Dreamcatcher, Page 4

  "Have you talked to his mother?" Jonesy asked.

  "I think," Henry says, "it might be better if we just . . . you know, orbited on in there. How's your calendar look for this weekend? Or the one after?"

  Jonesy doesn't need to check. The weekend starts day after tomorrow. There's a faculty thing Saturday afternoon, but he can easily get clear of that.

  "I'm fine both days this weekend," he says. "If I was to come by Saturday? At ten?"

  "That'd be fine." Henry sounds relieved, more like himself. Jonesy relaxes a little. "You're sure?"

  "If you think we ought to go see . . ." Jonesy hesitates. ". . . see Douglas, then probably we should. It's been too long."

  "Your appointment's there, isn't he?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Okay. I'll look for you at ten on Saturday. Hey, maybe we'll take the Scout. Give it a run. How would that be?"

  "That would be terrific."

  Henry laughs. "Carla still makin your lunch, Jonesy?"

  "She is." Jonesy looks toward his briefcase.

  "What you got today? Tuna fish?"

  "Egg salad."

  "Mmm-mmm. Okay, I'm out of here. SSDD, right?"

  "SSDD," Jonesy agrees. He can't call their old friend by his right name in front of a student, but SSDD is all right. "Talk to you l--"

  "And take care of yourself. I mean it." The emphasis in Henry's voice is unmistakable, and a little scary. But before Jonesy can respond (and what he would say with Defuniak sitting in the corner, watching and listening, he doesn't know), Henry is gone.

  Jonesy looks at the phone thoughtfully for a moment, then hangs up. He flips a page on his desk calendar, and on Saturday he crosses out Drinks at Dean Jacobson's house and writes Beg off--going to Derry with Henry to see D. But this is an appointment he will not keep. By Saturday, Derry and his old friends will be the furthest things from his mind.

  Jonesy pulls in a deep breath, lets it out, and transfers his attention to his troublesome eleven-o'clock. The kid shifts uncomfortably in his chair. He has a pretty good idea why he's been summoned here, Jonesy guesses.

  "So, Mr. Defuniak," he says. "You're from Maine, according to your records."

  "Uh, yeah. Pittsfield. I--"

  "Your records also say that you're here on scholarship, and that you've done well."

  The kid, he sees, is actually a lot more than worried. The kid is on the verge of tears. Christ, but this is hard. Jonesy has never had to accuse a student of cheating before, but he supposes this won't be the last time. He only hopes it doesn't happen too often. Because this is hard, what Beaver would call a fuckarow.

  "Mr. Defuniak--David--do you know what happens to scholarships if the students holding them are caught cheating? On a mid-term exam, let us say?"

  The kid jerks as if a hidden prankster under his chair has just triggered a low-voltage electrical charge into one of his skinny buttocks. Now his lips are trembling and the first tear, oh God, there it goes down his unshaven boy's cheek.

  "I can tell you," Jonesy says. "Such scholarships evaporate. That's what happens to them. Poof, and gone into thin air."

  "I--I--"

  There is a folder on Jonesy's desk. He opens it and takes out a European History mid-term, one of those multiple-choice monstrosities upon which the Department, in its great unwisdom, insists. Written on top of this one, in the black strokes of an IBM pencil ("Make sure your marks are heavy and unbroken, and if you need to erase, erase completely"), is the name DAVID DEFUNIAK.

  "I've reviewed your course-work, David; I've re-scanned your paper on feudalism in France during the Middle Ages; I've even been through your transcripts. You haven't exhibited brilliance, but you've done okay. And I'm aware that you're simply satisfying a requirement here--your real interests don't lie in my field, do they?"

  Defuniak shakes his head mutely. The tears gleam on his cheeks in that untrustworthy mid-March sunlight.

  There's a box of Kleenex on the corner of Jonesy's desk, and he tosses it to the boy, who catches it easily even in his distress. Good reflexes. When you're nineteen, all your wiring is still nice and tight, all your connections nice and solid.

  Wait a few years, Mr. Defuniak, he thinks. I'm only thirty-seven and already some of my wires are getting loose.

  "Maybe you deserve another chance," Jonesy says.

