Dreamcatcher Page 5

  The idea passed--all of the funny ideas he'd had in the hospital eventually passed--but it left a residue. Caution was the residue. He had no memory of Henry's calling and telling him to watch himself for the next little while (and Henry hadn't reminded him), but since then Jonesy had watched himself. He was careful. Because maybe death was out there, and maybe sometimes it called your name.

  But the past was the past. He had survived his brush with death, and nothing was dying here this morning but a deer (a buck, he hoped) who had strolled in the wrong direction.

  The sound of the rustling brush and snapping twigs was coming toward him from the southwest, which meant he wouldn't have to shoot around the trunk of the maple--good--and put him upwind. Even better. Most of the maple's leaves had fallen, and he had a good, if not perfect, sightline through the interlacing branches. Jonesy raised the Garand, settled the buttplate into the hollow of his shoulder, and prepared to shoot himself a conversation-piece.

  What saved McCarthy--at least temporarily--was Jonesy's disenchantment with hunting. What almost got McCarthy killed was a phenomenon George Kilroy, a friend of his father's, had called "eye-fever." Eye-fever, Kilroy claimed, was a form of buck-fever, and was probably the second most common cause of hunting accidents. "First is drink," said George Kilroy . . . and like Jonesy's father, Kilroy knew a bit on that subject, as well. "First is always drink."

  Kilroy said that victims of eye-fever were uniformly astounded to discover they had shot a fence-post, or a passing car, or the broad side of a barn, or their own hunting partner (in many cases the partner was a spouse, a sib, or a child). "But I saw it," they would protest, and most of them, according to Kilroy, could pass a lie-detector test on the subject. They had seen the deer or the bear or the wolf, or just the grouse flip-flapping through the high autumn grass. They had seen it.

  What happened, according to Kilroy, was that these hunters were afflicted by an anxiety to make the shot, to get it over with, one way or the other. This anxiety became so strong that the brain persuaded the eye that it saw what was not yet visible, in order to end the tension. This was eye-fever. And although Jonesy was aware of no particular anxiety--his fingers had been perfectly steady as he screwed the red stopper back into the throat of the Thermos--he admitted later to himself that yes, he might have fallen prey to the malady.

  For one moment he saw the buck clearly at the end of the tunnel made by the interlocking branches--as clearly as he had seen any of the previous sixteen deer (six bucks, ten does) he had brought down over the years at Hole in the Wall. He saw its brown head, one eye so dark it was almost the black of jeweler's velvet, even part of its rack.

  Shoot now! part of him cried--it was the Jonesy from the other side of the accident, the whole Jonesy. That one had spoken more frequently in the last month or so, as he began to approach some mythical state which people who had never been hit by a car blithely referred to as "total recovery," but he had never spoken as loudly as he did now. This was a command, almost a shout.

  And his finger did tighten on the trigger. It never put on that last pound of pressure (or perhaps it only would have taken another half, a paltry eight ounces), but it did tighten. The voice that stopped him was that second Jonesy, the one who had awakened in Mass General, doped and disoriented and in pain, not sure of anything anymore except that someone wanted something to stop, someone couldn't stand it--not without a shot, anyway--that someone wanted Marcy.

  No, not yet--wait, watch, this new cautious Jonesy said, and that was the voice he listened to. He froze in place, most of his weight thrown forward on his good left leg, rifle raised, barrel angled down that interlacing tunnel of light at a cool thirty-five degrees.

  The first flakes of snow came skating down out of the white sky just then, and as they did, Jonesy saw a bright vertical line of orange below the deer's head--it was as if the snow had somehow conjured it up. For a moment perception simply gave up and what he was seeing over the barrel of his gun became only an unconnected jumble, like paints swirled all together on an artist's palette. There was no deer and no man, not even any woods, just a puzzling and untidy jumble of black, brown, and orange.

  Then there was more orange, and in a shape that made sense: it was a hat, the kind with flaps you could fold down to cover your ears. The out-of-staters bought them at L. L. Bean's for forty-four dollars, each with a little tag inside that said PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA BY UNION LABOR. Or you could pick one up at Gosselin's for seven bucks. The tag in a Gosselin's cap just said MADE IN BANGLADESH.

