Dreamcatcher

not.

Six men were standing about ten feet down the hill from him, their shadows impossibly long and crisp on the diamond-dusted new snow. They were all wearing parkas. They all had clear plastic masks over their mouths and noses-these looked more efficient than the painters” masks Henry had found in the snowmobile shed, but Henry had an idea that the basic purpose was the same.

The men also had automatic weapons, all of them pointed at him. It now seemed rather lucky to Henry that he had left Jonesy’s Garand and his own Winchester back at the Scout. If he’d had a gun, he might have a dozen or more holes in him by now.

“I don’t think I’ve got it,” he croaked. “Whatever it is you’re worried about, I don’t think-”

“ON YOUR, FEET!” God’s voice again. Corning from the truck. The men standing in front of him blocked out at least some of the glare and Henry could see more men at the foot of the hill where the roads met. All of them had weapons, too, except for the one holding the bullhorn.

“I don’t know if I can g-”

“ON YOUR FEET NOW!” God commanded, and one of the men in front of him made an expressive little erking motion with the barrel of his gun.

Henry got shakily to his feet. His legs were trembling and the ankle he’d bent was outraged, but everything was holding together, at least for the time being. Thus ends the eggman’s journey, he thought, and began to laugh. The men in front of him looked at each other uneasily, and although they pointed their rifles at him again, he was comforted to see even that small demonstration of human emotion.

In the brilliant glow of the lights mounted on the pulper’s flatbed, Henry saw something lying in the snow-it had fallen from his pocket when he wiped out. Slowly, knowing they might shoot him anyway, he bent down.

“DON’T TOUCH THAT!” God cried from His loudspeaker atop the cab of the pulp-truck, and now the men down there also raised their weapons, a little hello darkness my old friend peeping from the muzzle of each.

“Bite shit and die,” Henry said-one of the Beav’s better efforts-and picked up the package. He held it out to the armed and masked men in front of him, smiling. “I come in peace for all mankind,” he said. “Who wants a hot dog?”

Chapter Twelve JONESY IN THE HOSPITAL

1

This was a dream.

It didn’t feel like one, but it had to be. For one thing, he’d already been through March fifteenth once, and it seemed monstrously unfair to have to go through it again. For another, he could remember all sorts of things from the eight months between mid-March and mid-November-helping the kids with their homework, Carla on the phone with her friends (many from the Narcotics Anonymous program), giving a lecture at Harvard… and the months of physical rehab, of course. All the endless bends, all the tiresome screaming as his joints stretched themselves out again, oh so reluctantly. He telling Jeannie Morin, his therapist, that he couldn’t. She telling him that he could. Tears on his face, big smile on hers (that hateful undeniable junior-miss-smile), and in the end she had turned out to be right. He could, he was the little engine that could, but what a price the little engine had paid.

He could remember all those things and more: getting out of bed for the first time, wiping his ass for the first time, the night in early May when he’d gone to bed thinking I’m going to get through this for the first time, the night in late May when he and Carla had made love for the first time since the accident, and afterward he’d told her an old joke: How do porcupines fuck? Very carefully. He could remember watching fireworks on Memorial Day, his hip and upper thigh aching like a bastard; he could remember eating watermelon on the Fourth of July, spitting seeds into the grass and watching Carla and her sisters play badminton, his hip and upper leg still aching but not so fiercely; he could remember Henry calling in September-“Just to check in,” he’d said-and talking about all sorts of things, including the annual hunting trip to Hole in the Wall come November. “Sure I’m coming,” Jonesy had said, not knowing then how little he would like the feel of the Garand in his hands. They had talked about their work (Jonesy had taught the final three weeks of summer session, hopping around pretty spryly on one crutch by then), about their families, about the books they had read and the movies they had seen; Henry had mentioned again, as he had in January, that Pete was drinking too much. Jonesy, having already been through one substance-abuse war with his wife, hadn’t wanted to talk about that, but when Henry passed along Beaver’s suggestion that they stop in Derry and see Duddits Cavell when their week of hunting was over, Jonesy had agreed enthusiastically. It had been too long, and there was nothing like a shot of Duddits to cheer a person up. Also…

“Henry?” he had asked. “We made plans to go see Duddits, didn’t we? We were going on St Patrick’s Day. I don’t remember it, but it’s written on my office calendar.”

“Yeah,” Henry had replied. “As a matter of fact, we did.”

“So much for the luck of the Irish, huh?”

As a result of such memories, Jonesy was positive March fifteenth had already happened. There were all sorts of evidence supporting the thesis, his office calendar being Exhibit A. Yet here they were again, those troublesome Ides… and now, oh goddam, how was this for unfair, now there seemed to be more of the fifteenth than ever.

Previously, his memory of that day faded out at around ten A.M. He’d been in his office, drinking coffee and making a stack of books to take down to the History Department office, where there was a FREE WITH STUDENT ID table. He hadn’t been happy, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember why. According to the same office calendar on which he had spied the unkept March seventeenth appointment to go see Duddits, he’d had a March fifteenth appointment with a student named David Defuniak. Jonesy couldn’t remember what it had been about, but he later found a notation from one of his grad assistants about a make-up essay from Defuniak-short-term results of the Norman Conquest-so he supposed it had been that. Still, what was there in a make-up assignment that could possibly have made Associate Professor Gary Jones feel unhappy?

