The Body

Vern is nervous about walking across the train tracks on the bridge over the river. If a train comes, they’ll have nowhere to go, but using the tracks will save them a lot of time. They go in single file. Teddy and Chris are far ahead. Gordie goes last, following Vern. He has what he calls a “psychic flash,” kneels, and grips a rail. It’s vibrating. He’s more scared than he’s ever been. Gordie screams that a train is coming. They run. Gordie and Vern barely make it. 

They stop to drink the Cokes. Gordie is glad to be alive. In a flash-forward, the adult Chris muses that he understands why people become daredevils.

Chris asks him to tell a story. Gordie recalls how a boy named Richie found stories that Gordie was working on and told Gordie that he was good and should show the stories to Chris. Richie shared his stories with the others, and they liked them.

He tells them a story about a pie-eating contest in the fictional town of Gretna, Maine. An obese kid named Davie Hogan is always getting bullied. He decides to get revenge during the contest. 

Chapter 16 is the text of The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan, originally published in Cavalier magazine in 1975. Lots of people bet on the pie-eating contest, including some of the contestants. Hogan eats the first pie at a record pace. During his fifth pie, Hogan—who drank an entire bottle of castor oil at home before the contest—begins purposely thinking of disgusting images and then vomits on Bill Travis. The entire crowd begins throwing up on each other. 

Hogan declares that the contest is a draw and then walks home. Teddy wants to know what else happened, but Gordie says he doesn’t know because that’s the end of the story. Teddy and Vern try to come up with alternate endings.

They start to walk again. Chris says that he’s impressed with how easily Gordie invents stories. He asks Gordie if he’s ready for school and says that they will all be “quits” by the following June. He says that Gordie will be in the college courses, and they’ll be in shop. Gordie replies that he’d rather be with them. Chris says that Gordie can’t let his friends drag him down and that he knows Gordie’s parents don’t care about him but that he’ll look out for Gordie if his parents won’t. He adds that Gordie won’t write his stories down if he takes shop class.

Chris talks about being accused of taking milk money. When he was the milk money monitor, a few dollars disappeared. He knows that people look down on him and his family. Everyone assumed that he’d taken the money. Chris tells Gordie that he stole the money, but when his conscience bothered him, he returned it to the teacher, Mrs. Simons, who took the money, bought herself a skirt, and still allowed Chris to get suspended for three days. 

They walk another mile and then camp in the Harlow woods. They cook the hamburgers and smoke cigarettes. They talk for an hour by the fire. Gordie thinks about Ray Brower. It makes him sad, so he tells a Le Dio story. The Le Dio stories are always about soldiers facing improbable odds, and Teddy loves them. 

Gordie hears Vern groaning in the night. Vern is promising someone that he’ll be a good boy. They hear a scream. Teddy thinks it is Ray’s ghost. They hold him down, and they hear another scream. They sleep in shifts. Gordie dreams that Chris drowns and wakes up to Teddy shaking him. 

Gordie wakes at dawn. He goes and sits on the railroad tracks. He sees a deer. She runs when a train approaches. Gordie never tells them about the deer, and he never writes it down until now. For him, it’s the best part of the trip. 

They walk through the heat. Gordie feels that they must see the body. They find a beaver dam and swim in the pool, but soon they’re covered in leeches. Gordie picks them off Chris. He sees a huge leech on his testicles. Gordie pulls it off and starts crying but isn’t sure why. Fourteen years later he sells his first novel. When his editor, Keith, takes him on the Staten Island Ferry, Gordie sees condoms floating in the water. They remind him of the leeches. He thinks, “The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality” (131). 

After the boys walk for a while, Gordie faints. When he wakes up, he says that he was thinking about the leeches.

The boys realize that they haven’t taken the most efficient route; they won’t reach the Royal River until at least four o’clock. Back at home, their families will know that they’re missing. Nevertheless, they keep going. 

They decide to walk down the tracks. Years later, Gordie wonders if his friends would still be alive if they hadn’t made that choice. At the time, they didn’t yet know that a group of hoodlums was also in the woods, looking for the body: Ace Merrill, Eyeball (Chris’s older brother), Vince Desjardins, Norman “Fuzzy” Bracowicz, Jack Mudgett, Charlie Hogan, and Billy Tessio (Vern’s older brother). They thought they could be famous if they found the body.