Dreamcatcher (10 page)

“Oh God, I am so sorry,” McCarthy said without opening his eyes. “I've been doing that all day, ever since light. And my stomach hurts again.”

Jonesy and the Beav shared a silent, concerned look.

“You know what I think?” Beaver asked. “I think you need to lie down and take you a little sleep. You were probably awake all night, listening to that pesky bear and God knows what else. You're tired out
and stressed out and fuck-a-duck knows what else out. You just need some shuteye, a few hours and you'll be right as the goddam rain.”

McCarthy looked at Beaver with such wretched gratitude that Jonesy felt a little ashamed to be seeing it. Although McCarthy's complexion was still leaden, he had begun to break a sweat—great big beads that formed on his brow and temples, and then ran down his cheeks like clear oil. This in spite of the cold air now circulating in the room.

“You know,” he said, “I bet you're right. I'm tired, that's all it is. My stomach hurts, but that part's just stress. And I was eating all sorts of things, bushes and just . . . gosh, oh dear, I don't know . . . all sorts of things.” He scratched his cheek. “Is this darn thing on my face bad? Is it bleeding?”

“No,” Jonesy said. “Just red.”

“It's a reaction,” McCarthy said dolefully. “I get the same thing from peanuts. I'll lie down. That's the ticket, all right.”

He got to his feet, then tottered. Beaver and Jonesy both reached for him, but McCarthy steadied on his feet before either of them could take hold. Jonesy could have sworn that what he had taken for a middle-aged potbelly was almost gone. Was it possible? Could the man have passed that much gas? He didn't know. All he knew for sure was that it had been a mighty fart and an even mightier belch, the sort of thing you could yarn on for twenty years or more, starting off
We used to go up to Beaver Clarendon's camp the first week of hunting season every year, and one
November—it was '01, the year of the big fall storm—this fella wandered into camp
 . . . Yes, it would make a good story, people would laugh about the big fart and the big burp, people
always
laughed at stories about farts and burps. He wouldn't tell the part about how he had come within eight ounces of press on a Garand's trigger of taking McCarthy's life, though. No, he wouldn't want to tell that part. Would he.

Pete and Henry were doubling, and so Beaver led McCarthy to the other downstairs bedroom, the one Jonesy had been using. The Beav shot him a little apologetic look, and Jonesy shrugged. It was the logical place, after all. Jonesy could double in with Beav tonight—Christ knew they'd done it enough as kids—and in truth, he wasn't sure McCarthy could have managed the stairs, anyway. He liked the man's sweaty, leaden look less and less.

Jonesy was the sort of man who made his bed and then buried it—books, papers, clothes, bags, assorted toiletries. He swept all this off as quick as he could, then turned back the coverlet.

“You need to take a squirt, partner?” the Beav asked.

McCarthy shook his head. He seemed almost hypnotized by the clean blue sheet Jonesy had uncovered. Jonesy was once again struck by how glassy the man's eyes were. Like the eyes of a stuffed trophy head. Suddenly and unbidden, he saw his living room back in Brookline, that upscale municipality next door to Boston. Braided rugs, early American furniture . . . and McCarthy's head mounted over the fireplace.
Bagged that one up in Maine,
he would tell his guests at cocktail parties.
Big bastard, dressed out at one-seventy.

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the Beav was looking at him with something like alarm.

“Twinge in the hip,” he said. “Sorry. Mr. McCarthy—Rick—you'll want to take off your sweater and pants. Boots too, of course.”

McCarthy looked around at him like a man roused from a dream. “Sure,” he said. “You bet.”

“Need help?” Beaver asked.

“No, gosh no.” McCarthy looked alarmed or amused or both. “I'm not that far gone.”

“Then I'll leave Jonesy to supervise.”

Beaver slipped out and McCarthy began to undress, starting by pulling his sweater off over his head. Beneath it he wore a red-and-black hunter's shirt, and beneath that a thermal undershirt. And yes, there was less gut poking out the front of that shirt, Jonesy was sure of it.

Well—
almost
sure. Only an hour ago, he reminded himself, he had been sure McCarthy's coat was the head of a deer.

