Dreamcatcher

see them. Roberta’s enthusiasm is enough to light some faint hope in
the eyes of Ellen and Hector Rinkenhauer.
The other parents respond, too-it is as if they have just been waiting to be asked. The
calls started shortly after Duddits and his friends trooped out the door (to play, Roberta assumed, and someplace close by, because Henry’s old jalopy is still parked in the driveway), and by the time the boys return, there are almost two dozen people crammed

into the Cavells” living room, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. The man currently
addressing them is a guy Henry has seen before, a lawyer named Dave Bocklin. His son,
Kendall, sometimes plays with Duddits.
Ken Bocklin also has Down’s, and he’s a good enough guy, but he’s not like Duds.
Get serious, though-who is?

The boys stand at the entrance to the living room, Josie among them. She is once more carrying her great big purse, with BarbieKen tucked away inside. Even her face is almost clean, because Beaver, seeing all the cars, has done a little work on it with his handkerchief out in the driveway. (“Tell you what, it made me feel funny,” the Beav confides later, after all the hoopdedoo and fuckaree has died down. “Here I’m cleanin up

this girl, she’s got the bod of a Playboy Bunny and the brain, roughly speaking, of a lawn-
sprinkler.”) At first no one sees them but Mr Bocklin, and Mr Bocklin doesn’t seem to realize what he’s looking at, because he goes right on talking.
“So what we need to do, folks, is divide up into a number of teams, let’s say three couples to each… each team… and we’ll… we… we Mr Bocklin slows like one of those

toys you need to wind up and then just stands there in front of the Cavells” TV, staring.
There’s a nervous rustle among the hastily assembled parents, who don’t understand what
can be wrong with him-he was going along so confidently.
“Joise,” he says in a flat, uninflected voice utterly unlike his usual confident courthouse boom.
“Yes,” says Hector Rinkenhauer, “that’s her name. What’s up, Dave? Are you all r-”

“Josie,” Dave says again, and raises a trembling hand. To Henry (and hence to Owen,
who is seeing this through Henry’s eyes) he looks like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing at Ebenezer Scrooge’s grave.
One face turns… two… four… Alfie Cavell’s eyes, huge and unbelieving behind his
specs… and finally, Mrs Rinkenhauer’s. “Hi, Mom,” Josie says nonchalantly. She holds up her purse. “Duddie found my BarbieKen. I was stuck in a-” The rest is blotted out by

the woman’s shriek of joy. Henry has never heard such a cry in his life, and although it is
wonderful, it is also somehow terrible. “Fuck me Freddy,” Beaver says… low, under his
breath. Jonesy is holding Duddits, who has been frightened by the scream.
Pete looks at Henry and gives a little nod:
We did okay.
And Henry nods back.
Yeah, we did.

It may not have been their finest hour, but surely it is a close second. And as Mrs Rinkenhauer sweeps her daughter into her arms, now sobbing, Henry taps Duddits on the
arm. When Duddits turns to look at him, Henry kisses him softly on the cheek.
Good old
Duddits,
Henry thinks.
Good old
-
6
“This is it, Owen,” Henry said quietly. “Exit 27.”
Owen’s vision of the Cavell living room popped like a soap bubble and he looked at

the looming sign: KEEP RIGHT FOR EXIT 27-KANSAS STREET. He could still hear
the woman’s happy, unbelieving cries echoing in his ears.
“You okay?” Henry asked.
“Yeah. At least I guess so.” He turned up the exit ramp, the Humvee shouldering its
way through the snow. The clock built into the dashboard had gone as dead as Henry’s wristwatch, but he thought he could see the faintest lightening in the air. “Right or left at

the top of the ramp? Tell me now, because I don’t want to risk stopping.”
“Left, left.”
Owen swung the Hummer left under a dancing blinker-light, rode it through another
skid, and then moved south on Kansas Street. It had been plowed, and not that long ago,
but it was drifting in again already.
“Snow’s letting up,” Henry said.
“Yeah, but the wind’s a bitch. You’re looking forward to seeing him, aren’t you?
Duddits.”

