Dreamcatcher

  Eyes closed. Arms crossed over his aching chest. Breathing slow, Mumma say breathe slow when you cough. Jonesy's not dead, not in heaven with Beaver and Pete, but Mr. Gray say Jonesy locked and Jonesy believes him. Jonesy's in the office, no phone and no facts, hard to talk to because Mr. Gray is mean and Mr. Gray is scared. Scared Jonesy will find out which one is really locked up.

  When did they talk most?

  When they played the game.

  The game.

  A shudder racks him. He has to make hard think and it hurts, he can feel it stealing away his strength, the last little bits of his strength, but this time it's more than just a game, this time it matters who wins and who boozes, so he gives his strength, he makes the board and he makes the cards, Jonesy is crying, Jonesy thinks o lost, but Duddits Cavell isn't lost, Duddits sees the line, the line goes to the office, and this time he will do more than peg the pegs.

  Don't cry Jonesy, he says, and the words are clear, in his mind they always are, it is only his stupid mouth that mushes them up. Don't cry, I'm not lost.

  Eyes closed. Arms crossed.

  In Jonesy's office, beneath the dreamcatcher, Duddits plays the game.

  14

  "I've got the dog," Henry said. He sounded exhausted. "The one Perlmutter's homed in on. I've got it. We're a little bit closer. Christ, if there was just a way to slow them down!"

  It was raining now, and Owen could only hope they'd be south of the freeze-line if it went over to sleet. The wind was gusting hard enough to sway the Hummer on the road. It was noon, and they were between Saco and Biddeford. Owen glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Duddits in the back seat, eyes closed, head back, skinny arms crossed on his chest. His complexion was an alarming yellow, but a thin line of bright blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

  "Is there any way your friend can help?" Owen asked.

  "I think he's trying."

  "I thought you said he was asleep."

  Henry turned, looked at Duddits, then looked at Owen. "I was wrong," he said.

  15

  Jonesy dealt the cards, threw two into the crib from his hand, then picked up the other hand and added two more.

  "Don't cry, Jonesy. Don't cry, I'm not lost."

  Jonesy glanced up at the dreamcatcher, quite sure the words had come from there. "I'm not crying, Duds. Fuckin allergies, that's all. Now I think you want to play--"

  "Two," said the voice from the dreamcatcher.

  Jonesy played the deuce from Duddits's hand--not a bad lead, actually--then played a seven from his own. That made nine. Duddits had a six in his hand; the question was whether or not--

  "Six for fifteen," said the voice from the dreamcatcher. "Fifteen for two. Kiss my bender!"

  Jonesy laughed in spite of himself. It was Duddits, all right, but for a moment he had sounded just like the Beav. "Go on and peg it, then." And watched, fascinated, as one of the pegs on the board rose, floated, and settled back down in the second hole on First Street.

  Suddenly he understood something.

  "You could play all along, couldn't you, Duds? You used to peg all crazy just because it made us laugh." The idea brought fresh tears to his eyes. All those years they'd thought they were playing with Duddits, he had been playing with them. And on that day behind Tracker Brothers, who had found whom? Who had saved whom?

  "Twenty-one," he said.

  "Thirty-one for two." From the dreamcatcher. And once again the unseen hand lifted the peg and played it two holes farther on. "He's blocked to me, Jonesy."

  "I know." Jonesy played a three. Duddits called thirteen, and Jonesy played it out of Duddits's hand.

  "But you're not. You can talk to him."

  Jonesy played his own deuce and pegged two. Duddits played, pegged one for last card, and Jonesy thought: Outpegged by a retard--what do you know. Except this Duddits wasn't retarded. Exhausted and dying, but not retarded.

  They pegged their hands, and Duddits was far ahead even though it had been Jonesy's crib. Jonesy swept the cards together and began to shuffle them.

  "What does he want, Jonesy? What does he want besides water?"

  Murder, Jonesy thought. He likes to kill people. But no more of that. Please God, no more of that.

  "Bacon," he said. "He does like bacon."

  He began to shuffle the cards . . . then froze as Duddits filled his mind. The real Duddits, young and strong and ready to fight.

