(no subject)
Title: "Of Sinking or Swimming"
Universe: "Stand By Me"/"The Body" by Stephen King
Rating: PG (I think)
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Stephen King. Especially the sentences you recognize from the book or the movie.
Summary: I wouldn’t let him drown. I wanted him to swim with me in this dark water.
Of Sinking or Swimming
I
I was twelve when I saw my best friend cry for the first time.
It was end of summer 1959, the last summer that we could really feel like children, with camp outs and sleepovers and talking about stuff you consider important before you discover girls.
Something changed the moment I saw Ray Brower’s shoe hang from a branch. A slight shift of reality that made everything stand out clearer than it had ever before. There could have been miles between the dead boy and his shoe, never to be reunited. That’s when I became aware of the finality of that kid’s fate, aware of what his death meant: never again. Never again would he walk home, wearing that shoe. I remember the thought that hit me when I saw him: he had been knocked out of his Keds like the train had knocked the life out of his body.
My brother had died in an accident a few months before. And he would never come back. A person who had tackled me, a person I had fought and laughed with. That handsome, talented boy everybody loved, the promise of a good life edged into his smile. And he never had it. He was gone.
We could all feel the change when we returned to Castle Rock, but none of us spoke about it. It was too big for words. Too big for the small town we lived in. We said goodbye like it was forever. And in a way, it was. It always is when you say goodbye to your friends after such an adventure. We were closer that moment than we would ever be. The next morning would bring us back to school, back to a normal life. The trip down the tracks would soon be just a memory, a shadow that marked the end of innocence. We would drift apart and each of us would go on with their own life. It happens.
But Chris and I clung to each other from that day on, even more than we had before. Maybe because I was the only one who knew that Chris had had an innocence to lose on that trip.
I was twelve when I found my best friend with a broken arm in our tree house.
His brother had broken it in two places. I had heard it from my dad shortly after Ace Merrill’s gang had got me and as soon as I could walk more than a dozen steps without being in too much pain, I made my way first to his house, then - as he hadn’t been there - to the tree house.
He looked up from his comic book and gave me a half-smile.
“You look like a sunrise”, he told me.
“Gee, thanks. At least I got Fuzzy Bracowicz in the calf.”
“What did you do?”
“Bit him.”
Chris laughed, but broke off, his face showing that he was in pain.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Only hurts when I laugh,” he said and shrugged with his good shoulder. “But it was worth it.”
“Yeah.”
He shut the comic book and put it aside.
“You heard of Vern and Teddy?” Chris asked.
“Vern was knocked out cold, I heard. Don’t know about Teddy. Guess we’ll see him tomorrow at school.”
“Yeah.” Chris got out his pack of cigarettes and offered me one. We smoked in silence for a while.
“Your parents asked where you got that from?” Chris asked, gesturing towards my abused face. My swollen eye just started to get a little better and I could open it a slit if I tried really hard.
“’Course. It’s not like I show up like this every day.” I bit my tongue for saying this to Chris who - unlike me - did show up at school quite often with cuts and bruises all over him, telling everyone that he had fallen down a tree or tripped over something. If he talked to his friends of the real cause of his injuries at all, he tried to play it down. ‘My dad’s on a mean streak again, ya know. He’s drinkin’ a lot these days.’
I had always accepted the way he dealt with it although it made me sick to think of him living in one house with a father and an older brother who both used him as a punching bag. I felt for him, tried to help him by inviting him for sleepovers as often as possible, but standing up and trying to get an adult to do something about it was out of question. Chris didn’t want to leave his mother and younger siblings to his father’s mercy. And what it meant to have a father up in Togis, he could easily see in Teddy.
He took the punches and wore his bruises with a kind of silent dignity, grateful that they had not been aimed at his mother.
Chris’ face had gone blank. “I covered up for Eyeball.” The smoke from his forgotten cigarette was stirring in a soft breeze from outside. “I told them I had fallen down the cellar stairs in the dark. The doctor called the police. I called Mrs. McGinn and made her tell my mom to take the lightbulb out of the socket in the cellar, if she didn’t want to see her second oldest son in jail.”
I let him take his time. He was sticking up to a brother who was becoming more and more like his father every day. I guess he wasn’t as sure about his reasons as he would have liked to be.
“I just thought that … well, I didn’t want it to become a family tradition.”
