Dreamcatcher

cps guys were now wearing nose-and-mouth masks. That had to take whatever fuck-you
was left.
“Boss?”
Almost
whining had given way to
actual
whining. The sight of American citizens standing behind barbed wire had apparently added to Melrose’s unease. “Boss, come on-why does the big boy want to see me? Big boy shouldn’t know a cook’s third even exists.”
“I don’t know,” Pearly replied. It was the truth.

Up ahead, standing at the head of what had been dubbed Eggbeater Alley, was Owen
Underhill and some guy from the motorpool. The motor-pool guy was almost shouting
into Underhill’s ear in order to make himself heard over the racket of the idling helicopters. Surely, Perlmutter thought, they’d shut the choppers down soon; nothing was
going to fly in this shit, an early-season blizzard that Kurtz called “our gift from God”.

When he said stuff like that, you couldn’t tell if Kurtz really meant it or was just being ironic. He always
sounded
like he meant it… but then sometimes he would laugh. The kind of laugh that made Archie Perlmutter nervous. In the movie, Kurtz would be played
by James Woods. Or maybe Christopher Walken. Neither one of them looked like Kurtz,
but had George C. Scott looked like Patton? Case closed.

Perlmutter abruptly detoured toward Underhill. Melrose tried to follow and went on
his ass, cursing. Perlmutter tapped Underhill on his shoulder, then hoped his mask would
at least partially conceal his expression of surprise when the other man turned. Owen Underhill looked as if he had aged ten years since stepping off the Millinocket School Department bus.
Leaning forward, Pearly shouted over the wind: “Kurtz in fifteen! Don’t

forget!‘Underhill gave him an impatient wave to say he wouldn’t, and turned back to the
motor-pool guy. Perlmutter had him placed now; Brodsky, his name was. The men called
him Dawg.
Kurtz’s command post, a humongous Winnebago (if this were a movie-set, it would
be the star’s home away from home, or perhaps Jimmy Cameron’s), was just ahead. Pearly
picked up the pace, facing boldly forward into the
flick-flick-flick

of the snow. Melrose scurried to catch up, brushing snow off his coverall.
“C’mon, Skipper,” he pleaded. “Don’tcha have any idea?”
“No,” Perlmutter said. He had no clue as to why Kurtz would want to see a cook’s
third with everything up and running in high gear. But he thought both of them knew it couldn’t be anything good.
2

Owen turned Emil Brodsky’s head, placed the bulb of his mask against the man’s ear, and said: “Tell me again. Not all of it, Just about the part you called the mind-fuck.”
Brodsky didn’t argue but took ten seconds or so to arrange his thoughts. Owen gave it
to him. There was his appointment with Kurtz, and debriefing after that-plenty of crew, reams of paperwork-and God alone knew what gruesome tasks to follow, but he sensed this was important.

Whether or not he would tell Kurtz remained to be seen. At last Brodsky turned
Owen’s head, placed the bulb of his own mask against Owen’s car, and began to talk. The
story was a little more detailed this time, but essentially the same, He had been walking
across the field next to the store, talking to Cambry beside him and to an approaching fuel-
supply convoy at the same time, when all at once he felt as if his mind had been hijacked.

He had been in a cluttery old shed with someone he couldn’t quite see. The man wanted to
get a snowmobile going, and couldn’t. He needed the Dawg to tell him what was wrong
with it.
“I asked him to open the cowling!” Brodsky shouted into Owen’s ear. “He did, and
then it seemed like I was looking through his eyes… but with my
mind
, do you see?”
Owen nodded.
“I could see right away what was wrong, someone had taken the plugs out. So I told

the guy to look around, which he did. Which we both did. And there they were, in a jar of
gasoline on the table. My Dad used to do the same thing with the plugs from his Lawnboy
and his rototiller when the cold weather came.”
Brodsky paused, clearly embarrassed either by what he was saying or how he
imagined it must sound. Owen, who was fascinated, gestured for him to go on.
“There ain’t much more. I told him to fish em out, dry em off, and pop em in. It was

like a billion times I’ve helped some guy work on somethin except I wasn’t
there-
I was
here
. None of it was happening.”
Owen said: “What next?” Bellowing to be heard over the engines, but the two of
them still as private as a priest and his customer in a church confessional.
“Started up first crank. I told him to check the gas while he was at it, and there was a
full tank. He said thanks.” Brodsky shook his head wonderingly. “And I said, No problem,

boss. Then I kind of thumped back into my own head and I was just walking along. You
think I’m crazy?”
“No. But I want you to keep this to yourself for the time being.” Under his mask, Brodsky’s lips spread in a grin. “Oh man, no problem there, either. I just… well, we’re supposed to report anything unusual, that’s the directive, and I thought-” Quickly, not giving Brodsky time to think, Owen rapped: “What was his name?” “Jonesy Three,”

