Dreamcatcher

Pete nods again. Henry’s the head shrinker, but as Pete has told him more than once,
you have to know a fair amount about how the human mind works in order to succeed at
selling. Now he’s pleased to see that his new friend is calming down a little. That’s good.
He has an idea he can help her, if she’ll let him. He can feel that little click wanting to happen. He likes that little click. It’s no big deal, it’ll never make his fortune, but he likes it.

“And I also went across the street to Penny’s. I bought a scarf… because of the rain,
you know… “She touches her hair. “Then I went back to my car… and my son-of-a-
damn-bitch keys were gone! I retraced my steps… went backward from Renny’s to the
store to the pharmacy, and they’re not anywhere! And now I’m going to miss my
appointment!”
Distress is creeping back into her voice. Her eyes go to the clock again. Creeping for

him; racing for her. That’s the difference between people, Pete reflects. One of them, anyway. “Calm down,” he says. “Calm down just a few seconds and listen to me. We’re
going to walk back to the drugstore, you and I, and look for your car-keys.” “They’re not
there! I checked all the aisles, I looked on the shelf where I got the aspirin, I asked the girl at the counter-”

“It won’t hurt to check again,” he says. He’s walking her toward the door now, his hand pressed lightly against the small of her back, getting her to walk with him. He likes
the smell of her perfume and he likes her hair even more, yes he does. And if it looks this
pretty on a rainy day, how might it look when the sun is out?
“My appointment-”

“You’ve still got forty minutes,” he says. “With the summer tourists gone, it only takes twenty to drive up to Fryeburg. We’ll take ten minutes to try and find your keys, and
if we can’t, I’ll drive you myself.”
She peers at him doubtfully.
He looks past her, into one of the other offices. “Dick!” he calls.
“Hey, Dickie M.!”
Dick Macdonald looks up from a clutter of invoices.
“Tell this lady I’m safe to drive her up to Fryeburg, should it come to that.”

“Oh, he’s safe enough, ma’am,” Dick says. “Not a sex maniac or a fast driver. He’ll
just try to sell you a new car.”
“I’m a tough sell, she says, smiling a little, “but I guess you’re on.
“Cover my phone, would you, Dick?” Pete asks.
“Oh yeah, that’ll be a hardship. Weather like this, I’ll be beatin the customers off with
a stick.”
Pete and the brunette-Trish-go out, cross the alley, and walk the forty or so feet back

to Main Street. The Bridgton Pharmacy is the second building on their left. The drizzle has
thickened; now it’s almost rain. The woman puts her new scarf up over her hair and glances at Pete, who’s bare-headed. “You’re getting all wet,” she says.
“I’m from upstate,” he says. “We grow em tough up there.”
“You think you can find them, don’t you?” she asks.
Pete shrugs. “Maybe. I’m good at finding things. Always have been.”
“Do you know something 1 don’t?” she asks.

No bounce, no play
, he thinks.
I know that much, ma’am
.
“Nope,” he says. “Not yet.”
They walk into the pharmacy, and the bell over the door jingles. The girl behind the
counter looks up from her magazine. At three-twenty on a rainy late September afternoon,
the pharmacy is deserted except for the three of them down here and Mr Diller up behind
the prescription counter.
“Hi, Pete,” the counter-girl says.
“Yo, Cathy, how’s it going?”

“Oh, you know-slow.” She looks at the brunette. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I checked
around again, but I didn’t find them. “‘That’s all right,” Trish says with a wan smile. “This
gentleman has agreed to give me a ride to my appointment.” “Well,” Cathy says, “Pete’s
okay, but I don’t think I’d go so far as to call him a
gentleman
.”

“You want to watch what you say, darlin,” Pete tells her with a grin. “There’s a Rexall just down 302 in Naples.” Then he glances up at the clock. Time has sped up for
him, too. That’s okay, that makes a nice change.
Pete looks back at Trish. “You came here first. For the aspirin.”
“That’s right. I got a bottle of Anacin. Then I had some time to kill, so-”
“I know, you got a coffee next door at Christie’s, then went across to Renny’s.”
“Yes.

“You didn’t take your aspirin with hot coffee, did you?”
“No, I had a bottle of Poland water in my car.” She points out the window at a green
Taurus. “I took them with some of that. But I checked the seat, too, Mr… Pete. I also checked the ignition.” She gives him an impatient look which says,
I know what you’re
thinking: daffy woman
.