  16

  Behind them, in the back seat, Duddits groaned loudly. Henry turned and saw fresh blood, red as byrus, running from his nostrils. His face was twisted in a terrible cramp of concentration. Beneath their closed lids, his eyeballs rolled rapidly back and forth.

  "What's the matter with him?" Owen asked.

  "I don't know."

  Duddits began to cough: deep and racking bronchial sounds. Blood flew from between his lips in a fine spray.

  "Wake him up, Henry! For Christ's sake, wake him up!"

  Henry gave Owen Underhill a frightened look. They were approaching Kennebunkport now, no more than twenty miles from the New Hampshire border, a hundred and ten from the Quabbin Reservoir. Jonesy had a picture of the Quabbin on the wall of his office; Henry had seen it. And a cottage nearby, in Ware.

  Duddits cried out: a single word repeated three times between bursts of coughing. The sprays of blood weren't heavy, not yet, the stuff was coming from his mouth and throat, but if his lungs began to rupture--

  "Wake him up! He says he's aching! Can't you hear him--"

  "He's not saying aykin."

  "What, then? What?"

  "He's saying bacon."

  17

  The entity which now thought of itself as Mr. Gray--who thought of himself as Mr. Gray--had a serious problem, but at least it (he) knew it.

  Forewarned is forearmed was how Jonesy put it. There were hundreds of such sayings in Jonesy's storage cartons, perhaps thousands. Some of them Mr. Gray found utterly incomprehensible--A nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse was one such, What goes around comes around was another--but forewarned is forearmed was a good one.

  His problem could be best summed up with how he felt about Jonesy . . . and of course that he felt at all was bad enough. He could think Now Jonesy is cut off and I have solved my problem; I have quarantined him just as their military tried to quarantine us. I am being followed--chased, in fact--but barring engine trouble or a flat tire, neither group of followers has much chance of catching me. I have too great a lead.

  These things were facts--truth--but they had no savor. What had savor was the idea of going to the door behind which his reluctant host was imprisoned and yelling: "I fixed you, didn't I? I fixed your little red wagon, didn't I?" What a wagon, red or otherwise, had to do with any of this Mr. Gray didn't know, but it was an emotional bullet of fairly high caliber from Jonesy's armory--it had a deep and satisfying childhood resonance. And then he would stick Jonesy's tongue (my tongue now, Mr. Gray thought with undeniable satisfaction) between Jonesy's lips and "give him the old raspberry."

  As for the followers, he wanted to drop Jonesy's pants and show them Jonesy's buttocks. This was as senseless as What goes around comes around, as senseless as little red wagon, but he wanted to do it. It was called "mooning the assholes" and he wanted to do it.

  He was, Mr. Gray realized, infected with this world's byrus. It began with emotion, progressed to sensory awareness (the taste of food, the undeniable savage pleasure of making the State Trooper beat his head in against the tiled bathroom wall--the hollow thud-thud of it), and then progressed to what Jonesy called higher thinking. This was a joke, in Mr. Gray's view, not much different from calling shit reprocessed food or genocide ethnic cleansing. And yet thinking had its attractions for a being which had always existed as part of a vegetative mind, a sort of highly intelligent not-consciousness.

  Before Mr. Gray had shut him up, Jonesy had suggested that he give over his mission and simply enjoy being human. Now he discovered that desire in himself as hi
s previously harmonious mind, his not-conscious mind, began to fragment, to turn into a crowd of opposing voices, some wanting A, some wanting B, some wanting Q squared and divided by Z. He would have thought such babble would be horrible, the stuff of madness. Instead he found himself enjoying the wrangle.

  There was bacon. There was "sex with Carla," which Jonesy's mind identified as a superlatively enjoyable act, involving both sensory and emotional input. There was fast driving and bumper pool in O'Leary's Bar near Fenway Park and beer and live bands that played loud and Patty Loveless singing "Blame it on your lyin cheatin cold deadbeatin two-timin double-dealin mean mistreatin lovin heart" (whatever that meant). There was the look of the land rising from the fog on a summer morning. And murder, of course. There was that.

  His problem was that if he didn't finish this business quickly, he might never finish it at all. He was no longer byrum but Mr. Gray. How long before he left Mr. Gray behind and became Jonesy?

