The .45 shell casings

The .45 shell casings are the two spent brass casings ejected when Chris Chambers fires his father's pistol during the confrontation with Ace Merrill's gang over the body of Ray Brower. After the standoff, Gordon Lachance retrieves them from the boggy ground to eliminate evidence, and Chris pockets them, a small but decisive act that seals the boys' secret and marks the end of their claim on the dead boy.

Origin and Context

The casings come from the same box of nine .45-caliber cartridges that Chris had taken from his father's bureau drawer along with the pistol itself. Chris had told Gordon the gun was unloaded, but when Gordon accidentally fired it behind the Blue Point Diner, the weapon proved to be loaded, and Chris later admitted his father must have been drunk when he put it away. The pistol and its ammunition were thus already entangled in the dangerous, adult world of Chris's family—a world of drinking, violence, and unreliability. When Chris later fired the gun in earnest, the two shell casings that flew from the chamber were the physical residue of that world intruding into the boys' adventure.

The Firing and the Casings

During the confrontation in the bog beside the Back Harlow Road, as Ace Merrill and his gang advanced on the four younger boys, Chris unshouldered his knapsack, drew the pistol, and fired a single shot into the water about ten feet in front of Eyeball Chambers to stop his advance. The shot—a KA-BLAM that made Charlie Hogan jump into the air and Ace Merrill's mouth form a perfect O of surprise—was the turning point of the standoff. The first casing was ejected then. Later, when Ace continued to press forward, Chris fired a second bullet into the water, again kicking up a splash and forcing Eyeball to jump back. That second shot produced the second casing. Both rounds were fired not at anyone but into the boggy water, a deliberate choice that showed Chris's restraint even as he brandished lethal force.

Retrieval and Disposal

After Ace's gang retreated and the immediate crisis passed, Gordon realized that the shell casings could be used as evidence against them. He went back to the spot where Chris had been standing, got down on his knees, and began to comb carefully through the water and marshgrass with his fingers. Chris, still standing nearby, pointed and said, "It's to your left, I think." Gordon found both casings, which winked in the fresh sunlight that broke through the storm clouds. He handed them to Chris, who nodded and stuffed them into a pocket of his jeans. This small act of evidence-gathering was the final, practical step in the boys' decision to abandon the body and keep the entire incident secret. Without the casings, there would be no physical proof linking Chris to the gunfire, and without that proof, the story could never be told.

Significance

The retrieval of the shell casings is a quiet but crucial moment of partnership between Gordon and Chris. It is Gordon who thinks to look for them, Chris who knows exactly where they fell, and together they erase the most damning trace of what happened. The casings, once part of a weapon that could have killed, become instead the object of a shared, silent conspiracy. They are the last physical link to the confrontation, and once they are pocketed, the boys are free to walk away—not as heroes who discovered a body, but as children who have learned that some truths are too dangerous to leave lying in the open. The casings, like the body itself, are left behind in memory, but unlike the body, they are deliberately hidden, a secret carried in a pocket and never spoken of again.