Dreamcatcher

It occurred to Henry that he had just been indiscreet. “Yes, but you ought to keep
your mouth shut about it. Carla told me, but I don’t think Jonesy knows. I never…” He waved his arm vaguely, and Pete nodded with perfect understanding.
I never sensed that
he did
was what Henry meant.
“I’ll keep it under my hat,” Pete said.
“I think it’s best you do.”
“And you never got to see Duds.”

Henry shook his head. “In all the excitement about Jonesy, I forgot. Then it was
summer, and you know how things come up…”
Pete nodded.
“But you know what? I was thinking of him just a little while ago. Back in
Gosselin’s.”
“Was it the kid in the Beavis and Butt-head shirt?” Pete asked. His words came out in
little puffs of white vapor.
Henry nodded. “The kid” could have been twelve or twenty-five, when it came to

Down’s syndrome you just couldn’t tell. He had been red-haired, wandering along the middle aisle of the dark little market next to a man who just about had to be his father-same green-and-black-checked hunting jacket, more importantly the same carroty red hair,
the man’s now thin enough to show the scalp underneath, and he had given them a look,
the kind that says
Don’t you say nothing about my kid unless you want trouble

, and of course neither of them had said anything, they had come the twenty or so miles from Hole
in the Wall for beer and bread and hot dogs, not trouble, and besides, they had once known

Duddits, still knew Duddits in a way-sent him Christmas presents and birthday cards, anyway, Duddits who had once been, in his own peculiar fashion, one of them. What Henry could not very well confide to Pete was that he’d been thinking of Duds at odd moments ever since realizing, some sixteen months ago, that he meant to take his own life

and that everything he did had become either a holding action against that event or a preparation for it. Sometimes he even dreamed of Duddits, and of the Beav saying
Let me
fix that, man
and Duddits saying
Fit wha?
“Nothing wrong with thinking about Duddits, Pete,” he said as he hauled the
makeshift sled with the woman on it into the shelter. He was out of breath himself.
“Duddits was how we defined ourselves. He was our finest hour.”

“You think so?”
“Yup.” Henry plopped down to get his breath before going on. to the next thing. He
looked at his watch. Almost noon. By now Jonesy and Beaver would be past the point of
thinking the snow had just slowed them down; would be almost sure something had gone
wrong. Perhaps one of them would fire up the snowmobile (
if it works
, he reminded himself again,
if the damn thing works
). Come out looking for them. That would simplify things a bit.

He looked at the woman lying on the tarp. Her hair had fallen over one eye, hiding it;
the other looked at Henry-and through him-with chilly indifference.
Henry believed that all children were presented with self-defining moments in early adolescence, and that children in groups were apt to respond more decisively than children

alone. Often they behaved badly, answering distress with cruelty. Henry and his friends had behaved well, for whatever reason. It meant no more than anything else in the end, but
it did not hurt to remember, especially when your soul was dark, that once you had confounded the odds and behaved decently.
He told Pete what he was going to do and what Pete was going to do, then got to his

feet to start doing it-he wanted them all safe behind the doors of Hole in the Wall before
the light left the day. A clean, well-lighted place.
“Okay,” Pete said, but he sounded nervous. “Just hope she doesn’t die on me. And
that those lights don’t come back.” He craned to look out at the sky, where now there were
only dark, low-hanging clouds. “What were they, do you think? Some kind of lightning?”

“Hey, you’re the space expert.” Henry got up. “Start picking up the little sticks-you
don’t even have to get up to do that.”
“Kindling, right?”
“Right,” Henry said, then stepped over the woman on the tarp and walked to the edge
of the woods, where there was plenty of bigger stuff lying around in the snow. Roughly nine miles, that was the walk ahead of him. But first they were going to light a fire. A nice
big one.
Chapter Four
MCCARTHY GOES TO THE JOHN
1