  It's not going to happen, he thought. He pressed the accelerator down, and although it didn't have much, the Subaru gave him a little more. In the back seat the dog yipped . . . then howled in pain. Mr. Gray sent out his mind and touched the byrum growing inside the dog. It was growing fast. Almost too fast. And here was something else--there was no pleasure in meeting its mind, none of the warmth that comes when like encounters like. The mind of the byrum felt cold . . . rancid . . .

  "Alien," he muttered.

  Nevertheless, he quieted it. When the dog went into the water supply, the byrum should still be inside. It would need time to adapt. The dog would drown, but the byrum would live yet awhile, feeding on the dog's dead body, until it was time. But first he had to get there.

  It wouldn't be long now.

  As he drove west on I-90, past little towns (shitsplats, Jonesy thought them, but not without affection) like Westborough, Grafton, and Dorothy Pond (getting closer now, maybe forty miles to go), he looked for a place to put his new and uneasy consciousness where it wouldn't get him in trouble. He tried Jonesy's kids, then backed away--far too emotional. Tried Duddits again, but that was still a blank; Jonesy had stolen the memories. Finally he settled on Jonesy's work, which was teaching history, and his specialty, which was grue-somely fascinating. Between 1860 and 1865, it seemed, America had split in two, as byrus colonies did near the end of each growth cycle. There had been all sorts of causes, the chief of which had to do with "slavery," but again, this was like calling shit or vomit reprocessed food. "Slavery" meant nothing. "Right of secession" meant nothing. "Preserving the Union" meant nothing. Basically, they had just done what these creatures did best: they "got mad," which was really the same thing as "going mad" but more socially acceptable. Oh, but on such a scale!

  Mr. Gray was investigating boxes and boxes of fascinating weaponry--grapeshot, chainshot, minie balls, cannonballs, bayonets, landmines--when a voice intruded.

  bacon

  He pushed the thought aside, although Jonesy's stomach gurgled. He'd like some bacon, yes, bacon was fleshy and greasy and slippery and satisfying in a primitive, physical way, but this was not the time. Perhaps after he'd gotten rid of the dog. Then, if he had time before the others caught up, he could eat himself to death if he so chose. But this was not the time. As he passed Exit 10--only two to go, now--he turned his mind back to the Civil War, to blue men and gray men running through the smoke, screaming and stabbing each other in the guts, fixing little red wagons without number, pounding the stocks of their rifles into the skulls of their enemies, producing those intoxicating thud-thud sounds, and--

  bacon

  His stomach gurgled again. Saliva squirted into Jonesy's mouth and he remembered Dysart's, the brown and crispy strips on the blue plate, you picked it up with your fingers, the texture was hard, the texture of dead and tasty flesh--

  Can't think of this.

  A horn honked irritably, making Mr. Gray jump, making Lad whine. He had wandered into the wrong lane, what Jonesy's mind identified as "the passing lane," and he pulled over to let one of the big trucks, going faster than the Subaru could go, sweep by. It splashed the small car's windshield with muddy water, momentarily blinding him, and Mr. Gray thought Catch you kill you beat the brains out of your head you unsafe johnny reb of a driver you, thud-thud, fix your wagon your little red

  bacon sandwich

  That one was like a gunshot in his head. He fought it but the strength of it was something entirely new. Could that be Jonesy? Surely not, Jonesy wasn't that strong. But suddenly he seemed all stomach, and the stomach was hollow, hurting, craving. Surely he could stop long enough to assuage it. If he didn't he was apt to drive right off the

  bacon sandwich!

  with mayo!

  Mr. Gray let out an inarticulate cry, unaware that he'd begun to drool helplessly.

  18

  "I hear him," Henry said suddenly. He put his fists to his temples, as if to contain a headache. "Christ, it hurts. He's so hungry."

  "Who?" Owen asked. They had just crossed the state line into Massachusetts. In front of the car, the rain fell in silver, wind-slanted lines. "The dog? Jonesy? Who?"

  "Him," Henry said. "Mr. Gray." He looked at Owen, a sudden wild hope in his eye. "I think he's pulling over. I think he's stopping."

  19

  "Boss."

  Kurtz was on the verge of dozing again when Perlmutter turned--not without effort--and spoke to him. They had just gone through the New Hampshire tolls, Freddy Johnson being careful to use the automated exact-change lane (he was afraid a human toll-taker might notice the stench in the Humvee's cabin, the broken window in back, the weaponry . . . or all three).

