The Body

by Stephen King

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.

Especially on the nights I wake up from dreams where the hail falls into his open eyes.

“Yeah, but you didn’t miss him,” I said. “Chris Chambers never misses, am I right?” “Not even when the ladies leave the seat down,” he said. He winked at me, formed an O with his thumb and forefinger, and spat a neat white bullet through it. “Eat me raw, Chambers,” I said. “Through a Flavor Straw,” he said, and we grinned at each other.

Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were going. It was grand.

The Untouchables or Peter Gunn—both Robert Stack as Eliot Ness and Craig

They chanted together: “I don’t shut up, I grow up. And when I look at you I throw up.”

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?

“He still stormed the beach at Normandy, right?”

“What’s all this happy crappy? How’d it come out!”

“I wish to fuck I was your father!” he said angrily. “You wouldn’t go around talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was! 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.”

I asked, thinking he must mean the teachers, or adult monsters like Miss Simons, who had wanted a new skirt, or maybe his brother Eyeball who hung around with Ace and Billy and Charlie and the rest, or maybe his own mom and dad. But he said: “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.”

Our stomachs made pre-dinner conversation.

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.

It seemed right to do it this way, because the rite of passage is a magic corridor and so we always provide an aisle—it’s what you walk down when you get married, what they carry you down when you get buried. Our corridor was those twin rails, and we walked between them, just hopping along toward whatever this was supposed to mean.

A sudden impossible bolt of lightning flashed down, seemingly from directly overhead, making me cry out and clap my hands to my eyes. God had taken my picture, a little kid with his shirt tied around his waist, duck-bumps on his bare chest and cinders on his cheeks. I heard the rending fall of some big tree not sixty yards away. The crack of thunder which followed made me cringe. I wanted to be at home reading a good book in a safe place…

We turned him face up into the pouring rain, the lightning, the steady crack of thunder.

“Besides, we might only get a couple of months or so. As excessories. I mean, we’re only twelve fuckin years old, they ain’t gonna put us in 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. Love isn’t what these asshole poets like McKuen want you to think it is. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close those lovebites. It’s the other way around, that’s the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them. Take it from me. I’ve made my life from the words, and I know that is so.

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.