Jonesy and Beaver sat in the kitchen, playing cribbage, which they simply called the
game. That was what Lamar, Beaver’s father, had always called it, as though it were the
only game. For Lamar Clarendon, whose life revolved around his central Maine

construction company, it probably was the only game, the one most at home in logging camps, railroad sheds, and, of course, construction trailers. A board with a hundred and twenty holes, four pegs, and an old greasy deck of cards; if you had those things, you were
in business. The game was mostly played when you were waiting to do something else-for

the rain to let up, for a freight order to arrive, or for your friends to get back from the store so you could figure out what to do with the strange fellow now lying behind a closed bedroom door.
Except
, Jonesy thought,
we’re really waiting for Henry. Pete’s just with him. Henry’s
the one who’ll know what to do, Beaver was right. Henry’s the one
.
But Henry and Pete were late back. It was too early to say something had happened

to them, it could just be the snow slowing them down, but Jonesy was starting to wonder if
that was all, and guessed the Beav was, too. Neither of them had said anything about it as
yet-it was still on the morning side of noon and things might still turn out okay-but the idea was there, floating unspoken between them.
Jonesy would concentrate on the board and the cards for awhile, and then he’d look

at the closed bedroom door behind which McCarthy lay, probably sleeping, but oh boy his
color had looked bad. Two or three times he saw Beav’s eyes flicking over there, too.
Jonesy shuffled the old Bikes, dealt, gave himself a couple of cards, then set aside the
crib when Beaver slid a couple across to him. Beaver cut and then the preliminaries were
done; it was time to peg.
You can peg and still lose the game

, Lamar told them, that Chesterfield always sticking out from the comer of his mouth, his Clarendon Construction
cap always pulled down over his left eye like a man who knows a secret he will only tell if
the price is right, Lamar Clarendon a no-play workadaddy dead of a heart attack at forty-
eight,
but if you peg you won’t never get skunked
.
No play
, Jonesy thought now.
No bounce, no play
. And then, on the heels of that, the wavering damned voice that day in the hospital:

Please stop, I can’t stand it, give me a
shot, where’s Marcy?
And oh man, why was the world so hard? Why were there so many
spokes hungry for your fingers, so many gears eager to grab for your guts?
“Jonesy?”
“Huh?”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You shivered.”
“Did I?” Sure he did, he knew he did.
“Yeah.”
“Drafty, maybe. You smell anything?”
“You mean… like him?”
“I wasn’t talking about Meg Ryan’s armpits. Yeah, him.”

“No,” Beaver said. “A couple of times I thought… but it was just imagination.
Because those farts, you know-”-smelled so bad. “‘Yeah. They did. The burps, too. I thought he was gonna blow chunks, man. For sure.” Jonesy nodded.
I’m scared
, he thought.
Sitting here shit scared in a snowstorm. I want Henry, goddammit. How about
that.
“Jonesy?”
“What? Are we ever gonna play this hand or not?”
“Sure, but… do you think Henry and Pete are okay?”

“How the hell do I know?”
“You don’t… have a feeling? Maybe see-”
“I don’t see anything but your face.”
Beav sighed. “But do you think they’re okay?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Yet his eyes stole first to the clock half past eleven, now-
and then to the closed bedroom door with McCarthy behind it. In the middle of the room,
the dreamcatcher danced and slowly turned in some breath of air. “Just going slow.
They’ll be right along. Come on, let’s play.”
“All right. Eight.”

“Fifteen for two.”
“Fuck.” Beaver put a toothpick in his mouth. “Twenty-five.”
“Thirty.”
“Go.”
“One for two.”
“
Doodlyfuck!
” Beaver gave an exasperated little laugh as Jonesy turned the corner onto Third Street. “You peg my ass off every time you deal.” “I peg your ass when you deal, too,” Jonesy said. “The truth hurts. Come on, play.” “Nine.” “Sixteen.”
“And one for last card,” the Beav said, as if he had won a moral victory. He stood up.
“I’m

gonna go out, take a leak.” “Why? We’ve got a perfectly good john, in case you
didn’t know it.” “I know it. I just want to see if I can write my name in the snow.” Jonesy
laughed. “Are you ever gonna grow up?”Not if I can help it. And keep it down. Don’t wake the guy up.
Jonesy swept the cards together and began to shuffle them as Beaver walked to the
back door. He found himself thinking about a version of the game they had played when

they were kids. They called it the Duddits Game, and they usually played in the Cavell rec
room. It was the same as regular cribbage, except they let Duddits peg.
I got ten
, Henry would say,
peg me ten, Duddits
. And Duddits, grinning that loopy grin of his that never failed to make Jonesy feel happy, might peg four or six or ten or two fucking dozen. The
rule when you played the Duddits Game was that you never complained, never said

