Dreamcatcher(16)

His feet slipped and Jonesy grabbed his upper arms. He was a big man, taller than Jonesy, who stood six-two, and broader, as well. Nevertheless, Jonesy's first impression was of insubstantialness, as if the man's fear had somehow scooped him out and left him light as a milkweed pod.

'Easy, fella,' Jonesy said. 'Easy, you're all right now, you're okay. Let's just get you inside and get you warm, how would that be?'

As if the word warm had been his cue, the man's teeth began to chatter. 'S-S-Sure.' He tried to smile, without much success. Jonesy was again struck by his extreme pallor. It was cold out here this morning, upper twenties at best, but the guy's cheeks were all ashes and lead. The only color in his face, other than the red patch, was the brown crescents under his eyes.

Jonesy got an arm around the man's shoulders, suddenly swept by an absurd and sappy tenderness for this stranger, an emotion so strong it was like his first junior high school crush  -  Mary Jo Martineau in a sleeveless white blouse and straight knee-length denim skirt. He was now absolutely sure the man hadn't been drinking  -  it was fear (and maybe exhaustion) rather than booze that had made him unsteady on his feet. Yet there was a smell on his breath  -  something like bananas. It reminded Jonesy of the ether he'd sprayed into the carburetor of his first car, a Vietnam-era Ford, to get it to crank over on cold mornings.

'Get you inside, right?'

'Yeah. C-Cold. Thank God you came along. Is this - '

'My place? No, a friend's.' Jonesy opened the varnished oak door and helped the man over the threshold. The stranger gasped at the feel of the warm air, and a flush began to rise in his cheeks. Jonesy was relieved to see there was some blood in him, after all.

6

Hole in the Wall was pretty grand by deep woods standards. You came in on the single big downstairs room  -  kitchen, dining room, and living room, all in one  -  but there were two bedrooms behind it and another upstairs, under the single eave. The big room was filled with the scent of pine and its mellow, varnished glow. There was a Navajo rug on the floor and a Micmac hanging on one wall which depicted brave little stick-hunters surrounding an enormous bear. A plain oak table, long enough to accommodate eight places, defined the dining area. There was a woodstove in the kitchen and a fireplace in the living area; when both were going, the place made you feel stupid with the heat even if it was twenty below outside. The west wall was all window, giving a view of the long, steep slope which fell off to the west. There had been a fire there in the seventies, and the dead trees stood black and twisted in the thickening snow. Jonesy, Pete, Henry and the Beav called this slope The Gulch, because that's what the Beav's Dad and his friends had called it.

'Oh God, thank God, and thank you, too,' the man in the orange hat said to Jonesy, and when Jonesy grinned  -  that was a lot of thank-yous  -  the man laughed shrilly as if to say yes, he knew it, it was a funny thing to say but he couldn't help it. He began to take deep breaths, for a few moments looking like one of those exercise gurus you saw on high-number cable. On every exhale, he talked.

'God, I really thought I was done-for last night . . . it was so cold . . . and the damp air, I remember that . . . remember thinking Oh boy, oh dear, what if there's snow coming after all . . . I got coughing and couldn't stop . . . something came and I thought I have to stop coughing, if that's a bear or something I'll . . . you know . . . provoke it or something only I couldn't and after awhile it just . . . you know, went away on its own - '

'You saw a bear in the night',' Jonesy was both fascinated and appalled. He had heard there were bears up here  -  Old Man Gosselin and his pickle-barrel buddies at the store loved to tell bear stories, particularly to the out-of-staters  -  but the idea that this man, lost and on his own, had been menaced by one in the night, was keenly horrible. It was like hearing a sailor talk about a sea monster.

'I don't know that it was,' the man said, and suddenly shot Jonesy a sidewards look of cunning that Jonesy didn't like and couldn't read. 'I can't say for sure, by then there was no more lightning.'

'Lightning, too? Man!' If not for the guy's obviously genuine distress, Jonesy would have wondered if he wasn't getting his leg pulled. In truth, he wondered it a little, anyway.

'Dry lightning, I guess,' the man said. Jonesy could almost see him shrugging it off. He scratched at the red place on his cheek, which might have been a touch of frostbite. 'See it in winter, it means there's a storm on the way.'

'And you saw this? Last night?'

'I guess so.' The man gave him another quick, sideways glance, but this time Jonesy saw no slyness in it, and guessed he had seen none before. He saw only exhaustion. 'It's all mixed up in my mind . . . my stomach's been hurting ever since I got lost it always hurts when I'm ascairt, ever since I was a little kid . . . '

And he was like a little kid, Jonesy thought, looking everywhere at once with perfect unselfconsciousness. Jonesy led the guy toward the couch in front of the fireplace and the guy let himself be led. Ascairt. He even said ascairt instead of afraid, like a kid. A little kid.

'Give me your coat,' Jonesy said, and as the guy first unbuttoned the buttons and then reached for the zipper under them, Jonesy thought again of how he had thought he was looking at a deer, at a buck for Chrissakes  -  he had mistaken one of those buttons for an eye and had damned near put a bullet through it.