Tracks Symbol Analysis

“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?”

“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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”