by Stephen King
And Milo yelled: "Sic 'im, Chopper! Go get 'im, boy!"
I threw the bag over the fence and Vem elbowed Teddy out of the way to catch it. Behind me I could hear Chopper coming, shaking the earth, blurting fire out of one distended nostril and ice out of the other, dripping sulphur from his champing jaws. I threw myself halfway up the fence with one leap, screaming. I made it to the top in no more than three seconds and simply leaped--I never thought about it, never even looked down to see what I might land on. What I almost landed on was Teddy, who was doubled over and laughing like crazy. His glasses had fallen off and tears were streaming out of his eyes. I missed him by inches and hit the clay-gravel embankment just to his left. At the same instant, Chopper hit the chain-link fence behind me and let out a howl of mingled pain and disappointment. I turned around, holding one skinned knee, and got my first look at the famous Chopper--and my first lesson in the vast difference between myth and reality.
Instead of some huge hellhound with red, savage eyes and teeth jutting out of his mouth like straight-pipes from a hotrod, I was looking at a medium-sized mongrel dog that was a perfectly common black and white. He was yapping and jumping fruitlessly, going up on his back legs to paw the fence.
Teddy was now strutting up and down in front of the fence, twiddling his glasses in one hand, and inciting Chopper to ever greater rage.
"Kiss my ass, Choppie!" Teddy invited, spittle flying from his lips. "Kiss my ass! Bite shit!"
He bumped his fanny against the chain-link fence and Chopper did his level best to take Teddy up on his invitation. He got nothing for his pains but a good healthy nose-bump. He began to bark crazily, foam flying from his snout. Teddy kept bumping his rump against the fence and Chopper kept lunging at it, always missing, doing nothing but racking out his nose, which was now bleeding. Teddy kept exhorting him, calling him by the somehow grisly diminutive "Choppie," and Chris and Vern were lying weakly on the embankment, laughing so hard that they could now do little more than wheeze.
And here came Milo Pressman, dressed in sweat-stained fatigues and a New York Giants baseball cap, his mouth drawn down in distracted anger.
"Here, here!" he was yelling. "You boys stop a-teasing that dawg! You hear me? Stop it right now!"
"Bite it, Choppie!" Teddy yelled, strutting up and down on our side of the fence like a mad Prussian reviewing his troops. "Come on and sic me! Sic me!"
Chopper went nuts. I mean it sincerely. He ran around in a big circle, yelping and barking and foaming, rear feet spewing up tough little dry clods. He went around about three times, getting his courage up, I guess, and then he launched himself straight at the security fence. He must have been going thirty miles an hour when he hit it, I kid you not--his doggy lips were stretched back from his teeth and his ears were flying in the slipstream. The whole fence made a low, musical sound as the chain-link was not just driven back against the posts but sort of stretched back. It was like a zither note--yimmmmmmmm. A strangled yawp came out of Chopper's mouth, both eyes came up blank and he did a totally amazing reverse snap-roll, landing on his back with a solid thump that sent dust puffing up around him. He just lay there for a moment and then he crawled off with his tongue hanging crookedly from the left side of his mouth.
At this, Milo himself went almost berserk with rage. His complexion darkened to a scary plum color--even his scalp was purple under the short hedgehog bristles of his flattop haircut. Sitting stunned in the dirt, both knees of my jeans torn out, my heart still thudding from the nearness of my escape, I thought that Milo looked like a human version of Chopper.
"I know you!" Milo raved. "You're Teddy Duchamp! I know all of you! Sonny, I'll beat your ass, teasing my dawg like that!"
"Like to see you try!" Teddy raved right back. "Let's see you climb over this fence and get me, fatass!"
"WHAT? WHAT DID YOU CALL ME?"
"FATASS!" Teddy screamed happily. "LARD-BUCKET! TUBBAGUTS! COME ON! COME ON!" He was jumping up and down, fists clenched, sweat flying from his hair. "TEACH YOU TO SIC YOUR STUPID DOG ON PEOPLE! COME ON! LIKE TO SEE YOU TRY!"
"You little tin-weasel peckerwood loony's son! I'll see your mother gets an invitation to go down and talk to the judge in court about what you done to my dawg!"
"What did you call me?" Teddy asked hoarsely. He had stopped jumping up and down. His eyes had gone huge and glassy, and his skin was the color of lead.
