At last Beaver grabbed him and yanked him out the door. There they stood coatless in the deepening snow, finally able to laugh out loud with the booming wind to cover the sounds they made.
6
When they went back in again, Jonesy's hands were so numb he barely felt the hot water when he plunged his hands into it, but he was laughed out and that was good. He wondered again about Pete and Henry--how they were doing and if they'd make it back okay.
"You said it explained some stuff," the Beav said. He had started another toothpick. "What stuff?"
"He didn't know snow was coming," Jonesy said. He spoke slowly, trying to recall McCarthy's exact words. " 'So much for fair and seasonably cold,' I think that's what he said. But that would make sense if the last forecast he heard was for the eleventh or twelfth. Because until late yesterday, it was fair, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, and seasonably fuckin cold," Beaver agreed. He pulled a dishtowel with a pattern of faded lady-bugs on it from the drawer by the sink and began to dry the dishes. He looked across at the closed bedroom door as he worked. "What else'd he say?"
"That their camp was in Kineo."
"Kineo? That's forty, fifty miles west of here. He--" Beaver took the toothpick out of his mouth, examined the bite-marks on it, and put the other end in his mouth. "Oh, I see."
"Yeah. He couldn't have done all that in a single night, but if he was out there for three days--"
"--and four nights, if he got lost on Saturday afternoon that makes four nights--"
"Yeah, and four nights. So, supposing he kept pretty much headed dead east that whole time . . ." Jonesy calculated fifteen miles a day. "I'd say it's possible."
"But how come he didn't freeze?" Beaver had lowered his voice to a near-whisper, probably without being aware of it. "He's got a nice heavy coat and he's wearin longies, but nights have been in the twenties everywhere north of the county line since Halloween. So you tell me how he spends four nights out there and doesn't freeze. Doesn't even look like he's got any frostbite, just that mess on his cheek."
"I don't know. And there's something else," Jonesy said. "How come he doesn't have the start of a beard?"
"Huh?" Beaver's mouth opened. The toothpick hung from his lower lip. Then, very slowly, he nodded. "Yeah. All he's got is stubble."
"I'd say less than a day's growth."
"I guess he was shavin, huh?"
"Right," Jonesy said, picturing McCarthy lost in the woods, scared and cold and hungry (not that he looked like he'd missed many meals, that was another thing), but still kneeling by a stream every morning, breaking the ice with a booted foot so he could get to the water beneath, then taking his trusty Gillette from . . . where? His coat pocket?
"And then this morning he lost his razor, which is why he's got the stubble," the Beav said. He was smiling again, but there didn't seem to be a lot of humor in it.
"Yeah. Same time he lost his gun. Did you see his teeth?"
Beaver made a what-now grimace.
"Four gone. Two on top, two on the bottom. He looks like the What-me-worry kid that's always on the front of Mad magazine."
"Not a big deal, buddy. I've got a couple of AWOL choppers myself." Beaver hooked back one corner of his mouth, baring his left gum in a one-sided grin Jonesy could have done without. "Eee? Ight ack ere."
Jonesy shook his head. It wasn't the same. "The guy's a lawyer, Beav--he's out in public all the time, his looks are part of his living. And these babies are right out in front. He didn't know they were gone. I'd swear to it."
"You don't suppose he got exposed to radiation or something, do you?" Beaver asked uneasily. "Your teeth fall out when you get fuckin radiation poisonin, I saw that in a movie one time. One of the ones you're always watching, those monster shows. You don't suppose it's that, do you? Maybe he got that red mark the same time."
"Yeah, he got a dose when the Mars Hill Nuclear Power Plant blew up," Jonesy said, and Beaver's puzzled expression made him immediately sorry for the crack. "Beav, when you get radiation poisoning, I think your hair falls out, too."