I knew what he meant. His oldest brother Frank was in jail doing a long stretch for rape and criminal assault. Saving Eyeball was like saving himself, as weird as that might sound. Strangely enough, I always got even his weirdest way of thinking of himself and his family.
His cigarette had burned down and he flicked the cold ashes out of the window.
We heard the noise of people coming towards us, other kids who frequented the tree house.
We exchanged a look, silently agreeing on not wanting any company at the moment. Ever since we had come back from our trip down the tracks, we had started avoiding the other kids. Too much had happened. Guys we had hung out with before seemed to be miles away now, living in a different world. A world in which boys were not knocked out of their shoes.
We climbed down the ladder, Chris following me slowly, having to work with only one arm to steady himself. The noise had come closer, but the kids had not come into view yet. We walked away into the opposite direction, not wanting to meet them and be pestered about our bruises.
Cutting through a row of bushes, we soon got onto the road leading out of Castle Rock. Without any particular aim, we kept walking, soon leaving the houses behind and turning into a path parallel to the last row of houses, but hidden from them by a line of trees.
We went in silence. We didn’t need to talk about what had happened or what would happen. We just enjoyed the peace.
II
I was thirteen when Chris enrolled in the college courses.
He just waltzed in on the first day of the new term, duck-tailed and leather-jacketed, grinning at me like he was giving me a surprise present. For me, it was.
The grin didn’t last long. His friends turned from him one by one, his parents nagged at him for putting on airs, as they thought, his teachers and classmates kept seeing him as an intruder in their own private territory and obviously saw the need to defend it. Most of the teachers gave him a really hard time and it took all my persuation to keep him from quitting. Sometimes, I almost saw him crumble in front of me, leaning back from a book, rubbing his tired eyes and then looking at me with a hopelessness that scared the shit out of me. It was the only way to get him out of Castle Rock, away from his father and older brother. Away from his bad boy reputation.
‘I wish I could go someplace where nobody knows me.’ That sentence had burned itself into my mind and kept me going when we spent night after night hunched over books together, trying to get Chris onto one level with the others. I tried to fill all the blanks for him, all that he had missed out on by playing truant or fooling around with Vern and Teddy. The bill he had to pay was extremely high and I could feel his despair, but I never gave up on him. I wouldn’t let him drown. I wanted him to swim with me in this dark water.
One night, I was drawn from the book I was reading by the clicking noise of pebbles against my window. Chris was standing in our garden, his face unreadable in the dim light coming from behind me. I gestured for him to climb the tree next to my window, a way he had often used when visiting me as he knew my father didn’t like seeing us hang out together.
This time, he shook his head and pointed at our backdoor with his left hand. His right arm hung limply by his side.
My parents were fast asleep so I tiptoed down and entered the kitchen. When I opened the door for him, Chris was already waiting.
“What’s wrong?” I asked in a hushed voice. The fact that something was wrong was evident on his face.
“I need your help. I think my arm is dislodged,” he whispered back.
My heart did a sharp leap. I didn’t need to ask how it had happened. I briefly put a hand on his good shoulder. “Wait a sec, I’ll be right back.”
I silently went up into my room, put on my shoes and rummaged for something to use as a makeshift sling. Then I went into the living room and took the half-empty bottle of brandy my parents kept in a drawer under a stack of official papers. Unlike Mr. Chambers, my father didn’t drink often so chances were slim he’d remember how much had been left in the bottle.
Chris was still standing in a kind of apathy in the open backdoor when I returned. I quietly stirred him outside and away from the house. I had read enough books to know that mending a dislodged arm was very painful and I didn’t want my parents to wake up and question us on what we were doing up in the middle of the night.
Behind my father’s tool shed, I made Chris sit down and lean against the wall. I handed him the scarf I had brought for making a sling.
“Roll one end up and bite on it.” I told him.
While he did that with his left hand, I took his right one and moved his arm a little. It was completely limp in my hands. Like the arm of a dead body. I shuddered inwardly. Carefully, I brushed back the sleeve of his t-shirt and touched his shoulder to find out in which direction I’d have to move the disconnected bones. I had never done this before and prayed it would only take one go to mend this. Later on, I could never remember how I managed to appear so sure about what to do. To be honest, I was scared out of my wits.
“Ready?” I asked. He nodded. Even with the moon being the only source of light, I could see that he was very pale.