  Slowly and deliberately, he begins to crumple Defuniak's mid-term, which is suspiciously perfect, A-plus work, into a ball.

  "Maybe what happened is you were sick the day of the mid-term, and you never took it at all."

  "I was sick," David Defuniak says eagerly. "I think I had the flu."

  "Then maybe I ought to give you a take-home essay instead of the multiple-choice test to which your colleagues have been subjected. If you want it. To make up for the test you missed. Would you want that?"

  "Yeah," the kid says, wiping his eyes madly with a large swatch of tissues. At least he hasn't gone through all that small-time cheapshit stuff about how Jonesy can't prove it, can't prove a thing, he'd take it to the Student Affairs Council, he'd call a protest, blah-blah-blah-de-blah. He's crying instead, which is uncomfortable to witness but probably a good sign--nineteen is young, but too many of them have lost most of their consciences by the time they get there. Defuniak has pretty much owned up, which suggests there might still be a man in there, waiting to come out. "Yeah, that'd be great."

  "And you understand that if anything like this ever happens again--"

  "It won't," the kid says fervently. "It won't, Professor Jones."

  Although Jonesy is only an associate professor, he doesn't bother to correct him. Someday, after all, he will be Professor Jones. He better be; he and his wife have a houseful of kids, and if there aren't at least a few salary-bumps in his future, life is apt to be a pretty tough scramble. They've had some tough scrambles already.

  "I hope not," he says. "Give me three thousand words on the short-term results of the Norman Conquest, David, all right? Cite sources but no need of footnotes. Keep it informal, but present a cogent thesis. I want it by next Monday. Understood?"

  "Yes. Yes, sir."

  "Then why don't you go on and get started." He points at Defuniak's tatty footwear. "And the next time you think of buying beer, buy some new sneakers instead. I wouldn't want you to catch the flu again."

  Defuniak goes to the door, then turns. He is anxious to be gone before Mr. Jones changes his mind, but he is also nineteen. And curious. "How did you know? You weren't even there that day. Some grad student proctored the test."

  "I knew, and that's enough," Jonesy says with some asperity. "Go on, son. Write a good paper. Hold onto your scholarship. I'm from Maine myself--Derry--and I know Pittsfield. It's a better place to be from than to go back to."

  "You got that right," Defuniak says fervently. "Thank you. Thank you for giving me another chance."

  "Close the door on your way out."

  Defuniak--who will spend his sneaker-money not on beer but on a get-well bouquet for Jonesy--goes out, obediently closing the door behind him. Jonesy swings around and looks out the window again. The sunshine is untrustworthy but enticing. And because the Defuniak thing went better than he had expected, he thinks he wants to get out in that sunlight before more March clouds--and maybe snow--come rolling in. He has planned to eat in his office, but a new plan occurs to him. It is absolutely the worst plan of his life, but of course Jonesy doesn't know that. The plan is to grab his briefcase, pick up a copy of the Boston Phoenix, and walk across the river to Cambridge. He'll sit on a bench and eat his egg salad sandwich in the sun.

  He gets up to put Defuniak's file in the cabinet marked D-F. How did you know? the boy had asked, and Jonesy supposes that was a good question. An excellent question, really. The answer is this: he knew because . . . sometimes he does. That's the truth, and there's no other. If someone put a gun to his head, he'd say he found out during the first class after the mid-term, that it was right there in the front of David Defuniak's mind, big
and bright, flashing on and off in guilty red neon: CHEATER CHEATER CHEATER.

  But man, that's dope--he can't read minds. He never could. Never-ever, never-ever, never-ever could. Sometimes things flash into his head, yes--he knew about his wife's problems with pills that way, and he supposes he might have known in that same way that Henry was depressed when he called (No, it was in his voice, doofus, that's all it was), but stuff like that hardly ever happens anymore. There has been nothing really odd since the business with Josie Rinkenhauer. Maybe there was something once, and maybe it trailed them out of their childhood and adolescence, but surely it is gone now. Or almost gone.

  Almost.

  He circles the words going to Derry on his desk calendar, then grabs his briefcase. As he does, a new thought comes to him, sudden and meaningless but very powerful: Watch out for Mr. Gray.

