by Stephen King
“Aw, Dad, they’re okay—”
“Of course they are. A thief and two feebs. Fine company for my son.”
“Vern Tessio isn’t feeble,” I said. Teddy was a harder case to argue.
‘Twelve years old and still in the fifth grade,” my dad said. “And that time he slept over. When the Sunday paper came the next morning, he took an hour and a half to read the funnypages.”
That made me mad, because I didn’t think he was being fair. He was judging Vern the way he judged all my friends, from having seen them off and on, mostly going in and out of the house. He was wrong about them. And when he called Chris a thief I always saw red, because he didn’t know anything about Chris. I wanted to tell him that, but if I pissed him off he’d keep me home. And he wasn’t really mad anyway, not like he got at the supper-table sometimes, ranting so loud that nobody wanted to eat. Now he just looked sad and tired and used. He was sixty-three years old, old enough to be my grandfather.
My mom was fifty-five—no spring chicken, either. When she and dad got married they tried to start a family right away and my mom got pregnant and had a miscarriage. She miscarried two more and the doctor told her she’d never be able to carry a baby to term. I got all of this stuff, chapter and verse, whenever one of them was lecturing me, you understand. They wanted me to think I was a special delivery from God and I wasn’t appreciating my great good fortune in being conceived when my mother was forty-two and starting to gray. I wasn’t appreciating my great good fortune and I wasn’t appreciating her tremendous pain and sacrifices, either.
Five years after the doctor said Mom would never have a baby she got pregnant with Dennis. She carried him for eight months and then he just sort of fell out, all eight pounds of him—my father used to say that if she had carried Dennis to term, the kid would have weighed fifteen pounds. The doctor said: Well, sometimes nature fools us, but he’ll be the only one you’ll ever have. Thank God for him and be content. Ten years later she got pregnant with me. She not only carried me to term, the doctor had to use forceps to yank me out. Did you ever hear of such a fucked-up family? I came into the world the child of two Geritol-chuggers, not to go on and on about it, and my only brother was playing league baseball in the big kids’ park before I even got out of diapers.
In the case of my mom and dad, one gift from God had been enough. I won’t say they treated me badly, and they sure never beat me, but I was a hell of a big surprise and I guess when you get into your forties you’re not as partial to surprises as you were in your twenties. After I was born, Mom got the operation her hen-party friends referred to as “The Band-Aid.” I guess she wanted to make a hundred percent sure that there wouldn’t be any more gifts from God. When I got to college I found out I’d beaten long odds just by not being born retarded . . . although I think my dad had his doubts when he saw my friend Vern taking ten minutes to puzzle out the dialogue in Beetle Baily.
This business about being ignored: I could never really pin it down until I did a book report in high school on this novel called The Invisible Man. When I agreed to do the book for Miss Hardy I thought it was going to be the science fiction story about the guy in bandages and Foster Grants—Claude Rains played him in the movies. When I found out this was a different story I tried to give the book back but Miss Hardy wouldn’t let me off the hook. I ended up being real glad. This Invisible Man is about a Negro. Nobody ever notices him at all unless he fucks up. People look right through him. When he talks, nobody answers. He’s like a black ghost. Once I got into it, I ate that book up like it was a John D. MacDonald, because that cat Ralph Ellison was writing about me. At the supper-table it was Denny how many did you strike out and Denny who asked you to the Sadie Hawkins dance and Denny I want to talk to you man to man about that car we were looking at. I’d say: “Pass the butter,” and Dad would say: Denny, are you sure the Army is what you want? I’d say: “Pass the butter someone, okay?” and Mom would ask Denny if he wanted her to pick him up one of the Pendleton shirts on sale downtown, and I’d end up getting the butter myself. One night when I was nine, just to see what would happen: I said, “Please pass those goddam spuds.” And my mom said: Denny, Auntie Grace called today and she asked after you and Gordon.
The night Dennis graduated with honors from Castle Rock High School I played sick and stayed home. I got Stevie Darabont’s oldest brother Royce to buy me a bottle of Wild Irish Rose and I drank half of it and puked in my bed in the middle of the night.