“If you are?” He said and stuffed the end of the scarf into his mouth.
I wasn’t. But I had no choice.
“Okay. One … two … three.” With one hand I pulled at his arm as hard as I could, guiding the joint back into its socket with the other. I felt the joint snap back into place with a sickening thud.
He screamed in pain through the muffling scarf, straining his back against the wall of the tool shed. Then it was over. I unscrewed the brandy bottle and closed the fingers of his left hand around them. He tugged the scarf from his mouth and took two large gulps, followed by a sharp intake of breath at the burning in his throat. He was blinking back the tears. Only one had escaped and trailed down his cheek before he quickly wiped it away with the back of his hand.
“You okay?” I asked.
He nodded. Of course he wasn’t. But he would be.
I unrolled the scarf and made a knot to connect the ends, then offered it to him. He put the bottle down, took the sling, dragged it over his head and carefully put his arm in it.
I picked up the bottle and stood up, offering him a hand. He took it and let me pull him to his feet. For a moment, he was unsteady and I took his left arm to guide him back to the house. After closing the door behind us and putting the bottle back in its place, I led Chris up to my room. He followed me like he was in a trance, still dazed from the pain and the alcohol he wasn’t used to.
Putting up a makeshift bed would have caused too much noise, so I made him sit down on mine and started pulling off his shoes. Looking up at his face, I found him looking back half forlorn, half surprised. It tugged at my heart that he seemed to not be used at all to someone taking care of him.
“Get some sleep,” I told him and nodded towards my bed. I went to lock my door in case my mom would come in the next morning before I woke up. It would be hard to explain why I had locked my door, but better that than having them catch Chris in my room, when they had not seen him come in.
When I turned again, Chris had laid down and moved to one side of the bed to give me room. I brushed off my shoes and stretched out next to him, not caring that I was in my full clothes.
I stared into the darkness above me for a while.
“Gordie?” came Chris voice from beside me.
“Hm?”
“Thanks, man.”
“Sure.”
I listened to Chris breathing for a long time before I drifted off to sleep.
III
I was fifteen when my father died of a heart attack.
It happened at work. His colleagues told us that he suddenly clutched his chest and tipped over onto his desk, spilling a mug of coffee onto the papers he had been working on.
I dream about it sometimes. I see him at his desk, writing something, then suddenly his hand closes on the shirt over his chest, knuckles going white, a gasp from his lips, spit gathering in the corners of his mouth, his eyes going wide, looking at me with a silent accusation. Next thing he is face down in a heap of coffee-stained papers. Sometimes, I only dream of that image. My father, dead at his desk.
The night after I heard the terrible news, Chris was knocking on my window. I opened it for him and let him in. He just looked at me for a long time, then pulled me into a hug and didn’t let go. That was when I broke down.
I had never been as close to my father as I had been to Denny, and still, there I was, crying my heart out on my best friend’s shoulder on the day my father died, while it had taken me months after Denny’s death before I had been able to cry. My mother had cried all day, had hugged me fiercely several times and at some point went into their bedroom and cried some more. I had seen and heard and felt it as if all of it happened to somebody else. Anyone but me. I had been wrapped in an invisible blanket all day, seeing and hearing, but never being touched by what went on. When Chris pulled me into his arms, that blanket slipped off. It was like I had been wearing earplugs all my life and suddenly they were gone and I was drowning in noise. The pain was real and sharp and cutting into me like a knife. I barely noticed that Chris made me sit on my bed, never letting go of me. He didn’t say or do anything apart from holding me and waiting patiently until I calmed down.
When I wiped fiercely at my face to get rid of the tears, he pulled back a little but didn’t break the contact. His hand went up and down my back until the last sobs had ceased.
He offered me a cigarette then and we smoked in silence, sitting in my open bedroom window.
He stayed with me that night, knowing that I needed him as an anchor to stay sane. He slept next to me on my bed and when I woke with a start and tears streaming down my face in the middle of the night, he put his arms around me and held me until pale morning light crept through my bedroom window.
He left when the sun rose, on the same way that he had come. When he jumped the last few feet from a low branch, I stood at the window and watched him go. He looked back at me, shot me one of his trademark half-smiles and lifted a hand, saying ‘See ya later.’ without words.