Milo had called Teddy a lot of things, but he was able to go back and get the one that had struck home with no trouble at all--since then I have noticed again and again what a genius people have for that ... for finding the LOONY button down inside and not just pressing it but hammering on the fucker.
"Your dad was a loony," he said, grinning. "Loony up in Togus, that's what. Crazier'n a shithouse rat. Crazier'n a buck with tickwood fever. Nuttier'n a long-tailed cat in a room fulla rockin chairs. Loony. No wonder you're actin the way you are, with a loony for a f--"
"YOUR MOTHER BLOWS DEAD RATS!" Teddy screamed. "AND IF YOU CALL MY DAD A LOONY AGAIN, I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU COCKSUCKER!"
"Loony," Milo said smugly. He'd found the button, all right. "Loony's kid, loony's kid, your father's got toys in the attic, kid, tough break."
Vern and Chris had been getting over their laughing fit, perhaps getting ready to appreciate the seriousness of the situation and call Teddy off, but when Teddy told Milo that his mother blew dead rats, they went back into hysterics again, lying there on the bank, rolling from side to side, their feet kicking, holding their bellies. "No more," Chris said weakly. "No more, please, no more, I swear to God I'm gonna bust!"
Chopper was walking around in a large, dazed figure-eight behind Milo. He looked like the losing fighter about ten seconds after the ref has ended the match and awarded the winner a TKO. Meanwhile, Teddy and Milo continued their discussion of Teddy's father, standing nose to nose, with the wire fence Milo was too old and too fat to climb between them.
"Don't you say nothing else about my dad! My dad stormed the beach at Normandy, you fucking wet end!"
"Yeah, well, where is he now, you ugly little four-eyed turd? He's up to Togus, ain't he? He's up to Togus because HE WENT FUCKING SECTION EIGHT!"
"Okay, that's it," Teddy said. "That's it, that's the end, I'm gonna kill you." He threw himself at the fence and started up.
"You come on and try it, you slimy little bastard." Milo stood back, grinning and waiting.
"No!" I shouted. I got to my feet, grabbed Teddy by the loose seat of his jeans, and pulled him off the fence. We both staggered back and fell over, him on top. He squashed my balls pretty good and I groaned. Nothing hurts like having your balls squashed, you know it? But I kept my arms locked around Teddy's middle.
"Lemme up!" Teddy sobbed, writhing in my arms. "Lemme up, Gordie! Nobody ranks out my old man. LEMME UP GODDAMMIT LEMME UP!"
"That's just what he wants!" I shouted in his ear. "He wants to get you over there and beat the piss out of you and then take you to the cops!"
"Huh?" Teddy craned around to look at me, his face dazed.
"Never mind your smartmouth, kid," Milo said, advancing to the fence again with his hands curled into ham-sized fists. "Let'im fight his own battles."
"Sure," I said. "You only outweigh him by five hundred pounds."
"I know you, too," Milo said ominously. "Your name's Lachance." He pointed to where Vern and Chris were finally picking themselves up, still breathing fast from laughing so hard. "And those guys are Chris Chambers and one of those stupid Tessio kids. All your fathers are going to get calls from me, except for the loony up to Togus. You'll go to the 'formatory, every one of you. Juvenile delinquents!"
He stood flat on his feet, big freckled hands held out like a guy who wanted to play One Potato Two Potato, breathing hard, eyes narrow, waiting for us to cry or say we were sorry or maybe give him Teddy so he could feed Teddy to Chopper.
Chris made an O out of his thumb and index finger and spat neatly through it.
Vern h
ummed and looked at the sky.
Teddy said: "Come on, Gordie. Let's get away from this asshole before I puke."
"Oh, you're gonna get it, you foulmouthed little whoremaster. Wait'll I get you to the Constable."
"We heard what you said about his father," I told him. "We're all witnesses. And you sicced that dog on me. That's against the law."
Milo looked a trifle uneasy. "You was trespassin."
"The hell I was. The dump's public property."
"You climbed the fence."
"Sure I did, after you sicced your dog on me," I said, hoping that Milo wouldn't recall that I'd also climbed the gate to get in. "What'd you think I was gonna do? Stand there and let 'im rip me to pieces? Come on, you guys. Let's go. It stinks around here."
"'Formatory," Milo promised hoarsely, his voice shaking. " 'Formatory for you wiseguys."
