The Body (1982), Fall From Innocence, a Novella by Stephen King: a summary

The most important things are the hardest things to say. (on page 1)

The narrator is Gordie Lachance, this fiction is told in a memoir form. We could say he is the hero of the story, although he never did heroic acts. He was just a regular teenager then turned to be a good writer. His books is in the movie and they get good reviews. The story follows Gordie, about his teenage days in Castle Rock in sixties. Four teenagers tried to find a body of the missing boy at their age named Ray.

This is not an easy, quick read. Time also flip-flops back and forth with little warning. Instead of a structure narrative that explains, the reader is able to see through the characters’ ideas, remembering memories the way actually remember moments from our lives in flashes. You will find poetries throughout the work. I totally also agree with Gordie or the author when he said that friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant.

The Body (1982), Fall From Innocence, a Novella by Stephen King: a summary

It had been driest an hottest since 1907-or so the newspaper said, and on that Friday preceding the Labor Day weekend and the start of another school year, even the goldenrod in the fields and ditches beside the backroads looked parched and poorly. Nobody’s garden had done doodly-squat that year, and the big displays of canning stuff in the Castle Rock Red & White were still there, gathering dust. No one had anything to put up that summer, except maybe dandelion wine.

Besides playing cards, the club was a good place to go and smoke cigarettes and look at girly book. Teddy and Chris and Gordie were up in the club on that Friday morning, glooming to each other about school being so near and playing cards and swapping the same old traveling salesman jokes and frenchman jokes.

Teddy Duchamp was close to being thirteen like the rest of them, but thick glasses and the hearing aid he wore sometimes made him look like an old man. Kids were always trying to cadge smokes of him on the street, but the bugle in his shirt was just his hearing-aid battery. In spite of the glasses and flesh-colored button always screwed into his ear, Teddy could not see very well and often misunderstood the things people said to him.

His eyes was just naturally bad, but there was nothing natural about what had happened to his ears. Back in those days, when it was cool to get your hair cut so that your ears stuck out like a couple of jug-handles, Teddy had Castle Rock’s first Beatle haircut-four years before anyone in America had ever heard of the Beatles. He kept his ears covered because they looked like two lumps of warm wax.

One day when he was eight, Teddy’s father got pissed at him for breaking a plate. His mother was working at the shoe factory in South Paris when it happened and by the time she found out about it, it was all over. Teddy’s dad took Teddy over the big woodstove at the back kitchen and shoved the side of Teddy’s head down against one of the cast-iron burner plates. Then he called the Central Main General Emergency unit and told them to come to get his boy. Then he hung up the phone, went into the closet, got his gun, and sat down to watch the daytime stories on TV with shotgun laid across his knees. When his neighbor came over to ask if Teddy was all right- she had heard the screaming-Teddy’s dad pointed the shotgun at her.

Teddy was shuffling the cards in his clumsy way and Gordie was just getting to the gooshy part of murder story. The trapdoor banged up and Vern Tessio, one of the other regulars, pulled himself into the clubhouse.

In April Gordie’s older brother, Dennis, had been killed in a Jeep accident. He and another guy were on their way and an Army truck hit them. Dennis would be twenty-two later that week. Gordie had already picked out a birthday card for him. For Dennis, his brother was hardly more than acquaintance. He was ten years older than Gordie, and he had his own friends and classmates.

They all heard about it on the radio. The radio, a Philco with a cracked case which had also been scavenged from the dump, played all the time. When the news came on they usually switched some metal dial over to the Mute. The news was a lot happy horseshit about Kennedy and Nixon and Quemoy and Matsu and the missile gap and what a shit that Castro was turning out to be after all. But they had all listened to the Ray Brower story a little more closely, because he was a kid their age.

