The Body Read online

  Or so he figured it.

  He tried to find the spot from memory and dug there. No luck. To the right and the left of that spot. Still no luck. He gave up for the day but had tried off and on ever since. Four years, man. Four years. Isn’t that a pisser? You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  It had gotten to be sort of an obsession with him. The Tessio front porch ran the length of the house, probably forty feet long and seven feet wide. He had dug through damn near every inch of that area two, maybe three times and no pennies. The number of pennies began to grow in his mind. When it first happened he told Chris and me that there had been maybe three dollars’ worth. A year later he was up to five and just lately it was running around ten, more or less, depending on how broke he was.

  Every so often we tried to tell him what was so clear to us—that Billy had known about the jar and dug it up himself. Vern refused to believe it, although he hated Billy like the Arabs hate the Jews and probably would have cheerfully voted the death-penalty on his brother for shoplifting, if the opportunity had ever presented itself. He also refused to ask Billy point blank. Probably he was afraid Billy would laugh and say Course I got them, you stupid pussy, and there was twenty bucks’ worth of pennies in that jar and I spent every fuckin cent of it. Instead, Vern went out and dug for the pennies whenever the spirit moved him (and whenever Billy wasn’t around). He always crawled out from under the porch with his jeans dirty and his hair leafy and his hands empty. We ragged him about it something wicked, and his nickname was Penny—Penny Tessio. I think he came up to the club with his news as quick as he did not just to get it out but to show us that some good had finally come of his penny-hunt.

  He had been up that morning before anybody, ate his cornflakes, and was out in the driveway shooting baskets through the old hoop nailed up on the garage, nothing much to do, no one to play Ghost with or anything, and he decided to have another dig for his pennies. He was under the porch when the screen door slammed up above. He froze, not making a sound. If it was his dad, he would crawl out; if it was Billy, he’d stay put until Billy and his j.d. friend Charlie Hogan had taken off.

  Two pairs of footsteps crossed the porch, and then Charlie Hogan himself said in a trembling, crybaby voice: “Jesus Christ, Billy, what are we gonna do?”

  Vern said that just hearing Charlie Hogan talk like that—Charlie, who was one of the toughest kids in town—made him prick up his ears. Charlie, after all, hung out with Ace Merrill and Eyeball Chambers, and if you hung out with cats like that, you had to be tough.

  “Nuthin,” Billy said. “That’s all we’re gonna do. Nuthin.”

  “We gotta do somethin,” Charlie said, and they sat down on the porch close to where Vern was hunkered down. “Didn’t you see him?”

  Vern took a chance and crept a little closer to the steps, practically slavering. At that point he thought that maybe Billy and Charlie had been really drunked up and had run somebody down. Vern was careful not to crackle any of the old leaves as he moved. If the two of them found out he was under the porch and had overheard them, you could have put what was left of him in a Ken-L Ration dogfood can.

  “It’s nuthin to us,” Billy Tessio said. “The kid’s dead so it’s nuthin to him, neither. Who gives a fuck if they ever find him? I don’t.”

  “It was that kid they been talkin about on the radio,” Charlie said. “It was, sure as shit. Brocker, Brower, Flowers, whatever his name is. Fuckin train must have hit him.”

  “Yeah,” Billy said. Sound of a scratched match. Vern saw it flicked into the gravel driveway and then smelled cigarette smoke. “It sure did. And you puked.”

  No words, but Vern sensed emotional waves of shame radiating off Charlie Hogan.

  “Well, the girls didn’t see it,” Billy said after awhile. “Lucky break.” From the sound, he clapped Charlie on the back to buck him up. “They’d blab it from here to Portland. We tore out of there fast, though. You think they knew there was something wrong?”

  “No,” Charlie said. “Marie don’t like to go down that Back Harlow Road past the cemetery, anyway. She’s afraid of ghosts.” Then again in that scared crybaby voice: “Jesus, I wish we’d never boosted no car last night! Just gone to the show like we was gonna!”