He stayed with me the next night and the night after that. I cannot put my finger on when it stopped being for my comfort and when it started being for his as well. After hours of learning, when we could both not suppress our yawns anymore, we stretched out next to each other on my bed and talked until we drifted off to sleep.
Sometimes, when I heard the usual knock on my window after sundown and turned to it, he looked at me as if he wanted to ask if it was okay with me. And I just opened my bedroom window a little wider to let him in.
One night, he had a fresh gash across his cheek. I reached out to turn his face and get a better view but he backed away. We didn’t talk about it. He didn’t want to. But he unconsciously snuggled closer to me after he had fallen asleep that night. I put an arm around him and watched him sleep until I, too, sank into a dreamless slumber.
He always left in the early morning hours, before he could be missed at home. Sometimes I wonder how he managed to steal away almost every night without any of his family members noticing his absence. Maybe they did and thought he was going to see some girl. As long as he wasn’t caught and kept from seeing me, we both didn’t care.
I was eighteen when Chris and I left Castle Rock for good.
We stood at the small train station of Castle Rock, luggage piled around us. The morning sun was beating down on us. Chris was kicking pebbles onto the tracks while I stood with my hands in my pockets, looking in the direction from which the train would be coming.
We had reached the shore. It had been sink or swim for the last five years and I had dreamed more than once of the dark water and Chris swimming beside me, then suddenly going under, his head disappearing beneath the surface, his flailing hands following the next second. I dived after him, but couldn’t find him. I never could.
I always woke up from these dreams bathed in sweat, gasping for air. One night, it woke Chris and he rose onto one elbow, looking at me with concern. He reached out and touched my cheek to make me look at him. I didn’t tell him about the dream then. I just moved closer to him, needing to feel his presence to reassure me that he was still there, that he had not drowned. He held me patiently until I had gone back to sleep.
The air above the tracks was shimmering in the heat. It was almost as hot as it had been on the day we set off to look for the dead body. Such a long time ago.
‘I wish I could go someplace where nobody knows me.’
And I was there with him as he got his wish. In a few minutes, we would board the train that would carry him into a new life, away from his abusive father, away from his family’s bad reputation, away from all the people who remembered that he had been suspended for stealing the milk money.
University of Maine, Portland-campus. Pre-law. Even more Latin, one of the subjects he had struggled with the most. I was prouder of him coming out nineteenth of our grade than I was of my own standing seventh. We had dragged ourselves out of the water and onto shore and now he was standing tall on the pavement, a few feet away from me, blinking into the sun.
A car came rolling up on the other side of the fence that separated the platform from the parking lot. It was Billy Tessio and Eyeball Chambers with a pair of chicks. Five years had passed them without making any difference.
“Hey Chris, you here to help your girlfriend with her oversized handbag?” Billy yelled and broke into laughter.
Eyeball stood up in his seat, held one hand to his chest and the other out towards Chris. “I will so miss you, baby brother. You little fag!”
“You and your girlfriend finally moving in together?” Billy again.
“Fuck off!” Chris yelled back. He had unconsciously stepped between me and the car.
“You shouldn’t use swear words in front of your girlfriend, Christopher. Didn’t mom tell you that?”
The girls in the car looked uncomfortable.
I saw Chris clench his fists so hard the knuckles stood out white. I put a hand on his shoulder.
“Chris.”
He looked back at me. The trail had started humming. The train would arrive in less than a minute.
He turned completely to me, the edge of his mouth curving up into a smile. I saw it all in his eyes then. The sadness to have to leave behind his mother and younger siblings with his abusive father and older brother, the gratitude to finally be able to leave those two behind himself, the pain of years and years … and the love.
I took his hand and held it until the train stopped. Neither of us heard any more of what Billy and Eyeball had to say.
We picked up our luggage and boarded the train. As we left Castle Rock behind us, memories of a tree house and railroad tracks in the summer heat flooded my mind. Of a campfire and sleeping under the stars, of a doe in the early hours of morning, of a dead boy who had lost his shoe forever, of swimming in a pool full of bloodsuckers, of my best friend’s face hovering over me after I fainted, gently shaking me back to consciousness, of mending his dislodged arm in the middle of the night behind my father’s tool shed, of my best friend’s arms around me when I cried, of my best friend sleeping next to me for the last three years.
Chris turned from the window behind which the last houses of Castle Rock had vanished minutes before. He turned and looked at me with one of his trademark half-smiles.
