Dreamcatcher(13)

'Leave him alone,' Pete said. 'He likes it up there. Don't you, Jones-boy?'

'Sort of,' he said, unwilling to say much more  -  how much he actually did like it, for instance. Some things you didn't feel safe telling even your closest friends. And sometimes your closest friends knew, anyway.

'Tell you something,' the Beav said. He picked up a pencil and began to gnaw lightly at it  -  his oldest, dearest trick, going all the way back to first grade. 'I like coming back and seeing you there  -  ?like a lookout in the crow's nest in one of those f**kin Hornblower books. Keepin an eye out, you know.'

'Sail, ho,' Jonesy had said, and they all laughed, but Jonesy knew what the Beav meant. He felt it. Keeping an eye out. Just thinking his thoughts and keeping an eye out for ships or sharks or who knew what. His hip hurt coming back down, the pack with his shit in it was heavy on his back, and he felt slow and clumsy on the wooden rungs nailed to the trunk of the maple, but that was okay. Good, in fact. Things changed, but only a fool believed they only changed for the worse.

That was what he thought then.

4

When he heard the whicker of moving brush and the soft snap of a twig  -  sounds he never questioned were those of an approaching deer  -  Jonesy thought of something his father said: You can't make yourself be lucky. Lindsay Jones was one of life's losers and had said few things worth committing to memory, but that was one, and here was the proof of it again: days after deciding he had finished with deer hunting, here came one, and a big one by the sound ?a buck, almost surely, maybe one as big as a man.

That it was a man never so much as crossed Jonesy's mind. This was an unincorporated township fifty miles north of Rangely, and the nearest hunters were two hours' walk away. The nearest paved road, the one which eventually took you to Gosselin's Market (BEER BAIT OUT OF STATE LICS LOTTERY TIX), was at least sixteen miles away.

Well, he thought, it isn't as if I took a vow, or anything.

No, he hadn't taken a vow. Next November he might be up here with a Nikon instead of a Garand, but it wasn't next year yet, and the rifle was at hand. He had no intention of looking a gift deer in the mouth.

Jonesy screwed the red stopper into the Thermos of coffee and put it aside. Then he pushed the sleeping bag off his lower body like a big quilted sock (wincing at the stiffness in his hip as he did it) and grabbed his gun. There was no need to chamber a round, producing that loud, deer-frightening click; old habits died hard, and the gun was ready to fire as soon as he thumbed off the safety. This he did when he was solidly on his feet. The old wild excitement was gone, but there was a residue  -  his pulse was up and he welcomed the rise. In the wake of his accident, he welcomed all such reactions  -  it was as if there were two of him now, the one before he had been knocked flat in the street and the warier, older fellow who had awakened in Mass General . . . if you could call that slow, drugged awareness being awake. Sometimes he still heard a voice  -  whose he didn't know, but not his  -  calling out Please stop, I can't stand it, give me a shot, where's Marcy, I want Marcy. He thought of it as death's voice  -  death had passed him in the street and had then come to the hospital to finish the job, death masquerading as a man (or perhaps it had been a woman, it was hard to tell) in pain, someone who said Marcy but meant Jonesy.

The idea passed  -  all of the funny ideas he'd had in the hospital eventually passed  -  but it left a residue. Caution was the residue. He had no memory of Henry calling and telling him to watch himself for the next little while (and Henry hadn't reminded him), but since then Jonesy had watched himself. He was careful. Because maybe death was out there, and maybe sometimes it called your name.

But the past was the past. He had survived his brush with death, and nothing was dying here this morning but a deer (a buck, he hoped) who had strolled in the wrong direction.

The sound of the rustling brush and snapping twigs was conu'ng toward him from the southwest, which meant he wouldn't have to shoot around the trunk of the maple  -  good  -  and put him upwind. Even better. Most of the maple's leaves had fallen, and he had a good, if not perfect, sightline through the interlacing branches. Jonesy raised the Garand, settled the buttplate into the hollow of his shoulder, and prepared to shoot himself a conversation-piece.

What saved McCarthy  -  at least temporarily  -  was Jonesy's disenchantment with hunting. What almost got McCarthy killed was a phenomenon George Kilroy, a friend of his father's, had called 'eye-fever'. Eye-fever, Kilroy claimed, was a form of buck fever, and was probably the second most common cause of hunting accidents. 'First is drink,' said George Kilroy . . . and like Jonesy's father, Kilroy knew a bit on that subject, as well. 'First is always drink.'

Kilroy said that victims of eye-fever were uniformly astounded to discover they had shot a fencepost, or a passing car, or the broad side of a barn, or their own hunting partner (in many cases the partner was a spouse, a sib, or a child). 'But I saw it,' they would protest, and most of them according to Kilroy, could pass a lie-detector test on the subject. They had seen the deer or the bear or the wolf, or just the grouse flip-flapping through the high autumn grass. They had seen it.

What happened, according to Kilroy, was that these hunters were afflicted by an anxiety to make the shot, to get it over with, one way or the other. This anxiety became so strong that the brain persuaded the eye that it saw what was not yet visible, in order to end the tension. This was eye-fever. And although Jonesy was aware of no particular anxiety  -  his fingers had been perfectly steady as he screwed the red stopper back into the throat of the Thermos  -  he admitted later to himself that yes, he might have fallen prey to the malady.