In a family situation like that, you’re supposed to either hate the older brother or idolize him hopelessly—at least that’s what they teach you in college psychology. Bullshit, right? But so far as I can tell, I didn’t feel either way about Dennis. We rarely argued and never had a fist-fight. That would have been ridiculous. Can you see a fourteen-year-old boy finding something to beat up his four-year-old brother about? And our folks were always a little too impressed with him to burden him with the care of his kid brother, so he never resented me the way some older kids come to resent their sibs. When Denny took me with him somewhere, it was of his own free will, and those were some of the happiest times I can remember.
“Hey Lachance, who the fuck is that?”
“My kid brother and you better watch your mouth, Davis. He’ll beat the crap out of you. Gordie’s tough.”
They gather around me for a moment, huge, impossibly tall, just a moment of interest like a patch of sun. They are so big, they are so old.
“Hey kid! This wet end really your big brother?”
I nod shyly.
“He’s a real asshole, ain’t he, kid?”
I nod again and everybody, Dennis included, roars with laughter. Then Dennis claps his hands together twice, briskly, and says: “Come on, we gonna have a practice or stand around here like a bunch of pussies?”
They run to their positions, already peppering the ball around the infield.
“Go sit over there on the bench, Gordie. Be quiet. Don’t bother anybody.”
I go sit over there on the bench. I am good. I feel impossibly small under the sweet summer clouds. I watch my brother pitch. I don’t bother anybody.
But there weren’t many times like that.
Sometimes he read me bedtime stories that were better than Mom’s; Mom’s stories were about The Gingerbread Man and The Three Little Pigs, okay stuff, but Dennis’s were about stuff like Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper. He also had a version of Billy Goat’s Gruff where the troll under the bridge ended up the winner. And, as I have already said, he taught me the game of cribbage and how to do a box-shuffle. Not that much, but hey! in this world you take what you can get, am I right?
As I grew older, my feelings of love for Dennis were replaced with an almost clinical awe, the kind of awe so-so Christians feel for God, I guess. And when he died, I was mildly shocked and mildly sad, the way I imagine those same so-so Christians must have felt when Time magazine said God was dead. Let me put it this way: I was as sad for Denny’s dying as I was when I heard on the radio that Dan Blocker had died. I’d seen them both about as frequently, and Denny never even got any re-runs.
He was buried in a closed coffin with the American flag on top (they took the flag off the box before they finally stuck it in the ground and folded it—the flag, not the box—into a cocked hat and gave it to my mom). My parents just fell to pieces. Four months hadn’t been long enough to put them back together again; I didn’t know if they’d ever be whole again. Mr. and Mrs. Dumpty. Denny’s room was in suspended animation just one door down from my room, suspended animation or maybe in a time-warp. The Ivy League college pennants were still on the walls, and the senior pictures of the girls he had dated were still tucked into the mirror where he had stood for what seemed like hours at a stretch, combing his hair back into a ducktail like Elvis’s. The stack of Trues and Sports Illustrated remained on his desk, their dates looking more and more antique as time passed. It’s the kind of thing you see in sticky-sentimental movies. But it wasn’t sentiment
al to me; it was terrible. I didn’t go into Dennis’s room unless I had to because I kept expecting that he would be behind the door, or under the bed, or in the closet. Mostly it was the closet that preyed on my mind, and if my mother sent me in to get Denny’s postcard album or his shoebox of photographs so she could look at them, I would imagine that door swinging slowly open while I stood rooted to the spot with horror. I would imagine him pallid and bloody in the darkness, the side of his head walloped in, a gray-veined cake of blood and brains drying on his shirt. I would imagine his arms coming up, his bloody hands hooking into claws, and he would be croaking: It should have been you, Gordon. It should have been you.
7
Stud City, by Gordon Lachance. Originally published in Greenspun Quarterly, Issue 45, Fall, 1970. Used by permission.
March.
Chico stands at the window, arms crossed, elbows on the ledge that divides upper and lower panes, naked, looking out, breath fogging the glass. A draft against his belly. Bottom right pane is gone. Blocked by a piece of cardboard.
“Chico.”
He doesn’t turn. She doesn’t speak again. He can see a ghost of her in the glass, in his bed, sitting, blankets pulled up in apparent defiance of gravity. Her eye makeup has smeared into deep hollows under her eyes.