Henry grinned. “A little nervous about it, but yeah.” He shook his head. “Duddits, man… Duddits just makes you feel good. He’s a tribble. You’ll see for yourself I just wish
we weren’t busting in like this at the crack of dawn.” Owen shrugged.
Can’t do anything
about it,
the gesture said. “They’ve been over here on the west side for four years, I guess, and I’ve never even been to the new place.” And, without even realizing, went on in mindspeak:

They moved after Alfie died. Did you-
And then, instead of words, a picture: people in black under black umbrellas. A graveyard in the rain. A coffin on trestles with
R.I.P. ALFIE carved on top.
No,
Henry said, feeling ashamed.
None of us did.
But Henry didn’t know why they hadn’t gone, although a phrase occurred to him:
The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on.
Duddits had been an important (he guessed the word he actually wanted was
vital)

part of their childhood. And once that link was broken, going back would have been painful. Painful was one thing,
uselessly
painful another. He understood something now. The images he associated with his depression and
his growing certainty of suicide-the trickle of milk on his father’s chin, Barry Newman hustling his doublewide butt out of the office-had been hiding another, more potent, image

all along: the dreamcatcher. Hadn’t that been the real source of his despair? The
grandiosity of the dreamcatcher concept coupled to the banality of the uses to which the
concept had been put? Using Duddits to find Josie Rinkenhauer had been like discovering

quantum physics and then using it to build a video game. Worse, discovering that was really all quantum physics was good for. Of course they had done a good thing-without them, Josie Rinkenhauer would have died in that pipe like a rat in a rainbarrel. But-come
on-it wasn’t as if they’d rescued a future Nobel Peace Prize winner-
I can’t follow everything that just went through your head,
Owen said, suddenly deep
in Henry’s mind,

but it sounds pretty goddam arrogant. Which street?
Stung, Henry glared at him. “We haven’t been back to see him lately, okay? Could we just leave it at that?”
“Yes,” Owen said. “But we all sent him Christmas cards, okay? Every year, which is how I
know they moved to
Dearborn Street, 41 Dearborn Street, West Side Derry, make your right three streets
up.”
“Okay. Calm down.”
“Fuck your mother and die.”
“Henry-”

“We just fell out of touch. It happens. Probably never happened to a Mr Perfection like your honored self, but to the rest of us… the rest of us…” Henri looked down, saw
that his fists were clenched, and forced them to roll open.
“Okay, I said.”
“Probably Mr Perfection stays in touch with
all
his junior-high-school friends, right?
You guys probably get together once a year to snap bras, play your Motley Crue records,

and eat Tuna Surprise just like they used to serve in the cafeteria.”
“I’m sorry if I upset you.”
“Oh, bite me. You act like we fucking
abandoned
him.” Which, of course, was pretty
much what they had done.
Owen said nothing. He was squinting through the swirling snow, looking for the
Dearborn Street sign in the pallid gray light of early morning… and there it was, just up

ahead. A plow passing along Kansas Street had plugged the end of Dearborn, but Owen thought the Humvee could beat its way past.
“It’s not like I stopped thinking about him,” Henry said. He started to continue by thought, then switched back to words again. Thinking about Duddits was too revealing.
“We all thought about him. In fact, Jonesy and I were going to go see him this spring.

Then Jonesy had his accident, and I forgot all about it. Is that so surprising?”
“Not at all,” Owen said mildly. He swung the wheel hard to the right, flicked it back
the other way to control the skid, then floored the accelerator. The Hummer hit the packed
and crusty wall of snow hard enough to throw both of them forward against their seatbelts.
Then they were through, Owen jockeying the wheel to keep from hitting the drifted-in cars
parked on either side of the street.

“I don’t need a guilt-trip from someone who was planning to barbecue a few hundred
civilians,” Henry grumbled. Owen stamped on the brake with both feet, throwing them forward into their harnesses again, this time hard enough to lock them. The Humvee skidded to a diagonal stop in the street. “Shut the fuck up.”
Don’t be talking shit you don’t understand.
“
I’m likely going to be a”
dead man because of
“
you, so why don’t you just keep all your fucking”
self-indulgent

(picture of a spoiled-looking kid with his lower lip stuck out)
“rationalizing bullshit”
to yourself.
Henry stared at him, shocked and stunned. When was the last time someone had
talked to him that way? The answer was probably never.
“I only care about one thing,” Owen said. His face was pale and strained and

exhausted. “I want to find your Typhoid Jonesy and stop him. All right? Fuck your precious tender feelings, fuck how tired you are, and fuck you. I’m here.”
“All right,” Henry said.
“I don’t need lessons in morality from a guy planning to blow his overeducated, self-
indulgent brains out.”
“Okay.”
“So fuck
your
mother and die.”
Silence inside the Humvee. Nothing from outside but the monotonous vacuum-
cleaner shriek of the wind.

At last Henry said, “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll fuck
your
mother, then die; you fuck
my
mother, then die. At least we’ll avoid the incest taboo.”
Owen began to smile. Henry smiled back.
Mat’re Jonesy and Mr Gray doing?
Owen asked Henry.
Can you tell?

