The Body Read online

  All sensory input became intensified, as if some power-surge had occurred in the electrical flow of my brain, cranking everything up from a hundred and ten volts to two-twenty. I could hear a plane passing in the sky somewhere near and had time to wish I was on it, just sitting in a window seat with a Coke in my hand and gazing idly down at the shining line of a river whose name I did not know. I could see every little splinter and gouge in the tarred crosstie I was squatting on. And out of the corner of my eye I could see the rail itself with my hand still clutched around it, glittering insanely. The vibration from that rail sank so deeply into my hand that when I took it away it still vibrated, the nerve-endings kicking each other over again and again, tingling the way a hand or foot tingles when it has been asleep and is starting to wake up. I could taste my saliva, suddenly all electric and sour and thickened to curds along my gums. And worst, somehow most horrible of all, I couldn’t hear the train yet, could not know if it was rushing at me from ahead or behind, or how close it was. It was invisible. It was unannounced, except for that shaking rail. There was only that to advertise its imminent arrival. An image of Ray Brower, dreadfully mangled and thrown into a ditch somewhere like a ripped-open laundry bag, reeled before my eyes. We would join him, or at least Vern and I would, or at least I would. We had invited ourselves to our own funerals.

  The last thought broke the paralysis and I shot to my feet. I probably would have looked like a jack-in-the-box to anyone watching, but to myself I felt like a boy in underwater slow motion, shooting up not through five feet of air but rather up through five hundred feet of water, moving slowly, moving with a dreadful languidness as the water parted grudgingly.

  But at last I did break the surface.

  I screamed: “TRAIN!”

  The last of the paralysis fell from me and I began to run.

  Vern’s head jerked back over his shoulder. The surprise that distorted his face was almost comically exaggerated, written as large as the letters in a Dick and Jane primer. He saw me break into my clumsy, shambling run, dancing from one horribly high crosstie to the next, and knew I wasn’t joking. He began to run himself.

  Far ahead, I could see Chris stepping off the ties and onto the solid safe embankment and I hated him with a sudden bright green hate as juicy and as bitter as the sap in an April leaf. He was safe. That fucker was safe. I watched him drop to his knees and grab a rail.

  My left foot almost slipped into the yaw beneath me. I flailed with my arms, my eyes as hot as ball bearings in some runaway piece of machinery, got my balance, and ran on. Now I was right behind Vern. We were past the halfway point and for the first time I heard the train. It was coming from behind us, coming from the Castle Rock side of the river. It was a low rumbling noise that began to rise slightly and sort itself into the diesel thrum of the engine and the higher, more sinister sound of big grooved wheels turning heavily on the rails.

  “Awwwwwwww, shit!” Vern screamed.

  “Run, you pussy!” I yelled, and thumped him on the back.

  “I can’t! I’ll fall!”

  “Run faster!”

  “AWWWWWWWWW-SHIT!”

  But he ran faster, a shambling scarecrow with a bare, sunburnt back, the collar of his shirt swinging and dangling below his butt. I could see the sweat standing out on his peeling shoulderblades, standing out in perfect little beads. I could see the fine down on the nape of his neck. His muscles clenched and loosened, clenched and loosened, clenched and loosened. His spine stood out in a series of knobs, each knob casting its own crescent-shaped shadow—I could see that these knobs grew closer together as they approached his neck. He was still holding his bedroll and I was still holding mine. Vern’s feet thudded on the crossties. He almost missed one, lunged forward with his arms out, and I whacked him on the back again to keep him going.

  “Gordeee I can’t AWWWWWWWWW-SHEEEEEEYIT—”

  “RUN FASTER, DICKFACE!” I bellowed and was I enjoying this?

  Yeah—in some peculiar, self-destructive way that I have experienced since only when completely and utterly drunk, I was. I was driving Vern Tessio like a drover getting a particularly fine cow to market. And maybe he was enjoying his own fear in that same way, bawling like that self-same cow, hollering and sweating, his ribcage rising and falling like the bellows of a blacksmith on a speed-trip, clumsily keeping his footing, lurching ahead.

