by Stephen King
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 his 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 Vern 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.”
“Yeah,” Chris said softly. “Maybe it shouldn’t.”
Vern said pleadingly: “You won’t tell none of the other guys, will you? I don’t mean about the nightmares, everybody has those—I mean about wakin up and thinkin there might be somethin under the bed. I’m too fuckin old for the boogey-man.”
We all said we wouldn’t tell, and a glum silence fell over us again. It was only quarter to three, but it felt much later. It was too hot and too much had happened. We weren’t even over into Harlow yet. We were going to have to pick them up and lay them down if we were going to make some real miles before dark.
&nb
sp; We passed the railroad junction and a signal on a tall, rusty pole and all of us paused to chuck cinders at the steel flag on top, but nobody hit it. And around three-thirty we came to the Castle River and the GS&WM trestle which crossed it.
14
The river was better than a hundred yards across at that point in 1960; I’ve been back to look at it since then, and found it had narrowed up quite a bit during the years between. They’re always fooling with the river, trying to make it work better for the mills, and they’ve put in so many dams that it’s pretty well tamed. But in those days there were only three dams on the whole length of the river as it ran across New Hampshire and half of Maine. The Castle was still almost free back then, and every third spring it would overflow its banks and cover Route 136 in either Harlow or Danvers Junction or both.
Now, at the end of the driest summer western Maine had seen since the depression, it was still broad. From where we stood on the Castle Rock side, the bulking forest on the Harlow side looked like a different country altogether. The pines and spruces over there were bluish in the heat-haze of the afternoon. The rails went across the water fifty feet up, supported by an underpinning of tarred wooden support posts and crisscrossing beams. The water was so shallow you could look down and see the tops of the cement plugs which had been planted ten feet deep in the riverbed to hold up the trestle.
The trestle itself was pretty chintzy—the rails ran over a long, narrow wooden platform of six-by-fours. There was a four-inch gap between each pair of these beams where you could look all the way down into the water. On the sides, there was no more than eighteen inches between the rail and the edge of the trestle. If a train came, it was maybe enough room to avoid getting plastered . . . but the wind generated by a highballing freight would surely sweep you off to fall to a certain death against the rocks just below the surface of the shallow running water.
Looking at the trestle, we all felt fear start to crawl around in our bellies . . . and mixing uneasily with the fear was the excitement of a boss dare, a really big one, something you could brag on for weeks after you got home . . . if you got home. That queer light was creeping back into Teddy’s eyes and I thought he wasn’t seeing the GS&WM train trestle at all but a long sandy beach, a thousand LSTs aground in the foaming waves, ten thousand GIs charging up the sand, combat boots digging. They were leaping rolls of barbed wire! Tossing grenades at pillboxes! Overrunning machine-gun nests!
We were standing beside the tracks where the cinders sloped away toward the river’s cut—the place where the embankment stopped and the trestle began. Looking down, I could see where the slope started to get steep. The cinders gave way to scraggly, tough-looking bushes and slabs of gray rock. Further down there were a few stunted firs with exposed roots writhing their way out of fissures in the plates of rock; they seemed to be looking down at their own miserable reflections in the running water.
At this point, the Castle River actually looked fairly clean; at Castle Rock it was just entering Maine’s textile-mill belt. But there were no fish jumping out there, although the river was clear enough to see bottom—you had to go another ten miles upstream and toward New Hampshire before you could see any fish in the Castle. There were no fish, and along the edges of the river you could see dirty collars of foam around some of the rocks—the foam was the color of old ivory. The river’s smell was not particularly pleasant, either; it smelled like a laundry hamper full of mildewy towels. Dragonflies stitched at the surface of the water and laid their eggs with impunity. There were no trout to eat them. Hell, there weren’t even any shiners.
“Man,” Chris said softly.
“Come on,” Teddy said in that brisk, arrogant way. “Let’s go.” He was already edging his way out, walking on the six-by-fours between the shining rails.
“Say,” Vern said uneasily, “any of you guys know when the next train’s due?”
We all shrugged.
I said: “There’s the Route 136 bridge . . .”
“Hey, come on, gimme a break!” Teddy cried. “That means walkin five miles down the river on this side and then five miles back up on the other side . . . it’ll take us until dark! If we use the trestle, we can get to the same place in ten minutes!”
“But if a train comes, there’s nowheres to go,” Vern said. He wasn’t looking at Teddy. He was looking down at the fast, bland river.
“Fuck there isn’t!” Teddy said indignantly. He swung over the edge and held one of the wooden supports between the rails. He hadn’t gone out very far—his sneakers were almost touching the ground—but the thought of doing that same thing above the middle of the river with a fifty-foot drop beneath and a train bellowing by just over my head, a train that would probably be dropping some nice hot sparks into my hair and down the back of my neck . . . none of that actually made me feel like Queen for a Day.
“See how easy it is?” Teddy said. He dropped to the embankment, dusted his hands, and climbed back up beside us.