  Charlie and Billy went with a couple of scags named Marie Dougherty and Beverly Thomas; you never saw such gross-looking broads outside of a carnival show—pimples, moustaches, the whole works. Sometimes the four of them—or maybe six or eight if Fuzzy Bracowicz or Ace Merrill were along with their girls—would boost a car from a Lewiston parking lot and go joyriding out into the country with two or three bottles of Wild Irish Rose wine and a six-pack of ginger ale. They’d take the girls parking somewhere in Castle View or Harlow or Shiloh, drink Purple Jesuses, and make out. Then they’d dump the car somewhere near home. Cheap thrills in the monkey-house, as Chris sometimes said. They’d never been caught at it, but Vern kept hoping. He really dug the idea of visiting Billy on Sundays at the reformatory.

  “If we told the cops, they’d want to know how we got way the hell out in Harlow,” Billy said. “We ain’t got no car, neither of us. It’s better if we just keep our mouths shut. Then they can’t touch us.”

  “We could make a nonnamus call,” Charlie said.

  “They trace those fuckin calls,” Billy said ominously. “I seen it on Highway Patrol. And Dragnet.”

  “Yeah, right,” Charlie said miserably. “Jesus. I wish Ace’d been with us. We could have told the cops we was in his car.”

  “Well, he wasn’t.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. He sighed. “I guess you’re right.” A cigarette butt flicked into the driveway. “We hadda walk up and take a piss by the tracks, didn’t we? Couldn’t walk the other way, could we? And I got puke on my new P. F. Fliers.” His voice sank a little. “Fuckin kid was laid right out, you know it? Didja see that sonofawhore, Billy?”

  “I seen him,” Billy said, and a second cigarette butt joined the first in the driveway. “Let’s go see if Ace is up. I want some juice.”

  “We gonna tell him?”

  “Charlie, we ain’t gonna tell nobody. Nobody never. You dig me?”

  “I dig you,” Charlie said. “Christ Jesus, I wish we never boosted that fucking Dodge.”

  “Aw, shut the fuck up and come on.”

  Two pairs of legs clad in tight, wash-faded pegged jeans, two pairs of feet in black engineer boots with side-buckles, came down the steps. Vern froze on his hands and knees (“My balls crawled up so high I thought they was trine to get back home,” he told us), sure his brother would sense him beneath the porch and drag him out and kill him—he and Charlie Hogan would kick the few brains the good Lord had seen fit to give him right out his jug ears and then stomp him with their engineer boots. But they just kept going and when Vern was sure they were really gone, he had crawled out from under the porch and ran here.

  5

  “You’re really lucky,” I said. “They would have killed you.”

  Teddy said, “I know the Back Harlow Road. It comes to a dead end by the river. We used to fish for cossies out there.”

  Chris nodded. “There used to be a bridge, but there was a flood. A long time ago. Now there’s just the train-tracks.”

  “Could a kid really have gotten all the way from Chamberlain to Harlow?” I asked Chris. “That’s twenty or thirty miles.”

  “I think so. He probably happened on the train-tracks and followed them the whole way. Maybe he thought they’d take him out, or maybe he thought he could flag down a train if he had to. But that’s just a freight run now—GS&WM up to Derry and Brownsville—and not many of those anymore. He’d have to’ve walked all the way to Castle Rock to get out. After dark a train must have finally come along . . . and el smacko.”

  Chris drove his right fist down against his left palm, making a flat noise. Teddy, a veteran of many close calls dodging the pulp-trucks on 196, looked vaguely pleased. I felt a little sick, imagining that kid so far away
from home, scared to death but doggedly following the GS&WM tracks, probably walking on the ties because of the night-noises from the overhanging trees and bushes . . . maybe even from the culverts underneath the railroad bed. And here comes the train, and maybe the big headlight on the front hypnotized him until it was too late to jump. Or maybe he was just lying there on the tracks in a hunger-faint when the train came along. Either way, any way, Chris had the straight of it: el smacko had been the final result. The kid was dead.

  “So anyway, you want to go see it?” Vern asked. He was squirming around like he had to go to the bathroom he was so excited.

