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To be twelve years old was to accept, on some unconscious level, that the parents and adults in your life were always going to have their way over you. No matter how right you thought you were.
Chris knew that better than anyone. I’d never seen a kid more at mercy of the adults in their life than he was, even for a time when pretty much all kids were treated like we existed solely to obey our parents orders. I tried to help Chris as much as he helped me. When he came knocking at my window in the dead of night, the indents of shiny silver rings pressed into red welts on his face, I helped him clean up as best as I could. I’d sit cross-legged in front of him in the treehouse and dab a wet cloth on his face, hoping I could minimise some of the damage with the limited medical expertise available to a kid. When he cried about his dad and his brother — who’d elected to use him as their personal punching bag once he got old enough to become a threat in their minds — I rubbed his back and told him that he was worth more than the whole damn town put together.
But I was twelve. There’s only so much you can do when you’ve only got a few quarters stashed in your piggy bank and most of your life experience begins and ends at the doorstep of your childhood home.
I tried to convince my dad to let Chris stay the night when the beatings got worse. My dad never relented. He saw Chris as an extension of his no-good-brother and his worse father; destined to spend the better half of his adult life in a federal institution, probably weighed down by gambling debts and child support payments. He thought Chris was a thief and a liar and he believed that every second I spent with him was turning me into one, too.
I pleaded with him. I pleaded with my mom too — not that she would’ve been able to change his mind even if she did agree with me. It never made a difference. Chris wasn’t allowed to sleep over or stay for dinner, and as far as my father was concerned, he shouldn’t even step foot inside our house. Ditto for Teddy. Vern was okay, because his mother knew my mother and his family were our sort of people. Solidly middle class. Chris and Teddy came from a different part of town and wore different clothes. They had different families, different houses. To my parents, that made them essentially a different type of people.
Vern was allowed to stay the night. Chris and Teddy were not allowed past the porch.
So there was only so much I could do for Chris. I hated it. I hated that I had to let him go back to his house every night. We all knew what went on there. The adults had to have known too. There was no way they could have possibly not known, that’s what I thought. Now, I’m not so sure. I’m sure they knew something was wrong. There was no good explanation for the frequency of which Chris came to school sporting a busted lip or a black eye or a fresh scar. Then again, maybe things were just different back then. Everyone smacked their kids in those days. There was a limit to how far you could push these things, of course, but back then you just didn’t comment on how other people parented their kids. No matter how much you gossiped about it behind closed doors.
If the adults knew about Chris, then they didn’t really know the truth. If they saw the bruises, it just made them shake their heads at that awful Chambers family. They saw Chris as a bad kid from a bad family and that was enough to make him not their problem.
I tried to apologise for it, but Chris never let me. “It’s not your fault, Gordie,” he’d tell me. He’d shake his head like it was just some minor inconvenience, living under the same roof as his father with his beer bottles and hands like catcher’s mitts.
“It’s okay, really. Your folks don’t want me around anyway.”
And so Chris would smile and wave at me through the fly-screen door of my house and then head back home, back to the beer bottles and the silver rings.
*
I think we both knew, as best as our small-town worldview would allow, that there was a word to describe what we had between us. There was something different to what we had with our other friends. We just didn’t know what.
It was what my dad was trying to shame and silence out of me. It was what Chris’s dad was trying to beat out of him.
I didn’t have the words for it then. I didn’t have the words for it when I was twelve, consoling my best friend because his dad had racked up more gambling debts and had decided to take it out on his youngest son. I didn’t have the words for it when I was fifteen, sitting on the hood of my parked car down by the lake, blowing smoke rings into the night air as I tried to convince Chris that maybe college would be worth a shot. I didn’t have the words for it when I was twenty and visiting Chris in his dorm, sitting up late with him in the library as he studied pre-law. Christ, I still barely have the words for it now. It took me fifteen years to put a finger on that strange sensation I felt every time I shared a cigarette with him, the twist in my gut from knowing that his lips had touched the same place that mine had.
I didn’t have the words for it and I certainly didn’t have the guts to act on it. Every time I thought about saying something — or doing something — I’d think about the story Teddy had told about his dad beating a guy up in the army just for giving him the wrong look. I’d think about how my dad looked at me when I’d told him that I didn’t want to play football, that lingering question of why I couldn’t be more like Denny. We might’ve not had the words for what was slowly developing between us, but we were all to familiar with that sinking feeling that we would be doing something wrong, anything that might justify our parents anger. Our fathers had reason enough to see us as not good enough to be their sons.
Chris’s dad spent seventeen years trying to beat every inch of kindness, sensitivity and generosity out of his youngest son. He called Chris a fag in hopes that he wouldn’t end up being one. Maybe he somehow already sensed something about Chris that Chris didn’t know himself.
I think I knew it, even back then. I knew there was something different about me and something different about Chris.
I worried that if I said something about it, it would ruin his life.
*
Growing up in Castle Rock, people never discussed their problems frankly. There was enough gossip floating around about everyone else; no one wanted to open themselves up as the next target. It was all euphemisms and double-meanings, sentences that seeemed to say one thing but really meant something else. It was a habit I never realised I’d internalised until I got paid to write for a living.
It was a habit I noticed in Chris, however, long before I saw it in myself. We were sitting in Chris’ dorm room. That last semester of college we spent most of our time holed up in there, as if real life couldn’t get at us when we were in those four walls. We were twenty-one. We were staring down the tail end of our undergraduate degrees, the real world racing towards us like the impending, relentless motion of that train on the tracks when we twelve. We’d gotten out of Castle Rock. We’d realised the world was a lot bigger than we had ever thought.
