"Jonesy's in the hospital," he said abruptly. No idea what he meant. "Jonesy's in the hospital with Mr. Gray. Got to stay there. ICU."
Madness. Prattling madness. He clamped the skis to his boots again, praying that his back wouldn't lock up while he was bent over, and then pushed off along the track once more, the snow starting to thicken around him now, the day darkening.
By the time he realized that he had remembered the hot dogs but forgotten Jonesy's rifle (not to mention his own), he'd gone too far to turn around.
12
He stopped what might have been three quarters of an hour later, peering stupidly down at the Arctic Cat's print. There was little more than a glimmer of light left in the day now, but enough to see that the track--what was left of it--veered abruptly to the right and went into the woods.
Into the fucking woods. Why had Jonesy (and Pete, if Pete was with him) gone into the woods? What sense did that make when the Deep Cut ran straight and clear, a white lane between the darkening trees?
"Deep Cut goes northwest," he said, standing there with his skis toeing in toward each other and the loosely wrapped package of hot dogs poking out of his coat pocket. "The road to Gosselin's--the blacktop--can't be more than three miles from here. Jonesy knows that. Pete knows that. Still . . . snowmobile goes . . ." He held up his arms like the hands of a clock, estimating. "Snowmobile goes almost dead north. Why?"
Maybe he knew. The sky was brighter in the direction of Gosselin's, as if banks of lights had been set up there. He could hear the chatter of helicopters, waxing and waning but always tending in that same direction. As he drew closer, he expected to hear other heavy machinery as well: supply vehicles, maybe generators. To the east there was still the isolated crackle of gunfire, but the big action was clearly in the direction he was going.
"They've set up a base camp at Gosselin's," Henry said. "And Jonesy didn't want any part of it."
That felt like a bingo to Henry. Only . . . there was no more Jonesy, was there? Just the redblack cloud.
"Not true," he said. "Jonesy's still there. Jonesy's in the hospital with Mr. Gray. That's what the cloud is--Mr. Gray." And then, apropos of nothing (at least that he could tell): "Fit wha? Fit neek?"
Henry looked up into the sifting snow (it was much less urgent than the earlier snowfall, at least so far, but it was starting to accumulate) as if he believed there was a God above it somewhere, studying him with all the genuine if detached interest of a scientist looking at a wriggling paramecium. "What the fuck am I talking about? Any idea?"
No answer, but an odd memory came. He, Pete, Beaver, and Jonesy's wife had kept a secret among them last March. Carla had felt Jonesy could do without knowing that his heart had stopped twice, once just after the EMTs put him in the back of their ambulance, and again shortly after he had arrived at Mass General. Jonesy knew he'd come close to stepping out, but not (at least as far as Henry knew) just how close. And if Jonesy had had any Kubler-Ross step-into-the-light experiences, he had either kept them to himself or forgotten thanks to repeated doses of anesthetic and lots of pain-killers.
A roar built out of the south with terrifying speed and Henry ducked, putting his hands to his ears as what sounded like a full squadron of jet fighters passed in the clouds overhead. He saw nothing, but when the roar of the jets faded as fast as it had come, he straightened with his heart beating hard and fast. Yow! Christ! It occurred to him that this was what the airbases surrounding Iraq must have sounded like during the days leading up to Operation Desert Storm.
That big boom. Did it mean the United States of America had just gone to war against beings from another world? Was he now living in an H. G. Wells novel? Henry felt a hard, squeezing flutter under his breastbone. If so, this enemy might have more than a few hundred rusty Soviet Scuds to throw back at Uncle Sammy.
Let it go. You can't do anything about any of that. What's next for you, that's the question. What's next for you?
The rave of the jets had already faded to a mutter. He guessed that they would be back, though. Maybe with friends.
"Two paths diverged in a snowy wood, is that how it goes? Something like that, anyway."
But following the snowmobile's track any farther was really not an option. He'd lose it in the dark half an hour from now, and this new snowfall would wipe it out in any case. He would end up wandering and lost . . . as Jonesy very likely was now.
Sighing, Henry turned away from the snowmobile track and continued along the road.
