Dreamcatcher

  "They're back!" she screamed. "They're back! They're back!"

  Then she covered her eyes and put her head against the front tire of the overturned Scout. She quit screaming and only moaned, like something caught in a trap with no hope of getting free.

  5

  For some unknown length of time (probably no more than five minutes, although it felt longer) they watched those brilliant lights run across the sky--circling, skidding, hanging lefts and rights, appearing to leapfrog each other. At some point Henry became aware there were only five instead of nearly a dozen, and then there were only three. Beside him the woman with her face against the tire farted again, and Henry realized they were standing out here in the middle of nowhere, gawping at some sort of storm-related celestial phenomenon which, while interesting, would contribute absolutely nothing toward getting them into a place that was dry and warm. He could remember the final reading on the tripmeter with perfect clarity: 12.7. They were nearly ten miles from Hole in the Wall, a good hike under the best of circumstances, and here they were in a storm only two steps below a blizzard. Plus, he thought, I'm the only one who can walk.

  "Pete."

  "It's somethin, isn't it?" Pete breathed. "They're fucking UFOs, just like on The X-Files. What d'you suppose--"

  "Pete." He took Pete's chin in his hand and turned his face away from the sky, to his own. Overhead, the last two lights were paling. "It's some sort of electrical phenomenon, that's all."

  "You think?" Pete looked absurdly disappointed.

  "Yeah--something related to the storm. But even if it's the first wave of the Butterfly Aliens from Planet Alnitak, it isn't going to make any difference to us if we turn into Popsicles out here. Now I need you to help me. I need you to do that trick of yours. Can you?"

  "I don't know," Pete said, venturing one final look at the sky. There was only one light now, and so dim you wouldn't have known it was there if you hadn't been looking for it. "Ma'am? Ma'am, they're almost gone. Mellow out, okay?"

  She made no reply, only stood with her face pressed against the tire. The streamers on her hat flapped and flew. Pete sighed and turned to Henry.

  "What do you want?"

  "You know the loggers' shelters along this road?" There were eight or nine of them, Henry thought, nothing but four posts each, with pieces of rusty corrugated tin on top for roofs. The pulpers stored cut logs or pieces of equipment beneath them until spring.

  "Sure," Pete said.

  "Where's the closest one? Can you tell me?"

  Pete closed his eyes, raised one finger, and began moving it back and forth. At the same time he made a little ticking sound with the tip of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. This had been a part of Pete ever since high school. It didn't go back as far as Beaver's gnawed pencils and chewed toothpicks, or Jonesy's love of horror movies and murder stories, but it went back a long way. And it was usually reliable. Henry waited, hoping it would be reliable now.

  The woman, her ears perhaps catching that small regular ticking sound beneath the boom of the wind, raised her head and looked around. There was a large dark smear across her forehead from the tire.

  At last Pete opened his eyes. "Right up there," he said, pointing in the direction of Hole in the Wall. "Go around that curve and then there's a hill. Go down the other side of the hill and there's a straight stretch. At the end of the straight there's one of those shelters. It's on the left. Part of the roof's fallen in. A man named Stevenson had a nosebleed there once."

  "Yeah?"

  "Aw, man, I don't know." And Pete looked away, as if embarrassed.

  Henry vaguely remembered the shelter . . . and the fact that the roof had partially fallen in was good, or could be; if it had fallen the right way, it would have turned the wall-less shelter into a lean-to.

  "How far?"

  "Half a mile. Maybe three-quarters."

  "And you're sure."

  "Yeah."

  "Can you walk that far on your knee?"

  "I think so--but will she?"

  "She better," Henry said. He put his hands on the woman's shoulders, turned her wide-eyed face to his, and moved in until they were almost nose to nose. The smell of her breath was awful--antifreeze with something oily and organic beneath it--but he stayed close, and made no move to draw back.

  "We need to walk!" he told her, not quite shouting but speaking loudly and in a tone of command. "Walk with me now, on three! One, two, three!"

  He took her hand and led her back around the Scout and into the road. There was one moment of resistance and then she followed with perfect docility, not seeming to feel the push of the wind when it struck them. They walked for about five minutes, Henry holding the woman's gloved right hand in his left one, and then Pete lurched.

