Dreamcatcher (8 page)

“Oh God, thank God, and thank you, too,” the man in the orange hat said to Jonesy, and when Jonesy grinned—that was a lot of thank-you's—the man laughed shrilly as if to say yes, he knew it, it was a funny thing to say but he couldn't help it. He began to take deep breaths, for a few moments looking like one of those exercise gurus you saw on high-number cable. On every exhale, he talked.

“God, I really thought I was done-for last night . . . it was so cold . . . and the damp air, I remember that . . . remember thinking Oh boy, oh dear, what if there's snow coming after all . . . I got coughing and couldn't stop . . . something came and I thought I have to stop coughing, if that's a bear or something I'll . . . you know
. . . provoke it or something . . . only I couldn't and after awhile it just . . . you know, went away on its own—”

“You saw a bear in the night?” Jonesy was both fascinated and appalled. He had heard there were bears up here—Old Man Gosselin and his pickle-barrel buddies at the store loved to tell bear stories, particularly to the out-of-staters—but the idea that this man, lost and on his own, had been menaced by one in the night was keenly horrible. It was like hearing a sailor talk about a sea monster.

“I don't know that it was,” the man said, and suddenly shot Jonesy a sideward look of cunning that Jonesy didn't like and couldn't read. “I can't say for sure, by then there was no more lightning.”

“Lightning, too? Man!” If not for the guy's obviously genuine distress, Jonesy would have wondered if he wasn't getting his leg pulled. In truth, he wondered it a little, anyway.

“Dry lightning, I guess,” the man said. Jonesy could almost see him shrugging it off. He scratched at the red place on his cheek, which might have been a touch of frostbite. “See it in winter, it means there's a storm on the way.”

“And you saw this? Last night?”

“I guess so.” The man gave him another quick, sideways glance, but this time Jonesy saw no slyness in it, and guessed he had seen none before. He saw only exhaustion. “It's all mixed up in my mind . . . my stomach's been hurting ever since I got lost . . . it always hurts when I'm ascairt, ever since I was a little kid . . .”

And he was
like
a little kid, Jonesy thought, looking everywhere at once with perfect unselfconsciousness. Jonesy led the guy toward the couch in front of the fireplace and the guy let himself be led.
Ascairt. He even said ascairt instead of afraid, like a kid. A little kid.

“Give me your coat,” Jonesy said, and as the guy first unbuttoned the buttons and then reached for the zipper under them, Jonesy thought again of how he had thought he was looking at a deer, at a
buck
for Chrissake—he had mistaken one of those buttons for an eye and had damned near put a bullet through it.

The guy got the zipper halfway down and then it stuck, one side of the little gold mouth choking on the cloth. He looked at it—gawked at it, really—as if he had never seen such a thing before. And when Jonesy reached for the zipper, the man dropped his hands to his sides and simply let Jonesy reach, as a first-grader would stand and let the teacher put matters right when he got his galoshes on the wrong feet or his jacket on inside out.

Jonesy got the little gold mouth started again and pulled it the rest of the way down. Outside the window-wall, The Gulch was disappearing, although you could still see the black scrawled shapes of the trees. Almost twenty-five years they had come up here together for the hunting, almost twenty-five years without a single miss, and in none of that time had there been snow heavier than the occasional squall. It looked like all that was about to change, although how could you tell? These days the guys on radio and TV
made four inches of fresh powder sound like the next Ice Age.

For a moment the guy only stood there with his jacket hanging open and snow melting around his boots on the polished wooden floor, looking up at the rafters with his mouth open, and yes, he was like a great big six-year-old—or like Duddits. You almost expected to see mittens dangling from the cuffs of his jacket on clips. He shrugged out of his coat in that perfectly recognizable child's way, simply slumping his shoulders once it was unzipped and letting it fall. If Jonesy hadn't been there to catch it, it would have gone on the floor and gotten right to work sopping up the puddles of melting snow.

“What's that?” he asked.

For a moment Jonesy had no idea what the guy was talking about, and then he traced the stranger's gaze to the bit of weaving which hung from the center rafter. It was colorful—red and green, with shoots of canary yellow, as well—and it looked like a spiderweb.

“It's a dreamcatcher,” Jonesy said. “An Indian charm. Supposed to keep the nightmares away, I guess.”

