by Stephen King
That finally rammed it all the way home for me. The kid was dead. The kid wasn’t sick, the kid wasn’t sleeping. The kid wasn’t going to get up in the morning anymore or get the runs from eating too many apples or catch poison ivy or wear out the eraser on the end of his Ticonderoga No. 2 during a hard math test. The kid was dead; stone dead. The kid was never going to go out bottling with his friends in the spring, gunnysack over his shoulder to pick up the returnables the retreating snow uncovered. The kid wasn’t going to wake up at two o’clock a.m. on the morning of November 1st this year, run to the bathroom, and vomit up a big glurt of cheap Holloween candy. The kid wasn’t going to pull a single girl’s braid in home room. The kid wasn’t going to give a bloody nose, or get one. The kid was can’t, don’t, won’t, never, shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t. He was the side of the battery where the terminal says neg. The fuse you have to put a penny in. The wastebasket by the teacher’s desk, which always smells of wood-shavings from the sharpener and dead orange peels from lunch. The haunted house outside of town where the windows are crashed out, the NO TRESPASSING signs whipped away across the fields, the attic full of bats, the cellar full of rats. The kid was dead, mister, ma’am, young sir, little miss. I could go on all day and never get it right about the distance between his bare feet on the ground and his dirty Keds hanging in the bushes. It was thirty-plus inches, it was a googol of light-years. The kid was disconnected from his Keds beyond all hope of reconciliation. He was dead.
We turned him face up into the pouring rain, the lightning, the steady crack of thunder.
There were ants and bugs all over his face and neck. They ran briskly in and out of the round collar of his tee-shirt. His eyes were open, but terrifyingly out of sync—one was rolled back so far that we could see only a tiny arc of iris; the other stared straight up into the storm. There was a dried froth of blood above his mouth and on his chin—from a bloody nose, I thought—and the right side of his face was lacerated and darkly bruised. Still, I thought, he didn’t really look bad. I had once walked into a door my brother Dennis was shoving open, came off with bruises even worse than this kid’s, plus the bloody nose, and still had two helpings of everything for supper after it happened.
Teddy and Vern stood behind us, and if there had been any sight at all left in that one upward-staring eye, I suppose we would have looked to Ray Brower like pallbearers in a horror movie.
A beetle came out of his mouth, trekked across his fuzzless cheek, stepped onto a nettle, and was gone.
“D’joo see that?” Teddy asked in a high, strange, fainting voice. “I bet he’s fuckin fulla bugs! I bet his brains’re—”
“Shut up, Teddy,” Chris said, and Teddy did, looking relieved.
Lightning forked blue across the sky, making the boy’s single eye light up. You could almost believe he was glad to be found, and found by boys his own age. His torso had swelled up and there was a faint gassy odor about him, like the smell of old farts.
I turned away, sure I was going to be sick, but my stomach was dry, hard, steady. I suddenly rammed two fingers down my throat, trying to make myself heave, needing to do it, as if I could sick it up and get rid of it. But my stomach only hitched a little and then was steady again.
The roaring downpour and the accompanying thunder had completely covered the sound of cars approaching along the Back Harlow Road, which lay bare yards beyond this boggy tangle. It likewise covered the crackle-crunch of the underbrush as they blundered through it from the dead end where they had parked.
And the first we knew of them was Ace Merrill’s voice raised above the tumult of the storm, saying: “Well what the fuck do you know about this?”
26
We all jumped like we had been goosed and Vern cried out—he admitted later that he thought, for just a second, that the voice had come from the dead boy.
On the far side of the boggy patch, where the woods took up again, masking the butt end of the road, Ace Merrill and Eyeball Chambers stood together, half-obscured by a pouring gray curtain of rain. They were both wearing red nylon high school jackets, the kind you can buy in the office if you’re a regular student, the same kind they give away free to varsity sports players. Their d.a. haircuts had been plastered back against their skulls and a mixture of rainwater and Vitalis ran down their cheeks like ersatz tears.
“Sumbitch!” Eyeball said. “That’s my little brother!”
Chris was staring at Eyeball with his mouth open. His shirt, wet, limp, and dark, was still tied around his skinny middle. His pack, stained a darker green by the rain, was hanging against his naked shoulderblades.