Duddits, that’s too many or Duddits, that’s not enough
. And man, they’d laugh. Mr and Mrs Cavell, they’d laugh, too, if they happened to be in the room, and Jonesy remembered
once, they must have been fifteen, sixteen, and Duddits of course was whatever he was, Duddits Cavell’s age was never going to change, that was what was so beautiful and scary
about him, and this one time Alfie Cavell had started crying, saying
Boys, if you only knew

what this means, to me and to the missus, if you only knew what it means to Douglas-
“
Jonesy.” Beaver’s voice, oddly flat. Cold air came in through the open kitchen door,
raising a rash of gooseflesh on Jonesy’s arms.
“Close the door, Beav, was you born in a barn?”
“Come over here. You need to look at this.”
Jonesy got up and went to the door. He opened his mouth to say something, then
closed it again. The backyard was filled with enough animals to stock a petting zoo. Deer,

mostly, a couple of dozen assorted does and bucks. But moving with them were raccoons,
waddling woodchucks, and a contingent of squirrels that seemed to move effortlessly
along the top of the snow. From around the side of the shed where the Arctic Cat and assorted tools and engine parts were stored, came three large canines Jonesy at first mistook for wolves. Then he saw the old discolored length of clothesline hanging around

the neck of one of them and realized they were dogs, probably gone feral. They were all
moving east, up the slope from The Gulch. Jonesy saw a pair of good-sized wildcats moving between two little groups of deer and actually rubbed his eyes, as if to clear them

of a mirage. The cats were still there. So were the deer, the woodchucks, the coons and squirrels. They moved steadily, barely giving the men in the doorway a glance, but without the panic of creatures running before a fire. Nor was there any smell of fire. The
animals were simply moving cast, vacating the area.
“Holy Christ, Beav,” Jonesy said in a low, awed voice. Beaver had been looking up.

Now he gave the animals a quick, cursory glance and lifted his gaze to the sky again.
“Yeah. Now look up there.”
Jonesy looked up and saw a dozen glaring lights-some red, some blue-white-dancing

around up there. They lit the clouds, and he suddenly understood that they were what McCarthy had seen when he was lost. They ran back and forth, dodging each other or sometimes briefly merging, making a glow so bright he couldn’t look at it without
squinting. “What
are
they?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Beaver said, not looking away. On his pale face, the stubble stood out
with almost eerie clarity. “But the animals don’t like it.
That’s

what they’re trying to get
away from.”
2
They watched for ten, perhaps fifteen minutes, and Jonesy became aware of a low
humming, like the sound of an electrical transformer. Jonesy asked Beaver if he heard it,
and the Beav simply nodded, not taking his eyes off the dancing lights in the sky, which to
Jonesy looked to be the size of manhole covers. He had an idea that it was the sound the
animals wanted to escape, not the lights, but said nothing. Speech all at once seemed hard;

he felt a debilitating fear grip him, something feverish and constant, like a low-grade flu.
At last the lights began to dim, and although Jonesy hadn’t seen any of them wink out, there seemed to be fewer of them. Fewer animals, too, and that nagging hum was fading.
Beaver started, like a man awakening from a deep sleep. “Camera,” he said. “I want
to get some pictures before they’re gone.” “I don’t think you’ll be able to-”

“I got to try!” Beaver almost shouted. Then, in a lower tone of voice: “I got to try. At
least I can get some of the deers and such before they…” He was turning away, heading
back across the kitchen, probably trying to remember what heap of dirty clothes he’d left
his old battered camera under, when he stopped suddenly. In a flat and decidedly
unbeaverish voice, he said, “Oh, Jonesy. I think we got a problem.”

Jonesy took a final look at the remaining lights, still fading (smaller, too), then turned
around. Beaver was standing beside the sink, looking across the counter and the big central room.
“What? What now?” That nagging, shrewish voice with the little tremor in it… was
that really his?
Beaver pointed. The door to the bathroom where they’d put Rick McCarthy-Jonesy’s
room-stood open. The door to the bathroom, which they had left open so McCarthy could

not possibly miss his way if nature called, was now closed.
Beaver turned his somber, beard-speckled face to Jonesy’s. “Do you smell it?”
Jonesy did, in spite of the cold fresh air coming in through the door. Ether or ethyl
alcohol, yes, there was still that, but now it was mixed with other stuff. Feces for sure.
Something that could have been blood. And something else, something like mine-gas

trapped a million years and finally let free. Not the kind of fart-smells kids giggled over on
camping trips, in other words. This was something richer and far more awful. You could
only compare it to farts because there was nothing else even close. At bottom, Jonesy thought, it was the smell of something contaminated and dying badly.
“And look there.” Beaver pointed at the hardwood floor. There was blood on it, a trail

of bright droplets running from the open door to the closed one. As if McCarthy had
dashed with a nosebleed.Only Jonesy didn’t think it was his nose that had been bleeding.
3
Of all the things in his life he hadn’t wanted to do-calling his brother Mike to tell him
Ma had died of a heart attack, telling Carla she had to do something about the booze and
all the prescriptions or he was going to leave her, telling Big Lou, his cabin counselor at

