Dreamcatcher

  If not for the cloud cover, a spotter in a low-flying plane might have been able to see all three at the same time, the Subaru and both Humvees, at 11:43 EST, when the President finished his speech by saying, "God bless you, my fellow Americans, and God bless America."

  Jonesy and Mr. Gray were crossing the Kittery-Portsmouth bridge into New Hampshire; Henry, Owen, and Duddits were passing Exit 9, which gives access to the communities of Falmouth, Cumberland, and Jerusalem's Lot; Kurtz, Freddy, and Perlmutter (Perlmutter's belly was swelling again; he lay back groaning and passing noxious gas, perhaps a kind of critical comment on the Great White Father's speech) were near the Bowdoinham exit of 295, not far north of Brunswick. All three vehicles would have been easy enough to pick out because so many people had pulled in somewhere to watch the President give his soothing, Chroma-Key-aided lecture.

  Drawing on Jonesy's admirably organized memories, Mr. Gray left 95 for 495 just after crossing over the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border . . . and directed by Duddits, who saw Jonesy's passage as a bright yellow line, the lead Humvee would follow. At the town of Marlborough, Mr. Gray would leave 495 for I-90, one of America's major east-west highways. In the Bay State this road is known as the Mass Pike. Exit 8, according to Jonesy, was marked Palmer, UMass, Amherst, and Ware. Six miles beyond Ware was the Quabbin.

  Shaft 12 was what he wanted; Jonesy said so, and Jonesy couldn't lie, much as he might have liked to. There was a Massachusetts Water Authority office at the Winsor Dam, on the south end of the Quabbin Reservoir. Jonesy could get him that far, and then Mr. Gray would do the rest.

  9

  Jonesy couldn't sit behind the desk anymore--if he did, he'd start to blubber. From blubbering he would no doubt progress to gibbering, from gibbering to yammering, and once he started to yammer, he'd probably be out and rushing into Mr. Gray's arms, totally bonkers and ready to be extinguished.

  Where are we now, anyway? he wondered. Marlborough yet? Leaving 495 for 90? That sounds about right.

  Not that there was any way to tell for sure, with his window shuttered. Jonesy looked at the window . . . and grinned in spite of himself. Had to. GIVE UP COME OUT had been replaced with what he'd been thinking of: SURRENDER DOROTHY.

  I did that, he thought, and I bet I could make the goddam shutters vanish, if I wanted to.

  And so what? Mr. Gray would put up another set, or maybe just slop some black paint on the glass. If he didn't want Jonesy looking out, Jonesy would stay blind. The point was, Mr. Gray controlled the outside part of him. Mr. Gray's head had exploded, he'd sporulated right in front of Jonesy's eyes--Dr. Jekyll turns into Mr. Byrus--and Jonesy had inhaled him. Now Mr. Gray was . . .

  He's a pain, Jonesy thought. Mr. Gray is the pain in my brain.

  Something tried to protest this view, and he actually had a coherent dissenting thought--No, you've got it all backward, you were the one who got out, who escaped--but he pushed it away. That was pseudo-intuitive bullshit, a cognitive hallucination, not much different than a thirsty man seeing a nonexistent oasis in the desert. He was locked in here. Mr. Gray was out there, eating bacon and ruling the roost. If Jonesy allowed himself to think differently, he'd be an April Fool in November.

  Got to slow him down. If I can't stop him, is there a way I can at least throw a monkeywrench into the works?

  He got up and began to walk around the edge of the office. It was thirty-four paces. Hell of a short roundtrip. Still, he supposed, it was bigger than your average jail cell; guys in Walpole or Danvers or Shawshank would think this was the cat's ass. In the middle of the room, the dreamcatcher danced and turned. One part of Jonesy's mind counted paces; the other wondered how close they were getting to Exit 8 of the Mass Pike.

  Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four. And here he was, back behind his chair again. Time for Round Two.

  They'd be in Ware soon enough . . . not that they'd stop there. Unlike the Russian woman, Mr. Gray knew exactly where he wanted to go.

  Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six. Behind his chair again and ready for another spin.

