Dreamcatcher

  Beav snorted laughter. Duddits with his Scooby-Doo lunchbox. Duddits on his belly, blowing the fluff off dandelions. Duddits running around in his backyard, happy as a bird in a tree, yeah, and people who called kids like him special didn't know the half of it. He had been special, all right, their present from a fucked-up world that usually didn't give you jack-shit. Duddits had been their own special thing, and they had loved him.

  5

  They sit in the sunny kitchen nook--the clouds have gone away as if by magic--drinking iced tea and watching Duddits, who drank his ZaRex (awful-looking orange stuff) in three or four huge splattering gulps and then ran out back to play.

  Henry does most of the talking, telling Mrs. Cavell that the boys were just "kinda pushing him around." He says that they got a little bit rough and ripped his shirt, which scared Duddits and made him cry. There is no mention of how Richie Grenadeau and his friends took off his pants, no mention of the nasty after-school snack they wanted Duddits to eat, and when Mrs. Cavell asks them if they know who these big boys were, Henry hesitates briefly and then says no, just some big boys from the high school, he didn't know any of them, not by name. She looks at Beaver, Jonesy, and Pete; they all shake their heads. It may be wrong--dangerous to Duddits in the long run, as well--but they can't step that far outside the rules which govern their lives. Already Beaver cannot understand where they found the sack to intervene in the first place, and later the others will say the same. They marvel at their courage; they also marvel that they aren't in the fuckin hospital.

  She looks at them sadly for a moment, and Beaver realizes she knows a lot of what they aren't telling, probably enough to keep her awake that night. Then she smiles. Right at Beaver she smiles, and it makes him tingle all the way down to his toes. "What a lot of zippers you have on your jacket!" she says.

  Beaver smiles. "Yes, ma'am. It's my Fonzie jacket. It was my brother's first. These guys make fun of it, but I like it just the same."

  "Happy Days," she says. "We like it, too. Duddits likes it. Perhaps you'd like to come over some night and watch it with us. With him." Her smile grows wistful, as if she knows nothing like that will ever happen.

  "Yeah, that'd be okay," Beav says.

  "Actually it would," Pete agrees.

  They sit for a little without talking, just watching him play in the backyard. There's a swing-set with two swings. Duddits runs behind them, pushing them, making the swings go by themselves. Sometimes he stops, crosses his arms over his chest, turns the clockless dial of his face up to the sky, and laughs.

  "Seems all right now," Jonesy says, and drinks the last of his tea. "Guess he's forgotten all about it."

  Mrs. Cavell has started to get up. Now she sits back down, giving him an almost startled look. "Oh no, not at all," she says. "He remembers. Not like you and I, perhaps, but he remembers things. He'll probably have nightmares tonight, and when we go into his room--his father and me--he won't be able to explain. That's the worst for him; he can't tell what it is he sees and thinks and feels. He doesn't have the vocabulary."

  She sighs.

  "In any case, those boys won't forget about him. What if they're laying for him now? What if they're laying for you?"

  "We can take care of ourselves," Jonesy says, but although his voice is stout enough, his eyes are uneasy.

  "Maybe," she says. "But what about Duddits? I can walk him to school--I used to, and I suppose I'll have to again, for awhile at least, anyway--but he loves to walk home on his own so much."

  "It makes him feel like a big boy," Pete says.

  She reaches across the table and touches Pete's hand, making him blush. "That's right, it makes him feel like a big boy."

  "You know," Henry says, "we could walk him. We all go together to the junior high, and it would be easy enough to come down here from Kansas Street."

  Roberta Cavell only sits there without saying anything, a little birdie-woman in a print dress, looking at Henry attentively, like someone waiting for the punchline of a joke.

  "Would that be okay, Missus Cavell?" Beaver asks her. "Because we could do it, easy. Or maybe you don't want us to."

  Something complicated happens to Mrs. Cavell's face--there are all those little twitches, mostly under the skin. One eye almost winks, and then the other one does wink. She takes a handkerchief from her pocket and blows her nose. Beaver thinks, She's trying not to laugh at us. When he tells Henry that as they are walking home, Jonesy and Pete already dropped off, Henry will look at him with utter astonishment. Cry is what she was tryin not to do, he will say . . . and then, affectionately, after a pause: Dope.

