"Go."
"One for two."
"Doodlyfuck!" Beaver gave an exasperated little laugh as Jonesy turned the corner onto Third Street. "You peg my ass off every time you deal."
"I peg your ass when you deal, too," Jonesy said. "The truth hurts. Come on, play."
"Nine."
"Sixteen."
"And one for last card," the Beav said, as if he had won a moral victory. He stood up. "I'm gonna go out, take a leak."
"Why? We've got a perfectly good john, in case you didn't know it."
"I know it. I just want to see if I can write my name in the snow."
Jonesy laughed. "Are you ever gonna grow up?"
"Not if I can help it. And keep it down. Don't wake the guy up."
Jonesy swept the cards together and began to shuffle them as Beaver walked to the back door. He found himself thinking about a version of the game they had played when they were kids. They called it the Duddits Game, and they usually played in the Cavell rec room. It was the same as regular cribbage, except they let Duddits peg. I got ten, Henry would say, peg me ten, Duddits. And Duddits, grinning that loopy grin of his that never failed to make Jonesy feel happy, might peg four or six or ten or two fucking dozen. The rule when you played the Duddits Game was that you never complained, never said Duddits, that's too many or Duddits, that's not enough. And man, they'd laugh. Mr. and Mrs. Cavell, they'd laugh, too, if they happened to be in the room, and Jonesy remembered once, they must have been fifteen, sixteen, and Duddits of course was whatever he was, Duddits Cavell's age was never going to change, that was what was so beautiful and scary about him, and this one time Alfie Cavell had started crying, saying Boys, if you only knew what this means, to me and to the missus, if you only knew what it means to Douglas--
"Jonesy." Beaver's voice, oddly flat. Cold air came in through the open kitchen door, raising a rash of gooseflesh on Jonesy's arms.
"Close the door, Beav, was you born in a barn?"
"Come over here. You need to look at this."
Jonesy got up and went to the door. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. The backyard was filled with enough animals to stock a petting zoo. Deer, mostly, a couple of dozen assorted does and bucks. But moving with them were raccoons, waddling woodchucks, and a contingent of squirrels that seemed to move effortlessly along the top of the snow. From around the side of the shed where the Arctic Cat and assorted tools and engine parts were stored came three large canines Jonesy at first mistook for wolves. Then he saw the old discolored length of clothesline hanging around the neck of one of them and realized they were dogs, probably gone feral. They were all moving east, up the slope from The Gulch. Jonesy saw a pair of good-sized wildcats moving between two little groups of deer and actually rubbed his eyes, as if to clear them of a mirage. The cats were still there. So were the deer, the woodchucks, the coons and squirrels. They moved steadily, barely giving the men in the doorway a glance, but without the panic of creatures running before a fire. Nor was there any smell of fire. The animals were simply moving east, vacating the area.
"Holy Christ, Beav," Jonesy said in a low, awed voice.
Beaver had been looking up. Now he gave the animals a quick, cursory glance and lifted his gaze to the sky again. "Yeah. Now look up there."
Jonesy looked up and saw a dozen glaring lights--some red, some blue-white--dancing around up there. They lit the clouds, and he suddenly understood that they were what McCarthy had seen when he was lost. They ran back and forth, dodging each other or sometimes briefly merging, making a glow so bright he couldn't look at it without squinting. "What are they?" he asked.
"I don't know," Beaver said, not looking away. On his pale face, the stubble stood out with almost eerie clarity. "But the animals don't like it. That's what they're trying to get away from."
2
They watched for ten, perhaps fifteen minutes, and Jonesy became aware of a low humming, like the sound of an electrical transformer. Jonesy asked Beaver if he heard it, and the Beav simply nodded, not taking his eyes off the dancing lights in the sky, which to Jonesy looked to be the size of manhole covers. He had an idea that it was the sound the animals wanted to escape, not the lights, but said nothing. Speech all at once seemed hard; he felt a debilitating fear grip him, something feverish and constant, like a low-grade flu.
At last the lights began to dim, and although Jonesy hadn't seen any of them wink out, there seemed to be fewer of them. Fewer animals, too, and that nagging hum was fading.
Beaver started, like a man awakening from a deep sleep. "Camera," he said. "I want to get some pictures before they're gone."
