There was a loud, dank fart from beneath the man on the toilet, and the room immediately filled with an eyewatering aroma of excrement and airplane glue. Jonesy thought it a wonder that the shower curtain didn't melt.
From the bowl there came a splash. Not the plop of a turd dropping--at least Jonesy didn't think so. It sounded more like a fish jumping in a pond.
"Christ almighty, the stink of it!" Beaver cried. He had the heel of his hand over his mouth and nose and his words were muffled. "But if he can fart, he must be alive. Huh, Jonesy? He must still be--"
"Hush," Jonesy said in a quiet voice. He was astonished at its steadiness. "Just hush, okay?" And the Beav hushed.
Jonesy leaned in close. He could see everything: the small stipple of blood in McCarthy's right eyebrow, the red growth on his cheek, the blood on the blue plastic curtain, the joke sign--LAMAR'S THINKIN PLACE--that had hung in here when the toilet was still of the chemical variety and the shower had to be pumped up before it could be used. He saw the little gelid gleam from between McCarthy's eyelids and the cracks in his lips, which looked purple and liverish in this light. He could smell the noxious aroma of the passed gas and could almost see that, too, rising in filthy dark yellow streamers, like mustard gas.
"McCarthy? Rick? Can you hear me?"
He snapped his fingers in front of those nearly closed eyes. Nothing. He licked a spot on the back of his wrist and held it first in front of McCarthy's nostrils, then in front of his lips. Nothing.
"He's dead, Beav," he said, drawing back.
"Bullshit he is," Beaver replied. His voice was ragged, absurdly offended, as if McCarthy had violated all the rules of hospitality. "He just dropped a clinker, man, I heard it."
"I don't think that was--"
Beav stepped past him, bumping Jonesy's bad hip against the sink hard enough to hurt. "That's enough, fella!" Beaver cried. He grabbed McCarthy's round freckled unmuscled shoulder and shook it. "Snap out of it! Snap--"
McCarthy listed slowly tubward and Jonesy had a moment when he thought Beaver had been right after all, the guy was still alive, alive and trying to get up. Then McCarthy fell off the throne and into the tub, pushing the shower curtain ahead of him in a filmy blue billow. The orange hat fell off. There was a bony crack as his skull hit the porcelain and then Jonesy and Beaver were screaming and clutching each other, the sound of their horror deafening in the little tile-lined room. McCarthy's ass was a lopsided full moon with a giant bloody crater in its center, the site of some terrible impact, it seemed. Jonesy saw it for only a second before McCarthy collapsed facedown into the tub and the curtain floated back into place, hiding him, but in that second it seemed to Jonesy that the hole was a foot across. Could that be? A foot? Surely not.
In the toilet bowl, something splashed again, hard enough to spatter droplets of bloody water up onto the ring, which was also blue. Beaver started to lean forward to look in, and Jonesy slammed the lid down on the ring without even thinking about it. "No," he said.
"No?"
"No."
Beaver tried to get a toothpick out of the front pocket of his overalls, came up with half a dozen, and dropped them on the floor. They rolled across the bloody blue tiles like jackstraws. The Beav looked at them, then looked up at Jonesy. There were tears standing in his eyes. "Like Duddits, man," he said.
"What in God's name are you talking about?"
"Don't you remember? He was almost naked, too. Fuckers snatched off his shirt and his pants, didn't leave him nothing but his underpants. But we saved him." Beaver nodded vigorously, as if Jonesy--or some deep and doubtful part of himself--had scoffed at this idea.
Jonesy scoffed at nothing, although McCarthy didn't remind him in the slightest of Duddits. He kept seeing McCarthy going over sideways into the tub, his orange hat falling off, the fatty deposits on his chest (the tits of easy living, Henry called them whenever he saw a pair underneath some guy's polo shirt) wobbling. And then his ass turning up to the light--that harsh fluorescent light that kept no secrets but blabbed everything in a droning monotone. That perfect white man's ass, hairless, just starting to turn flabby and settle down on the backs of the thighs; he had seen a thousand like it in the various locker rooms where he had dressed and showered, was developing one himself (or had been until the guy had run him over, changing the physical configuration of his backside perhaps forever), only he had never seen one like McCarthy's was now, one that looked like something inside had fired a flare or a shotgun shell in order to--to what?
There was another hollow splash from the toilet. The lid bumped up. It was as good an answer as any. In order to get out, of course.
