Dreamcatcher(31)

'We need to walk!' he told her, not quite shouting but speaking loudly and in a tone of command. 'Walk with me now, on three! One, two, three!'

He took her hand and led her back around the Scout and into the road. There was one moment of resistance and then she followed with perfect docility, not seeming to feel the push of the wind when it struck them. They walked for about five minutes, Henry holding the woman's gloved right hand in his left one, and then Pete lurched.

'Wait,' he said. 'Bastardly knee's tryin to lock up on me again.

While he bent and massaged it, Henry looked up at the sky. There were no lights up there now. 'Are you all right? Can you make it?'

'I'll make it,' Pete said. 'Come on, let's go.'

6

They made it around the curve all right and halfway up the hill all right and then Pete dropped, groaning and cursing and clutching his knee. He saw the way Henry was looking at him and made a peculiar sound, something caught between a laugh and a snarl. 'Don't you worry about me,' he said. 'Petie-bird's gonna make it.'

'You sure?'

'Ayuh.' And to Henry's alarm (although there was amusement, too, that dark amusement which never seemed to leave him now), Pete balled his gloved hands into fists and began pounding on his knee.

'Pete - '

'Let go, you hump, let go!' Pete cried, ignoring him completely. And during this the woman stood slump-shouldered with the wind now at her back and the orange hat-ribbons blowing out in front of her, as silent as a piece of equipment that has been turned off.

'Pete?'

'I'm all right now,' Pete said. He looked up at Henry with exhausted eyes . . . but they, too, were not without amusement. 'Is this a total f**karow or not?'

'It is.'

'I don't think I could walk all the way back to Derry, but I'll get to that shelter.' He held out a hand. 'Help me up, chief'

Henry took his old friend's hand and pulled. Pete came up stiff-legged, like a man rising from a formal bow, stood still for a moment, then said: 'Let's go. I'm lookin forward to gettin out of this wind.' He paused, then added: 'We should have brought a few beers.'

They got to the top of the hill and the wind was better on the other side. By the time they got to the straight stretch at the bottom, Henry had begun allowing himself to hope that this part of it, at least, was going to go all right. Then, halfway along the straight with a shape up ahead that just about had to be the loggers' shelter, the woman collapsed  -  first to her knees, then onto her front. She lay like that for a moment, head turned, only the breath rising from her open mouth to indicate she was still alive (and how much simpler this would be if she wasn't, Henry thought). Then she rolled over on her side and let out another long bray of a belch.

'Oh you troublesome cunt,' Pete said, sounding not angry but only tired. He looked at Henry. 'What now?'

Henry knelt by her, told her in his loudest voice to get up, snapped his fingers, clapped his hands, and counted to three several times. Nothing worked.

'Stay here with her. Maybe I can find something up there to drag her on.'

'Good luck.'

'You have a better idea?'

Pete sat down in the snow with a grimace, his bad leg stretched out in front of him. 'Nosir,' he said, 'I do not. I'm fresh out of ideas.'

7

It took Henry five minutes to walk up to the shelter. His own leg was stiffening where the turnsignal lever had gouged it, but he thought he was all right. If he could get Pete and the woman to shelter, and if the Arctic Cat back at Hole in the Wall would start, he thought this might still turn out okay. And damn, it was interesting, there was that. Those lights in the sky . . .

The shelter's corrugated top had fallen perfectly: the front, facing the road, was open, but the back was almost entirely closed off And poking out of the thin scrim of snow that had drifted inside was a swatch of dirty gray tarpaulin with a coating of sawdust and ancient splinters clinging to it.

'Bingo,' Henry said, and grabbed it. At first it stuck to the ground, but when he put his back to it, the tarp came loose with a hoarse ripping sound that made him think of the woman farting.

Dragging it behind him, he plodded back toward where Pete, his leg still pointed out stiffly before him, sat in the snow next to the prone woman.

8

It was far easier than Henry had dared hope. In fact, once they got her on the tarpaulin, it was a breeze. She was a hefty woman, but she slid on the snow like grease. Henry was glad it wasn't five degrees warmer; sticky snow might have changed things considerably. And, of course, it helped being on a straight stretch.

The snow was now ankle deep and falling more thickly than ever, but the flakes had gotten bigger. It's stopping, they'd tell each other in tones of disappointment when they saw flakes like that as kids.

'Hey Henry?' Pete sounded out of breath, but that was okay; the shelter was just up ahead. In the meantime Pete walked in a kind of stiff-legged strut to keep his knee from coming out of whack again.

'What?'

'I been thinkin about Duddits a lot just lately  -  how strange is that?'

'No, bounce,' Henry said at once, without even thinking about it.

'That's right.' Pete gave a somehow nervous laugh. 'No bounce, no play. You do think it's strange, don't you?'