  We all looked at him for a long second, no one saying anything. Then Chris tossed his cards down and said: “Sure! And I bet you anything we get our pictures in the paper!”

  “Huh?” Vern said.

  “Yeah?” Teddy said, and grinning his crazy truck-dodging grin.

  “Look,” Chris said, leaning across the ratty card-table. “We can find the body and report it! We’ll be on the news!”

  “I dunno,” Vern said, obviously taken aback. “Billy will know where I found out. He’ll beat the living shit outta me.”

  “No he won’t,” I said, “because it’ll be us guys that find that kid, not Billy and Charlie Hogan in a boosted car. Then they won’t have to worry about it anymore. They’ll probably pin a medal on you, Penny.”

  “Yeah?” Vern grinned, showing his bad teeth. It was a dazed sort of grin, as if the thought of Billy being pleased with anything he did had acted on him like a hard shot to the chin. “Yeah, you think so?”

  Teddy was grinning, too. Then he frowned and said: “Oh-oh.”

  “What?” Vern asked. He was squirming again, afraid that some really basic objection to the idea had just cropped up in Teddy’s mind . . . or what passed for Teddy’s mind.

  “Our folks,” Teddy said. “If we find that kid’s body over in South Harlow tomorrow, they’re gonna know we didn’t spend the night campin out in Vern’s back field.”

  “Yeah,” Chris said. “They’ll know we went lookin for that kid.”

  “No they won’t,” I said. I felt funny—both excited and scared because I knew we could do it and get away with it. The mixture of emotions made me feel heatsick and headachy. I picked up the Bikes to have something to do with my hands and started box-shuffling them. That and how to play cribbage was about all I got for older brother stuff from Dennis. The other kids envied that shuffle, and I guess everyone I knew had asked me to show them how it went . . . everyone except Chris. I guess only Chris knew that showing someone would be like giving away a piece of Dennis, and I just didn’t have so much of him that I could afford to pass pieces around.

  I said: “We’ll just tell em we got bored tenting in Vern’s field because we’ve done it so many times before. So we decided to hike up the tracks and have a campout in the woods. I bet we don’t even get hided for it because everybody’ll be so excited about what we found.”

  “My dad’ll hide me anyway,” Chris said. “He’s on a really mean streak this time.” He shook his head sullenly. “To hell, it’s worth a hiding.”

  “Okay,” Teddy said, getting up. He was still grinning like crazy, ready to break into his high-pitched, cackling laugh at any second. “Let’s all get together at Vern’s house after lunch. What can we tell em about supper?”

  Chris said, “You and me and Gordie can say we’re eating at Vern’s.”

  “And I’ll tell my mom I’m eating over at Chris’s,” Vern said.

  That would work unless there was some emergency we couldn’t control or unless any of the parents got together. And neither Vern’s folks or Chris’s had a phone. Back then there were a lot of families which still considered a telephone a luxury, especially families of the shirttail variety. And none of us came from the upper crust.

  My dad was retired. Vern’s dad worked in the mill and was still driving a 1952 DeSoto. Teddy’s mom had a house on Danberry Street and she took in a boarder whenever she could get one. She didn’t have one that summer; the furnished room to let sign had been up in the parlor window since June. And Chris’s dad was always on a “mean streak,” more or less; he was a drunk who got welfare off and on—mostly on—and spent most of his time hanging out in Sukey’s Tavern with Junior Merrill, Ace Merrill’s old man, and a couple of other local rumpots.

  Chris didn’t talk much about his dad, but we all knew he hated him like poison. Chris was marked up every two weeks or so, bruises on his cheeks and neck or one eye swelled up and as colorful as a sunset, and once he came into school with a big clumsy bandage on the back of his head. Other times he never got to school at all. His mom would call him in sick because he was too lamed up to come in. Chris was smart, really smart, but he played truant a lot, and Mr. Halliburton, the town truant officer, was always showing up at Chris’s house, driving his old black Chevrolet with the NO RIDERS sticker in the corner of the windshield. If Chris was being truant and Bertie (as we called him—always behind his back, of course) caught him, he would haul him back to school and see that Chris got detention for a week. But if Bertie found out that Chris was home because his father had beaten the shit out of him, Bertie just went away and didn’t say boo to a cuckoo-bird. It never occurred to me to question this set of priorities until about twenty years later.

