Dreamcatcher

  "Dry lightning, I guess," the man said. Jonesy could almost see him shrugging it off. He scratched at the red place on his cheek, which might have been a touch of frostbite. "See it in winter, it means there's a storm on the way."

  "And you saw this? Last night?"

  "I guess so." The man gave him another quick, sideways glance, but this time Jonesy saw no slyness in it, and guessed he had seen none before. He saw only exhaustion. "It's all mixed up in my mind . . . my stomach's been hurting ever since I got lost . . . it always hurts when I'm ascairt, ever since I was a little kid . . ."

  And he was like a little kid, Jonesy thought, looking everywhere at once with perfect unselfconsciousness. Jonesy led the guy toward the couch in front of the fireplace and the guy let himself be led. Ascairt. He even said ascairt instead of afraid, like a kid. A little kid.

  "Give me your coat," Jonesy said, and as the guy first unbuttoned the buttons and then reached for the zipper under them, Jonesy thought again of how he had thought he was looking at a deer, at a buck for Chrissake--he had mistaken one of those buttons for an eye and had damned near put a bullet through it.

  The guy got the zipper halfway down and then it stuck, one side of the little gold mouth choking on the cloth. He looked at it--gawked at it, really--as if he had never seen such a thing before. And when Jonesy reached for the zipper, the man dropped his hands to his sides and simply let Jonesy reach, as a first-grader would stand and let the teacher put matters right when he got his galoshes on the wrong feet or his jacket on inside out.

  Jonesy got the little gold mouth started again and pulled it the rest of the way down. Outside the window-wall, The Gulch was disappearing, although you could still see the black scrawled shapes of the trees. Almost twenty-five years they had come up here together for the hunting, almost twenty-five years without a single miss, and in none of that time had there been snow heavier than the occasional squall. It looked like all that was about to change, although how could you tell? These days the guys on radio and TV made four inches of fresh powder sound like the next Ice Age.

  For a moment the guy only stood there with his jacket hanging open and snow melting around his boots on the polished wooden floor, looking up at the rafters with his mouth open, and yes, he was like a great big six-year-old--or like Duddits. You almost expected to see mittens dangling from the cuffs of his jacket on clips. He shrugged out of his coat in that perfectly recognizable child's way, simply slumping his shoulders once it was unzipped and letting it fall. If Jonesy hadn't been there to catch it, it would have gone on the floor and gotten right to work sopping up the puddles of melting snow.

  "What's that?" he asked.

  For a moment Jonesy had no idea what the guy was talking about, and then he traced the stranger's gaze to the bit of weaving which hung from the center rafter. It was colorful--red and green, with shoots of canary yellow, as well--and it looked like a spiderweb.

  "It's a dreamcatcher," Jonesy said. "An Indian charm. Supposed to keep the nightmares away, I guess."

  "Is it yours?"

  Jonesy didn't know if he meant the whole place (perhaps the guy hadn't been listening before) or just the dreamcatcher, but in either case the answer was the same. "No, my friend's. We come up hunting every year."

  "How many of you?" The man was shivering, holding his arms crisscrossed over his chest and cupping his elbows in his palms as he watched Jonesy hang his coat on the tree by the door.

  "Four. Beaver--this is his camp--is out hunting now. I don't know if the snow'll bring him back in or not. Probably it will. Pete and Henry went to the store."

  "Gosselin's? That one?"

  "Uh-huh. Come on over here and sit down on the couch."

  Jonesy led him to the couch, a ridiculously long sectional. Such things had gone out of style decades ago, but it didn't smell too bad and nothing had infested it. Style and taste didn't matter much at Hole in the Wall.

  "Stay put now," he said, and left the man sitting there, shivering and shaking with his hands clasped between his knees. His jeans had the sausagey look they get when there are longjohns underneath, and still he shook and shivered. But the heat had brought on an absolute flood of color; instead of looking like a corpse, the stranger now looked like a diphtheria victim.

  Pete and Henry were doubling in the bigger of the two downstairs bedrooms. Jonesy ducked in, opened the cedar chest to the left of the door, and pulled out one of the two down comforters folded up inside. As he recrossed the living room to where the man sat shivering on the couch, Jonesy realized he hadn't asked the most elementary question of all, the one even six-year-olds who couldn't get their own zippers down asked.