  "You would do that?" she asks, and when Henry nods for all of them, she changes the question slightly. "Why would you do that?"

  Henry looks around as if to say Someone else take this one, willya?

  Pete says, "We like him, ma'am."

  Jonesy is nodding. "I like the way he carries his lunchbox over his head--"

  "Yeah, that's bitchin," Pete says. Henry kicks him under the table. Pete replays what he just said--you can see him doing it--and begins blushing furiously.

  Mrs. Cavell appears not to notice. She's looking at Henry with fixed intensity. "He has to go by quarter of eight," she says.

  "We're always near here by then," Henry replies. "Aren't we, you guys?"

  And although seven forty-five is in fact a little early for them, they all nod and say yeah right sure yeah.

  "You would do that?" she asks again, and this time Beaver has no trouble reading her tone; she is incredyouwhatsis, the word that means you can't fuckin believe it.

  "Sure," Henry says. "Unless you think Duddits wouldn't . . . you know . . ."

  "Wouldn't want us to," Jonesy finishes.

  "Are you crazy?" she asks. Beaver thinks she is speaking to herself, trying to convince herself that these boys are really in her kitchen, that all of this is in fact happening. "Walking to school with the big boys? Boys who go to what Duddits calls 'real school'? He'd think he was in heaven."

  "Okay," Henry says. "We'll come by quarter of eight, walk him to school. And we'll walk home with him, too."

  "He gets out at--"

  "Aw, we know what time The Retard Academy gets out," Beaver says cheerfully, and realizes a second before he sees the others' stricken faces that he's said something a lot worse than bitchin. He claps his hands over his mouth. Above them, his eyes are huge. Jonesy kicks his shin so hard under the table that Beav almost tumbles over backward.

  "Don't mind him, ma'am," Henry says. He is talking rapidly, which he only does when he's embarrassed. "He just--"

  "I don't mind," she says. "I know what people call it. Sometimes Alfie and I call it that ourselves." This topic, incredibly, hardly seems to interest her. "Why?" she says again.

  And although it's Henry she's looking at, it's Beaver who answers, in spite of his blazing cheeks. "Because he's cool," he says. The others nod.

  They will walk Duddits to school and back for the next five years or so, unless he is sick or they are at Hole in the Wall; by the end of it Duddits is no longer going to Mary M. Snowe, aka The Retard Academy, but to Derry Vocational, where he learns to bake cookies (baitin tooties, in Duddits-ese), replace car batteries, make change, and tie his own tie (the knot is always perfect, although it sometimes appears about halfway down his shirt). By then the Josie Rinkenhauer thing has come and gone, a little nine days' wonder forgotten by everyone except Josie's parents, who will never forget. In those years when they walk with him to and from his school, Duddits will sprout up until he's the tallest of all of them, a gangly teenager with a strangely beautiful child's face. By then they will have taught him how to play Parcheesi and a simplified version of Monopoly; by then they will have invented the Duddits Game and played it incessantly, sometimes laughing so hard that Alfie Cavell (he was the tall one of the pair, but he also had a birdie look about him) would come to the head of the stairs in the kitchen, the ones that led to the rec room, and yell down at them, wanting to
know what was going on, what was so funny, and maybe they would try to explain that Duddits had pegged Henry fourteen on a two hand or that Duddits had pegged Pete fifteen backward, but Alfie never seemed to get it; he'd stand there at the head of the stairs with a section of the newspaper in his hand, smiling perplexedly, and at last he'd always say the same thing, Keep it down to a dull roar, boys, and close the door, leaving them to their own devices . . . and of all those devices the Duddits Game was the best, totally bitchin, as Pete would have said. There were times when Beaver thought he might actually laugh until he exploded, and Duddits sitting there all the time on the rug beside the big old Parkmunn cribbage board, feet folded under him and grinning like Buddha. What a fuckaree! All of that ahead of them but now just this kitchen, and the surprising sun, and Duddits outside, pushing the swings. Duddits who had done them such a favor by coming into their lives. Duddits who is--they know it from the first--not like anyone else they know.

