Dreamcatcher

. That’s the truth, and there’s no other. If someone put a gun to his head, he’d say he found out during the first
class after the mid-term, that it was right there in the front of David Defuniak’s mind, big
and bright, flashing on and off in guilty red neon: CHEATER CHEATER CHEATER.
But man, that’s dope-he can’t read minds. He never could. Never-ever, never-ever,

never-ever could. Sometimes things flash into his head, yes-he knew about his wife’s problems with pills that way, and he supposes he might have known in that same way that
Henry was depressed when he called (
No, it was in his voice, doofus, that’s all it was
), but stuff like that hardly ever happens anymore. There has been nothing
really
odd since the business with Josie Rinkenhauer. Maybe there
was
something once, and maybe it trailed

them out of their childhoods and adolescence, but surely it is gone now. Or almost gone.
Almost.
He circles the words
going to Derry
on his desk calendar, then grabs his briefcase. As
he does, a new thought comes to him, sudden and meaningless but very powerful:
Watch
out for Mr Gray
.
He stops with one hand on his doorknob. That was his own voice, no doubt about it.
“What?” he asks the empty room.
Nothing.
Jonesy steps out of his office, closes the door, and tests the lock.

In the comer of his door’s bulletin board is a blank white card. Jonesy unpins it and
turns it over. On the flip side is the printed message BACK AT ONE-UNTIL THEN I’m
HISTORY. He pins the message side to the bulletin board with perfect confidence, but it
will be almost two months before Jonesy enters this room again and sees his desk calendar
still turned to St Patrick’s Day.
Take care of yourself

, Henry said, but Jonesy isn’t thinking about taking care of himself. He is thinking about March sunlight. He’s thinking about eating his sandwich.
He’s thinking he might watch a few girls over on the Cambridge side-skirts are short, and
March winds are frisky. He’s thinking about all sorts of things, but watching out for Mr Gray isn’t one of them. Neither is taking care of himself
This is a mistake. This is also how lives change forever.
Part One
CANCER

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
Chapter One
McCARTHY
1
Jonesy almost shot the guy when he came out of the woods. How close? Another
pound on the Garand’s trigger, maybe just a half. Later, hyped on the clarity that sometimes comes to the horrified mind, he wished he had shot before he saw the orange

cap and the orange flagman’s vest. Killing Richard McCarthy couldn’t have hurt, and it might have helped. Killing McCarthy might have saved them all.
2
Pete and Henry had gone to Gosselin’s Market, the closest store, to stock up on

bread, canned goods, and beer, the real essential. They had plenty for another two days, but the radio said there might be snow coming. Henry had already gotten his deer, a good-sized doe, and Jonesy had an idea Pete cared a lot more about making sure of the beer supply than he did about getting his own deer-for Pete Moore, hunting was a hobby, beer a
religion. The Beaver was out there someplace, but Jonesy hadn’t heard the crack of a rifle

any closer than five miles, so he guessed that the Beav, like him, was still waiting,
There was a stand in an old maple about seventy yards from the camp and that was
where Jonesy was, sipping coffee and reading a Robert Parker mystery novel, when he heard something coming and put the book and the Thermos aside. In other years he might
have spilled the coffee in his excitement, but not this time. This time he even took a few
seconds to screw on the Thermos’s bright red stopper.

The four of them had been coming up here to hunt in the first week of November for
twenty-six years, if you counted in the times Beav’s Dad had taken them, and Jonesy had
never bothered with the tree-stand until now. None of them had; it was too confining. This
year Jonesy had staked it out. The others thought they knew why, but they only knew half
of it.

In mid-March of 2001, Jonesy had been struck by a car while crossing a street in Cambridge, not far from John Jay College, where he taught. He had fractured his skull, broken two ribs, and suffered a shattered hip, which had been replaced with some exotic

combination of Teflon and metal. The man who’d struck him was a retired BU history professor who was-according to his lawyer, anyway-in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, more to be pitied than punished. So often, Jonesy thought, there was no one to blame when the dust cleared. And even if there was, what good did it do? You still had to live
with what was left, and console yourself with the fact that, as people told him every day

(until they forgot the whole thing, that was), it could have been worse.
And it could have been. His head was hard, and the crack in it healed. He had no memory of the hour or so leading up to his accident near Harvard Square, but the rest of
his mental equipment was fine. His ribs healed in a month. The hip was the worst, but he
was off the crutches by October, and now his limp only became appreciable toward the end of the day.

