Ace Merrill's revenge

Ace Merrill's revenge was the brutal, delayed consequence of the standoff over Ray Brower's corpse. Weeks after the four boys had faced down Ace and his gang in the rain-soaked bog near the Back Harlow Road, the older teenagers made good on their promise to retaliate. The attack was not a spontaneous act but a calculated settling of accounts, aimed at the two boys who had most directly defied them: Gordon Lachance and Chris Chambers.

The Ambush on the Street

One day near the end of September, as Gordon Lachance walked home from school, a black 1952 Ford with gangster white-walls, spinner hubcaps, and a Lucite death-knob on the steering wheel cut into the curb in front of him. The car was unmistakable: painted on its back deck were a deuce and a one-eyed jack, and beneath them, in Roman Gothic script, the words WILD CARD. The doors flew open, and Ace Merrill and Fuzzy Bracowicz stepped out. Ace smiled his gentle smile and said, "Cheap hood, right? My mother loves the way I do it to her, right?" Fuzzy added, "We're gonna rack you, baby." Gordon dropped his schoolbooks on the sidewalk and ran, but they caught him before he made the end of the block. Ace hit him with a flying tackle, and Gordon went full-length on the paving, his chin hitting the cement so hard that he saw whole constellations. He was already crying when they picked him up, not from the scraped and bleeding elbows and knees, or even from fear, but from a vast, impotent rage. Chris had been right: the body had been theirs.

The Beating

Gordon twisted and turned and almost squiggled free, but then Fuzzy hoicked his knee into Gordon's crotch. The pain was incredible, widening the horizons of pain from plain old wide screen to Vista Vision, and Gordon began to scream. Ace punched him twice in the face with long, looping haymaker blows. The first closed Gordon's left eye; it would be four days before he could really see out of that eye again. The second broke his nose with a crunch that sounded like crispy cereal inside his head. Old Mrs. Chalmers came out on her porch, clutching her cane in one arthritis-twisted hand and jutting a Herbert Tareyton from one corner of her mouth. She began to bellow at them, "Hi! Hi there, you boys! You stop that! Police! Poleeeece!" Ace smiled and said, "Don't let me see you around, dipshit," and they let go of him and backed off. Gordon sat up and leaned over, cupping his wounded balls, sickly sure he was going to throw up and then die. But when Fuzzy started to walk around him, the sight of his pegged jeans-leg snuggered down over the top of his motorcycle boot brought all the fury back. Gordon grabbed him and bit his calf through his jeans, biting just as hard as he could. Fuzzy began to scream and hop around on one leg, calling Gordon a dirty-fighter. Then Ace stamped down on Gordon's left hand, breaking the first two fingers. They sounded like pretzels. Ace and Fuzzy went back to Ace's car, Ace sauntering with his hands in his back pockets, Fuzzy hopping on one leg and throwing curses back over his shoulder. Gordon curled up on the sidewalk, crying.

Aftermath and Cover-Up

Aunt Evvie Chalmers came down her walk, thudding her cane angrily. She took Gordon into her house, gave him a wet rag for his nose, which had begun to resemble a summer squash, and gave him a big cup of medicinal-tasting coffee that was somehow calming. She kept bellowing that she should call the doctor, but Gordon kept telling her not to. Finally she gave up, and Gordon walked home very slowly. His parents saw him and "wigged right out." They asked who the boys were and whether he could pick them out of a line-up. Gordon said he didn't think he could, that he thought they were from some other town or from "up the city," a phrase everyone understood to mean Lewiston-Auburn. They took him to Dr. Clarkson, who set his nose and his fingers and gave his mother a prescription for painkiller. Dr. Clarkson got Gordon's parents out of the examining room on some pretext and then asked Gordon who had done it. When Gordon said he didn't know, the doctor accused him of lying. "Why should you protect the cretins who did this? Do you think they will respect you? They will laugh and call you stupid-fool!" Gordon insisted he didn't know them. The doctor sent him out to his parents, shaking his white head and muttering about juvenile delinquents.

The Broader Retaliation

Gordon's beating was not the only one. Chris Chambers suffered worse. His brother Eyeball Chambers broke Chris's arm in two places and left his face looking like a Canadian sunrise; the elbow-break had to be set with a steel pin. Mrs. McGinn found Chris staggering along the soft shoulder, bleeding from both ears and reading a Richie Rich comic book. She took him to the Central Maine General Emergency Room, where Chris told the doctor he had fallen down the cellar stairs in the dark. The doctor was disgusted and went to call Constable Bannerman. While he did that, Chris went slowly down the hall, holding the temporary sling against his chest, and used a nickel in the pay phone to call Mrs. McGinn collect. He asked her to go to his house and tell his mother to take the lightbulb out of the socket in the cellar. Mrs. McGinn agreed, asking no questions. Constable Bannerman did come out to the Chambers house, but Eyeball did not go to jail. Vern Tessio and Teddy Duchamp also took their lumps, though not as badly. Billy Tessio was laying for Vern when Vern got home; he took after him with a stovelength and hit him hard enough to knock him unconscious after only four or five good licks. Three of the older kids caught Teddy walking home from the vacant lot one afternoon, punched him out, and broke his glasses. Teddy fought them, but they wouldn't fight him when they realized he was groping after them like a blindman in the dark. The four boys hung out together at school looking like the remains of a Korean assault force. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but everybody understood that they had had a pretty serious run-in with the big kids and comported themselves like men. A few stories went around, all of them wildly wrong.

The Long-Term Cost

The revenge attack marked a turning point. When the casts came off and the bruises healed, Vern and Teddy drifted away, discovering a new group of younger kids they could lord it over. Chris and Gordon began to drop by the treehouse less and less frequently, and after a while the place was theirs by default. The friendship that had been forged on the railroad tracks slowly dissolved. Gordon later reflected that some people drown, and that is all. The beating did not end with the physical injuries; it accelerated the dissolution of the gang, scattering the four boys into separate futures long before their eventual, separate deaths.