The Body

“I’ll see you.”

He grinned—that same sweet, sunny grin. “Not if I see you first, fuckface.”

He walked off, still laughing, moving easily and gracefully, as though he didn’t hurt like me and have blisters like me and like he wasn’t lumped and bumped with mosquito and chigger and blackfly bites like me. As if he didn’t have a care in the world, as if he was going to some real boss place instead of just home to a three-room house (shack would have been closer to the truth) with no indoor plumbing and broken windows covered with plastic and a brother who was probably laying for him in the front yard. Even if I’d known the right thing to say, I probably couldn’t have said it. Speech destroys the functions of love, I think—that’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is the harm. Love isn’t what these asshole poets like McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close those lovebites. It’s the other way around, that’s the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them. Take it from me. I’ve made my life from the words, and I know that is so.

But like I said, the writing isn’t so easy or as much fun as it used to be. The phone rings a lot. Sometimes I get headaches, bad ones, and then I have to go into a dim room and lie down until they go away. The doctors say they aren’t true migraines; he called them “stressaches” and told me to slow down. I worry about myself sometimes. What a stupid habit that is… and yet I can’t quite seem to stop it. And I wonder if there is really any point to what I’m doing, or what I’m supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing “let’s pretend.”

Had he perhaps lain awake and trembling in the dark for hours, not just lost now but disoriented as well, cut off from the world? Maybe he had died of fear. A bird with crushed tailfeathers once died in my cupped hands in just that way. Its body trembled and vibrated lightly, its beak opened and closed, its dark, bright eyes stared up at me. Then the vibration quit, the beak froze half-open and the black eyes became lackluster and uncaring. It could have been that way with Ray Brower. He could have died because he was simply too frightened to go on living.

The last touristy thing we did was to take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, and while leaning on the rail I happened to look down and see scores of used condoms floating on the mild swells. And I had a moment of almost total recall—or perhaps it was an actual incidence of time-travel. Either way, for one second I was literally in the past, pausing halfway up that embankment and looking back at the burst leech: dead, deflated… but still ominous.

Keith must have seen something in my face because he said: “Not very pretty, are they?”

I only shook my head, wanting to tell him not to apologize, wanting to tell him that you didn’t have to come to the Apple and ride the ferry to see used rubbers, wanting to say: The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality; that’s why all the verbs in stories have -ed endings, Keith my good man, even the ones that sell millions of paperbacks. The only two useful artforms are religion and stories.

I was pretty drunk that night, as you may have guessed.

What I did tell him was: “I was thinking of something else, that’s all.” The most important things are the hardest things to say.

There’s something horrible and fascinating about the way dark comes to the woods, its coming unsoftened by headlights or streetlights or houselights or neon. It comes with no mothers’ voices, calling for their kids to leave off and come on in now, to herald it. If you’re used to the town, the coming of the dark in the woods seems more like a natural disaster than a natural phenomenon; it rises like the Castle River rises in the spring.

“Chris,” I said, “why don’t you go into the college courses? You’re smart enough.”

“They decide all of that in the office. And in their smart little conferences. The teachers, they sit around in this big circle-jerk and all they say is Yeah, Yeah, Right, Right. All they give a fuck about is whether you behaved yourself in grammar school and what the town thinks of your family. All they’re deciding is whether or not you’ll contaminate all those precious college-course dootchbags. But maybe I’ll try to work myself up. I don’t know if I could do it, but I might try. Because I want to get out of Castle Rock and go to college and never see my old man or any of my brothers again. I want to go someplace where nobody knows me and I don’t have any black marks against me before I start. But I don’t know if I can do it.”

“Why not?”

“People. People drag you down.”

“Who?” I asked, thinking he must mean the teachers, or adult monsters like Miss Simons, who had wanted a new skirt, or maybe his brother Eyeball who hung around with Ace and Billy and Charlie and the rest, or maybe his own mom and dad.

But he said: “Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don’t you know that?” He pointed at Vern and Teddy, who were standing and waiting for us to catch up. They were laughing about something; in fact, Vern was just about busting a gut. “Your friends do. They’re like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You can’t save them. You can only drown with them.”

“Come on, you fuckin slowpokes!” Vern shouted, still laughing.

“Yeah, comin!” Chris called, and before I could say anything else, he began to run. I ran, too, but he caught up to them before I could catch up to him.