  He stops with one hand on his doorknob. That was his own voice, no doubt about it.

  "What?" he asks the empty room.

  Nothing.

  Jonesy steps out of his office, closes the door, and tests the lock. In the corner of his door's bulletin board is a blank white card. Jonesy unpins it and turns it over. On the flip side is the printed message BACK AT ONE--UNTIL THEN I'M HISTORY. He pins the message side to the bulletin board with perfect confidence, but it will be almost two months before Jonesy enters this room again and sees his desk calendar still turned to St. Patrick's Day.

  Take care of yourself, Henry said, but Jonesy isn't thinking about taking care of himself. He is thinking about March sunlight. He's thinking about eating his sandwich. He's thinking he might watch a few girls over on the Cambridge side--skirts are short, and March winds are frisky. He's thinking about all sorts of things, but watching out for Mr. Gray isn't one of them. Neither is taking care of himself.

  This is a mistake. This is also how lives change forever.

  PART 1

  CANCER

  This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

  What falls away is always. And is near.

  I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

  I learn by going where I have to go.

  THEODORE ROETHKE

  CHAPTER ONE

  MCCARTHY

  1

  Jonesy almost shot the guy when he came out of the woods. How close? Another pound on the Garand's trigger, maybe just a half. Later, hyped on the clarity that sometimes comes to the horrified mind, he wished he had shot before he saw the orange cap and the orange flagman's vest. Killing Richard McCarthy couldn't have hurt, and it might have helped. Killing McCarthy might have saved them all.

  2

  Pete and Henry had gone to Gosselin's Market, the closest store, to stock up on bread, canned goods, and beer--the real essential. They had plenty for another two days, but the radio said there might be snow coming. Henry had already gotten his deer, a good-sized doe, and Jonesy had an idea Pete cared a lot more about making sure of the beer supply than he did about getting his own deer--for Pete Moore, hunting was a hobby, beer a religion. The Beaver was out there someplace, but Jonesy hadn't heard the crack of a rifle any closer than five miles, so he guessed that the Beav, like him, was still waiting.

  There was a stand in an old maple about seventy yards from the camp and that was where Jonesy was, sipping coffee and reading a Robert Parker mystery novel, when he heard something coming and put the book and the Thermos aside. In other years he might have spilled the coffee in his excitement, but not this time. This time he even took a few seconds to screw on the Thermos's bright red stopper.

  The four of them had been coming up here to hunt in the first week of November for almost twenty-five years, if you counted in the times Beav's Dad had taken them, and Jonesy had never bothered with the tree-stand until now. None of them had; it was too confining. This year Jonesy had staked it out. The others thought they knew why, but they only knew half of it.

  In mid-March of 2001, Jonesy had been struck by a car while crossing a street in Cambridge, not far from John Jay College, where he taught. He had fractured his skull, broken two ribs, and suffered a shattered hip, which had been replaced with some exotic combination of Teflon and metal. The man who'd struck him was a retired BU history professor who was--according to his lawyer, anyway--in the early stages of Alzheimer's, more to be pitied than punished. So often, Jonesy thought, there was no one to blame when the dust cleared. And even if there was, what good did it do? You still had to live with what was left, and console yourself with the fact that, as people told him every day (until they forgot the whole thing, that was), it could have been worse.

  And it could have been. His head was hard, and the crack in it healed. He had no memory of the hour or so leading up to his accident near Harvard Square, but the rest of his mental equipment was fine. His ribs healed in a month. The hip was the worst, but he was off the crutches by October, and now his limp only became appreciable toward the end of the day.

  Pete, Henry, and the Beav thought it was the hip and only the hip that had caused him to opt for the tree-stand instead of the damp, cold woods, and the hip was certainly a factor--just not the only one. What he had kept from them was that he now had little interest in shooting deer. It would have dismayed them. Hell, it dismayed Jonesy himself. But there it was, something new in his existence that he hadn't even suspected until they had actually gotten up here on November eleventh and he had uncased the Garand. He wasn't revolted by the idea of hunting, not at all--he just had no real urge to do it. Death had brushed by him on a sunny day in March, and Jonesy had no desire to call it back, even if he was dealing rather than receiving.

