Dreamcatcher

“Gross,” Pete says.

Henry looks at him impatiently, but then he sees Pete isn’t looking at Beaver but past him, at a steaming puddle of vomit. In it are kernels of last night’s corn (Lamar Clarendon believes passionately in the virtues of canned food when it comes to camp cooking) and strings of last night’s fried chicken. Henry’s stomach takes a big unhappy lurch. And just as it starts to settle, Jonesy yarks. The sound is like a big liquid belch. The puke is brown.

“Gross!” Pete almost screams it this time.

Beaver doesn’t seem to even notice. “Henry!” he says. His eyes, submerged beneath twin lenses of tears, are huge and spooky. They seem to peer past Henry’s face and into the supposedly private rooms behind his forehead.

“Beav, it’s okay. You had a bad dream.”

“Sure, a bad dream.” Jonesy’s voice is thick, his throat still plated with puke. He tries to clear it with a thick ratching noise that is somehow worse than what just came out of him, then bends over and spits. His hands are planted on the legs of his longhandles, and his bare back is covered with bumps.

Beav takes no notice of Jonesy, nor of Pete as Pete kneels down on his other side and puts a clumsy, tentative arm around Beav’s shoulders. Beav continues to look only at Henry. “His head was off,” Beaver whispers.

Jonesy also drops to his knees, and now all three of them are surrounding the Beav, Henry and Pete to either side, Jonesy in front. There is vomit on Jonesy’s chin. He reaches to wipe it away, but Beaver takes his hand before he can. The boys kneel beneath the maple, and suddenly they are all one. It is brief, this sense of union, but as vivid as their dream. It is the dream, but now they are all awake, the sensation is rational, and they cannot disbelieve.

Now it is Jonesy the Beav is looking at with his spooky swimming eyes. Clutching Jonesy’s hand.

“It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud.”

“Yeah,” Jonesy whispers in an awed and shaky voice. “Oh jeez, it was.”

“Said he’d see us again, remember?” Pete asks. “One at a time or all together. He said that.”

Henry hears these things from a great distance, because he’s back in the dream. Back at the scene of the accident. At the bottom of a trash-littered embankment where there is a soggy piece of marsh, created by a blocked drainage culvert. He knows the place, it’s on Route 7, the old Derry-Newport Road. Lying overturned in the muck and the murk is a burning car. The air stinks of gas and burning tires. Duddits is crying. Duddits is sitting halfway down the trashy slope and holding his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox against his chest and crying his eyes out.

A hand protrudes from one of the windows of the overturned car. It’s slim, the nails painted candy-apple red. The car’s other two occupants have been thrown clear, one of them almost thirty damn feet. This one’s facedown, but Henry still recognizes him by the masses of soaked blond hair. It’s Duncan, the one who said you’re not gonna tell anyone anything, because you’ll be fuckin dead. Only Duncan’s the one who wound up dead.

Something floats against Henry’s shin. “Don’t pick that up!” Pete says urgently, but Henry does. It’s a brown suede moccasin. He has just time to register this, and then Beaver and Jonesy shriek in terrible childish harmony. They are standing together, ankle-deep in the muck, both of them wearing their hunting clothes: Jonesy in his new bright orange parka, bought special from Sears for this trip (and Mrs Jones still tearfully, unpersuadably convinced that her son win be killed in the woods by a hunter’s bullet, cut down in his prime), Beaver in his tattered motorcycle jacket (What a lot of zippers! Duddie’s Mom had said admiringly, thus winning Beaver’s love and admiration forever) with the orange bandannas tied up and down the arms. They aren’t looking at the third body, the one lying just outside the driver’s door, but Henry does, just for a moment (still holding the moccasin, like a small waterlogged canoe, in his hands), because something is terribly, fundamentally wrong with it, so wrong that for a moment he cannot tell what it might be. Then he realizes that there’s nothing above the collar of the corpse’s high-school jacket. Beaver and Jonesy are screaming because they have seen what should have been above it. They have seen Richie Grenadeau’s head lying faceup, glaring at the sky from a blood-spattered stand of cattails. Henry knows it’s Richie at once. Even though the swatch of tape no longer rides the bridge of his nose, there is no mistaking the guy who was trying to feed Duddits a piece of shit that day behind Tracker’s.

Duds is up there on the bank, crying and crying, that crying that gets into your head like a sinus headache, and if it goes on it will drive Henry mad. He drops the moc and slogs around the back of the burning car to where Beaver and Jonesy stand with their arms around each other.

“Beaver! Beav!” Henry shouts, but until he reaches out and gives Beaver a hard shake, Beaver just continues to stare at the severed head, as if hypnotized.

Finally, though, Beaver looks at him. “His head’s off,” he says, as if this were not evident. “Henry, his head’s-”

“Never mind his head, take care of Duddits! Make him stop that goddam crying!”

“Yeah,” Pete says. He looks at Richie’s head, that final dead glare, then looks away, mouth

twitching. “It’s drivin me fuckin bugshit.” “Like chalk on a chalkboard,” Jonesy mutters. Above his new orange parka, his skin is the color of old cheese. “Make him stop, Beav. “'H-H-H-” “Don’t be a dweeb, sing him the fuckin song!” Henry shouts. He can feel mucky water oozing up between his toes. “The lullaby, the goddam lullaby!”