"Can't wait to tell the cops how you called a war vet a fuckin loony," Chris called back over his shoulder as we moved away. "What did you do in the war, Mr. Pressman?"
"NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUSINESS!" Milo shrieked. "YOU HURT MY DAWG!"
"Put it on your t.s. slip and send it to the chaplain," Vern muttered, and then we were climbing the railroad embankment again.
"Come back here!" Milo shouted, but his voice was fainter now and he seemed to be losing interest.
Teddy shot him the finger as we walked away. I looked back over my shoulder when we got to the top of the embankment. Milo was standing there behind the security fence, a big man in a baseball cap with his dog sitting beside him. His fingers were hooked through the small chain-link diamonds as he shouted at us, and all at once I felt very sorry for him--he looked like the biggest third-grader in the world, locked inside the playground by mistake, yelling for someone to come and let him out. He kept on yelling for awhile and then he either gave up or we got out of range. No more was seen or heard of Milo Pressman and Chopper that day.
13
There was some discussion--in righteous tones that were actually kind of forced-sounding--about how we had shown that creepy Milo Pressman we weren't just another bunch of pussies. I told how the guy at the Florida Market had tried to jap us, and then we fell into a gloomy silence, thinking it over.
For my part, I was thinking that maybe there was something to that stupid goocher business after all. Things couldn't have turned out much worse--in fact, I thought, it might be better to just keep going and spare my folks the pain of having one son in the Castle View Cemetery and one in South Windham Boys' Correctional. I had no doubt that Milo would go to the cops as soon as the importance of the dump having been closed at the time of the incident filtered into his thick skull. When that happened, he would realize that I really had been trespassing, public property or not. Probably that gave him every right in the world to sic his stupid dog on me. And while Chopper wasn't the hellhound he was cracked up to be, he sure would have ripped the sitdown out of my jeans if I hadn't won the race to the fence. All of it put a big dark crimp in the day. And there was another gloomy idea rolling around inside my head--the idea that this was no lark after all, and maybe we deserved our bad luck. Maybe it was even God warning us to go home. What were we doing, anyway, going to look at some kid that had gotten himself all mashed up by a freight train?
But we were doing it, and none of us wanted to stop.
We had almost reached the trestle which carried the tracks across the river when Teddy burst into tears. It was as if a great inner tidal wave had broken through a carefully constructed set of mental dykes. No bullshit--it was that sudden and that fierce. The sobs doubled him over like punches and he sort of collapsed into a heap, his hands going from his stomach to the mutilated gobs of flesh that were the remains of his ears. He went on crying in hard, violent bursts.
None of us knew what the fuck to do. It wasn't crying like when you got hit by a line drive while you were playing shortstop or smashed on the head playing tackle football on the common or when you fell off your bike. There was nothing physically wrong with him. We walked away a little and watched him, our hands in our pockets.
"Hey, man ..." Vern said in a very thin voice. Chris and I looked at Vern hopefully. "Hey, man" was always a good start. But Vern couldn't follow it up.
Teddy leaned forward onto the crossties and put a hand over his eyes. Now he looked like he was doing the Allah bit--"Salami, salami, baloney," as Popeye says. Except it wasn't funny.
At last, when the force of his crying had trailed off a little, it was Chris who went to him. He was the toughest guy in our gang (maybe even tougher than Jamie Gallant, I thought privately), but he was also the guy who made the best peace. He had a way about it. I'd seen him sit down on the curb next to a little kid with a scraped knee, a kid he didn't even fucking know, and get him talking about something--the Shrine Circus that was coming to town or Huckleberry Hound on TV--until the kid forgot he was supposed to be hurt. Chris was good at it. He was tough enough to be good at it.
"Lissen, Teddy, what do you care what a fat old pile of shit like him said about your father? Huh? I mean, sincerely! That don't change nothing, does it? What a fat old pile of shit like him says? Huh? Huh? Does it?"
Teddy shook his head violently. It changed nothing. But to hear it spoken of in bright daylight, something he must have gone over and over in his mind while he was lying awake in bed and looking at the moon off-center in one windowpane, something he must have thought about in his slow and broken way until it seemed almost holy, trying to make sense out of it, and then to have it brought home to him that everybody else had merely dismissed his dad as a loony ... that had rocked him. But it changed nothing. Nothing.
"He still stormed the beach at Normandy, right?" Chris said. He picked up one of Teddy's sweaty, grimy hands and patted it.