  He and Carla had had three children by the time they turned thirty (number four had come less than a year ago), and neither of them had expected to own a summer cottage, not even a modest one like the place on Osborne Road in North Ware, any time soon. Then there had been a seismic shift in Jonesy's department. A good friend had assumed the chairmanship, and Jonesy had found himself an associate professor at least three years earlier than his most optimistic expectations. The salary bump had been considerable.

  Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and behind his chair again. This was good. It was pacing the cell, no more than that, but it was calming him.

  That same year, Carla's grandmother had passed away, and there had been a considerable estate, settled between Carla and her sister, as the close blood kin in the intervening generation had died. So they got the cottage, and that first summer they'd taken the kids up to the Winsor Dam. From there they'd gone on one of the regularly scheduled summer tours. Their guide, an MWA employee in a forest-green uniform, had told them the area around the Quabbin Reservoir was called "the accidental wilderness," and had become the major nesting area for eagles in Massachusetts. (John and Misha, the older kids, had hoped to see an eagle or two, but they had been disappointed.) The Reservoir had been formed in the thirties by flooding three farming communities, each with its own little market-town. At that time the land surrounding the new lake had been tame. In the sixty or so years since, it had returned to what all of New England must have been like before the tillage and industry began midway through the seventeenth century. A tangle of rutted, unpaved roads ran up the east side of the lake--one of the purest reservoirs in North America, their guide had told them--but that was it. If you wanted to go much beyond Shaft 12 on the East Branch, you'd need your hiking shoes. That was what the guide said. Lorrington, his name had been.

  There had been maybe a dozen other people on the tour, and by then they had been about back to their starting place again. Standing on the edge of the road which ran across Winsor Dam, looking north at the Reservoir (the Quabbin bright blue in the sunlight, sparkling with a million points of light, Joey fast asleep in the Papoose carrier on Jonesy's back). Lorrington had been wrapping up his spiel, just about to wish them a nice day, when some guy in a Rutgers sweatshirt had raised his hand like a school kid and said: Shaft 12. Isn't that where the Russian woman . . . ?

  Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, and back to the desk chair. Counting without really thinking about the numbers, something he did all the time. Carla said it was a sign of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Jonesy didn't know about that, but he knew that the counting was soothing him, and so he set off on another round.

  Lorrington's mouth had tightened at the words "Russian woman." Not part of the lecture, apparently; not part of the good vibes the Water Authority wanted visitors to take with them. Depending upon which municipal pipes it flowed through during the last eight or ten miles of its journey, Boston tap water could be the purest, best tap water in the world: that was the gospel they wanted to spread.

  I really don't know much about that, sir, Lorrington had said, and Jonesy had thought: My goodness, I think our guide just told a wittle fibby-wibby.

  Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, back behind the chair and ready to start around again. Walking a little faster now. Hands clasped behind his back like a ship's captain pacing the foredeck . . . or pacing the brig after a successful mutiny. He supposed that was really more like it.

  Jonesy had been a history teacher most of his life, and curiosity came as second nature. He had gone to the library one day later that week, had looked for the story in the local paper, and had eventually found it. It had been brief and dry--there were stories about lawn-parties inside that had more detail and color--but their postman had known more and had been happy to share. Old Mr. Beckwith. Jonesy still remembered his final words before he'd put
his blue-and-white mail-truck back in gear and rolled on down Osborne Road to the next rural box; there was a lot of mail to be delivered on the south end of the lake in summertime. Jonesy had walked back to the cottage, their unexpected gift, thinking it was no wonder Lorrington hadn't wanted to talk about the Russian woman.

  Not good public relations at all.

  10

  Her name is either Ilena or Elaina Timarova--no one seems sure which. She turns up in Ware in the early fall of 1995 in a Ford Escort with a discreet yellow Hertz sticker on the windshield. The car turns out to be stolen, and a story makes the rounds--unsubstantiated but juicy--that she obtained it at Logan Airport, swapping sex for a set of car keys. Who knows, it could have happened that way.

  However it happens, she is clearly disoriented, not quite right in the head. Someone remembers the bruise on the side of her face, someone else the fact that her blouse is buttoned wrong. Her English is poor, but good enough for her to get across what she wants: directions to the Quabbin Reservoir. These she writes down (in Russian) on a slip of paper. That evening, when the road across the Winsor Dam is closed, the Escort is found, abandoned, in the picnic area at Good-nough Dike. When the car is still there the next morning, two Water Authority guys (who knows, perhaps Lorrington was one of them) and two Forest Service rangers start looking for her.