"I don't think you'll be able to--"
"I got to try!" Beaver almost shouted. Then, in a lower tone of voice: "I got to try. At least I can get some of the deers and such before they . . ." He was turning away, heading back across the kitchen, probably trying to remember what heap of dirty clothes he'd left his old battered camera under, when he stopped suddenly. In a flat and decidedly un-Beaverish voice, he said, "Oh, Jonesy. I think we got a problem."
Jonesy took a final look at the remaining lights, still fading (smaller, too), then turned around. Beaver was standing beside the sink, looking across the counter and the big central room.
"What? What now?" That nagging, shrewish voice with the little tremor in it . . . was that really his?
Beaver pointed. The door to the bedroom where they'd put Rick McCarthy--Jonesy's room--stood open. The door to the bathroom, which they had left open so McCarthy could not possibly miss his way if nature called, was now closed.
Beaver turned his somber, beard-speckled face to Jonesy's. "Do you smell it?"
Jonesy did, in spite of the cold fresh air coming in through the door. Ether or ethyl alcohol, yes, there was still that, but now it was mixed with other stuff. Feces for sure. Something that could have been blood. And something else, something like mine-gas trapped a million years and finally let free. Not the kind of fart-smells kids giggled over on camping trips, in other words. This was something richer and far more awful. You could only compare it to farts because there was nothing else even close. At bottom, Jonesy thought, it was the smell of something contaminated and dying badly.
"And look there."
Beaver pointed at the hardwood floor. There was blood on it, a trail of bright droplets running from the open door to the closed one. As if McCarthy had dashed with a nosebleed.
Only Jonesy didn't think it was his nose that had been bleeding.
3
Of all the things in his life he hadn't wanted to do--calling his brother Mike to tell him Ma had died of a heart attack, telling Carla she had to do something about the booze and all the prescriptions or he was going to leave her, telling Big Lou, his cabin counselor at Camp Agawam, that he had wet his bed--crossing the big central room at Hole in the Wall to that closed bathroom door was the hardest. It was like walking in a nightmare where you seem to cover ground at the same dreamy, underwater pace no matter how fast you move your legs.
In bad dreams you never get to where you're going, but they made it to the other side of the room and so Jonesy supposed it wasn't a dream after all. They stood looking down at the splatters of blood. They weren't very big, the largest the size of a dime.
"He must have lost another tooth," Jonesy said, still whispering. "That's probably it."
The Beav looked at him, one eyebrow raised. Then he went to the bedroom door and looked in. After a moment he turned to Jonesy and curled his finger in a beckoning gesture. Jonesy went to where Beaver stood in a kind of sidle, not wanting to lose sight of the closed bathroom door.
In the bedroom the covers had been thrown all the way back onto the floor, as if McCarthy had risen suddenly, urgently. The shape of his head was still in the middle of the pillow and the shape of his body still lay printed on the sheet. Also printed on the sheet, about halfway down, was a large bloody blotch. Soaking into the blue sheet, it looked purple.
"Funny
place to lose a tooth from," Beaver whispered. He bit down on the toothpick in his mouth and the ragged front half of it fell on the doorsill. "Maybe he was hoping for a quarter from the Ass Fairy."
Jonesy didn't respond. He pointed to the left of the doorway, instead. There, in a tangle, were the bottoms of McCarthy's longjohns and the Jockey briefs he'd been wearing beneath them. Both were matted with blood. The Jockeys had caught the worst of it; if not for the waistband and the cotton high up on the front, you might have thought they were a racy, jaunty red, the kind of shorts a devotee of the Penthouse Forum might put on if he was expecting to get laid when the date was over.
"Go look in the chamber pot," Beaver whispered.
"Why don't we just knock on the bathroom door and ask him how he is?"
"Because I want to know what to fucking expect," Beaver replied in a vehement whisper. He patted his chest, then spit out the ragged remains of his latest toothpick. "Man, my ticker's goin nuts."
Jonesy's own heart was racing, and he could feel sweat running down his face. Nevertheless he stepped into the room. The cold fresh air coming in the back door had cleaned out the main room pretty well, but the stench in here was foul--shit and mine-gas and ether. Jonesy felt the little bit of food he'd eaten take an uneasy lurch in his stomach and willed it to stay where it was. He approached the chamber pot and at first couldn't make himself look in. Half a dozen horror-movie images of what he might see danced in his head. Organs floating in blood soup. Teeth. A severed head.
"Go on!" Beaver whispered.
