by Stephen King
I asked for three pounds of hamburger and got some hamburger rolls, four bottles of Coke and a two-cent churchkey to open them with. The owner, a man named George Dusset, got the meat and then leaned by his cash register, one hammy hand planted on the counter by the big bottle of hardcooked eggs, a toothpick in his mouth, his huge beer belly rounding his white tee-shirt like a sail filled with a good wind. He stood right there as I shopped, making sure I didn’t try to hawk anything. He didn’t say a word until he was weighing up the hamburger.
“I know you. You’re Denny Lachance’s brother. Ain’t you?” The toothpick journeyed from one corner of his mouth to the other, as if on ball bearings. He reached behind the cash register, picked up a bottle of S’OK cream soda, and chugged it.
“Yes, sir. But Denny, he—”
“Yeah, I know. That’s a sad thing, kid. The Bible says: ‘In the midst of life, we are in death.’ Did you know that? Yuh. I lost a brother in Korea. You look just like Denny, people ever tell you that? Yuh. Spitting image.”
“Yes, sir, sometimes,” I said glumly.
“I remember the year he was All-Conference. Halfback, he played. Yuh. Could he run? Father God and Sonny Jesus! You’re probably too young to remember.” He was looking over my head, out through the screen door and into the blasting heat, as if he were having a beautiful vision of my brother.
“I remember. Uh, Mr. Dusset?”
“What, kid?” His eyes were still misty with memory; the toothpick trembled a little between his lips.
“Your thumb is on that scales.”
“What?” He looked down, astounded, to where the ball of his thumb was pressed firmly on the white enamel. If I hadn’t moved away from him a little bit when he started talking about Dennis, the ground meat would have hidden it. “Why, so it is. Yuh. I guess I just got thinkin about your brother, God love him.” George Dusset signed a cross on himself. When he took his thumb off the scales, the needle sprang back six ounces. He patted a little more meat on top and then did the package up with white butcher’s paper.
“Okay,” he said past the toothpick. “Let’s see what we got here. Three pounds of hamburg, that’s a dollar forty-four. Hamburg rolls, that’s twenty-seven. Four sodas, forty cents. One churchkey, two pence. Comes to . . .” He added it up on the bag he was going to put the stuff in. “Two-twenty-nine.”
“Thirteen,” I said.
He looked up at me very slowly, frowning. “Huh?”
“Two-thirteen. You added it wrong.”
“Kid, are you—”
“You added it wrong,” I said. “First you put your thumb on the scales and then you overcharged on the groceries, Mr. Dusset. I was gonna throw some Hostess Twinkies on top of that order but now I guess I won’t.” I spanged two dollars and thirteen cents down on the Schlitz placemat in front of him.
He looked at the money, then at me. The frown was now tremendous, the lines on his face as deep as fissures. “What are you, kid?” he said in a low voice that was ominously confidential. “Are you some kind of smartass?”
“No, sir,” I said. “But you ain’t gonna jap me and get away with it. What would your mother say if she knew you was japping little kids?”
He thrust our stuff into the paper bag with quick stiff movements, making the Coke bottles clink together. He thrust the bag at me roughly, not caring if I dropped it and broke the sodas or not. His swarthy face was flushed and dull, the frown now frozen in place. “Okay, kid. Here you go. Now what you do is you get the Christ out of my store. I see you in here again and I going to throw you out, me. Yuh. Smartass little sonofawhore.”
“I won’t come in again,” I said, walking over to the screen door and pushing it open. The hot afternoon buzzed somnolently along its appointed course outside, sounding green and brown and full of silent light. “Neither will none of my friends. I guess I got fifty or so.”
“Your brother wasn’t no smartass!” George Dusset yelled.
“Fuck you!” I yelled, and ran like hell down the road.
I heard the screen door bang open like a gunshot and his bull roar came after me: “If you ever come in here again I’ll fat your lip for you, you little punk!”
I ran until I was over the first hill, scared and laughing to myself, my heart beating out a triphammer pulse in my chest. Then I slowed to a fast walk, looking back over my shoulder every now and then to make sure he wasn’t going to take after me in his car, or anything.
He didn’t, and pretty soon I got to the dump gate. I put the bag inside my shirt, climbed the gate, and monkeyed down the other side. I was halfway across the dump area when I saw something I didn’t like—Milo Pressman’s portholed ’56 Buick was parked behind his tarpaper shack. If Milo saw me I was going to be in a world of hurt. As yet there was no sign of either him or the infamous Chopper, but all at once the chain-link fence at the back of the dump seemed very far away. I found myself wishing I’d gone around the outside, but I was now too far into the dump to want to turn around and go back. If Milo saw me climbing the dump fence, I’d probably be in dutch when I got home, but that didn’t scare me as much as Milo yelling for Chopper to sic would.
Scary violin music started to play in my head. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, trying to look casual, trying to look as if I belonged here with a paper grocery sack poking out of my shirt, heading for the fence between the dump and the railroad tracks.
I was about fifty feet from the fence and just beginning to think that everything was going to be all right after all when I heard Milo shout: “Hey! Hey, you! Kid! Get away f’n that fence! Get outta here!”
The smart thing to have done would have been to just agree with the guy and go around, but by then I was so keyed that instead of doing the smart thing I just broke for the fence with a wild yell, my sneakers kicking up dirt. Vern, Teddy, and Chris came out of the underbrush on the other side of the fence and stared anxiously through the chain-link.
“You come back here!” Milo bawled. “Come back here or I’ll sic my dawg on you, goddammit!”
I did not exactly find that to be the voice of sanity and conciliation, and I ran even faster for the fence, my arms pumping, the brown grocery bag crackling against my skin. Teddy started to laugh his idiotic chortling laugh, eee-eee-eeee into the air like some reed instrument being played by a lunatic.
“Go, Gordie! Go!” Vern screamed.
And Milo yelled: “Sic ’im, Chopper! Go get ’im, boy!”
I threw the bag over the fence and Vern 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 hummed 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?