“Just one more question,” he says. “If I find your car-keys, would you go out to dinner with me? I could meet you at The West Wharf. It’s on the road between here and-”
“I know The West Wharf,” she says, looking amused in spite of her distress. At the
counter, Cathy isn’t even pretending to read her magazine. This is better than Redbook, by
far. “How do
you
know I’m not married, or something?”
“No wedding ring,” he replies promptly, although he hasn’t even looked at her hands

yet, not closely, anyway. “Besides, I was just talking about fried clams, cole slaw, and
strawberry shortcake, not a lifetime commitment.”
She looks at the clock. “Pete… Mr Moore… I’m afraid that at this minute I have
absolutely no interest in flirting. If you want to give me a ride, I would be very happy to
have dinner with you. But-”
“That’s good enough for me,” he says. “But you’ll be driving your own car, I think,

so I’ll meet you. Would five-thirty be okay?”Yes, fine, but-”
“Okay.” Pete feels happy. That’s good; happy is good. A lot of days these last couple
of years he hasn’t felt within a holler of happy, and he doesn’t know why. Too many late
and soggy nights cruising the bars along 302 between here and North Conway? Okay, but
is that all? Maybe not, but this isn’t the time to think about it. The lady has an appointment

to keep. If she keeps it and sells the house, who knows how lucky Pete Moore might get?
And even if he doesn’t get lucky, he’s going to be able to help her. He feels it.
“I’m going to do something a little weird now,” he says, “but don’t let it worry you,
okay? It’s just a little trick, like putting your finger under your nose to stop a sneeze or thumping your forehead when you’re trying to remember someone’s name. Okay?”
“Sure, I guess,” she says, totally mystified.

Pete closes his eyes, raises one loosely fisted hand in front of his face, then pops up
his index finger. He begins to tick it back and forth in front of him.
Trish looks at Cathy, the counter-girl. Cathy shrugs as if to say
Who knows?
“Mr Moore?” Trish sounds uneasy now. “Mr Moore, maybe I just ought to-”
Pete opens his eyes, takes a deep breath, and drops his hand. He looks past her, to the
door.
“Okay,” he says. “So you came in His eyes move as if watching her come in. “And

you went to the counter…” His eyes go there. “You asked, probably, “Which aisle’s the aspirin in?” Something like that.”
“Yes, I-”Only you got something, too.” He can see it on the candy-rack, a bright
yellow mark something like a handprint. “Snickers bar?” “Mounds.” Her brown eyes are
wide. “How did you know that?” “You got the candy,
then
you went up to get the aspirin.

He’s looking up Aisle 2 now. “After that you paid and went out… let’s go outside a minute. Seeya, Cathy.” Cathy only nods, looking at him with wide eyes.
Pete walks outside, ignoring the tinkle of the bell, ignoring the rain, which now really
is rain. The yellow is on the sidewalk, but fading. The rain’s washing it away. Still, he can
see it and it Pleases him to see it. That feeling of
click
. Sweet. It’s the line. It has been a long time since he’s seen it so clearly.

“Back to your car,” he says, talking to himself now. “Back to take a couple of your
aspirin with your water… “He crosses the sidewalk, slowly, to the Taurus. The woman walks behind him, eyes more worried than ever now. Almost frightened. “You opened the
door. You’ve got your purse… your keys… your aspirin… your candy… all this stuff…
juggling it around from hand to hand… and that’s when…” He bends, fishes in the water

flowing along the gutter, hand in it all the way up to the wrist, and brings something up.
He gives it a magician’s flourish. Keys flash silver in the dull day.
“… you dropped your keys.”
She doesn’t take them at first. She only gapes at him, as if he has performed an act of
witchcraft (warlock-craft, in his case, maybe) before her eyes.

“Go on,” he says, smile fading a little. “Take them. It wasn’t anything too spooky, you know. Mostly just deduction. I’m good at stuff like that. Hey, you should have me in
the car sometime when you’re lost. I’m great at getting unlost.”
She takes the keys, then. Quickly, being careful not to touch his fingers, and he knows right then that she isn’t going to meet him later. It doesn’t take any special gift to

figure that; he only has to look in her eyes, which are more frightened than grateful.
“Thank… thank you,” she says. All at once she’s measuring the space between them,
not wanting him to use too much of it up.
“Not a problem. Now don’t forget. The West Wharf, at five-thirty. Best fried clams in
this part of the state.” Keeping up the fiction. You have to keep it up, sometimes, no matter
how you feel. And although some of the joy has gone out of the afternoon, some is still

there; he has seen the line, and that always makes him feel good. It’s a minor trick, but it’s
nice to know it’s still there.
“Five-thirty,” she echoes, but as she opens her car door, the glance she throws back
over her shoulder is the kind you’d give to a dog that might bite if it got off its leash. She
is very glad she won’t be riding up to Fryeburg with him. Pete doesn’t need to be a mind-
reader to know that, either.