In order to get out.
"Sit on that," Jonesy told Beaver.
"Huh?"
"Sit on it!" Jonesy almost shouted it this time and Beaver sat down on the closed lid in a hurry, looking startled. In the no-secrets, flat-toned light of the fluorescents, Beaver's skin looked as white as freshly turned clay and every fleck of black stubble was a mole. His lips were purple. Above his head was the old joke sign: LAMAR'S THINKIN PLACE. Beav's blue eyes were wide and terrified.
"I'm sittin, Jonesy--see?"
"Yeah. I'm sorry, Beav. But you just sit there, all right? Whatever he had inside him, it's trapped. Got nowhere to go but the septic tank. I'll be back--"
"Where you goin? Cause I don't want you to leave me sittin in the shithouse next to a dead man, Jonesy. If we both run--"
"We're not running," Jonesy said grimly. "This is our place, and we're not running." Which sounded noble but left out at least one aspect of the situation: he was mostly just afraid the thing that was now in the toilet might be able to run faster than they could. Or squiggle faster. Or something. Clips from a hundred horror films--Parasite, Alien, They Came from Within--ran through his mind at super-speed. Carla wouldn't go to the movies with him when one of those was playing, and she made him go downstairs and use the TV in his study when he brought them home on tape. But one of those movies--something he'd seen in one of them--just might save their lives. Jonesy glanced at the reddish-gold mildewy stuff growing on McCarthy's bloody handprint. Save their lives from the thing in the toilet, anyway. The mildewy stuff . . . who in God's name knew?
The thing in the bowl leaped again, thudding the underside of the lid, but Beaver had no trouble holding the lid down. That was good. Maybe whatever it was would drown in there, although Jonesy didn't see how they could count on that; it had been living inside McCarthy, hadn't it? It had been living inside old Mr. Behold-I-stand-at-the-door-and-knock for quite some time, maybe the whole four days he'd been lost in the woods. It had slowed the growth of McCarthy's beard, it seemed, and caused a few of his teeth to fall out; it had also caused McCarthy to pass gas that probably couldn't have gone ignored even in the politest of polite society--farts like poison gas, to be perfectly blunt about it--but the thing itself had apparently been fine . . . lively . . . growing . . .
Jonesy had a sudden vivid image of a wriggling white tapeworm emerging from a pile of raw meat. His gorge rose with a liquid chugging sound.
"Jonesy?" Beaver started to get up. He looked more alarmed than ever.
"Beaver, sit back down!"
Beaver did, just in time. The thing in the toilet leaped and hit the underside of the lid with a hard, hollow rap. Behold, I stand at the door and knock.
"Remember that Lethal Weapon movie where Mel Gibson's partner didn't dare to get off the crapper?" Beaver said. He smiled, but his voice was dry and his eyes were terrified. "This is like that, isn't it?"
"No," Jonesy said, "because nothing's going to blow up. Besides, I'm not Mel Gibson and you're too fucking white to be Danny Glover. Listen, Beav. I'm going out to the shed--"
"Huh-uh, no way, don't leave me here all by myself--"
"Shut up and listen. There's friction tape out there, isn't there?"
"Yeah, hangin on a nail, at least I think--"
"Hanging on a nail, that's right. Near the paint-cans, I think. A
big fat roll of it. I'm going to get that, then come back and tape the lid down. Then--"
It leaped again, furiously, as if it could hear and understand. Well, how do we know it can't? Jonesy thought. When it hit the bottom of the lid with a hard, vicious thud, the Beav winced.
"Then we're getting out of here," Jonesy finished.
"On the Cat?"
Jonesy nodded, although he had in fact forgotten all about the snowmobile. "Yeah, on the Cat. And we'll hook up with Henry and Pete--"
The Beav was shaking his head. "Quarantine, that's what the guy in the helicopter said. That must be why they haven't come back yet, don't you think? They musta got held out by the--"
Thud!
Beaver winced. So did Jonesy.
"--by the quarantine."
"That could be," Jonesy said. "But listen, Beav--I'd rather be quarantined with Pete and Henry than here with . . . than here, wouldn't you?"
"Let's just flush it down," Beaver said. "How about that?"
Jonesy shook his head.
"Why not?"
"Because I saw the hole it made getting out," Jonesy said, "and so did you. I don't know what it is, but we're not going to get rid of it just by pushing a handle. It's too big."