Henry licked at his lips. The itching in his leg had largely stopped, but his tongue tasted like an old piece of shag rug. “No. They’re cut off. Gray’s responsible for that, probably. And your fearless leader? Kurtz? He’s getting closer, isn’t he?”
“Yeah. If we’re going to maintain any kind of lead on him at all, we better make this
quick.” “Then we will.” Owen scratched the red stuff on the side of his face, looked at the

bits of red that came off on his fingers, then got moving again.
Number 41, you said?
Yeah. Owen?
What?
I’m scared.
Of Duddits?
Sort of, yeah.
Why?
I don’t know.”
Henry looked at Owen bleakly.
I feel like there’s something wrong with him.
7
It was her after-midnight fantasy made real, and when the knock came at the door, Roberta was unable to get up. Her legs felt like water. The night was gone, but it had been

replaced by a pallid, creepy morning light that wasn’t much better, and they were out there, Pete and Beav, the dead ones had come for her son.
The fist fell again, booming, rattling the pictures on the walls.
One of them was a framed front page of the Derry
News,
the photo showing Duddits,

his friends, and Josie Rinkenhauer, all of them with their arms around each other, all of them grinning like mad (how well Duddits had looked in that picture, how strong and normal) below a headline reading HIGH-SCHOOL CHUMS PLAY DETECTIVE, FIND
MISSING GIRL.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
No,
she thought,
I’ll just sit here and eventually they’ll go away, they’ll have to go
away, because with dead people you have to invite them in and if I just sit tight
-

But then Duddits was running past her rocker-
running,
when these days just walking
wore him out, and his eyes were full of their old blazing brightness, such good boys they
had been and such happiness they had brought him, but now they were
dead,
they had come to him through the storm and they were
dead
-
“
Duddie, no!”

she screamed, but he paid her no attention. He rushed past that old framed picture-Duddits Cavell on the front page, Duddits Cavell a hero, would wonders never cease-and she heard what he was shouting just as he opened the door on the dying
storm:
“
Ennie! Ennie! ENNIE!”
8
Henry opened his mouth-to say what he never knew, because nothing came out. He
was thunderstruck, dumbstruck. This wasn’t Duddits, couldn’t be-it was some sickly uncle

or older brother, pale and apparently bald beneath his pushed-back Red Sox cap. There was stubble on his cheeks, crusts of blood around his nostrils, and deep dark circles beneath his eyes. And yet-
“
Ennie! Ennie! Ennie!”
The tall, pale stranger in the doorway threw himself into Henry’s arms with all of Duddie’s old extravagance, knocking him backward on the snowy step not by force of his

weight-he was as light as milkweed fluff-but simply because Henry was unprepared for the assault. If Owen hadn’t steadied him, he and Duddits would have gone tumbling into
the snow.
“
Ennie! Ennie!”
Laughing. Crying. Covering him with those big old Duddits smackeroos. Deep in the
storehouse of his memory, Beaver Clarendon whispered,
If you guys tell anybody he did
that…
And Jonesy:
Yeah, yeah, you’ll never chum with us again, ya fuckin wank.

It was Duddits, all right, kissing Henry’s byrus-speckled cheeks… but the pallor on
Duddits’s
cheeks, what was that? He was so thin-no, beyond thin,
gaunt-
and what was that? The blood in his nostrils, the smell drifting off his skin… not the smell that had been coming
from Becky Shue, not the smell of the overgrown cabin, but a deathly smell just the same.
And here was Roberta, standing in the hall beside a photograph of Duddits and Alfie

at the Derry Days carnival, riding the carousel, dwarfing their wild-eyed plastic horses and
laughing.
Didn’t go to Alfie’s funeral, but sent a card,
Henry thought, and loathed himself
She was wringing her hands together, her eyes full of tears, and although she had put
on weight at breast and hip, although her hair was now almost entirely gray, it was her, she was still she, but Duddits… oh boy,
Duddits…
Henry looked at her, his arms wrapped around the old friend who was still crying his

name. He patted at Duddits’s shoulder blade. It felt insubstantial beneath his palm, as fragile as the bone in a bird’s wing.
“Roberta,” he said. “Roberta, my God! What’s wrong with him?”
“ALL,” she said, and managed a wan smile. “Sounds like a laundry detergent,
doesn’t it? It stands for acute lymphocytic leukemia. He was diagnosed nine months ago,
and by then curing him was no longer an option. All we’ve been doing since then is fighting the clock.”

