AFTERWORD

So there it was: the summer I was 17, the summer of 1959 and in some way the summer I came of age. It was also the summer that the Cobra's fell apart: Billy and Charlie left Castle Rock in the fall to work on the reconstruction of the Waymouth railway line on the outskirts of Portland, Vince discovered he was to become a father the following year and this seemed to be the kick he needed to leave his juvenile ways, he left town with his fiancé in tow shortly after the news of her condition. Then there was Ace. Ace, for weeks into my senior year, continued to drive through the neighbourhood as I walked home from school but never stopped. We bumped into one another that winter at a movie where he had a tipsy, giggly teen hung from his arm but we only exchanged pleasantries, as pleasant as Ace Merrill could be that is. I heard from sources he was in and out of the cells, for everything from petty theft to the numerous fights he started every weekend outside Irby's. Ace Merrill was a deeply unhappy young man who was looking for something; any way out of the hand he had been dealt in Castle Rock. For a while, I probably had naively believed I could have given him that but I soon realised that nobody would be able to do that for Ace but himself. He did find a way out in the end; the first summer I returned home from college I was to be greeted to the news that Ace had got caught up with the wrong kind of people who passed through Castle Rock occasionally from Salem. A deal turned sour, Ace and a few others couldn't come up with money and a few weeks later Ace never returned home after a heavy night at Irby's. Some speculated that he had moved away to escape his debt, but most people knew the debt had caught up with him that night. I secretly always hoped that it was the former and that one day I would walk down a street somewhere far from Castle Rock and see him, where he would smile that old smirk my way and wink and I would finally know that he was content. However, there was one Cobra who did find contentment in Castle Rock: Eyeball. Eyeball and I fell in love that night on the porch and I loved him right up to the minute he waved me off to college. In fact I never really stopped loving Eyeball, but he knew that he needed to let me go. When Auntie Frank finally retired from the Diner in 1964 she handed it over to her favourite person in the world: Eyeball. Eyeball became the youngest business owner in Castle Rock and immediately his bad boy past was forgotten in the mind of the castle Rock council. In fact, Eyeball became one of the town's most respected citizens after funding his younger brother through College and his father through rehabilitation for his alcohol abuse: the condition which ultimately took his life only a few years later after which Eyeball inherited the family home. When I left college for my first graduate Job as a writer in New York, an anonymous cheque arrived through the post. It was for two hundred dollars and I knew it was from Eyeball and in that moment we were both seventeen again.