“You tellin me you’re gonna hang on that way if it’s a two-hundred-car freight?” Chris asked. “Just sorta hang there by your hands for five or ten minutes?”
“You chicken?” Teddy shouted.
“No, just askin what you’d do,” Chris said, grinning. “Peace, man.”
“Go around if you want to!” Teddy brayed. “Who gives a fuck? I’ll wait for you! I’ll take a nap!”
“One train already went by,” I said reluctantly. “And there probably isn’t any more than one, two trains a day that go through Harlow. Look at this.” I kicked the weeds growing up through the railroad ties with one sneaker. There were no weeds growing between the tracks which ran between Castle Rock and Lewiston.
“There. See?” Teddy triumphant.
“But still, there’s a chance,” I added.
“Yeah,” Chris said. He was looking only at me, his eyes sparkling. “Dare you, Lachance.”
“Dares go first”
“Okay,” Chris said. He widened his gaze to take in Teddy and Vern. “Any pussies here?”
“NO!” Teddy shouted.
Vern cleared his throat, croaked, cleared it again, and said “No” in a very small voice. He smiled a weak, sick smile.
“Okay,” Chris said . . . but we hesitated for a moment, even Teddy, looking warily up and down the tracks. I knelt down and took one of the steel rails firmly in my hand, never minding that it was almost hot enough to blister the skin. The rail was mute.
“Okay,” I said, and as I said it some guy pole-vaulted in my stomach. He dug his pole all the way into my balls, it felt like, and ended up sitting astride my heart.
We went out onto the trestle single file: Chris first, then Teddy, then Vern, and me playing tail-end Charlie because I was the one who said dares go first. We walked on the platform crossties between the rails, and you had to look at your feet whether you were scared of heights or not. A misstep and you would go down to your crotch, probably with a broken ankle to pay.
The embankment dropped away beneath me, and every step further out seemed to seal our decision more firmly . . . and to make it feel more suicidally stupid. I stopped to look up when I saw the rocks giving way to water far beneath me. Chris and Teddy were a long way ahead, almost out over the middle, and Vern was tottering slowly along behind them, peering studiously down at his feet. He looked like an old lady trying out stilts with his head poked downward, his back hunched, his arms held out for balance. I looked back over my shoulder. Too far, man. I had to keep going now, and not only because a train might come. If I went back, I’d be a pussy for life.
So I got walking again. After looking down at that endless series of crossties for awhile, with a glimpse of running water between each pair, I started to feel dizzy and disoriented. Each time I brought my foot down, part of my brain assured me it was going to plunge through into space, even though I could see it was not.
I became acutely aware of all the noises inside me and outside me, like some crazy orchestra tuning up to play. Th
e steady thump of my heart, the bloodbeat in my ears like a drum being played with brushes, the creak of sinews like the strings of a violin that has been tuned radically upward, the steady hiss of the river, the hot hum of a locust digging into tight bark, the monotonous cry of a chickadee, and somewhere, far away, a barking dog. Chopper, maybe. The mildewy smell of the Castle River was strong in my nose. The long muscles in my thighs were trembling. I kept thinking how much safer it would be (probably faster, as well) if I just got down on my hands and knees and scuttered along that way. But I wouldn’t do that—none of us would. If the Saturday matinee movies down to the Gem had taught us anything, it was that Only Losers Crawl. It was one of the central tenets of the Gospel According to Hollywood. Good guys walk firmly upright, and if your sinews are creaking like overtimed violin strings because of the adrenaline rush going on in your body, and if the long muscles in your thighs are trembling for the same reason, why, so be it.
I had to stop in the middle of the trestle and look up at the sky for awhile. That dizzy feeling had been getting worse. I saw phantom crossties—they seemed to float right in front of my nose. Then they faded out and I began to feel okay again. I looked ahead and saw I had almost caught up with Vern, who was slowpoking along worse than ever. Chris and Teddy were almost all the way across.
And although I’ve since written seven books about people who can do such exotic things as read minds and precognit the future, that was when I had my first and last psychic flash. I’m sure that’s what it was; how else to explain it? I squatted and made a fist around the rail on my left. It thrummed in my hand. It was thrumming so hard that it was like gripping a bundle of deadly metallic snakes.
You’ve heard it said “His bowels turned to water”? I know what that phrase means—exactly what it means. It may be the most accurate cliché ever coined. I’ve been scared since, badly scared, but I’ve never been as scared as I was in that moment, holding that hot live rail. It seemed that for a moment all my works below throat level just went limp and lay there in an internal faint. A thin stream of urine ran listlessly down the inside of one thigh. My mouth opened. I didn’t open it, it opened by itself, the jaw dropping like a trapdoor from which the hingepins had suddenly been removed. My tongue was plastered suffocatingly against the roof of my mouth. All my muscles were locked. That was the worst. My works went limp but my muscles were in a kind of dreadful lockbolt and I couldn’t move at all. It was only for a moment, but in the subjective timestream, it seemed forever.