13
By the time he neared the place where the Deep Cut joined up with the two-lane blacktop known as the Swanny Pond Road, Henry was almost too tired to stand, let alone ski. The muscles in his thighs felt like old wet teabags. Not even the lights on the northwestern horizon, now much brighter, or the sound of the motors and helicopters could offer him much comfort. Ahead of him was a final long, steep hill. On the other side, Deep Cut ended and Swanny Pond began. There he might actually encounter traffic, especially if there were troops being moved in.
"Come on," he said. "Come on, come on, come on." Yet he stood where he was awhile longer. He didn't want to go over that hill. "Better underhill than over-hill," he said. That seemed to mean something but it was probably just another idiotic non sequitur. Besides, there was nowhere else to go.
He bent, scooped up more snow--in the dark the double handful looked like a small pillowcase. He nibbled some, not because he wanted it but because he really didn't want to start moving again. The lights coming from Gosselin's were more understandable than the lights he and Pete had seen playing in the sky (They're back! Becky had screamed, like the little girl sitting in front of the TV in that old Steven Spielberg movie), but Henry liked them even less, somehow. All those motors and generators sounded somehow . . . hungry.
"That's right, rabbit," he said. And then, because there really were no other options, he started up the last hill between him and a real road.
14
He paused at the top, gasping for breath and bent over his skipoles. The wind was stronger up here, and it seemed to go right through his clothing. His left leg throbbed where it had been gored by the turnsignal stalk, and he wondered again if he was incubating a little red-gold colony under the makeshift bandage. Too dark to see, and when the only possible good news would be no news, maybe that was just as well.
"Time slowed, reality bent, on and on the eggman went." No yuks left in that one, so he started down the hill toward the T-junction where the Deep Cut Road ended.
This side of the hill was steeper and soon he was skiing rather than walking. He picked up speed, not knowing if what he felt was terror, exhilaration, or some unhealthy mix of the two. Certainly he was going too fast for the visibility, which was almost nil, and his abilities, which were as rusty as the clamps holding the skis to his boots. The trees blurred past on either side, and it suddenly occurred to him that all his problems might be solved at a stroke. Not the Hemingway Solution after all. Call this way out the Bono Solution.
His hat blew off his head. He reached for it automatically, one of his poles flailing out ahead of him, half-seen in the dark, and all at once his balance was gone. He was going to take a tumble. And maybe that was good, as long as he didn't break his goddam leg. Falling would stop him, at least. He would just pick himself up, and--
Lights blazed out, big truck-mounted spotlights, and before his vision disappeared into dazzle, Henry glimpsed what might have been a flatbed pulp-truck pulled across the end of the Deep Cut Road. The lights were undoubtedly motion-sensitive, and there was a line of men standing in front of them.
"HALT!" a terrifying, amplified voice commanded. It could have been the voice of God. "HALT OR WE'LL FIRE!"
Henry went down hard and awkwardly. His skis shot off his feet. One ankle bent painfully enough to make him cry out. He lost one skipole; the other snapped off halfway up its shaft. The wind was knocked out of him in a large frosty whoop of breath. He slid, snowplowing with his wide-open crotch, then c
ame to rest, bent limbs forming a shape something like a swastika.
His vision began to come back, and he heard feet crunching in the snow. He flailed and managed to sit up, not able to tell if anything was broken or not.
Six men were standing about ten feet down the hill from him, their shadows impossibly long and crisp on the diamond-dusted new snow. They were all wearing parkas. They all had clear plastic masks over their mouths and noses--these looked more efficient than the painters' masks Henry had found in the snowmobile shed, but Henry had an idea that the basic purpose was the same.
The men also had automatic weapons, all of them pointed at him. It now seemed rather lucky to Henry that he had left Jonesy's Garand and his own Winchester back at the Scout. If he'd had a gun, he might have a dozen or more holes in him by now.
"I don't think I've got it," he croaked. "Whatever it is you're worried about, I don't think--"
"ON YOUR FEET!" God's voice again. Coming from the truck. The men standing in front of him blocked out at least some of the glare and Henry could see more men at the foot of the hill where the roads met. All of them had weapons, too, except for the one holding the bullhorn.
"I don't know if I can g--"
"ON YOUR FEET NOW!" God commanded, and one of the men in front of him made an expressive little jerking motion with the barrel of his gun.