The promise of a good life edged into it.
* * *
Universe: "Stand By Me"/"The Body" by Stephen King
Rating: PG (I think)
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Stephen King. Especially the sentences you recognize from the book or the movie.
Summary: I wouldn’t let him drown. I wanted him to swim with me in this dark water.
Of Sinking or Swimming
I
I was twelve when I saw my best friend cry for the first time.
It was end of summer 1959, the last summer that we could really feel like children, with camp outs and sleepovers and talking about stuff you consider important before you discover girls.
Something changed the moment I saw Ray Brower’s shoe hang from a branch. A slight shift of reality that made everything stand out clearer than it had ever before. There could have been miles between the dead boy and his shoe, never to be reunited. That’s when I became aware of the finality of that kid’s fate, aware of what his death meant: never again. Never again would he walk home, wearing that shoe. I remember the thought that hit me when I saw him: he had been knocked out of his Keds like the train had knocked the life out of his body.
My brother had died in an accident a few months before. And he would never come back. A person who had tackled me, a person I had fought and laughed with. That handsome, talented boy everybody loved, the promise of a good life edged into his smile. And he never had it. He was gone.
We could all feel the change when we returned to Castle Rock, but none of us spoke about it. It was too big for words. Too big for the small town we lived in. We said goodbye like it was forever. And in a way, it was. It always is when you say goodbye to your friends after such an adventure. We were closer that moment than we would ever be. The next morning would bring us back to school, back to a normal life. The trip down the tracks would soon be just a memory, a shadow that marked the end of innocence. We would drift apart and each of us would go on with their own life. It happens.
But Chris and I clung to each other from that day on, even more than we had before. Maybe because I was the only one who knew that Chris had had an innocence to lose on that trip.
I was twelve when I found my best friend with a broken arm in our tree house.
His brother had broken it in two places. I had heard it from my dad shortly after Ace Merrill’s gang had got me and as soon as I could walk more than a dozen steps without being in too much pain, I made my way first to his house, then - as he hadn’t been there - to the tree house.
He looked up from his comic book and gave me a half-smile.
“You look like a sunrise”, he told me.
“Gee, thanks. At least I got Fuzzy Bracowicz in the calf.”
“What did you do?”
“Bit him.”
Chris laughed, but broke off, his face showing that he was in pain.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Only hurts when I laugh,” he said and shrugged with his good shoulder. “But it was worth it.”
“Yeah.”
He shut the comic book and put it aside.
“You heard of Vern and Teddy?” Chris asked.
“Vern was knocked out cold, I heard. Don’t know about Teddy. Guess we’ll see him tomorrow at school.”
“Yeah.” Chris got out his pack of cigarettes and offered me one. We smoked in silence for a while.
“Your parents asked where you got that from?” Chris asked, gesturing towards my abused face. My swollen eye just started to get a little better and I could open it a slit if I tried really hard.
“’Course. It’s not like I show up like this every day.” I bit my tongue for saying this to Chris who - unlike me - did show up at school quite often with cuts and bruises all over him, telling everyone that he had fallen down a tree or tripped over something. If he talked to his friends of the real cause of his injuries at all, he tried to play it down. ‘My dad’s on a mean streak again, ya know. He’s drinkin’ a lot these days.’
I had always accepted the way he dealt with it although it made me sick to think of him living in one house with a father and an older brother who both used him as a punching bag. I felt for him, tried to help him by inviting him for sleepovers as often as possible, but standing up and trying to get an adult to do something about it was out of question. Chris didn’t want to leave his mother and younger siblings to his father’s mercy. And what it meant to have a father up in Togis, he could easily see in Teddy.
He took the punches and wore his bruises with a kind of silent dignity, grateful that they had not been aimed at his mother.
Chris’ face had gone blank. “I covered up for Eyeball.” The smoke from his forgotten cigarette was stirring in a soft breeze from outside. “I told them I had fallen down the cellar stairs in the dark. The doctor called the police. I called Mrs. McGinn and made her tell my mom to take the lightbulb out of the socket in the cellar, if she didn’t want to see her second oldest son in jail.”
I let him take his time. He was sticking up to a brother who was becoming more and more like his father every day. I guess he wasn’t as sure about his reasons as he would have liked to be.
“I just thought that … well, I didn’t want it to become a family tradition.”
