Dreamcatcher(106)

'Double-time, Mr Perlmutter. Owen, I want to talk to you mano a mano, as the Irish say.' He stepped over Melrose's body without looking down at it and walked briskly into the kitchenette. 'Coffee? Freddy made it, so I can't swear it's drinkable . . . no, I can't swear, but . . .'

'Coffee would be good,' Owen Underhill said. 'You pour and I'll try to stop this fellow's bleeding.'

Kurtz stood by the Mr Coffee on the counter and gave Underhill a look of darkly brilliant doubt. 'Do you really think that's necessary?' That was where Perlmutter went out. Never before in his life had stepping into a storm felt so much like an escape.

4

Henry stood at the fence (not touching the wire; he had seen what happened when you did that), waiting for Underhill  -  that was his name, all right  -  to come back out of what had to be the command post, but when the door opened, one of the other fellows he'd seen go in came hustling out. Once down the steps, the guy started running. The guy was tall, and possessed one of those earnest faces Henry associated with middle management. Now the face looked terrified, and the man almost fell before he got fully into stride. Henry was rooting for that.

The middle manager managed to keep his balance after the first ship, but halfway to a couple of semi trailers that had been pushed together, his feet flew out from beneath him and he went on his ass. The clipboard he'd been carrying went sliding like a toboggan for leprechauns.

Henry held his hands out and clapped as loudly as he could. Probably not loud enough to be heard over all the motors, so he cupped them around his mouth and yelled: 'Way to go shitheels! Let's look at the videotape!'

The middle manager got up without looking at him, retrieved his clipboard, and ran on toward the two semi trailers.

There was a group of eight or nine guys standing by the fence about twenty yards from Henry. Now one of them, a portly fellow in an orange down-filled parka that made him look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, walked over.

'I don't think you should do that, fella.' He paused, then lowered his voice. 'They shot my brother-in-law.'

Yes. Henry saw it in the man's head. The portly man's brother-?in-law, also portly, talking about his lawyer, his rights, his job with some investment company in Boston. The soldiers nodding, telling him it was just temporary, the situation was normalizing and would be straightened out by dawn, all the time hustling the two overweight mighty hunters toward the barn, which already held a pretty good trawl, and all at once the brother-in-law had broken away, running toward the motor-pool, and boom-boom, out go the lights.

The portly man was telling Henry some of this, his pale face earnest in the newly erected lights, and Henry interrupted him.

'What do you think they're going to do to the rest of us?' The portly man looked at Henry, shocked, then backed off a step, as if he thought Henry might have something contagious. Quite funny, when you thought about it, because they all had something contagious, or at least this team of government-funded cleaners thought they did, and in the end it would come to the same.

'You can't be serious,' the portly man said. Then, almost indulgently: 'This is America, you know.'

'Is it? You seeing a lot of due process, are you?'

'They're just . . . I'm sure they're just . . .' Henry waited, interested, but there was no more, at least not in this vein. 'That was a gunshot, wasn't it?' the portly man asked, 'And I think I heard some screaming.'

From the two pushed-together trailers there emerged two hurrying men with a stretcher between them. Following them with marked reluctance came the middle manager, his clipboard once more tucked firmly beneath his arm.

'I'd say you got that right.' Henry and the portly man watched as the stretcher-bearers burned up the steps of the Winnebago. As Mr Middle Management made his closest approach to the fence, Henry called out to him, 'How's it going, shitheels? Having any fun yet?' The portly man winced. The guy with the clipboard gave Henry a single dour look and then trudged on toward the Winnebago.

'This is just . . . it's just some sort of emergency situation,' the portly man said. 'It'll be straightened out by tomorrow morning, I'm sure.'

'Not for your brother-in-law,' Henry said.

The portly man looked at him, mouth tucked in and trembling slightly. Then he returned to the other men, whose views no doubt more closely corresponded to his own. Henry turned back to the Winnebago and resumed waiting for Underhill to come out. He had an idea that Underhill was his only hope . . . but whatever Underhill's doubts about this operation might be, the hope was a thin one. And Henry had only one card to play. The card was Jonesy. They didn't know about Jonesy.

The question was whether or not he should tell Underhill. Henry was terribly afraid that telling the man would do no good.

5

About five minutes after Mr Middle Management followed the stretcher-bearers into the 'Bago, the three of them came out again, this time with a fourth on the stretcher. Under the brilliant overhead lights, the wounded man's face was so pale it looked purple. Henry was relieved to see that it wasn't Underhill, because Underhill was different from the rest of these maniacs.

Ten minutes passed. Underhill still hadn't come out of the command post. Henry waited in the thickening snow. There were soldiers watching the inmates (that was what they were, inmates, and it was best not to gild the lily), and eventually one of them strolled over. The men who had been stationed at the T-junction of the Deep Cut and Swanny Pond Roads had pretty well blinded Henry with their lights, and he didn't recognize this man by his face. Henry was both delighted and deeply unsettled to realize that minds also had features, every bit as distinctive as a pretty mouth, a broken nose, or a crooked eye. This was one of the guys who had been out there, the one who had hit him in the ass with the stock of his rifle when he decided Henry wasn't moving toward the truck fast enough. Whatever had happened to Henry's mind was skitzy; he couldn't pick out this guy's name, but he knew that the man's brother's name was Frankie, and that in high school Frankie had been tried and acquitted on a rape charge. There was more, as well  -  unconnected jumbles of stuff, like the contents of a wastebasket. Henry realized that he was looking at an actual river of consciousness, and at the flotsam and jetsam the river was carrying along. The humbling thing was how prosaic most of it was.