Dreamcatcher

Butch handed over the keys willingly enough. He still looked alert (“bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” was how Jonesy put it, although the young cook had no tail Mr Gray could see), but his consciousness was gone. “Out on his feet,” Jonesy thought.

You won’t remember this, Mr Gray said.

“No,” Butch agreed.

Just back to work.

“You bet,” Butch agreed. He picked up his bags of garbage and headed for the Dumpsters again. By the time his shift was over and he realized his mother’s car was gone, all this would likely be over.

Mr Gray unlocked the red Subaru and got in. There was half a bag of barbecue potato chips on the seat. Mr Gray gobbled them greedily as he drove back to the plow. He finished by licking Jonesy’s fingers. Greasy. Good. Like the bacon. He got the dog. Five minutes later he was on the turnpike again.

South and south and south.

2

The night roars with music and laughter and loud voices; the air is big with the smell of grilled hotdogs, chocolate, roasted peanuts; the sky blooms with colored fire. Binding it all together, identifying it, signing it like summer’s own autograph, is an amplified rock-and-roll song from the speakers that have been set up in Strawford Park:

Hey pretty baby take a ride with me

We’re goin down to Alabama on the C amp;C.

And here comes the tallest cowboy in the world, a nine-foot Pecos Bill under the burning sky, towering over the crowd, little kids with their ice-cream- smeared mouths dropped open in wonder, their eyes wide; laughing parents hold them up or put them on their shoulders so they can see better. In one hand Pecos Bill waves his hat, in the other a banner which reads DERRY DAYS 1981.

We’re gonna walk the tracks, stay up all night

we get a little bored, then we’ll have a little fight.

“Ow eee-oh all?” Duddits asks. He has a cone of blue cotton candy in one hand, but it is forgotten; as he watches the stilt-walking cowboy pass under the burning fireworks sky, his eyes are as wide as any three-year-old’s. Standing on one side of Duddits are Pete and Jonesy; on the other are Henry and the Beav. Behind the cowboy comes a retinue of vestal virgins (surely some of them are still virgins, even in this year of grace 1981) in spangly cowboy skirts and white cowboy boots, tossing the batons that won the West,

“Don’t know how he can be so tall, Duds,” Pete says, laughing. He yanks a hank of blue floss from the cone in Duddits’s hand and tucks it into Duddits’s amazed mouth. “Must be magic.”

They all laugh at how Duddits chews without even taking his eyes from the cowpoke on stilts. Duds is taller than all of them now, even taller than Henry. But he’s still just a kid, and he makes them all happy. Magic is what he is; he won’t find Josie Rinkenhauer for another year, but they know-he’s fuckin magic. It was scary going up against Richie Grenadeau and his friends, but that was still the luckiest day of their lives-they all think so.

Don’t say no, baby, come with me

We’re gonna take a little ride on the C amp;C.

“Hey, Tex!” Beaver shouts, waving his own lid (a Derry Tigers baseball hat) up at the tall cowboy. “Kiss my bender, big boy! I mean, sit on it and spin!”

And they’re all killing themselves laughing (it is a memory for the ages, all right, the night Beaver ranked on the stilt-walking cowboy in the Derry Days Parade beneath that burning gunpowder sky), all but Duddits, who is staring with that expression of stoned wonder, and Owen Underhill (Owen! Henry thinks, how did you get here, buddy?), who looks worried.

Owen is shaking him, Owen is once more telling him to wake up, Henry, wake up, wake

3

up, for God’s sake!”

It was the fright in Owen’s voice that finally roused Henry from his dream. For a moment he could still smell peanuts and Duddits’s cotton candy. Then the world came back in: white sky, snow-covered turnpike lanes, a green sign reading AUGUSTA NEXT TWO EXITS. Also Owen shaking him, and from behind them a barking sound, hoarse and desperate. Duddits coughing.

“Wake up, Henry, he’s bleeding! Will you please wake the fuck-”

“I’m awake, I’m awake.”

He unbuckled his seatbelt, twisted around, got up on his knees. The overstrained muscles in his thighs shrieked in protest, but Henry paid no attention.

It was better than he expected. From the panic in Owen’s voice, he had expected some sort of hemorrhage, but it was just a trickle from one nostril and a fine spray of blood from Duddits’s mouth when he coughed. Owen had probably thought poor old Duds was coughing up his lungs, when in fact he’d probably strained something in his throat. Not that this wasn’t potentially serious. In Duddits’s increasingly fragile condition, anything was potentially serious; a random cold-germ could kill him. From the moment he’d seen him, Henry had known Duds was coming out of the last turn and heading for home.