Pete, Henry, and the Beav thought it was the hip and only the hip that had caused him
to opt for the tree-stand instead of the damp, cold woods, and the hip was certainly a factor
just not the only one. What he had kept from them was that he now had little interest in
shooting deer. It would have dismayed them. Hell, it dismayed Jonesy himself. But there it
was, something new in his existence that he hadn’t even suspected until they had actually

gotten up here on November eleventh and he had uncased the Garand. He wasn’t revolted
by the idea of hunting, not at all-he just had no real urge to do it. Death had brushed by
him on a sunny day in March, and Jonesy had no desire to call it back, even if he were dealing rather than receiving.
3

What surprised him was that he still liked being at camp-in some ways, better than ever. Talking at night-books, politics, the shit they’d gotten up to as kids, their plans for
the future. They were in their thirties, still young enough to have plans, plenty of them, and the old bond was still strong.
And the days were good, too-the hours in the tree-stand, when he was alone. He took

a sleeping bag and slid into it up to his hips when he got cold, and a book, and a Walkman.
After the first day, he stopped listening to the Walkman, discovering that he liked the music of the woods better-the silk of the wind in the pines, the rust of the crows. He would
read a little, drink coffee, read a little more, sometimes work his way out of the sleeping
bag (it was as red as a stoplight) and piss off the edge of the platform. He was a man with

a big family and a large circle of colleagues. A gregarious man who enjoyed all the various relationships the family and the colleagues entailed (and the students, of course, the endless stream of students) and balanced them well. It was only out here,
up
here, that he realized the attractions of silence were still real, still strong. It was like meeting an old friend after a long absence.

“You sure you want to be up there, man?” Henry had asked him yesterday morning.
“I mean, you’re welcome to come out with me. We won’t overuse that leg of yours, I promise. “‘Leave him alone,” Pete said. “He likes it up there. Don’t you, Jones-boy?”
“Sort of,” he said, unwilling to say much more-how much he actually
did
like it, for
instance. Some things you didn’t feel safe telling even your closest friends. And
sometimes your closest friends knew, anyway.

“Tell you something,” the Beav said. He picked up a pencil and began to gnaw lightly
at it-his oldest, dearest trick, going all the way back to first grade. “I like coming back and seeing you there-like a lookout in the crow’s nest in one of those fuckin Hornblower books. Keepin an eye out, you know.”
“Sail, ho,” Jonesy had said, and they all laughed, but Jonesy knew what the Beav
meant. He felt it. Keeping an eye out. Just thinking his thoughts and keeping an eye out

for ships or sharks or who knew what. His hip hurt coming back down, the pack with his
shit in it was heavy on his back, and he felt slow and clumsy on the wooden rungs nailed
to the trunk of the maple, but that was okay. Good, in fact. Things changed, but only a fool
believed they only changed for the worse.
That was what he thought then.
4
When he heard the whicker of moving brush and the soft snap of a twig-sounds he

never questioned were those of an approaching deer-Jonesy thought of something his
father said:
You can’t make yourself be lucky
. Lindsay Jones was one of life’s losers and had said few things worth committing to memory, but that was one, and here was the proof of it again: days after deciding he had finished with deer hunting, here came one, and a big one by the sound a buck, almost surely, maybe one as big as a man.
That it
was

a man never so much as crossed Jonesy’s mind. This was an
unincorporated township fifty miles north of Rangely, and the nearest hunters were two hours” walk away. The nearest paved road, the one which eventually took you to
Gosselin’s Market (BEER BAIT OUT OF STATE LICS LOTTERY TIX), was at least
sixteen miles away.
Well
, he thought,
it isn’t as if I took a vow, or anything
.

