It happened not long after Mr. Gray put the State Trooper's car back in the turnpike's southbound lane (there was just the one, at least for the time being, and that was treacherous). Jonesy was in a closet at the time, following up what seemed to him to be an absolutely brilliant idea.
Mr. Gray had cut off his telephone service? Okay, he would simply create a new form of communication, as he had created a thermostat to cool the place down when Mr. Gray tried to force him out by overloading him with heat. A fax machine would be just the thing, he decided. And why not? All the gadgets were symbolic, only visualizations to help him first focus and then exercise powers that had been in him for over twenty years. Mr. Gray had sensed those powers, and after his initial dismay had moved very efficiently to keep Jonesy from using them. The trick was to keep finding ways around Mr. Gray's roadblocks, just as Mr. Gray himself kept finding ways to move south.
Jonesy closed his eyes and visualized a fax like the one in the History Department office, only he put it in the closet of his new office. Then, feeling like Aladdin rubbing the magic lamp (only the number of wishes he was granted seemed infinite, as long as he didn't get carried away), he also visualized a stack of paper and a Berol Black Beauty pencil lying beside it. Then he went into the closet to see how he'd done.
Pretty well, it appeared at first glance . . . although the pencil was a tad eerie, brand-new and sharpened to a virgin point, but still gnawed all along the barrel. Yet that was as it should be, wasn't it? Beaver was the one who had used Black Beauty pencils, even way back in Witcham Street Grammar. The rest of them had carried the more standard yellow Eberhard Fabers.
The fax looked perfect, sitting there on the floor beneath a dangle of empty coathangers and one jacket (the bright orange parka his mother had bought him for his first hunting trip, then made him promise--with his hand over his heart--to wear every single moment he was out of doors), and it was humming in an encouraging way.
Disappointment set in when he knelt in front of it and read the message in the lighted window: GIVE UP JONESY COME OUT.
He picked up the phone on the side of the machine and heard Mr. Gray's recorded voice: "Give up, Jonesy, come out. Give up, Jonesy, come o--"
A series of violent bangs, almost as loud as thunderclaps, made him cry out and jump to his feet. His first thought was that Mr. Gray was using one of those SWAT squad door-busters, battering his way in.
It wasn't the door, though. It was the window, and in some ways that was even worse. Mr. Gray had put industrial gray shutters--steel, they looked like--across his window. Now he wasn't just imprisoned; he was blind, as well.
Written across the inside, easily readable through the glass: GIVE UP COME OUT. Jonesy had a brief memory of The Wizard of Oz--SURRENDER DOROTHY written across the sky--and wanted to laugh. He couldn't. Nothing was funny, nothing was ironic. This was horrible.
"No!" he shouted. "Take them down! Take them down, damn you!"
No answer. Jonesy raised his hands, meaning to shatter the glass and beat on the steel shutters beyond, then thought, Are you crazy? That's what he wants! The minute you break the glass, those shutters disappear and Mr. Gray is in here. And you're gone, buddy.
He was aware of movement--the heavy rumble of the plow. Where were they by now? Waterville? Augusta? Even farther south? Into the zone where the precip had fallen as rain? No, probably not, Mr. Gray would have switched the plow for something faster if they had gotten clear of the snow. But they would be clear of it, and soon. Because they were going south.
Going where?
I might as well be dead already, Jonesy thought, looking disconsolately at the closed shutter with its taunt of a message. I might as well be dead right now.
14
In the end it was Owen who took Roberta Cavell by the arms and--with one eye on the racing clock, all too aware that every minute and a half brought Kurtz a mile closer--told her why they had to take Duddits, no matter how ill he was. Even in these circumstances, Henry didn't know if he could have uttered the phrase fate of the world may depend on it with a straight face. Underhill, who had spent his life carrying a gun for his country, could and did.
Duddits stood with his arm around Henry, staring raptly down at him with his brilliant green eyes. Those eyes, at least, had not changed. Nor had the feeling they'd always had when around Duddits--that things were either perfectly all right or soon would be.
Roberta looked at Owen, her face seeming to grow older with every sentence he spoke. It was as if some malign time-lapse photography were at work.