"Fuck." Beaver slammed the heel of his hand against his forehead.
Jonesy nodded.
"All right, Jonesy. Go get the tape."
In the doorway, Jonesy paused and looked back. "And Beaver . . . ?"
The Beav raised his eyebrows.
"Sit tight, buddy."
Beaver started to giggle. So did Jonesy. They looked at each other, Jonesy in the doorway and the Beav sitting on the closed toilet seat, snorting laughter. Then Jonesy hurried across the big central room (still giggling--sit tight, the more he thought about it the funnier it seemed) toward the kitchen door. He felt hot and feverish, both horrified and hilarious. Sit tight. Jesus-Christ-Bananas.
2
Beav could hear Jonesy giggling all the way across the room, still giggling when he went out the door. In spite of everything, Beav was glad to hear that sound. It had already been a bad year for Jonesy, getting run over the way he had--for awhile there at first they'd all thought he was going to step out, and that was awful, poor old Jonesy wasn't yet thirty-eight. Bad year for Pete, who'd been drinking too much, a bad year for Henry, who sometimes got a spooky absence about him that Beav didn't understand and didn't like . . . and now he guessed you could say it had been a bad year for Beaver Clarendon, as well. Of course this was only one day in three hundred and sixty-five, but you just didn't get up in the morning thinking that by afternoon there'd be a dead guy lying naked in the tub and you'd be sitting on a closed toilet seat in order to keep something you hadn't even seen from--
"Nope," Beaver said. "Not going there, okay? Just not going there."
And he didn't have to. Jonesy would be back with the friction tape in a minute or two, three minutes tops. The question was where did he want to go until Jonesy returned? Where could he go and feel good?
Duddits, that was where. Thinking about Duddits always made him feel good. And Roberta, thinking about her was good, too. Undoubtedly.
Beav smiled, remembering the little woman in the yellow dress who'd been standing at the end of her walk on Maple Lane that day. The smile widened as he remembered how she'd caught sight of them. She had called her boy that same thing. She had called him
3
"Duddits!" she cries, a little graying wren of a woman in a flowered print dress, then runs up the sidewalk toward them.
Duddits has been walking contentedly with his new friends, chattering away six licks to the minute, holding his Scooby-Doo lunchbox in his left hand and Jonesy's hand in his right, swinging it cheerfully back and forth. His gabble seems to consist almost entirely of open vowel-sounds. The thing which amazes Beaver the most about it is how much of it he understands.
Now, catching sight of the graying birdie-woman, Duddits lets go of Jonesy's hand and runs toward her, both of them running, and it reminds Beaver of some musical about a bunch of singers, the Von Cripps or Von Crapps or something like that. "Ah-mee, Ah-mee!" Duddits shouts exuberantly--Mommy! Mommy!
"Where have you been? Where have you been, you bad boy, you bad old Duddits!"
They come together and Duddits is so much bigger--two or three inches taller, too--that Beaver winces, expecting the birdie-woman to be flattened the way Coyote is always getting flattened in the Roadrunner cartoons. Instead, she picks him up and swings him around, his sneakered feet flying out behind him, his mouth stretched halfway up to his ears in an expression of joyful ecstasy.
"I was just about to go in and call the police, you bad old late thing, you bad old late D--"
She sees Beaver and his friends and sets her son down on his feet. Her smile of relief is gone; she is solemn as she steps toward them over some little girl's hopscotch grid--crude as it is, Beav thinks, even that will always be beyond Duddits. The tears on her cheeks gleam in the glow of the sun that has finally broken through.
"Uh-oh," Pete says. "We're gonna catch it."
"Be cool," Henry says, speaking low and fast. "Let her rant and then I'll explain."
But they have misjudged Roberta Cavell--have judged her by the standard of so many adults who seem to view boys their age as guilty until proven innocent. Roberta Cavell isn't that way, and neither is her husband, Alfie. The Cavells are different. Duddits has made them different.
"Boys," she says again. "Was he wandering? Was he lost? I've been so afraid to let him walk, but he wants to so much to be a real boy . . ."
She gives Beaver's fingers a strong squeeze with one hand and Pete's with the other. Then she drops them, takes Jonesy's and Henry's hands, and gives them the same treatment.
"Ma'am . . ." Henry begins.
Mrs. Cavell looks at Henry with fixed concentration, as if she is trying to read his mind. "Not just lost," she says. "Not just wandering."