For a moment the Beav looks as though he still doesn’t understand, but then his eyes clear a little and he says “Oh!” He goes slogging toward the embankment where Duddits sits, clutching his bright yellow lunchbox and howling as he did on the day they met him. Henry sees something that he barely has time to notice: there is blood caked around Duddits’s nostrils, and there’s a bandage on his left shoulder. Something is poking out of it, something that looks like white plastic.

“Duddits,” the Beav says, climbing the embankment. “Duddle, honey, don’t. Don’t cry no more, don’t look at it no more, it’s not for you to look at, it’s so fuckin gross…”

At first Duddits takes no notice, just goes on howling. Henry thinks, He cried himself into a nosebleed and that’s the blood part, but what’s that white thing sticking out of his shoulder?

Jonesy has actually raised his hands to cover his ears. Pete has got one of his on top of his head, as if to keep it from blowing off. Then Beaver takes Duddits in his arms, just as he did a few weeks earlier, and be ins to sing in that high clear voice that you’d never think could come out of a scrub like the Beav.

“Baby’s boat’s a silver dream, sailing near and far…”

And oh miracle of blessed miracles, Duddits begins to quiet. Speaking from the comer of his mouth, Pete says: “Where are we, Henry? Where the fuck are we?''In a dream,” Henry says, and all at once the four of them are back under the maple tree at Hole in the Wall, kneeling together in their underwear and shivering in the cold. “What?” Jonesy says. He pulls free to wipe at his mouth, and when the contact among them breaks, reality comes all the way back. “What did you say, Henry?” Henry feels the withdrawal of their minds, actually feels it, and he thinks, We weren’t meant to be like this, none of us. Sometimes being alone is better.

Yes, alone. Alone with your thoughts.

“I had a bad dream,” Beaver says. He seems to be explaining this to himself rather than to the rest of them. Slowly, as if he were still dreaming, he unzips one of his jacket pockets, rummages around inside, and comes out with a Tootsie Pop. Instead of unwrapping it, Beaver puts the stick end in his mouth and be ins to roll it back and forth, nipping and gnawing lightly. “I dreamed that-”

“Never mind,” Henry says, and pushes his glasses up on his nose. “We all know what you dreamed.” We ought to, we were there trembles on his lips, but he keeps it inside. He’s only fourteen, but wise enough to know that what is said cannot be unsaid. When it’s laid, it’s played they say when they’re playing rummy or Crazy Eights and someone makes a goofy-ass discard. If he says it, they’ll have to deal with it. If he doesn’t, then maybe… just maybe it’ll go away.

“I don’t think it was your dream, anyhow,” Pete says. “I think it was Duddits’s dream and we all-”

“I don’t give a shit what you think,” Jonesy says, his voice so harsh that it startles them all. “It was a dream, and I’m going to forget it. We’re all going to forget it, aren’t we, Henry?”

Henry nods at once.

“Let’s go back in,” Pete says. He looks vastly relieved. “My feet’re fre-

“One thing, though,” Henry says, and they all look at him nervously. Because when they need a leader, Henry is it. And if you don’t like the way I do it, he thinks resentfully, someone else can do it. Because this is no tit job, believe me.

“What?” Beaver asks, meaning What now?

“When we go into Gosselin’s later on, someone’s got to call Duds. In case he’s upset.”

No one replies to this, all of them awed to silence by the idea of calling their new retardo friend on the phone. It occurs to Henry that Duddits has likely never received a phone call in his life; this will be his first. “You know, that’s probably right,” Pete agrees and then slaps his hand over his mouth like someone who has said something incriminating.Beaver, naked except for his dopey boxers and his even dopier jacket, is now shivering violently. The Tootsie Pop jitters at the end of its gnawed stick. “Someday you’ll choke on one of those things,” Henry tells him. “Yeah, that’s what my Mom says. Can we go in? I’m freezing.” They start back toward Hole in the Wall, where their friendship will end twenty-three years from this very day. “Is Richie Grenadeau really dead, do you think?” Beaver asks. “I don’t know and I don’t care,” Jonesy says. He looks at Henry. “We’ll call Duddits, okay-

I’ve got a phone and we can bill the charges to my number.”

“Your own phone,” Pete says. “You lucky duck. Your folks spoil you fuckin rotten, Gary.”

Calling him Gary usually gets under his skin, but not this morning-Jonesy is too preoccupied. “It was for my birthday and I have to pay the long-distance out of my allowance, so let’s keep it short. And after that, this never happened-never happened, you got that?”

And they all nod. Never happened. Never fucking hap-

3

A gust of wind pushed Henry forward, almost into the electrified compound fence. He came back to himself, shaking off the memory like a heavy coat. It couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time (of course, the time for some memories was never convenient). He had been waiting for Underhill, freezing his katookis off and waiting for his only chance to get out of here, and Underhill could have walked right by him while he stood daydreaming, leaving him up shit creek without a paddle.

Only Underhill hadn’t gone past. He was standing on the other side of the fence, hands in his pockets, looking at Henry. Snowflakes landed on the transparent, buglike bulb of the mask he wore, were melted by the warmth of his breath, and ran down its surface like…

Like Beaver’s tears that day, Henry thought. “You ought to go in the barn with the rest of them,” Underhill said. “You’ll turn into a snowman out here.”

Henry’s tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. His life quite literally depended on what he said to this man, and he could think of no way to get started. Couldn’t even loosen his tongue. And why bother? the voice inside inquired-the voice of darkness, his old friend. Really and truly, why bother? Why not just let them do what you were going to do to yourself, anyway?

Because it wasn’t just him anymore. Yet he still couldn’t speak.