I knew what he meant. His oldest brother Frank was in jail doing a long stretch for rape and criminal assault. Saving Eyeball was like saving himself, as weird as that might sound. Strangely enough, I always got even his weirdest way of thinking of himself and his family.
His cigarette had burned down and he flicked the cold ashes out of the window.
We heard the noise of people coming towards us, other kids who frequented the tree house.
We exchanged a look, silently agreeing on not wanting any company at the moment. Ever since we had come back from our trip down the tracks, we had started avoiding the other kids. Too much had happened. Guys we had hung out with before seemed to be miles away now, living in a different world. A world in which boys were not knocked out of their shoes.
We climbed down the ladder, Chris following me slowly, having to work with only one arm to steady himself. The noise had come closer, but the kids had not come into view yet. We walked away into the opposite direction, not wanting to meet them and be pestered about our bruises.
Cutting through a row of bushes, we soon got onto the road leading out of Castle Rock. Without any particular aim, we kept walking, soon leaving the houses behind and turning into a path parallel to the last row of houses, but hidden from them by a line of trees.
We went in silence. We didn’t need to talk about what had happened or what would happen. We just enjoyed the peace.
II
I was thirteen when Chris enrolled in the college courses.
He just waltzed in on the first day of the new term, duck-tailed and leather-jacketed, grinning at me like he was giving me a surprise present. For me, it was.
The grin didn’t last long. His friends turned from him one by one, his parents nagged at him for putting on airs, as they thought, his teachers and classmates kept seeing him as an intruder in their own private territory and obviously saw the need to defend it. Most of the teachers gave him a really hard time and it took all my persuation to keep him from quitting. Sometimes, I almost saw him crumble in front of me, leaning back from a book, rubbing his tired eyes and then looking at me with a hopelessness that scared the shit out of me. It was the only way to get him out of Castle Rock, away from his father and older brother. Away from his bad boy reputation.
‘I wish I could go someplace where nobody knows me.’ That sentence had burned itself into my mind and kept me going when we spent night after night hunched over books together, trying to get Chris onto one level with the others. I tried to fill all the blanks for him, all that he had missed out on by playing truant or fooling around with Vern and Teddy. The bill he had to pay was extremely high and I could feel his despair, but I never gave up on him. I wouldn’t let him drown. I wanted him to swim with me in this dark water.
One night, I was drawn from the book I was reading by the clicking noise of pebbles against my window. Chris was standing in our garden, his face unreadable in the dim light coming from behind me. I gestured for him to climb the tree next to my window, a way he had often used when visiting me as he knew my father didn’t like seeing us hang out together.
This time, he shook his head and pointed at our backdoor with his left hand. His right arm hung limply by his side.
My parents were fast asleep so I tiptoed down and entered the kitchen. When I opened the door for him, Chris was already waiting.
“What’s wrong?” I asked in a hushed voice. The fact that something was wrong was evident on his face.
“I need your help. I think my arm is dislodged,” he whispered back.
My heart did a sharp leap. I didn’t need to ask how it had happened. I briefly put a hand on his good shoulder. “Wait a sec, I’ll be right back.”
I silently went up into my room, put on my shoes and rummaged for something to use as a makeshift sling. Then I went into the living room and took the half-empty bottle of brandy my parents kept in a drawer under a stack of official papers. Unlike Mr. Chambers, my father didn’t drink often so chances were slim he’d remember how much had been left in the bottle.
Chris was still standing in a kind of apathy in the open backdoor when I returned. I quietly stirred him outside and away from the house. I had read enough books to know that mending a dislodged arm was very painful and I didn’t want my parents to wake up and question us on what we were doing up in the middle of the night.
Behind my father’s tool shed, I made Chris sit down and lean against the wall. I handed him the scarf I had brought for making a sling.
“Roll one end up and bite on it.” I told him.
While he did that with his left hand, I took his right one and moved his arm a little. It was completely limp in my hands. Like the arm of a dead body. I shuddered inwardly. Carefully, I brushed back the sleeve of his t-shirt and touched his shoulder to find out in which direction I’d have to move the disconnected bones. I had never done this before and prayed it would only take one go to mend this. Later on, I could never remember how I managed to appear so sure about what to do. To be honest, I was scared out of my wits.
“Ready?” I asked. He nodded. Even with the moon being the only source of light, I could see that he was very pale.