“Gordie…” Chris started, his voice getting wobbly around the edges like it always did when something was bothering him but he didn’t want to say it.
“Do you ever think about Ray Brower?” He asked quietly.
I had, plenty of times. More so when I was younger and the memory was still fresh like a wound. It was his expression that haunted me the most. The shock that had stretched across his face. Until the age of roughly fourteen I kept having these recurring nightmares where I was walking along a path and a train would come and knock me out of my PF Flyers the same way it had knocked Ray out of his Keds. I would wake up screaming five nights out of the week, until my dad rushed into my room one particularly bad night and suggested in no uncertain terms that unless I could pull my act together and stop scaring my mother, I would be out on the street so fast it would make my head spin.
Naturally I thought about him less as time went on, though I could never forget about the day we found him. Every time I heard a story of a kid going missing I thought about Ray Brower, half-hidden under the shrubland with his eyes still open.
Ray Brower was the indelible mark on my childhood, the stain on my adolescence that I could never get out.
“Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if we’d never found him,” I said.
Chris let out a shaky breath. “I just can’t stop thinking about— he just died, Gordie. He was just a kid walking along the tracks and a train came and killed him. Don’t you ever think about how many times we walked along those tracks? Don’t you ever think about what would’ve happened if a train had’ve come along at the wrong moment and killed us?”
As kids we were, I think, too naive to consequences to seriously consider the fact that we could’ve been Ray Brower. Childhood felt like invincibility. To hear of a kid getting killed was so terrifying precisely because you thought that kind of thing couldn’t happen to you. In my twenties, the memory of Ray Brower scared me more because of the realisation that that could’ve been me. That could’ve been any of us.
Chris hugged his legs and tucked his knees under his chin. He looked like a kid again.
His voice cracked. “I can’t forget about it, Gordie. What if I had’ve… at twelve, Jesus. I can’t stop thinking about it. All the things I would’ve never done. All the things I still haven’t done.”
He looked at me.
This was my chance, I thought. I still couldn’t quite explain how I felt for Chris, unable to confront that amorphous desire no matter how much my own body beat me over the head with it. But I knew in my gut that there was a chance here and I was wasting it. An opportunity that I might never get again.
I looked at my best friend of over ten years. I thought about Ray Brower and Denny and all the chances they missed out on.
“We should’ve never gone looking for that body,” I admitted. There’d been times where I’d wonder if I would’ve been better off if we never heard about Ray Brower, if we’d decided to sleep in the clubhouse that night instead of going out looking for him. Deep down, I knew that wasn’t true.
Something passed through Chris’s eyes. Sadness, maybe. Disappointment. He was always hard to read, even then. Sixteen years under his father’s roof had made him good at feigning his emoptions.
He sighed. “But if we hadn’t found him, who else would’ve?”
*
I ran into him, for the first time in nearly five years, in a diner near Portland.
We’d lost touch soon after graduating. There’d been no specific reason for it, no big fight or explosive argument that tore us apart. It had happened in that oddly natural way that friendships go. He’d gone to law school. I published a book. He moved interstate. I got married.
Slowly, we saw less and less of each other. I still thought about him. Chris might have gotten out, but the Chambers family stuck around in Castle Rock forever, a constant reminder of the life Chris had left behind. I’d come back to visit my parents sometimes and see his old house, slowly growing more disrepaired as his dad’s drinking got worse and his brothers did stints in the local prison. It was hard not to think about Chris at twelve, terrified and trying his best to hide it, every time I passed that house. Years on and I’d still feel that sting of guilt that had haunted me as a kid, remembering that helpless feeling of knowing what Chris was going home to every night and yet being unable to stop it from happening.
I looked at my best friend — and I still considered him my best friend, even after so much time — and I couldn’t help but still see that scared kid behind his eyes.
I asked him if he’d been back to Castle Rock.
“There’s not much for me to go back to,” he said. “Have you?”
“Occasionally.” I didn’t tell him about my parents, still living in that same house with the same pictures of Denny on the walls, his things still in boxes in the attic. I understood his reluctance; it was hard to come back to a ghost town. There were too many memories back there that we’d tried to let go of.
“It hasn’t changed,” I told him. He nodded. Castle Rock would always be a town stuck in time.
It felt strange, talking to him so familiarly. So much had happened in five years that it felt like I hadn’t seem him in fifty. He looked older, more comfortable in himself. His hair was a little longer. He’d put on a little weight. He was still my best friend. But I think we both understood that things would never be the same.
Our friendship had always operated off of unspoken agreements. The lingering touch of his hand on my back. The smile on his face that told me that it was okay to let him go home, even when we both knew what he would walking back to. The looks we’d give each other that made it feel like no one else was in the room. We’d gotten good at saying more in the silence than we ever could in our conversations.
He had to leave — he had some big meeting, he couldn’t be late — and he apologised profusely. I told him it was okay. He told me we’d catch up soon. And for a moment, I understood it all. He was my best friend and my first love, and as I watched him get up from the booth and pull me into a hug, I knew this might be the last time we ever spoke.
To be thirty years old was to understand, through painful experience, that not all friendships would stay in your life forever.
“It was nice seeing you, Gordie,” he said.
“It was really nice seeing you too, Chris,” I told him. And I really meant it.