Dreamcatcher (6 page)

He gets up to put Defuniak's file in the cabinet marked
D–F.
How did you know?
the boy had asked, and Jonesy supposes that was a good question. An
excellent
question, really. The answer is this: he knew
because . . . sometimes he
does.
That's the truth, and there's no other. If someone put a gun to his head, he'd say he found out during the first class after the mid-term, that it was right there in the front of David Defuniak's mind, big and bright, flashing on and off in guilty red neon:
CHEATER CHEATER CHEATER.

But man, that's dope—he
can't
read minds. He never could. Never-ever, never-ever, never-ever could. Sometimes things flash into his head, yes—he knew about his wife's problems with pills that way, and he supposes he might have known in that same way that Henry was depressed when he called (
No, it was in his voice, doofus, that's all it was
), but stuff like that hardly ever happens anymore. There has been nothing
really
odd since the business with Josie Rinkenhauer. Maybe there
was
something once, and maybe it trailed them out of their childhood and adolescence, but surely it is gone now. Or almost gone.

Almost.

He circles the words
going to Derry
on his desk calendar, then grabs his briefcase. As he does, a new thought comes to him, sudden and meaningless but very powerful:
Watch out for Mr. Gray.

He stops with one hand on his doorknob. That was his own voice, no doubt about it.

“What?” he asks the empty room.

Nothing.

Jonesy steps out of his office, closes the door, and tests the lock. In the corner of his door's bulletin board is a blank white card. Jonesy unpins it and
turns it over. On the flip side is the printed message
BACK AT ONE—UNTIL THEN I'M HISTORY
. He pins the message side to the bulletin board with perfect confidence, but it will be almost two months before Jonesy enters this room again and sees his desk calendar still turned to St. Patrick's Day.

Take care of yourself,
Henry said, but Jonesy isn't thinking about taking care of himself. He is thinking about March sunlight. He's thinking about eating his sandwich. He's thinking he might watch a few girls over on the Cambridge side—skirts are short, and March winds are frisky. He's thinking about all sorts of things, but watching out for Mr. Gray isn't one of them. Neither is taking care of himself.

This is a mistake. This is also how lives change forever.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

T
HEODORE
R
OETHKE

1

Jonesy almost shot the guy when he came out of the woods. How close? Another pound on the Garand's trigger, maybe just a half. Later, hyped on the clarity that sometimes comes to the horrified mind, he wished he had shot before he saw the orange cap and the orange flagman's vest. Killing Richard McCarthy couldn't have hurt, and it might have helped. Killing McCarthy might have saved them all.

2

Pete and Henry had gone to Gosselin's Market, the closest store, to stock up on bread, canned goods, and beer—the real essential. They had plenty for another two days, but the radio said there might be snow coming. Henry had already gotten his deer, a good-sized doe, and Jonesy had an idea Pete cared a lot more
about making sure of the beer supply than he did about getting his own deer—for Pete Moore, hunting was a hobby, beer a religion. The Beaver was out there someplace, but Jonesy hadn't heard the crack of a rifle any closer than five miles, so he guessed that the Beav, like him, was still waiting.

There was a stand in an old maple about seventy yards from the camp and that was where Jonesy was, sipping coffee and reading a Robert Parker mystery novel, when he heard something coming and put the book and the Thermos aside. In other years he might have spilled the coffee in his excitement, but not this time. This time he even took a few seconds to screw on the Thermos's bright red stopper.

The four of them had been coming up here to hunt in the first week of November for almost twenty-five years, if you counted in the times Beav's Dad had taken them, and Jonesy had never bothered with the tree-stand until now. None of them had; it was too confining. This year Jonesy had staked it out. The others thought they knew why, but they only knew half of it.