"Yes," she said, "yes, I understand you want to find Jonesy--to catch him--but what does he want to do? And if he came here, why didn't he do it here?"
"Ma'am, I can't answer those questions--"
"War," Duddits said suddenly. "Onesy ont war."
War? Owen's mind asked Henry, alarmed. What war?
Never mind, Henry responded, and all at once the voice in Owen's head was faint, hard to hear. We have to go.
"Ma'am. Mrs. Cavell." Owen took her arms again, very gently. Henry loved this woman a lot, although he had ignored her quite cruelly over the last dozen years or so, and Owen knew why he'd loved her. It came off her like a sweet smoke. "We have to go."
"No. Oh please say no." The tears coming again. Don't do that, lady, Owen wanted to say. Things are bad enough already. Please don't do that.
"There's a man coming. A very bad man. We have to be gone when he gets here."
Roberta's distracted, sorrowing face filled with resolution. "All right, then. If you have to. But I'm coming with you."
"Roberta, no," Henry said.
"Yes! Yes, I can take care of him . . . give him his pills . . . his Prednisone . . . I'll make sure to bring his lemon swabs and--"
"Umma, oo ay ere."
"No, Duddie, no!'
"Umma, oo ay ere! Ayfe! Ayfe!" Safe, safe. Duddits growing agitated now.
"We really don't have any more time," Owen said.
"Roberta," Henry said. "Please."
"Let me come!" she cried. "He's all I have!"
"Umma," Duddits said. His voice was not a bit childish. "Ooo . . . ay . . . ERE."
She looked at him fixedly, and her face sagged. "All right," she said. "Just one more minute. I have to get something."
She went into Duddits's room and came back with a paper bag, which she handed to Henry.
"It's his pills," she said. "He has his Prednisone at nine o'clock. Don't forget or he gets wheezy and his chest hurts. He can have a Percocet if he asks, and he probably will ask, because being out in the cold hurts him."
She looked at Henry with sorrow but no reproach. He almost wished for reproach. God knew he'd never done anything which had made him feel this ashamed. It wasn't just that Duddits had leukemia; it was that he'd had it for so long and none of them had known.
"Also his lemon swabs, but only on his lips, because his gums bleed a lot now and the swabs sting him. There's cotton for his nose if it bleeds. Oh, and the catheter. See it there on his shoulder?"
Henry nodded. A plastic tube protruding from a packing of bandage. Looking at it gave him a weirdly strong feeling of deja vu.
"If you're outside, keep it covered . . . Dr. Briscoe laughs at me, but I'm always afraid the cold will get down inside . . . a scarf will work . . . even a handkerchief . . ." She was crying again, the sobs breaking through.
"Roberta--" Henry began. Now he was looking at the clock, too.
"I'll take care of him," Owen said. "I saw my Pop through to the end of it. I know about Prednisone and Percocet." And more: bigger steroids, better painkillers. At the end, marijuana, methadone, and finally pure morphine, so much better than heroin. Morphine, death's sleekest engine.
He felt her in his head, then, a strange, tickling sensation like bare feet so light they barely touched down. Tickly, but not unpleasant. She was trying to make out if what he'd said about his father was the truth or a lie. This was her little gift from her extraordinary son, Owen r
ealized, and she had been using it so long she no longer even knew she was doing it . . . like Henry's friend Beaver chewing on his toothpicks. It wasn't as powerful as what Henry had, but it was there, and Owen had never in his life been so glad he had told the truth.
"Not leukemia, though," she said.
"Lung cancer. Mrs. Cavell, we really have to--"
"I need to get him one more thing."
"Roberta, we can't--" Henry began.
"In a flash, in a flash." She darted for the kitchen.
Owen felt really frightened for the first time. "Kurtz and Freddy and Perlmutter--Henry, I can't tell where they are! I've lost them!"
Henry had unrolled the top of the bag and looked inside. What he saw there, lying on top of the box of lemon-flavored glycerine swabs, transfixed him. He replied to Owen, but his voice seemed to be coming from the far end of some previously undisclosed--hell, unsuspected--valley. There was such a valley, he knew that now. A trough of years. He would not, could not, say he had never suspected that such geography existed, but how in God's name could he have suspected so little?
