Dreamcatcher

“Yes, but the fucking Tigers lost the Homecoming game and Grenadeau ended up with a broken nose,” Henry says. “First Derry High team ever to play a Class-A team from southern Maine and those fools-”

“Fuck the Tigers,” Pete breaks in. He has more interest in high school football than he does in the dreaded x, but not much. Anyway, he’s got the girl placed now, remembers the newspaper photo of her standing on the flower-decked bed of a pulp truck next to the Tiger quarterback, both of them wearing tinfoil crowns, smiling, and waving to the crowd. The girl’s hair fell around her face in big blowy Farrah Fawcett waves, and her gown was strapless, showing the tops of her breasts.

For the first time in his life, Pete feels real lust-it is a meaty feeling, red and heavy, that stiffens his prick, dries up the spit in his mouth, and makes it hard for him to think. Pussy is interesting; the idea of seeing local pussy, Homecoming Queen pussy… that is a lot more than exciting. That is, as the Derry News’s film critic sometimes says about movies she especially likes, “a must-see.”

“Where?” he asks Jonesy breathlessly. He is imagining seeing this girl, this Tina Jean Schlossinger, waiting on the corner for the school bus, just standing there giggling with her girlfriends, not having the slightest idea that the boy walking past has seen what is under her skirt or her jeans, that he knows if the hair on her pussy is the same color as the hair on her head. Pete is on fire. “Where is it?”

“There,” Jonesy says, and points at the red brick box that is Tracker Brothers old freight and storage depot. There is ivy crawling up the sides, but this has been a cold fall and most of the leaves have already died and turned black. Some of the windows are broken and the rest are bleary. Looking at the place gives Pete a little chin. Partly because the big kids, the high-school kids and even some that are beyond high school, play baseball in the vacant lot behind the building, and big kids like to beat up little kids, who knows why, it relieved the monotony or something. But this isn’t the big deal, because baseball is over for the year and the big kids have probably moved on to Strawford Park, where they will play two-hand touch football until the snow flies. (Once the snow flies, they will beat each others” brains in playing hockey with old friction-taped sticks.) No, the big deal is that kids sometimes disappear in Derry, Derry is funny that way, and when they do disappear, they are often last seen in out-of-the-way places like the deserted Tracker Brothers depot. No one talks about this unpleasant fact, but everyone knows about it.

Yet a pussy… not some fictional Penthouse pussy but the actual muff of an actual girl from town… that would be something to see, all right. That would be a fuckin pisser.

“Tracker Brothers?” Henry says with frank disbelief They have stopped now, are standing together in a little clump not far from the building while the last of the retards go moaning and goggling by on the other side of the street. “I think the world of you, Jonesy, don’t get me wrong-the fucking world-but why would there be a picture of Tina Jean’s pussy in there?''I don’t know,” Jonesy said, “but Davey Trask saw it and said it was her.” “I dunno about goin in there, man,” Beaver says. “I mean, I’d love to see Tina Jean Slophanger’s pussy-”

“Schlossinger-”

“-but that place has been empty at least since we were in the fifth grade-”

“Beav-”

“-and I bet it’s full of rats.”

“Beav-”

But Beav intends to have his entire say. “Rats get rabies,” he says. “They get rabies up the old wazoo.”

“We don’t have to go in,” Jonesy says, and all three look at him with renewed interest. This is, as the fellow said when he saw the black-haired Swede, a Norse of a different color.

Jonesy sees he has their full attention, nods, goes on. “Davey says all you have to do is go around on the driveway side and look in the third or fourth window. It used to be Phil and Tony Tracker’s office. There’s still a bulletin board on the wall. And Davey said the only two things on the bulletin board are a map of New England showing all the truck routes, and a picture of Tina jean Schlossinger showing all of her pussy.”

They look at him with breathless interest, and Pete asks the question which has occurred to all of them. “Is she bollocky?”

“No,” Jonesy admits. “Davey says you can’t even see her tits, but she’s holding her skirt up and she isn’t wearing pants and you can see it, just as clear as day.”

Pete is disappointed that this year’s Tiger Homecoming Queen isn’t bollocky bare-ass, but the thing about how she’s holding her skirt up inflames them all, feeding some primal, semi-secret notion of how sex really works. A girl could hold her skirt up, after all; any girl could.

Not even Henry asks any more questions. The only question comes from the Beav, who asks if Jonesy is sure they won’t have to go inside in order to see. And they are already moving in the direction of the driveway running down the far side of the building toward the vacant lot, powerful as a spring tide in their nearly mindless motion.