In mid-March of 2001, Jonesy had been struck by a car while crossing a street in Cambridge, not far from John Jay College, where he taught. He had fractured his skull, broken two ribs, and suffered a shattered hip, which had been replaced with some exotic combination of Teflon and metal. The man who'd struck him was a retired BU history professor who was—according to his lawyer, anyway—in the early stages of Alzheimer's, more to be pitied than punished. So often, Jonesy thought, there was no one to
blame when the dust cleared. And even if there was, what good did it do? You still had to live with what was left, and console yourself with the fact that, as people told him every day (until they forgot the whole thing, that was), it could have been worse.

And it could have been. His head was hard, and the crack in it healed. He had no memory of the hour or so leading up to his accident near Harvard Square, but the rest of his mental equipment was fine. His ribs healed in a month. The hip was the worst, but he was off the crutches by October, and now his limp only became appreciable toward the end of the day.

Pete, Henry, and the Beav thought it was the hip and only the hip that had caused him to opt for the tree-stand instead of the damp, cold woods, and the hip was certainly a factor—just not the only one. What he had kept from them was that he now had little interest in shooting deer. It would have dismayed them. Hell, it dismayed Jonesy himself. But there it was, something new in his existence that he hadn't even suspected until they had actually gotten up here on November eleventh and he had uncased the Garand. He wasn't revolted by the idea of hunting, not at all—he just had no real urge to do it. Death had brushed by him on a sunny day in March, and Jonesy had no desire to call it back, even if he was dealing rather than receiving.

3

What surprised him was that he still liked being at camp—in some ways, better than ever. Talking at
night—books, politics, the shit they'd gotten up to as kids, their plans for the future. They were in their thirties, still young enough to have plans, plenty of them, and the old bond was still strong.

And the days were good, too—the hours in the tree-stand, when he was alone. He took a sleeping-bag and skid into it up to his hips when he got cold, and a book, and a Walkman. After the first day, he stopped listening to the Walkman, discovering that he liked the music of the woods better—the silk of the wind in the pines, the rust of the crows. He would read a little, drink coffee, read a little more, sometimes work his way out of the sleeping-bag (it was as red as a stoplight) and piss off the edge of the platform. He was a man with a big family and a large circle of colleagues. A gregarious man who enjoyed all the various relationships the family and the colleagues entailed (and the students, of course, the endless stream of students) and balanced them well. It was only out here,
up
here, that he realized the attractions of silence were still real, still strong. It was like meeting an old friend after a long absence.

“You sure you want to be up there, man?” Henry had asked him yesterday morning. “I mean, you're welcome to come out with me. We won't overuse that leg of yours, I promise.”

“Leave him alone,” Pete said. “He likes it up there. Don't you, Jones-boy?”

“Sort of,” he said, unwilling to say much more—how much he actually
did
like it, for instance. Some things you didn't feel safe telling even your closest
friends. And sometimes your closest friends knew, anyway.

“Tell you something,” the Beav said. He picked up a pencil and began to gnaw lightly at it—his oldest, dearest trick, going all the way back to first grade. “I like coming back and seeing you there—like a lookout in the crow's nest in one of those fuckin Horn-blower books. Keepin an eye out, you know.”

“Sail, ho,” Jonesy had said, and they all laughed, but Jonesy knew what the Beav meant. He felt it. Keeping an eye out. Just thinking his thoughts and keeping an eye out for ships or sharks or who knew what. His hip hurt coming back down, the pack with his shit in it was heavy on his back, and he felt slow and clumsy on the wooden rungs nailed to the trunk of the maple, but that was okay. Good, in fact. Things changed, but only a fool believed they only changed for the worse.

That was what he thought then.

4

When he heard the whicker of moving brush and the soft snap of a twig—sounds he never questioned were those of an approaching deer—Jonesy thought of something his father said:
You can't make yourself be lucky.
Lindsay Jones was one of life's losers and had said few things worth committing to memory, but that was one, and here was the proof of it again: days after deciding he had finished with deer hunting, here came one, and a big one by the sound—a buck, almost surely, maybe one as big as a man.