  As he spread the comforter over the stranger on the outsized camp couch, he said: "What's your name?" And realized he almost knew. McCoy? McCann?

  The man Jonesy had almost shot looked up at him, at once pulling the comforter up around his neck. The brown patches under his eyes were filling in purple.

  "McCarthy," he said. "Richard McCarthy." His hand, surprisingly plump and white without its glove, crept out from beneath the coverlet like a shy animal. "You are?"

  "Gary Jones," he said, and took the hand with the one which had almost pulled the trigger. "Folks mostly call me Jonesy."

  "Thanks, Jonesy." McCarthy looked at him earnestly. "I think you saved my life."

  "Oh, I don't know about that," Jonesy said. He looked at that red patch again. Frostbite, just a small patch. Frostbite, had to be.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE BEAV

  1

  "You know I can't call anyone, don't you?" Jonesy said. "The phone lines don't come anywhere near here. There's a genny for the electric, but that's all."

  McCarthy, only his head showing above the comforter, nodded. "I was hearing the generator, but you know how it is when you're lost--noises are funny. Sometimes the sound seems to be coming from your left or your right, then you'd swear it's behind you and you better turn back."

  Jonesy nodded, although he did not, in fact, know how it was. Unless you counted the week or so immediately after his accident, time he had spent wandering in a fog of drugs and pain, he had never been lost.

  "I'm trying to think what'd be the best thing," Jonesy said. "I guess when Pete and Henry get back, we better take you out. How many in your party?"

  It seemed McCarthy had to think. That, added to the unsteady way he had been walking, solidified Jonesy's impression that the man was in shock. He wondered that one night lost in the woods would do that; he wondered if it would do it to him.

  "Four," McCarthy said, after that minute to think. "Just like you guys. We were hunting in pairs. I was with a friend of mine, Steve Otis. He's a lawyer like me, down in Skowhegan. We're all from Skowhegan, you know, and this week for us . . . it's a big deal."

  Jonesy nodded, smiling. "Yeah. Same here."

  "Anyway, I guess I just wandered off." He shook his head. "I don't know, I was hearing Steve over on my right, sometimes seeing his vest through the trees, and then I . . . I just don't know. I got thinking about stuff, I guess--one thing the woods are great for is thinking about stuff--and then I was on my own. I guess I tried to backtrack but then it got dark . . ." He shook his head yet again. "It's all mixed up in my mind, but yeah--there were four of us, I guess that's one thing I'm sure of. Me and Steve and Nat Roper and Nat's sister, Becky."

  "They must be worried sick."

  McCarthy looked first startled, then apprehensive. This was clearly a new idea for him. "Yeah, they must be. Of course they are. Oh dear, oh gee."

  Jonesy had to restrain a smile at this. When he got going, McCarthy sounded a little like a character in that movie, Fargo.

  "So we better take you out. If, that is--"

  "I don't want to be a bother--"

  "We'll take you out. If we can. I mean, this weather came in fast."

  "It sure did," McCarthy said bitterly. "You'd think they could do better with all their darn satellites and doppler radar and gosh know
s what else. So much for fair and seasonably cold, huh?"

  Jonesy looked at the man under the comforter, just the flushed face and the thatch of thinning brown hair showing, with some perplexity. The forecasts he had heard--he, Pete, Henry, and the Beav--had been full of the prospect of snow for the last two days. Some of the prognosticators hedged their bets, saying the snow could change over to rain, but the fellow on the Castle Rock radio station that morning (WCAS was the only radio they could get up here, and even that was thin and jumbled with static) had been talking about a fast-moving Alberta Clipper, six or eight inches, and maybe a nor'easter to follow, if the temperatures stayed down and the low didn't go out to sea. Jonesy didn't know where McCarthy had gotten his weather forecasts, but it sure hadn't been WCAS. The guy was just mixed up, that was most likely it, and had every right to be.

  "You know, I could put on some soup. How would that be, Mr. McCarthy?"

  McCarthy smiled gratefully. "I think that would be pretty fine," he said. "My stomach hurt last night and something fierce this morning, but I feel better now."