The Beaver's face cleared. "Yeah, that's right. The guy in the movie ended up as bald as Telly what's-his-fuck, used to play that cop on TV." He paused. "Then the guy died. The one in the movie, I mean, not Telly, although now that I think of it--"
"This guy's got plenty of hair," Jonesy interrupted. Let Beaver get off on a tangent and they would likely never get back to the point. He noticed that, out of the stranger's presence, neither of them called him Rick, or even McCarthy. Just "the guy," as if they subconsciously wanted to turn him into something less important than a man--something generic, as if that would make it matter less if . . . well, if.
"Yeah," Beaver said. "He does, doesn't he? Plenty of hair."
"He must have amnesia."
"Maybe, but he remembers who he is, who he was with, shit like that. Man, that was some trumpet-blast he blew, wasn't it? And the stink! Like ether!"
"Yeah," Jonesy said. "I kept thinking of starter fluid. Diabetics get a smell when they're tipping over. I read that in a mystery novel, I think."
"Is it like starter fluid?"
"I can't remember."
They stood there looking at each other, listening to the wind. It crossed Jonesy's mind to tell Beaver about the lightning the guy claimed to have seen, but why bother? Enough was enough.
"I thought he was going to blow his cookies when he leaned forward like that," the Beav said. "Didn't you?"
Jonesy nodded.
"And he don't look well, not at all well."
"No."
Beaver sighed, tossed his toothpick in the trash, and looked out the window, where the snow was coming down harder and heavier than ever. He flicked his fingers through his hair. "Man, I wish Henry and Pete were here. Henry especially."
"Beav, Henry's a psychiatrist."
"I know, but he's the closest thing to a doctor we got--and I think that fellow needs doctoring."
Henry actually was a physician--had to be, in order to get his certificate of shrinkology--but he'd never practiced anything except psychiatry, as far as Jonesy knew. Still, he understood what Beaver meant.
"Do you still think they'll make it back, Beav?"
Beaver sighed. "Half an hour ago I would have said for sure, but it's really comin heavy. I think so." He looked at Jonesy somberly; there was not much of the usually happy-go-lucky Beaver Clarendon in that look. "I hope so," he said.
CHAPTER THREE
HENRY'S SCOUT
1
Now, as he followed the Scout's headlights through the thickening snow, burrowing as if through a tunnel along the Deep Cut Road toward Hole in the Wall, Henry was down to thinking about ways to do it.
There was the Hemingway Solution, of course--way back at Harvard, as an undergraduate, he had written a paper calling it that, so he might have been thinking about it--in a personal way, not just as another step toward fulfilling some twinky course requirement, that was--even then. The Hemingway Solution was a shotgun, and Henry had one of those now . . . not that he would do it here, with the others. The four of them had had a lot of fine times at Hole in the Wall, and it would be unfair to do it there. It would pollute the place for Pete and Jonesy--for Beaver too, maybe Beaver most of all, and that wouldn't be right. But it would be soon, he could feel it coming on, something like a sneeze. Funny to compare the ending of your life to a sneeze, but that was probably what it came to. Just kerchoo, and then hello darkness, my old friend.
When implementing the Hemingway Solution, you took off your shoe and your sock. Butt of the gun went on the floor. Barrel went into your mouth. Great toe went around the trigger. Memo to myself, Henry thought as the Scout fishtailed a little in the fresh snow and he corrected--the ruts helped, that was really all this road was, a couple of ruts dug by the skidders that used it in the summertime. If you do it that way, take a laxative and don't do it until after that final dump, no need to make any extra mess for the people who find you.
"Maybe you better slow down a little," Pete said. He had a beer between his legs and it was half gone, but one wouldn't be enough to mellow Pete out. Three or four more, though, and Henry could go barrelassing down this road at sixty and Pete would just sit there in the passenger seat, singing along with one of those horrible fucking Pink Floyd discs. And he could go sixty, probably, without putting so much as another ding in the front bumper. Being in the ruts of the Deep Cut, even when they were filled with snow, was like being on rails. If it kept snowing that might change, but for now, all was well.
"Don't worry, Pete--everything's five-by-five."
"You want a beer?"
"Not while I'm driving."
"Not even out here in West Overshoe?"
"Later."