  "Wait," he said. "Bastardly knee's tryin to lock up on me again."

  While he bent and massaged it, Henry looked up at the sky. There were no lights up there now. "Are you all right? Can you make it?"

  "I'll make it," Pete said. "Come on, let's go."

  6

  They made it around the curve all right and halfway up the hill all right and then Pete dropped, groaning and cursing and clutching his knee. He saw the way Henry was looking at him and made a peculiar sound, something caught between a laugh and a snarl. "Don't you worry about me," he said. "Petiebird's gonna make it."

  "You sure?"

  "Ayuh." And to Henry's alarm (although there was amusement, too, that dark amusement which never seemed to leave him now), Pete balled his gloved hands into fists and began pounding on his knee.

  "Pete--"

  "Let go, you hump, let go!" Pete cried, ignoring him completely. And during this the woman stood slump-shouldered with the wind now at her back and the orange hat-ribbons blowing out in front of her, as silent as a piece of equipment that has been turned off.

  "Pete?"

  "I'm all right now," Pete said. He looked up at Henry with exhausted eyes . . . but they, too, were not without amusement. "Is this a total fuckarow or not?"

  "It is."

  "I don't think I could walk all the way back to Derry, but I'll get to that shelter." He held out a hand. "Help me up, chief."

  Henry took his old friend's hand and pulled. Pete came up stiff-legged, like a man rising from a formal bow, stood still for a moment, then said: "Let's go. I'm lookin forward to gettin out of this wind." He paused, then added: "We should have brought a few beers."

  They got to the top of the hill and the wind was better on the other side. By the time they got to the straight stretch at the bottom, Henry had begun allowing himself to hope that this part of it, at least, was going to go all right. Then, halfway along the straight with a shape up ahead that just about had to be the loggers' shelter, the woman collapsed--first to her knees, then onto her front. She lay like that for a moment, head turned, only the breath rising from her open mouth to indicate she was still alive (and how much simpler this would be if she weren't, Henry thought). Then she rolled over on her side and let out another long bray of a belch.

  "Oh you troublesome cunt," Pete said, sounding not angry but only tired. He looked at Henry. "What now?"

  Henry knelt by her, told her in his loudest voice to get up, snapped his fingers, clapped his hands, and counted to three several times. Nothing worked.

  "Stay here with her. Maybe I can find something up there to drag her on."

  "Good luck."

  "You have a better idea?"

  Pete sat down in the snow with a grimace, his bad leg stretched out in front of him. "Nosir," he said, "I do not. I'm fresh out of ideas."

  7

  It took Henry five minutes to walk up to the shelter. His own leg was stiffening where the turnsignal lever had gouged it, but he thought he was all right. If he could get Pete and the woman to shelter, and if the Arctic Cat back at Hole in the Wall would start, he thought this might still turn out okay. And damn, it was interesting, there was that. Those lights in the sky . . .

  The shelter's cor
rugated top had fallen perfectly: the front, facing the road, was open, but the back was almost entirely closed off. And poking out of the thin scrim of snow that had drifted inside was a swatch of dirty gray tarpaulin with a coating of sawdust and ancient splinters clinging to it.

  "Bingo," Henry said, and grabbed it. At first it stuck to the ground, but when he put his back to it, the tarp came loose with a hoarse ripping sound that made him think of the woman farting.

  Dragging it behind him, he plodded back toward where Pete, his leg still pointed out stiffly before him, sat in the snow next to the prone woman.

  8

  It was far easier than Henry had dared hope. In fact, once they got her on the tarpaulin, it was a breeze. She was a hefty woman, but she slid on the snow like grease. Henry was glad it wasn't five degrees warmer; sticky snow might have changed things considerably. And, of course, it helped being on a straight stretch.

  The snow was now ankle deep and falling more thickly than ever, but the flakes had gotten bigger. It's stopping, they'd tell each other in tones of disappointment when they saw flakes like that as kids.

