Dreamcatcher

shoot one so you can bring it down with one shot and it won’t suffer. (“Except my father
says that animals don’t suffer the way people do when they get hurt,” Jonesy tells them.
“He says God made them different that way so it would be okay for us to hunt them.”) They laugh and squabble and argue over who is the most likely to blow lunch when it comes time to gut their kills, and The Retard Academy falls farther and farther behind.

Ahead of them, on their side of the street, looms the square red brick building where Tracker Brothers used to do business.
“If anyone hurls, it won’t be me,” Beaver boasts. “I seen deerguts a thousand times
and they don’t bother me at all. I remember once-” “Hey you guys,” Jonesy breaks in, suddenly excited. “You want to see Tina Jean Schlossinger’s pussy?”
“Who’s Tina Jean Sloppinger?” Pete asks, but he is already intrigued. Seeing
any

pussy seems like a great idea to him; he is always looking at his Dad’s
Penthouse
and
Playboy
magazines, which his Dad keeps out in his workshop, behind the big Craftsman
toolbox. Pussy is very interesting. It doesn’t give him a boner and make him feel sexy the
way bare tits do, but he guesses that’s because he’s still a kid.
And pussy is interesting.
“
Schlossinger
,” Jonesy says, laughing. “
Schlossinger

, Petesky. The Schlossingers live two blocks over from me, and-” He stops suddenly, struck by an important question which
must be answered immediately. He turns to Henry. “Are the Schlossingers Jews or
Republicans?”
Now it’s Henry laughing at Jonesy, but without any malice. “Technically, I think it’s
possible to be both at the same time… or neither one.” Henry pronounces the word
nyther
instead of
neether

, which impresses Pete. It sounds smart as a motherfucker, and he reminds himself to say it that way from now on-
nyther, nyther, nyther
, he tells himself…
but knows somehow that he win forget, that he is one of those people condemned to say
neether
all his life.
“Never mind religion and politics,” Henry says, still laughing. “If you’ve got a
picture of Tina Jean Schlossinger showing her pussy, I want to see it.”

The Beav, meanwhile, has become visibly excited-cheeks flushed, eyes bright, and he
goes to stick a fresh toothpick in his mouth before the old one is even half finished. The
zippers on his jacket, the one Beaver’s older brother wore during his four or five years of
Fonzie-worship, jingle faster.
“Is she blonde?” the Beav asks. “Blonde, and in high school? Super good-looking?
Got-” He holds his hands out in front of his chest, and when Jonesy nods, grinning, Beaver

turns to Pete and blurts: “This year’s Homecoming Queen up at the high school, ringmeat!
Her picture was in the fuckin paper! Up on that float with Richie Grenadeau?”
“Yes, but the fucking Tigers lost the Homecoming game and Grenadeau ended up
with a broken nose,” Henry says. “First Derry High team ever to play a Class-A team from
southern Maine and those fools-”
“Fuck the Tigers,” Pete breaks in. He has more interest in high school football than

he does in the dreaded x, but not much. Anyway, he’s got the girl placed now, remembers
the newspaper photo of her standing on the flower-decked bed of a pulp truck next to the
Tiger quarterback, both of them wearing tinfoil crowns, smiling, and waving to the crowd.
The girl’s hair fell around her face in big blowy Farrah Fawcett waves, and her gown was
strapless, showing the tops of her breasts.
For the first time in his life, Pete feels real lust-it is a meaty feeling, red and heavy,

that stiffens his prick, dries up the spit in his mouth, and makes it hard for him to think.
Pussy is interesting; the idea of seeing
local pussy, Homecoming Queen
pussy… that is a lot more than exciting. That is, as the Derry
News’s
film critic sometimes says about movies she especially likes, “a must-see.”
“Where?” he asks Jonesy breathlessly. He is imagining seeing this girl, this Tina Jean

Schlossinger, waiting on the corner for the school bus, just standing there giggling with her girlfriends, not having the slightest idea that the boy walking past has seen what is under her skirt or her jeans, that he knows if the hair on her pussy is the same color as the
hair on her head. Pete is on fire. “Where is it?”

