Dreamcatcher (9 page)

His Mom had taught him the dozen basic things he knew about cooking, and one of them had to do with the art of making grilled cheese sandwiches.
Lay in a little mouseturds first,
she said—
mouseturds
being Janet Jones for
mustard—and then butter the goddam bread, not the skillet. Butter the skillet and all's you got's fried bread with some cheese in it.
He had never understood how the difference between where you put the butter, on the bread or in the skillet, could change the ultimate result, but he always did it his mother's way, even though it was a pain in the ass buttering the tops of the sandwiches while the bottoms cooked. No more would he have left his rubber boots on once he was in the house . . . because, his mother had always said, “they draw your feet.” He had no idea just what that meant, but even now, as a man going on forty, he took his boots off as soon as he was in the door, so they wouldn't draw his feet.

“I think I might have one of these babies myself,” Jonesy said, and laid the sandwiches in the skillet, butter side down. The soup had begun to simmer, and it smelled fine—like comfort.

“Good idea. I certainly hope your friends are all right.”

“Yeah,” Jonesy said. He gave the soup a stir. “Where's your place?”

“Well, we used to hunt in Mars Hill, at a place Nat and Becky's uncle owned, but some god-bless'd idiot burned it down two summers ago. Drinking and then getting careless with the old smokes, that's what the Fire Marshal said, anyway.”

Jonesy nodded. “Not an uncommon story.”

“The insurance paid the value of the place, but we had nowhere to hunt. I thought probably that'd be the end of it, and then Steve found this nice place over in Kineo. I think it's probably an unincorporated township, just another part of the Jefferson Tract, but Kineo's what they call it, the few people who live there. Do you know where I mean?”

“I know it,” Jonesy said, speaking through lips that felt oddly numb. He was getting another of those telephone calls from nowhere. Hole in the Wall was about twenty miles east of Gosselin's. Kineo was maybe thirty miles to the west of the market. That was fifty miles in all. Was he supposed to believe that the man sitting on the couch with just his head sticking out of the down comforter had wandered fifty miles since becoming lost the previous afternoon? It was absurd. It was impossible.

“Smells good,” McCarthy said.

And it did, but Jonesy no longer felt hungry.

3

He was just bringing the chow over to the couch when he heard feet stamping on the stone outside the door. A moment later the door opened and Beaver
came in. Snow swirled around his legs in a dancing mist.

“Jesus-Christ-bananas,” the Beav said. Pete had once made a list of Beav-isms, and Jesus-Christ-bananas was high on it, along with such standbys as
doodlyfuck
and
Kiss my bender.
They were exclamations both Zen and profane. “I thought I was gonna end up spendin the night out there, then I saw the light.” Beav raised his hands roofward, fingers spread. “Seen de light, Lawd, yessir, praise Je—” His glasses started to unfog then, and he saw the stranger on the couch. He lowered his hands, slowly, then smiled. That was one of the reasons Jonesy had loved him ever since grade school, although the Beav could be tiresome and wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier, by any means: his first reaction to the unplanned and unexpected wasn't a frown but a smile.

“Hi,” he said. “I'm Joe Clarendon. Who're you?”

“Rick McCarthy,” he said, and got to his feet. The comforter tumbled off him and Jonesy saw he had a pretty good potbelly pooching out the front of his sweater.
Well,
he thought,
nothing strange about that, at least, it's the middle-aged man's disease, and it's going to kill us in our millions during the next twenty years or so.

McCarthy stuck out his hand, started to step forward, and almost tripped over the fallen comforter. If Jonesy hadn't reached out and grabbed his shoulder, steadying him, McCarthy probably would have fallen forward, very likely cleaning out the coffee-table on which the food was now set. Again Jonesy was struck by the man's queer ungainliness—it made him think of
himself a little that past spring, as he had learned to walk all over again. He got a closer look at the patch on the guy's cheek, and sort of wished he hadn't. It wasn't frostbite at all. It looked like a skin-tumor of some kind, or perhaps a portwine stain with stubble growing out of it.

