Dreamcatcher(28)

'Henry! Henry, help me!'

He hurried on, slipping in the new snow as he rounded the passenger side. Pete's door was stuck, but when Henry got on his knees and yanked with both hands, it came open about halfway. He reached in, grabbed Pete's shoulder, and yanked. Nothing.

'Unbuckle your belt, Pete.'

Pete fumbled but couldn't seem to find it even though it was right in front of him. Working carefully, with not the slightest feeling of impatience (he supposed he might be in shock), Henry unclipped the belt and Pete thumped to the roof, his head bending sideways. He screamed in mingled surprise and pain and then came floundering and yanking his way out of the half-open door. Henry grabbed him under his arms and pulled backward. They both went over in the snow and Henry was afflicted with déjà vu so strong and so sudden it was like swooning. Hadn't they played just this way as kids? Of course they had. The day they'd taught Duddits how to make snow angels, for one. Someone began to laugh, startling him badly. Then he realized it was him.

Pete sat up, wild-eyed and glowering, the back of him covered with snow. 'The f**k are you laughing about? That ass**le almost got us killed! I'm gonna strangle the son of a bitch!'

'Not her son but the bitch herself,' Henry said. He was laughing harder than ever and thought it quite likely that Pete didn't understand what he was saying  -  especially with the wind thrown in  -  but he didn't care. Seldom had he felt so delicious.

Pete flailed to his feet much as Henry had done himself, and Henry was just about to say something wise, something about how Pete was moving pretty well for a guy with a broken leg, when Pete went back down with a cry of pain. Henry went to him and felt Pete's leg, thrust out in front of him. It seemed intact, but who could tell through two layers of clothing?

'It ain't broke after all,' Pete said, but he was panting with pain. 'Fucker's locked up is all, just like when I was playin football. Where is she? You sure it's a woman?'

'Yes.'

Pete got up and hobbled around the front of the car holding his knee. The remaining headlight still shone bravely into the snow. 'She better be crippled or blind, that's all I can say,' he told Henry. 'If she's not, I'm gonna kick her ass all the way back to Gosselin's.' Henry began to laugh again. It was the mental picture of Pete hopping . . . then kicking. Like some f**ked-up Rockette. 'Peter, don't you really hurt her!' he shouted, suspecting any severity he might have managed was negated by the fact that he was speaking between gusts of maniacal laughter.

'I won't unless she puts some sass on me,' Pete said. The words, carried back to Henry on the wind, had an offended-old-lady quality to them that made him laugh harder than ever. He scooted down his jeans and long underwear and stood there in his jockeys to see how badly the turnsignal stalk had wounded him.

It was a shallow gash about three inches long on the inside of his thigh. It had bled copiously  -  was still oozing  -  but Henry didn't think it was deep.

'What in the hell did you think you were doing?' Pete scolded from the other side of the overturned Scout, whose wipers were still whick-thumping back and forth. And although Pete's tirade was laced with profanity (much of it decidedly Beaverish), his friend still sounded to Henry like an offended old lady schoolteacher, and this got him laughing again as he hauled up his britches.

'Why you sittin out here in the middle of the motherf*ckin road in the middle of a motherf*ckin snowstorm? You drunk? High on drugs? What kind of dumb doodlyf*ck are you? Hey, talk to me! You almost got me n my buddy killed, the least you can do is . . . oww, FUCK-ME-FREDDY!'

Henry came around the wreck just in time to see Pete fall over beside Ms Buddha. His leg must have locked up again. She never looked at him. The orange ribbons on her hat blew out behind her.  

Her face was raised into the storm, wide eyes not blinking as the snowflakes whirled into them to melt on their warm living lenses, and Henry felt, in spite of everything, his professional curiosity aroused. Just what had they found here?

3

'Oww, f**k me sideways, shit-a-goddam, don't that f**kin HURT!'

'Are you all right?' Henry asked, and that started him laughing again. What a foolish question.

'Do I sound all right, shrink-boy?' Pete asked waspishly, but when Henry bent toward him, he raised one hand and waved him away. 'Nah, I got it, it's lettin go, check Princess Dipshit. She just sits there.'

Henry dropped to his knees in front of the woman, wincing at the pain  -  his legs, yes, but his shoulder also hurt where he had banged it on the roof and his neck was stiffening rapidly  -  but still chuckling.

This was no dewy damsel in distress. She was forty at least, and heavyset. Although her parka was thick and she was wearing God knew how many layers beneath it, it swelled noticeably in front, indicating the sort of prodigious jugs for which breast-reduction surgery had been made. The hair whipping out from beneath and around the flaps of her cap was cut in no particular style. Like them, she was wearing jeans, but one of her thighs would have made two of Henry's. The first word to occur to him was countrywoman  -  the kind of woman you saw hanging out her wash in the toy-littered yard beside her doublewide trailer while Garth or Shania blared from a radio stuck in an open window . . . or maybe buying a few groceries at Gosselin's. The orange gear suggested that she might have been hunting, but if so, where was her rifle? Already covered in snow? Her wide eyes were dark blue and utterly blank. Henry looked for her tracks and saw none. The wind had erased them, no doubt, but it was still eerie; she might have dropped from the sky.