Jonesy squeezed his eyes shut, bent his head, held his breath, then opened his eyes again. There was nothing but clean china gleaming in the glow thrown by the overhead light. The chamber pot was empty. He released his breath in a sigh through his clenched teeth, then walked back to the Beav, avoiding the splashes of blood on the floor.
"Nothing," he said. "Now come on, let's stop screwing around."
They walked past the closed door of the linen closet and regarded the closed pine-paneled door to the john. Beaver looked at Jonesy. Jonesy shook his head. "It's your turn," he whispered. "I looked in the thunderjug."
"You found him," Beaver whispered back. His jaw was set stubbornly. "You do it."
Now Jonesy was hearing something else--hearing it without hearing it, exactly, partly because this sound was more familiar, mostly because he was so fiercely fixed on McCarthy, the man he had almost shot. A whup-whup-whup sound, faint but growing louder. Coming this way.
"Well fuck this," Jonesy said, and although he spoke in a normal tone of voice, it was loud enough to make them both jump a little. He rapped a knuckle on the door. "Mr. McCarthy! Rick! Are you all right in there?"
He won't answer, Jonesy thought. He won't answer because he's dead. Dead and sitting on the throne, just like Elvis.
But McCarthy wasn't dead. He groaned, then said: "I'm a little sick, fellows. I need to move my bowels. If I can move my bowels, I'll be--" There was another groan, then another fart. This one was low, almost liquid. The sound made Jonesy grimace. "--I'll be all right," McCarthy finished. To Jonesy, the man didn't sound on the same continent with all right. He sounded out of breath and in pain. As if to underline this, McCarthy groaned again, louder. There was another of those liquid ripping sounds, and then McCarthy cried out.
"McCarthy!" Beaver tried the doorknob but it wouldn't turn. McCarthy, their little gift from the woods, had locked it from the inside. "Rick!" The Beav rattled the knob. "Open up, man!" Beaver was trying to sound lighthearted, as if the whole thing were a big joke, a camp prank, which only made him sound more scared.
"I'm okay," McCarthy said. He was panting now. "I just . . . fellows, I just need to make a little room." There came the sound of more flatulence. It was ridiculous to think of what they were hearing as "passing gas" or "breaking wind"--those were airy phrases, light as meringue. The sounds coming from behind the closed door were brutal and meaty, like ripping flesh.
"McCarthy!" Jonesy said. He knocked. "Let us in!" But did he want to go in? He did not. He wished McCarthy had stayed lost or been found by someone else. Worse, the amygdala in the base of his brain, that unapologetic reptile, wished he had shot McCarthy to begin with. "Keep it simple, stupid," as they said in Carla's Narcotics Anonymous program. "McCarthy!"
"Go away!" McCarthy called with weak vehemence. "Can't you go away and let a fellow . . . let a fellow make a little number two? Gosh!"
Whup-whup-whup: louder and closer now.
"Rick!" Now it was the Beav. Holding onto the light tone with a kind of desperation, like a climber in trouble holding onto his rope. "Where you bleedin from, buddy?"
"Bleeding?" McCarthy sounded honestly puzzled. "I'm not bleeding."
Jonesy and Beaver exchanged a scared glance.
WHUP-WHUP-WHUP!
The sound had finally gotten Jonesy's full attention, and what he felt was enormous relief. "That's a helicopter," he said. "Bet they're looking for him."
"You think so?" Beaver wore the expression of a man hearing something too good to be true.
"Yeah." Jonesy supposed the people in the chopper could be chasing the foo-lights in the sky or trying to figure out what the animals were up to, but he didn't want to think about those things, didn't care about those things. What he cared about was getting Rick McCarthy off the hopper, off his hands, and into a hospital in Machias or Derry. "Go on out there and flag them down."
"What if--"
WHUP! WHUP! WHUP! And from behind the door there came more of those wrenching, liquid sounds, followed by another cry from McCarthy.
"Get out there!" Jonesy shouted. "Flag those fuckers down! I don't care if you have to drop trou and dance the hootchie-koo, just get them to land!"
"Okay--" Beaver had started to turn away. Now he jerked and screamed.
A number of things Jonesy had been quite successfully not thinking about suddenly leaped out of the closet and came running into the light, capering and leering. When he wheeled around, however, all he saw was a doe standing in the kitchen with its head extended over the counter, examining them with its mild brown eyes. Jonesy took a deep, gasping breath and slumped back against the wall.
