The Body Quotes

The most important things in life are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people to look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried when you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

He was the dumbest guy we hung around with, I guess, and he was crazy. He’d take the craziest chances you can imagine, and get away with them. His big thing was what he called “truck-dodging.” He’d run out in front of them on 196 and sometimes they’d miss him by bare inches. God knew how many heart attacks he’d caused, and he’d be laughing while the windblast from the passing truck rippled his clothes. It scared us because his vision was so lousy, Coke-bottle glasses or not. It seemed like only a matter of time before he misjudged one of those trucks. And you had to be careful what you dared him because Teddy would do anything on a dare.

I cried when I heard, and I cried more at the funeral, and I couldn’t believe that Dennis was gone, that anyone that used to knuckle my head or scare me with a rubber spider until I cried or give me a kiss when I fell down and scraped both my knees bloody […] that a person who had touched me could be dead. It hurt me and it scared me that he could be dead…but it seemed to have taken all the heart out of my parents. For me, Dennis was hardly more than an acquaintance. He was ten years older than me if you can dig it, and he had his own friends and classmates. We ate at the same table for a lot of years, and sometimes he was my friend and sometimes my tormentor, but mostly he was, you know, just a guy.

The year before, Chris had been suspended from school for three days. A bunch of milk-money disappeared when it was Chris’s turn to be room-monitor and collect it, and because he was a Chambers from those no-account Chamberses, he had to take a hike even though he always swore he never hawked that money. That was the time Mr. Chambers put Chris in the hospital for an overnight stay; when his dad heard Chris was suspended, he broke Chris’s nose and his right wrist. Chris came from a bad family, all right, and everybody thought he would turn out bad…including Chris. His brothers had lived up to the town’s expectations admirably.

This business about being ignored: I could never really pin it down until I did a book report in high school on this novel called The Invisible Man. When I agreed […] I thought it was going to be the science fiction story […] When I found out this was a different story I tried to give the book back but Miss Hardy wouldn’t let me off the hook. I ended up being real glad. This Invisible Man is about a Negro. Nobody ever notices him at all unless he fucks up. People look right through him. When he talks, nobody answers. He’s like a black ghost. Once I got into it, I ate that book up like it was a John D. MacDonald, because that cat Ralph Ellison was writing about me.

No, it’s not a very good story—its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to his own […] But it was the first time I had ever really used the place I knew and the things I felt in a piece of fiction, and there was a kind of dreadful exhilaration in seeing things that had troubled me for years come out in a new form, a form over which I had imposed control. It had been years since that childhood idea of Denny being in the closet of his spookily preserved room had occurred to me; I would have honestly believed I had forgotten it. Yet there it is in “Stud City,” only slightly changed…but controlled.

“Paratroops over the side!” Vern bawled, and leaped halfway down the embankment in one crazy, clownish stride. Vern was nuts for playing paratroops anyplace the ground was soft—a gravel pit, a haymow, an embankment like this one. Chris jumped after him. The train was really loud now, probably headed straight up our side of the river toward Lewiston. Instead of jumping, Teddy turned in the direction from which it was coming. His thick glasses glittered in the sun. His long hair flopped untidily over his brow in sweat-soaked stringers.

“Go on, Teddy,” I said.

“No, huh-uh, I’m gonna dodge it.” He looked at me, his magnified eyes frantic with excitement. “A train-dodge, dig it? What’s trucks after a fuckin train-dodge?”

“You’re crazy, man. You want to get killed?”

So up he went, and he actually made it […] He stood there, clutching the top of the pine in one tar-gummy hand […] and then there was a sickening, rotted crack as the branch he was standing on gave way and he plummeted. What happened next was one of those things that make you sure there must be a God. Chris reached out, purely on reflex, and what he caught was a fistful of Teddy Duchamp’s hair. And although his wrist swelled up fat and he was unable to use his right hand very well for almost two weeks, Chris held him until Teddy, screaming and cursing, got his foot on a live branch thick enough to support his weight. Except for Chris’s blind grab, he would have turned and crashed and smashed all the way to the foot of the tree, a hundred and twenty feet below.