Dawg replied, and then his eyes widened in surprise. “Holy shit! I didn’t know I
knew that.”
“Is that some sort of Indian name, do you think? Like Sonny Sixkiller or Ron Nine
Moons?”
“Coulda been, but…” Brodsky paused, thinking, then burst out: “It was awful! Not
when it was happening, but later on… thinking about it… it was like being…” He dropped
his voice. “Like being raped, sir.”
“Let it go,” Owen said. “You must have a few things to do?”
Brodsky smiled. “Only a few thousand.”

“Then get started.”
“Okay.” Brodsky took a step away, then turned back. Owen was looking toward the
corral, which had once held horses and now held men. Most of the detainees were in the
barn, and all but one of the two dozen or so out here were huddled up together, as if for
comfort. The one who stood apart was a tall, skinny drink of water wearing big glasses that made him look sort of like an owl. Brodsky looked from the doomed owl to

Underhill. “You’re not gonna get me in hack over this, are you? Send me to see the shrink?” Unaware, of course, both of them unaware that the skinny guy in the old-fashioned horn-rims
was
a shrink.
“Not a ch-” Owen began. Before he could finish, there was a gunshot from Kurtz’s
Winnebago and someone began to scream. “Boss?” Brodsky whispered. Owen couldn’t

hear him over the contending motors; he read the word off Brodsky’s lips. And: “Ohh, fuck.”
“Go on, Dawg,” Owen said. “Not your business.”
Brodsky looked at him a moment longer, wetting his lips inside his mask. Owen gave
him a nod, trying to project an air of confidence, of command, of everything’s-under-control. Maybe it worked, because Brodsky returned the nod and started away.
From the Winnebago with the hand-lettered sign on the door (THE BUCK STOPS

HERE), the screaming continued. As Owen started that way, the man standing by himself
in the compound spoke to him. “Hey! Hey, you! Stop a minute, I need to talk to you!”
I’ll bet,
Underhill thought, not slowing his pace.
I bet you’ve got a whale of a tale to
tell and a thousand reasons why you should be let out of here right now.
“Overhill? No,
Underhill.
That’s your name, isn’t it? Sure it is. I have to talk to you-it’s important to both of us!”

Owen stopped in spite of the screaming from the Winnebago, which was breaking up
into hurt sobs now. Not good, but at least it seemed that no one had been killed. He took a
closer look at the man in the spectacles. Skinny as a rail and shivering in spite of the down
parka he was wearing.
“It’s important to Rita,” the skinny man called over the contending roar of the
engines. “To Katrina, too.” Speaking the names seemed to sap the geeky guy, as if he had

drawn them up like stones from some deep well, but in his shock at hearing the names of
his wife and daughter from this stranger’s lips, Owen barely noticed. The urge to go to the
man and ask him how he knew those names was strong, but he was currently out of time… he had an appointment. And just because no one had been killed yet didn’t mean
no one
would
be killed.
Owen gave the man behind the wire a final look, marking his face, and then hurried

on toward the Winnebago with the sign on the door.
3
Perlmutter had read
Heart of Darkness,
had seen
Apocalypse Now,
and had on many occasions thought that the name Kurtz was simply a little too convenient. He would have
bet a hundred dollars (a great sum for a non-wagering artistic fellow such as himself) that
it wasn’t the boss’s real name-that the boss’s real name was Arthur Holsapple or Dagwood
Elgart, maybe even Paddy Maloney. Kurtz? Unlikely. It was almost surely an affectation,

as much a prop as George Patton’s pearl-handled.45. The men, some of whom had been
with Kurtz since Desert Storm (Archie Perlmutter didn’t go back nearly that far), thought
he was one crazy motherfucker, and so did Perlmutter… crazy like Patton had been crazy.
Crazy like a fox, in other words. Probably when he was shaving in the morning he looked
at his reflection and practiced saying “The horror, the horror” in just the right Marlon Brando whisper.
So Pearly felt disquiet but no

unusual
disquiet as he escorted Cook’s Third Melrose
into the over-warm command trailer. And Kurtz looked pretty much okay. The skipper
was sitting in a cane rocking chair in the living-room area. He had removed his coverall-it
hung on the door through which Perlmutter and Melrose had entered-and received them in
his longjohns. From one post of the rocking chair his pistol hung by its belt, not a pearl-
handled.45 but a nine-millimeter automatic.