“There,” Jonesy says, and points at the red brick box that is Tracker Brothers old freight and storage depot. There is ivy crawling up the sides, but this has been a cold fall
and most of the leaves have already died and turned black. Some of the windows are broken and the rest are bleary. Looking at the place gives Pete a little chin. Partly because

the big kids, the high-school kids and even some that are beyond high school, play baseball in the vacant lot behind the building, and big kids like to beat up little kids, who
knows why, it relieved the monotony or something. But this isn’t the big deal, because baseball is over for the year and the big kids have probably moved on to Strawford Park,

where they will play two-hand touch football until the snow flies. (Once the snow flies, they will beat each others” brains in playing hockey with old friction-taped sticks.) No, the
big deal is that kids sometimes disappear in Derry, Derry is funny that way, and when they
do
disappear, they are often last seen in out-of-the-way places like the deserted Tracker Brothers depot. No one talks about this unpleasant fact, but everyone knows about it.

Yet a pussy… not some fictional
Penthouse
pussy but the actual muff of an actual girl
from town… that would be something to see, all right. That would be a fuckin pisser.
“Tracker Brothers?” Henry says with frank disbelief They have stopped now, are
standing together in a little clump not far from the building while the last of the retards go
moaning and goggling by on the other side of the street. “I think the world of you, Jonesy,
don’t get me wrong-the fucking
world-

but why would there be a picture of Tina Jean’s pussy in there?”I don’t know,” Jonesy said, “but Davey Trask saw it and said it was her.”
“I dunno about goin in there, man,” Beaver says. “I mean, I’d love to see Tina Jean Slophanger’s pussy-”
“
Schlossinger
-”
“-but that place has been empty at least since we were in the fifth grade-”
“Beav-”
“-and I bet it’s full of rats.”
“
Beav
-”
But Beav intends to have his entire say. “Rats get rabies,” he says. “They get rabies

up the old wazoo.”
“We don’t have to go in,” Jonesy says, and all three look at him with renewed
interest. This is, as the fellow said when he saw the black-haired Swede, a Norse of a different color.
Jonesy sees he has their full attention, nods, goes on. “Davey says all you have to do
is go around on the driveway side and look in the third or fourth window. It used to be Phil

and Tony Tracker’s office. There’s still a bulletin board on the wall. And Davey said the
only two things on the bulletin board are a map of New England showing all the truck routes, and a picture of Tina jean Schlossinger showing all of her pussy.”
They look at him with breathless interest, and Pete asks the question which has
occurred to all of them. “Is she bollocky?”
“No,” Jonesy admits. “Davey says you can’t even see her tits, but she’s holding her

skirt up and she isn’t wearing pants and you can see
it
, just as clear as day.”
Pete is disappointed that this year’s Tiger Homecoming Queen isn’t bollocky bare-
ass, but the thing about how she’s holding her skirt up inflames them all, feeding some primal, semi-secret notion of how sex really works. A girl
could
hold her skirt up, after all; any girl could.
Not even Henry asks any more questions. The only question comes from the Beav,

who asks if Jonesy is
sure
they won’t have to go inside in order to see. And they are already moving in the direction of the driveway running down the far side of the building
toward the vacant lot, powerful as a spring tide in their nearly mindless motion.
5
Pete finished the second beer and heaved the bottle deep into the woods. Feeling

better now, he got cautiously to his feet and dusted the snow from his ass. And was his knee a little bit looser? He thought maybe it was. Looked awful, of course-looked like he
had a little model of the Minnesota goddam Metrodome under there-but felt a bit better.
Still, he walked carefully, swinging his plastic sack of beer in short arcs beside him. Now
that the small but powerful voice insisting that he
had
to have a beer, just goddam
had

to, had been silenced, he thought of the woman with new solicitude, hoping she hadn’t
noticed he was gone. He would walk slowly, he would stop to massage his knee every five
minutes or so (and maybe talk to it, encourage it, a crazy idea, but he was out here on his
own and it couldn’t hurt), and he would get back to the woman. Then he would have another beer. He did not look back at the overturned Scout, did not see that he had written

DUDDITS in the snow, over and over again, as he sat thinking of that day back in 1978.
Only Henry had asked why the Schlossinger girl’s picture would be there in the empty office of an empty freight depot, and Pete thought now that Henry had only asked
because he had to fulfill his role as Group Skeptic. Certainly he’d only asked once; as for
the rest of them, they had simply
believed