“Who, whoa, shake it but don't break it,” Beaver said, springing forward. He grabbed McCarthy's hand and pumped it until Jonesy thought McCarthy would end up swan-diving into the coffee-table after all. He was glad when the Beav—all five-feet-six of him, with snow still melting into all that long black hippie hair—stepped back. The Beav was still smiling, more broadly than ever. With the shoulder-length hair and the thick glasses, he looked like either a math genius or a serial killer. In fact, he was a carpenter.

“Rick here's had a time of it,” Jonesy said. “Got lost yesterday and spent last night in the woods.”

Beaver's smile stayed on but became concerned. Jonesy had an idea what was coming next and willed Beaver not to say it—he had gotten the impression that McCarthy was a fairly religious man who might not care much for profanity—but of course asking Beaver to clean up his mouth was like asking the wind not to blow.

“Bitch-in-a-buzzsaw!” he cried now. “That's fuckin terrible! Sit down! Eat! You too, Jonesy.”

“Nah,” Jonesy said, “you go on and eat that. You're the one who just came in out of the snow.”

“You sure?”

“I am. I'll just scramble myself some eggs. Rick
can catch you up on his story.”
Maybe it'll make more sense to you than it does to me,
he thought.

“Okay.” Beaver took off his jacket (red) and his vest (orange, of course). He started to toss them on the woodpile, then thought better of it. “Wait, wait, got something you might want.” He stuck his hand deep into one of the pockets of his down jacket, rummaged, and came out with a paperback book, considerably bent but seemingly none the worse for wear otherwise. Little devils with pitchforks danced across the cover—
Small Vices,
by Robert Parker. It was the book Jonesy had been reading in the stand.

The Beav held it out to him, smiling. “I left your sleeping-bag, but I figured you wouldn't be able to sleep tonight unless you knew who the fuck done it.”

“You shouldn't have gone up there,” Jonesy said, but he was touched in a way only Beaver could touch him. The Beav had come back through the blowing snow and hadn't been able to make out if Jonesy was up in the tree-stand or not, not for sure. He could have called, but for the Beav, calling wasn't enough, only seeing was believing.

“Not a problem,” Beaver said, and sat down next to McCarthy, who was looking at him as a person might look at a new and rather exotic kind of small animal.

“Well, thanks,” Jonesy said. “You get around that sandwich. I'm going to do eggs.” He started away, then stopped. “What about Pete and Henry? You think they'll make it back okay?”

The Beav opened his mouth, but before he could
answer the wind gasped around the cabin again, making the walls creak and rising to a grim whistle in the eaves.

“Aw, this is just a cap of snow,” Beaver said when the gust died away. “They'll make it back. Getting out again if there comes a real norther, that might be a different story.” He began to gobble the grilled cheese sandwich. Jonesy went over to the kitchen to scramble some eggs and heat up another can of soup. He felt better about McCarthy now that Beaver was here. The truth was he always felt better when the Beav was around. Crazy but true.

4

By the time he got the eggs scrambled and the soup hot, McCarthy was chatting away to Beaver as if the two of them had been friends for the last ten years. If McCarthy was offended by the Beav's litany of mostly comic profanity, that was outweighed by Beav's considerable charm. “There's no explaining it,” Henry had once told Jonesy. “He's a tribble, that's all—you can't help liking him. It's why his bed is never empty—it sure isn't his looks women respond to.”

Jonesy brought his eggs and soup into the living area, working not to limp—it was amazing how much more his hip hurt in bad weather; he had always thought that was an old wives' tale but apparently it was not—and sat in one of the chairs at the end of the couch. McCarthy had been doing more
talking than eating, it seemed. He'd barely touched his soup, and had eaten only half of his grilled cheese.

“How you boys doin?” Jonesy asked. He shook pepper onto his eggs and fell to with a will—his appetite had made a complete comeback, it seemed.

“We're two happy whoremasters,” Beaver said, but although he sounded as chipper as ever, Jonesy thought he looked worried, perhaps even alarmed. “Rick's been telling me about his adventures. It's as good as a story in one of those men's magazines they had in the barber shop when I was a kid.” He turned back to McCarthy, still smiling—that was the Beav, always smiling—and flicked a hand through the heavy fall of his black hair. “Old Man Castonguay was the barber on our side of Derry when I was a kid, and he scared me so fuckin bad with those clippers of his that I been stayin away from em ever since.”