Chico shifts his gaze beyond her ghost, out beyond the house. Raining. Patches of snow sloughed away to reveal the bald ground underneath. He sees last year’s dead grass, a plastic toy—Billy’s—a rusty rake. His brother Johnny’s Dodge is up on blocks, the detired wheels sticking out like stumps. He remembers times he and Johnny worked on it, listening to the super-hits and boss oldies from WLAM in Lewiston pour out of Johnny’s old transistor radio—a couple of times Johnny would give him a beer. She gonna run fast, Chico, Johnny would say. She gonna eat up everything on this road from Gates Falls to Castle Rock. Wait till we get that Hearst shifter in her!
But that had been then, and this was now.
Beyond Johnny’s Dodge was the highway. Route 14, goes to Portland and New Hampshire south, all the way to Canada north, if you turned left on U.S. 1 at Thomaston.
“Stud City,” Chico says to the glass. He smokes his cigarette.
“What?”
“Nothing, babe.”
“Chico?” Her voice is puzzled. He will have to change the sheets before Dad gets back. She bled.
“What?”
“I love you, Chico.”
“That’s right.”
Dirty March. You’re some old whore, Chico thinks. Dirty, staggering old baggy-tits March with rain in her face.
“This room used to be Johnny’s,” he says suddenly.
“Who?”
“My brother.”
“Oh. Where is he?”
“In the Army,” Chico says, but Johnny isn’t in the Army. He had been working the summer before at Oxford Plains Speedway and a car went out of control and skidded across the infield toward the pit area, where Johnny had been changing the back tires on a Chevy Charger-class stocker. Some guys shouted at him to look out, but Johnny never heard them. One of the guys who shouted was Johnny’s brother Chico.
“Aren’t you cold?” she asks.
“No. Well, my feet. A little.”
And he thinks suddenly: Well, my God. Nothing happened to Johnny that isn’t going to happen to you, too, sooner or later. He sees it again, though: the skidding, skating Ford Mustang, the knobs of his brother’s spine picked out in a series of dimpled shadows against the white of his Hanes tee-shirt; he had been hunkered down, pulling one of the Chevy’s back tires. There had been time to see rubber flaying off the tires of the runaway Mustang, to see its hanging muffler scraping up sparks from the infield. It had struck Johnny even as Johnny tried to get to his feet. Then the yellow shout of flame.
Well, Chico thinks, it could have been slow, and he thinks of his grandfather. Hospital smells. Pretty young nurses bearing bedpans. A last papery breath. Were there any good ways?
He shivers and wonders about God. He touches the small silver St. Christopher’s medal that hangs on a chain around his neck. He is not a Catholic and he’s surely not a Mexican: his real name is Edward May and his friends all call him Chico because his hair is black and he greases it back with Brylcreem and he wears boots with pointed toes and Cuban heels. Not Catholic, but he wears this medallion. Maybe if Johnny had been wearing one, the runaway Mustang would have missed him. You never knew.
He smokes and stares out the window and behind him the girl gets out of bed and comes to him quickly, almost mincing, maybe afraid he will turn around and look at her. She puts a warm hand on his back. Her breasts push against his side. Her belly touches his buttock.
“Oh. It is cold.”
“It’s this place.”
“Do you love me, Chico?”
“You bet!” he says off-handedly, and then, more seriously: “You were cherry.”
“What does that—”
“You were a virgin.”
The hand reaches higher. One finger traces the skin on the nape of his neck. “I said, didn’t I?”
“Was it hard? Did it hurt?”
She laughs. “No. But I was scared.”
They watch the rain. A new Oldsmobile goes by on 14, spraying up water.
“Stud City,” Chico says.
“What?”
“That guy. He’s going Stud City. In his new stud car.”
She kisses the place her finger has been touching gently and he brushes at her as if she were a fly.
“What’s the matter?”
He turns to her. Her eyes flick down to his penis and then up again hastily. Her arms twitch to cover herself, and then she remembers that they never do stuff like that in the movies and she drops them to her sides again. Her hair is black and her skin is winter white, the color of cream. Her breasts are firm, her belly perhaps a little too soft. One flaw to remind, Chico thinks, that this isn’t the movies.
“Jane?”
“What?” He can feel himself getting ready. Not beginning, but getting ready.
“It’s all right,” he says. “We’re friends.” He eyes her deliberately, letting himself reach at her in all sorts of ways. When he looks at her face again, it is flushed. “Do you mind me looking at you?”