“Duds!” he called sharply. Something different. Something different in him, Henry. What? No time to think about it now. “Duddits, breathe in through your nose! Your nose, Duds! Like this!”

Henry demonstrated, taking big breaths through flared nostrils… and when he exhaled, little threads of white flew from his nostrils. Like the fluff in milkweed pods, or dandelions gone to seed. Byrus, Henry thought. It was growing up my nose, but now it’s dead. I’m sloughing it off, literally breath by breath. And then he understood the difference: the itching had stopped, in his leg and in his mouth and in the thatch of his groin. His mouth still tasted as if it had been lined with someone’s old carpet, but it didn’t itch.

Duddits began to imitate him, breathing deep through his nose, and his coughing began to ease as soon as it did. Henry took his paper bag, found a bottle of harmless no-alcohol cough medicine, and poured Duddits a capful. “This’ll take care of you,” Henry said. Confidence in the thought as well as the words; with Duddits, how you sounded was only part of it.

Duddits drank the capful of Robitussin, grimaced, then smiled at Henry. The coughing had stopped, but blood was still trickling from one nostril… and from the corner of one eye as well, Henry saw. Not good. Nor was Duddits’s extreme pallor, much more noticeable than it had been at the house back in Derry. The cold… his lost night’s sleep all this untoward excitement in someone who was an invalid… not good. He was getting sick, and in a late-stage ALL patient, even a nasal infection could be fatal.

“He all right?” Owen asked.

“Duds? Duds is iron. Right, Duddits?”

“I ion,” Duddits agreed, and flexed one woefully skinny arm. The sight of his face-thin and tired but still trying to smile-made Henry feel like screaming. Life was unfair; that was something he supposed he’d known for years. But this went far beyond unfair. This was monstrous.

“Let’s see what she put in here for good boys to drink.” Henry took the yellow lunchbox.

“Oooby-Doo,” Duddits said. He was smiling, but his voice sounded thin and exhausted.

“Yep, got some work to do now,” Henry agreed, and opened the Thermos. He gave Duds his morning Prednisone tablet, although it hadn’t yet gone eight, and then asked Duddits if he wanted a Percocet, as well. Duddits thought about it, then held up two fingers. Henry’s heart sank.

“Pretty bad, huh?” he asked, passing Duddits a couple of Percocet tablets over the seat between them. He hardly needed an answer-people like Duddits didn’t ask for the extra pill so they could get high.

Duddits made a seesawing gesture with his hand-comme ci, comme ca. Henry remembered it well, that seesawing hand as much a part of Pete as the chewed pencils and toothpicks were of Beaver.

Roberta had filled Duddits’s Thermos with chocolate milk, his favorite. Henry poured him a cup, held it a moment as the Humvee skidded on a slick patch, then handed it over. Duddits took his pills.

“Where does it hurt, Duds?”

“Here.” Hand to the throat. “More here.” Hand to the chest. Hesitating, coloring a little, then a hand to his crotch. “Here, ooo.”

A urinary-tract infection, Henry thought. Oh, goody.

“Ills ake ee etter?”

Henry nodded. “Pills’ll make you better. Just give em a chance to work. Are we still on the line, Duddits?”

Duddits nodded emphatically and pointed through the windshield. Henry wondered (not for the first time) just what he saw. Once he’d asked Pete, who told him it was something like a thread, often faint and hard to see. It’s best when it’s yellow, Pete had said. Yellow’s always easier to pick up. I don’t know why. And if Pete saw a yellow thread, perhaps Duddits saw something like a broad yellow stripe, perhaps even Dorothy’s yellow brick road.

“If it goes off on another road, you tell us, okay?”

“I tell.”

“Not going to go to sleep, are you?”

Duddits shook his head. In fact he had never looked more alive and awake, his eyes glowing in his exhausted face. Henry thought of how lightbulbs would sometimes go mysteriously bright before burning out for good.

“If you do start to get sleepy, you tell me and we’ll pull over. Get you some coffee. We need you awake. “'O-ay.” Henry started to turn around, moving his aching body with as much care as he could muster,

when Duddits said something else.

“Isser Ay ont aykin.”

“Does he, now?” Henry said thoughtfully.

“What?” Owen asked. “I didn’t get that one.”

“He says Mr Gray wants bacon.”