Teddy nodded fiercely, crying. Snot was running out of his nose.
"Do you think that pile of shit was at Normandy?"
Teddy shook his head violently. "Nuh-Nuh-No!"
"Do you think that guy knows you?"
"Nuh-No! No, b-b-but--"
"Or your father? He one of your father's buddies?"
"NO!" Angry, horrified. The thought. Teddy's chest heaved and more sobs came out of it. He had pushed his hair away from his ears and I could see the round brown plastic button of the hearing aid set in the middle of his right one. The shape of the hearing aid made more sense than the shape of his ear, if you get what I mean.
Chris said calmly: "Talk is cheap."
Teddy nodded, still not looking up.
"And whatever's between you and your old man, talk can't change that."
Teddy's head shook without definition, unsure if this was true. Someone had redefined his pain, and redefined it in shockingly common terms. That would
(loony)
have to be examined
(fucking section eight)
later. In depth. On long sleepless nights.
Chris rocked him. "He was ranking you, man," he said in soothing cadences that were almost a lullaby. "He was tryin to rank you over that friggin fence, you know it? No strain, man. No fuckin strain. He don't know nothin about your old man. He don't know nothin but stuff he heard from those rumdums down at The Mellow Tiger. He's just dogshit, man. Right, Teddy? Huh? Right?"
Teddy's crying was down to sniffles. He wiped his eyes, leaving two sooty rings around them, and sat up.
"I'm okay," he said, and the sound of his own voice seemed to convince him. "Yeah, I'm okay." He stood up and put his glasses back on--dressing his naked face, it seemed to me. He laughed thinly and swiped his bare arm across the snot of his upper lip. "Fuckin crybaby, right?"
"No, man," Vern said uncomfortably. "If anyone was rankin out my dad--"
"Then you got to kill em!" Teddy said briskly, almost arrogantly. "Kill their asses. Right, Chris?"
"Right," Chris said amiably, and clapped Teddy on the back.
"Right, Gordie?"
"Absolutely," I said, wondering how Teddy could care so much for hi
s dad when his dad had practically killed him, and how I couldn't seem to give much of a shit one way or the other about my own dad, when so far as I could remember, he had never laid a hand on me since I was three and got some bleach from under the sink and started to eat it.
We walked another two hundred yards down the tracks and Teddy said in a quieter voice: "Hey, if I spoiled your good time, I'm sorry. I guess that was pretty stupid shit back there at that fence."
"I ain't sure I want it to be no good time," Vern said suddenly.
Chris looked at him. "You sayin you want to go back, man?"
"No, huh-uh!" Vern's face knotted in thought. "But going to see a dead kid--it shouldn't be a party, maybe. I mean, if you can dig it. I mean ..." He looked at us rather wildly. "I mean, I could be a little scared. If you get me."
Nobody said anything and Vern plunged on:
"I mean, sometimes I get nightmares. Like ... aw, you guys remember the time Danny Naughton left that pile of old funnybooks, the ones with the vampires and people gettin cut up and all that shit? Jeezum-crow, I'd wake up in the middle of the night dreamin about some guy hangin in a house with his face all green or somethin, you know, like that, and it seems like there's somethin under the bed and if I dangled a hand over the side, that thing might, you know, grab me ..."
We all began to nod. We knew about the night shift. I would have laughed then, though, if you had told me that one day not too many years from then I'd parlay all those childhood fears and night-sweats into about a million dollars.
"And I don't dare say anything because my friggin brother ... well, you know Billy ... he'd broadcast it ..." He shrugged miserably. "So I'm ascared to look at that kid cause if he's, you know, if he's really bad ..."
I swallowed and glanced at Chris. He was looking gravely at Vem and nodding for him to go on.
"If he's really bad," Vern resumed, "I'll have nightmares about him and wake up thinkin it's him under my bed, all cut up in a pool of blood like he just came out of one of those Saladmaster gadgets they show on TV, just eyeballs and hair, but movin somehow, if you can dig that, mooovin somehow, you know, and gettin ready to grab--"
"Jesus Christ," Teddy said thickly. "What a fuckin bedtime story."
"Well I can't help it," Vern said, his voice defensive. "But I feel like we hafta see him, even if there are bad dreams. You know? Like we hafta. But ... but maybe it shouldn't be no good time."