  The train was very loud now, its engine deepening to a steady rumble. Its whistle sounded as it crossed the junction point where we had paused to chuck cinders at the rail-flag. I had finally gotten my hellhound, like it or not. I kept waiting for the trestle to start shaking under my feet. When that happened, it would be right behind us.

  “GO FASTER, VERN! FAAASTER!”

  “Oh Gawd Gordie oh Gawd Gordie oh Gawd AWWWWWWW-SHEEEEYIT!”

  The freight’s electric horn suddenly spanked the air into a hundred pieces with one long loud blast, making everything you ever saw in a movie or a comic book or one of your own daydreams fly apart, letting you know what both the heroes and the cowards really heard when death flew at them:

  WHHHHHHHONNNNNNNK! WHHHHHHHHONNNN-NNNNK!

  And then Chris was below us and to the right, and Teddy was behind him, his glasses flashing back arcs of sunlight, and they were both mouthing a single word and the word was jump! but the train had sucked all the blood out of the word, leaving only its shape in their mouths. The trestle began to shake as the train charged across it. We jumped.

  Vern landed full-length in the dust and the cinders and I landed right beside him, almost on top of him. I never did see that train, nor do I know if its engineer saw us—when I mentioned the possibility that he hadn’t seen us to Chris a couple of years later, he said: “They don’t blow the horn like that just for chucks, Gordie.” But he could have; he could have been blowing it just for the hell of it. I suppose. Right then, such fine points didn’t much matter. I clapped my hands over my ears and dug my face into the hot dirt as the freight went by, metal squalling against metal, the air buffeting us. I had no urge to look at it. It was a long freight but I never looked at all. Before it had passed completely, I felt a warm hand on my neck and knew it was Chris’s.

  When it was gone—when I was sure it was gone—I raised my head like a soldier coming out of his foxhole at the end of a day-long artillery barrage. Vern was still plastered into the dirt, shivering. Chris was sitting cross-legged between us, one hand on Vern’s sweaty neck, the other still on mine.

  When Vern finally sat up, shaking all over and licking his lips compulsively, Chris said: “What you guys think if we drink those Cokes? Could anybody use one besides me?”

  We all thought we could use one.

  15

  About a quarter of a mile along on the Harlow side, the GS&WM tracks plunged directly into the woods. The heavily wooded land sloped down to a marshy area. It was full of mosquitoes almost as big as fighter-planes, but it was cool . . . blessedly cool.

  We sat down in the shade to drink our Cokes. Vern and I threw our shirts over our shoulders to keep the bugs off, but Chris and Teddy just sat naked to the waist, looking as cool and collected as two Eskimos in an icehouse. We hadn’t been there five minutes when Vern had to go off into the bushes and take a squat, which led to a good deal of joking and elbowing when he got back.

  “Train scare you much, Vern?”

  “No,” Vern said. “I was gonna squat when we got acrosst, anyway, I hadda take a squat, you know?”

  “Verrrrrrrn?” Chris and Teddy chorused.

  “Come on, you guys, I did. Sincerely.”

  “Then you won’t mind if we examine the seat of your Jockeys for Hershey-squirts, willya?” Teddy asked, and Vern laughed, finally understanding that he was getting ribbed.

  “Go screw.”

  Chris turned to me. “That train scare you, Gordie?”

  “Nope,” I said, and sipped my Coke.

  “Not much, you sucker.” He punched my arm.

  “Sincerely! I wasn’t
scared at all.”

  “Yeah? You wasn’t scared?” Teddy was looking me over carefully.

  “No. I was fuckin petrified.”

  This slew all of them, even Vern, and we laughed long and hard. Then we just lay back, not goofing anymore, just drinking our Cokes and being quiet. My body felt warm, exercised, at peace with itself. Nothing in it was working crossgrain to anything else. I was alive and glad to be. Everything seemed to stand out with a special dearness, and although I never could have said that out loud I didn’t think it mattered—maybe that sense of dearness was something I wanted just for myself.