That it
was
a man never so much as crossed Jonesy's mind. This was an unincorporated township fifty miles north of Rangely, and the nearest hunters were two hours' walk away. The nearest paved road, the one which eventually took you to Gosselin's Market (
BEER BAIT OUT OF STATE LICS LOTTERY TIX
), was at least sixteen miles away.

Well,
he thought,
it isn't as if I took a vow, or anything.

No, he hadn't taken a vow. Next November he might be up here with a Nikon instead of a Garand, but it wasn't next year yet, and the rifle was at hand. He had no intention of looking a gift deer in the mouth.

Jonesy screwed the red stopper into the Thermos of coffee and put it aside. Then he pushed the sleeping-bag off his lower body like a big quilted sock (wincing at the stiffness in his hip as he did it) and grabbed his gun. There was no need to chamber a round, producing that loud, deer-frightening click; old habits died hard, and the gun was ready to fire as soon as he thumbed off the safety. This he did when he was solidly on his feet. The old wild excitement was gone, but there was a residue—his pulse was up and he welcomed the rise. In the wake of his accident, he welcomed all such reactions—it was as if there were two of him now, the one before he had been knocked flat in the street and the warier, older fellow who had awakened in Mass General . . . if you could call that slow, drugged awareness being awake. Sometimes he still heard a voice—whose he didn't know, but not his—calling
out
Please stop, I can't stand it, give me a shot, where's Marcy, I want Marcy.
He thought of it as death's voice—death had missed him in the street and had then come to the hospital to finish the job, death masquerading as a man (or perhaps it had been a woman, it was hard to tell) in pain, someone who said Marcy but meant Jonesy.

The idea passed—all of the funny ideas he'd had in the hospital eventually passed—but it left a residue. Caution was the residue. He had no memory of Henry's calling and telling him to watch himself for the next little while (and Henry hadn't reminded him), but since then Jonesy
had
watched himself. He was careful. Because maybe death was out there, and maybe sometimes it called your name.

But the past was the past. He had survived his brush with death, and nothing was dying here this morning but a deer (a buck, he hoped) who had strolled in the wrong direction.

The sound of the rustling brush and snapping twigs was coming toward him from the southwest, which meant he wouldn't have to shoot around the trunk of the maple—good—and put him upwind. Even better. Most of the maple's leaves had fallen, and he had a good, if not perfect, sightline through the interlacing branches. Jonesy raised the Garand, settled the buttplate into the hollow of his shoulder, and prepared to shoot himself a conversation-piece.

What saved McCarthy—at least temporarily—was Jonesy's disenchantment with hunting. What almost got McCarthy killed was a phenomenon George Kilroy,
a friend of his father's, had called “eye-fever.” Eye-fever, Kilroy claimed, was a form of buck-fever, and was probably the second most common cause of hunting accidents. “First is drink,” said George Kilroy . . . and like Jonesy's father, Kilroy knew a bit on that subject, as well. “First is always drink.”

Kilroy said that victims of eye-fever were uniformly astounded to discover they had shot a fence-post, or a passing car, or the broad side of a barn, or their own hunting partner (in many cases the partner was a spouse, a sib, or a child). “But I
saw
it,” they would protest, and most of them, according to Kilroy, could pass a lie-detector test on the subject. They had seen the deer or the bear or the wolf, or just the grouse flip-flapping through the high autumn grass. They had
seen
it.

What happened, according to Kilroy, was that these hunters were afflicted by an anxiety to make the shot, to get it over with, one way or the other. This anxiety became so strong that the brain persuaded the eye that it saw what was not yet visible, in order to end the tension. This was eye-fever. And although Jonesy was aware of no particular anxiety—his fingers had been perfectly steady as he screwed the red stopper back into the throat of the Thermos—he admitted later to himself that yes, he might have fallen prey to the malady.

For one moment he saw the buck clearly at the end of the tunnel made by the interlocking branches—as clearly as he had seen any of the previous sixteen deer (six bucks, ten does) he had brought down over the
years at Hole in the Wall. He saw its brown head, one eye so dark it was almost the black of jeweler's velvet, even part of its rack.