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Which would be easy, because the door of the boys” bedroom is open. So is the door on the far side of the big central room, the one to the outside. No wonder they’re cold, there’s a hell of a draft. Now that Henry has his eyes back on (that is how he thinks of it), he can see the dreamcatcher out there dancing in the cold November breeze coming in through the open door.
“Where’s Duddits?” Jonesy asks in a dazed, I’m-still-dreaming voice. “Did he go out with Beaver?”
“He’s back in Derry, foolish,” Henry says, getting up and pulling on his thermal undershirt. And he doesn’t feel that Jonesy is foolish, not really; he also has a sense that Duddits was just here with them.
It was the dream, he thinks. Duddits was in the dream. He was sitting on the bank. He was crying. He was so. He didn’t mean to. If anyone meant to, it was us.
And there is still crying. He can hear it, coming in through the front door, carried on the breeze. It’s not Duddits, though; it’s the Beav. They leave the room in a line, pulling on scraps of clothes as they go, not bothering with their shoes, which would take too long.
One good thing-judging from the tin city of beer-cans on the kitchen table (plus a suburb of same on the coffee-table), it’ll take more than a couple of open doors and some whispering kids to wake up Beaver’s Dad.
The big granite doorstep is freezing under Henry’s stocking feet, cold in the deep thoughtless way death must be cold, but he barely notices.
He sees the Beaver right away. He’s at the foot of the maple tree with the deer-stand in it, on his knees as if praying. His legs and feet are bare, Henry sees. He’s wearing his motorcycle jacket, and tied up and down its arms, fluttering like pirate’s finery, are the orange banda
Henry breaks into a run. Pete and Jonesy follow suit, their breath puffing white in the chill morning air. The needle-strewn ground under Henry’s feet is almost as hard and cold as the granite doorstep.
He drops to his knees beside Beaver, scared and somehow awed by those tears. Because the Beav isn’t just misting up, like the hero of a movie who may be allowed to shed a manly drop or two when his dog or his girlfriend dies; Beav is ru
“Gross,” Pete says.
Henry looks at him impatiently, but then he sees Pete isn’t looking at Beaver but past him, at a steaming puddle of vomit. In it are kernels of last night’s corn (Lamar Clarendon believes passionately in the virtues of ca
“Gross!” Pete almost screams it this time.
Beaver doesn’t seem to even notice. “Henry!” he says. His eyes, submerged beneath twin lenses of tears, are huge and spooky. They seem to peer past Henry’s face and into the supposedly private rooms behind his forehead.
“Beav, it’s okay. You had a bad dream.”
“Sure, a bad dream.” Jonesy’s voice is thick, his throat still plated with puke. He tries to clear it with a thick ratching noise that is somehow worse than what just came out of him, then bends over and spits. His hands are planted on the legs of his longhandles, and his bare back is covered with bumps.
Beav takes no notice of Jonesy, nor of Pete as Pete kneels down on his other side and puts a clumsy, tentative arm around Beav’s shoulders. Beav continues to look only at Henry. “His head was off,” Beaver whispers.
Jonesy also drops to his knees, and now all three of them are surrounding the Beav, Henry and Pete to either side, Jonesy in front. There is vomit on Jonesy’s chin. He reaches to wipe it away, but Beaver takes his hand before he can. The boys kneel beneath the maple, and suddenly they are all one. It is brief, this sense of union, but as vivid as their dream. It is the dream, but now they are all awake, the sensation is rational, and they ca
Now it is Jonesy the Beav is looking at with his spooky swimming eyes. Clutching Jonesy’s hand.
“It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud.”
“Yeah,” Jonesy whispers in an awed and shaky voice. “Oh jeez, it was.”
“Said he’d see us again, remember?” Pete asks. “One at a time or all together. He said that.”
Henry hears these things from a great distance, because he’s back in the dream. Back at the scene of the accident. At the bottom of a trash-littered embankment where there is a soggy piece of marsh, created by a blocked drainage culvert. He knows the place, it’s on Route 7, the old Derry-Newport Road. Lying overturned in the muck and the murk is a burning car. The air stinks of gas and burning tires. Duddits is crying. Duddits is sitting halfway down the trashy slope and holding his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox against his chest and crying his eyes out.
A hand protrudes from one of the windows of the overturned car. It’s slim, the nails painted candy-apple red. The car’s other two occupants have been thrown clear, one of them almost thirty damn feet. This one’s facedown, but Henry still recognizes him by the masses of soaked blond hair. It’s Duncan, the one who said you’re not go
Something floats against Henry’s shin. “Don’t pick that up!” Pete says urgently, but Henry does. It’s a brown suede moccasin. He has just time to register this, and then Beaver and Jonesy shriek in terrible childish harmony. They are standing together, ankle-deep in the muck, both of them wearing their hunting clothes: Jonesy in his new bright orange parka, bought special from Sears for this trip (and Mrs Jones still tearfully, unpersuadably convinced that her son win be killed in the woods by a hunter’s bullet, cut down in his prime), Beaver in his tattered motorcycle jacket (What a lot of zippers! Duddie’s Mom had said admiringly, thus wi
Duds is up there on the bank, crying and crying, that crying that gets into your head like a sinus headache, and if it goes on it will drive Henry mad. He drops the moc and slogs around the back of the burning car to where Beaver and Jonesy stand with their arms around each other.
“Beaver! Beav!” Henry shouts, but until he reaches out and gives Beaver a hard shake, Beaver just continues to stare at the severed head, as if hypnotized.
Finally, though, Beaver looks at him. “His head’s off,” he says, as if this were not evident. “Henry, his head’s-”