All the electronic gear was rebounding. On Kurtz’s desk the fax hummed constantly,
piling up paper. Every fifteen seconds or so, Kurtz’s iMac cried “You’ve got mail!” in its
cheery robot voice. Three radios, all turned low, crackled and hopped with transmissions.
Mounted on the fake pine behind the desk were two framed photographs. Like the sign on
the door, the photos went with Kurtz everywhere. The one on the left, titled

INVESTMENT, showed an angelic young fellow in a Boy Scout uniform, right hand
raised in the three-fingered Boy Scout salute. The one on the right, labeled DIVIDEND,
was an aerial photograph of Berlin taken in the spring of 1945. Two or three buildings still
stood, but mostly what the camera showed was witless brick-strewn rubble.
Kurtz waved his hand at the desk. “Don’t mind all that, boys-it’s just noise. I’ve got

Freddy Johnson to deal with it, but I sent him over to the commissary to grab some chow.
Told him to take his time, go through the whole four courses, soup to nuts,
poisson
to sorbet, because this situation here… boys, this situation here is near-bout…
STABILIZED!”
He gave them a ferocious FDR grin and began to rock in his chair. Beside
him, the pistol swung in the holster at the end of its belt like a pendulum.

Melrose returned Kurtz’s smile tentatively, Perlmutter with less reserve. He had
Kurtz’s number, all right; the boss was an existential wannabe… and you wanted to
believe that was a good call. A
brilliant
call. A liberal arts education didn’t have many benefits in the career Military, but there were a few. Phrase-making was one of them.
“My only order to Lieutenant Johnson-whoops, no rank on this one, to my
good pal

Freddy Johnson is what I meant to say-was that he say grace before chowing in. Do you
pray, boys?” Melrose nodded as tentatively as he had smiled; Perlmutter did so
indulgently. He felt sure that, like his name, Kurtz’s oft-professed belief in God was plumage.
Kurtz rocked, looking happily at the two men with the snow melting from their
footgear and puddling on the floor. “The best prayers are the child’s prayers,” Kurtz said.

“The simplicity, you know. “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food.”
Isn’t that simple? Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Yes, b-” Pearly began.
“Shut the fuck up, you hound,” Kurtz said cheerfully. Still rocking. The gun still swinging back and forth at the end of its belt. He looked from Pearly to Melrose. “What
do
you
think, laddie-buck? Is that a beautiful little prayer, or is that a beautiful little prayer?”
“Yes, s-”
“Or

Allah akhbar,
as our Arab friends say; there is no God but God.” What could be
more simple than that? It cuts the pizza directly down the middle, if you see what I mean.”
They didn’t reply. Kurtz was rocking faster now, and the pistol was swinging faster,
and Perlmutter began to feel a little antsy, as he had earlier in the day, before Underhill arrived and sort of cooled Kurtz out. This was probably just more plumage, but-

“Or Moses at the burning bush!” Kurtz cried. His lean and rather horsey face lit with
a daffy smile. “‘Who’m I talking to?” Moses asks, and God gives him the old “I yam what
I yam and that’s all that I yam, uck-uck-uck.” What a kidder, that God, eh, Mr Melrose,
did you
really
refer to our emissaries from the Great Beyond as “space-niggers”?”
Melrose’s mouth dropped open.
“Answer me, buck.”
“Sir, I-”

“Call me sir again while the group is hot, Mr Melrose, and you will celebrate your next two birthdays in the stockade, do you understand that? Catch my old drift-ola?”Yes,
boss.” Melrose had snapped to attention, his face dead white except for the patches of cold-induced red on his cheeks, patches that were cut neatly in two by the straps of his mask. “Now
did
you or did you
not
refer to our visitors as “space-niggers”?”

“Sir, I may have just in passing said something-”
Moving with a speed Perlmutter could scarcely credit (it was like a special effect in a
James Cameron movie, almost), Kurtz snatched the nine-millimeter from the swinging
holster, pointed it without seeming to aim, and fired. The top half of the sneaker on Melrose’s left foot exploded. Fragments of canvas flew. Blood and flecks of flesh
splattered Perlmutter’s pantsleg.
I didn’t see that,

Pearly thought.
7hat didn’t happen.
But Melrose was screaming, looking down at his ruined left foot with agonized disbelief and howling his head off.
Perlmutter could see bone in there, and felt his stomach turn over. Kurtz didn’t get himself
out of his rocker as quickly as he’d gotten his gun out of his holster-Perlmutter could at
least see this happening-but it was still fast.
Spookily fast.

