Decision to find the body

On the Friday before Labor Day weekend, 1960, four twelve-year-old boys sat in a treehouse in Castle Rock, playing three-penny-scat and glooming about the approaching school year. The summer had been the driest and hottest since 1907; the goldenrod in the fields looked parched, nobody's garden had done anything, and even the shade of the big elm that held their clubhouse offered little relief. Teddy Duchamp, Chris Chambers, and Gordon Lachance had their shirts off to avoid sweating them up, and the conversation had dwindled to stale traveling salesman jokes. Then Vern Tessio, another regular, came scrambling up the ladder, sweating buckets, his carefully combed Bobby Rydell hair plastered to his head in chunks. He was so out of breath from running all the way from his house, two miles down Grand Street, that he had to pause before he could speak. When he finally got the words out, they stopped everything: "You guys want to go see a dead body?"

The Secret Vern Overheard

Vern had been under his front porch that morning, digging for a quart jar of pennies he had buried four years earlier when he was eight. The pennies had become an obsession; he had dug through nearly every inch of the forty-foot-long porch two or three times without success, and the imagined sum had grown from three dollars to ten. While he was under there, the screen door slammed and he heard two pairs of footsteps cross the porch. It was his older brother Billy and Billy's friend Charlie Hogan. Charlie was talking in a trembling, crybaby voice, and Vern pricked up his ears because Charlie was one of the toughest kids in town, a hanger-on with Ace Merrill and Eyeball Chambers. Billy told Charlie to keep his mouth shut: "The kid's dead so it's nuthin to him, neither." They had been out joyriding in a boosted car the night before with two girls, and when they stopped to take a piss by the railroad tracks, they found the body of the missing boy from Chamberlain, Ray Brower. A train must have hit him. Charlie had puked. Billy told him they would never tell anyone, because the cops would want to know how they got way out in Harlow without a car. Vern stayed frozen under the porch, his balls crawling up so high he thought they were trying to get back home, until Billy and Charlie left. Then he crawled out and ran straight to the treehouse.

The Decision and the Plan

Chris Chambers immediately saw the opportunity: they could find the body and report it, and get their pictures in the paper. Vern was afraid his brother would beat the living shit out of him, but Gordon pointed out that if the four of them found the kid, Billy and Charlie wouldn't have to worry about it anymore. Teddy Duchamp raised the practical objection that their folks would know they hadn't spent the night camping in Vern's back field. Gordon worked out the cover story: they would say they got bored tenting and decided to hike up the tracks for a campout in the woods. Chris, whose father was on a mean drinking streak, said it was worth a hiding. They arranged their alibis: Chris, Teddy, and Gordon would say they were eating at Vern's; Vern would tell his mother he was eating at Chris's. None of the parents had phones except Gordon's, and the families were all shirttail poor—Vern's father drove a 1952 DeSoto, Teddy's mother took in boarders, and Chris's father was a drunk who spent most of his time at Sukey's Tavern. The DeSpain twins, the other regular members of their gang, were away until Monday, so the four of them were set. They were too excited to play cards anymore; they climbed down from the treehouse and played three-flies-six-grounders in the vacant lot with Vern's old friction-taped baseball, but all they could think about was the dead kid and how they were going to see him, or what was left of him. Around ten o'clock they drifted home to fix it with their parents.

Gordon's Home Front

Gordon got home at quarter of eleven. His mother had gone to Boston with her hen-party friends to see a concert—a way to take her mind off the death of Gordon's older brother Dennis, who had been killed in a Jeep accident at Fort Benning in April. Gordon found his father out back, passing a fine spray from the hose over his ruined garden. The soil was a light, powdery gray; everything in it was dead except the corn, which had never grown a single edible ear. Gordon asked if he could camp out in Vern's back field. His father sighed and said it was okay, then added: "Those are the only people you want to be with, aren't they, Gordon?" He called Vern a feeb and Chris a thief. Gordon argued, but his father wasn't really mad—just sad and tired and used, sixty-three years old, old enough to be his grandfather. Gordon's mother was fifty-five; she had been told she could never carry a baby to term, then had Dennis, and then, ten years later, Gordon. The family revolved around Dennis; at the supper table it was always Denny this and Denny that, and Gordon felt like the Invisible Boy. He packed his bedroll, collected his sixty-eight cents, and went down the back stairs to avoid meeting his father again.

The Gathering and the Gun

Walking up Carbine Street toward the treehouse, Gordon met Chris, who had just been dropped off by a car. Chris was carrying his old Boy Scout pack and two blankets. He pulled Gordon into the narrow alley between the Blue Point Diner and the Castle Rock Drugstore, behind the diner where the garbage cans stank, and pulled out a huge pistol with dark wood grips—a .45 he had stolen from his father's bureau. He had nine shells for it, all that was left in the box. Gordon took the gun, sighted on a trashcan, and squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked, fire licked from the end, and a big hole appeared in the corrugated metal. Francine Tupper, a waitress, came out the back door asking who was letting off cherry-bombs. They ran like hell, cutting behind stores and climbing a fence, until they reached Curran Street. Chris swore he hadn't known the gun was loaded. When they got back to the vacant lot, Vern and Teddy were sitting on their bedrolls waiting. Vern had set up a tent in his field with two turned-on flashlights inside to make it look like they were there after dark. Chris shouldered his pack and said, "Come on, you guys." They walked out of the vacant lot together, Chris slightly in the lead, and headed across Beeman's field toward the railroad tracks that would take them into Harlow.