truck-dodging

Truck-dodging is the signature act of Teddy Duchamp, a twelve-year-old boy whose reckless courage and damaged body make him the most volatile member of the gang that sets out to find the body of Ray Brower. Running into the path of oncoming pulp-trucks on Route 196, Teddy treats each near-miss as a victory, laughing his high-pitched cackling laugh while the windblast from the passing vehicle ripples his clothes. The game is not a one-time stunt but a compulsive ritual, one that his friends watch with a mixture of awe and dread, knowing that his Coke-bottle glasses and poor vision make every attempt a genuine gamble with death. Truck-dodging is the outward expression of an inner wound: Teddy's father, Norman Duchamp, a man who stormed the beach at Normandy, burned the sides of Teddy's head against a cast-iron stove plate when Teddy was eight, then sat down with a shotgun to watch daytime television until the ambulance came. Norman was sent to Togus, a VA hospital for veterans who have gone section eight, and Teddy visits him every week, proud of his father's war record in spite of what was done to him. The game is Teddy's way of claiming the same kind of courage his father once had, of proving that he too can face death without flinching—and of punishing a body that has already been betrayed by the man he admires most.

The Game and Its Witnesses

Teddy's truck-dodging is not a secret or a solitary dare; he performs it in plain sight, and his friends are the unwilling audience. Chris Chambers, the toughest and most clear-eyed of the group, states flatly that Teddy "won't live to be twice the age he is now" because of the way he throws himself at danger. Gordon Lachance, the narrator, recalls the sickening tension of watching Teddy stand in the middle of the road, his thick glasses glittering, his long hair flopping in sweat-soaked stringers, as a truck bears down. The windblast that misses him by bare inches is a physical shock that leaves the onlookers breathless. Teddy's own laughter—described as "Eeee-eee-eee, like a rusty nail being slowly hauled out of a rotten board"—is the sound of a boy who has found a way to feel alive by courting the thing that could kill him. The game is so ingrained that when the gang is walking the railroad tracks toward Harlow, Teddy tries to dodge a freight train, shouting "Just like the beach at Normandy!" before Gordon tackles him off the tracks to prevent the engineer from seeing them and reporting the trespass. The train-dodge attempt is a direct escalation of the truck-dodging logic: if a truck is a thrill, a train is the ultimate test.

The Logic of Recklessness

Teddy's compulsion to dodge vehicles is inseparable from the damage his father inflicted. Norman Duchamp's atrocity—holding Teddy's head down on a cast-iron burner plate, then doing the other side—left Teddy with ears that look "like two lumps of warm wax," a hearing aid he wears sometimes, and a vision so poor that even his thick glasses cannot give him clear sight. In baseball, he has to play the fences because he cannot see the ball, and he has been knocked unconscious running full-tilt into a fence. Yet Teddy never speaks of his father with bitterness; he always says that his dad "stormed the beach at Normandy," and he visits him at Togus every week. The pride and the horror are fused inside him, and truck-dodging is the physical enactment of that fusion. He is not trying to die; he is trying to prove that the body his father damaged can still master the machines that threaten it. Each successful dodge is a small victory over the vulnerability that was forced on him. His friends understand this on some level—Chris says matter-of-factly that "his dad burnin his ears like that. That's what did it"—but they also know that the game cannot end well. The odds are against a boy who can barely see, and the trucks on Route 196 do not care about his father's war record.

The Reckoning

Teddy's truck-dodging never kills him, but it is part of the same pattern of risk that eventually does. He dies in a car crash in Harlow in 1971 or early 1972, his Chevrolet Bel Air full of friends, all of them passing around joints and bottles of Popov. The car hits a utility pole, shears it off, and rolls six times. One girl survives for six months in what the nurses call the C&T Ward—Cabbages and Turnips—before someone pulls the plug on her respirator. Teddy, who wanted nothing but military service and was turned down by the Air Force and classified 4-F by the draft because of his glasses and hearing aid, is posthumously awarded what Gordon calls "the Dogpiss of the Year Award." The crash is the logical endpoint of a life lived at the edge of control, a life in which dodging trucks was not a phase but a philosophy. Teddy's truck-dodging is the purest expression of a boy who learned, from the man who should have protected him, that courage means standing in the path of destruction and laughing. The game gave him a way to be a hero in his own story, even if the only witnesses were his friends and the only reward was the wind.