  Kurtz looked into Archie Perlmutter's sweat-streaked, haggard face with interest. With fascination, even. The colorless bean-counting bureaucrat, he of the briefcase on station and clipboard in the field, hair always neatly combed and parted ruler-straight on the left? The man who could not for the life of him train himself out of using the word sir? That man was gone. Thin though it was, he thought Pearly's countenance had somehow richened. He's turning into Ma Joad, Kurtz thought, and almost giggled.

  "Boss, I'm still thirsty." Pearly cast longing eyes on Kurtz's Pepsi, then blew out another hideous fart. Ma Joad on trumpet in hell Kurtz thought and this time he did giggle. Freddy cursed, but not with his former shocked disgust; now he sounded resigned, almost bored.

  "I'm afraid this is mine, buck," Kurtz said. "And I'm a wee parched myself."

  Perlmutter began to speak, then winced as a fresh pain struck him. He farted again, the sound thinner this time, not a trumpet but an untalented child blowing over a piccolo. His eyes narrowed, became crafty. "Give me a drink and I'll tell you something you want to know." A pause. "Something you need to know."

  Kurtz considered. Rain slapped the side of the car and came in through the busted window. The goddamned window was a pain in the ass, praise Jesus, the arm of his jacket was soaked right through, but he would have to bear up. Who was responsible, after all?

  "You are," Pearly said, and Kurtz jumped. The mind-reading thing was just so spooky. You thought you were getting used to it and then realized that no, negative, you were not. "You're responsible. So give me a fucking drink. Boss."

  "Watch your mouth, cheeseboy," Freddy rumbled.

  "Tell me what you know and you can have the rest of this." Kurtz raised the Pepsi bottle, waggling it in front of Pearly's tortured gaze. Kurtz was not without humorous self-loathing as he did this. Once he had commanded whole units and had used them to alter entire geopolitical landscapes. Now his command was two men and a soft drink. He had fallen low. Pride had brought him low, praise God. He had the pride of Satan, and if it was a fault, it was a hard one to give up. Pride was the belt you could use to hold up your pants even after your pants were gone.

  "Do you promise?" Pearly's red-fuzzed tongue came out and licked at his parched lips.

  "If I'm lyin I'm dyin," Kurtz said solemnly. "Hell, buck, read my fucking mind!"

  Pearly stud
ied him for a moment and Kurtz could almost feel the man's creepy little fingers (mats of red stuff now growing under each nail) in his head. An awful sensation, but he bore it.

  At last Perlmutter seemed satisfied. He nodded.

  "I'm getting more now," he said, and then his voice lowered to a confidential, horrified whisper. "It's eating me, you know. It's eating my guts. I can feel it."

  Kurtz patted him on the arm. Just now they were passing a sign which read WELCOME TO MASSACHUSETTS. "I'm going to take care of you, laddie-buck; I promised, didn't I? Meantime, tell me what you're getting."

  "Mr. Gray is stopping. He's hungry."

  Kurtz had left his hand on Perlmutter's arm. Now he tightened his grip, turning his fingernails into talons. "Where?"

  "Close to where he's going. It's a store." In a chanting, childish voice that made Kurtz's skin crawl, Archie Perlmutter said: " 'Best bait, why wait? Best bait, why wait?' " Then, resuming a more normal tone: "Jonesy knows Henry and Owen and Duddits are coming. That's why he made Mr. Gray stop."

  The idea of Owen's catching Jonesy/Mr. Gray filled Kurtz with panic. "Archie, listen to me carefully."

  "I'm thirsty," Perlmutter whined. "I'm thirsty, you son of a bitch."

  Kurtz held the Pepsi bottle up in front of Perlmutter's eyes, then slapped away Perlmutter's hand when Pearly reached for it.

  "Do Henry, Owen, and Dud-Duts know Jonesy and Mr. Gray have stopped?"

  "Dud-dits, you old fool!" Perlmutter snarled, then groaned with pain and clutched at his stomach, which was on the rise again. "Dits, dits, Dud-dits! Yes, they know! Duddits helped make Mr. Gray hungry! He and Jonesy did it together!"