Dreamcatcher(120)

Only Jonesy needed no such landmark to know what time it was. No more than he needed someone to tell him the green shingles were no more, Hole in the Wall was no more, Henry had burned it to the ground. In a moment the door would open and Beaver would run out. It was 1978, the year all this had really started, and in a moment Beaver would run out, wearing only his boxer shorts and his many-zippered motorcycle jacket, the orange bandannas fluttering. It was 1978, they were young . . . and they had changed. No more same shit, different day. This was the day when they began to realize just how much they had changed.

Jonesy stared out the window, fascinated.

The door opened.

Beaver Clarendon, age fourteen, ran out.

PART TWO GRAYBOYS CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HENRY AND OWEN

1

Henry watched Underhill trudge toward him in the glare of the security lights. Underhill's head was bent against the snow and the intensifying wind. Henry opened his mouth to call out, but before he could, he was overwhelmed, nearly flattened, by a sense of Jonesy. And then a memory came, blotting out Underhill and this brightly lit, snowy world completely. All at once it was 1978 again, not October but November and there was blood, blood on cattails, broken glass in marshy water, and then the bang of the door.

2

Henry awakes from a terrible confused dream  -  blood, broken glass, the rich smells of gasoline and burning rubber  -  to the sound of a banging door and a blast of cold air. He sits up and sees Pete sitting up beside him, Pete's hairless chest covered with goosebumps. Henry and Pete are on the floor in their sleeping - bags because they lost the four - way toss. Beav and Jonesy got the bed Oater there will be a third bedroom at Hole in the Wall, but now there are only two and Lamar has one all to himself, by the divine right of adulthood), only now Jonesy is alone in the bed, also sitting up, also looking confused and frightened.

Scooby-ooby-Doo, where are you, Henry thinks for no appreci?able reason as he gropes for his glasses on the windowsill. In his nose he can still smell gas and burning tires. We got some work to do now -

'Crashed,' Jonesy says thickly, and throws back the covers. His chest is bare, but like Henry and Pete, he wore his socks and longjohn bottoms to bed.

'Yeah, went in the water,' Pete says, his face suggesting he doesn't have the slightest idea what he's talking about. 'Henry, you got his shoe - '

'Moccasin - 'Henry says, but he hasn't any idea what he's talking about either. Nor wants to.

'Beav,' Jonesy says, and gets out of bed in a clumsy lunge. One of his stocking-clad feet comes down on Pete's hand.

'Ow!' Pete cries. 'Ya stepped on me, ya f**kin gomer, watch where you're - '

'Shut up, shut up,' Henry says, grabbing Pete's shoulder and giving it a shake. 'Don't wake up Mr Clarendon!'

Which would be easy, because the door of the boys' bedroom is open. So is the door on the far side of the big central room, the one to the outside. No wonder they're cold, there's a hell of a draft. Now that Henry has his eyes back on (that is how he thinks of it), he can see the dreamcatcher out there dancing in the cold November breeze coming in through the open door.

'Where's Duddits?' Jonesy asks in a dazed, I'm-still-dreaming voice. 'Did he go out with Beaver?'

'He's back in Derry, foolish,' Henry says, getting up and pulling on his thermal undershirt. And he doesn't feel that Jonesy is foolish, not really; he also has a sense that Duddits was just here with them.

It was the dream, he thinks. Duddits was in the dream. He was sitting on the bank. He was crying. He was so. He didn't mean to. If  anyone meant to, it was us.  

And there is still crying. He can hear it, coming in through the front door, carried on the breeze. It's not Duddits, though; it's the Beav.

They leave the room in a line, pulling on scraps of clothes as they go, not bothering with their shoes, which would take too long.

One good thing  -  judging from the tin city of beer-cans on the kitchen table (plus a suburb of same on the coffee-table), it'll take more than a couple of open doors and some whispering kids to wake up Beaver's Dad.

The big granite doorstep is freezing under Henry's stocking feet, cold in the deep thoughtless way death must be cold, but he barely notices.

He sees the Beaver right away. He's at the foot of the maple tree with the deer-stand in it, on his knees as if praying. His legs and feet are bare, Henry sees. He's wearing his motorcycle jacket, and tied up and down its arms, fluttering like pirate's finery, are the orange bandannas his father made his son wear when Beaver insisted on wearing such a damned foolish unhunterly thing in the woods. The outfit looks pretty funny, but there's nothing funny about that agonized face tilted up toward the maple's nearly bare branches. The Beav's cheeks are streaming with tears.

Henry breaks into a run. Pete and Jonesy follow suit, their breath puffing white in the chill morning air. The needle-strewn ground under Henry's feet is almost as hard and cold as the granite doorstep.

He drops to his knees beside Beaver, scared and somehow awed by those tears. Because the Beav isn't just misting up, like the hero of a movie who may be allowed to shed a manly drop or two when his dog or his girlfriend dies; Beav is running like Niagara Falls. From his nose hang two ropes of clear glistening snot. You never saw stuff like that in the movies.

'Gross,' Pete says.