He grabbed Melrose by the shoulder and peered into the cook third’s contorted face with great intensity. “Stop that blatting, laddie-buck.”
Melrose carried on blatting. His foot was
gushing,
and the part with the toes on it looked to Pearly as if it might be severed fi7om the part with the heel on it. Pearly’s world
went gray and started to lose focus. With all the force of his will, he forced that grayness

away. If he passed out now, Christ alone knew what Kurtz might do to him. Perlmutter had
heard stories and had dismissed ninety per cent of them out of hand, thinking they were
either exaggerations or Kurtz-planted propaganda designed to enhance his loony-crafty
image.
Now I know better,
Perlmutter thought.
This isn’t myth-making; this is the myth.
Kurtz, moving with a finicky, almost surgical precision, placed the barrel of his pistol against the

center of Melrose’s cheese-white forehead. “squelch that womanish bawling, buck, or I’ll
squelch it for you. These are hollow-points, as I think even a dimly lit American like yourself must now surely know.” Melrose somehow choked the screams off, turned them
into low, in-the-throat sobs. This seemed to satisfy Kurtz.
“Just so you can hear me, buck, You
have
to hear me, because you have to spread the

word. I believe, praise God, that your foot, what’s left of it, will articulate the basic
concept,
but it’s your own sacred mouth that must share the details. So are you listening, bucko? Are you listening for the details?”
Still sobbing, his eyes starting from his face like blue glass balls, Melrose managed a
nod.
Quick as a striking snake, Kurtz’s head turned and Perlmutter clearly saw the man’s

face. The madness there was stamped into the features as clearly as a warrior’s tattoos. At
that moment everything Perlmutter had ever believed about his OIC fell down.
“What about you, bucko? Listening? Because you’re a messenger, too. All of us are
messengers. “Pearly nodded. The door opened and he saw, with unutterable relief, that the
newcomer was Owen Underhill. Kurtz’s eyes flew to him. “Owen! Me foine bucko!
Another witness! Another, praise God, another messenger! Are you

listening? Will you carry the word hence from this happy place?”
Expressionless as a poker-player in a high-stakes game, Underhill nodded.
“Good! Good!”
Kurtz returned his attention to Melrose.
“I quote from the
Manual of Affairs,
Cook’s Third Melrose, Part 16, Section 4, Paragraph 3-“Use of inappropriate epithets, whether racial, ethnic, or gender-based, are counterproductive to morale and run counter to armed service protocol. When use is

proven, the user will be punished immediately by court-martial or in the field by
appropriate command personnel,” end quote.
Appropriate command personnel, that’s me, user of inappropriate epithets, that’s you.
Do you understand, Melrose? Do you get the drift-ola?”
Melrose, blubbering, tried to speak, but Kurtz cut him off. In the doorway Owen
Underhill continued to stand completely still as the snow melted on his shoulders and ran

down the transparent bulb of his mask like sweat. His eyes remained fixed on Kurtz.
“Now, Cook’s Third Melrose, what I have quoted to you in the presence of these,
these praise God witnesses, is called “an order of conduct”, and it means no spicktalk, no
mockietalk, no krauttalk or redskin talk. It also means as is most applicable in the current
situation no spaceniggertalk, do you understand
that?”

Melrose tried to nod, then reeled, on the verge of passing out. Perlmutter grabbed him
by the shoulder and got him straight again, praying that Melrose wouldn’t conk before this
was over. God only knew what Kurtz might do to Melrose if Melrose had the temerity to
turn out the lights before Kurtz was done reading him the riot act.
“We are going to wipe these invading assholes out, my friend, and if they ever come

back to Terra Firma, we are going to rip off their collective gray head and shit down their
collective gray neck; if they persist we will use their own technology, which we are already well on our way to grasping, against them, returning to their place of origin in their own ships or ships like them built by General Electric and DuPont and praise God Microsoft and once there we will burn their cities or hives or goddam anthills, whatever

they live in, we “II napalm their amber waves of grain and nuke their purple mountains”
majesty, praise God,
Allah akhbar,
we will pour the fiery piss of America into their lakes and oceans… but we will do it in a way that
is proper and appropriate
and without regard to
race or gender or ethnicity or religious preference.

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