“You get away, Rich,” he said in a trembling voice. “We found him. We got dibs.”
“Fuck your dibs. We’re gonna report ’im.”
“No you’re not,” I said. I was suddenly furious with them, turning up this way at the last minute. If we’d thought about it, we’d have known something like this was going to happen . . . but this was one time, somehow, that the older, bigger kids weren’t going to steal it—to take something they wanted as if by divine right, as if their easy way was the right way, the only way. They had come in cars—I think that was what made me angriest. They had come in cars. “There’s four of us, Eyeball. You just try.”
“Oh, we’ll try, don’t worry,” Eyeball said, and the trees shook behind him and Ace. Charlie Hogan and Vern’s brother Billy stepped through them, cursing and wiping water out of their eyes. I felt a lead ball drop into my belly. It grew bigger as Jack Mudgett, Fuzzy Bracowicz, and Vince Desjardins stepped out behind Charlie and Billy.
“Here we all are,” Ace said, grinning. “So you just—”
“VERN!!” Billy Tessio cried in a terrible, accusing, my-judgment-cometh-and-that-right-early voice. He made a pair of dripping fists. “You little sonofawhore! You was under the porch! Cock-knocker!”
Vern flinched.
Charlie Hogan waxed positively lyrical: “You little keyhole-peeping cunt-licking bungwipe! I ought to beat the living shit out of you!”
“Yeah? Well, try it!” Teddy brayed suddenly. His eyes were crazily alight behind his rainspotted glasses. “Come on, fightcha for ’im! Come on! Come on, big men!”
Billy and Charlie didn’t need a second invitation. They started forward together and Vern flinched again—no doubt visualizing the ghosts of Beatings Past and Beatings Yet to Come. He flinched . . . but hung tough. He was with his friends, and we had been through a lot, and we hadn’t got here in a couple of cars.
But Ace held Billy and Charlie back, simply by touching each of them on the shoulder.
“Now listen, you guys,” Ace said. He spoke patiently, just as if we weren’t all standing in a roaring rainstorm. “There’s more of us than there are of you. We’re bigger. We’ll give you one chance to just blow away. I don’t give a fuck where. Just make like a tree and leave.”
Chris’s brother giggled and Fuzzy clapped Ace on the back in appreciation of his great wit. The Sid Caesar of the j.d. set.
“Cause we’re takin him.” Ace smiled gently, and you could imagine him smiling that same gentle smile just before breaking his cue over the head of some uneducated punk who had made the terrible mistake of lipping off while Ace was lining up a shot. “If you go, we’ll take him. If you stay, we’ll beat the piss outta you and still take him. Besides,” he added, trying to gild the thuggery with a little righteousness, “Charlie and Billy found him, so it’s their dibs anyway.”
“They was chicken!” Teddy shot back. “Vern told us about it! They was fuckin chicken right outta their fuckin minds!” He screwed his face up into a terrified, snivelling parody of Charlie Hogan. “ ‘I wish we never boosted that car! I wish we never went out on no Back Harlow Road to whack off a piece! Oh, Billee, what are we gonna do? Oh Billee, I think I just turned my Fruit of the Looms into a fudge factory! Oh Billee—’ ”
“That’s it,” Charlie said, starting forward again. His face was knotted with rage and sullen embarrassment. �
��Kid, whatever your name is, get ready to reach down your fuckin throat the next time you need to pick your nose.”
I looked wildly down at Ray Brower. He stared calmly up into the rain with his one eye, below us but above it all. The thunder was still booming steadily, but the rain had begun to slack off.
“What do you say, Gordie?” Ace asked. He was holding Charlie lightly by the arm, the way an accomplished trainer would restrain a vicious dog. “You must have at least some of your brother’s sense. Tell these guys to back off. I’ll let Charlie beat up the foureyes el punko a little bit and then we all go about our business. What do you say?”