“No, man,” Vern said earnestly. “A goocher, that’s really bad. You remember when Clint Bracken and those guys got wiped out on Sirois Hill in Durham? Billy tole me they was flippin for beers and they came up a goocher just before they got into that car. And bang! They all get fuckin totaled. I don’t like that. Sincerely.”

“Nobody believes that crap about moons and goochers,” Teddy said impatiently. “It’s baby stuff, Vern. You gonna flip or not?”

Vern flipped, but with obvious reluctance. This time he, Chris, and Teddy all had tails. I was showing Thomas Jefferson on a nickel. And I was suddenly scared. It was as if a shadow had crossed some inner sun. They still had a goocher, the three of them, as if dumb fate had pointed at them a second time.

“RUN FASTER, DICKFACE!” I bellowed and was I enjoying this?

Yeah—in some peculiar, self-destructive way that I have experienced since only when completely and utterly drunk, I was. I was driving Vern Tessio like a drover getting a particularly fine cow to market. And maybe he was enjoying his own fear in the same way, bawling like that self-same cow, hollering and sweating, his ribcage rising and falling like the bellows of a blacksmith on a speed-trip, clumsily keeping his footing, lurching ahead.

“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 a while. 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.”

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 zeroes, house number, everybody loses. They give you a free pass and then they turn on the rain machine, pretty funny, huh […]

He grabbed my naked arm and his fingers closed tight. They dug grooves in my flesh. They ground at the bones. His eyes were hooded and dead—so dead, man, that he might have just fallen out of his own coffin.

“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 […] “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 […]

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

And as I thought about the body of Ray Brower in this light—or lack of it—what I felt was not queasiness or fear that he would suddenly appear before us, a green and gibbering banshee whose purpose was to drive us back the way we had come before we could disturb his—its—peace, but a sudden and unexpected wash of pity that he should be so alone and so defenseless in the dark that was now coming over our side of the earth. If something wanted to eat on him, it would. His mother wasn’t here to stop that from happening, and neither was his father, nor Jesus Christ in the company of all the saints. He was dead and he was all alone, and I realized that if I didn’t stop thinking about it I was going to cry.

“Jesus H Baldheaded Christ,” Teddy whispered, and he talked no more of going into the woods to see what was making that screaming noise. All four of us huddled up together and I thought of running. I doubt if I was the only one. If we had been tenting in Vern’s field—where our folks thought we were—we probably would have run. But Castle Rock was too far, and the thought of trying to run across that trestle in the dark made my blood freeze. Running deeper into Harlow and closer to the corpse of Ray Brower was equally unthinkable. We were stuck. If there was a ha’ant out there in the woods—what my dad called a Goosalum—and it wanted us, it would probably get us.

I’ve never spoken or written of it until just now, today. And I have to tell you that it seems a lesser thing written down, damn near inconsequential. But for me it was the best part of that trip, the cleanest part, and it was a moment I found myself returning to, almost helplessly, when there was trouble in my life—my first day in Vietnam, and this fellow walked into the clearing where we were with his hand over his nose and when he took his hand away there was no nose there because it had been shot off; the time the doctor told us our youngest son might be hydrocephalic (he turned out just to have an outsized head, thank God); the long, crazy weeks before my mother died. I would find my thoughts turning back to that morning, the scuffed suede of her ears, the white flash of her tail.

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.

We looked into each others’ tired, sweaty faces. We were hungry and out of temper. The big adventure had turned into a long slog—dirty and sometimes scary. We would have been missed back home by now, too, and if Milo Pressman hadn’t already called the cops on us, the engineer of the train crossing the trestle might have done it. We had been planning to hitchhike back to Castle Rock, but four o’clock was just three hours from dark, and nobody gives four kids on a back country road a lift after dark.