  "Hey, Henry?" Pete sounded out of breath, but that was okay; the shelter was just up ahead. In the meantime Pete walked in a kind of stiff-legged strut to keep his knee from coming out of whack again.

  "What?"

  "I been thinkin about Duddits a lot just lately--how strange is that?"

  "No bounce," Henry said at once, without even thinking about it.

  "That's right." Pete gave a somehow nervous laugh. "No bounce, no play. You do think it's strange, don't you?"

  "If it is," Henry said, "we're both strange."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I've been thinking of Duddits myself, and for quite awhile. Since at least March. Jonesy and I were going to go see him--"

  "You were?"

  "Yeah. Then Jonesy had that accident--"

  "Crazy old cocksucker that hit him never should have been driving," Pete said with a dark frown. "Jonesy's lucky to be alive."

  "You got that right," Henry said. "His heart stopped in the ambulance. The EMTs had to give him the juice."

  Pete halted, wide-eyed. "No shit? It was that bad? That close?"

  It occurred to Henry that he had just been indiscreet. "Yes, but you ought to keep your mouth shut about it. Carla told me, but I don't think Jonesy knows. I never . . ." He waved his arm vaguely, and Pete nodded with perfect understanding. I never sensed that he did was what Henry meant.

  "I'll keep it under my hat," Pete said.

  "I think it's best you do."

  "And you never got to see Duds."

  Henry shook his head. "In all the excitement about Jonesy, I forgot. Then it was summer, and you know how things come up . . ."

  Pete nodded.

  "But you know what? I was thinking of him just a little while ago. Back in Gosselin's."

  "Was it the kid in the Beavis and Butt-head shirt?" Pete asked. His words came out in little puffs of white vapor.

  Henry nodded. "The kid" could have been twelve or twenty-five, when it came to Down's syndrome you just couldn't tell. He had been red-haired, wandering along the middle aisle of the dark little market next to a man who just about had to be his father--same green-and-black-checked hunting jacket, more important the same carroty red hair, the man's now thin enough to show the scalp underneath, and he had given them a look, the kind that says Don't you say nothing about my kid unless you want trouble, and of course neither of them had said anything, they had come the twenty or so miles from Hole in the Wall for beer and bread and hot dogs, not trouble, and besides, they had once known Duddits, still knew Duddits in a way--sent him Christmas presents and birthday cards, anyway, Duddits who had once been, in his own peculiar fashion, one of them. What Henry could not very well confide to Pete was that he'd been thinking of Duds at odd moments ever since realizing, some sixteen months ago, that he meant to take his own life and that everything he did had become either a holding action against that event or a preparation for it. Sometimes he even dreamed of Duddits, and of the Beav saying Let me fix that, man and Duddits saying Fit wha?

  "Nothing wrong with thinking about Duddits, Pete," he said as he hauled the makeshift sled with the woman on it into the shelter. He was out of breath himself. "Duddits was how we defined ourselves. He was our finest hour."

  "You think so?"

  "Yup." Henry plopped down to get his breath before going on to the next thing. He looked at his watch. Almost noon. By now Jonesy and Beaver would be past the point of thinking the snow had just slowed them down; would be almost sure something had gone wrong. Perhaps one of them would fire up the snowmobile (if it works, he reminded himself again, if the damn thing works). Come out looking for them. That would simplify things a bit.

  He looked at the woman lying on the tarp. Her hair had fallen over one eye, hiding it; the other looked at Henry--and through him--with chilly indifference.

  Henry believed that all children were presented with self-defining moments in early adolescence, and that children in groups were apt to respond more decisively than children alone. Often they behaved badly, answering distress with cruelty. Henry and his friends had behaved well, for whatever reason. It meant no more than anything else in the end, but it did not hurt to remember, especially when your soul was dark, that once you had confounded the odds and behaved decently.

  He told Pete what he was going to do and what Pete was going to do, then got to his feet to start doing it--he wanted them all safe behind the doors of Hole in the Wall before the light left the day. A clean, well-lighted place.

  "Okay," Pete said, but he sounded nervous. "Just hope she doesn't die on me. And that those lights don't come back." He craned to look out at the sky, where now there were only dark, low-hanging clouds. "What were they, do you think? Some kind of lightning?"

