Dreamcatcher

Duddits the past was always last week, the future always next week. It seemed to Owen that if everyone thought that way, there would be a lot less grief and rancor in the world.

Henry looked at the little string dreamcatcher a moment longer, then returned it to the brown bag just as Roberta bustled back in. Duddits broke into a huge grin when he saw what she’d gone for. “Oooby-Doo!” he cried. “Ooby-Doo unnox!” He took it and gave her a kiss on each cheek.

“Owen,” Henry said. His eyes were bright. “I have some extremely good news.” “Tell me.” “The bastards just hit a detour- jackknifed tractor-trailer just shy of Exit 28. It’s going to cost them ten, maybe twenty minutes.”

“Thank Christ. Let’s use them.” He glanced at the coat-tree in the corner. Hanging from it was a huge blue duffel coat with RED SOX WINTER BALL printed on the back in bright scarlet. “That yours, Duddits?”

“Ine!” Duddits said, smiling and nodding. “I-acket.” And, as Owen reached for it: “Ooo saw us ine Osie.” He got that one, too, and it sent a chill up his back. You saw us find Josie.

So he had… and Duddits had seen him. Only last night, or had Duddits seen him on that day, nineteen years ago? Did Duddits’s gift also involve a kind of time travel?

This wasn’t the time to ask such questions, and Owen was almost glad.

“I said I wouldn’t pack his lunchbox, but of course I did. In the end, I did.”

Roberta looked at it-at Duddits holding it, shifting it from hand to hand as he struggled into the enormous parka, which had also been a gift from the Boston Red Sox. His face was unbelievably pale against the bright blue and even brighter yellow of the lunchbox. “I knew he was going. And that I wasn’t.” Her eyes searched Henry’s face. “Please may I not go, Henry?”

“If you do, you could die in front of him,” Henry said-hating the cruelty of it, also hating how well his life’s work had prepared him to push the right buttons. “Would you want him to see that, Roberta?”

“No, of course not.” And, as an afterthought, hurting him all the way to the center of his heart: “Damn you.”

She went to Duddits, pushed Owen aside, and quickly ran up her son’s zip per. Then she took him by the shoulders, pulled him down, and fixed him with her eyes. Tiny, fierce little bird of a woman. Tall, pale son, floating inside his parka. Roberta had stopped crying.

“You be good, Duddie.”

“I eee ood, Umma.”

“You mind Henry.”

“I-ill, Umma. I ine Ennie.”

“Stay bundled up.”

“I-ill.”

Still obedient, but a little impatient now, wanting to be off, and how all this took Henry back: trips to get ice cream, trips to play minigolf (Duddits had been weirdly good at the game, only Pete had been able to beat him with any consistency), trips to the movies; always you mind Henry or you mind Jonesy or you mind your friends; always you be good, Duddie and I ee oood, Umma.

She looked him up and down. “I love you, Douglas. You have always been a good son to me, and I love you so very much. Give me a kiss, now.”

He kissed her; her hand stole out and caressed his beard-sandy cheek. Henry could hardly bear to look, but he did look, was as helpless as any fly caught in any spiderweb. Every dreamcatcher was also a trap.

Duddits gave her another perfunctory kiss, but his brilliant green eyes shifted between Henry and the door. Duddits was anxious to be off. Because he knew the people after Henry and his friend were close? Because it was an adventure, like all the adventures the five of them had had in the old days? Both? Yes, probably both. Roberta let him go, her hands leaving her son for the last time.

“Roberta,” Henry said. “Why didn’t you tell any of us this was happening? Why didn’t you call?”

“Why didn’t you ever come?”

Henry might have asked another of his own-Why didn’t Duddits call?-but the very question would have been a lie. Duddits had called repeatedly since March, when Jonesy had had his accident. He thought of Pete, sitting in the snow beside the overturned Scout, drinking beer and writing DUDDITS over and over again in the snow. Duddits, marooned in Never-Never Land and dying there, Duddits sending his messages and receiving back only silence. Finally one of them had come, but only to take him away with nothing but a bag of pills and his old yellow lunchbox. There was no kindness in the dreamcatcher. They had meant only good for Duddits, even on that first day; they had loved him honestly. Still, it came down to this.

“Take care of him, Henry.” Her gaze shifted to Owen. “You too. Take care of my son.”

Henry said, “We’ll try.”

