Dreamcatcher(40)

Forget it, numbnuts. You're spooking yourself, that's all. There's a big difference between really seeing the line and just spooking yourself. Forget about it and get what you came for.

'Good f**kin idea,' Pete said.

The store - bags were plastic, not paper, the kind with handles; Old Man Gosselin had marched at least that far into the future. Pete snagged one, and as he did, felt a rip of pain on the pad of his right hand. Only one goddam broken bottle and so naturally he'd cut himself on it, and pretty deep, from the feel. Maybe this was his punishment for leaving the woman alone back there. If so, he'd take it like a man and count himself let off easy.

He gathered up eight bottles, started to work his way back out of the Scout, then thought again. Had he staggered all the way back here for a lousy eight beers? 'I think not,' he muttered, and then got the other seven, taking time to scrounge them all in spite of how creepy the Scout was making him feel. At last he backed out, fighting the panicky idea that something small, but with big teeth, would soon spring at him, taking a great big chomp out of his balls. Pete's Punishment, Part Two.

He didn't exactly freak, but he wiggled back out faster than he'd wiggled in, and his knee locked up again just as he got entirely clear. He rolled over on his back, whimpering, looking up into the snow  -  the last of it, now coming down in great big flakes as lacy as a woman's best underwear  -  and massaging the knee, telling it to come on, now, honey, come on now, sweetie, let go, you f**king bitch. And just as he was starting to think that this time it wouldn't, it did. He hissed through his teeth, sat up, and looked at the bag 'THANKS FOR SHOPPING AT OUR PLACE! printed on the side in red.

'Where else would I shop, you old bastard?' he asked. He decided to allow himself one beer after all before starting back to the woman. Hell, it would lighten the load. 

Pete fished one out, twisted the cap, and poured the top half down his throat in four big gulps. It was cold and the snow he was sitting in was even colder, but he still felt better. That was the magic of beer. The magic of scotch, vodka, and gin as well, but when it came to alcohol, he was with Tom T. Hall: he liked beer.

Looking at the bag, he thought again of the carrot-top back in the store  -  the mystified grin, the Chinese eyes that had originally earned such people the term mongoloids, as in mongoloid idiot. That led him to Duddits again, Douglas Cavell if you wanted to be formal about it. Why Duds had been on his mind so much lately Pete couldn't say, but he had, and Pete made himself a promise: when this was over, he was going to stop in Derry and see old Duddits. He'd make the others go with him, and somehow he didn't think he'd have to try very hard to convince them. Duddits was probably the reason they were still friends after so many years. Hell, most kids never so much as thought of their college or high - school buddies again, let alone those they'd chummed with in junior high . . . what was now known as middle school, although Pete had no doubt it was the same sad jungle of insecurities, confusion, smelly armpits, crazy fads, and half - baked ideas. They hadn't known Duddits from school, of course, because Duddits didn't go to Derry junior High. Duds went to The Mary M. Snowe School for the Exceptional, which was known to the neighborhood kids as The Retard Academy or sometimes just The Dumb School. In the ordinary course of events their paths never would have crossed, but there was this vacant lot out on Kansas Street, and the abandoned brick building that went with it. Facing the street you could still read TRACKER BROTHERS SHIPPING TRUCKING AND STORAGE in fading white paint on the old red brick. And on the other side, in the big alcove where the trucks had once backed up to unload . . . something else was painted there.

Now, sitting in the snow but no longer feeling it melting to cold slush under his ass, drinking his second beer without even being aware he had opened it (the first empty he had cast into the woods where he could still see animals moving east), Pete remembered the day they had met Duds. He remembered Beaver's stupid jacket that the Beav had loved so much, and Beaver's voice, thin but somehow powerful, announcing the end of something and the beginning of something else, announcing in some ungraspable but perfectly real and knowable way that the course of their lives had changed one Tuesday afternoon when all they had been planning was some two-on-two in Jonesy's driveway and then maybe a game of Parcheesi in front of the TV; now, sitting here in the woods beside the overturned Scout, still smelling the cologne Henry hadn't been wearing, drinking his life's happy poison with a hand wearing a bloodstained glove, the car salesman remembered the boy who had not quite given up his dreams of being an astronaut in spite of his increasing problems with math (Jonesy had helped him, and then Henry had helped him and then, in tenth grade, he'd been beyond help), and he remembered the other boys as well, mostly the Beav, who had turned the world upside down with a high yell in his just-beginning-to-change voice: Hey you guys, quit it! Just f**king QUIT it!

'Beaver,' Pete said, and toasted the dark afternoon as he sat with his back propped against the overturned Scout's hood. 'You were beautiful, man.' But hadn't they all been?

Hadn't they all been beautiful?

4

Because he is in the eighth grade and his last class of the day is music, on the ground floor, Pete is always out before his three best friends, who always finish the day on the second floor, Jonesy and Henry in American Fiction, which is a reading class for smart kids, and Beaver next door in Math for Living, which is actually Math for Stupid Boys and Girls. Pete is fighting hard not to have to take that one next year, but he thinks it's a fight he will ultimately lose. He can add, subtract, multiply, and divide; he can do fractions, too, although it takes him too much time. But now there is something new, now there is the x. Pete does not understand the x, and fears it.