“If you are?” He said and stuffed the end of the scarf into his mouth.
I wasn’t. But I had no choice.
“Okay. One … two … three.” With one hand I pulled at his arm as hard as I could, guiding the joint back into its socket with the other. I felt the joint snap back into place with a sickening thud.
He screamed in pain through the muffling scarf, straining his back against the wall of the tool shed. Then it was over. I unscrewed the brandy bottle and closed the fingers of his left hand around them. He tugged the scarf from his mouth and took two large gulps, followed by a sharp intake of breath at the burning in his throat. He was blinking back the tears. Only one had escaped and trailed down his cheek before he quickly wiped it away with the back of his hand.
“You okay?” I asked.
He nodded. Of course he wasn’t. But he would be.
I unrolled the scarf and made a knot to connect the ends, then offered it to him. He put the bottle down, took the sling, dragged it over his head and carefully put his arm in it.
I picked up the bottle and stood up, offering him a hand. He took it and let me pull him to his feet. For a moment, he was unsteady and I took his left arm to guide him back to the house. After closing the door behind us and putting the bottle back in its place, I led Chris up to my room. He followed me like he was in a trance, still dazed from the pain and the alcohol he wasn’t used to.
Putting up a makeshift bed would have caused too much noise, so I made him sit down on mine and started pulling off his shoes. Looking up at his face, I found him looking back half forlorn, half surprised. It tugged at my heart that he seemed to not be used at all to someone taking care of him.
“Get some sleep,” I told him and nodded towards my bed. I went to lock my door in case my mom would come in the next morning before I woke up. It would be hard to explain why I had locked my door, but better that than having them catch Chris in my room, when they had not seen him come in.
When I turned again, Chris had laid down and moved to one side of the bed to give me room. I brushed off my shoes and stretched out next to him, not caring that I was in my full clothes.
I stared into the darkness above me for a while.
“Gordie?” came Chris voice from beside me.
“Hm?”
“Thanks, man.”
“Sure.”
I listened to Chris breathing for a long time before I drifted off to sleep.
III
I was fifteen when my father died of a heart attack.
It happened at work. His colleagues told us that he suddenly clutched his chest and tipped over onto his desk, spilling a mug of coffee onto the papers he had been working on.
I dream about it sometimes. I see him at his desk, writing something, then suddenly his hand closes on the shirt over his chest, knuckles going white, a gasp from his lips, spit gathering in the corners of his mouth, his eyes going wide, looking at me with a silent accusation. Next thing he is face down in a heap of coffee-stained papers. Sometimes, I only dream of that image. My father, dead at his desk.
The night after I heard the terrible news, Chris was knocking on my window. I opened it for him and let him in. He just looked at me for a long time, then pulled me into a hug and didn’t let go. That was when I broke down.
I had never been as close to my father as I had been to Denny, and still, there I was, crying my heart out on my best friend’s shoulder on the day my father died, while it had taken me months after Denny’s death before I had been able to cry. My mother had cried all day, had hugged me fiercely several times and at some point went into their bedroom and cried some more. I had seen and heard and felt it as if all of it happened to somebody else. Anyone but me. I had been wrapped in an invisible blanket all day, seeing and hearing, but never being touched by what went on. When Chris pulled me into his arms, that blanket slipped off. It was like I had been wearing earplugs all my life and suddenly they were gone and I was drowning in noise. The pain was real and sharp and cutting into me like a knife. I barely noticed that Chris made me sit on my bed, never letting go of me. He didn’t say or do anything apart from holding me and waiting patiently until I calmed down.
When I wiped fiercely at my face to get rid of the tears, he pulled back a little but didn’t break the contact. His hand went up and down my back until the last sobs had ceased.
He offered me a cigarette then and we smoked in silence, sitting in my open bedroom window.
He stayed with me that night, knowing that I needed him as an anchor to stay sane. He slept next to me on my bed and when I woke with a start and tears streaming down my face in the middle of the night, he put his arms around me and held me until pale morning light crept through my bedroom window.
He left when the sun rose, on the same way that he had come. When he jumped the last few feet from a low branch, I stood at the window and watched him go. He looked back at me, shot me one of his trademark half-smiles and lifted a hand, saying ‘See ya later.’ without words.
He stayed with me the next night and the night after that. I cannot put my finger on when it stopped being for my comfort and when it started being for his as well. After hours of learning, when we could both not suppress our yawns anymore, we stretched out next to each other on my bed and talked until we drifted off to sleep.