He was wrong to mention Denny. I had wanted to reason with him, to point out what Ace knew perfectly well, that we had every right to take Billy and Charlie’s dibs since Vern had heard them giving said dibs away. I wanted to tell him how Vern and I had almost gotten run down by a freight train on the trestle which spans the Castle River. About Milo Pressman and his fearless—if stupid—sidekick, Chopper the Wonder-Dog. About the bloodsuckers, too. I guess all I really wanted to tell him was Come on, Ace, fair is fair. You know that. But he had to bring Denny into it, and what I heard coming out of my mouth instead of sweet reason was my own death-warrant: “Suck my fat one, you cheap dimestore hood.”
Ace’s mouth formed a perfect O of surprise—the expression was so unexpectedly prissy that under other circumstances it would have been a laff riot, so to speak. All of the others—on both sides of the bog—stared at me, dumbfounded.
Then Teddy screamed gleefully: “That’s telling ’im, Gordie! Oh boy! Too cool!”
I stood numbly, unable to believe it. It was like some crazed understudy had shot onstage at the critical moment and declaimed lines that weren’t even in the play. Telling a guy to suck was as bad as you could get without resorting to his mother. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Chris had unshouldered his knapsack and was digging into it frantically, but I didn’t get it—not then, anyway.
“Okay,” Ace said softly. “Let’s take em. Don’t hurt nobody but the Lachance kid. I’m gonna break both his fuckin arms.”
I went dead cold. I didn’t piss myself the way I had on the railroad trestle, but it must have been because I had nothing inside to let out. He meant it, you see; the years between then and now have changed my mind about a lot of things, but not about that. When Ace said he was going to break both of my arms, he absolutely meant it.
They started to walk toward us through the slackening rain. Jackie Mudgett took a switchknife out of his pocket and hit the chrome. Six inches of steel flicked out, dove-gray in the afternoon half-light. Vern and Teddy dropped suddenly into fighting crouches on either side of me. Teddy did so eagerly, Vern with a desperate, cornered grimace on his face.
The big kids advanced in a line, their feet splashing through the bog, which was now one big sludgy puddle because of the storm. The body of Ray Brower lay at our feet like a waterlogged barrel. I got ready to fight . . . and that was when Chris fired the pistol he had hawked out of his old man’s dresser.
KA-BLAM!
God, what a wonderful sound that was! Charlie Hogan jumped right up into the air. Ace Merrill, who had been staring straight at me, now jerked around and looked at Chris. His mouth made that O again. Eyeball looked absolutely astounded.
“Hey, Chris, that’s Daddy’s,” he said. “You’re gonna get the tar whaled out of you—”
“That’s nothing to what you’ll get,” Chris said. His face was horribly pale, and all the life in him seemed to have been sucked upward, into his eyes. They blazed out of his face.
“Gordie was right, you’re nothing but a bunch of cheap hoods. Charlie and Billy didn’t want their fuckin dibs and you all know it. We wouldn’t have walked way to fuck out here if they said they did. They just went someplace and puked the story up and let Ace Merrill do their thinkin for them.” His voice rose to a scream. “But you ain’t gonna get him, do you hear me?”
“Now listen,” Ace said. “You better put that down before you take your foot off with it. You ain’t got the sack to shoot a woodchuck.” He began to walk forward again, smiling his gentle smile as he came. “You’re just a sawed-off pint-sized pissy-assed little runt and I’m gonna make you eat that fuckin gun.
“Ace, if you don’t stand still I’m going to shoot you. I swear to God.”
“You’ll go to jayy-ail,” Ace crooned, not even hesitating. He was still smiling. The others watched him with horrified fascination . . . much the same way as Teddy and Vern and I were looking at Chris. Ace Merrill was the hardest case for miles around and I didn’t think Chris could bluff him down. And what did that leave? Ace didn’t think a twelve-year-old punk would actually shoot him. I thought he was wrong; I thought Chris would shoot Ace before he let Ace take his father’s pistol away from him. In those few seconds I was sure there was going to be bad trouble, the worst I’d ever known. Killing trouble, maybe. And all of it over who got dibs on a dead body.
Chris said softly, with great regret: “Where do you want it, Ace? Arm or leg? I can’t pick. You pick for me.”
And Ace stopped.
27
His face sagged, and I saw sudden terror on it. It was Chris’s tone rather than his actual words, I think; the real regret that things were going to go from bad to worse. If it was a bluff, it’s still the best I’ve ever seen. The other big kids were totally convinced; their faces were squinched up as if someone had just touched a match to a cherry-bomb with a short fuse.