15

There was no place to turn around on Dearborn Street; every driveway had been plowed under. In the strengthening morning light, the sleeping neighborhood looked like a town deep in the Alaskan tundra. Owen threw the Hummer in reverse and went flying backward down the street, the bulky vehicle’s rear end wagging clumsily from side to side. Its high steel bumper smacked some snow-shrouded vehicle parked at the curb, there was a tinkle of breaking glass, and then they again burst through the frozen roadblock of snow at the intersection, swerving wildly back into Kansas Street, pointing toward the turnpike. During all this Duddits sat in the back seat, perfectly complacent, his lunchbox on his lap.

Henry, why did Duddits say Jonesy wants war? What war?

Henry tried to send the answer telepathically, but Owen could no longer hear him. The patches of byrus on Owen’s face had all turned white, and when he scratched absently at his cheek, he pulled clumps of the stuff out with his nails. The skin beneath looked chapped and irritated, but not really hurt. Like getting over a cold, Henry marvelled. Really not more serious than that.

“He didn’t say war, Owen.”

“War,” Duddits agreed from the back seat. He leaned forward to look at the big green sign reading 95 SOUTHBOUND. “Onesy ont war.

Owen’s brow wrinkled; a dust of dead byrus flakes sifted down like dandruff. “What-”

“Water,” Henry said, and reached back to pat Duddit’s bony knee. “Jonesy wants water is what he was trying to say. Only it’s not Jonesy who wants it. It’s the other one. The one he calls Mr Gray.”

16

Roberta went into Duddits’s room and began to pick up the litter of his clothes-the way he left them around drove her crazy, but she supposed she wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore. She had been at it scarcely five minutes before a weakness overcame her legs, and she had to sit in his chair by the window. The sight of the bed, where he had come to spend more and more of his time, haunted her. The dull morning light on the pillow, which still bore the circular indentation of his head, was inexpressibly cruel.

Henry thought she’d let Duddits go because they believed the future of the whole world somehow hinged on finding Jonesy, and finding him fast. But that wasn’t it. She had let him go because it was what Duddits wanted. The dying got signed baseball caps; the dying also got to go on trips with old friends.

But it was hard.

Losing him was so hard.

She put her handful of tee-shirts to her face in order to blot out the sight of the bed and there was his smell: Johnson’s shampoo, Dial soap, and most of all, worst of all, the arnica cream she put on his back and legs when his muscles hurt.

In her desperation she reached out to him, trying to find him with the two men who had come like the dead and taken him away, but his mind was gone.

He’s blocked himself off from me, she thought. They had enjoyed (mostly enjoyed) their own ordinary telepathy over the years, perhaps only different in minor degree from the telepathy most mothers of special children experienced (she had heard the word rapport over and over again at the support-group meetings she and Alfie sometimes attended), but that was gone now. Duddits had blocked himself off, and that meant he knew something terrible was going to happen.

He knew.

Still holding the shirts to her face and inhaling his scent, Roberta began to cry again.

17

Kurtz had been okay (mostly okay) until they saw the road-flares and blue police lightbars flashing in the grim morning light, and beyond it, a huge semi lying on its side like a dead dinosaur. Standing out front, so bundled up his face was completely invisible, was a cop waving them toward an exit ramp.

“Fuck!” Kurtz spat. He had to fight an urge to draw the nine and just start spraying away. He knew that would be disaster-there were other cops running around the stalled semi-but he felt the urge, all but ungovernable, just the same. They were so close! Closing in, by the hands of the nailed-up Christ! And then stopped like this! “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“What do you want me to do, boss?” Freddy had asked. Impassive behind the wheel, but he had drawn his own weapon-an automatic rifle-across his lap. “If I nail it, I think we can skate by on the night. Gone in sixty seconds.”

Again Kurtz had to fight the urge to just say Yeah, punch it, Freddy, and if one of those bluesuits gets in the way, bust his gut for him. Freddy might get by… but he might not. He wasn’t the driver he thought he was, that Kurtz had already ascertained. Like too many pilots, Freddy had the erroneous belief that his skills in the sky were mirrored by skills on the ground. And even if they did get by, they’d be marked. And that was not acceptable, not after General Yellow-Balls Randall had hollered Blue Exit. His Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card had been revoked. He was strictly a vigilante now.

Got to do the smart thing, he thought. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.

“Be a good boy and just go the way he’s pointing you,” Kurtz said. “In fact, I want you to give him a wave and a big thumb’s-up when you take the ramp. Then keep moving south and get back on the turnpike at your earliest opportunity.” He sighed. “Lord love a duck.” He leaned forward, close enough to Freddy to see the whitening fuzz of Ripley in his