Sometimes, when I heard the usual knock on my window after sundown and turned to it, he looked at me as if he wanted to ask if it was okay with me. And I just opened my bedroom window a little wider to let him in.
One night, he had a fresh gash across his cheek. I reached out to turn his face and get a better view but he backed away. We didn’t talk about it. He didn’t want to. But he unconsciously snuggled closer to me after he had fallen asleep that night. I put an arm around him and watched him sleep until I, too, sank into a dreamless slumber.
He always left in the early morning hours, before he could be missed at home. Sometimes I wonder how he managed to steal away almost every night without any of his family members noticing his absence. Maybe they did and thought he was going to see some girl. As long as he wasn’t caught and kept from seeing me, we both didn’t care.
I was eighteen when Chris and I left Castle Rock for good.
We stood at the small train station of Castle Rock, luggage piled around us. The morning sun was beating down on us. Chris was kicking pebbles onto the tracks while I stood with my hands in my pockets, looking in the direction from which the train would be coming.
We had reached the shore. It had been sink or swim for the last five years and I had dreamed more than once of the dark water and Chris swimming beside me, then suddenly going under, his head disappearing beneath the surface, his flailing hands following the next second. I dived after him, but couldn’t find him. I never could.
I always woke up from these dreams bathed in sweat, gasping for air. One night, it woke Chris and he rose onto one elbow, looking at me with concern. He reached out and touched my cheek to make me look at him. I didn’t tell him about the dream then. I just moved closer to him, needing to feel his presence to reassure me that he was still there, that he had not drowned. He held me patiently until I had gone back to sleep.
The air above the tracks was shimmering in the heat. It was almost as hot as it had been on the day we set off to look for the dead body. Such a long time ago.
‘I wish I could go someplace where nobody knows me.’
And I was there with him as he got his wish. In a few minutes, we would board the train that would carry him into a new life, away from his abusive father, away from his family’s bad reputation, away from all the people who remembered that he had been suspended for stealing the milk money.
University of Maine, Portland-campus. Pre-law. Even more Latin, one of the subjects he had struggled with the most. I was prouder of him coming out nineteenth of our grade than I was of my own standing seventh. We had dragged ourselves out of the water and onto shore and now he was standing tall on the pavement, a few feet away from me, blinking into the sun.
A car came rolling up on the other side of the fence that separated the platform from the parking lot. It was Billy Tessio and Eyeball Chambers with a pair of chicks. Five years had passed them without making any difference.
“Hey Chris, you here to help your girlfriend with her oversized handbag?” Billy yelled and broke into laughter.
Eyeball stood up in his seat, held one hand to his chest and the other out towards Chris. “I will so miss you, baby brother. You little fag!”
“You and your girlfriend finally moving in together?” Billy again.
“Fuck off!” Chris yelled back. He had unconsciously stepped between me and the car.
“You shouldn’t use swear words in front of your girlfriend, Christopher. Didn’t mom tell you that?”
The girls in the car looked uncomfortable.
I saw Chris clench his fists so hard the knuckles stood out white. I put a hand on his shoulder.
“Chris.”
He looked back at me. The trail had started humming. The train would arrive in less than a minute.
He turned completely to me, the edge of his mouth curving up into a smile. I saw it all in his eyes then. The sadness to have to leave behind his mother and younger siblings with his abusive father and older brother, the gratitude to finally be able to leave those two behind himself, the pain of years and years … and the love.
I took his hand and held it until the train stopped. Neither of us heard any more of what Billy and Eyeball had to say.
We picked up our luggage and boarded the train. As we left Castle Rock behind us, memories of a tree house and railroad tracks in the summer heat flooded my mind. Of a campfire and sleeping under the stars, of a doe in the early hours of morning, of a dead boy who had lost his shoe forever, of swimming in a pool full of bloodsuckers, of my best friend’s face hovering over me after I fainted, gently shaking me back to consciousness, of mending his dislodged arm in the middle of the night behind my father’s tool shed, of my best friend’s arms around me when I cried, of my best friend sleeping next to me for the last three years.
Chris turned from the window behind which the last houses of Castle Rock had vanished minutes before. He turned and looked at me with one of his trademark half-smiles.
The promise of a good life edged into it.
* * *