Ace slowly got control of himself. The muscles in his face tightened again, his lips pressed together, and he looked at Chris the way you’d look at a man who has made a serious business proposition—to merge with your company, or handle your line of credit, or shoot your balls off. It was a waiting, almost curious expression, one that made you know that the terror was either gone or tightly lidded. Ace had recomputed the odds on not getting shot and had decided that they weren’t as much in his favor as he had thought. But he was still dangerous—maybe more than before. Since then I’ve thought it was the rawest piece of brinkmanship I’ve ever seen. Neither of them was bluffing, they both meant business.
“All right,” Ace said softly, speaking to Chris. “But I know how you’re going to come out of this, motherfuck.”
“No you don’t,” Chris said.
“You little prick!” Eyeball said loudly. “You’re gonna wind up in traction for this!”
“Bite my bag,” Chris told him.
With an inarticulate sound of rage Eyeball started forward and Chris put a bullet into the water about ten feet in front of him. It kicked up a splash. Eyeball jumped back, cursing.
“Okay, now what?” Ace asked.
“Now you guys get into your cars and bomb on back to Castle Rock. After that I don’t care. But you ain’t getting him.” He touched Ray Brower lightly, almost reverently, with the toe of one sopping sneaker. “You dig me?”
“But we’ll get you,” Ace said. He was starting to smile again. “Don’t you know that?”
“You might. You might not.”
“We’ll get you hard,” Ace said, smiling. “We’ll hurt you. I can’t believe you don’t know that. We’ll put you all in the fuckin hospital with fuckin ruptures. Sincerely.”
“Oh, why don’t you go home and fuck your mother some more? I hear she loves the way you do it.”
Ace’s smile froze. “I’ll kill you for that. Nobody ranks my mother.”
“I heard your mother fucks for bucks,” Chris informed him, and as Ace began to pale, as his complexion began to approach Chris’s own ghastly whiteness, he added: “In fact, I heard she throws blowjobs for jukebox nickels. I heard—”
Then the storm came back, viciously, all at once. Only this time it was hail instead of rain. Instead of whispering or talking, the woods now seemed alive with hokey B-movie jungle drums—it was the sound of big icy hailstones honking off treetrunks. Stinging pebbles began to hit my shoulders—it felt as if some sentient, male
volent force were throwing them. Worse than that, they began to strike Ray Brower’s upturned face with an awful splatting sound that reminded us of him again, of his terrible and unending patience.
Vern caved in first, with a wailing scream. He fled up the embankment in huge, gangling strides. Teddy held out a minute longer, then ran after Vern, his hands held up over his head. On their side, Vince Desjardins floundered back under some nearby trees and Fuzzy Bracowicz joined him. But the others stood pat, and Ace began to grin again.
“Stick with me, Gordie,” Chris said in a low, shaky voice. “Stick with me, man.”
“I’m right here.”
“Go on, now,” Chris said to Ace, and he was able, by some magic, to get the shakiness out of his voice. He sounded as if he were instructing a stupid infant.
“We’ll get you,” Ace said. “We’re not going to forget it, if that’s what you’re thinking. This is big time, baby.”
“That’s fine. You just go on and do your getting another day.”
“We’ll fuckin ambush you, Chambers. We’ll—”
“Get out!” Chris screamed, and levelled the gun. Ace stepped back.
He looked at Chris a moment longer, nodded, then turned around. “Come on,” he said to the others. He looked back over his shoulder at Chris and me once more. “Be seeing you.”
They went back into the screen of trees between the bog and the road. Chris and I stood perfectly still in spite of the hail that was welting us, reddening our skins, and piling up all around us like summer snow. We stood and listened and above the crazy calypso sound of the hail hitting the treetrunks we heard two cars start up.
“Stay right here,” Chris told me, and he started across the bog.
“Chris!” I said, panicky.
“I got to. Stay here.”
It seemed he was gone a very long time. I became convinced that either Ace or Eyeball had lurked behind and grabbed him. I stood my ground with nobody but Ray Brower for company and waited for somebody—anybody—to come back. After a while, Chris did.
