Dreamcatcher (24 page)

2

Beav could hear Jonesy giggling all the way across the room, still giggling when he went out the door. In spite of everything, Beav was glad to hear that sound. It had already been a bad year for Jonesy, getting run over the way he had—for awhile there at first they'd all thought he was going to step out, and that was awful, poor old Jonesy wasn't yet thirty-eight. Bad year for Pete, who'd been drinking too
much, a bad year for Henry, who sometimes got a spooky absence about him that Beav didn't understand and didn't like . . . and now he guessed you could say it had been a bad year for Beaver Clarendon, as well. Of course this was only one day in three hundred and sixty-five, but you just didn't get up in the morning thinking that by afternoon there'd be a dead guy lying naked in the tub and you'd be sitting on a closed toilet seat in order to keep something you hadn't even
seen
from—

“Nope,” Beaver said. “Not going there, okay? Just not going there.”

And he didn't have to. Jonesy would be back with the friction tape in a minute or two, three minutes tops. The question was where
did
he want to go until Jonesy returned? Where could he go and feel good?

Duddits, that was where. Thinking about Duddits always made him feel good. And Roberta, thinking about her was good, too. Undoubtedly.

Beav smiled, remembering the little woman in the yellow dress who'd been standing at the end of her walk on Maple Lane that day. The smile widened as he remembered how she'd caught sight of them. She had called her boy that same thing. She had called him

3

“Duddits!”
she cries, a little graying wren of a woman in a flowered print dress, then runs up the sidewalk toward them.

Duddits has been walking contentedly with his new friends, chattering away six licks to the minute, holding his Scooby-Doo lunchbox in his left hand and Jonesy's hand in his right, swinging it cheerfully back and forth. His gabble seems to consist almost entirely of open vowel-sounds. The thing which amazes Beaver the most about it is how much of it he understands.

Now, catching sight of the graying birdie-woman, Duddits lets go of Jonesy's hand and runs toward her, both of them running, and it reminds Beaver of some musical about a bunch of singers, the Von Cripps or Von Crapps or something like that. “Ah-mee, Ah-mee!” Duddits shouts exuberantly—
Mommy! Mommy!

“Where have you been? Where have you been, you bad boy, you bad old Duddits!”

They come together and Duddits is so much bigger—two or three inches taller, too—that Beaver winces, expecting the birdie-woman to be flattened the way Coyote is always getting flattened in the Roadrunner cartoons. Instead, she picks him up and swings him around, his sneakered feet flying out behind him, his mouth stretched halfway up to his ears in an expression of joyful ecstasy.

“I was just about to go in and call the police, you bad old late thing, you bad old late D—”

She sees Beaver and his friends and sets her son down on his feet. Her smile of relief is gone; she is solemn as she steps toward them over some little girl's hopscotch grid—crude as it is, Beav thinks,
even that will always be beyond Duddits. The tears on her cheeks gleam in the glow of the sun that has finally broken through.

“Uh-oh,” Pete says. “We're gonna catch it.”

“Be cool,” Henry says, speaking low and fast. “Let her rant and then I'll explain.”

But they have misjudged Roberta Cavell—have judged her by the standard of so many adults who seem to view boys their age as guilty until proven innocent. Roberta Cavell isn't that way, and neither is her husband, Alfie. The Cavells are different. Duddits has
made
them different.

“Boys,” she says again. “Was he wandering? Was he lost? I've been so afraid to let him walk, but he wants to so much to be a real boy . . .”

She gives Beaver's fingers a strong squeeze with one hand and Pete's with the other. Then she drops them, takes Jonesy's and Henry's hands, and gives them the same treatment.

“Ma'am . . .” Henry begins.

Mrs. Cavell looks at Henry with fixed concentration, as if she is trying to read his mind. “Not just lost,” she says. “Not just wandering.”

“Ma'am . . .” Henry tries again, and then gives up any thought of dissembling. It is Duddits's green gaze looking up at him from her face, only intelligent and aware, keen and questioning. “No, ma'am.” Henry sighs. “Not just wandering.”

“Because usually he comes right home. He says he can't get lost because he sees the line. How many were there?”