, and why not? At thirteen, Pete had still spent half his life believing in Santa Claus. And besides-Pete stopped near the top of the big hill, not because he was out of breath or because
his leg was cramping up, but because he could suddenly feel a low humming sound in his
head, sort of like an electrical transformer, only with a kind of cycling quality to it, a low
thud-thud-thud

. And no, it wasn’t “suddenly” as in “suddenly started up’; he had an idea the sound had been there for awhile and he was just becoming aware of it. And he had started to think some funny stuff. All that about Henry’s cologne, for instance… and Marcy. Someone named Marcy. He didn’t think he knew anyone named Marcy but the
name was suddenly in his head, as in
Marcy I need you
or
Marcy I want you
or maybe

Zounds, Marcy, bring the gasogene
.
He stood where he was, licking his dry lips, the bag of beer hanging straight down from his hand now, its pendulum motion stilled. He looked up in the sky, suddenly sure the lights would be there… and they were there, only just two of them now, and very faint.
“Tell Marcy to make them give me a shot,” Pete said, enunciating each word
carefully in the stillness, and knew they were exactly the right words. Right
why

or right
how
he couldn’t say, but yes, those were the words in his head. Was it the click, or had the lights caused those thoughts? Pete couldn’t say for sure.
“Maybe nyther,” he said.
Pete realized the last of the snow had stopped. The world around him was only three
colors: the deep gray of the sky, the deep green of the firs, and the perfect unblemished white of the new snow. And hushed.

Pete cocked his head first to one side and then to the other, listening. Yes, hushed.
Nothing. No sound in the world and the humming noise had stopped as completely as the
snow. When he looked up, he saw that the pale, mothlike glow of the lights was also gone.
“Marcy?” he said, as if calling someone. It occurred to him that Marcy might be the
name of the woman who had caused them to wreck, but he dismissed the idea. That

woman’s name was Becky, he knew it as surely as he had known the name of the real estate woman that time. Marcy was just a word now, and nothing about it called to him.
Probably he’d just had a brain-cramp. Wouldn’t be the first time.
He finished climbing the hill and started down the other side, his thoughts returning
to that day in the fall of 1978, the day they had met Duddits.
He was almost back to the place where the road leveled when his knee abruptly let

go, not locking up this time but seeming to explode like a pine knot in a hot fire.
Pete pitched forward into the snow. He didn’t hear the Bud bottles break inside the bag-all but two of them. He was screaming too loudly.
Chapter Six
DUDDITS, PART TWO
1

Henry started off in the direction of the camp at a quick walk, but as the snow subsided to isolated flurries and the wind began to die, he upped the walk to a steady, clocklike jog. He had been jogging for years, and the pace felt natural enough. He might
have to pull up for awhile, walk or even rest, but he doubted it. He had run road-races longer than nine miles, although not for a couple of years and never with four inches of

snow underfoot. Still, what was there to worry about? Falling down and busting a hip?
Maybe having a heart attack? At thirty-seven a heart attack seemed unlikely, but even if he
had been a prime candidate for one, worrying about it would have been ludicrous,
wouldn’t it? Considering what he was planning? So what was there to worry about?
Jonesy and Beaver, that was what. On the face of it that seemed as ludicrous as

worrying about suffering a catastrophic cardiac outage here in the middle of nowhere-the
trouble was behind him, with Pete and that strange, semi-comatose woman, not up ahead
at Hole in the Wall… except there
was
trouble at Hole in the Wall, bad trouble. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did and he accepted the knowing. Even before he started
encountering the animals, all hurrying by and none giving him more than the most cursory
glance, he knew that.

Once or twice he glanced up into the sky, looking for more foo-lights, but there were
none to be seen and after that he just looked straight ahead, sometimes having to zig or zag to keep out of the way of the animals. They weren’t quite stampeding, but their eyes
had an odd, spooky look that Henry had never seen before.
Once he had to skip handily to keep from being upended by a pair of hurrying foxes.
Eight more miles

, he told himself. It became a jogging mantra, different from the ones that usually went through his head when he was running (nursery rhymes were the most common), but not that different-same idea, really.
Eight more miles, eight more miles
to Banbury Cross
. No Banbury Cross, though, just Mr Clarendon’s old camp-Beaver’s camp, now-and no cock horse to get him there. What
was

a cock horse, anyway? Who knew? And what in Christ’s name was happening out here-the lights, the slow-motion
stampede (dear God, what was that in the woods off to his left, was that a fucking bear?),
the woman in the road, just sitting there with most of her teeth and most of her brains missing? And those
farts