He stands there in the rain, watching her back out of the slant parking space, and when she drives away he tosses her a cheerful car-salesman’s wave. She gives him a distracted little flip of the fingers in return, and of course when he shows up at The West

Wharf (at five-fifteen, just to be Johnny on the spot, Just in case) she isn’t there and an hour later she’s still not there. He stays for quite awhile just the same, sitting at the bar and drinking beer, watching the traffic out on 302. He thinks he sees her go by without slowing at about five-forty, a green Taurus busting past in a rain which has now become
heavy, a green Taurus that might or might not be pulling a light yellow nimbus behind it

that fades at once in the graying air.
Same shit, different day
, he thinks, but now the joy is gone and the sadness is back,
the sadness that feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal. He lights a cigarette-in the old days, as a kid, he used to pretend to smoke but now he doesn’t have to pretend anymore-and orders another beer.
Milt brings it, but says, “You ought to lay some food on top of that, Peter.”

So Pete orders a plate of fried clams and even eats a few dipped in tartar sauce while
he drinks another couple of beers, and at some point, before moving on up the line to some
other joint where he isn’t so well-known, he tries to call Jonesy, down there in
Massachusetts. But Jonesy and Carla are enjoying the rare night out, he only gets the baby-sitter, who asks him if he wants to leave a message.

Pete almost says no, then reconsiders. “Just tell him Pete called. Tell him Pete said
SSDD.”
“S… S… D… D.” She is writing it down. “Will he know what-”
“Oh yeah,” Pete says, “he’ll know.”
By midnight he’s drunk in some New Hampshire dive, the Muddy Rudder or maybe
it’s the Ruddy Mother, he’s trying to tell some chick who’s as drunk as he is that once he

really believed he was going to be the first man to set foot on Mars, and although she’s nodding and saying yeah-yeah-yeah, he has an idea that all she understands is that she’d
like to get outside of one more coffee brandy before closing. And that’s okay. It doesn’t
matter. Tomorrow he’ll wake up with a headache but he’ll go in to work just the same and
maybe he’ll sell a car and maybe he won’t but either way things will go on. Maybe he’ll

sell the burgundy Thunderbird, goodbye, sweetheart. Once things were different, but now
they’re the same. He reckons he can live with that; for a guy like him, the rule of thumb is
just SSDD, and so fucking what. You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less
than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER, sign
on it.
In November he’ll go hunting with his friends, and that’s enough to took forward

to… that, and maybe a big old sloppy-lipstick blowjob from this drunk chick out in his car. Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.
Dreams are for kids.
1998: HENRY TREATS A COUCH MAN
The room is dim. Henry always keeps it that way when he’s seeing patients. It’s
interesting to him how few seem to notice it. He thinks it’s because their states of mind are
so often dim to start with. Mostly he sees neurotics (
The wood’s are full of em

, as he once told Jonesy while they were in, ha-ha, the woods) and it is his assessment-completely unscientific-that their problems act as a kind of polarizing shield between them and the rest of the world. As the neurosis deepens, so does the interior darkness. Mostly what he
feels for his patients is a kind of distanced sympathy. Sometimes pity. A very few of them
make him impatient. Barry Newman is one of those.

Patients who enter Henry’s office for the first time are presented with a choice they
usually don’t register as a choice. When they come in they see a pleasant (if rather dim)
room, with a fireplace to the left. It’s equipped with one of those everlasting logs, steel disguised as birch with four cunningly placed gas jets beneath. Beside the fireplace is a wing chair, where Henry always sits beneath an excellent reproduction of Van Gogh’s