  The year before, Chris had been suspended from school for three days. A bunch of milk-money disappeared when it was Chris’s turn to be room-monitor and collect it, and because he was a Chambers from those no-account Chamberses, he had to take a hike even though he always swore he never hawked that money. That was the time Mr. Chambers put Chris in the hospital for an overnight stay; when his dad heard Chris was suspended, he broke Chris’s nose and his right wrist. Chris came from a bad family, all right, and everybody thought he would turn out bad . . . including Chris. His brothers had lived up to the town’s expectations admirably. Frank, the eldest, ran away from home when he was seventeen, joined the Navy, and ended up doing a long stretch in Portsmouth for rape and criminal assault. The next-eldest, Richard (his right eye was all funny and jittery, which was why everybody called him Eyeball), had dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, and chummed around with Charlie and Billy Tessio and their j.d. buddies.

  “I think all that’ll work,” I told Chris. “What about John and Marty?” John and Marty DeSpain were two other members of our regular gang.

  ‘They’re still away,” Chris said. “They won’t be back until Monday.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad.”

  “So are we set?” Vern asked, still squirming. He didn’t want the conversation sidetracked even for a minute.

  “I guess we are,” Chris said. “Who wants to play some more scat?”

  No one did. We were too excited to play cards. We climbed down from the treehouse, climbed the fence into the vacant lot, and played three-flies-six-grounders for awhile with Vern’s old friction-taped baseball, but that was no fun, either. All we could think about was that kid Brower, hit by a train, and how we were going to see him, or what was left of him. Around ten o’clock we all drifted away home to fix it with our parents.

  6

  I got to my house at quarter of eleven, after stopping at the drugstore to check out the paperbacks. I did that every couple of days to see if there were any new John D. MacDonalds. I had a quarter and I figured if there was, I’d take it along. But there were only the old ones, and I’d read most of those half a dozen times.

  When I got home the car was gone and I remembered that my mom and some of her hen-party friends had gone to Boston to see a concert. A great old concert-goer, my mother. And why not? Her only kid was dead and she had to do something to take her mind off it. I guess that sounds pretty bitter. And I guess if you’d been there, you’d understand why I felt that way.

  Dad was out back, passing a fine spray from the hose over his ruined garden. If you couldn’t tell it was a lost cause from his glum face, you sure could by looking at the garden itse
lf. The soil was a light, powdery gray. Everything in it was dead except for the corn, which had never grown so much as a single edible ear. Dad said he’d never known how to water a garden; it had to be mother nature or nobody. He’d water too long in one spot and drown the plants. In the next row, plants were dying of thirst. He could never hit a happy medium. But he didn’t talk about it often. He’d lost a son in April and a garden in August. And if he didn’t want to talk about either one, I guess that was his privilege. It just bugged me that he’d given up talking about everything else, too. That was taking democracy too fucking far.

  “Hi, Daddy,” I said, standing beside him. I offered him the Rollos I’d bought at the drugstore. “Want one?”

  “Hello, Gordon. No thanks.” He kept on flicking the fine spray over the hopeless gray earth.

  “Be okay if I camp out in Vern Tessio’s back field tonight with some of the guys?”

  “What guys?”

  “Vern. Teddy Duchamp. Maybe Chris.”

  I expected him to start right in on Chris—how Chris was bad company, a rotten apple from the bottom of the barrel, a thief, and an apprentice juvenile delinquent.

  But he just sighed and said, “I suppose it’s okay.”

  “Great! Thanks!”

  I turned to go into the house and check out what was on the boob tube when he stopped me with: “Those are the only people you want to be with, aren’t they, Gordon?”

  I looked back at him, braced for an argument, but there was no argument in him that morning. It would have been better if there had been, I think. His shoulders were slumped. His face, pointed toward the dead garden and not toward me, sagged. There was a certain unnatural sparkle in his eyes that might have been tears.