Dreamcatcher(53)

Jonesy didn't know, either  -  not really  -  but he reached out and took Beaver's hand. Beav's fingers closed over his with panicky tightness and together they went a step deeper into the bathroom. Jonesy tried to avoid the blood, but it was hard; there was blood everywhere. And not all of it was blood.

'Jonesy,' Beaver said in a dry near-whisper. 'Do you see that crud on the shower curtain?'

'Yeah.' Growing in the blurred fingerprints were little clumps of reddish-golden mold, like mildew. There was more of it on the floor, not in the fat blood-snake, but in the narrow angles of the grout.

'What is it?'

'I don't know,' Jonesy said. 'Same shit he had on his face, I guess. Shut up a minute.' Then: 'Mr McCarthy? . . . Rick?'

McCarthy, sitting there on the toilet, made no response. He had for some reason put his orange cap back on  -  the bill stuck off at a crooked, slightly drunken angle. He was otherwise naked. His chin was down on his breastbone, in a parody of deep thought (or maybe it wasn't a parody, who knew?). His eyes were mostly closed. His hands were clasped pritrdy together over his pubic thatch. Blood ran down the side of the toilet in a big sloppy paintstroke, but there was no blood on McCarthy himself, at least not as far as Jonesy could see.

One thing he could see: the skin of McCarthy's stomach hung in two slack dewlaps. The look of it reminded Jonesy of something, and after a moment or two it came to him. It was how Carla's stomach had looked after she had delivered each of their four children. Above McCarthy's hip, where there was a little lovehandle (and some give to the flesh), the skin was only red. Across the belly, however, it had split open in tiny weals. If McCarthy had been pregnant, it must have been with some sort of parasite, a tapeworm or a hookworm or something like that. Only there was stuff growing in his spilled blood, and what had he said as he lay there in Jonesy's bed with the blankets pulled up to his chin? Behold, I stand at the door and knock. This was one knock Jonesy wished he had never answered. In fact, he wished he had shot him. Yes. He saw more clearly now. He was hyped on the clarity that sometimes comes to the completely horrified mind, and in that state wished he had put a bullet in McCarthy before he saw the orange cap and the orange flagman's vest. It couldn't have hurt and it might have helped.

'Stand at the door and knock on my ass,' Jonesy muttered.

'Jonesy? Is he still alive?'

'I don't know.'

Jonesy took another step forward and felt Beaver's fingers slide out of his; the Beav had apparently come as close to McCarthy as he was able.

'Rick?' Jonesy asked in a hushed voice. A don't-wake-the-baby voice. A viewing-the-corpse voice. 'Rick, are you - '

There was a loud, dank fart from beneath the man on the toilet, and the room immediately filled with an eyewatering aroma of excrement and airplane glue. Jonesy thought it a wonder that the shower curtain didn't melt.

From the bowl there came a splash. Not the plop of a turd dropping  -  at least Jonesy didn't think so. It sounded more like a fish jumping in a pond.

'Christ almighty, the stink of it! 'Beaver cried. He had the heel of his hand over his mouth and nose and his words were muffled. 'But if he can fart, he must be alive. Huh, Jonesy? He must still be - '

'Hush,' Jonesy said in a quiet voice. He was astonished at its steadiness. 'Just hush, okay?' And the Beav hushed.

Jonesy leaned in close. He could see everything: the small stipple of blood in McCarthy's right eyebrow, the red growth on his cheek, the blood on the blue plastic curtain, the joke sign  -  LAMAR'S THINKIN PLACE  -  that had hung in here when the toilet was still of the chemical variety and the shower had to be pumped up before it could be used. He saw the little gelid gleam from between McCarthy's eyelids and the cracks in his lips, which looked purple and liverish in this light. He could smell the noxious aroma of the passed gas and could almost see that, too, rising in filthy dark yellow streamers, like mustard gas.

'McCarthy? Rick? Can you hear me?'

He snapped his fingers in front of those nearly closed eyes. Nothing. He licked a spot on the back of his wrist and held it first in front of McCarthy's nostrils, then in front of his lips. Nothing.

'He's dead, Beav,' he said, drawing back.

'Bullshit he is,' Beaver replied. His voice was ragged, absurdly offended, as if McCarthy had violated all the rules of hospitality. 'He just dropped a clinker, man, I heard it.'

'I don't think that was - '

Beav stepped past him, bumping Jonesy's bad hip against the sin k hard enough to hurt. 'That's enough, fella!' Beaver cried. He grabbed McCarthy's round freckled unmuscled shoulder and shook it. 'Snap out of it! Snap - '

McCarthy listed slowly tubward and Jonesy had a moment when he thought Beaver had been right after all, the guy was still alive, alive and trying to get up. Then McCarthy fell off the throne and into the tub, pushing the shower curtain ahead of him in a filmy blue billow. The orange hat fell off. There was a bony crack as his skull hit the porcelain and then Jonesy and Beaver were screaming and clutching each other, the sound of their horror deafening in the little tile-lined room. McCarthy's ass was a lopsided full moon with a giant bloody crater in its center, the site of some terrible impact, it seemed. Jonesy saw it for only a second before McCarthy collapsed facedown into the tub and the curtain floated back into place, hiding him, but in that second it seemed to Jonesy that the hole was a foot across. Could that be? A foot? Surely not.