Henry got shakily to his feet. His legs were trembling and the ankle he'd bent was outraged, but everything was holding together, at least for the time being. Thus ends the eggman's journey, he thought, and began to laugh. The men in front of him looked at each other uneasily, and although they pointed their rifles at him again, he was comforted to see even that small demonstration of human emotion.
In the brilliant glow of the lights mounted on the pulper's flatbed, Henry saw something lying in the snow--it had fallen from his pocket when he wiped out. Slowly, knowing they might shoot him anyway, he bent down.
"DON'T TOUCH THAT!" God cried from His loudspeaker atop the cab of the pulp-truck, and now the men down there also raised their weapons, a little hello darkness my old friend peeping from the muzzle of each.
"Bite shit and die," Henry said--one of the Beav's better efforts--and picked up the package. He held it out to the armed and masked men in front of him, smiling. "I come in peace for all mankind," he said. "Who wants a hot dog?"
CHAPTER TWELVE
JONESY IN THE HOSPITAL
1
This was a dream.
It didn't feel like one, but it had to be. For one thing, he'd already been through March fifteenth once, and it seemed monstrously unfair to have to go through it again. For another, he could remember all sorts of things from the eight months between mid-March and mid-November--helping the kids with their homework, Carla on the phone with her friends (many from the Narcotics Anonymous program), giving a lecture at Harvard . . . and the months of physical rehab, of course. All the endless bends, all the tiresome screaming as his joints stretched themselves out again, oh so reluctantly. He telling Jeannie Morin, his therapist, that he couldn't. She telling him that he could. Tears on his face, big smile on hers (that hateful undentable junior-miss smile), and in the end she had turned out to be right. He could, he was the little engine that could, but what a price the little engine had paid.
He could remember all those things and more: getting out of bed for the first time, wiping his ass for the first time, the night in early May when he'd gone to bed thinking I'm going to get through this for the first time, the night in late May when he and Carla had made love for the first time since the accident, and afterward he'd told her an old joke: How do porcupines fuck? Very carefully. He could remember watching fireworks on Memorial Day, his hip and upper thigh aching like a bastard; he could remember eating watermelon on the Fourth of July, spitting seeds into the grass and watching Carla and her sisters play badminton, his hip and upper leg still aching but not so fiercely; he could remember Henry calling in September--"Just to check in," he'd said--and talking about all sorts of things, including the annual hunting trip to Hole in the Wall come November. "Sure I'm coming," Jonesy had said, not knowing then how little he would like the feel of the Garand in his hands. They had talked about their work (Jonesy had taught the final three weeks of summer session, hopping around pretty spryly on one crutch by then), about their families, about the books they had read and the movies they had seen; Henry had mentioned again, as he had in January, that Pete was drinking too much. Jonesy, having already been through one substance-abuse war with his wife, hadn't wanted to talk about that, but when Henry passed along Beaver's suggestion that they stop in Derry and see Duddits Cavell when their week of hunting was over, Jonesy had agreed enthusiastically. It had been too long, and there was nothing like a shot of Duddits to cheer a person up. Also . . .
"Henry?" he had asked. "We made plans to go see Duddits, didn't we? We were going on St. Patrick's Day. I don't remember it, but it's written on my office calendar."
"Yeah," Henry had replied. "As a matter of fact, we did."
"So much for the luck of the Irish, huh?"
As a result of such memories, Jonesy was positive March fifteenth had already happened. There were all sorts of evidence supporting the thesis, his office calendar being Exhibit A. Yet here they were again, those troublesome Ides . . . and now, oh goddam, how was this for unfair, now there seemed to be more of the fifteenth than ever.
Previously, his memory of that day faded out at around ten A.M. He'd been in his office, drinking coffee and making a stack of books to take down to the History Department office, where there was a FREE WITH STUDENT ID table. He hadn't been happy, but he couldn't for the life of him remember why. According to the same office calendar on which he had spied the unkept March seventeenth appointment to go see Duddits, he'd had a March fifteenth appointment with a student named David Defuniak. Jonesy couldn't remember what it had been about, but he later found a notation from one of his grad assistants about a make-up essay from Defuniak--short-term results of the Norman Conquest--so he supposed it had been that. Still, what was there in a make-up assignment that could possibly have made Associate Professor Gary Jones feel unhappy?