  The hat brought everything into horrible oh-God focus: the brown he had mistaken for a buck's head was the front of a man's wool jacket, the black jeweler's velvet of the buck's eye was a button, and the antlers were only more branches--branches belonging to the very tree in which he was standing. The man was unwise (Jonesy could not quite bring himself to use the word crazy) to be wearing a brown coat in the woods, but Jonesy was still at a loss to understand how he himself could have made a mistake of such potentially horrifying consequence. Because the man was also wearing an orange cap, wasn't he? And a bright orange flagman's vest as well, over the admittedly unwise brown coat. The man was--

  --was a pound of finger-pressure from death. Maybe less.

  It came home to him in a visceral way then, knocking him clean out of his own body. For a terrible, brilliant moment he never forgot, he was neither Jonesy Number One, the confident pre-accident Jonesy, nor Jonesy Number Two, the more tentative survivor who spent so much of his time in a tiresome state of physical discomfort and mental confusion. For that moment he was some other Jonesy, an invisible presence looking at a gunman standing on a platform in a tree. The gunman's hair was short and already graying, his face lined around the mouth, beard-speckled on the cheeks, and haggard. The gunman was on the verge of using his weapon. Snow had begun to dance around his head and light on his untucked brown flannel shirt, and he was on the verge of shooting a man in an orange cap and vest of the very sort he would have been wearing himself if he had elected to go into the woods with the Beaver instead of up into this tree.

  He fell back into himself with a thud, exactly as one fell back into one's seat after taking a car over a bad bump at a high speed. To his horror, he realized he was still tracking the man below with the Garand, as if some stubborn alligator deep in his brain refused to let go of the idea that the man in the brown coat was prey. Worse, he couldn't seem to make his finger relax on the rifle's trigger. There was even an awful second or two when he thought he was actually still squeezing, inexorably eating up those last few ounces between him and the greatest mistake of his life. He later came to accept that that at least had been an illusion, something akin to the feeling you get of rolling backward in your stopped car when you glimpse a slowly moving car beside you, out of the corner of your eye.

  No, he was just frozen, but that was bad enough, that was hell. Jonesy, you think too much, Pete liked to say when he caught Jonesy staring out into the middle distance, no longer tracking the conversation, and what he probably meant was Jonesy, you imagine too much, and that was very likely true. Certainly he was imagining too much now as he stood up here in the middle of the tree and the season's first snow, hair leaping up in tufts, finger locked on the Garand's trigger--not tightening still, as he had for a moment feared, but not loosening, either, the man almost below him now, the Garand's gunsight on the top of the orange cap, the man's life on an invisible wire between the Garand's muzzle and that cap, the man maybe thinking about trading his car or cheating on his wife or buying his oldest daughter a pony (Jonesy later had reason to know McCarthy had been thinking about none of those things, but of course not then, not in the tree with his forefinger a frozen curl around the trigger of his rifle) and not knowing what Jonesy had not known as he stood on the curb in Cambridge with his briefcase in one hand and a copy of the Boston Phoenix under his arm, namely that death was in the neighborhood, or perhaps even Death, a hurrying figure like something escaped from an early I
ngmar Bergman film, something carrying a concealed implement in the coarse folds of its robe. Scissors, perhaps. Or a scalpel.

  And the worst of it was that the man would not die, or at least not at once. He would fall down and lie there screaming, as Jonesy had lain screaming in the street. He couldn't remember screaming, but of course he had; he had been told this and had no reason to disbelieve it. Screamed his fucking head off, most likely. And what if the man in the brown coat and orange accessories started screaming for Marcy? Surely he would not--not really--but Jonesy's mind might report screams of Marcy. If there was eye-fever--if he could look at a man's brown coat and see it as a deer's head--then there was likely the auditory equivalent, as well. To hear a man screaming and know you were the reason--dear God, no. And still his finger would not loosen.

  What broke his paralysis was both simple and unexpected: about ten paces from the base of Jonesy's tree, the man in the brown coat fell down. Jonesy heard the pained, surprised sound he made--mrof! was what it sounded like--and his finger released the trigger without his even thinking about it.