  Two miles up East Street, they find her shoes. Two miles farther up, where East Street goes to dirt (it winds through the wilderness on the east shore of the Reservoir and is really not a street at all but a Massachusetts version of the Deep Cut Road) they find her shirt . . . oh-oh. Two miles beyond the abandoned shirt, East Street ends, and a rutty logging stripe--Fitzpatrick Road--leads away from the lake. The searchers are about to go this way when one of them sees something pink hanging from a tree-limb down by the water. It proves to be the lady's bra.

  The ground here is damp--not quite marshy--and they can follow both her tracks and the broken branches through which she has pushed, doing damage they don't like to think of to her bare skin. Yet the evidence of the damage is there, and they must see it, like it or not--the blood on the branches and then on the rocks is part of her trail.

  A mile from where East Street ends, they come to a stone building which stands on an outcropping. It looks across the East Branch at Mount Pomery. This building houses Shaft 12, and is accessible by car only from the north. Why Ilena or Elaina did not just start from the north is a question that will never be answered.

  The water-bearing aqueduct which begins at the Quabbin runs sixty-five miles dead east to Boston, picking up more water from the Wachusett and Sud-bury Reservoirs as it goes (the latter two sources are smaller and not quite so pure). There are no pumps; the aqueduct-pipe, thirteen feet high and eleven feet wide, needs none to do its job. Boston's water supply is provided by simple gravity feed, a technique used by the Egyptians thirty-five centuries before. Twelve vertical shafts run between the ground and the aqueduct. These serve as vents and pressure-regulation points. They also serve as points of access, should the aqueduct become clogged. Shaft 12, the one closest to the Reservoir, is also known as the Intake Shaft. Water purity is tested there, and female virtue has often been tested there, as well (the stone building isn't locked, and is a frequent stopping place for lovers in canoes).

  On the lowest of the eight steps leading up to the door, they find the woman's jeans, neatly folded. On the top step is a pair of plain white cotton underpants. The door is open. The men look at each other, but no one speaks. They have a good idea of what they're going to find inside: one dead Russian lady, hold the clothes.

  But they don't. The circular iron cover over the top of Shaft 12 has been moved just enough to create a crescent moon of darkness on the Reservoir side. Beyond it is the crowbar the woman used to shift the lid--it would have been leaning behind the door, where there are a few other tools. And beyond the crowbar is the Russian woman's purse. On top of it is her billfold, open to show her identification card. On top of the billfold--the apex of the pyramid, so to speak--is her passport. Poking out of it is a slip of paper, covered with chicken-scratches that have to be Russian, or Cyrillic, or whatever they call it. The men believe it is a suicide note, but upon translation it proves to be nothing but the Russian woman's directions. At the very bottom she has written When road ends, walk along shore. And so she did, disrobing as she went, unmindful of the branches which poked and the bushes which scratched.

  The men stand around the partially covered shaft-head, scratching their heads and listening to the babble of the water as it starts on its way to the taps and faucets and fountains and backyard hoses of Boston. The sound is hollow, somehow dank, and there's good reason for that: Shaft 12 is a hundred and twenty-five feet deep. The men cannot understand why she chose to do it the way she did, but they can see what she did all too clearly, can see her sitting on the stone floor with her feet dangling; she looks like a nakedy version of the girl on the White Rock labels. She takes a final look over her shoulder, perhaps, to make sure her billfold and her passport are still where she put them. She wants someone to know who passed this way, and there is something hideously, unassuageably sad about that. One look back, and then she slips into the eclipse between the partially dislodged cover and the side of the shaft. Perhaps she held her nose, like a kid cannonballing into the community swimming pool. Perhaps not. Either way, she is gone in less than a second. Hello darkness my old friend.

  11

  Old Mr. Beckwith's final words on the subject before driving on down the road in his mail-truck had been these: Way I heard it, the folks in Boston'll be drinking her in their morning coffee right around Valentine's Day. Then he'd given Jonesy a grin. I don't drink the water myself. I stick to beer.

  In Massachusetts, as in Australia, you say that beah.