  "I don't see how they could have done it," Pete says suddenly. "The way he was crying. I don't see how they could have gone on teasing him."

  Roberta Cavell looks at him sadly. "Older boys don't hear him the same way," she says. "I hope you never understand."

  6

  "Jonesy!" Beaver shouted. "Hey, Jonesy!"

  This time there's a response, faint but unmistakable. The snowmobile shed was a kind of ground-level attic, and one of the things out there was an old-fashioned bulb horn, the kind a bicycle delivery-man back in the twenties or thirties might have had mounted on the handlebars of his bike. Now Beaver heard it: Ooogah! How-oogah! A noise that surely would have made Duddits laugh until he cried--a sucker for big, juicy noises, that had been ole Duds.

  The filmy blue shower curtain rustled and the Beav's arms broke out in lush bundles of gooseflesh. For a moment he almost leaped up, thinking that it was McCarthy, then realized he'd brushed the curtain with his own elbow--it was close quarters in here, close quarters, no doubt--and settled back. Still nothing from beneath him, though; that thing, whatever it was, was either dead or gone. For certain.

  Well . . . almost for certain.

  The Beav reached behind him, fingered the flush lever for a moment, then let his hand fall away. Sit tight, Jonesy had said, and Beaver would, but why the fuck didn't Jonesy come back? If he couldn't find the tape, why didn't he just come back without it? It had to have been at least ten minutes now, didn't it? And felt like a fucking hour. Meantime, here he sat on the john with a dead man in the tub beside him, one who looked as if his ass had been blown open by dynamite, man, talk about having to take a shit--

  "Beep the horn again, at least," Beaver muttered. "Honk that jeezly thing, let me know you're still there." But Jonesy didn't.

  7

  Jonesy couldn't find the tape.

  He'd looked everywhere and couldn't find it anywhere. He knew it had to be here, but it wasn't hanging from any of the nails and it wasn't on the tool-littered worktable. It wasn't behind the paint-cans, or on the hook beneath the old painting masks that hung there by their yellowing elastics. He looked under the table, looked in the boxes stacked against the far wall, then in the compartment under the Arctic Cat's passenger seat. There was a spare headlight in there, still in its carton, and half a pack of ancient Lucky Strikes, but no goddam tape. He could feel the minutes ticking away. Once he was pretty sure he heard the Beav calling for him, but he didn't want to go back without the tape and so he blew the old horn that was lying on the floor, pumping its cracked black rubber horn and making an oogah-oogah sound that Duddits no doubt would have loved.

  The more he looked for the tape and didn't find it, the more imperative it seemed. There was a ball of twine, but how would you tie down a toilet seat with twine, for Christ's sake? And there was Scotch tape in one of the kitchen drawers, he was almost sure of it, but the thing in the toilet had sounded pretty strong, like a good-sized fish or something. Scotch tape just wasn't good enough.

  Jonesy stood beside the Arctic Cat, looking around with wide eyes, running his hands through his hair (he hadn't put his gloves back on and he'd been out here long enough to numb his fingers), breathing out big white puffs of vapor.

  "Where the fuck?" he asked aloud, and slammed his fist down on the table. A stack of little boxes filled with nails and screws fell over when he did, and there was the friction tape behind them, a big fat roll of it. He must have looked right past it a dozen times.

  He grabbed it, stuffed it in his coat pocket--he had remembered to put that on, at least, although he hadn't bothered to zip it up--and turned to go. And that was when Beaver began to scream. His calls had been barely there, but Jonesy had no trouble at all hearing the screams. They were big, lusty, filled with pain.

  Jonesy sprinted for the door.

  8

  Beaver's Mom had always said the toothpicks would kill him, but she had never imagined anything like this.

  Sitting there on the closed toilet seat, Beaver felt in the bib pocket of his overalls for a pick to chew on, but there weren't any--they were scattered all over the floor. Two or three had landed clear of the blood, but he'd have to rise up off the toilet seat a little to get them--rise up and lean forward.