Pete subsided, leaving Henry to follow the bore of the headlights, to thread his way along this white lane between the trees. Leaving him with his thoughts, which was where he wanted to be. It was like returning to a bloody place inside your mouth, exploring it again and again with the tip of your tongue, but it was where he wanted to be.
There were pills. There was the old Baggie-over-the-head-in-the-bathtub trick. There was drowning. There was jumping from a high place. The handgun in the ear was too unsure--too much chance of waking up paralyzed--and so was slitting the wrists, that was for people who were only practicing, but the Japanese had a way of doing it that interested Henry very much. Tie a rope around your neck. Tie the other end to a large rock. Put the rock on the seat of a chair, then sit down with your back braced so you can't fall backward but have to keep sitting. Tip the chair over and the rock rolls off. Subject may live for three to five minutes in a deepening dream of asphyxiation. Gray fades to black; hello darkness, my old friend. He had read about that method in one of Jonesy's beloved Kinsey Milhone detective novels, of all places. Detective novels and horror movies: those were the things that floated Jonesy's boat.
On the whole, Henry leaned toward the Hemingway Solution.
Pete finished his first beer and popped the top on his second, looking considerably more content. "What'd you make of it?" Pete asked.
Henry felt called to from that other universe, the one where the living actually wanted to live. As always these days, that made him feel impatient. But it was important that none of them suspect, and he had an idea Jonesy already did, a little. Beaver might, too. They were the ones who could sometimes see inside. Pete didn't have a clue, but he might say the wrong thing to one of the others, about how preoccupied ole Henry had gotten, like there was something on his mind, something heavy, and Henry didn't want that. This was going to be the last trip to Hole in the Wall for the four of them, the old Kansas Street gang, the Crimson Pirates of the third and fourth grades, and he wanted it to be a good one. He wanted them to be shocked when they heard, even Jonesy, who saw into him the most often and always had. He wanted them to say they'd had no idea. Better that than the three of them sitting around with their heads hung, not able to make eye contact with one another except in fleeting glances, thinking that they should have known, they had seen the signs and should have done something. So he came back to that other universe, simulating interest smoothly and convincingly. Who could do that better than a headshrinker?
"What did I make of what?"
Pete rolled his eyes. "At Gosselin's, dimbulb! All that stuff Old Man Gosselin was talking about."
"Peter, they don't call him Old Man Gosselin for nothing. He's eighty if he's a day, and if there's one thing old women and old men are not short on, it's hysteria." The Scout--no spring chicken itself, fourteen years old and far into its second trip around the odometer--popped out of the ruts and immediately skidded, four-wheel drive or not. Henry steered into the skid, almost laughing when Pete dropped his beer onto the floor and yelled, "Whoa--fuck, watch out!"
Henry let off on the gas until he felt the Scout start to straighten out, then zapped the go-pedal again, deliberately too fast and too hard. The Scout went into another skid, this time widdershins to the first, and Pete yelled again. Henry let up once more and the Scout thumped back into the ruts and once again ran smoothly, as if on rails. One positive to deciding to end your life, it seemed, was no longer sweating the small stuff. The lights cut through the white and shifting day, full of a billion dancing snowflakes, not one of them the same, if you believed the conventional wisdom.
Pete picked up his beer (only a little had spilled), and patted his chest. "Aren't you going a little fast?"
"Not even close," Henry said, and then, as if the skid had never occurred (it had) or interrupted his train of thought (it hadn't), he went on, "Group hysteria is most common in the very old and the very young. It's a well-documented phenomenon in both my field and that of the sociology heathens who live next door."
Henry glanced down and saw he was doing thirty-five, which was, in fact, a little fast for these conditions. He slowed down. "Better?"
Pete nodded. "Don't get me wrong, you're a great driver, but man, it's snowing. Also, we got the supplies." He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at the two bags and two boxes in the back seat. "In addition to hot dogs, we got the last three boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Beaver can't live without that stuff, you know."