“Marigolds”. (Henry sometimes tells colleagues that every psychiatrist should have at least one Van Gogh in his or her consulting space.) Across the room is an easy chair and a
couch. Henry is always interested to see which one a new patient will choose. Certainly he
has been plying the trade long enough to know that what a patient chooses the first time is
what he or she will choose almost every time. There is a paper in this. Henry knows there

is, but he cannot isolate the thesis. And in any case, he finds he has less interest these days in such things as papers and journals and conventions and colloquia. They used to matter,
but now things have changed. He is sleeping less, eating less, laughing less, too. A darkness has come into his own life that polarizing filter-and Henry finds he has no objection to this. Less glare.
Barry Newman was a couch man from the first, and Henry has never once made the

mistake of believing this has anything to do with Barry’s mental condition. The couch is
simply more comfortable for Barry, although Henry sometimes has to give him a hand to
get Barry up from it when his fifty minutes have expired. Barry Newman stands five-seven and weighs four hundred and twenty pounds. This makes the couch his friend.
Barry Newman’s sessions tend to be long, droning accounts of each week’s

adventures in gastronomy. Not that Barry is a discriminating eater, oh, no, Barry is the antithesis of that. Barry eats anything that happens to stray into his orbit. Barry is an eating machine. And his memory, on this subject, at least, is eidetic. He is to food what Henry’s old friend Pete is to directions and geography.
Henry has almost given up trying to drag Barry away from the trees and make him

examine the forest. Partly this is because of Barry’s soft but implacable desire to discuss
food in its specifics; partly it’s because Henry doesn’t like Barry and never has. Barry’s parents are dead. Dad went when Barry was sixteen, Morn when he was twenty-two. They
left a very large estate, but it is in trust until Barry is thirty. He can get the principal then…
if he continues in therapy. If not, the principal will remain in trust until he is fifty.

Henry doubts Barry Newman will make fifty.
Barry’s blood pressure (he has told Henry this with some pride) is one-ninety over
one-forty.
Barry’s whole cholesterol number is two hundred and ninety; he is a lipid goldmine.
I’m a walking stroke, I’m a walking heart attack

, he has told Henry, speaking with the gleeful solemnity of one who can state the hard, cold truth because he knows in his soul that such ends are not meant for him, not for him, no, not for him.
“I had two of those Burger King X-tras for lunch,” he is saying now. “I love those,
because the cheese is actually hot.” His fleshy lips-oddly small lips for such a large man,

the lips of a perch-tighten and tremble, as if tasting that exquisitely hot cheese. “I also had a shake, and on my way back home I had a couple of Mallomars. I took a nap, and when I
got up I microwaved a whole package of those frozen waffles. “Leggo my Eggo!”” he cries, then laughs. It is the laugh of a man in the grip of fond recall-the sight of a sunset,
the firm feel of a woman’s breast through a thin silk shirt (not that Barry has, in Henry’s

estimation, ever felt such a thing), or the packed warmth of beach sand.
“Most people use the toaster oven for their Eggo waffles,” Barry continues, “but I find that makes them too crispy. The microwave just gets them hot and soft. Hot… and soft.” He smacks his little perch lips. “I had a certain amount of guilt about eating the whole package.” He throws this last in almost as an aside, as if remembering Henry has a

job to do here. He throws out similar little treats four or five times in every session… and
then it’s back to the food.
Barry has now reached Tuesday evening. Since this is Friday, there are plenty of
meals and snacks still to go. Henry lets his mind drift. Barry is his last appointment of the
day. When Barry has finished taking caloric inventory, Henry is going back to his
apartment to pack. He’ll be up tomorrow at Six A.M… and sometime between seven and

eight, Jonesy will pull into his driveway. They will pack their stuff into Henry’s old Scout,
which he now keeps around solely for their autumn hunting trips, and by eight-thirty the
two of them will be on their way north. Along the way they will pick up Pete in Bridgton,
and then the Beav, who still lives close to Derry. By evening they will be at Hole in the
Wall up in the Jefferson Tract, playing cards in the living room and listening to the wind

hoot around the eaves. Their guns will be leaning in the corner of the kitchen, their hunting licenses hung over the hook on the back door.
He will be with his friends, and that always feels like coming home. For a week, that

polarizing filter may lift a little bit. They will talk about old times, they will laugh at Beaver’s outrageous profanities, and if one or more of them actually shoots a deer, that will be an extra added attraction. Together they are still good. Together they still defeat time.
Far in the background, Barry Newman drones on and on. Pork chops and mashed

potatoes and corn on the cob dripping with butter and Pepperidge Farm chocolate cake and a bowl of Pepsi Cola with four scoops of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream
floating in it and eggs fried eggs boiled eggs poached…
Henry nods in all the right places and hears it all without really listening. This is an
old psychiatric skill.
God knows Henry and his old friends have their problems. Beaver is terrible when it

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