"They just passed Exit 29," he said. "Twenty miles behind us now. Maybe even closer."
"What's wrong with you?"
Henry reached into the brown bag and brought out the little creation of string, so like a cobweb, which had hung over Duddits's bed here, and over the bed at the Maple Lane house before Alfie had died.
"Duddits, where did you get this?" he asked, but of course he knew. This dreamcatcher was smaller than the one which had hung in the main room at Hole in the Wall, but was otherwise its twin.
"Eeeyer," Duddits said. He had never taken his eyes off Henry. It was as if he could still not entirely believe that Henry was here. "Eeeyer ent ooo eee. Or eye Issmuss ass-eek."
Although his mind-reading ability was fading rapidly as his body beat back the byrus, Owen understood this easily enough; Beaver sent to me, Duddits said. For my Christmas last week. Down's sufferers had difficulty expressing concepts of time past and time to come, and Owen suspected that to Duddits the past was always last week, the future always next week. It seemed to Owen that if everyone thought that way, there would be a lot less grief and rancor in the world.
Henry looked at the little string dreamcatcher a moment longer, then returned it to the brown bag just as Roberta bustled back in. Duddits broke into a huge grin when he saw what she'd gone for. "Oooby-Doo!" he cried. "Ooby-Doo unnox!" He took it and gave her a kiss on each cheek.
"Owen," Henry said. His eyes were bright. "I have some extremely good news."
"Tell me."
"The bastards just hit a detour--jackknifed tractor-trailer just shy of Exit 28. It's going to cost them ten, maybe twenty minutes."
"Thank Christ. Let's use them." He glanced at the coat-tree in the corner. Hanging from it was a huge blue duffel coat with RED SOX WINTER BALL printed on the back in bright scarlet. "That yours, Duddits?"
"Ine!" Duddits said, smiling and nodding. "I-acket." And, as Owen reached for it: "Ooo saw us ine Osie." He got that one, too, and it sent a chill up his back. You saw us find Josie.
So he had . . . and Duddits had seen him. Only last night, or had Duddits seen him on that day, nineteen years ago? Did Duddits's gift also involve a kind of time travel?
This wasn't the time to ask such questions, and Owen was almost glad.
"I said I wouldn't pack his lunchbox, but of course I did. In the end, I did."
Roberta looked at it--at Duddits holding it, shifting it from hand to hand as he struggled into the enormous parka, which had also been a gift from the Boston Red Sox. His face was unbelievably pale against the bright blue and even brighter yellow of the lunchbox. "I knew he was going. And that I wasn't." Her eyes searched Henry's face. "Please may I not go, Henry?"
"If you do, you could die in front of him," Henry said--hating the cruelty of it, also hating how well his life's work had prepared him to push the right buttons. "Would you want him to see that, Roberta?"
"No, of course not." And, as an afterthought, hurting him all the way to the center of his heart: "Damn you."
She went to Duddits, pushed Owen aside, and quickly ran up her son's zipper. Then she took him by the shoulders, pulled him down, and fixed him with her eyes. Tiny, fierce little bird of a woman. Tall, pale son, floating inside his parka. Roberta had stopped crying.
"You be good, Duddie."
"I eee ood, Umma."
"You mind Henry."
"I-ill, Umma. I ine Ennie."
"Stay bundled up."
"I-ill." Still obedient, but a little impatient now, wanting to be off, and how all this took Henry back: trips to get ice cream, trips to play minigolf (Duddits had been weirdly good at the game, only Pete had been able to beat him with any consistency), trips to the movies; always you mind Henry or you mind Jonesy or you mind your friends; always you be good, Duddie and I eee oood, Umma.
She looked him up and down.
"I love you, Douglas. You have always been a good son to me, and I love you so very much. Give me a kiss, now."
He kissed her; her hand stole out and caressed his beard-sandy cheek. Henry could hardly bear to look, but he did look, was as helpless as any fly caught in any spiderweb. Every dreamcatcher was also a trap.
Duddits gave her another perfunctory kiss, but his brilliant green eyes shifted between Henry and the door. Duddits was anxious to be off. Because he knew the people after Henry and his friend were close? Because it was an adventure, like all the adventures the five of them had had in the old days? Both? Yes, probably both. Roberta let him go, her hands leaving her son for the last time.
