Dreamcatcher(88)

What exactly was going on here? Not in the wild, wonderful, wacky Outside World, but inside his own head? He'd had flashes of understanding his whole life  -  his life since Duddits, anyway  -  but nothing like this. What was this? Was it time to examine this new and powerful way of seeing the line?

No. No, no, no.

And, as if mocking him, the song in his head: general's rank, bodies stank.

'Duddits!' he exclaimed in the graying, dying afternoon; lazy flakes falling like feathers from a split pillow. Some thought struggled to be born but it was too big, too big.

'Duddits!' he cried again in his hortatory eggman's voice, and one thing he did understand: the luxury of suicide had been denied him. Which was the most horrible thing of all, because these weird thoughts  -  I shouted out who killed the Kennedys  -  were tearing him apart. He began to weep again, bewildered and afraid, alone in the woods. All his friends except Jonesy were dead, and Jonesy was in the hospital. A movie star in the hospital with Mr Gray.

'What does that mean?' Henry groaned. He clapped his hands to his temples (he felt as though his head were bulging, bulging) and his rusty old ski-poles flapped aimlessly at the ends of their wrist-loops like broken propeller blades. 'Oh Christ, what does that MEAN?'

Only the song came in answer: Pleased to meet you! Hope you guess my name!

Only the snow: red with the blood of slaughtered animals and they lay everywhere, a Dachau of deer and raccoon and rabbit and weasel and bear and groundhog and -

Henry screamed, held his head and screamed so loud and so hard that he felt sure for a moment that he was going to pass out. Then his lightheartedness passed and his rm'nd seemed to clear, at least for the time being. He was left with a brilliant image of Duddits as he had been when they first met him, Duddits not under the light of a blitzkrieg winter as in that Stones song but under the sane light of a cloudy October afternoon, Duddits looking up at them with his tilted, somehow wise Chinese eyes. Duddits was our finest hour, he had told Pete.

'Fit wha?' Henry said now. 'Fit neek?'

Yeah, fit neek. Turn it around, put it on the right way, fit neek.

Smiling a little now (although his cheeks were still wet with tears that were beginning to freeze), Henry began to ski along the crimped track of the snowmobile again.

10

Ten minutes later he came to the overturned wreck of the Scout. He suddenly realized two things: that he was ragingly hungry after all and that there was food in there. He had seen the tracks both going and coming and hadn't needed Natty Bumppo to know that Pete had left the woman and returned to the Scout. Nor did he need Hercule Poirot to tell him that the food they'd bought at the store  -  most of it, at least  -  would still be in there. He knew what Pete had come back for.

He skied around to the passenger side, following Pete's tracks, then froze in the act of loosening the ski bindings. This side was away from the wind, and what Pete had written in the snow as he sat drinking his two beers was mostly still here: DUDDITS, printed over and over again. As he looked at the name in the snow, Henry began to shiver. It was like coming to the grave of a loved one and hearing a voice speak out of the ground.

11

There was broken glass inside the Scout. Blood, as well. Because most of the blood was on the back seat, Henry felt sure it hadn't been spilled in the original accident; Pete had cut himself on his return trip. To Henry, the interesting thing was that there was none of the red-gold fuzz. It grew rapidly, and so the logical conclusion was that Pete hadn't been infected when he'd come for the beer. Later, maybe, but not then.

He grabbed the bread, the peanut butter, the milk, and the carton of orange juice. Then he backed out of the Scout and sat with his shoulders against the overturned rear end, watching the fresh snow sift down and gobbling bread and peanut butter as fast as he could, using his index finger as a knife and licking it clean between spreads. The peanut butter was good and the orange juice went down in two long drafts, but it wasn't enough.

'What you're thinking of,' he announced to the darkening afternoon, 'is grotesque. Not to mention red. Red food.'

Red or not, he was thinking of it, and surely it wasn't all that grotesque; he was, after all, a man who had spent long nights thinking about guns and ropes and plastic bags. All of that seemed a little childish just now, but it was him, all right. And so -

'And so let me close, ladies and gentlemen of the American Psy?chiatric Association, by quoting the late Joseph "Beaver" Clarendon: "Said f**k it and put a dime in the Salvation Army bucket. And if you don't like it, grab my c**k and suck it." Thank you very much.'

Having thus discoursed to the American Psychiatric Association, Henry crawled back into the Scout, once more successfully avoiding the broken glass, and got the package wrapped in butcher's paper ($2.79 printed on it in Old Man Gosselin's shaky hand). He backed out again with the package in his pocket, then took it out and snapped the twine. Inside were nine plump hot dogs. The red kind.

For a moment his mind tried to show him the legless reptilian thing squirming on Jonesy's bed and looking at him with its empty black eyes, but he banished it with the speed and ease of one whose survival instincts have never wavered.

The hot dogs were fully cooked, but he warmed them up just the same, running the flame of his butane lighter back and forth beneath each one until it was at least warm, then wrapping it in Wonder Bread and gobbling it down. He smiled as he did it, knowing how ridiculous he would look to an observer. Well, didn't they say that psychiatrists eventually ended up as loony as their patients, if not more so?