McCarthy sat down in the chair beside the window to take off his shoes, and when he did there was another fart—not as long as the first one, but just as loud and hoarse. Neither of them commented on it, or the resulting smell, which was strong enough in the little room to make Jonesy's eyes feel like watering.

McCarthy kicked his boots off—they made
clunking sounds on the wooden floor—then stood up and unbuckled his belt. As he pushed his blue jeans down, revealing the lower half of his thermal underwear, the Beav came back in with a ceramic pot from upstairs. He put it down by the head of the bed. “Just in case you have to, you know, urk. Or if you get one of those collect calls you just have to take right away.”

McCarthy looked at him with a dullness Jonesy found alarming—a stranger in what had been his bedroom, somehow ghostly in his baggy long underwear. An
ill
stranger. The question was just
how
ill.

“In case you can't make the bathroom,” the Beav explained. “Which, by the way, is close by. Just bang a left outside the bedroom door, but remember it's the
second
door as you go along the wall, okay? If you forget and go in the first one, you'll be taking a shit in the linen closet.”

Jonesy was surprised into a laugh and didn't care for the sound of it in the slightest—high and slightly hysterical.

“I feel better now,” McCarthy said, but Jonesy detected absolutely zero sincerity in the man's voice. And the guy just stood there in his underwear, like an android whose memory circuits have been about three-quarters erased. Before, he had shown some life, if not exactly vivacity; now that was gone, like the color in his cheeks.

“Go on, Rick,” Beaver said quietly. “Lie down and catch some winks. Work on getting your strength back.”

“Yes, okay.” He sat down on the freshly opened bed and looked out the window. His eyes were wide and blank. Jonesy thought the smell in the room was dissipating, but perhaps he was just getting used to it, the way you got used to the smell of the monkey-house at the zoo if you stayed in there long enough. “Gosh, look at it snow.”

“Yeah,” Jonesy said. “How's your stomach now?”

“Better.” McCarthy's eyes moved to Jonesy's face. They were the solemn eyes of a frightened child. “I'm sorry about passing gas that way—I never did anything like that before, not even in the Army when it seemed like we ate beans every day—but I feel better.”

“Sure you don't need to take a leak before you turn in?” Jonesy had four children, and this question came almost automatically.

“No. I went in the woods just before you found me. Thank you for taking me in. Thank you both.”

“Ah, hell,” Beaver said, and shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “Anybody woulda.”

“Maybe,” McCarthy said. “And maybe not. In the Bible it says, ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.' ” Outside, the wind gusted more fiercely yet, making Hole in the Wall shake. Jonesy waited for McCarthy to finish—it sounded as if he had more to say—but the man just swung his feet into bed and pulled the covers up.

From somewhere deep in Jonesy's bed there came another of those long, rasping farts, and Jonesy decided that was enough for him. It was one thing to let in a wayfaring stranger when he came to your
door just ahead of a storm; it was another to stand around while he laid a series of gas-bombs.

The Beaver followed him out and closed the door gently behind him.

5

When Jonesy started to talk, the Beav shook his head, raised his finger to his lips, and led Jonesy across the big room to the kitchen, which was as far as they could get from McCarthy without going into the shed out back.

“Man, that guy's in a world of hurt,” Beaver said, and in the harsh glow of the kitchen's fluorescent strips, Jonesy could see just how worried his old friend was. The Beav rummaged into the wide front pocket of his overalls, found a toothpick, and began to nibble on it. In three minutes—the length of time it took a dedicated smoker to finish a cigarette—he would reduce it to a palmful of flax-fine splinters. Jonesy didn't know how the Beav's teeth stood up to it (or his stomach), but he had been doing it his whole life.

“I hope you're wrong, but . . .” Jonesy shook his head. “Did you ever smell anything like those farts?”

“Nope,” Beaver said. “But there's a lot more going on with that guy than just a bad stomach.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he thinks it's November eleventh, for one thing.”

Jonesy had no idea what the Beav was talking
about. November eleventh was the day their own hunting party had arrived, bundled into Henry's Scout, as always.