“Those stories you tell, they’re no good to anybody but you, Gordie. If you go along with us just because you don’t want the gang to break up, you’ll wind up just another grunt, makin C’s to get on the teams. You’ll get to High and take the same fuckin shop courses and throw erasers and pull your meat along with the rest of the grunts. Get detentions. Fuckin suspensions. And after awhile all you’ll care about is gettin a car so you can take some skag to the hops or down to the fuckin Twin Bridges Tavern. Then you’ll knock her up and spend the rest of your life in the mill or some fuckin shoeshop in Auburn or maybe even up to Hillcrest pluckin chickens. And that pie story will never get written down. Nothin’ll get written down. Cause you’ll just be another wiseguy with shit for brains.”

Chris Chambers was twelve when he said all that to me. But while he was saying it his face crumpled and folded into something older, oldest, ageless. He spoke tonelessly, colorlessly, but nevertheless, what he said struck terror into my bowels. It was as if he had lived that whole life already, that life where they tell you to step right up and spin the Wheel of Fortune, and it spins so pretty and the guy steps on a pedal and it comes up double zeros, house number, everybody loses. They give you a free pass and then they turn on the rain machine, pretty funny, huh, a joke even Vern Tessio could appreciate.

It’s asshole if your friends can drag you down,” Chris said finally. “I know about you and your folks. They don’t give a shit about you. Your big brother was the one they cared about. Like my dad, when Frank got thrown into the stockade in Portsmouth. That was when he started always bein mad at us other kids and hitting us all the time. Your dad doesn’t beat on you, but maybe that’s even worse. He’s got you asleep. You could tell him you were enrolling in the fuckin shop division and you know what he’d do? He’d turn to the next page in his paper and say: Well, that’s nice, Gordon, go ask your mother what’s for dinner. And don’t try to tell me different. I’ve met him.”

I didn’t try to tell him different. It’s scary to find out that someone else, even a friend, knows just how things are with you.

“You’re just a kid, Gordie—”

“Gee, thanks, Dad.”

“I wish to fuck I was your father!” he said angrily. “You wouldn’t go around talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was! It’s like God gave you something, all those stories you can make up, and He said: This is what we got for you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it then maybe I ought to.”

That’s a really fine story,” Chris said suddenly. “They’re just a little too dumb to understand.”

“No, it’s not that hot. It’s a mumbler.”

“That’s what you always say. Don’t give me that bullshit you don’t believe. Are you gonna write it down? The story?”

“Probably. But not for awhile. I can’t write em down right after I tell em. It’ll keep.”

“What Vern said? About the ending being a gyp?”

“Yeah?”

Chris laughed. “Life’s a gyp, you know it? I mean, look at us.”

“Nah, we have a great time.”

“Sure,” Chris said. “All the fuckin time, you wet.”

I laughed. Chris did, too.

“They come outta you just like bubbles out of soda-pop,” he said after awhile.

“What does?” But I thought I knew what he meant.

“The stories. That really bugs me, man. It’s like you could tell a million stories and still only get the ones on top. You’ll be a great writer someday, Gordie.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Yeah, you will. Maybe you’ll even write about us guys if you ever get hard up for material.”

“Have to be pretty fuckin hard up.” I gave him the elbow.

“Yeah, that’s cool, then what happened?” Teddy asked eagerly.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Teddy asked.

“It means it’s the end. When you don’t know what happens next, that’s the end.”

“Whaaaat?” Vern cried. There was an upset, suspicious look on his face, like he thought maybe he’d just gotten rooked playing penny-up Bingo at the Topsham Fair. “What’s all this happy crappy? How’d it come out!”

“You have to use your imagination,” Chris said patiently.

“No, I ain’t!” Vern said angrily. “He’s supposed to use his imagination! He made up the fuckin story!”

“Yeah, what happened to the cat?” Teddy persisted. “Come on, Gordie, tell us.”

“I think his dad was at the Pie-Eat and when he came home he beat the living crap out of Lard Ass.”

“Yeah, right,” Chris said. “I bet that’s just what happened.”

“And,” I said, “the kids went right on calling him Lard Ass. Except that maybe some of them started calling him Puke-Yer-Guts, too.”

“That ending sucks,” Teddy said sadly.

“That’s why I didn’t want to tell it.”

“You could have made it so he shot his father and ran away and joined the Texas Rangers,” Teddy said. “How about that?”

Chris and I exchanged a glance. Chris raised one shoulder in a barely perceptible shrug.

“I guess so,” I said.