No, he hadn’t taken a vow. Next November he might be up here with a Nikon instead
of a Garand, but it wasn’t next year yet, and the rifle was at hand. He had no intention of
looking a gift deer in the mouth.
Jonesy screwed the red stopper into the Thermos of coffee and put it aside. Then he
pushed the sleeping bag off his lower body like a big quilted sock (wincing at the stiffness

in his hip as he did it) and grabbed his gun. There was no need to chamber a round, producing that loud, deer-frightening click; old habits died hard, and the gun was ready to
fire as soon as he thumbed off the safety. This he did when he was solidly on his feet. The
old wild excitement was gone, but there was a residue-his pulse was up and he welcomed
the rise. In the wake of his accident, he welcomed all such reactions-it was as if there were

two of him now, the one before he had been knocked flat in the street and the warier, older
fellow who had awakened in Mass General… if you could call that slow, drugged
awareness being awake. Sometimes he still heard a voice-whose he didn’t know, but not
his-calling out
Please stop, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy, I want Marcy
.
He thought of it as death’s voice-death had passed him in the street and had then come to

the hospital to finish the job, death masquerading as a man (or perhaps it had been a woman, it was hard to tell) in pain, someone who said Marcy but meant Jonesy.
The idea passed-all of the funny ideas he’d had in the hospital eventually passed-but
it left a residue. Caution was the residue. He had no memory of Henry calling and telling
him to watch himself for the next little while (and Henry hadn’t reminded him), but since
then Jonesy
had

watched himself. He was careful. Because maybe death was out there, and maybe sometimes it called your name.
But the past was the past. He had survived his brush with death, and nothing was dying here this morning but a deer (a buck, he hoped) who had strolled in the wrong direction.
The sound of the rustling brush and snapping twigs was conu’ng toward him from the

southwest, which meant he wouldn’t have to shoot around the trunk of the maple-good-and put him upwind. Even better. Most of the maple’s leaves had fallen, and he had a good, if not perfect, sightline through the interlacing branches. Jonesy raised the Garand,
settled the buttplate into the hollow of his shoulder, and prepared to shoot himself a conversation-piece.
What saved McCarthy-at least temporarily-was Jonesy’s disenchantment with

hunting. What almost got McCarthy killed was a phenomenon George Kilroy, a friend of
his father’s, had called “eye-fever”. Eye-fever, Kilroy claimed, was a form of buck fever,
and was probably the second most common cause of hunting accidents. “First is drink,”
said George Kilroy… and like Jonesy’s father, Kilroy knew a bit on that subject, as well.
“First is always drink.”
Kilroy said that victims of eye-fever were uniformly astounded to discover they had

shot a fencepost, or a passing car, or the broad side of a barn, or their own hunting partner
(in many cases the partner was a spouse, a sib, or a child). “But I
saw
it,” they would protest, and most of them according to Kilroy, could pass a lie-detector test on the subject.
They had seen the deer or the bear or the wolf, or just the grouse flip-flapping through the
high autumn grass. They had
seen
it.

What happened, according to Kilroy, was that these hunters were afflicted by an
anxiety to make the shot, to get it over with, one way or the other. This anxiety became so
strong that the brain persuaded the eye that it saw what was not yet visible, in order to end
the tension. This was eye-fever. And although Jonesy was aware of no particular anxiety-
his fingers had been perfectly steady as he screwed the red stopper back into the throat of

the Thermos-he admitted later to himself that yes, he might have fallen prey to the malady.
For one moment he saw the buck clearly at the end of the tunnel made by the
interlocking branches-as clearly as he had seen any of the previous sixteen deer (six bucks,
ten does) he had brought down over the years at Hole in the Wall. He saw its brown head,
one eye so dark it was almost the black of jeweler’s velvet, even part of its rack.
Shoot now!

part of him cried-it was the Jonesy from the other side of the accident, the whole Jonesy. That one had spoken more frequently in the last month or so, as he began to
approach some mythical state which people who had never been hit by a car blithely referred to as “total recovery”, but he had never spoken as loudly as he did now. This was
a command, almost a shout.
And his finger
did

tighten on the trigger. It never put on that last pound of pressure (or perhaps it only would have taken another half, a paltry eight ounces), but it
did
tighten.
The voice that stopped him was that second Jonesy, the one who had awakened in Mass
General, doped and disoriented and in pain, not sure of anything anymore except that someone wanted something to stop, someone couldn’t stand it-not without a shot, anyway-that someone wanted Marcy.
No, not yet-wait, watch

