his old man’s dresser.