Dreamcatcher(102)

Beside him, Melrose, the cook's third (which was about as close as anyone got to an official rating on this little adventure), struggled to keep up. He was wearing sneakers on his feet instead of shoes or boots  -  Perlmutter had dragged him out of Spago's, which was what the men called the cook-tent  -  and he kept slipping. Men (and a few women) passed everywhere around them, mostly at the double. Many were talking into lavalier mikes or walkie-talkies. The sense that this was a movie-set instead of a real place was enhanced by the trailers, the semis, the idling helicopters (the worsening weather had brought them all back in), and the endless conflicting roar of motors and generators.

'Why does he want to see me?' Melrose asked again. Out of breath and whinier than ever. They were passing the paddock and corral to one side of Gosselin's barn, now. The old and dilapidated fence (it had been ten years or more since there'd been an actual horse in the corral or exercised in the paddock) had been reinforced by alternating strands of barbwire and smoothwire. There was an electrical charge running through the smoothwire, probably not lethal but high enough to lay you out on the ground, convulsing . . . and the charge could be jacked up to lethal levels if the natives became restless. Behind this wire, watching them, were twenty or thirty men, Old Man Gosselin among them (in the James Cameron version, Gosselin would be played by some craggy oldtimer like Bruce Dern). Earlier, the men behind the wire would have called out, issuing threats and angry demands, but since they'd seen what happened to that banker from Massachusetts who tried to run, their peckers had wilted considerably, poor fellows. Seeing someone shot in the head took a lot of the f**k-you out of a man. And then there was the fact that all the cps guys were now wearing nose-and-mouth masks. That had to take whatever f**k-you was left.

'Boss?' Almost whining had given way to actual whining. The sight of American citizens standing behind barbed wire had apparently added to Melrose's unease. 'Boss, come on  -  why does the big boy want to see me? Big boy shouldn't know a cook's third even exists.'

'I don't know,' Pearly replied. It was the truth.

Up ahead, standing at the head of what had been dubbed Eggbeater Alley, was Owen Underhill and some guy from the motor?pool. The motor-pool guy was almost shouting into Underhill's ear in order to make himself heard over the racket of the idling helicopters. Surely, Perlmutter thought, they'd shut the choppers down soon; nothing was going to fly in this shit, an early-season blizzard that Kurtz called 'our gift from God'. When he said stuff like that, you couldn't tell if Kurtz really meant it or was just being ironic. He always sounded like he meant it . . . but then sometimes he would laugh. The kind of laugh that made Archie Perlmutter nervous. In the movie, Kurtz would be played by James Woods. Or maybe Christopher Walken. Neither one of them looked like Kurtz, but had George C. Scott looked like Patton? Case closed.

Perlmutter abruptly detoured toward Underhill. Melrose tried to follow and went on his ass, cursing. Perlmutter tapped Underhill on his shoulder, then hoped his mask would at least partially conceal his expression of surprise when the other man turned. Owen Underhill looked as if he had aged ten years since stepping off the Millinocket School Department bus.

Leaning forward, Pearly shouted over the wind: 'Kurtz in fifteen! Don't forget!'

Underhill gave him an impatient wave to say he wouldn't, and turned back to the motor-pool guy. Perlmutter had him placed now; Brodsky, his name was. The men called him Dawg.

Kurtz's command post, a humongous Winnebago (if this were a movie-set, it would be the star's home away from home, or perhaps Jimmy Cameron's), was just ahead. Pearly picked up the pace, facing boldly forward into the flick-flick-flick of the snow. Melrose scurried to catch up, brushing snow off his coverall.

'C'mon, Skipper,' he pleaded. 'Don'tcha have any idea?'

'No,' Perlmutter said. He had no clue as to why Kurtz would want to see a cook's third with everything up and running in high gear. But he thought both of them knew it couldn't be anything good.

2

Owen turned Emil Brodsky's head, placed the bulb of his mask against the man's ear, and said: 'Tell me again. Not all of it, Just about the part you called the mind-f*ck.'

Brodsky didn't argue but took ten seconds or so to arrange his thoughts. Owen gave it to him. There was his appointment with Kurtz, and debriefing after that  -  plenty of crew, reams of paperwork  -  and God alone knew what gruesome tasks to follow, but he sensed this was important.

Whether or not he would tell Kurtz remained to be seen.

At last Brodsky turned Owen's head, placed the bulb of his own mask against Owen's car, and began to talk. The story was a little more detailed this time, but essentially the same, He had been walking across the field next to the store, talking to Cambry beside him and to an approaching fuel-supply convoy at the same time, when all at once he felt as if his mind had been hijacked. He had been in a cluttery old shed with someone he couldn't quite see. The man wanted to get a snowmobile going, and couldn't. He needed the Dawg to tell him what was wrong with it.

'I asked him to open the cowling!' Brodsky shouted into Owen's ear. 'He did, and then it seemed like I was looking through his eyes . . . but with my mind, do you see?'

Owen nodded.

'I could see right away what was wrong, someone had taken the plugs out. So I told the guy to look around, which he did. Which we both did. And there they were, in a jar of gasoline on the table. My Dad used to do the same thing with the plugs from his Lawnboy and his rototiller when the cold weather came.'