, this new cautious Jonesy said, and that was the voice he listened to. He froze in place, most of his weight thrown forward on his good left leg, rifle
raised, barrel angled down that interlacing tunnel of light at a cool thirty-five degrees.
The first flakes of snow came skating down out of the white sky just then, and as they
did, Jonesy saw a bright vertical line of orange below the deer’s head-it was as if the snow

had somehow conjured it up. For a moment perception simply gave up and what he was
seeing over the barrel of his gun became only an unconnected jumble, like paints swirled
all together on an artist’s palette. There was no deer and no man, not even any woods, just
a puzzling and untidy jumble of black, brown, and orange.
Then there was more orange, and in a shape that made sense: it was a hat, the kind
with flaps you could fold down to cover your ears. The out-of-staters bought them at L.L.

Bean’s for forty-four dollars, each with a little tag inside that said PROUDLY MADE IN
THE USA BY UNION LABOR. Or you could pick one up at Gosselin’s for seven bucks.
The tag in a Gosselin’s cap just said MADE IN BANGLADESH.
The hat brought everything into horrible oh-God focus: the brown he had mistaken
for a buck’s head was the front of a man’s wool jacket, the black jeweler’s velvet of the
buck’s eye was a button, and the antlers were only more branches-branches belonging to

the very tree in which he was standing. The man was unwise (Jonesy could not quite bring
himself to use the word
crazy
) to be wearing a brown coat in the woods, but Jonesy was
still at a loss to understand how he himself could have made a mistake of such potentially
horrifying consequence. Because the man was also wearing an orange cap, wasn’t he?
And a bright orange flagman’s vest as well, over the admittedly unwise brown coat. The

man was-was a pound of finger-pressure from death. Maybe less.
It came home to him in a visceral way then, knocking him clean out of his own body.
For a terrible, brilliant moment he never forgot, he was neither Jonesy Number One, the
confident pre-accident Jonesy, or Jonesy Number Two, the more tentative survivor who spent so much of his time in a tiresome state of physical discomfort and mental confusion.

For that moment he was some other Jonesy, an invisible presence looking at a gunman standing on a platform in a tree. The gunman’s hair was short and already graying, his face
lined around the mouth, beard-speckled on the cheeks, and haggard. The gunman was on
the verge of using his weapon. Snow had begun to dance around his head and light on his
untucked brown flannel shirt, and he was on the verge of shooting a man in an orange cap

and vest of the very sort he would have been wearing himself if he had elected to go into
the woods with the Beaver instead of up into this tree.
He fell back into himself with a thud, exactly as one fell back into one’s seat after taking a car over a bad bump at a high speed. To his horror, he realized he was still tracking the man below with the Garand, as if some stubborn alligator deep in his brain

refused to let go of the idea that the man in the brown coat was prey. Worse, he couldn’t seem to make his finger relax on the rifle’s trigger. There was even an awful second or two
when he thought he was actually still squeezing, inexorably eating up those last few ounces between him and the greatest mistake of his life. He later came to accept that that
at least had been an illusion, something akin to the feeling you get of rolling backward in

your stopped car when you glimpse a slowly moving car beside you, out of the corner of
your eye.
No, he was just frozen, but that was bad enough, that was hell.
Jonesy, you think too
much
, Pete liked to say when he caught Jonesy staring out into the middle distance, no longer tracking the conversation, and what he probably meant was
Jonesy, you imagine
too much
, and that was very likely true. Certainly he was imagining too much now as he

stood up here in the middle of the tree and the season’s first snow, hair leaping up in tufts,
finger locked on the Garand’s trigger-not tightening still, as he had for a moment feared,
but not loosening, either, the man almost below him now, the Garand’s gunsight on the top
of the orange cap, the man’s life on an invisible wire between the Garand’s muzzle and that cap, the man maybe thinking about trading his car or cheating on his wife or buying

his oldest daughter a pony (Jonesy later had reason to know McCarthy had been thinking
about none of those things, but of course not then, not in the tree with his forefinger a frozen curl around the trigger of his rifle) and not knowing what Jonesy had not known as
he stood on the curb in Cambridge with his briefcase in one hand and a copy of the Boston
Phoenix

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