“Oh, a few,” Jonesy says, then shoots a swift look at Henry. Beside them, Duddits has found a last few gone-to-seed dandelions on the neighbors' lawn and is down on his belly, blowing the fluff off them and watching it float away on the breeze. “A few boys were teasing him, ma'am.”

“Big boys,” Pete says.

Again her eyes search them, from Jonesy to Pete, from Pete to Beaver, and then back to Henry again. “Come up to the house with us,” she says. “I want to hear all about it. Duddits has a big glass of ZaRex every afternoon—it's his special drink—but I'll bet you guys would rather have iced tea. Wouldn't you?”

The three of them look at Henry, who considers and then nods. “Yes, ma'am, iced tea would be great.”

So she leads them back to the house where they'll spend so much of their time in the following years—the house at 19 Maple Lane—only it is really Duddits who leads the way, prancing, skipping, sometimes lifting his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox over his head, but always, Beaver notices, keeping at almost exactly the same place on the sidewalk, about a foot from the grass margin between the walk and the street. Years later, after the thing with the Rinkenhauer girl, he will consider what Mrs. Cavell said. They all will.
He sees the line.

4

“Jonesy?” Beaver called.

No answer. Christ, it seemed like Jonesy had been
gone a long time. Probably hadn't been, but there was no way Beaver could tell; he'd forgotten to put on his watch that morning. Stupid, but then, he'd always been stupid, he ought to be used to it by now. Next to Jonesy and Henry, both he and Pete had been stupid. Not that Jonesy or Henry had ever treated them that way—that was one of the great things about them.

“Jonesy?”

Still nothing. Probably he was having trouble finding the tape, that was all.

There was a vile little voice far back in Beaver's head telling him that the tape had nothing to do with it, that Jonesy had just gone Powder River, leaving him here to sit on the toilet like Danny Glover in that movie, but he wouldn't listen to that voice because Jonesy would never do anything like that. They were friends to the end, always had been.

That's right,
the vile voice agreed.
You were friends. And this is the end.

“Jonesy? You there, man?”

Still nothing. Maybe the tape had fallen off the nail it had been hung on.

Nothing from beneath him, either. And hey, it really wasn't possible that McCarthy had shit some kind of monster into the john, was it? That he'd given birth to—
Gasp!
—The Beast in the Bowl? It sounded like a horror-movie spoof on
Saturday Night Live.
And even if that
had
happened, The Beast in the Bowl had probably drowned by now, drowned or gone deep. A line from a story suddenly occurred to him, one they'd read to Duddits—taking turns, and it was good there
were four of them because when Duddits liked something he never got tired of it.

“Eee doool!” Duddits would shout, running to one of them with the book held high over his head, the way he'd carried his lunchbox home that first day. “Eee doool, eee doool!” Which in this case meant
Read
Pool!
Read
Pool! The book was
McElligot's Pool,
by Dr. Seuss, the first memorable couplet of which went, “Young man,” laughed the farmer, / “You're sort of a fool! / You'll
never
catch fish / In McElligot's Pool.” But there
had
been fish, at least in the imagination of the little boy in the story. Plenty of fish.
Big
fish.

No splashes from beneath him, though. No bumps on the underside of the lid, either. Not for awhile now. He could maybe risk one quick look, just raise the lid a little and slam it back down if anything—

But
sit tight, buddy
was the last thing Jonesy had said to him, and that was what he'd better do.

Jonesy's most likely a mile down the road by now,
the vile voice estimated.
A mile down the road and still picking up speed.

“No, he ain't,” Beaver said. “Not Jonesy.”

He shifted a little bit on the closed seat, waiting for the thing to jump, but it didn't. It might be sixty yards away by now and swimming with the turds in the septic tank. Jonesy had said it was too big to go down, but since neither of them had actually seen it, there was no way to tell for sure, was there? But in either case, Monsieur Beaver Clarendon was going to sit right here. Because he'd said he would. Because time always
seemed slower when you were worried or scared. And because he trusted Jonesy. Jonesy and Henry had never hurt him or made fun, not of him and not of Pete. And none of them had ever hurt Duddits or made fun of him, either.