  The man was down on his hands and knees, his brown-gloved fingers (brown gloves, another mistake, this guy almost could have gone out with a sign reading SHOOT ME taped to his back, Jonesy thought) spread on the ground, which had already begun to whiten. As the man got up again, he began to speak aloud in a fretful, wondering voice. Jonesy didn't realize at first that he was also weeping.

  "Oh dear, oh dear," the man said as he worked his way back to a standing position. He swayed on his feet as if drunk. Jonesy knew that men in the woods, men away from their families for a week or a weekend, got up to all sorts of small wickedness--drinking at ten in the morning was one of the most common. But Jonesy didn't think this guy was drunk. No reason; just a vibe.

  "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear." And then, as he began to walk again: "Snow. Now it's snow. Please God, oh God, now it's snow, oh dear."

  His first couple of steps were lurching and unsure. Jonesy had about decided that his vibe was incorrect, the guy was loaded, and then the fellow's gait smoothed out and he began to walk a little more evenly. He was scratching at his right cheek.

  He passed directly beneath the stand, for a moment he wasn't a man at all but only a round circle of orange cap with brown shoulders to either side of it. His voice drifted up, liquid and full of tears, mostly Oh dear with the occasional Oh God or Now it's snow thrown in for salt.

  Jonesy stood where he was, watching as the guy first disappeared directly beneath the stand, then came out on the other side. He pivoted without being aware of it to keep the plodding man in view--nor was he aware that he had lowered his rifle to his side, even pausing long enough to put the safety back on.

  Jonesy didn't call out, and he supposed he knew why: simple guilt. He was afraid that the man down there would take one look at him and see the truth in Jonesy's eyes--even through his tears and the thickening snow, the man would see that Jonesy had been up there with his gun pointed, that Jonesy had almost shot him.

  Twenty paces beyond the tree, the man stopped and only stood there, his gloved right hand raised to his brow, shielding his eyes from the snow. Jonesy realized he had seen Hole in the Wall. Had probably realized he was on an actual path, too. Oh dear and Oh God stopped, and the guy began to run toward the sound of the generator, rocking from side to side like a man on the deck of a ship. Jonesy could hear the stranger's short, sharp gasps for breath as he pounded toward the roomy cabin with the lazy curl of smoke rising from the chimney and fading almost at once into the snow.

  Jonesy began to work his way down the rungs nailed to the trunk of the maple with his gun slung over his shoulder (the thought that the man might present some sort of danger did not occur to him, not then; he simply didn't want to leave the Garand, which was a fine gun, out in the snow). His hip had stiffened, and by the time he got to the foot of the tree, the man he'd almost shot had made it nearly all the way to the cabin door . . . which was unlocked, of course. No one locked up, not way out here.

  5

  About ten feet from the granite slab that served as Hole in the Wall's front stoop, the man in the brown coat and orange hat fell down again. His hat tumbled off, revealing a sweaty clump of thinning brown hair. He stayed on one knee for a moment, head lowered. Jonesy could hear his harsh, fast breathing.

  The man picked up his cap, and just as he set it back on his head, Jonesy hailed him.

  The man staggered to his feet and turned tipsily. Jonesy's first impression was that the man's face was very long--that he was almost what people meant when they called someone "horsefaced." Then, as Jonesy got closer, hitching a little but not really limping (and that was good, because the ground underfoot was getting slippery fast), he realized the guy's face wasn't particularly long at all--he was just very scared and very very pale. The red patch on his cheek where he had been scratching stood out brightly. The relief that came over him when he saw Jonesy hurrying toward him was large and immediate. Jonesy almost laughed at himself, standing up there on the platform in the tree and worrying about the guy reading his eyes. This man wasn't into reading faces, and he clearly had no interest in where Jonesy had come from or what he might have been doing. This man looked like he wanted to throw his arms around Jonesy's neck and cover him with big gooey kisses.

