Dreamcatcher(212)

'It's me,' Henry said. He glanced at the dog still partly stuck into the crack at the top of Shaft 12, then back at Jonesy. He brushed Jonesy's sweat-soaked hair off his forehead with infinite tenderness.

'Man, it took you . . .' Jonesy began, and then the world wavered. He closed his eyes, concentrated hard, then opened them again. ' . . . took you long enough to get back from the store. Did you remember the bread' '

'Yeah, but I lost the hot dogs.'

'What a f**kin pisser.' Jonesy took a long and wavering breath.

'I'll go myself, next time.'

'Kiss my bender, pal,' Henry said, and Jonesy slipped into darkness smiling.

PART THREE QUABBIN EPILOGUE

LABOR DAY

The universe, she is a bitch.

- Norman Maclean

Another summer down the tubes, Henry thought.

There was nothing sad about the thought, though; summer had been good, and fall would be good, too. No hunting this year, and there would undoubtedly be the occasional visit from his new military friends (his new military friends wanted to be sure above all things that he wasn't growing any red foliage on his skin), but fall would be good just the same. Cool air, bright days, long nights.

Sometimes, in the post-midnight hours of his nights, Henry's old friend still came to visit, but when it did, he simply sat up in his study with a book in his lap and waited for it to go again. Eventually it always did. Eventually the sun always came up. The sleep you didn't get one night sometimes came to you on the next, and then it came like a lover. This was something he'd learned since last November.

He was drinking a beer on the porch of Jonesy and Carla's cottage in Ware, the one on the shore of Pepper Pond. The south end of the Quabbin Reservoir was about four miles northwest of where he sat. And East Street, of course.

The hand holding the can of Coors only had three fingers. He'd lost the two on the end to frostbite, perhaps while skiing out the Deep Cut Road from Hole in the Wall, perhaps while dragging Jonesy back to the remaining Humvee on a lashed-together travois. Last fall had been his season to drag people through the snow, it seemed, and with mixed results.  

Near the little scrape of beach, Carla Jones was tending a barbecue. Noel, the baby, was toddling around the picnic table to her left, diaper sagging. He was waving a charred hot dog cheerily in one hand. The other three Jones kids, ranging in ages from eleven to three, were in the water, splashing around and yelling at each other. Henry supposed there might be some value to that Biblical imperative about being fruitful and multiplying, but it seemed to him that Jonesy and Carla had taken it to absurd lengths.  

Behind him, the screen door clapped. Jonesy came out, carrying a bucket filled with iced beers. His limp wasn't all that bad; this time the doc had just said f**k the original equipment and had replaced the whole thing with steel and Teflon. It would have come to that, anyway, the doc had told Jonesy, but if you'd been a little more careful, Chief, you could've gotten another five years out of the old one. He'd had the operation in February, shortly after Henry and Jonesy's six-week 'vacation' with the military intelligence and Psy0ps people had ended.

The military folks had offered to throw in the hip replacement courtesy of Uncle Sam  -  sort of a coda to their debriefing  -  but Jonesy had refused with thanks, saying he wouldn't want to deprive his own orthopedist of the work, or his insurance company of the bill.

By then, all the two of them had wanted was to get out of Wyoming. The apartments were nice (if you could get used to living underground, that was), the food was four-star (Jonesy put on ten pounds, Henry close to twenty), and the movies were always first-run. The atmosphere, however, was just a teensy bit on the Dr Strangelove side. For Henry, those six weeks had been infinitely worse than they had been for Jonesy. Jonesy suffered, but mostly with his derailed hip; his memories of sharing a body with Mr Gray had faded to the consistency of dreams in a remarkably short space of time.

Henry's memories, on the other hand, had only grown stronger. Those of the barn were the worst. The debriefers had been com?passionate, not a Kurtz in the bunch, but Henry couldn't block his thoughts of Bill and Marsha and Darren Chiles, Mr Bomber-Joint?-from-Newton. They often came to visit in his dreams.

So did Owen Underhill.

'Reinforcements,' Jonesy said, setting the bucket of beer down. He then lowered himself into the sagging cane-bottomed rocker beside Henry with a grunt and a grimace.

'One more and I'm done,' Henry said. 'I'm driving back to Portland in an hour or so, and an OUI I don't need.'

'Stay the night,' Jonesy said, watching Noel. The baby had plumped down on the grass beneath the picnic table and now seemed intent upon inserting the remains of his hot dog into his navel.

'With your kids squabbling their way toward midnight and maybe beyond?' Henry asked. 'Getting my pick of Mario Bava horror movies?'

'I've pretty well signed off the fright flicks,' Jonesy said. 'We're having a Kevin Costner festival tonight, starting with The Body?guard.'

'I thought you said no horror movies.'

'Smartass.' Then he shrugged, grinned. 'Whatever you feel.'

Henry raised his beer can. 'Here's to absent friends.'

Jonesy raised his own. 'Absent friends.'

They clinked cans and drank.

'How's Roberta?' Jonesy asked.