  "Hey, you're the space expert." Henry got up. "Start picking up the little sticks--you don't even have to get up to do that."

  "Kindling, right?"

  "Right," Henry said, then stepped over the woman on the tarp and walked to the edge of the woods, where there was plenty of bigger stuff lying around in the snow. Roughly nine miles, that was the walk ahead of him. But first they were going to light a fire. A nice big one.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MCCARTHY GOES TO THE JOHN

  1

  Jonesy and Beaver sat in the kitchen, playing cribbage, which they simply called the game. That was what Lamar, Beaver's father, had always called it, as though it were the only game. For Lamar Clarendon, whose life revolved around his central Maine construction company, it probably was the only game, the one most at home in logging camps, railroad sheds, and, of course, construction trailers. A board with a hundred and twenty holes, four pegs, and an old greasy deck of cards; if you had those things, you were in business. The game was mostly played when you were waiting to do something else--for the rain to let up, for a freight order to arrive, or for your friends to get back from the store so you could figure out what to do with the strange fellow now lying behind a closed bedroom door.

  Except, Jonesy thought, we're really waiting for Henry. Pete's just with him. Henry's the one who'll know what to do, Beaver was right. Henry's the one.

  But Henry and Pete were late back. It was too early to say something had happened to them, it could just be the snow slowing them down, but Jonesy was starting to wonder if that was all, and guessed the Beav was, too. Neither of them had said anything about it as yet--it was still on the morning side of noon and things might still turn out okay--but the idea was there, floating unspoken between them.

  Jonesy would concentrate on the board and the cards for awhile, and then he'd look at the closed bedroom door behind which McCarthy lay, probably sleeping, but oh boy his color had looked bad. Two or three times he saw Beav's eyes flicking over there, too.

  Jonesy shuffled the old Bikes, dealt, gave himself a couple of cards, then set aside the crib when Beaver slid a couple across to him. Beav
er cut and then the preliminaries were done; it was time to peg. You can peg and still lose the game, Lamar told them, that Chesterfield always sticking out from the corner of his mouth, his Clarendon Construction cap always pulled down over his left eye like a man who knows a secret he will tell only if the price is right, Lamar Clarendon a no-play workadaddy dead of a heart attack at forty-eight, but if you peg you won't never get skunked.

  No play, Jonesy thought now. No bounce, no play. And then, on the heels of that, the wavering damned voice that day in the hospital: Please stop, I can't stand it, give me a shot, where's Marcy? And oh man, why was the world so hard? Why were there so many spokes hungry for your fingers, so many gears eager to grab for your guts?

  "Jonesy?"

  "Huh?"

  "You okay?"

  "Yeah, why?"

  "You shivered."

  "Did I?" Sure he did, he knew he did.

  "Yeah."

  "Drafty, maybe. You smell anything?"

  "You mean . . . like him?"

  "I wasn't talking about Meg Ryan's armpits. Yeah, him."

  "No," Beaver said. "A couple of times I thought . . . but it was just imagination. Because those farts, you know--"

  "--smelled so bad."

  "Yeah. They did. The burps, too. I thought he was gonna blow chunks, man. For sure."

  Jonesy nodded. I'm scared, he thought. Sitting here shit-scared in a snowstorm. I want Henry, goddammit. How about that.

  "Jonesy?"

  "What? Are we ever gonna play this hand or not?"

  "Sure, but . . . do you think Henry and Pete are okay?"

  "How the hell do I know?"

  "You don't . . . have a feeling? Maybe see--"

  "I don't see anything but your face."

  Beav sighed. "But do you think they're okay?"

  "As a matter of fact, I do." Yet his eyes stole first to the clock--half past eleven, now--and then to the closed bedroom door with McCarthy behind it. In the middle of the room, the dreamcatcher danced and slowly turned in some breath of air. "Just going slow. They'll be right along. Come on, let's play."

  "All right. Eight."

  "Fifteen for two."

  "Fuck." Beaver put a toothpick in his mouth. "Twenty-five."

  "Thirty."