  "Stress," Jonesy said. "I would have been puking my guts. Probably filling my pants, as well."

  "I didn't throw up," McCarthy said. "I'm pretty sure I didn't. But . . ." Another shake of the head, it was like a nervous tic with him. "I don't know. The way things are jumbled, it's like a nightmare I had."

  "The nightmare's over," Jonesy said. He felt a little foolish saying such a thing--a little auntie-ish--but it was clear the guy needed reassurance.

  "Good," McCarthy said. "Thank you. And I would like some soup."

  "There's tomato, chicken, and I think maybe a can of Chunky Sirloin. What do you fancy?"

  "Chicken," McCarthy said. "My mother always said chicken soup was the thing when you're not feeling your best."

  He grinned as he said it, and Jonesy tried to keep the shock off his face. McCarthy's teeth were white and even, really too even to be anything but capped, given the man's age, which had to be forty-five or thereabouts. But at least four of them were missing--the canines on top (what Jonesy's father had called "the vampire teeth") and two right in front on the bottom--Jonesy didn't know what those were called. He knew one thing, though: McCarthy wasn't aware they were gone. No one who knew about such gaps in the line of his teeth could expose them so unselfconsciously, even under circumstances like these. Or so Jonesy believed. He felt a sick little chill rush through his gut, a telephone call from nowhere. He turned toward the kitchen before McCarthy could see his face change and wonder what was wrong. Maybe ask what was wrong.

  "One order chicken soup coming right up. How about a grilled cheese to go with it?"

  "If it's no trouble. And call me Richard, will you? Or Rick, that's even better. When people save my life, I like to get on a first-name basis with them as soon as possible."

  "Rick it is, for sure." Better get those teeth fixed before you step in front of another jury, Rick.

  The feeling that something was wrong here was very strong. It was that click, just as almost guessing McCarthy's name had been. He was a long way from wishing he'd shot the man when he had the chance, but he was already starting to wish McCarthy had stayed the hell away from his tree and out of his life.

  2

  He had the soup on the stove and was making the cheese sandwiches when the first gust of wind arrived--a big whoop that made the cabin creak and raised the snow in a furious sheet. For a moment even the black scrawled shapes of the trees in The Gulch were erased, and there was nothing outside the big window but white: it was as if someone had set up a drive-in movie screen out there. For the first time, Jonesy felt a thread of unease not just about Pete and Henry, presumably on their way back from Gosselin's in Henry's Scout, but for the Beaver. You would have said that if anybody knew these woods it would have been the Beav, but nobody knew anything in a white-out--all bets were off, that was another of his ne'er-do-well father's sayings, probably not as good as you can't make yourself be lucky, but not bad. The sound of the genny might help Beav find his way, but as McCarthy had pointed out, sounds had a way of deceiving you. Especially if the wind started kicking up, as it had now apparently decided to do.

  His Mom had taught him the dozen basic things he knew about cooking, and one of them had to do with the art of making grilled cheese sandwiches. Lay in a little mouseturds first, she said--mouseturds being Janet Jones for mustard--and then butter the goddam bread, not the skillet. Butter the skillet and all's you got's fried bread with some cheese in it. He had never understood how the difference between where you put the butter, on the bread or in the skillet, could change the ultimate result, but he always did it his mother's way, even though it was a pain in the ass buttering the tops of the sandwiches while the bottoms cooked. No more would he have left his rubber boots on once he was in the house . . . because, his mother had always said, "they draw your feet." He had no idea just what that meant, but even now, as a man going on forty, he took his boots off as soon as he was in the door, so they wouldn't draw his feet.

  "I think I might have one of these babies myself," Jonesy said, and laid the sandwiches in the skillet, butter side down. The soup had begun to simmer, and it smelled fine--like comfort.

  "Good idea. I certainly hope your friends are all right."

  "Yeah," Jonesy said. He gave the soup a stir. "Where's your place?"

  "Well, we used to hunt in Mars Hill, at a place Nat and Becky's uncle owned, but some god-bless'd idiot burned it down two summers ago. Drinking and then getting careless with the old smokes, that's what the Fire Marshal said, anyway."

  Jonesy nodded. "Not an uncommon story."