"Eat snot and rot," Beaver breathed. Then he advanced on the doe, clapping his hands. "Bug out, Mabel! Don't you know what time of year this is? Go on! Put an egg in your shoe and beat it! Make like an amoeba and split!"
The deer stayed where she was for a moment, eyes widening in an expression of alarm that was almost human. Then she whirled around, her head skimming the line of pots and ladles and tongs hanging over the stove. They clanged together and some fell from their hooks, adding to the clangor. Then she was out the door, little white tail flipping.
Beaver followed, pausing long enough to look at the cluster of droppings on the linoleum with a jaundiced eye.
4
The mixed migration of animals had pretty well dried up to stragglers. The doe Beav had scared out of their kitchen leaped over a limping fox that had apparently lost one paw to a trap, and then disappeared into the woods. Then, from above the low-hanging clouds just beyond the snowmobile shed, a lumbering helicopter the size of a city bus appeared. It was brown, with the letters ANG printed on the side in white.
Ang? Beaver thought. What the hell is Ang? Then he realized: Air National Guard, probably out of Bangor.
It dipped, nose-heavy. Beaver stepped into the backyard, waving his arms over his head. "Hey!" he shouted. "Hey, little help here! Little help, guys!"
The helicopter descended until it was no more than seventy-five feet off the ground, close enough to raise the fresh snow in a cyclone. Then it moved toward him, carrying the snow-cyclone with it.
"Hey! We got a hurt guy here! Hurt guy!" Jumping up and down now like one of those numbass bootscooters on The Nashville Network, feeling like a jerk but doing it anyway. The chopper drifted toward him, low but not coming any lower, not showing any sign of actually landing, and a horrid idea filled him. Beav didn't know if it was s
omething he was getting from the guys in the chopper or just paranoia. All he could be sure of was that he suddenly felt like something pinned to the center ring of a target in a shooting gallery: hit the Beaver and win a clock-radio.
The chopper's side door slid back. A man holding a bullhorn and wearing the bulkiest parka Beaver had ever seen came tilting out toward him. The parka and the bullhorn didn't bother the Beav. What bothered him was the oxygen mask the guy was wearing over his mouth and nose. He'd never heard of fliers needing to wear oxygen masks at an altitude of seventy-five feet. Not, that was, if the air they were breathing was okay.
The man in the parka spoke into the bullhorn, the words coming out loud and clear over the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter's rotors but sounding strange anyway, partly because of the amplification but mostly, Beaver thought, because of the mask. It was like being addressed by some strange robot god.
"HOW MANY ARE YOU?" the god-voice called down. "SHOW ME ON YOUR FINGERS."
Beaver, confused and frightened, at first thought only of himself and Jonesy; Henry and Pete weren't back from the store, after all. He raised two fingers like a guy giving the peace sign.
"STAY WHERE YOU ARE!" the man leaning out of the helicopter boomed in his robot god's voice. "THIS AREA IS UNDER TEMPORARY QUARANTINE! SAY AGAIN, THIS AREA IS UNDER TEMPORARY QUARANTINE! YOU MUST NOT LEAVE!"
The snowfall was thinning, but now the wind kicked up and blew a sheet of the snow which had been sucked up by the copter's rotors into Beaver's face. He slitted his eyes against it and waved his arms. He sucked in freezing snow, spat out his toothpick to keep from yanking that down his throat, too (it was how he would die, his mother constantly predicted, by pulling a toothpick down his throat and choking on it), and then screamed: "What do you mean, quarantine? We got a sick guy down here, you got to come and get him!"
Knowing they couldn't hear him under the big whup-whup-whup of the rotor blades, he didn't have any fucking bullhorn to boost his voice, but yelling anyway. And as the words sick guy passed through his lips, he realized he'd given the guy in the chopper the wrong number of fingers--they were three, not two. He started to raise that number of fingers, then thought of Henry and Pete. They weren't here yet but unless something had happened to them, they would be--so how many were they? Two was the wrong answer, but was three the right one? Or was it five? As he usually did in such situations, Beaver went into mental dog-lock. When it happened in school, there'd been Henry sitting beside him or Jonesy behind him to give him the answers. Out here there was no one to help, only that big whup-whup-whup smacking into his ears and all that swirling snow going down his throat and into his lungs, making him cough.