Camp Agawam, that he had wet his bed-crossing the big central room at Hole in the Wall
to that closed bathroom door was the hardest. It was like walking in a nightmare where you seem to cover ground at the same dreamy, underwater pace no matter how fast you move your legs.
In bad dreams you never got to where you’re going, but they made it to the other side
of the room and so Jonesy supposed it wasn’t a dream after all. They stood looking down

at the splatters of blood. They weren’t very big, the largest the size of a dime.
“He must have lost another tooth,” Jonesy said, still whispering. “That’s probably it.”
The Beav looked at him, one eyebrow raised. Then he went to the bedroom door and
looked in. After a moment he turned to Jonesy and curled his finger in a beckoning gesture. Jonesy went to where Beaver stood in a kind of sidle, not wanting to lose sight of
the closed bathroom door.

In the bedroom the covers had been thrown all the way back onto the floor, as if McCarthy had risen suddenly, urgently. The shape of his head was still in the middle of the
pillow and the
shape of his body still lay printed on the sheet. Also printed on the sheet, about halfway down, was a large bloody blotch. Soaking into the blue sheet, it looked purple.
“Funny place to lose a tooth from,” Beaver whispered. He bit down on the toothpick

in his mouth and the ragged front half of it fell on the doorsill. “Maybe he was hoping for
a quarter from the Ass Fairy.”
Jonesy didn’t respond. He pointed to the left of the doorway, instead. There, in a tangle, were the bottoms of McCarthy’s longjohns and the jockey briefs he’d been wearing
beneath them. Both were matted with blood. The jockeys had caught the worst of it; if not
for the waistband and the cotton high up on the front, you might have thought they were a

racy, jaunty red, the kind of shorts a devotee of the
Penthouse
Forum might put on if he was expecting to get laid when the date was over.
“Go look in the chamber pot,” Beaver whispered.
“Why don’t we just knock on the bathroom door and ask him how he is?”
“Because I want to know what to fucking
expect
,” Beaver replied in a vehement whisper. He patted his chest, then spit out the ragged remains of his latest toothpick.
“Man, my ticker’s goin nuts.”

Jonesy’s own heart was racing, and he could feel sweat running down his face.
Nevertheless he stepped into the room. The cold fresh air coming in the back door had cleaned out the main room pretty well, but the stench in here was foul-shit and mine-gas
and ether. Jonesy felt the little bit of food he’d eaten take an uneasy lurch in his stomach

and willed it to stay where it was. He approached the chamber pot and at first couldn’t make himself look in. Half a dozen horror-movie images of what he might see danced in
his head. Organs floating in blood soup. Teeth. A severed head.
“
Go on!
” Beaver whispered.

Jonesy squeezed his eyes shut, bent his head, held his breath, then opened his eyes again. There was nothing but clean china gleaming in the glow thrown by the overhead light. The chamber pot was empty. He released his breath in a sigh through his clenched
teeth, then walked back to the Beav, avoiding the splashes of blood on the floor.
Nothing,” he said. “Now come on, let’s stop screwing around.” They walked past the

closed door of the linen closet and regarded the closed pine-paneled door to the john.
Beaver looked at Jonesy. Jonesy shook his head. “It’s your turn,” he whispered. “I looked
in the thunderjug.”
“You found him,” Beaver whispered back. His jaw was set stubbornly. “
You
do it.”
Now Jonesy was hearing something else-hearing it without hearing it, exactly, partly
because this sound was more familiar, mostly because he was so fiercely fixed on

McCarthy, the man he had almost shot. A
whup-whup-whup
sound, faint but growing louder. Coming this way.
“Well fuck this,” Jonesy said, and although he only spoke in a normal tone of voice,
it was loud enough to make them both jump a little. He rapped a knuckle on the door. “Mr
McCarthy! Pick! Are you all right in there?”
He won’t answer
, Jonesy thought.
He won’t answer because he’s dead. Dead and
sitting on the throne, just like Elvis
.

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