"Roberta," Henry said. "Why didn't you tell any of us this was happening? Why didn't you call?"
"Why didn't you ever come?"
Henry might have asked another of his own--Why didn't Duddits call?--but the very question would have been a lie. Duddits had called repeatedly since March, when Jonesy had had his accident. He thought of Pete, sitting in the snow beside the overturned Scout, drinking beer and writing DUDDITS over and over again in the snow. Duddits, marooned in Never-Never Land and dying there, Duddits sending his messages and receiving back only silence. Finally one of them had come, but only to take him away with nothing but a bag of pills and his old yellow lunchbox. There was no kindness in the dreamcatcher. They had meant only good for Duddits, even on that first day; they had loved him honestly. Still, it came down to this.
"Take care of him, Henry." Her gaze shifted to Owen. "You too. Take care of my son."
Henry said, "We'll try."
15
There was no place to turn around on Dearborn Street; every driveway had been plowed under. In the strengthening morning light, the sleeping neighborhood looked like a town deep in the Alaskan tundra. Owen threw the Hummer in reverse and went flying backward down the street, the bulky vehicle's rear end wagging clumsily from side to side. Its high steel bumper smacked some snow-shrouded vehicle parked at the curb, there was a tinkle of breaking glass, and then they again burst through the frozen roadblock of snow at the intersection, swerving wildly back into Kansas Street, pointing toward the turnpike. During all this Duddits sat in the back seat, perfectly complacent, his lunchbox on his lap.
Henry, why did Duddits say Jonesy wants war? What war?
Henry tried to send the answer telepathically, but Owen could no longer hear him. The patches of byrus on Owen's face had all turned white, and when he scratched absently at his cheek, he pulled clumps of the stuff out with his nails. The skin beneath looked chapped and irritated, but not really hurt. Like getting over a cold, Henry marvelled. Really not more serious than that.
"He didn't say war, Owen."
"War," Duddits agreed from the back seat. He leaned forward to look at the big green sign reading 95 SOUTHBOUND. "Onesy ont war."
Owen's brow wrinkled; a dust of dead byrus flakes sifted down like dandruff. "What--"
"Water," Henry said, and reached back to pat Duddits's bony knee. "Jonesy
wants water is what he was trying to say. Only it's not Jonesy who wants it. It's the other one. The one he calls Mr. Gray."
16
Roberta went into Duddits's room and began to pick up the litter of his clothes--the way he left them around drove her crazy, but she supposed she wouldn't have to worry about that anymore. She had been at it scarcely five minutes before a weakness overcame her legs, and she had to sit in his chair by the window. The sight of the bed, where he had come to spend more and more of his time, haunted her. The dull morning light on the pillow, which still bore the circular indentation of his head, was inexpressibly cruel.
Henry thought she'd let Duddits go because they believed the future of the whole world somehow hinged on finding Jonesy, and finding him fast. But that wasn't it. She had let him go because it was what Duddits wanted. The dying got signed baseball caps; the dying also got to go on trips with old friends.
But it was hard.
Losing him was so hard.
She put her handful of tee-shirts to her face in order to blot out the sight of the bed and there was his smell: Johnson's shampoo, Dial soap, and most of all, worst of all, the arnica cream she put on his back and legs when his muscles hurt.
In her desperation she reached out to him, trying to find him with the two men who had come like the dead and taken him away, but his mind was gone.
He's blocked himself off from me, she thought. They had enjoyed (mostly enjoyed) their own ordinary telepathy over the years, perhaps only different in minor degree from the telepathy most mothers of special children experienced (she had heard the word rapport over and over again at the support-group meetings she and Alfie sometimes attended), but that was gone now. Duddits had blocked himself off, and that meant he knew something terrible was going to happen.
He knew.
Still holding the shirts to her face and inhaling his scent, Roberta began to cry again.
17
Kurtz had been okay (mostly okay) until they saw the road-flares and blue police lightbars flashing in the grim morning light, and beyond it, a huge semi lying on its side like a dead dinosaur. Standing out front, so bundled up his face was completely invisible, was a cop waving them toward an exit ramp.