“Is it yours?”

Jonesy didn't know if he meant the whole place (perhaps the guy hadn't been listening before) or just the dreamcatcher, but in either case the answer was the same. “No, my friend's. We come up hunting every year.”

“How many of you?” The man was shivering, holding his arms crisscrossed over his chest and cupping
his elbows in his palms as he watched Jonesy hang his coat on the tree by the door.

“Four. Beaver—this is his camp—is out hunting now. I don't know if the snow'll bring him back in or not. Probably it will. Pete and Henry went to the store.”

“Gosselin's? That one?”

“Uh-huh. Come on over here and sit down on the couch.”

Jonesy led him to the couch, a ridiculously long sectional. Such things had gone out of style decades ago, but it didn't smell too bad and nothing had infested it. Style and taste didn't matter much at Hole in the Wall.

“Stay put now,” he said, and left the man sitting there, shivering and shaking with his hands clasped between his knees. His jeans had the sausagey look they get when there are longjohns underneath, and still he shook and shivered. But the heat had brought on an absolute flood of color; instead of looking like a corpse, the stranger now looked like a diphtheria victim.

Pete and Henry were doubling in the bigger of the two downstairs bedrooms. Jonesy ducked in, opened the cedar chest to the left of the door, and pulled out one of the two down comforters folded up inside. As he recrossed the living room to where the man sat shivering on the couch, Jonesy realized he hadn't asked the most elementary question of all, the one even six-year-olds who couldn't get their own zippers down asked.

As he spread the comforter over the stranger on
the outsized camp couch, he said: “What's your name?” And realized he almost knew. McCoy? McCann?

The man Jonesy had almost shot looked up at him, at once pulling the comforter up around his neck. The brown patches under his eyes were filling in purple.

“McCarthy,” he said. “Richard McCarthy.” His hand, surprisingly plump and white without its glove, crept out from beneath the coverlet like a shy animal. “You are?”

“Gary Jones,” he said, and took the hand with the one which had almost pulled the trigger. “Folks mostly call me Jonesy.”

“Thanks, Jonesy.” McCarthy looked at him earnestly. “I think you saved my life.”

“Oh, I don't know about that,” Jonesy said. He looked at that red patch again. Frostbite, just a small patch. Frostbite, had to be.

1

“You know I can't call anyone, don't you?” Jonesy said. “The phone lines don't come anywhere near here. There's a genny for the electric, but that's all.”

McCarthy, only his head showing above the comforter, nodded. “I was hearing the generator, but you know how it is when you're lost—noises are funny. Sometimes the sound seems to be coming from your left or your right, then you'd swear it's behind you and you better turn back.”

Jonesy nodded, although he did not, in fact, know how it was. Unless you counted the week or so immediately after his accident, time he had spent wandering in a fog of drugs and pain, he had never been lost.

“I'm trying to think what'd be the best thing,” Jonesy said. “I guess when Pete and Henry get back, we better take you out. How many in your party?”

It seemed McCarthy had to think. That, added to the unsteady way he had been walking, solidified Jonesy's impression that the man was in shock. He wondered that one night lost in the woods would do that; he wondered if it would do it to him.

“Four,” McCarthy said, after that minute to think. “Just like you guys. We were hunting in pairs. I was with a friend of mine, Steve Otis. He's a lawyer like me, down in Skowhegan. We're all from Skowhegan, you know, and this week for us . . . it's a big deal.”

Jonesy nodded, smiling. “Yeah. Same here.”

“Anyway, I guess I just wandered off.” He shook his head. “I don't know, I was hearing Steve over on my right, sometimes seeing his vest through the trees, and then I . . . I just don't know. I got thinking about stuff, I guess—one thing the woods are great for is thinking about stuff—and then I was on my own. I guess I tried to backtrack but then it got dark . . .” He shook his head yet again. “It's all mixed up in my mind, but yeah—there were four of us, I guess that's one thing I'm sure of. Me and Steve and Nat Roper and Nat's sister, Becky.”

“They must be worried sick.”

McCarthy looked first startled, then apprehensive. This was clearly a new idea for him. “Yeah, they must be. Of course they are. Oh dear, oh gee.”