  "Thank God!" the man cried. He held out one hand toward Jonesy and shuffled toward him through the thin icing of new snow. "Oh gee, thank God, I'm lost, I've been lost in the woods since yesterday, I thought I was going to die out here. I . . . I . . ."

  His feet slipped and Jonesy grabbed his upper arms. He was a big man, taller than Jonesy, who stood six-two, and broader, as well. Nevertheless, Jonesy's first impression was of insubstantialness, as if the man's fear had somehow scooped him out and left him light as a milkweed pod.

  "Easy, fella," Jonesy said. "Easy, you're all right now, you're okay. Let's just get you inside and get you warm, how would that be?"

  As if the word warm had been his cue, the man's teeth began to chatter. "S-S-Sure." He tried to smile, without much success. Jonesy was again struck by his extreme pallor. It was cold out here this morning, upper twenties at best, but the guy's cheeks were all ashes and lead. The only color in his face, other than the red patch, was the brown crescents under his eyes.

  Jonesy got an arm around the man's shoulders, suddenly swept by an absurd and sappy tenderness for this stranger, an emotion so strong it was like his first junior-high-school crush--Mary Jo Martineau in a sleeveless white blouse and straight knee-length denim skirt. He was now absolutely sure the man hadn't been drinking--it was fear (and maybe exhaustion) rather than booze that had made him unsteady on his feet. Yet there was a smell on his breath--something like bananas. It reminded Jonesy of the ether he'd sprayed into the carburetor of his first car, a Vietnam-era Ford, to get it to crank over on cold mornings.

  "Get you inside, right?"

  "Yeah. C-Cold. Thank God you came along. Is this--"

  "My place? No, a friend's." Jonesy opened the varnished oak door and helped the man over the threshold. The stranger gasped at the feel of the warm air, and a flush began to rise in his cheeks. Jonesy was relieved to see there was some blood in him, after all.

  6

  Hole in the Wall was pretty grand by deep-woods standards. You came in on the single big downstairs room--kitchen, dining room, and living room, all in one--but there were two bedrooms behind it and another upstairs, under the single eave. The big room was filled with the scent of pine and its mellow, varnished glow. There was a Navajo rug on the floor and a Micmac hanging on one wall which depicted brave little stick-hunters surrounding an enormous bear. A plain oak table, long enough to accommodate eight places, defined the dining area. There was a woodstove in the kitchen and a fireplace in the living area; when both were going, the place made you feel stupid with the heat even if it was twenty below outside. The west wall was all window, giving a view of the long, steep slope which fell off to the west. There had b
een a fire there in the seventies, and the dead trees stood black and twisted in the thickening snow. Jonesy, Pete, Henry, and the Beav called this slope The Gulch, because that's what the Beav's Dad and his friends had called it.

  "Oh God, thank God, and thank you, too," the man in the orange hat said to Jonesy, and when Jonesy grinned--that was a lot of thank-you's--the man laughed shrilly as if to say yes, he knew it, it was a funny thing to say but he couldn't help it. He began to take deep breaths, for a few moments looking like one of those exercise gurus you saw on high-number cable. On every exhale, he talked.

  "God, I really thought I was done-for last night . . . it was so cold . . . and the damp air, I remember that . . . remember thinking Oh boy, oh dear, what if there's snow coming after all . . . I got coughing and couldn't stop . . . something came and I thought I have to stop coughing, if that's a bear or something I'll . . . you know . . . provoke it or something . . . only I couldn't and after awhile it just . . . you know, went away on its own--"

  "You saw a bear in the night?" Jonesy was both fascinated and appalled. He had heard there were bears up here--Old Man Gosselin and his pickle-barrel buddies at the store loved to tell bear stories, particularly to the out-of-staters--but the idea that this man, lost and on his own, had been menaced by one in the night was keenly horrible. It was like hearing a sailor talk about a sea monster.

  "I don't know that it was," the man said, and suddenly shot Jonesy a sideward look of cunning that Jonesy didn't like and couldn't read. "I can't say for sure, by then there was no more lightning."

  "Lightning, too? Man!" If not for the guy's obviously genuine distress, Jonesy would have wondered if he wasn't getting his leg pulled. In truth, he wondered it a little, anyway.