Unhappy or not, he had been humming something, humming and then scatting the words, which were close to nonsense: Yes we can, yes we can-can, great gosh a’mighty yes we can-can. There were a few little shreds after that-wishing Colleen, the Department secretary, a nice St Paddy’s Day, grabbing a Boston Phoenix from the newspaper box outside the building, dropping a quarter into the saxophone case of a skinhead just over the bridge on the Cambridge side, feeling sorry for the guy because he was wearing a light sweater and the wind coming off the Charles was sharp-but mostly what he remembered after making that stack of giveaway books was darkness. Consciousness had returned in the hospital, with that droning voice from a nearby room: Please stop, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy, I want Marcy. Or maybe it had been where’s Jonesy, I want Jonesy. Old creeping death. Death pretending to be a patient. Death had lost track of him-sure, it was possible, it was a big hospital stuffed full of pain, sweating agony out its very seams-and now old creeping death was trying to find him again. Trying to trick him. Trying to make him give himself away.

This time around, though, all that merciful darkness in the middle is gone. This time around he not only wishes Colleen a happy St. Paddy’s Day, he tells her a joke: What do you call a Jamaican proctologist? A Pokemon. He goes out, his future self-his November self-riding in his March head like a stowaway. His future self hears his March self think foat a beautiful day it turned out to be as he starts walking towards his appointment with destiny in Cambridge. He tries to tell his March self that this is a bad idea, a grotesquely bad idea, that he can save himself months of agony just by hailing a Red Top or taking the T, but he can’t get through. Perhaps all the science-fiction stories he read about time when he was a teenager had it right: you can’t change the past, no matter how you try.

He walks across the bridge, and although the wind is a little cold, he still enjoys the sun on his face and the way it breaks into a million bright splinters on the Charles. He sings a snatch of “Here Comes the Sun,” then reverts to the Pointer Sisters: Yes we cancan, great gosh a’mighty. Swinging his briefcase in rhythm. His sandwich is inside. Egg salad. Mmm-mmmm, Henry said. SSDD, Henry said.

Here is the saxophonist, and surprise: he’s not on the end of the Mass Ave Bridge but farther up, by the MIT campus, outside one of those funky little Indian restaurants. He’s shivering in the cold, bald, with nicks on his scalp suggesting he wasn’t cut out to be a barber. The way he’s playing “These Foolish Things” suggests he wasn’t cut out to be a horn- player, either, and Jonesy wants to tell him to be a carpenter, an actor, a terrorist, anything but a musician. Instead, Jonesy actually encourages him, not dropping the quarter he previously remembered into the guy’s case (it’s lined with scuffed purple velvet), but a whole fistful of change-these foolish things, indeed. He blames it on the first warm sun after a long cold winter; he blames it on how well things turned out with Defuniak.

The sax-man rolls his eyes to Jonesy, thanking him but still blowing, Jonesy thinks of another joke: What do you call a sax-player with a credit card? An optimist.

He walks on, swinging his case, not listening to the Jonesy inside, the one who has swum upstream from November like some time-travelling salmon. “Hey Jonesy, stop. Just a few seconds should be enough. Tie your shoe or something. (No good, he’s wearing loafers. Soon he will be wearing a cast, as well.) That intersection up there is where it happens, the one where the Red Line stops, Mass Ave and Prospect. There’s an old guy coming, a wonked-out history professor in a dark blue Lincoln Town Car and he’s going to clean you like a house.”

But it’s no good. No matter how hard he yells, it’s no good. The phone lines are down. You can’t go back, can’t kill your own grandfather, can’t shoot Lee Harvey Oswald as he kneels at a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, congealing fried chicken on a paper plate beside him and his mail-order rifle aimed, can’t stop yourself walking across the intersection of Mass Ave and Prospect Street with your briefcase in your hand and your copy of the Boston Phoenix-which you will never read-under your arm. Sorry, sir, the lines are down somewhere in the Jefferson Tract, it’s a real fuckarow up there, your call cannot go through-

And then, oh God, this is new-the message does go through! As he reaches the corner, as he stands there on the curb, just about to step down into the crosswalk, it does go through!

“What?” he says, and the man who was stopped beside him, the first one to bend over him in a past which now may be blessedly canceled, looks at him suspiciously and says “I didn’t say anything,” as though there might be a third with them. Jonesy barely hears him because there is a third, there is a voice inside him, one which sounds suspiciously like his own, and it’s screaming at him to stay on the curb, to stay out of the street-

Then he hears someone crying. He looks across to the far side of Prospect and oh God, Duddits is there, Duddits Cavell naked except for his Underoos, and there is brown stuff smeared all around his mouth. It looks like chocolate, but Jonesy knows better. It’s dogshit, that bastard Richie made him eat it after all, and people over there are walking back and forth regardless, ignoring him, as if Duddits wasn’t there.

“Duddits!” Jonesy calls. “Duddits, hang on, man, I’m coming!”

And he plunges into the street without looking, the passenger inside helpless to do anything but ride along, understanding at last that this was exactly how and why the accident happened-the old man, yes, the old man with early-stage Alzheimer’s who had no business behind the wheel of a car in the first place, but that had only been part of it. The other part, concealed in the blackness surrounding the crash until now, was this: he had seen Duddits and had simply bolted, forgetting to look.