, dear God. The only thing he’d ever smelled even remotely like it was the breath of a patient he’d had once, a schizophrenic with intestinal cancer. Always
that smell, an internist friend had told Henry when Henry tried to describe it.
They can
brush their teeth a dozen times a day, use Lavoiis every hour on the hour, and that smell
still comes through. It’s the smell of the body eating itself, because that’s all cancer is

when you take the diagnostic masks off: autocannibalism.
Seven more miles, seven more miles, and all the animals are running, all the animals
are headed for Disneyland. And when they get there they’ll form a conga line and sing
“It’s a Small World After All.”
The steady, muted thud of his booted feet. The feel of his glasses bouncing up and down on the bridge of his nose. His breath coming out in balloons of cold vapor. But he

felt warm now, felt good, those endorphins kicking in. Whatever was wrong with him, it
was no shortage of those; he was suicidal but by no means dysthytmic.
That at least some of his problem-the physical and emotional emptiness that was like
a near-whiteout in a blizzard-
was

physical, hormonal, he had no doubt. That the problem could be addressed if not entirely corrected by pills he himself had prescribed by the bushel… he had no doubt of that, either, But like Pete, who undoubtedly knew there was a
rehab and years of AA meetings in his most plausible future, Henry did not
want
to be fixed, was somehow convinced that the fix would be a he, something that would lessen him.

He wondered if Pete had gone back for the beer, and knew the answer was probably
yes. Henry would have suggested bringing it along if he’d thought of it, making such a risky return trip (risky for the woman as well as Pete himself) unnecessary, but he’d been
pretty freaked out-and the beer hadn’t even crossed his mind. He bet it had crossed Pete’s,
though. Could Pete make it roundtrip on that sprung knee? It was
possible, but Henry would not have bet on it.

They’re back!
the woman had
screamed, looking up at the sky.
They’re back! They’re back!
Henry put his head down and jogged a little faster.
2
Six more miles, six more to Banbury Cross
. Was it down to six yet, or was he being

optimistic? Giving those old endorphins a little too much free rein? Well, so what if he was? Optimism couldn’t hurt at this point. The snow had almost stopped falling and the tide of animals had slackened, and that was also good-What wasn’t so good was the thoughts in his head, some of which seemed less and less like his own. Becky, for instance, who was Becky? The name had begun to resonate in his head, had become

another part of the mantra. He supposed it was the woman he’d just avoided killing.
Whose little girl are you? Becky, why I’m Becky, I’m pretty Becky Shue.
Except she hadn’t been pretty, not pretty at all. One heavyset smelly mama was what
she’d been, and now she was in Pete Moore’s less than reliable care.
Six. Six. Six more miles to Banbury Cross
.
Jogging steadily-as steadily as was possible, given the footing-and hearing strange

voices in his head. Except only one of them was really strange, and that one wasn’t a voice
at all but a kind of hum with a rhythmic beat
(whose little girl, whose little girl, pretty Becky Shue)
caught in it. The rest were voices he knew, or voices his friends knew. One was a voice Jonesy had told him about, a voice he’d heard after his accident and associated with
all his pain:
Please stop, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy.
He heard Beaver’s voice:

Go look in the chamber pot.
Jonesy, answering:
Why don’t we just knock on the bathroom door and ask him how
he is?
A stranger’s voice saying that if he could just do a number two he’d be okay…
… only he was no stranger, he was Rick, pretty Becky’s friend Rick. Rick what?
McCarthy? McKinley? McKeen? Henry wasn’t sure, but he leaned toward McCarthy, like
Kevin McCarthy in that old horror movie about the pods from space that made themselves

look like people. One of Jonesy’s raves. Get a few drinks in him and mention that movie
and Jonesy would respond
with the key line at once: “
They’re here! They’re here!”
The woman, looking up at the sky and screaming
They’re back, they’re back
.
Dear Christ, there’d been nothing like this since they were kids and this was worse,
like picking up a power-line filled with voices instead of electricity.

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