  I think I began to understand a little bit that day what makes men become daredevils. I paid twenty dollars to watch Evel Kneivel attempt his jump over the Snake River Canyon a couple of years ago and my wife was horrified. She told me that if I’d been born a Roman I would have been right there in the Colosseum, munching grapes and watching as the lions disemboweled the Christians. She was wrong, although it was hard for me to explain why (and, really, I think she thought I was just jiving her). I didn’t cough up that twenty to watch the man die on coast-to-coast closed-circuit TV, although I was quite sure that was exactly what was going to happen. I went because of the shadows that are always somewhere behind our eyes, because of what Bruce Springsteen calls the darkness on the edge of town in one of his songs, and at one time or another I think everyone wants to dare that darkness in spite of the jalopy bodies that some joker of a God gave us human beings. No . . . not in spite of our jalopy bodies but because of them.

  “Hey, tell that story,” Chris said suddenly, sitting up.

  “What story?” I asked, although I guess I knew.

  I always felt uncomfortable when the talk turned to my stories, although all of them seemed to like them—wanting to tell stories, even wanting to write them down . . . that was just peculiar enough to be sort of cool, like wanting to grow up to be a sewer inspector or a Grand Prix mechanic. Richie Jenner, a kid who hung around with us until his family moved to Nebraska in 1959, was the first one to find out that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, that I wanted to do that for my full-time job. We were up in my room, just fooling around, and he found a bunch of handwritten pages under the comic books in a carton in my closet. What’s this? Richie asks. Nothin, I say, and try to grab them back. Richie held the pages up out of reach . . . and I must admit that I didn’t try very hard to get them back. I wanted him to read them and at the same time I didn’t—an uneasy mix of pride and shyness that has never changed in me very much when someone asks to look. The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation—oh, I have one friend who has done things like write stories in the display windows of bookshops and department stores, but this is a man who is nearly crazy with courage, the kind of man you’d like to have with you if you just happened to fall down with a heart attack in a city where no one knew you. For me, it always wants to be sex and always falls short—it’s always that adolescent handjob in the bathroom with the door locked.

  Richie sat right there on the end of my bed for most of the afternoon reading his way through the stuff I had been doing, most of it influenced by the same sort of comic books as the ones that had given Vern nightmares. And when he was done, Richie looked at me in a strange new way that made me feel very peculiar, as if he had been forced to re-appraise my whole personality. He said: You’re pretty good at this. Why don’t you show these to Chris? I said no, I wanted it to be a secret, and Richie said: Why? It ain’t pussy. You ain’t no queer. I mean, it ain’t poetry.

  Still, I made him promise not to tell anybody about my stories and of course he did and it turned out most of them liked to read the stuff I wrote, which was mostly about getting burned alive or some crook coming back from the dead and slaughtering the jury that had condemned him in Twelve Interesting Ways or a maniac that went crazy and chopped a lot of people into veal cutlets before the hero, Curt Cannon, “cut the subhuman, screeching madman to pieces with round after round from his smoking .45 automatic.”

  In my stories, there were always rounds. Never bullets.

  For a change of pace, there were the Le Dio stories. Le Dio was a town in France, and during 1942, a grim squad of tired American dogfaces were trying to retake it from the Nazis (this was two years before I discovered that the Allies didn’t land in France until 1944). They went on trying to retake it, fighting their way from street to street, through about forty stories which I wrote between the ages of nine and fourteen. Teddy was absolutely mad for the Le Dio stories, and I think I wrote the last dozen or so just for him—by then I was heartily sick of Le Dio and writing things like Mon Dieu and Cherchez le Boche! and Fermez le porte! In Le Dio, French peasants were always hissing to GI dogfaces to Fermez le porte! But Teddy would hunch over the pages, his eyes big, his brow beaded with sweat, his face twisting. There were times when I could almost hear air-cooled Brownings and whistling 88s going off in his skull. The way he clamored for more Le Dio stories was both pleasing and frightening.