“I . . . no. No, Chico.”
She steps back, closes her eyes, sits on the bed, and leans back, legs spread. He sees all of her. The muscles, the little muscles on the insides of her thighs . . . they’re jumping, uncontrolled, and this suddenly excites him more than the taut cones of her breasts or the mild pink pearl of her cunt. Excitement trembles in him, some stupid Bozo on a spring. Love may be as divine as the poets say, he thinks, but sex is Bozo the Clown bouncing around on a spring. How could a woman look at an erect penis without going off into mad gales of laughter?
The rain beats against the roof, against the window, against the sodden cardboard patch blocking the glass-less lower pane. He presses his hand against his chest, looking for a moment like a stage Roman about to orate. His hand is cold. He drops it to his side.
“Open your eyes. We’re friends, I said.”
Obediently, she opens them. She looks at him. Her eyes appear violet now. The rainwater running down the window makes rippling patterns on her face, her neck, her breasts. Stretched across the bed, her belly has been pulled tight. She is perfect in her moment.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh Chico, it feels so funny.” A shiver goes through her. She has curled her toes involuntarily. He can see the insteps of her feet. Her insteps are pink. “Chico. Chico.”
He steps toward her. His body is shivering and her eyes widen. She says something, one word, but he can’t tell what it is. This isn’t the time to ask. He half-kneels before her for just a second, looking at the floor with frowning concentration, touching her legs just above the knees. He measures the tide within himself. Its pull is thoughtless, fantastic. He pauses a little longer.
The only sound is the tinny tick of the alarm clock on th
e bedtable, standing brassy-legged atop a pile of Spiderman comic books. Her breathing flutters faster and faster. His muscles slide smoothly as he dives upward and forward. They begin. It’s better this time. Outside, the rain goes on washing away the snow.
A half-hour later Chico shakes her out of a light doze. “We gotta move,” he says. “Dad and Virginia will be home pretty quick.”
She looks at her wristwatch and sits up. This time she makes no attempt to shield herself. Her whole tone—her body English—has changed. She has not matured (although she probably believes she has) or learned anything more complex than tying a shoe, but her tone has changed just the same. He nods and she smiles tentatively at him. He reaches for the cigarettes on the bedtable. As she draws on her panties, he thinks of a line from an old novelty song: Keep playin till I shoot through, Blue . . . play your digeree, do. “Tie Me Kangaroo Down,” by Rolf Harris. He grins. That was a song Johnny used to sing. It ended: So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde, and that’s it hanging on the shed.
She hooks her bra and begins buttoning her blouse. “What are you smiling about, Chico?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“Zip me up?”
He goes to her, still naked, and zips her up. He kisses her cheek. “Go on in the bathroom and do your face if you want,” he says. “Just don’t take too long, okay?”
She goes up the hall gracefully, and Chico watches her, smoking. She is a tall girl—taller than he—and she has to duck her head a little going through the bathroom door. Chico finds his underpants under the bed. He puts them in the dirty clothes bag hanging just inside the closet door, and gets another pair from the bureau. He puts them on, and then, while walking back to the bed, he slips and almost falls in a patch of wetness the square of cardboard has let in.
“Goddam,” he whispers resentfully.
He looks around at the room, which had been Johnny’s until Johnny died (why did I tell her he was in the Army, for Christ’s sake? he wonders . . . a little uneasily). Fiberboard walls, so thin he can hear Dad and Virginia going at it at night, that don’t quite make it all the way to the ceiling. The floor has a slightly crazy hipshot angle so that the room’s door will only stay open if you block it open—if you forget, it swings stealthily closed as soon as your back is turned. On the far wall is a movie poster from Easy Rider—Two Men Went Looking for America and Couldn’t Find It Anywhere. The room had more life when Johnny lived here. Chico doesn’t know how or why; only that it’s true. And he knows something else, as well. He knows that sometimes the room spooks him at night. Sometimes he thinks that the closet door will swing open and Johnny will be standing there, his body charred and twisted and blackened, his teeth yellow dentures poking out of wax that has partially melted and re-hardened; and Johnny will be whispering: Get out of my room, Chico. And if you lay a hand on my Dodge, I’ll fuckin kill you. Got it?