I tried to summon up the cool image of my deer, cropping at green morning grass, but even that seemed dusty and no good, no better than a stuffed trophy over the mantle in some guy’s hunting lodge, the eyes sprayed to give them a phony lifelike shine.

Finally Chris said: “It’s still closer out going ahead. Let’s go.”

If [the idea of hitchhiking] had come up and hadn’t been shot down in flames, none of the things which occurred later would have happened. Maybe Chris and Teddy and Vern would even be alive today. No, they didn’t die in the woods or on the railroad tracks; nobody dies in this story except some bloodsuckers and Ray Brower, and if you want to be completely fair about it, he was dead before it even started. But it is true that, of the four of us who flipped coins to see who would go down to the Florida Market to get supplies, only the one who actually went is still alive […] If you sense a certain flipness on my part, you’re right—but [… at ] an age when all four of us would be considered too young and immature to be President, three of us are dead.

There’s a high ritual to all fundamental events, the rites of passage, the magic corridor where the change happens. Buying the condoms. Standing before the minister. Raising your hand and taking the oath. Or, if you please, walking down the railroad tracks to meet a fellow your own age halfway, the same as I’d walk halfway over to Pine Street to meet Chris if he was coming over to my house, or the way Teddy would walk halfway down Gates Street to meet me if I was going to his. It seemed right to do it this way because the rite of passage is a magic corridor and so we always provide an aisle […] Our corridor was those twin rails, and we walked between them, just hopping along toward whatever this was supposed to mean […]

I looked in the direction Vern was pointing and saw a blue-white fireball bowling its way up the lefthand rail of the GS&WM tracks, crackling and hissing for all the world like a scalded cat. It hurried past us as we turned to watch it go, dumbfounded, aware for the first time that such things could exist. Twenty feet beyond us it made a sudden—pop!!—and just disappeared, leaving a greasy smell of ozone behind.

“What am I doin here, anyway?” Teddy muttered.

“What a pisser!” Chris exclaimed happily, his face upturned. “This is gonna be a pisser like you wouldn’t believe!” But I was with Teddy. Looking up at that sky gave me a dismaying sense of vertigo. It was like looking into some deeply mysterious marbled gorge.

Then the storm came all at once, as if a shower chain had been pulled in the sky. The whispering sound changed to loud contention. It was as if we were being rebuked for our discovery, and it was frightening. Nobody tells you about the pathetic fallacy until you’re in college…and even then I noticed that nobody but the total dorks completely believed it was a fallacy.

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 them 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 from my mouth was my own death-warrant: “Suck my fat one, you cheap dimestore hood.”

Still, it’s mostly just the idea of holding that pail in my two hands, I guess—as much a symbol of my living as his dying, proof that I really do know which boy it was—which boy of the five of us. Holding it. Reading every year in its cake of rust and the fading of its bright shine. Feeling it, trying to understand the suns that shone on it, the rains that fell on it, the snows that covered it. And to wonder where I was when each thing happened to it in its lonely place, where I was, what I was doing, who I was loving, how I was getting along where I was. I’d hold it, read it, feel it…and look at my own face in whatever reflection might be left. Can you dig it?

Even if I’d known the right thing to say, I probably wouldn’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 slip of its tail. The word is the harm. Love isn’t what these asshole poets like McKeun 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 it is so.

I didn’t care if Ace or Fuzzy and the rest of those assholes respected me or thought I was stupid or never thought about me at all. But there was Chris to think of. His brother Eyeball had broken his arm in two places and had left his face looking like a Canadian sunrise. They had to set the elbow-break with a steel pin. Mrs. McGinn from down the road saw Chris staggering along the soft shoulder, bleeding from both ears and reading a Richie Rich comic book. She took him to the CMG Emergency Room where Chris told the doctor he had fallen down the cellar stairs in the dark.