Dreamcatcher(17)

The guy got the zipper halfway down and then it stuck, one side of the little gold mouth choking on the cloth. He looked at it  -  gawked at it, really  -  as if he had never seen such a thing before. And when Jonesy reached for the zipper, the man dropped his hands to his sides and simply let Jonesy reach, as a first-grader would stand and let the teacher put matters right when he got his galoshes on the wrong feet or his jacket on inside out.

Jonesy got the little gold mouth started again and pulled it the rest of the way down. Outside the window-wall, The Gulch was disappearing, although you could still see the black scrawled shapes of the trees. Almost thirty years they had come up here together for the hunting, almost thirty years without a single miss, and in none of that time had there been snow heavier than the occasional squall. It looked like all that was about to change, although how could you tell? These days the guys on radio and TV made four inches of fresh powder sound like the next Ice Age.

For a moment the guy only stood there with his jacket hanging open and snow melting around his boots on the polished wooden floor, looking up at the rafters with his mouth open, and yes, he was like a great big six-year-old  -  or like Duddits. You almost expected to see mittens dangling from the cuffs of his jacket on clips. He shrugged out of his coat in that perfectly recognizable child's way, simply slumping his shoulders once it was unzipped and letting it fall. If Jonesy hadn't been there to catch it, it would have gone on the floor and gotten right to work sopping up the puddles of melting snow.

'What's that?' he asked.

For a moment Jonesy had no idea what the guy was talking about, and then he traced the stranger's gaze to the bit of weaving which hung from the center rafter. It was colorful  -  red and green, with shoots of canary yellow, as well  -  and it looked like a spiderweb.

'It's a dreamcatcher,' Jonesy said. 'An Indian charm. Supposed to keep the nightmares away, I guess.'

'Is it yours?'

Jonesy didn't know if he meant the whole place (perhaps the guy hadn't been listening before) or just the dreamcatcher, but in either case the answer was the same. 'No, my friend's. We come up hunting every year.'

'How many of you?' The man was shivering, holding his arms crisscrossed over his chest and cupping his elbows in his palms as he watched Jonesy hang his coat on the tree by the door.

'Four. Beaver  -  this is his camp  -  -  is out hunting now. I don't know if the snow'll bring him back in or not. Probably it will. Pete and Henry went to the store.'

'Gosselin's? That one?'

'Uh-huh. Come on over here and sit down on the couch.' Jonesy led him to the couch, a ridiculously long sectional. Such things had gone out of style decades ago, but it didn't smell too bad and nothing had infested it. Style and taste didn't matter much at Hole in the Wall.

'Stay put now,' he said, and left the man sitting there, shivering and shaking with his hands clasped between his knees. His jeans had the sausagey look they get when there are longjohns underneath, and still he shook and shivered. But the heat had brought on an absolute flood of color; instead of looking like a corpse, the stranger now looked like a diphtheria victim.

Pete and Henry were doubling in the bigger of the two downstairs bedrooms. Jonesy ducked in, opened the cedar chest to the left of the door, and pulled out one of the two down comforters folded up inside. As he recrossed the living room to where the man sat shivering on the couch, Jonesy realized he hadn't asked the most elementary question of all, the one even six-year-olds who couldn't get their own zippers down asked.

As he spread the comforter over the stranger on the outsized camp couch, he said: 'What's your name?' And realized he almost knew. McCoy? McCann?

The man Jonesy had almost shot looked up at him, at once pulling the comforter up around his neck. The brown patches under his eyes were filling in purple.

'McCarthy,' he said. 'Richard McCarthy.' His hand, surprisingly plump and white without its glove, crept out from beneath the coverlet like a shy animal. 'You are?'

'Gary Jones,' he said, and took the hand with the one which had almost pulled the trigger. 'Folks mostly call me Jonesy.'

'Thanks, Jonesy.' McCarthy looked at him earnestly. 'I think you saved my life.'

'Oh, I don't know about that,' Jonesy said. He looked at that red patch again. Frostbite, just a small patch. Frostbite, had to be.

PART ONE CANCER CHAPTER TWO

THE BEAV

1

'You know I can't call anyone, don't you?' Jonesy said. 'The phone lines don't come anywhere near here. There's a genny for the electric, but that's all.'

McCarthy, only his head showing above the comforter, nodded. 'I was hearing the generator, but you know how it is when you're lost  -  noises are funny. Sometimes the sound seems to be coming from your left or your right, then you'd swear it's behind you and you better turn back.'

Jonesy nodded, although he did not, in fact, know how it was. Unless you counted the week or so immediately after his accident, time he had spent wandering in a fog of drugs and pain, he had never been lost.

'I'm trying to think what'd be the best thing,' Jonesy said. 'I guess when Pete and Henry get back, we better take you out. How many in your party?'

It seemed McCarthy had to think. That, added to the unsteady way he had been walking, solidified Jonesy's impression that the man was in shock. He wondered that one night lost in the woods would do that; he wondered if it would do it to him.