Different Seasons(159)

“Chris, they could call the Constable. To get back at us.”

“He’s ours and we’re gonna take him OUT!”

“Those guys would say anything to get us in dutch,” I told him. My words sounded thin, stupid, sick with the flu. “Say anything and then lie each other up. You know how people can get other people in trouble telling lies, man. Like with the milk-mo—”

“I DON’T CARE! he screamed, and lunged at me with his fists up. But one of his feet struck Ray Brower’s ribcage with a soggy thump, making the body rock. He tripped and fell full-length and I waited for him to get up and maybe punch me in the mouth but instead he lay where he had fallen, head pointing toward the embankment, arms stretched out over his head like a diver about to execute, in the exact posture Ray Brower had been in when we found him. I looked wildly at Chris’s feet to make sure his sneakers were still on. Then he began to cry and scream, his body bucking in the muddy water, splashing it around, fists drumming up and down in it, head twisting from side to side. Teddy and Vern were staring at him, agog, because nobody had ever seen Chris Chambers cry. After a moment or two I walked back to the embankment, climbed it, and sat down on one of the rails. Teddy and Vern followed me. And we sat there in the rain, not talking, looking like those three Monkeys of Virtue they sell in dime-stores and those sleazy gift-shops that always look like they are tottering on the edge of bankruptcy.

28

It was twenty minutes before Chris climbed the embankment to sit down beside us. The clouds had begun to break. Spears of sun came down through the rips. The bushes seemed to have gone three shades darker green in the last forty-five minutes. He was mud all the way up one side and down the other. His hair was standing up in muddy spikes. The only clean parts of him were the whitewashed circles around his eyes.

“You’re right, Gordie,” he said. “Nobody gets last dibs. Goocher all around, huh?”

I nodded. Five minutes passed. No one said anything. And I happened to have a thought—just in case they did call Bannerman. I went back down the embankment and over to where Chris had been standing. I got down on my knees and began to comb carefully through the water and marshgrass with my fingers.

“What you doing?” Teddy asked, joining me.

“It’s to your left, I think,” Chris said, and pointed.

I looked there and after a minute or two I found both shell casings. They winked in the fresh sunlight. I gave them to Chris. He nodded and stuffed them into a pocket of his jeans.

“Now we go,” Chris said.

“Hey, come on!” Teddy yelled, in real agony. “I wanna take ’im!”

“Listen, dummy,” Chris said, “if we take him back we could all wind up in the reformatory. It’s like Gordie says. Those guys could make up any story they wanted to. What if they said we killed him, huh? How would you like that?”

“I don’t give a damn,” Teddy said sulkily. Then he looked at us with absurd hope. “Besides, we might only get a couple of months or so. As excessories. I mean, we’re only twelve f**kin years old, they ain’t gonna put us in Shawshank.”

Chris said softly: “You can’t get in the Army if you got a record, Teddy.”

I was pretty sure that was nothing but a bald-faced lie—but somehow this didn’t seem the time to say so. Teddy just looked at Chris for a long time, his mouth trembling. Finally he managed to squeak out: “No shit?”

“Ask Gordie.”

He looked at me hopefully.

“He’s right,” I said, feeling like a great big turd. “He’s right, Teddy. First thing they do when you volunteer is to check your name through R&I.”

“Holy God!”

“We’re gonna shag ass back to the trestle,” Chris said.

“Then we’ll get off the tracks and come into Castle Rock from the other direction. If people ask where we were, we’ll say we went campin up on Brickyard Hill and got lost.”

“Milo Pressman knows better,” I said. “That creep at the Florida Market does, too.”

“Well, we’ll say Milo scared us and that’s when we decided to go up on the Brickyard.”

I nodded. That might work. If Vern and Teddy could remember to stick to it.

“What about if our folks get together?” Vern asked.

“You worry about it if you want,” Chris said. “My dad’ll still be juiced up.”

“Come on, then,” Vern said, eyeing the screen of trees between us and the Back Harlow Road. He looked like he expected Bannerman, along with a brace of bloodhounds, to come crashing through at any moment. “Let’s get while the gettin’s good.”

We were all on our feet now, ready to go. The birds were singing like crazy, pleased with the rain and the shine and the worms and just about everything in the world, I guess. We all turned around, as if pulled on strings, and looked back at Ray Brower.

He was lying there, alone again. His arms had flopped out when we turned him over and now he was sort of spreadeagled, as if to welcome the sunshine. For a moment it seemed all right, a more natural deathscene than any ever constructed for a viewing-room audience by a mortician. Then you saw the bruise, the caked blood on the chin and under the nose, and the way the corpse was beginning to bloat. You saw that the bluebottles had come out with the sun and that they were circling the body, buzzing indolently. You remembered that gassy smell, sickish but dry, like farts in a closed room. He was a boy our age, he was dead, and I rejected the idea that anything about it could be natural; I pushed it away with horror.