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“Junior High,” Chris said. “And you know what, Gordie? By next June, we’ll all be quits.” “What are you talking about? Why would that happen?” “It’s not gonna be like grammar school, that’s why. You’ll be in the college courses. Me and Teddy and Vern, we’ll all be in the shop courses, playing pocket-pool with the rest of the retards, making ashtrays and birdhouses. Vern might even have to go into Remedial. You’ll meet a lot of new guys. Smart guys. That’s just the way it works, Gordie. That’s how they got it set up.”
It’s scary to find out that someone else, even a friend, knows just how things are with you.
It’s like God gave you something, all those stories you can make up, and He said: This is what we got for you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it then maybe I ought to.”
If you go along with us just because you don’t want the gang to break up, you’ll wind up just another grunt, makin C’s to get on the teams. You’ll get to High and take the same fuckin shop courses and throw erasers and pull your meat along with the rest of the grunts. Get detentions. Fuckin suspensions. And after awhile all you’ll care about is gettin a car so you can take some skag to the hops or down to the fuckin Twin Bridges Tavern. Then you’ll knock her up and spend the rest of your life in the mill or some fuckin shoeshop in Auburn or maybe even up to Hillcrest pluckin chickens. And that
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“People. People drag you down.”
“Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don’t you know that?” He pointed at Vern and Teddy, who were standing and waiting for us to catch up. They were laughing about something; in fact, Vern was just about busting a gut. “Your friends do. They’re like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You can’t save them. You can only drown with them.”
he caught up to them before I could catch up to him.
We lit them with flaming twigs from the fire and then leaned back, men of the world, watching the cigarette smoke drift away into the soft twilight.
“Nothin like a smoke after a meal,” Teddy said.
I looked at Chris, wondering if he would say anything about Miss Simons, but he didn’t say anything at all, and he didn’t see me looking at him—he was looking at Vern and nodding soberly at Vern’s story.
And in back of him, instead of the shattered shops and churches of my Le Dio dreamscape, I saw only dark forest and the cindered railway bed bulking against the starry sky like a prehistoric burial mound.
like a puppy which can’t think of anyplace else to go.
I saw—or thought I saw—something white and shapeless steal through the trees like a grotesquely ambulatory bedsheet.
At that precise moment the new day felt too good to share.
What I was seeing was some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that was appalling.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell them about the deer, but I ended up not doing it. That was one thing I kept to myself. 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
The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.
The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality; that’s why all the verbs in stories have -ed endings, Keith my good man, even the ones that sell millions of paperbacks. The only two useful artforms are religion and stories.
The most important things are the hardest things to say.
Events surrounding our hike had turned it into what we had suspected it was all along: serious business.
Nobody tells you about the pathetic fallacy until you’re in college . . . and even then I noticed that nobody but the total dorks completely believed it was a fallacy.
cars—I think that was what made me angriest. They had come in cars.
Since then I’ve thought it was the rawest piece of brinkmanship I’ve ever seen. Neither of them was bluffing, they both meant business.
“Stick with me, Gordie,” Chris said in a low, shaky voice. “Stick with me, man.” “I’m right here.”
Shawshank.”
Speech destroys the functions of love, I think—that’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is the harm.
Teddy and Vern slowly became just two more faces in the halls or in three-thirty detention. We nodded and said hi. That was all. It happens. Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that? But when I think of that dream, the corpses under the water pulling implacably at my legs, it seems right that it should be that way. Some people drown, that’s all. It’s not fair, but it happens. Some people drown.
Stevens knew the base alchemy of old age well enough: not lead into gold but bones into glass.
it is the tale, not he who tells it.
That bricky color drained from her cheeks, leaving only two small spots of hectic color.
“When I hear cynics say that the days of magic and miracles are all behind us, Dr. McCarron, I’ll know they’re deluded, won’t I? When you can buy a ring in a pawnshop for two dollars and that ring will instantly erase both bastardy and licentiousness, what else would you call that but magic? Cheap magic.”
There is no comfort without pain; thus we define salvation through suffering—could
The Valley of the Shadow Syndrome.
“Her name is Harriet White,” I said, and thought: And hers will be the first face you see when you arrive to deliver your child. The chill came back—that dreadful drifting formless chill. Her stone face.
He said he would have felt less nervous if she had let out a few healthy bellows, the way a woman in labor was supposed to do.
