The fort hung out in an old elm tree over an abandoned lot in a town in Maine called Castle Rock. It was a small town and didn't matter to anyone who didn't know about it. Even people who did live there or in the surrounding areas didn't care much for it. It was sad to think about, sad to think that that's the town I had grown up in my entire life and, up until that summer in 1960, I couldn't think of ever leaving. Everything I ever knew was right there; what was the point in moving away?

At the time, I was twelve years old--nearly thirteen-- and about to enter junior high. I was a little smart-mouthed wet end that hung around a bunch of boys. I was the only girl in the club, mostly because Chris Chambers had been my best friend for as long as we both could remember. There were a few other guys, plus a couple of other wet ends that were in and out all the time.

Chris was the toughest in our group. Anyone who challenged differently got a good knock in the face. I wasn't exactly tough, but the guys had never seen a girl as crazy as I was. I think the only reason they let me stay was because I could play a good hand at blackjack. Since my name was Rosie, they got a good kick out of dubbing me 'The Riveter'.

The day we decided to go out to Back Harlow Road started out like any other day, except for the fact that it had been the hottest day since 1907, or something like that. A cigarette lay tucked between my teeth, hanging limp and unlit as I stared down at my cards. I was so focused on the game at hand that I'd totally forgotten to light it.

"Hey, how do you know a Frenchman's been in your backyard?" asked Chris, looking up from his cards. I glanced up at him.

"Hey, I'm French, okay?" said Teddy defensively.

"Your garbage cans are empty and your dog's pregnant." Gordie and I started laughing, the cigarette nearly falling out of my mouth.

"Didn't I just say I was French?" Teddy pissed.

"I knock," Chris said.

"Shit," Teddy groaned.

"Twenty-nine," Chris smirked.

"Twenty-eight," I huffed.

"Twenty-two," Teddy sighed, glaring disgustedly at his hand of cards.

"Piss up a rope!" Gordie shouted and Teddy, Chris and I howled with laughter. Gordie threw down his cards dramatically and slouched back in his seat.

"Gordie's out. Ole Gordie just bit the bag and stepped out the door!" Gordie gave him a weird look.

"Shut up, Teddy," I managed, finally calming down from my laughing fit.

"Come on, man, deal," said Chris.

Teddy was probably the craziest kid I'd ever known. Every day he would dodge trucks just for the hell of it. He was pretty much blind and even needed a hearing aid, so his senses and his mind weren't all there. Damn near scared the hell out of everyone. He had a signature laugh that was a relative of nails on a chalkboard. It always made me grit my teeth when he'd cry out, eee-eee-eee! like an old screech owl.

"I knock," said Teddy.

"You four-eyed pile of shit," said Chris, turning his eyes upwards to glare daggers at the skinny kid sitting across from him.

"The pile of shit has a thousand eyes!" Teddy announced gravely. I busted up laughing again, along with the other two. Teddy stared at us. He always said the weirdest stuff and then looked at us like we were crazy because he couldn't figure out what he'd said that was so funny. Teddy put down his cards, showing thirty. Chris showed sixteen, and I was embarrassed about my nine. Chris and I handed Teddy our cards and he began to shuffle sloppily.

Gordie had a good hand when it came to shuffling. None of us knew how he did it and he refused to show us. I figured maybe his brother had shown him and I knew as well as everyone else that his brother was a touchy subject.

"Need a light?" Chris asked me and I nodded with a smile, holding out my cigarette. He flicked a match and lit it, smoke immediately trailing off the cherry at the end. Gordie had since abandoned our card game and had picked up a comic I knew he'd read a million times before. Teddy kept shuffling; a loud thumping sounded against the ladder, followed by a series of raps on the underneath of the trapdoor.

"Who goes?" I shouted.

"Vern!" the kid hollered in reply and I wondered why he sounded so excited. Gordie got up and opened the door to let Vern in. Vern Tessio, although good company to have around, was probably the dumbest kid in Castle Rock. He didn't come from a bad family necessarily— except his older brother Billy was a bit of a shithead (he hung around Ace and his gang and they all liked to terrorize the kids around town)—but, just like the rest of us, Vern didn't have a very good roll of the dice.

When he did finally stumble in, he was both white-faced and red-cheeked. He was sweating incredibly and his hair was sticking up at odd ends. We all stared at him expectantly, the guys and I pausing our game long enough to wait for some kind of explanation on his current state. The kid looked like he'd just seen his first nudey mag.

"Well?" I asked, picking up my cards but not glancing at them, yet. I decided I should give him my full attention for a couple seconds.

"Wow, man. Wait'll you hear this!" he panted.

"Hear what?" asked Gordie, already sounding like he was losing interest.

"Let me catch my breath. I ran all the way from my house."

Teddy cried out, "I ran all the way home, just to say I'm soh-ree.."

"Fuck your hand, man," Vern said and I grinned, not quite laughing, but still amused.

"Drop dead in a shed, Fred," Teddy retorted. Vern just blinked at him.

"You ran all the way from your place?" Chris asked, his eyebrows raised. I looked back to Vern, giving him an incredulous look. He lived two miles away and it was hot as hell outside. I lived closer and even I wouldn't have had the balls to run all the way here.

"Man, you're crazy," I nodded, shoving thick strands of red hair out of my face.

"This is worth it. Holy Jeezum. You won't believe this. Sincerely." He gave his forehead a nice slap, the impact making a wet, sticky sound. We all continued to stare at the kid, waiting for him to explain to us why he'd run two miles to our fort in a hundred degree weather.

"Okay, what?" I asked, urging him to tell his story.

"Can you guys camp out tonight? I mean if you tell your folks we're gonna tent in my backfield?"

"Maybe," I said. "Depends on my dad. Old man's been pretty moody."