He was from Chamberlain, a town forty miles or so east of Castle Rock. Three days before Vern came busting into the clubhouse after a two-mile run up Grand Street, Ray Brower had gone out with one of his mother’s pots to picked blueberries. When dark came and he still was not black, the Browers called the county sheriff and a search started – first just around the kid’s house and then spreading to the surrounding towns of Motton and Durham and Pownal. Everybody got into the act-cops, deputies, game wardens, volunteers. But three days later the kid was still missing. In 1960 the whole area between Chamberlain and Castle Rock was undeveloped, and there were places that had not even been logged since before World War II. In those days it was still possible to walk into the woods and lose your direction there and die there.

Teddy Duchamp was only about half-bright, but Vern Tessio would never be spending any of his spare time on College Bowl either. Still his brother Billy was even dumber. Four years ago, when he was eight, Vern buried a quart jar of pennies under the long Tessio front porch. He played a pirate sort game, and pennies were buried treasure. He drew a treasure map which he put up I his room with the rest of his junk. He forgot all about it for a month or so. But his mom had been in to clean two or three times since then, and had collected all the old homework papers and candy wrappers and comic magazines and joke books. She burned them in the stove to start the cook-fire one morning, and Vern’s treasure map went right up the kitchen chimney.

Vern came up to the club with his news as quick as he did not just to get it out but to show others that some good had finally come of his penny-hunt. He was under the porch when the screen door slammed up above. Two pair of footsteps crossed the porch, and then Billy’s friend, Charlie Hogan himself talked to Billy in trembling voice. Vern heard Charlie Hogan talked like who was one of the toughest kids in town. Charlie after all, hung out with Ace Merrill and Eyeball Chambers. Vern took a chance and crept a little closer to the steps, practically slavering. At that point he thought that maybe Billy and Charlie had been really drunken up and had run somebody down.

They talked about the kid, Billy said the kid was dead, it was nothing to him. The train must have hit him. Billy said the girls did not see it. Charlie and Billy went with a couple of scags named Marie Dougherty and Beverly Thomas. They had dump the car somewhere near home. If they called the police, they would want to know how they got way out in Harlow. If they made a nonnamus call, the police would trace the call. Vern told what he had heard to the club. It was Chris’s idea to find the body and report it so they all would be on the news.

They were too excited to play cards. They climbed down from the treehouse, climbed the fence into the vacant lot, and played three-flies-six-grounders for a while with Vern’s old friction-aped baseball, but that was no fun either. All we could think about was that kid Brower, hit by a train, and how they were going to see him. Around ten o’clock they all drifted away home to fix it with their parents. They chose the night camping out in Vern’s back field as the reason for their mission. Gordon’s father was sixty-three years old, old enough to be his grandfather. His mother was fifty-five.

Chris thought they needed a pistol. Everybody nodded at that. Chris was the biggest, toughest guy in the gang, and he could always get away with saying things like that. Teddy, on the other hand, would have gotten his ass ragged off if he even hinted he was afraid of the dark. Behind them was Castle Rock. They went another mile and then decided to camp for the night. They were in Harlow now, in the woods. Somewhere up ahead was a dead kid, probably mangled and covered with flies. Vern, Chris and Teddy gathered wood and got a modest little the campfire going on a bed of cinders. They tromped down a flat place in the underbrush beside the embankment and laid out their bedrolls Then, for an hour or so, they fed fire and talked, the kind of talk you can never quite remember once you get past fifteen and discover girls. They did not talk about Ray Brower as the dark drew down, but Gordie was thinking about him.

The others slept heavily through the rest of the night. Gordie was in and out, dozing, walking, dozing again. The night was far from silent. Gordie scrambled up the cinders to the railroad tracks and sat on one of the rails, idly chucking cinders between his feet, in no hurry to wake the others. Morning come on apache. He did not know how long he sat there on the rail. He was about to get up when he looked to his right and saw a deer standing in the railroad bed not ten yards from him. Her eyes were not brown but a dark, dusty black. They looked each other for a long time. Then she turned and walked off to the other side of the tracks. She found grass and began to crop.