Beav snorted laughter. Duddits with his Scooby-Doo lunchbox. Duddits on his belly, blowing the fluff off dandelions. Duddits running around in his backyard, happy as a bird in a tree, yeah, and people who called kids like him
special
didn't know the half of it. He had been special, all right, their present from a fucked-up world that usually didn't give you jack-shit. Duddits had been their own special thing, and they had loved him.

5

They sit in the sunny kitchen nook—the clouds have gone away as if by magic—drinking iced tea and watching Duddits, who drank his ZaRex (awful-looking orange stuff) in three or four huge splattering gulps and then ran out back to play.

Henry does most of the talking, telling Mrs. Cavell that the boys were just “kinda pushing him around.” He says that they got a little bit rough and ripped his shirt, which scared Duddits and made him cry. There is no mention of how Richie Grenadeau and his friends took off his pants, no mention of the nasty after-school snack they wanted Duddits to eat, and when Mrs. Cavell asks them if they know who these big boys were, Henry hesitates briefly and then says no, just
some big boys from the high school, he didn't know any of them, not by name. She looks at Beaver, Jonesy, and Pete; they all shake their heads. It may be wrong—dangerous to Duddits in the long run, as well—but they can't step that far outside the rules which govern their lives. Already Beaver cannot understand where they found the sack to intervene in the first place, and later the others will say the same. They marvel at their courage; they also marvel that they aren't in the fuckin hospital.

She looks at them sadly for a moment, and Beaver realizes she knows a lot of what they aren't telling, probably enough to keep her awake that night. Then she smiles. Right at Beaver she smiles, and it makes him tingle all the way down to his toes. “What a lot of zippers you have on your jacket!” she says.

Beaver smiles. “Yes, ma'am. It's my Fonzie jacket. It was my brother's first. These guys make fun of it, but I like it just the same.”

“Happy Days,”
she says. “We like it, too. Duddits likes it. Perhaps you'd like to come over some night and watch it with us. With him.” Her smile grows wistful, as if she knows nothing like that will ever happen.

“Yeah, that'd be okay,” Beav says.

“Actually it would,” Pete agrees.

They sit for a little without talking, just watching him play in the backyard. There's a swing-set with two swings. Duddits runs behind them, pushing them, making the swings go by themselves. Sometimes he stops, crosses his arms over his chest, turns the clockless dial of his face up to the sky, and laughs.

“Seems all right now,” Jonesy says, and drinks the last of his tea. “Guess he's forgotten all about it.”

Mrs. Cavell has started to get up. Now she sits back down, giving him an almost startled look. “Oh no, not at all,” she says. “He remembers. Not like you and I, perhaps, but he remembers things. He'll probably have nightmares tonight, and when we go into his room—his father and me—he won't be able to explain. That's the worst for him; he can't tell what it is he sees and thinks and feels. He doesn't have the vocabulary.”

She sighs.

“In any case, those boys won't forget about him. What if they're laying for him now? What if they're laying for
you
?”

“We can take care of ourselves,” Jonesy says, but although his voice is stout enough, his eyes are uneasy.

“Maybe,” she says. “But what about Duddits? I can walk him to school—I used to, and I suppose I'll have to again, for awhile at least, anyway—but he loves to walk home on his own so much.”

“It makes him feel like a big boy,” Pete says.

She reaches across the table and touches Pete's hand, making him blush. “That's right, it makes him feel like a big boy.”

“You know,” Henry says, “
we
could walk him. We all go together to the junior high, and it would be easy enough to come down here from Kansas Street.”

Roberta Cavell only sits there without saying anything, a little birdie-woman in a print dress, looking
at Henry attentively, like someone waiting for the punchline of a joke.

“Would that be okay, Missus Cavell?” Beaver asks her. “Because we could do it, easy. Or maybe you don't want us to.”

Something complicated happens to Mrs. Cavell's face—there are all those little twitches, mostly under the skin. One eye almost winks, and then the other one
does
wink. She takes a handkerchief from her pocket and blows her nose. Beaver thinks,
She's trying not to laugh at us.
When he tells Henry that as they are walking home, Jonesy and Pete already dropped off, Henry will look at him with utter astonishment.
Cry is what she was tryin not to do,
he will say . . . and then, affectionately, after a pause:
Dope.