"Yeah," said Chris, shrugging. "My dad's kind of on a mean streak. You know, he's been drinking a lot lately."

"You got to guys, sincerely! You won't believe this." Vern turned to Gordo. "Can you, Gordie?"

"Yeah, probably," said Gordie distantly, seemingly uninterested. He'd clearly lost faith in Vern's exciting news.

"So what are you pissing and moaning about, Verno?" asked Teddy, still half interested.

"I knock," said Chris.

"What!" Teddy exclaimed. "You friggin liar, you ain't got to pat hand. I didn't deal you no pat hand."

"Make your draw, shitheap," Chris said, smirking slightly. Teddy and I both reached for a card off the top of the deck of bikes, me letting out a sigh as I'd forgotten about the sweaty kid slouching in the chair next to me. Gordie picked up his comic again.

"You guys wanna go see a dead body?" At this, we all paused. We knew immediately what he was talking about because we all listened closely to the radio. If it had been anyone else, we would have dismissed it in search of a good Elvis song. Since the kid, Ray Brower, was our age, we listened closely in. We couldn't give a damn about the political debate going on at the time, but the progress of the search for Brower's body really got our attention.

Supposedly, the kid had gone off to pick blueberries or something and he hadn't returned. The officials couldn't find the body because it wasn't where he kid said he was going. We all figured he'd gotten hit by a train or something.

Vern said he'd been under the porch digging when he'd heard his older brother and Charlie Hogan walk out onto the porch. Vern had been under the porch because last year sometime, Vern buried a jar of pennies as some kind of loot for a pirate game. He made a map and everything. A few days after that, his mom was cleaning out his room and threw a bunch of old stuff away, including the map. Vern, short of some money, had decided to dig up his pennies, but he'd been digging ever since.

Vern said that he'd overheard Billy and Charlie talking about how they'd boosted a car and had gone out joyriding with a couple girls. They were probably planning on chugging Purple Jesuses and hitting it with their ugly lady friends. When they got out to Harlow, they'd probably gotten out to piss and that's when they stumbled across the body. The only problem was that if they told the cops, they would get suspicious and Billy and Charlie would get busted for car boosting. The cops knew that neither one of them had a car.

"You're really lucky," said Gordie. "They would have killed you."

"I know the back Harlow road! It comes to a dead end by the Royal River. The train tracks are right there! Me and my dad used to go fishing for cossies out there!"

"There used to be a bridge, but there was a flood," said Chris.

"Yeah, a long time ago," I added. "Now there's just train tracks.

"Could he have gotten all the way from Chamberlain to Harlow? That's twenty or thirty miles," said Gordie thoughtfully.

"Sure," I said. "Must have just followed the train tracks the whole way there."

"Yeah. Yeah, right. And then after dark, the train must have come along and-- el smacko!" Teddy ended his statement by punching the palm of his hand with his fist.

"So anyway, you want to go see it?" Vern said.

We stared at him for a long second or two before Chris finally spoke up. "Sure! And I bet you anything we get our pictures in the paper."

"Huh?" I heard Vern squeak.

"Yeah?" said Teddy, grinning with a crazed look in his eye.

"Yeah, we could find the body and report it," I said. "We'll be on the news!"

"I dunno," said Vern. "Billy will know where I found out. He'll beat the living shit outta me."

"No he won't," said Gordie. We all turned to stare at him. "Because it'll be us guys that find that kid. Not Billy and Charlie Hogan in a boosted car. Then they won't have to worry about it anymore. They'll probably pin a medal on ya, Penny."

"Yeah?" said Vern, grinning and showing us his bad teeth.

Teddy grinned, too, but quickly lost it as soon as it had appeared. "Uh-oh," he said.

"What?" I asked.

"Our folks," he replied. "If we do find that kid's body over in South Harlow, they're gonna know we didn't spend the night camping out in Vern's backfield."

"Yeah," said Chris sadly. "They're gonna know we went looking for that kid."

"No they won't," said Gordie. We all looked at him interestedly. "We'll just tell em we got bored camping in Vern's field because we've done it so many times before. So we decided to hike up the tracks and have a campout in the woods. I bet we won't even get hided for it because everyone'll be so excited about what we found."

"My dad'll hide me anyway. He's on a really mean streak," said Chris, but he started nodding. "To hell, it's worth a hiding!"

"Dig it," I smirked and Chris sent me a gentle smile. We have each other some skin and turned back to the others.

"Okay," Teddy nodded. "Let's all get together at Vern's house after lunch. What can we tell em about supper?"

"You and me and Gordie and The Riveter can say we're eating at Vern's," said Chris.

"And I'll tell my mom I'm eating over at Chris'," said Vern.

We all agreed. It would work unless our parents ended up having a meeting, but we didn't worry too much about that. None of our folks had phones, as it was something more like a luxury to have a telephone back in 1960. Besides that, my dad had some sort of social anxiety. It was a real blue moon if he ever left the house anymore.

I was born into the generation known as the Baby Boom. My dad had fought in World War II, just like Teddy's old man, except my dad was in the Navy. He'd survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor and was known as a local hero around town, although he was far from it in my eyes.

My dad had what they now call PTSD--Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One time during the 4th of July, when I was nine, he went into a sort of panic when the fireworks went off and, when Ma and I tried to calm him down, he flipped. He ended up breaking two of Ma's ribs and my wrist. He didn't remember anything from the whole ordeal.

Ma was in and out, usually with her coworkers. She was the general manager of some type of crafts and fabric store. Since I didn't much like to be around Pop due to his random fits of rage--much like Teddy's dad, actually--I hung around the other guys. I'd leave early in the morning when Pop was still sleeping and walk around until I ran into Chris or Gordie or Teddy or Vern.

Even though I was close with these guys, none of them knew the hell my father'd put me through just a few months before.