Jonesy had to restrain a smile at this. When he got going, McCarthy sounded a little like a character in that movie,
Fargo.

“So we better take you out. If, that is—”

“I don't want to be a bother—”

“We'll take you out. If we can. I mean, this weather came in
fast.
”

“It sure did,” McCarthy said bitterly. “You'd think they could do better with all their darn satellites and doppler radar and gosh knows what else. So much for fair and seasonably cold, huh?”

Jonesy looked at the man under the comforter, just the flushed face and the thatch of thinning brown hair showing, with some perplexity. The forecasts
he
had heard—he, Pete, Henry, and the Beav—had been full of the prospect of snow for the last two days. Some of the prognosticators hedged their bets, saying the snow could change over to rain, but the fellow on the Castle Rock radio station that morning (WCAS was the only radio they could get up here, and even that was thin and jumbled with static) had been talking about a fast-moving Alberta Clipper, six or eight inches, and maybe a nor'easter to follow, if the temperatures stayed down and the low didn't go out to sea. Jonesy didn't know where McCarthy had gotten his weather forecasts, but it sure hadn't been WCAS. The guy was just mixed up, that was most likely it, and had every right to be.

“You know, I could put on some soup. How would that be, Mr. McCarthy?”

McCarthy smiled gratefully. “I think that would be pretty fine,” he said. “My stomach hurt last night and something fierce this morning, but I feel better now.”

“Stress,” Jonesy said. “I would have been puking my guts. Probably filling my pants, as well.”

“I didn't throw up,” McCarthy said. “I'm pretty
sure I didn't. But . . .” Another shake of the head, it was like a nervous tic with him. “I don't know. The way things are jumbled, it's like a nightmare I had.”

“The nightmare's over,” Jonesy said. He felt a little foolish saying such a thing—a little auntie-ish—but it was clear the guy needed reassurance.

“Good,” McCarthy said. “Thank you. And I
would
like some soup.”

“There's tomato, chicken, and I think maybe a can of Chunky Sirloin. What do you fancy?”

“Chicken,” McCarthy said. “My mother always said chicken soup was the thing when you're not feeling your best.”

He grinned as he said it, and Jonesy tried to keep the shock off his face. McCarthy's teeth were white and even, really too even to be anything but capped, given the man's age, which had to be forty-five or thereabouts. But at least four of them were missing—the canines on top (what Jonesy's father had called “the vampire teeth”) and two right in front on the bottom—Jonesy didn't know what those were called. He knew one thing, though: McCarthy wasn't aware they were gone. No one who knew about such gaps in the line of his teeth could expose them so unselfconsciously, even under circumstances like these. Or so Jonesy believed. He felt a sick little chill rush through his gut, a telephone call from nowhere. He turned toward the kitchen before McCarthy could see his face change and wonder what was wrong. Maybe
ask
what was wrong.

“One order chicken soup coming right up. How about a grilled cheese to go with it?”

“If it's no trouble. And call me Richard, will you? Or Rick, that's even better. When people save my life, I like to get on a first-name basis with them as soon as possible.”

“Rick it is, for sure.”
Better get those teeth fixed before you step in front of another jury, Rick.

The feeling that something was wrong here was very strong. It was that click, just as almost guessing McCarthy's name had been. He was a long way from wishing he'd shot the man when he had the chance, but he was already starting to wish McCarthy had stayed the hell away from his tree and out of his life.

2

He had the soup on the stove and was making the cheese sandwiches when the first gust of wind arrived—a big whoop that made the cabin creak and raised the snow in a furious sheet. For a moment even the black scrawled shapes of the trees in The Gulch were erased, and there was nothing outside the big window but white: it was as if someone had set up a drive-in movie screen out there. For the first time, Jonesy felt a thread of unease not just about Pete and Henry, presumably on their way back from Gosselin's in Henry's Scout, but for the Beaver. You would have said that if anybody knew these woods it would have been the Beav, but nobody knew anything in a white-out—
all bets were off,
that was another of his ne'er-do-well father's sayings, probably not as good as
you can't
make yourself be lucky,
but not bad. The sound of the genny might help Beav find his way, but as McCarthy had pointed out, sounds had a way of deceiving you. Especially if the wind started kicking up, as it had now apparently decided to do.