Dreamcatcher(184)

He's a pain, Jonesy thought. Mr Gray is the pain in my brain.

Something tried to protest this view, and he actually had a coherent dissenting thought  -  No, you've got it all backward, you were the one who got out, who escaped  -  but he pushed it away. That was pseudo-intuitive bullshit, a cognitive hallucination, not much different than a thirsty man seeing a nonexistent oasis in the desert. He was locked in here. Mr Gray was out there, eating bacon and ruling the roost. If Jonesy allowed himself to think differently, he'd be an April Fool in November.

Got to slow him down. If I can't stop him, is there a way I can at least throw a monkeywrench into the works?

He got up and began to walk around the edge of the office. It was thirty-four paces. Hell of a short round-trip. Still, he supposed, it was bigger than your average jail cell; guys in Walpole or Danvers or Shawshank would think this was the cat's ass. In the middle of the room, the dreamcatcher danced and turned. One part of Jonesy's mind counted paces; the other wondered how close they were getting to Exit 8 of the Mass Pike.

Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four. And here he was, back behind his chair again. Time for Round Two.

They'd be in Ware soon enough . . . not that they'd stop there. Unlike the Russian woman, Mr Gray knew exactly where he wanted to go.

Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six. Behind his chair again and ready for another spin.

He and Carla had had three children by the time they turned thirty (number four had come less than a year ago), and neither of them had expected to own a summer cottage, not even a modest one like the place on Osborne Road in North Ware, any time soon. Then there had been a seismic shift in Jonesy's department. A good friend had assumed the chairmanship, and Jonesy had found himself an associate professor at least three years earlier than his most optimistic expectations. The salary bump had been considerable.

Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and behind his chair again. This was good. It was pacing the cell, no more than that, but it was calming him.

That same year, Carla's grandmother had passed away, and there had been a considerable estate, settled between Carla and her sister, as the close blood kin in the intervening generation had died. So they got the cottage, and that first summer they'd taken the kids up to the Winsor Dam. From there they'd gone on one of the regularly scheduled summer tours. Their guide, an MWA employee in a forest - green uniform, had told them the area around the Quabbin Reservoir was called 'the accidental wilderness', and had become the major nesting area for eagles in Massachusetts. (John and Misha, the older kids, had hoped to see an eagle or two, but they had been disappointed.) The Reservoir had been formed in the thirties by flooding three fanning communities, each with its own little market - town. At that time the land surrounding the new lake had been tame. In the sixty or so years since, it had returned to what all of New England must have been like before the tillage and industry began midway through the seventeenth century. A tangle of rutted, unpaved roads ran up the east side of the lake  -  one of the purest reservoirs in North America, their guide had told them  -  but that was it. If you wanted to go much beyond Shaft 12 on the East Branch, you'd need your hiking shoes. That was what the guide said. Lorrington, his name had been.

There had been maybe a dozen other people on the tour, and by then they had been about back to their starting place again. Standing on the edge of the road which ran across Winsor Dam, looking north at the Reservoir (the Quabbin bright blue in the sunlight, sparkling with a million points of light, Joey fast asleep in the Papoose carrier on Jonesy's back). Lorrington had been wrapping up his spiel, just about to wish them a nice day, when some guy in a Rutgers sweatshirt had raised his hand like a school kid and said: Shaft 12, Isn't that where the Russian woman . . . ?

Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, and back to the desk chair. Counting without really thinking about the numbers, something he did all the time. Carla said it was a sign of obsessive - compulsive disorder. Jonesy didn't know about that, but he knew that the counting was soothing him, and so he set off on another round.

Lorrington's mouth had tightened at the words 'Russian woman'. Not part of the lecture, apparently; not part of the good vibes the Water Authority wanted visitors to take with them. Depending upon which municipal pipes it flowed through during the last eight or ten miles of its journey, Boston tap water could be the purest, best tap water in the world: that was the gospel they wanted to spread.

I really don't know much about that, sir, Lorrington had said, and Jonesy had thought: My goodness, I think our guide just told a little fibby-wibby,

Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, back behind the chair and ready to start around again. Walking a little faster now. Hands clasped behind his back like a ship's captain pacing the foredeck . . . or pacing the brig after a successful mutiny. He supposed that was really more like it.

Jonesy had been a history teacher most of his life, and curiosity came as second nature. He had gone to the library one day later that week, had looked for the story in the local paper, and had eventually found it. It had been brief and dry  -  there were stories about lawn-parties inside that had more detail and color  -  but their postman had known more and had been happy to share. Old Mr Beckwith. Jonesy still remembered his final words before he'd put his blue-and-white mail - truck back in gear and rolled on down Osborne Road to the next rural box; there was a lot of mail to be delivered on the south end of the lake in summertime. Jonesy had walked back to the cottage, their unexpected gift, thinking it was no wonder Lorrington hadn't wanted to talk about the Russian woman.