  "The insurance paid the value of the place, but we had nowhere to hunt. I thought probably that'd be the end of it, and then Steve found this nice place over in Kineo. I think it's probably an unincorporated township, just another part of the Jefferson Tract, but Kineo's what they call it, the few people who live there. Do you know where I mean?"

  "I know it," Jonesy said, speaking through lips that felt oddly numb. He was getting another of those telephone calls from nowhere. Hole in the Wall was about twenty miles east of Gosselin's. Kineo was maybe thirty miles to the west of the market. That was fifty miles in all. Was he supposed to believe that the man sitting on the couch with just his head sticking out of the down comforter had wandered fifty miles since becoming lost the previous afternoon? It was absurd. It was impossible.

  "Smells good," McCarthy said.

  And it did, but Jonesy no longer felt hungry.

  3

  He was just bringing the chow over to the couch when he heard feet stamping on the stone outside the door. A moment later the door opened and Beaver came in. Snow swirled around his legs in a dancing mist.

  "Jesus-Christ-bananas," the Beav said. Pete had once made a list of Beav-isms, and Jesus-Christ-bananas was high on it, along with such standbys as doodlyfuck and Kiss my bender. They were exclamations both Zen and profane. "I thought I was gonna end up spendin the night out there, then I saw the light." Beav raised his hands roofward, fingers spread. "Seen de light, Lawd, yessir, praise Je--" His glasses started to unfog then, and he saw the stranger on the couch. He lowered his hands, slowly, then smiled. That was one of the reasons Jonesy had loved him ever since grade school, although the Beav could be tiresome and wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier, by any means: his first reaction to the unplanned and unexpected wasn't a frown but a smile.

  "Hi," he said. "I'm Joe Clarendon. Who're you?"

  "Rick McCarthy," he said, and got to his feet. The comforter tumbled off him and Jonesy saw he had a pretty good potbelly pooching out the front of his sweater. Well, he thought, nothing strange about that, at least, it's the middle-aged man's disease, and it's going to kill us in our millions during the next twenty years or so.

  McCarthy stuck out his hand, started to step forward, and almost tripped over the fallen comforter. If Jonesy hadn't reached out and grabbed his shoulder, steadying him, McCarthy probably would
have fallen forward, very likely cleaning out the coffee-table on which the food was now set. Again Jonesy was struck by the man's queer ungainliness--it made him think of himself a little that past spring, as he had learned to walk all over again. He got a closer look at the patch on the guy's cheek, and sort of wished he hadn't. It wasn't frostbite at all. It looked like a skin-tumor of some kind, or perhaps a portwine stain with stubble growing out of it.

  "Who, whoa, shake it but don't break it," Beaver said, springing forward. He grabbed McCarthy's hand and pumped it until Jonesy thought McCarthy would end up swan-diving into the coffee-table after all. He was glad when the Beav--all five-feet-six of him, with snow still melting into all that long black hippie hair--stepped back. The Beav was still smiling, more broadly than ever. With the shoulder-length hair and the thick glasses, he looked like either a math genius or a serial killer. In fact, he was a carpenter.

  "Rick here's had a time of it," Jonesy said. "Got lost yesterday and spent last night in the woods."

  Beaver's smile stayed on but became concerned. Jonesy had an idea what was coming next and willed Beaver not to say it--he had gotten the impression that McCarthy was a fairly religious man who might not care much for profanity--but of course asking Beaver to clean up his mouth was like asking the wind not to blow.

  "Bitch-in-a-buzzsaw!" he cried now. "That's fuckin terrible! Sit down! Eat! You too, Jonesy."

  "Nah," Jonesy said, "you go on and eat that. You're the one who just came in out of the snow."

  "You sure?"

  "I am. I'll just scramble myself some eggs. Rick can catch you up on his story." Maybe it'll make more sense to you than it does to me, he thought.

  "Okay." Beaver took off his jacket (red) and his vest (orange, of course). He started to toss them on the woodpile, then thought better of it. "Wait, wait, got something you might want." He stuck his hand deep into one of the pockets of his down jacket, rummaged, and came out with a paperback book, considerably bent but seemingly none the worse for wear otherwise. Little devils with pitchforks danced across the cover--Small Vices, by Robert Parker. It was the book Jonesy had been reading in the stand.