  12

  Jonesy had paced around his office twelve or fourteen times now. He stopped for a moment behind his desk chair, absently rubbing his hip, then set off again, still counting, good old obsessive-compulsive Jonesy.

  One . . . two . . . three . . .

  The story of the Russian woman was certainly a fine one, a superior example of the Small Town Creepy Yarn (haunted houses where multiple murders had taken place and the sites of terrible roadside accidents were also good), and it certainly cast a clear light on Mr. Gray's plans for Lad, the unfortunate border collie, but what good did it do him to know where Mr. Gray was going? After all . . .

  Back to the chair again, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty, and wait a minute, just wait a goddam minute. The first time he'd gone around the room, he'd done it in just thirty-four paces, hadn't he? So how could it be fifty this time? He wasn't shuffling, taking baby steps, anything like that, so how--

  You've been making it bigger. Walking around it and making it bigger. Because you were restless. It's your room, after all. I bet you could make it as big as the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom, if you wanted to . . . and Mr. Gray couldn't stop you.

  "Is that possible?" Jonesy whispered. He stood by his desk chair, one hand on the back, like a man posing for a portrait. He didn't need an answer to his question; eyesight was enough. The room was bigger.

  Henry was coming. If he had Duddits with him, following Mr. Gray would be easy enough no matter how many times Mr. Gray changed vehicles, because Duddits saw the line. He had led them to Richie Grenadeau in a dream, later he had led them to Josie Rinkenhauer in reality, and he could direct Henry now as easily as a keen-nosed hound leads a hunter to the fox's earth. The problem was the lead, the goddam lead that Mr. Gray had. An hour at least. Maybe more. And once Mr. Gray had chucked the dog down Shaft 12, there went your ballgame. There'd be time to shut off Boston's water supply--theoretically--but could Henry convince anyone to take such an enormous, disruptive step? Jonesy doubted it. And what about all the people along the way who would drink the water almost immediately? Sixty-five hundred in Ware, eleven thousand in Athol, over a hundred and fifty thousand in Worcester. Those people would have weeks instea
d of months. Only days in some cases.

  Was there any way to slow the son of a bitch down? Give Henry a chance to catch up?

  Jonesy looked up at the dreamcatcher, and as he did, something in the room changed--there was a sigh, almost, the sort of sound ghosts are reputed to make at seances. But this was no ghost, and Jonesy felt his arms prickle. At the same time his eyes filled with tears. A line from Thomas Wolfe occurred to him--o lost, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Thomas Wolfe, whose thesis had been that you can't go home again.

  "Duddits?" he whispered. The hair on his neck had stiffened. "Duddie, is that you?"

  No answer . . . but when he looked at the desk where the useless phone had stood, he saw that something new had been added. Not a stone or a leaf, not an unfound door, but a cribbage board and a deck of cards.

  Someone wanted to play the game.

  13

  Hurt pretty much all the time now. Mumma know, he tell Mumma. Jesus know, he tell Jesus. He don't tell Henry, Henry hurts too, Henry tired and make sad. Beaver and Pete are in heaven where they sitteth at the right hand of God the Father all righty, maker of heaven and earth forever and ever, Jesus' sake, hey man. That makes him sad, they were good friends and played games but never made fun. Once they found Josie and once they saw a tall guy, he a cowboy, and once they play the game.

  This a game too, only Pete used to say Duddits it doesn't matter if you win or booze it's how you play the game only this time it does matter, it does, Jonesy say it does, Jonesy hard of hearing but pretty soon it'll be better, pretty soon. If only he don't hurt. Even his Perco don't help. His throat make sore and his body shakes and his belly make hurty kind of like when he has to go poopoo, kind of like that, but he doesn't have to go poopoo, and when he cough sometimes make blood. He would like to sleep but there is Henry and his new friend Owen that was there the day they found Josie and they say If only we could slow him down and If only we could catch up and he has to stay awake and help them but he has to close his eyes to hear Jonesy and they think he's asleep, Owen says Shouldn't we wake him up, what if the son of a bitch turns off somewhere, and Henry says I tell you I know where he's going, but we'll wake him up at I-90 just to be sure. For now let him sleep, my God, he looks so tired. And again, only this time thinking it: If only we could slow the son of a bitch down.