Then the rail started to thrum under his ass and bare seconds later the doe’s head came up, cocked back toward Castle Rock. Then she was gone in there gangling leaps, vanishing into the woods with no sound.

It was about nine-thirty when Teddy and Chris spotted water up ahead-they shouted to Vern and Gordie. Chris went running down the bank. He turned and trashed off across the pool in a clumsy breast-stroke. By then they were all getting undressed. They dived, swam under water, ducked each other. Teddy was screaming as he picked the leeches off his naked body. The leech hung off him like a crazy beard. Gordie began to cry, his own blood ran across his palm and inner wrist in a warm flood.

Fourteen years later Gordie sold his first novel and made his first trip to New York. His editor told him that it was a three-day celebration. The last touristy thing they did was to take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, and while leaning on the rail he happened to look down. He had a moment of almost total recall- or perhaps it was an actual incidence of time-travel. He was literally in the past, pushing halfway up than embankment and looking back at the burst leech: dead, deflated. In the years between then and the writing of this memoir, Gordie had thought remarkably little about those two days in September, at least consciously. The associations the memories bring to the surface are as unpleasant as week-old river-corpses brought to the surface by canonfire. Maybe Chris and Teddy and Vern would even be alive today. They did not die in the woods or on the railroad tracks.

They started to walk again, a little more slowly. And in the hour between two and three, the quality of the day’s light began to change, and they knew for sure that rain was coming. It was just host as ever, and even more humid. A sudden impossible bolt of lightning flashing down, seemingly from directed overheard. Vern began to screech triumphantly, he saw the body. Chris and Gordie were first to reach the body of Ray Brower. He was face down. He was wearing a solid color dark green tee-shirt and bluejeans. His feet were bare, a few feet behind him, caught in tall blackberry brambles, Gordie saw a pair of filthy low-topped Keds. He had been knocked spang out of his Keds. The train had knocked him out of his Keds just as it had been knocked the life of his body. The kid was dead; stone dead. There were ants and bugs all over his face and neck. His eyes were open.

They all jumped like they had been goosed and Vern cried out. On the far side of the boggy patch, where the woods took up again, masking butt end off the road, Ace Merrill and Eyeball Chambers stood together, half-obscured by a pouring gray curtain of rain. Chris was staring at Eyeball with mouth open. Charlie Hogan and Vern’s brother Billy stepped through them, cursing, wiping water out of their eyes. They were all on their feet now, ready to go. Ray was lying there alone gain. A bad bruise on the side of his face, a scalp laceration, a bloody nose. The newspaper reported he had been carrying a pot to put his berries in. But Gordie and his friends had not found it.

One day near the end of the month, while Gordie was walking home from school, a black Ford cut into the curb in front of him. The door flew open, Ace Merrill and his friends stepped out. Ace hit him with a flying tackle, he punched Gordie twice in the face. Then old Chalmers came out her porch with her cane clutched. She began shouted. Vern and Teddy took their lumps, too, although not as bad as either Chris or Gordie. Three of them caught Teddy walking home from the vacant lot one afternoon. They punched him out and broke his glasses. He fought them, but they would not fight him when they realized he was groping after them like a blindman in the dark.

They hung out together at school looking like the remains of a Korean assault force. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but everybody understood that they had had a pretty serious run-in with the big kids and comforted themselves like men. When the casts came off and the bruises held, Vern and Teddy just drifted away. They discovered a whole new group of contemporaries that they could over it. Chris and Gordie began to drop by less and less frequently. Teddy and Vern slowly became just two more faces in the halls. They nodded and said hi. Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant.

Vern Tessio was killed in a housefire that swept an apartment building in 1966 in Brooklyn. Teddy went in a squalid car crash in 1972. Chris enrolled in the college courses I his second year of junior high- he and Gordie both knew that if he waited any longer it would be too late; he would never catch up. Gordie and Chris studied together almost every night, sometimes for as long as six hours at a stretch. But by their junior year in high school, Chris had been accepted. Neither of them made top honors, but Chris came out seventh and Chris stood nineteenth. They were both accepted at the University of Maine, but Gordie wet to the Orono campus while Chris enrolled at the Portland campus.