“Ennie!” Duddits exclaimed. The old goofy smile illuminated his gray and tired face.
“Ay ih, iffun-nay!”
“That’s right,” Henry said, and began to cry. “Same shit, different day.”
“I know why you’re here,” she said, “but don’t. Please, Henry.
I’m begging you. Don’t take my boy away from me. He’s dying.”
9
Kurtz was about to ask Perlmutter for an update on Underhill and his new friend-

Henry was the new friend’s name, Henry Devlin-when Pearly let out a long, ululating scream, his face turned up to the roof of the Humvee. Kurtz had helped a woman have a
baby in Nicaragua
(and they always call us the bad guys,
he thought sentimentally), and this scream reminded him of hers, heard on the shores of the beautiful La Juvena River.
“Hold on, Pearly!” Kurtz cried. “Hold on, buck! Deep breaths, now!”
“
Fuck you!”
Pearly screamed. “

Look what you got me into, you dirty cunt! FUCK
YOU!”
Kurtz did not hold this against him. Women said terrible things in childbirth, and while Pearly was definitely one of the fellas, Kurtz had an idea that he was going through
something as close to childbirth as any man had ever experienced. He knew it might be wise to put Perlmutter out of his misery-
“
You better not,”

Pearly groaned. Tears of pain were rolling down his red-bearded cheeks. “You better not, you lizard-skin old fuck.”
“Don’t you worry, laddie, Kurtz soothed, and patted Perlmutter’s shivering shoulder.
From ahead of them came the steady clanking rumble of the plow Kurtz had persuaded to
break trail for them (as gray light began to creep back into the world, their speed had risen
to a giddy thirty-five miles an hour). The plow’s taillights glowed like dirty red stars.

Kurtz leaned forward, looking at Perlmutter with bright-eyed interest. It was very
cold in the back seat of the Humvee because of the broken window, but for the moment Kurtz didn’t notice this. The front of Pearly’s coat was swelling outward like a balloon, and Kurtz once more drew his nine-millimeter,
“Boss, if he pops-”
Before Freddy could finish, Perlmutter produced a deafening fart. The stench was

immediate and enormous, but Pearly appeared not to notice. His head lolled back against
the seat, his eyes half-lidded, his expression one of sublime relief
“
Oh my fuckin GRANDMOTHER!”
Freddy cried, and cranked his window all the
way down despite the draft already coursing through the vehicle.
Fascinated, Kurtz watched Perlmutter’s distended belly deflate. Not yet, then. Not yet
and probably just as well. It was possible that the thing growing inside Perlmutter’s works

might come in handy. Not likely, but possible. All things served the Lord, said the Scripture, and that might include the shit-weasels.
“Hold on, soldier,” Kurtz said, patting Pearly’s shoulder with one hand and putting the nine on the seat beside him with the other. “You just hold on and think about the Lord.”
“Fuck the Lord,” Perlmutter said sullenly, and Kurtz was mildly amazed. He never

would have dreamed Perlmutter could have so much profanity in him.
Ahead of them, the plow’s taillights flashed bright and pulled over to the right side of
the road.
“Oh-oh,” Kurtz said.
“What should I do, boss?”
“Pull right in behind him,” Kurtz said. He spoke cheerfully, but picked the nine-
millimeter up off the seat again. “We’ll see what our new friend wants.” Although he believed he knew. “Freddy, what do you hear from our old friends? Are you picking them
up?”

Very reluctantly, Freddy said, “Only Owen. Not the guy with him or the guys they’re
chasing. Owen’s off the road. In a house. Talking with someone.”
“A house in Derry?”
“Yeah.”
And here came the plow’s driver, striding through the snow in great green gumrubber

boots and a hooded parka fit for an Eskimo. Wrapped around the lower part of his face was a vast woolen muffler, its ends flying out behind him in the wind, and Kurtz didn’t have to be telepathic to know the man’s wife or mother had made it for him.
The plowman leaned in the window and wrinkled his nose at the lingering aroma of

sulfur and ethyl alcohol. He looked doubtfully at Freddy, at the only-half-conscious Perlmutter, then at Kurtz in the back seat, who was leaning forward and looking at him with bright-eyed interest. Kurtz thought it prudent to hold his weapon beneath his left knee, at least for the time being.
“Yes, Cap’n?” Kurtz asked.
“I’ve had a radio message from a fella says his name is Randall.” The plowman

raised his voice to be heard over the wind. His accent was pure downeast Yankee.
“
Gen’rul
Randall. Claimed to be talkin to me by satellite relay straight from Cheyenne Mountain in Wyomin.”
“Name means nothing to me, Cap,” Kurtz said in the same bright tone-absolutely
ignoring Perlmutter, who groaned “You lie, you lie, you lie.”
The plow driver’s eyes flicked to him, then returned to Kurtz. “Fella gave me a code
phrase.
Blue exit.

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