  Beaver debated. Sit tight, Jonesy had said, but surely the thing in the toilet was gone; dive, dive, dive, as they said in the submarine war movies. Even if it wasn't, he'd only be lifting his ass for a second or two. If the thing jumped, Beaver could bring his weight right back down again, maybe break its scaly little neck for it (always assuming it had one).

  He looked longingly at the toothpicks. Three or four were close enough so he could just reach down and pick them up, but he wasn't going to put bloody toothpicks in his mouth, especially considering where the blood had come from. There was something else, too. That funny furry stuff was growing on the blood, growing in the gutters of grout between the tiles, as well--he could see it more clearly than ever. It was on some of the toothpicks, too . . . but not on those which had fallen clear of the blood. Those were clean and white, and if he had ever in his life needed the comfort of something in his mouth, a little piece of wood to gnaw on, it was now.

  "Fuck it," the Beav murmured, and leaned forward, reaching out. His stretching fingers came up just short of the nearest clean pick. He flexed the muscles of his thighs and his butt came up off the seat. His fingers closed on the toothpick--ah, got it--and something hit the closed lid of the toilet seat at just that moment, hit it with terrifying force, driving it up into his unprotected balls and knocking him forward. Beaver grabbed at the shower curtain in a last-ditch effort to maintain his balance, but it pulled free of the bar in a metallic clitter-clack of rings. His boots slipped in the blood and he went sprawling forward onto the floor like a man blown out of an ejection seat. Behind him he heard the toilet seat fly up hard enough to crack the porcelain tank.

  Something wet and heavy landed on Beaver's back. Something that felt like a tail or a worm or a muscular segmented tentacle curled between his legs and seized his already aching balls in a contracting python's grip. Beaver screamed, chin lifting from the bloody tiles (a red crisscross pattern tattooed faintly on his chin), eyes bulging. The thing lay wet and cold and heavy from the nape of his neck to the small of his back, like a rolled-up breathing rug, and now it began to utter a feverish high-pitched chittering noise, the sound of a rabid monkey.

  Beaver screamed again, wriggled toward the door on his belly, then lurched up onto all fours, trying to shake the thing off. The muscular rope between his legs squeezed again, and there was a low popping sound from somewhere in the liquid haze of pain that was now his groin.

  Oh Christ, the Beav thought. Mighty Christ bananas, I think that was one of my balls.

  Squealing, sweating, tongue dancing in and out of his mouth like a demented party-favor, Beaver did the only thing he could think of: rolled over onto his back, trying to crush the whatever-it-was between his spine and the tiles. It chittered in his ear, almost deafening him, and began to wriggle franti
cally. Beaver seized the tail curled between his legs, smooth and hairless on top, thorny--as if plated with hooks made of clotted hair--underneath. And wet. Water? Blood? Both?

  "Ahhh! Ahhh! Oh God let go! Fuckin thing, let go! Jesus! My fuckin sack! Jeesus!"

  Before he could get either hand beneath the tail, a mouthful of needles sank into the side of his neck. He reared up, bellowing, and then the thing was gone. Beaver tried to get to his feet. He had to push with his hands because there was no strength in his legs, and his hands kept slipping. In addition to McCarthy's blood, the bathroom floor was now covered with murky water from the cracked toilet tank and the tiled surface was a skating rink.

  As he finally got up, he saw something clinging to the doorway about halfway up. It looked like some kind of freak weasel--no legs but with a thick reddish-gold tail. There was no real head, only a kind of slippery-looking node from which two feverish black eyes stared.

  The lower half of the node split open, revealing a nest of teeth. The thing struck at Beaver like a snake, the node lashing forward, the hairless tail curled around the doorjamb. Beaver screamed and raised a hand in front of his face. Three of the four fingers on it--all but the pinky--disappeared. There was no pain, either that or the pain from his ruptured testicle swallowed it whole. He tried to step away, but the backs of his knees struck the bowl of the battered toilet. There was nowhere to go.

  That thing was in him? Beaver thought; there was time for that much. It was in him?

  Then it uncoiled its tail or its tentacle or whatever it was and leaped at him, the top half of its rudimentary head full of its stupidly furious black eyes, the lower half a packet of bone needles. Far away, in some other universe where there still might be sane life, Jonesy was calling his name, but Jonesy was late, Jonesy was way late.