The Body

Gordie has a treehouse where he plays cards, smokes cigarettes, and looks at magazines with several friends. He’s in the treehouse with Teddy DuChamp and Chris Chambers. Teddy is nearsighted and has long hair that covers his ears because his father burned them on a woodstove after Teddy broke a plate. After disfiguring his son, Teddy’s father called the hospital and, when the orderlies arrived to retrieve Teddy, explained that German snipers were everywhere. Police arrested him.

Vern Tessio arrives and asks if they can go camping that night. Gordie says that he can. In April, Gordie’s brother Dennis was killed in a car accident at Basic Training at Fort Benning. Gordie’s parents loved Dennis and are now indifferent to Gordie. Vern asks if they want to see a dead body. 

The boys have heard the Ray Brower story on the radio. Ray was from Chamberlain, forty miles away from Castle Rock. He disappeared after going to pick blueberries. Back then, it was possible to walk into the woods and get lost. Now, the area is too suburbanized. 

That morning, Vern was digging under his porch. Four years earlier he buried a jar of pennies. His mother burned his map to the jar, and he forgot where he buried it. Four years later, he’s still looking. While under the porch he heard his brother Billy talking with Charlie Hogan. Charlie asked what they were going to do, Billy says they wouldn’t do anything. They talked about a dead boy who was hit by a train. Billy said they wouldn’t tell anyone. After they left, Vern ran to the treehouse. 

The four friends talk about how the boy might have been hit by the train. Chris says if they find the body, they might be in the newspaper—and then their parents will know that they lied about going camping in Vern’s field. Gordie says that if they get caught, they can say they got bored and went for a walk. Chris hates his dad, who drinks and beats him. He once broke Chris’s nose and wrist when he learned that Chris was suspended from school. At ten o’ clock, they separate to go tell their parents their cover stories. 

Gordie goes to a bookstore but doesn’t find anything he wants. He asks his father if he can go camping in Vern’s field. His father, who’s 63, doesn’t think they’re good friends for him. Gordie often feels that his parents ignore him, and this reminds him of Ellison’s The Invisible Man. His parents always focused on his brother, Dennis, who used to take him to baseball practice and read him scary stories at night. He doesn’t think his parents will ever move on from Dennis’s death. He imagines Dennis coming home, covered in blood, telling Gordie that he should have died instead. 

Chapter 7 is the text of one of Gordie’s future stories, Stud City. Chico, the main character, imagines his dead brother Johnny coming back. Chico takes the virginity of a girl named Jane and takes her home after she tells him loves him. At home, he tells his father that he’s going to California. Chico’s mother, Virginia, asks if he had a girl in his room. Chico begs his father to stop letting Virginia control him and then leaves.

As an adult, Gordie describes the Chico story as melodramatic. He doesn’t like the sexual immaturity of it and knows he was inexperienced. Nevertheless, it was his first story and he’s proud of it: “There was a kind of dreadful exhilaration in seeing things that had troubled me come out in a new form, a form over which I had imposed control” (41). He still likes some things about the story, but he never showed it to his parents. 

On the way to meeting up with Vern and Teddy, Gordie meets Chris. Chris takes him into an alley and shows him a pistol. It’s his father’s pistol, and Chris took it when his father left to go drinking. Chris is the only character who never drinks. He’s scared of becoming an addict. Chris says that the gun is empty, but it fires when Gordie points it at a garbage can and pulls the trigger. Chris promises that he didn’t know it was loaded. They meet Vern and Teddy and tell them the story. They have 20 miles to walk along the train tracks to get to where the body is, near the town of Harlow. 

They reach the train tracks and realize they didn’t bring food. A train approaches. Teddy stands on the tracks and says he’s going to dodge it at the last minute. Gordie throws Teddy off the tracks, which leads to a fight. Teddy is dangerous when he’s angry. They shake hands and go on.

At half past one, they get to the dump, which reminds Gordie of a surrealist painting. They get water from a pump. Stray dogs are always there, hunting for food. Milo Pressman, the dump manager, he has a dog named Chopper. Local legends warn that Chopper is the meanest dog in the state.

Gordie recalls that a year earlier, Teddy fell when they were climbing a tree. He’d gone too high, into branches that they knew were rotting. Chris grabbed him by the hair and held him long enough for Teddy to regain his grip after a branch broke. Now Chris has dreams that he dropped him. The boys flip coins to decide who will go to town to get food for them. Gordie loses the coin toss.  

Gordie will forever associate the word summer with that particular summer. He remembers listening to baseball games and going to the movies. At the Florida Market, he gets Cokes, hamburger rolls, and meat. The owner, George Dusset, asks if he’s Dennis’s brother. Gordie sees that George’s thumb is on the scale when he measures the ground beef. He tells him that he’s overcharging. They argue.

When he gets to the dump fence, Milo sees him and yells for Chopper to get him. He makes it to the other side of the fence and turns around. Chopper is not the demon of their legends. He is a normal, medium-sized dog with a high bark. They tease the dog, and Milo yells at them, calling Teddy a “loony’s son” (67). Teddy says he’ll kill him and starts to climb the fence. Gordie grabs him. Milo calls them each by name and says he’ll call their parents. They leave.