  3

  What surprised him was that he still liked being at camp--in some ways, better than ever. Talking at night--books, politics, the shit they'd gotten up to as kids, their plans for the future. They were in their thirties, still young enough to have plans, plenty of them, and the old bond was still strong.

  And the days were good, too--the hours in the tree-stand, when he was alone. He took a sleeping-bag and skid into it up to his hips when he got cold, and a book, and a Walkman. After the first day, he stopped listening to the Walkman, discovering that he liked the music of the woods better--the silk of the wind in the pines, the rust of the crows. He would read a little, drink coffee, read a little more, sometimes work his way out of the sleeping-bag (it was as red as a stoplight) and piss off the edge of the platform. He was a man with a big family and a large circle of colleagues. A gregarious man who enjoyed all the various relationships the family and the colleagues entailed (and the students, of course, the endless stream of students) and balanced them well. It was only out here, up here, that he realized the attractions of silence were still real, still strong. It was like meeting an old friend after a long absence.

  "You sure you want to be up there, man?" Henry had asked him yesterday morning. "I mean, you're welcome to come out with me. We won't overuse that leg of yours, I promise."

  "Leave him alone," Pete said. "He likes it up there. Don't you, Jones-boy?"

  "Sort of," he said, unwilling to say much more--how much he actually did like it, for instance. Some things you didn't feel safe telling even your closest friends. And sometimes your closest friends knew, anyway.

  "Tell you something," the Beav said. He picked up a pencil and began to gnaw lightly at it--his oldest, dearest trick, going all the way back to first grade. "I like coming back and seeing you there--like a lookout in the crow's nest in one of those fuckin Horn-blower books. Keepin an eye out, you know."

  "Sail, ho," Jonesy had said, and they all laughed, but Jonesy knew what the Beav meant. He felt it. Keeping an eye out. Just thinking his thoughts and keeping an eye out for ships or sharks or who knew what. His hip hurt coming back down, the pack with his shit in it was heavy on his back, and he felt slow and clumsy on the wooden rungs nailed to the trunk of the maple, but that was okay. Good, in fact. Things changed, but only a fool believed they only changed for the worse.

  That was what he thought then. r />
  4

  When he heard the whicker of moving brush and the soft snap of a twig--sounds he never questioned were those of an approaching deer--Jonesy thought of something his father said: You can't make yourself be lucky. Lindsay Jones was one of life's losers and had said few things worth committing to memory, but that was one, and here was the proof of it again: days after deciding he had finished with deer hunting, here came one, and a big one by the sound--a buck, almost surely, maybe one as big as a man.

  That it was a man never so much as crossed Jonesy's mind. This was an unincorporated township fifty miles north of Rangely, and the nearest hunters were two hours' walk away. The nearest paved road, the one which eventually took you to Gosselin's Market (BEER BAIT OUT OF STATE LICS LOTTERY TIX), was at least sixteen miles away.

  Well, he thought, it isn't as if I took a vow, or anything.

  No, he hadn't taken a vow. Next November he might be up here with a Nikon instead of a Garand, but it wasn't next year yet, and the rifle was at hand. He had no intention of looking a gift deer in the mouth.

  Jonesy screwed the red stopper into the Thermos of coffee and put it aside. Then he pushed the sleeping-bag off his lower body like a big quilted sock (wincing at the stiffness in his hip as he did it) and grabbed his gun. There was no need to chamber a round, producing that loud, deer-frightening click; old habits died hard, and the gun was ready to fire as soon as he thumbed off the safety. This he did when he was solidly on his feet. The old wild excitement was gone, but there was a residue--his pulse was up and he welcomed the rise. In the wake of his accident, he welcomed all such reactions--it was as if there were two of him now, the one before he had been knocked flat in the street and the warier, older fellow who had awakened in Mass General . . . if you could call that slow, drugged awareness being awake. Sometimes he still heard a voice--whose he didn't know, but not his--calling out Please stop, I can't stand it, give me a shot, where's Marcy, I want Marcy. He thought of it as death's voice--death had missed him in the street and had then come to the hospital to finish the job, death masquerading as a man (or perhaps it had been a woman, it was hard to tell) in pain, someone who said Marcy but meant Jonesy.