"I know," Henry said. "I like it, too. Remember those stories about devil-worship in Washington State, the ones that made the press in the mid-nineties? They were traced back to several old people living with their children--grandchildren, in one case--in two small towns south of Seattle. The mass reports of sexual abuse in daycare centers apparently began with teenage girls working as part-time aides crying wolf at the same time in Delaware and California. Possibly coincidence, or possibly the time was simply ripe for such stories to gain credence and these girls caught a wave out of the air."
How smoothly the words rolled out of his mouth, almost as if they mattered. Henry talked, the man beside him listened with dumb admiration, and no one (certainly not Pete) could have surmised that he was thinking of the shotgun, the rope, the exhaust pipe, the pills. His head was full of tape-loops, that was all. And his tongue was the cassette player.
"In Salem," Henry went on, "the old men and the young girls combined their hysteria, and voila, you have the Salem Witch Trials."
"I saw that movie with Jonesy," Pete said. "Vincent Price was in it. Scared the shit out of me."
"I'm sure," Henry said, and laughed. For one wild moment he'd thought Pete was talking about The Crucible. "And when are hysterical ideas most likely to gain credence? Once the crops are in and the bad weather closes down, of course--then there's time for telling stories and making mischief. In Wenatchee, Washington, it's devil-worship and child sacrifices in the woods. In Salem it was witches. And in the Jefferson Tract, home of the one and only Gosselin's Market, it's strange lights in the sky, missing hunters, and troop maneuvers. Not to mention weird red stuff growing on the trees."
"I don't know about the helicopters and the soldiers, but enough people have seen those lights so they're having a special town meeting. Old Man Gosselin told me so while you were getting the canned stuff. Also, those folks over Kineo way are really missing. That ain't hysteria."
"Four quick points," Henry said. "First, you can't have a town meeting in the Jefferson Tract because there's no town--even Kineo's just an unincorporated township with a name. Second, the meeting will be held around Old Man Gosselin's Franklin stove and half those attending will be shot on peppermint schnapps or coffee brandy."
Pete snickered.
"Third, what else have they got to do? And fourth--this concerns the hunters--they probably either got tired of it and went home, or they all got drunk and decided to get rich at the rez casino up in Carrabassett."
"You think, huh?" Pete looked crestfallen, and Henry felt a great wave of affection for him. He reached over and patted Pete's knee.
"Never fear," he said. "The world is full of strange things." If the world had really been full of strange things, Henry doubted he would have been so eager to l
eave it, but if there was one thing a psychiatrist knew how to do (other than write prescriptions for Prozac and Paxil and Ambien, that was), it was tell lies.
"Four hunters all disappearing at the same time seems pretty strange to me, all right."
"Not a bit," Henry said, and laughed. "One would be odd. Two would be strange. Four? They went off together, depend on it."
"How far are we from Hole in the Wall, Henry?" Which, when translated, meant Do I have time for another beer?
Henry had zeroed the Scout's tripmeter at Gosselin's, an old habit that went back to his days working for the State of Massachusetts, where the deal had been twelve cents a mile and all the psychotic geriatrics you could write up. The mileage between the store and the Hole was easy enough to remember: 22.2. The odometer currently read 12.7, which meant--
"Look out!" Pete shouted, and Henry snapped his gaze back to the windshield.
The Scout had just topped the steep rise of a tree-covered ridge. The snow here was thicker than ever, but Henry was running with the high beams on and clearly saw the person sitting in the road about a hundred feet ahead--a person wearing a duffel coat, an orange vest that blew backward like Superman's cape in the strengthening wind, and one of those Russian fur hats. Orange ribbons had been attached to the hat, and they also blew back in the wind, reminding Henry of the streamers you sometimes saw strung over used-car lots. The guy was sitting in the middle of the road like an Indian that wants to smoke-um peace pipe, and he did not move when the headlights struck him. For one moment Henry saw the sitting figure's eyes, wide open but still, so still and bright and blank, and he thought: That's how my eyes would look if I didn't guard them so closely.
There was no time to stop, not with the snow. Henry twisted the wheel to the right and felt the thump as the Scout came out of the ruts again. He caught another glimpse of the white, still face and had time to think, Why, goddam! It's a woman.