Cell

he had no hope of an answer that made sense now. Most times he got no answer at all. He stayed the next night in a trailer about five miles north of Gurleyville, and the next morning at a little past nine he spied a small figure sitting on the curb outside the Gurleyville Cafe, in the middle of the town's one-block business district.

It can't be, he thought, but he began to walk faster, and when he got a little closer—close enough to be almost sure that the figure was that of a child and not just a small adult—he began to run. His new pack began to bounce up and down on his back. His feet found the place where Gurleyville's short length of sidewalk commenced and began clapping on the concrete.

It was a boy.

A very skinny boy with long hair almost down to the shoulders of his Red Sox T-shirt.

'Johnny!' Clay shouted. 'Johnny, Johnny-Gee!'

The boy turned toward the sound of the shout, startled. His mouth hung open in a vacant gawp. There was nothing in his eyes but vague alarm. He looked as if he was thinking about running, but before he could even begin to put his legs in gear, Clay had swept him up and was covering his grimy, unresponsive face and slack mouth with kisses.

'Johnny,' Clay said. 'Johnny, I came for you. I did. I came for you. I came for you.'

And at some point—perhaps only because the man holding him had begun to swing him around in a circle —the child put his hands around Clay's neck and hung on. He said something, as well. Clay refused to believe it was empty vocalization, as meaningless as wind blowing across the mouth of an empty pop-bottle. It was a word. It might have been tieey, as if the boy was trying to say tired.

Or it might have been Dieey, which was the way he had, as a sixteen-month-old, first named his father.

Clay chose to hang on to that. To believe the pallid, dirty, malnourished child clinging to his neck had called him Daddy.

4

It was little enough to hang on to, he thought a week later. one sound that might have been a word, one word that might have been Daddy. Now the boy was sleeping on a cot in a bedroom closet, because Johnny would settle there and because Clay was tired of fishing him out from under the bed. The almost womblike confines of the closet seemed to comfort him. Perhaps it was part of the conversion he and the others had been through. Some conversion. The phoners at Kashwak had turned his son into a haunted moron without even a flock for comfort.

Outside, under a gray evening sky, snow was spitting down. A cold wind sent it up Springvale's lightless Main Street in undulating snakes. It seemed too early for snow, but of course it wasn't, especially this far north. When it came before Thanksgiving you always griped, and when it came before Halloween you griped double, and then somebody reminded you that you were living in Maine, not on the isle of Capri.

He wondered where Tom, Jordan, Dan, and Denise were tonight. He wondered how Denise would do when it came time to have her baby. He thought she'd probably do okay—tough as a boiled owl, that one. He wondered if Tom and Jordan thought about him as often as he thought about them, and if they missed him as much as he missed them—Jordan's solemn eyes, Tom's ironic smile. He hadn't seen half enough of that smile; what they'd been through hadn't been all that funny.

He wondered if this last week with his broken son had been the loneliest of his life. He thought the answer to that was yes.

Clay looked down at the cell phone in his hand. More than anything else, he wondered about that. Whether to make one more call. There were bars on its little panel when he powered up, three good bars, but the charge wouldn't last forever, and he knew it. Nor could he count on the Pulse to continue forever. The batteries sending the signal up to the corn-satellites (if that was what was happening, and if it was still happening) might give out. Or the Pulse might mutate into no more than a simple carrier wave, an idiot hum or the kind of high-pitched shriek you used to get when you called someone's fax line by mistake.

Snow. Snow on the twenty-first of October. Was it the twenty-first? He'd lost track of the days. One thing he knew for sure was that the phoners would be dying out there, more every night. Johnny would have been one of them, if Clay hadn't searched and found him.

The question was, what had he found?

What had he saved?

Dieey.

Daddy?

Maybe.

Certainly the kid hadn't said anything even remotely resembling a word since then. He had been willing to walk with Clay . . . but he'd also been prone to wandering off in his own direction. When he did that, Clay had to grab him again, the way you grabbed a tot who tried to take off in a supermarket parking lot. Each time Clay did this he couldn't help thinking of a windup robot he'd had when he was a kid, and how it would always find its way into a corner and stand there marching its feet uselessly up and down until you turned it back toward the middle of the room again.

Johnny had put up a brief, panicky fight when Clay had found a car with the key in it, but once he got the boy buckled and locked in and got the car rolling, Johnny had quieted again and seemed to become almost hypnotized. He even found the button that unrolled the window and let the wind blow on his face, closing his eyes and lifting his head slightly. Clay watched the wind blowing back his son's long, dirty hair and thought, God help me, it's like riding with a dog.

When they came to a road-reef they couldn't get around and Clay helped Johnny from the car, he discovered his son had wet his pants. He'slost his toilet training along with his language, he had thought dismally. Christon a crutch. And that turned out to be true, but the consequences weren't as complicated or dire as Clay thought they might be. Johnny was no longer toilet-trained, but if you stopped and led him into a field, he would urinate if he had to. Or if he had to squat, he'd do that, looking dreamily up at the sky while he emptied his bowels. Perhaps tracing the courses of the birds that flew there. Perhaps not.

Not toilet-trained, but housebroken. Again, Clay was helpless not to think of dogs he had owned.

Only dogs did not wake up and scream for fifteen minutes in the middle of each night.

That first night they had stayed in a house not far from the Newfield Trading Post, and when the screaming started, Clay had thought Johnny was dying. And although the boy had fallen asleep in his arms, he was gone when Clay snapped awake. Johnny was no longer in the bed but under it. Clay crawled underneath, into a choking cavern of dust-kitties with the bottom of the box spring only an inch above his head, and clutched a slender body that was like an iron rail. The boy's shrieks were bigger than such small lungs could produce, and Clay understood that he was hearing them amplified in his head. All of Clay's hair, even his pubic hair, seemed to be standing up straight and stiff.

Johnny had shrieked for nearly fifteen minutes there under the bed, then ceased as abruptly as he had begun. His body went limp. Clay had to press his head against Johnny's side (one of the boy's arms somehow squeezed over his neck in the impossibly small space) to make sure he was breathing.

He had dragged Johnny out, limp as a mailsack, and had gotten the dusty, dirty body back onto the bed. Had lain awake beside him almost an hour before falling soddenly asleep himself. In the morning, the bed had been his alone again. Johnny had crawled underneath once more. Like a beaten dog, seeking the smallest shelter it could find. Quite the opposite of previous phoner behavior, it seemed . . . but of course, Johnny wasn't like them. Johnny was a new thing, God help him.

6

Now they were in the cozy caretaker's cottage next to the Springvale Logging Museum.