Dreamcatcher(58)

'We're always near here by then,' Henry replies. 'Aren't we, you guys?'

And although seven forty-five is in fact a little early for them, they all nod and say yeah right sure yeah. 

'You would do that?' she asks again, and this time Beaver has no trouble reading her tone; she is incredyouwhatsis, the word that means you can't f**kin believe it.

'Sure,' Henry says. 'Unless you think Duddits wouldn't . . . you know . . .'

'Wouldn't want us to,' Jonesy finishes.

'Are you crazy?' she asks. Beaver thinks she is speaking to herself, trying to convince herself that these boys are really in her kitchen, that all of this is in fact happening. 'Walking to school with the big boys? Boys who go to what Duddits calls "real school"? He'd think he was in heaven.'

'Okay,' Henry says. 'We'll come by quarter of eight, walk him to school. And we'll walk home with him, too.'

'He gets out at - '

'Aw, we know what time The Retard Academy gets out,' Beaver says cheerfully, and realizes a second before he sees the others' stricken faces that he's said something a lot worse than bitchin. He claps his hands over his mouth. Above them, his eyes are huge. Jonesy kicks his shin so hard under the table that Beav almost tumbles over backward.

'Don't mind him, ma'am,' Henry says. He is talking rapidly, which he only does when he's embarrassed. 'He just - '

'I don't mind,' she says. 'I know what people call it. Sometimes Alfie and I call it that ourselves.' This topic, incredibly, hardly seems to interest her. 'Why?' she says again.

And although it's Henry she's looking at, it's Beaver who answers, in spite of his blazing cheeks. 'Because he's cool,' he says. The others nod.

They will walk Duddits to school and back for the next five years or so, unless he is sick or they are at Hole in the Wall; by the end of it Duddits is no longer going to Mary M. Snowe, aka The Retard Academy, but to Derry Vocational, where he learns to bake cookies (baitin tooties, in Duddits-ese), replace car batteries, make change, and fie his own tie (the knot is always perfect, although it sometimes appears about halfway down his shirt). By then the Josie Rinkenhauer thing has come and gone, a little nine days' wonder forgotten by everyone except Josie's parents, who will never forget. In those years when they walk with him to and from his school, Duddits will sprout up until he's the tallest of all of them, a gangly teenager with a strangely beautiful child's face. By then they will have taught him how to play Parcheesi and a simplified version of Monopoly; by then they will have invented the Duddits Game and played it incessantly, sometimes laughing so hard that Alfie Cavell (he was the tall one of the pair, but he also had a birdie look about him) would come to the head of the stairs in the kitchen, the ones that led to the rec room, and yell down at them, wanting to know what was going on, what was so funny, and maybe they would try to explain that Duddits had pegged Henry fourteen on a two hand or that Duddits had pegged Pete fifteen backward, but Alfie never seemed to get it; he'd stand there at the head of the stairs with a section of the newspaper in his hand, smiling perplexedly, and at last he'd always say the same thing, Keep it down to a dull roar, boys, and close the door, leaving them to their own devices . . . and of all those devices the Duddits Game was the best, totally bitchin, as Pete would have said. There were times when Beaver thought he might actually laugh until he exploded, and Duddits sitting there all the time on the rug beside the big old Parkmunn cribbage board, feet folded under him and grinning like Buddha. What a f**karee! All of that ahead of them but now just this kitchen, and the surprising sun, and Duddits outside, pushing the swings. Duddits who had done them such a favor by coming into their lives. Duddits who is  -  they know it from the first  -  not like anyone else they know.

'I don't see how they could have done it,' Pete says suddenly. 'The way he was crying. I don't see how they could have gone on teasing him.'

Roberta Cavell looks at him sadly. 'Older boys don't hear him the same way,' she says. 'I hope you never understand.'

6

'Jonesy!' Beaver shouted. 'Hey, Jonesy!'

This time there's a response, faint but unmistakable. The snowmobile shed was a kind of ground-level attic, and one of the things out there was an old-fashioned bulb horn, the kind a bicycle deliveryman back in the twenties or thirties might have had mounted on the handlebars of his bike. Now Beaver heard it: Ooogah! How-oogah! A noise that surely would have made Duddits laugh until he cried  -  a sucker for big, juicy noises, that had been ole Duds.

The filmy blue shower curtain rustled and the Beav's arms broke out in lush bundles of gooseflesh. For a moment he almost leaped up, thinking that it was McCarthy, then realized he'd brushed the curtain with his own elbow  -  it was close quarters in here, close quarters, no doubt  -  and settled back. Still nothing from beneath him, though; that thing, whatever it was, was either dead or gone. For certain.

Well . . . almost for certain.

The Beav reached behind him, fingered the flush lever for a moment, then let his hand fall away. Sit tight, Jonesy had said, and Beaver would, but why the f**k didn't Jonesy come back? If he couldn't find the tape, why didn't he just come back without it? It had to have been at least ten minutes now, didn't it? And felt like a f**king hour. Meantime, here he sat on the john with a dead man in the tub beside him, one who looked as if his ass had been blown open by dy***ite, man, talk about having to take a shit -