5

Pete finished the second beer and heaved the bottle deep into the woods. Feeling better now, he got cautiously to his feet and dusted the snow from his ass. And was his knee a little bit looser? He thought maybe it was. Looked awful, of course-looked like he had a little model of the Minnesota goddam Metrodome under there-but felt a bit better. Still, he walked carefully, swinging his plastic sack of beer in short arcs beside him. Now that the small but powerful voice insisting that he had to have a beer, just goddam had to, had been silenced, he thought of the woman with new solicitude, hoping she hadn’t noticed he was gone. He would walk slowly, he would stop to massage his knee every five minutes or so (and maybe talk to it, encourage it, a crazy idea, but he was out here on his own and it couldn’t hurt), and he would get back to the woman. Then he would have another beer. He did not look back at the overturned Scout, did not see that he had written DUDDITS in the snow, over and over again, as he sat thinking of that day back in 1978.

Only Henry had asked why the Schlossinger girl’s picture would be there in the empty office of an empty freight depot, and Pete thought now that Henry had only asked because he had to fulfill his role as Group Skeptic. Certainly he’d only asked once; as for the rest of them, they had simply believed, and why not? At thirteen, Pete had still spent half his life believing in Santa Claus. And besides-

Pete stopped near the top of the big hill, not because he was out of breath or because his leg was cramping up, but because he could suddenly feel a low humming sound in his head, sort of like an electrical transformer, only with a kind of cycling quality to it, a low thud-thud-thud. And no, it wasn’t “suddenly” as in “suddenly started up'; he had an idea the sound had been there for awhile and he was just becoming aware of it. And he had started to think some funny stuff. All that about Henry’s cologne, for instance… and Marcy. Someone named Marcy. He didn’t think he knew anyone named Marcy but the name was suddenly in his head, as in Marcy I need you or Marcy I want you or maybe Zounds, Marcy, bring the gasogene.

He stood where he was, licking his dry lips, the bag of beer hanging straight down from his hand now, its pendulum motion stilled. He looked up in the sky, suddenly sure the lights would be there… and they were there, only just two of them now, and very faint.

“Tell Marcy to make them give me a shot,” Pete said, enunciating each word carefully in the stillness, and knew they were exactly the right words. Right why or right how he couldn’t say, but yes, those were the words in his head. Was it the click, or had the lights caused those thoughts? Pete couldn’t say for sure.

“Maybe nyther,” he said.

Pete realized the last of the snow had stopped. The world around him was only three colors: the deep gray of the sky, the deep green of the firs, and the perfect unblemished white of the new snow. And hushed.

Pete cocked his head first to one side and then to the other, listening. Yes, hushed. Nothing. No sound in the world and the humming noise had stopped as completely as the snow. When he looked up, he saw that the pale, mothlike glow of the lights was also gone.

“Marcy?” he said, as if calling someone. It occurred to him that Marcy might be the name of the woman who had caused them to wreck, but he dismissed the idea. That woman’s name was Becky, he knew it as surely as he had known the name of the real estate woman that time. Marcy was just a word now, and nothing about it called to him. Probably he’d just had a brain-cramp. Wouldn’t be the first time.

He finished climbing the hill and started down the other side, his thoughts returning to that day in the fall of 1978, the day they had met Duddits.

He was almost back to the place where the road leveled when his knee abruptly let go, not locking up this time but seeming to explode like a pine knot in a hot fire.

Pete pitched forward into the snow. He didn’t hear the Bud bottles break inside the bag-all but two of them. He was screaming too loudly.

Chapter Six DUDDITS, PART TWO

1

Henry started off in the direction of the camp at a quick walk, but as the snow subsided to isolated flurries and the wind began to die, he upped the walk to a steady, clocklike jog. He had been jogging for years, and the pace felt natural enough. He might have to pull up for awhile, walk or even rest, but he doubted it. He had run road-races longer than nine miles, although not for a couple of years and never with four inches of snow underfoot. Still, what was there to worry about? Falling down and busting a hip? Maybe having a heart attack? At thirty-seven a heart attack seemed unlikely, but even if he had been a prime candidate for one, worrying about it would have been ludicrous, wouldn’t it? Considering what he was planning? So what was there to worry about?

Jonesy and Beaver, that was what. On the face of it that seemed as ludicrous as worrying about suffering a catastrophic cardiac outage here in the middle of nowhere-the trouble was behind him, with Pete and that strange, semi-comatose woman, not up ahead at Hole in the Wall… except there was trouble at Hole in the Wall, bad trouble. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did and he accepted the knowing. Even before he started encountering the animals, all hurrying by and none giving him more than the most cursory glance, he knew that.

Once or twice he glanced up into the sky, looking for more foo-lights, but there were none to be seen and after that he just looked straight ahead, sometimes having to zig or zag to keep out of the way of the animals. They weren’t quite stampeding, but their eyes had an odd, spooky look that Henry had never seen before.

Once he had to skip handily to keep from being upended by a pair of hurrying foxes.

Eight more miles, he told himself. It became a jogging mantra, different from the ones that usually went through his head when