Near the end of 1971, Chris went to a restaurant in Portland. Just ahead of him, two men started arguing about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife. Chris, who had always been the best of gang at making peace, stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat. The man with the knife had been released from the prison only the week before. Chris died almost instantly. When he read the news from paper, Gordie had been married a year and a half and was teaching high school English. Gordie now was a writer, he sold the book and it was made into a movie and the movie got good reviews and it was a smash hit besides. It was funny how he saw Ace Merrill. His friends were dead but Ace was alive. There no sign of recognition on the face of that thirty-two-year old man who had broken Gordie’s nose in another dimension of time.

******

October 9, 2017

Sekapur Sirih

Berlatar belakang waktu pada tahun 60-an hingga 70-an, the Body merupakan novela ketiga dari empat novela yang terkandung dalam Different Season milik Stephen King. Ini merupakan postingan ketiga dari Different Season. 

Cerita disampaikan dalam gaya memoir, naratornya adalah Gordon Lachance. Isi cerita tetap menarik walau bukanlah terbaik bagi saya. Gordie, seorang penulis, tentang masa remajanya bersama tiga orang temannya. Gordie, Chris, Teddy dan Vern adalah empat remaja dan hampir sepantaran dan bersekolah di tempat yang sama. Dalam usia sekitar tiga belasan bergejolak rasa penasaran dan prihatin atas hilangnya remaja seusia mereka, seseorang yang dinyatakan hilang. Tanpa sengaja Vern, salah seorang dari mereka mendengar percakapan abangnya yang ketakutan membahas anak hilang. Anak itu ditabrak oleh kereta api dan geng Godie pun melakukan pencarian mayat tanpa sepengetahuan siapapun.

Persahabatan yang membekas di ingatan Gordie, walau banyak teman yang datang dan pergi namun kenangan remaja dan kisah mayat dan penganiyaan yang mereka terima dari anak berandal tidak terlupakan. Memang novela ini agak sulit dipahami sehingga kurang tepat bagi pembaca pemula. Gaya tulisan bebas dan plot acak, namun kuat dan banyak ditemui tulisan indah bersyair dalam narasinya.

Terjemahan dalam Bahasa Indonesia the Body (Jasad,1982), novela dari Stephen King: sebuah ringkasan

Bermain rumah pohon, permainan kartu menjadi rutinitas keempat anak itu. Teddy anak berkaca mata, Chris berbadan besar dan paling tua dari mereka, Gordie, dan Vern telah lama bersahabat. Ayah Gordie mempertanyakan putranya berteman dengan ketiga anak itu. Dalam keluarganya Gordie, bukanlah anak yang paling diinginkan. Orang tuanya lebih menyayangi Dennis, kakak tertua yang sudah meninggal dalam kecelakaan mobil. Ayah Gordie berumur enam puluh tahunan, lebih tepat menjadi kakeknya dan ibunya lima puluh lima tahun. Dennis lebih tua sepuluh tahun dari Gordie. Kematian Dennis membuat keluarga itu terpukul.

Berita hilangnya Ray pertama kali mereka dengar di radio. Semua permainan telah membuat keempatnya jenuh, dan rasa penasaran akan kabar hilangnya Ray, anak remaja sepantaran mereka membuat mereka gusar. Adalah Vern menyembunyikan uangnya dalam botol semasa ia berusia delapan tahun. Ia menggali tanah sedalam-dalamnya, seperti menyembunyikan harta karun. Ia pun membuat peta di mana ia mengubur uangnya, agar ia tidak lupa. Saat ibunya membersihkan kamar Vern, semua kertas-kertas dikumpulkan dan dibakar sebagai penyala kompor masak di dapur. Peta Vern pun ikut terbakar. 