"Ma'am . . ." Henry tries again, and then gives up any thought of dissembling. It is Duddits's green gaze looking up at him from her face, only intelligent and aware, keen and questioning. "No, ma'am." Henry sighs. "Not just wandering."
"Because usually he comes right home. He says he can't get lost because he sees the line. How many were there?"
"Oh, a few," Jonesy says, then shoots a swift look at Henry. Beside them, Duddits has found a last few gone-to-seed dandelions on the neighbors' lawn and is down on his belly, blowing the fluff off them and watching it float away on the breeze. "A few boys were teasing him, ma'am."
"Big boys," Pete says.
Again her eyes search them, from Jonesy to Pete, from Pete to Beaver, and then back to Henry again. "Come up to the house with us," she says. "I want to hear all about it. Duddits has a big glass of ZaRex every afternoon--it's his special drink--but I'll bet you guys would rather have iced tea. Wouldn't you?"
The three of them look at Henry, who considers and then nods. "Yes, ma'am, iced tea would be great."
So she leads them back to the house where they'll spend so much of their time in the following years--the house at 19 Maple Lane--only it is really Duddits who leads the way, prancing, skipping, sometimes lifting his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox over his head, but always, Beaver notices, keeping at almost exactly the same place on the sidewalk, about a foot from the grass margin between the walk and the street. Years later, after the thing with the Rinkenhauer girl, he will consider what Mrs. Cavell said. They all will. He sees the line.
4
"Jonesy?" Beaver called.
No answer. Christ, it seemed like Jonesy had been gone a long time. Probably hadn't been, but there was no way Beaver could tell; he'd forgotten to put on his watch that morning. Stupid, but then, he'd always been stupid, he ought to be used to it by now. Next to Jonesy and Henry, both he and Pete had been stupid. Not that Jonesy or Henry had ever treated them that way--that was one of the great things about them.
"Jonesy?"
Still nothing. Pr
obably he was having trouble finding the tape, that was all.
There was a vile little voice far back in Beaver's head telling him that the tape had nothing to do with it, that Jonesy had just gone Powder River, leaving him here to sit on the toilet like Danny Glover in that movie, but he wouldn't listen to that voice because Jonesy would never do anything like that. They were friends to the end, always had been.
That's right, the vile voice agreed. You were friends. And this is the end.
"Jonesy? You there, man?"
Still nothing. Maybe the tape had fallen off the nail it had been hung on.
Nothing from beneath him, either. And hey, it really wasn't possible that McCarthy had shit some kind of monster into the john, was it? That he'd given birth to--Gasp!--The Beast in the Bowl? It sounded like a horror-movie spoof on Saturday Night Live. And even if that had happened, The Beast in the Bowl had probably drowned by now, drowned or gone deep. A line from a story suddenly occurred to him, one they'd read to Duddits--taking turns, and it was good there were four of them because when Duddits liked something he never got tired of it.
"Eee doool!" Duddits would shout, running to one of them with the book held high over his head, the way he'd carried his lunchbox home that first day. "Eee doool, eee doool!" Which in this case meant Read Pool! Read Pool! The book was McElligot's Pool, by Dr. Seuss, the first memorable couplet of which went, "Young man," laughed the farmer, "You're sort of a fool! You'll never catch fish / In McElligot's Pool." But there had been fish, at least in the imagination of the little boy in the story. Plenty of fish. Big fish.
No splashes from beneath him, though. No bumps on the underside of the lid, either. Not for awhile now. He could maybe risk one quick look, just raise the lid a little and slam it back down if anything--
But sit tight, buddy was the last thing Jonesy had said to him, and that was what he'd better do.
Jonesy's most likely a mile down the road by now, the vile voice estimated. A mile down the road and still picking up speed.
"No, he ain't," Beaver said. "Not Jonesy."
He shifted a little bit on the closed seat, waiting for the thing to jump, but it didn't. It might be sixty yards away by now and swimming with the turds in the septic tank. Jonesy had said it was too big to go down, but since neither of them had actually seen it, there was no way to tell for sure, was there? But in either case, Monsieur Beaver Clarendon was going to sit right here. Because he'd said he would. Because time always seemed slower when you were worried or scared. And because he trusted Jonesy. Jonesy and Henry had never hurt him or made fun, not of him and not of Pete. And none of them had ever hurt Duddits or made fun of him, either.