  Nowadays writing is my work and the pleasure has diminished a little, and more and more often that guilty, masturbatory pleasure has become associated in my head with the coldly clinical images of artificial insemination: I come according to the rules and regs laid down in my publishing contract. And although no one is ever going to call me the Thomas Wolfe of my generation, I rarely feel like a cheat: I get it off as hard as I can every fucking time. Doing less would, in an odd way, be like going faggot—or what that meant to us back then. What scares me is how often it hurts these days. Back then I was sometimes disgusted by how damned good it felt to write. These days I sometimes look at this typewriter and wonder when it’s going to run out of good words. I don’t want that to happen. I guess I can stay cool as long as I don’t run out of good words, you know?

  “What’s this story?” Vern asked uneasily. “It ain’t a horror story, is it, Gordie? I don’t think I want to hear no horror stories. I’m not up for that, man.”

  “No, it ain’t a horror,” Chris said. “It’s really funny. Gross, but funny. Go on, Gordie. Hammer that fucker to us.”

  “Is it about Le Dio?” Teddy asked.

  “No, it ain’t about Le Dio, you psycho,” Chris said, and rabbit-punched him. “It’s about this pie-eatin contest.”

  “Hey, I didn’t even write it down yet,” I said.

  “Yeah, but tell it.”

  “You guys want to hear it?”

  “Sure,” Teddy said. “Boss.”

  “Well, it’s about this made-up town. Gretna, I call it. Gretna, Maine.”

  “Gretna?” Vern said, grinning. “What kind of name is that? There ain’t no Gretna in Maine.”

  “Shut up, fool,” Chris said. “He just toldja it was made-up, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but Gretna, that sounds pretty stupid—”

  “Lots of real towns sound stupid,” Chris said. “I mean, what about Alfred, Maine? Or Saco, Maine? Or Jerusalem’s Lot? Or Castle-fuckin-Rock? There ain’t no castle here. Most town names are stupid. You just don’t think so because you’re used to em. Right, Gordie?”

  “Sure,” I said, but privately I thought Vern was right—Gretna was a pretty stupid name for a town. I just hadn’t been able to think of another one. “So anyway, they’re having their annual Pioneer Days, just like in Castle Rock—”

  “Yeah, Pioneer Days, that’s a fuckin blast,” Vern said earnestly.

  “I put my whole family in that jail on wheels they have, even fuckin Billy. It was only for half an hour and it cost me my whole allowance but it was worth it just to know where that sonofawhore was—”

  “Will you shut up and let him tell it?” Teddy hollered.

  Vern blinked. “Sure. Yeah. Okay.”

  “Go on, Gordie,” Chris said.

  “It’s not really much—”

  “Naw, we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,” Teddy said, “but tell it anyway.”

  I cleared my throat. “So anyway. It’s Pioneer Days
, and on the last night they have these three big events. There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine, and then there’s the pie-eating contest. And the main guy of the story is this fat kid nobody likes named Davie Hogan.”

  “Like Charlie Hogan’s brother if he had one,” Vern said, and then shrank back as Chris rabbit-punched him again.

  “This kid, he’s our age, but he’s fat. He weighs like one-eighty and he’s always gettin beat up and ranked out. And all the kids, instead of callin him Davie, they call him Lard Ass Hogan and rank him out wherever they get the chance.”

  They nodded respectfully, showing the proper sympathy for Lard Ass, although if such a guy ever showed up in Castle Rock, we all would have been out teasing him and ranking him to the dogs and back.

  “So he decides to take revenge because he’s, like, fed up, you know? He’s only in the pie-eating contest, but that’s like the final event during Pioneer Days and everyone really digs it. The prize is five bucks—”

  “So he wins it and gives the finger to everybody!” Teddy said. “Boss!”

  “No, it’s better than that,” Chris said. “Just shut up and listen.”

  “Lard Ass figures to himself, five bucks, what’s that? If anybody remembers anything at all in two weeks, it’ll just be that fuckin pig Hogan out-ate everybody, well, it figures, let’s go over his house and rank the shit out of him, only now we’ll call him Pie Ass instead of Lard Ass.”