Vern sibuk menggali di bawah teras rumah, saat itu pula ia mendengar percakapan abangnya Billy dan temannya Charlie Hogan. Vern menguping percakapan keduanya membahas si anak hilang. Billy meyakinkan tidak ada yang melihat mereka dan anak itu sudah tertabrak, bukan mereka pelakunya. Gang Billy, Charlie Hogan dan Ace Merrill terkenal anak punk pemabuk dan tidak berpendidikan.

Kalau mereka menghubungi polisi maka kegiatan narkoba mereka ketahuan, kalau mereka menelepon kantor polisi atas nama penelepon misterius, maka polisi akan menelusuri jejak telepon dan mendapati mereka. Billy menegaskan Ray tertabrak kereta. Vern pun memberitahu pada gangnya atas apa yang ia dengar. Keempatnya pun berempati ingin mencari mayat Ray, dengan berdalih berkemah di belakang rumah Vern.

Mereka berjalan kaki menelusuri hutan dan berkemah di sekitar tempat yang diduga pembuangan tubuh Ray. Setelah dua hari menginap mereka pun mendapati jasad Ray. Wajah anak itu lebam, lehernya sudah dikerumuni semut. Ray benar-benar tewas, sepatunya terlempar, keempat anak itu pun percaya Ray mati tertabrak kereta api. Di koran diberitakan, ia hilang saat disuruh mememetik buah berry, tapi wadah tempat berry tidak ditemukan di lokasi. Gang abang Vern tiba-tiba muncul. Billy Tessio dan Ace Merrill dan beberapa anak punk lainnya mengancam dan memukuli mereka agar tutup mulut akan jasad Ray dan mobil bukti yang tersembunyi milik gang Ace. Mereka semua meninggalkan tempat itu, meninggalkan mayat Ray seorang diri lagi di sana.

Beberapa bulan kemudian, saat pulang sekolah Gordie dipukuli oleh Ace Merrill dan temannya hingga hidungnya patah. Tiga teman lainnya juga dipukuli dan diancam oleh gang Ace Merrill. Setiap orang di kampungya tidak pernah tahu alasan sebenarnya pemukulan berseri terhadap keempat anak itu, keempatnya tutup mulut. Teddy dan Vern membuat geng baru, kalau ketemu di sekolah seperti dua muka asing bagi Gordie. Mereka tetap saling menyapa.

Sejak lukanya sembuh, Chris dan Gordie semakin jarang bertemu. Keduanya melamar masuk universitas, mereka pun berteman kembali dan belajar bersama. Saat di bangku SMA, keduanya pun diterima di universitas negeri yang sama, tetapi keduanya memilih kampus lain di dua kota berbeda.

Vern tewas dalam kebakaran di apartemen yang ditinggalinya di Brooklyn. Teddy tewas dalam kecelakaan dan Chris tewas tertusuk. Gordie membaca kematian Chris di koran. Seorng mahasiswa tertikam tewas saat melerai dua pengantri di sebuah restauran. Saat Gordie membaca berita duka itu, ia sudah menikah, dan mengajar bahasa Inggris di SMA. Waktu berlalu. Gordie menjadi penulis dan bukunya telah difilmkan. Film itu mendapat banyak pujian. Di puncak kesuksesannya, ia kembali ke kotanya. Kematian Ray tetap menjadi misteri bagi Gordie, apalagi ia semakin dewasa mengingat dan menganalisa jasad Ray. Lebam pada muka anak itu diragukanya sebagai lindasan kereta api, apakah masinis sebegitu ceroboh menabrak anak itu. Dia semakin meragukan dugaan kematian Ray tertabrak kereta api.

Sangat lucu, ia bertemu Ace Merrill. Ace masih hidup, sementara tiga kawan Gordie telah meninggal. Ia berhadapan dengan lelaki gemuk berumur tiga puluhan yang dulu pernah mematahkan hidung Gordie. Mereka saling bertatap mata, tetapi Ace tidak mengenali Gordie sama sekali.

******

9 Oktober 2017