Dreamcatcher(25)

When implementing the Hemingway Solution, you took off your shoe and your sock. Butt of the gun went on the floor. Barrel went into your mouth. Great toe went around the trigger. Memo to myself, Henry thought as the Scout fishtailed a little in the fresh snow and he corrected  -  the ruts helped, that was really all this road was, a couple of ruts dug by the skidders that used it in the summertime. If you do it that way, take a laxative and don't do it until after that final dump, no need to make any extra mess for the people who find you.

'Maybe you better slow down a little,' Pete said. He had a beer between his legs and it was half gone, but one wouldn't be enough to mellow Pete out. Three or four more, though, and Henry could go barrel-assing down this road at sixty and Pete would just sit there in the passenger seat, singing along with one of those horrible f**king Pink Floyd discs. And he could go sixty, probably, without putting so much as another ding in the front bumper. Being in the ruts of the Deep Cut, even when they were filled with snow, was like being on rails. If it kept snowing that might change, but for now, all was well.

'Don't worry, Pete  -  everything's five-by-five.'

'You want a beer?'

'Not while I'm driving.'

'Not even out here in West Overshoe?'

'Later.'

Pete subsided, leaving Henry to follow the bore of the head?lights, to thread his way along this white lane between the trees. Leaving him with his thoughts, which was where he wanted to be. It was like returning to a bloody place inside your mouth, exploring it again and again with the tip of your tongue, but it was where he wanted to be.

There were pills. There was the old Baggie-over-the-head-in-?the-bathtub-trick. There was drowning. There was jumping from a high place. The handgun in the ear was too unsure  -  too much chance of waking up paralyzed  -  and so was slitting the wrists, that was for people who were only practicing, but the Japanese had a way of doing it that interested Henry very much. Tie a rope around your neck. Tie the other end to a large rock. Put the rock on the seat of a chair, then sit down with your back braced so you can't fall backward but have to keep sitting. Tip the chair over and the rock rolls off. Subject may live for three to five minutes in a deepening dream of asphyxiation. Gray fades to black; hello darkness, my old friend. He had read about that method in one of Jonesy's beloved Kinsey Milhone detective novels, of all places. Detective novels and horror movies: those were the things that floated Jonesy's boat.

On the whole, Henry leaned toward the Hemingway Solution.

Pete finished his first beer and popped the top on his sec?ond, looking considerably more content. 'What'd you make of it?' Pete asked.

Henry felt called to from that other universe, the one where the living actually wanted to live. As always these days, that made him feel impatient. But it was important that none of them suspect, and he had an idea Jonesy already did, a little. Beaver might, too. They were the ones who could sometimes see inside. Pete didn't have a clue, but he might say the wrong thing to one of the others, about how preoccupied ole Henry had gotten, like there was something on his mind, something heavy, and Henry didn't want that. This was going to be the last trip to Hole in the Wall for the four of them, the old Kansas Street gang, the Crimson Pirates of the third and fourth grades, and he wanted it to be a good one. He wanted them to be shocked when they heard, even Jonesy, who saw into him the most often and always had. He wanted them to say they'd had no idea. Better that than the three of them sitting around with their heads hung, not able to make eye contact with one another except in fleeting glances, thinking that they should have known, they had seen the signs and should have done something. So he came back to that other universe, simulating interest smoothly and convincingly. Who could do that better than a headshrinker?

'What did I make of what?'

Pete rolled his eyes. 'At Gosselin's, dimbulb! All that stuff Old Man Gosselin was talking about.'

'Peter, they don't call him Old Man Gosselin for nothing. He's eighty if he's a day, and if there's one thing old women and old men are not short on, it's hysteria.' The Scout  -  no spring chicken itself, fourteen years old and far into its second trip around the odometer ?popped out of the ruts and immediately skidded, four-wheel drive or not. Henry steered into the skid, almost laughing when Pete dropped his beer onto the floor and yelled, 'Whoa  -  f**k, watch out!'

Henry let off on the gas until he felt the Scout start to straighten out, then zapped the go-pedal again, deliberately too fast and too hard. The Scout went into another skid, this time widdershins to the first, and Pete yelled again. Henry let up once more and the Scout thumped back into the ruts and once again ran smoothly, as if on rails. One positive to deciding to end your life, it seemed, was no longer sweating the small stuff. The lights cut through the white and shifting day, full of a billion dancing snowflakes, not one of them the same, if you believed the conventional wisdom.

Pete picked up his beer (only a little had spilled), and patted his chest. 'Aren't you going a little fast?'

'Not even close,' Henry said, and then, as if the skid had never occurred (it had) or interrupted his train of thought (it hadn't), he went on, 'Group hysteria is most common in the very old and the very young. It's a well-documented phenomenon in both my field and that of the sociology heathens who live next door.'