“Beav, it's Wednesday. It's the
fourteenth.
”

Beaver nodded, smiling a little in spite of himself. The toothpick, which had already picked up an appreciable warp, rolled from one side of his mouth to the other. “I know that.
You
know that. Rick, he don't know that. Rick thinks it's the Lord's Day.”

“Beav, what exactly did he say to you?” Whatever it was, it couldn't have been much—it just didn't take that long to scramble a couple of eggs and heat a can of soup. That started a train of thought, and as Beaver talked, Jonesy ran water to do up the few dishes. He didn't mind camping out, but he was damned if he was going to live in squalor, as so many men seemed willing to do when they left their homes and went into the woods.

“What he said was they came up on Saturday so they could hunt a little, then spend Sunday working on the roof, which had a couple of leaks in it. He goes, ‘At least I didn't have to break the commandment about working on the Sabbath. When you're lost in the woods, the only thing you have to work on is not going crazy.' ”

“Huh,” Jonesy said.

“I guess I couldn't swear in a court of law that he thinks this is the eleventh, but it's either that or go back a week further, to the fourth, because he sure does think it's Sunday. And I just can't believe he's been out there ten days.”

Jonesy couldn't, either. But three? Yes. That he
could
believe. “It would explain something he told me,” Jonesy said. “He—”

The floor creaked and they both jumped a little, looking toward the closed bedroom door on the other side of the big room, but there was nothing to see. And the floors and walls were always creaking out here, even when the wind wasn't blowing up high. They looked at each other, a little shamefaced.

“Yeah, I'm jumpy,” Beaver said, perhaps reading Jonesy's face, perhaps picking the thought out of Jonesy's mind. “Man, you have to admit it's a little creepy, him turning up right out of the woods like that.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“That fart sounded like he had something crammed up his butt that was dying of smoke inhalation.”

The Beav looked a little surprised at that, as he always did when he said something funny. They began laughing simultaneously, holding onto each other and doing it through open mouths, expelling the sounds as a series of harsh sighs, trying to keep it down, not wanting the poor guy to hear them if he was still awake, hear and know they were laughing at him. Jonesy had a particularly hard time keeping it quiet because the release was so necessary—it had a hysterical severity to it and he doubled over, gasping and snorting, water running out of his eyes.

At last Beaver grabbed him and yanked him out the door. There they stood coatless in the deepening
snow, finally able to laugh out loud with the booming wind to cover the sounds they made.

6

When they went back in again, Jonesy's hands were so numb he barely felt the hot water when he plunged his hands into it, but he was laughed out and that was good. He wondered again about Pete and Henry—how they were doing and if they'd make it back okay.

“You said it explained some stuff,” the Beav said. He had started another toothpick. “What stuff?”

“He didn't know snow was coming,” Jonesy said. He spoke slowly, trying to recall McCarthy's exact words. “ ‘So much for fair and seasonably cold,' I think that's what he said. But that would make sense if the last forecast he heard was for the eleventh or twelfth. Because until late yesterday, it
was
fair, wasn't it?”

“Yeah, and seasonably fuckin cold,” Beaver agreed. He pulled a dishtowel with a pattern of faded lady-bugs on it from the drawer by the sink and began to dry the dishes. He looked across at the closed bedroom door as he worked. “What else'd he say?”

“That their camp was in Kineo.”

“
Kineo?
That's forty, fifty miles west of here. He—” Beaver took the toothpick out of his mouth, examined the bite-marks on it, and put the other end in his mouth. “Oh, I see.”

“Yeah. He couldn't have done all that in a single
night, but if he was out there for three days—”

“—and four nights, if he got lost on Saturday afternoon that makes four nights—”

“Yeah, and four nights. So, supposing he kept pretty much headed dead east that whole time . . .” Jonesy calculated fifteen miles a day. “I'd say it's possible.”

“But how come he didn't freeze?” Beaver had lowered his voice to a near-whisper, probably without being aware of it. “He's got a nice heavy coat and he's wearin longies, but nights have been in the twenties everywhere north of the county line since Halloween. So you tell me how he spends four nights out there and doesn't freeze. Doesn't even look like he's got any frostbite, just that mess on his cheek.”