McCarthy gave a weak little smile but made no reply. He picked up the other half of his cheese sandwich, looked at it, then put it back down again. The red mark on his cheek glowed like a brand. Beaver, meanwhile, rushed on, as if he was afraid of what McCarthy might say if given half a chance. Outside it was snowing harder than ever, blowing, too, and Jonesy thought of Henry and Pete out there, probably on the Deep Cut Road by now, in Henry's old Scout.

“Not only did Rick here just about get eaten up by something in the middle of the night—a bear, he thinks it was—he lost his rifle, too. A brand-new Remington .30-.30, fuckin A, you won't never see that again, not a chance in a hundred thousand.”

“I know,” McCarthy said. The color was fading out of his cheeks again, that leaden look coming back in. “I don't even remember when I put it down, or—”

There was a sudden low rasping noise, like a locust. Jonesy felt the hair on the back of his neck stiffen, thinking it was something caught in the fireplace chimney. Then he realized it was McCarthy. Jonesy had heard some loud farts in his time, some long ones, too, but nothing like this. It seemed to go on forever, although it couldn't have been more than a few seconds. Then the smell hit.

McCarthy had picked up his spoon; now he dropped it back into his barely touched soup and raised his right hand to his blemished cheek in an almost girlish gesture of embarrassment. “Oh gosh, I'm sorry,” he said.

“Not a bit, more room out than there is in,” Beaver said, but that was just instinct running his mouth, instinct and the habits of a lifetime—Jonesy could see he was as shocked by that smell as Jonesy was himself. It wasn't the sulfurous rotten-egg odor that made you laugh and roll your eyes and wave your hand in front of your face, yelling
Ah, Jesus, who cut the cheese?
Nor one of those methane swamp-gas farts, either. It was the smell Jonesy had detected on McCarthy's breath, only stronger—a mixture of ether and overripe bananas, like the starter fluid you shot into your carburetor on a subzero morning.

“Oh dear, that's
awful,
” McCarthy said. “I am so darned sorry.”

“It's all right, really,” Jonesy said, but his stomach
had curled up into a ball, like something protecting itself from assault. He wouldn't be finishing his own early lunch; no way in hell could he finish it. He wasn't prissy about farts as a rule, but this one really reeked.

The Beav got up from the couch and opened a window, letting in a swirl of snow and a draft of blessedly fresh air. “Don't you worry about it, partner . . . but that is pretty ripe. What the hell you been eatin? Woodchuck turds?”

“Bushes and moss and other stuff, I don't know just what,” McCarthy said. “I was just so hungry, you know, I had to eat
something,
but I don't know much about that sort of thing, never read any of those books by Euell Gibbons . . . and of course it was dark.” He said this last almost as if struck by an inspiration, and Jonesy looked up at Beaver, catching his eye to see if the Beav knew what Jonesy did—McCarthy was lying. McCarthy didn't know what he'd eaten in the woods, or if he had eaten anything at all. He just wanted to explain that ghastly unexpected frog's croak. And the stench which had followed it.

The wind gusted again, a big, gaspy whoop that sent a fresh skein of snow in through the open window, but at least it was turning the air over, and thank God for that.

McCarthy leaned forward so suddenly he might have been propelled by a spring, and when he hung his head forward between his knees, Jonesy had a good idea of what was coming next; so long Navajo
rug, it's been good to know ya. The Beav clearly thought the same; he pulled back his legs, which had been splayed out before him, to keep them from being splattered.

But instead of vomit, what came out of McCarthy was a long, low buzz—the sound of a factory machine which has been put under severe strain. McCarthy's eyes bulged from his face like glass marbles, and his cheeks were so taut that little crescents of shadow appeared under the corners of his eyes. It went on and on, a rumbling, rasping noise, and when it finally ceased, the genny out back seemed far too loud.

“I've heard some mighty belches, but that's the all-time blue-ribbon winner,” Beav said. He spoke with quiet and sincere respect.

McCarthy leaned back against the couch, eyes closing, mouth downturned in what Jonesy took for embarrassment, pain, or both. And once again he could smell that aroma of bananas and ether, a fermenting
active
smell, like something which has just started to go over.