Unhappy or not, he had been humming something, humming and then scatting the words, which were close to nonsense: Yes we can, yes we can-can, great gosh a'mighty yes we can-can. There were a few little shreds after that--wishing Colleen, the Department secretary, a nice St. Paddy's Day, grabbing a Boston Phoenix from the newspaper box outside the building, dropping a quarter into the saxophone case of a skinhead just over the bridge on the Cambridge side, feeling sorry for the guy because he was wearing a light sweater and the wind coming off the Charles was sharp--but mostly what he remembered after making that stack of giveaway books was darkness. Consciousness had returned in the hospital, with that droning voice from a nearby room: Please stop, I can't stand it, give me a shot, where's Marcy, I want Marcy. Or maybe it had been where's Jonesy, I want Jonesy. Old creeping death. Death pretending to be a patient. Death had lost track of him--sure, it was possible, it was a big hospital stuffed full of pain, sweating agony out its very seams--and now old creeping death was trying to find him again. Trying to trick him. Trying to make him give himself away.
This time around, though, all that merciful darkness in the middle is gone. This time around he not only wishes Colleen a happy St. Paddy's Day, he tells her a joke: What do you call a Jamaican proctologist? A Pokemon. He goes out, his future self--his November self--riding in his March head like a stowaway. His future self hears his March self think What a beautiful day it turned out to be as he starts walking toward his appointment with destiny in Cambridge. He tries to tell his March self that this is a bad idea, a grotesquely bad idea, that he can save himself months of agony just by hailing a Red Top or taking the T, but he can't get through. Perhaps all the science-fiction stories he read about time travel when he was a teenager had it right: you can't change the past, no matter how you try.
He walks across th
e bridge, and although the wind is a little cold, he still enjoys the sun on his face and the way it breaks into a million bright splinters on the Charles. He sings a snatch of "Here Comes the Sun," then reverts to the Pointer Sisters: Yes we can-can, great gosh a'mighty. Swinging his briefcase in rhythm. His sandwich is inside. Egg salad. Mmm-mmmm, Henry said. SSDD, Henry said.
Here is the saxophonist, and surprise: he's not on the end of the Mass Ave Bridge but farther up, by the MIT campus, outside one of those funky little Indian restaurants. He's shivering in the cold, bald, with nicks on his scalp suggesting he wasn't cut out to be a barber. The way he's playing "These Foolish Things" suggests he wasn't cut out to be a horn-player, either, and Jonesy wants to tell him to be a carpenter, an actor, a terrorist, anything but a musician. Instead, Jonesy actually encourages him, not dropping the quarter he previously remembered into the guy's case (it's lined with scuffed purple velvet), but a whole fistful of change--these foolish things, indeed. He blames it on the first warm sun after a long cold winter; he blames it on how well things turned out with Defuniak.
The sax-man rolls his eyes to Jonesy, thanking him but still blowing. Jonesy thinks of another joke: What do you call a sax-player with a credit card? An optimist.
He walks on, swinging his case, not listening to the Jonesy inside, the one who has swum upstream from November like some time-traveling salmon. "Hey Jonesy, stop. Just a few seconds should be enough. Tie your shoe or something. (No good, he's wearing loafers. Soon he will be wearing a cast, as well.) That intersection up there is where it happens, the one where the Red Line stops, Mass Ave and Prospect. There's an old guy coming, a wonked-out history professor in a dark blue Lincoln Town Car and he's going to clean you like a house."
But it's no good. No matter how hard he yells, it's no good. The phone lines are down. You can't go back, can't kill your own grandfather, can't shoot Lee Harvey Oswald as he kneels at a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, congealing fried chicken on a paper plate beside him and his mail-order rifle aimed, can't stop yourself walking across the intersection of Mass Ave and Prospect Street with your briefcase in your hand and your copy of the Boston Phoenix--which you will never read--under your arm. Sorry, sir, the lines are down somewhere in the Jefferson Tract, it's a real fuckarow up there, your call cannot go through--