ENRY'S SCOUT

1

Now, as he followed the Scout's headlights through the thickening snow, burrowing as if through a tunnel along the Deep Cut Road toward Hole in the Wall, Henry was down to thinking about ways to do it.

There was the Hemingway Solution, of course - way back at Harvard, as an undergraduate, he had written a paper calling it that, so he might have been thinking about it - in a personal way, not just as another step toward fulfilling some twinky course requirement, that was - even then. The Hemingway Solution was a shotgun, and Henry had one of those now . . . not that he would do it here, with the others. The four of them had had a lot of fine times at Hole in the Wall, and it would be unfair to do it there. It would pollute the place for Pete and Jonesy - for Beaver too, maybe Beaver most of all, and that wouldn't be right. But it would be soon, he could feel it coming on, something like a sneeze. Funny to compare the ending of your life to a sneeze, but that was probably what it came to. Just kerchoo, and then hello darkness, my old friend.

When implementing the Hemingway Solution, you took off your shoe and your sock. Butt of the gun went on the floor. Barrel went into your mouth. Great toe went around the trigger. Memo to myself, Henry thought as the Scout fishtailed a little in the fresh snow and he corrected - the ruts helped, that was really all this road was, a couple of ruts dug by the skidders that used it in the summertime. If you do it that way, take a laxative and don't do it until after that final dump, no need to make any extra mess for the people who find you.

'Maybe you better slow down a little,' Pete said. He had a beer between his legs and it was half gone, but one wouldn't be enough to mellow Pete out. Three or four more, though, and Henry could go barrel-assing down this road at sixty and Pete would just sit there in the passenger seat, singing along with one of those horrible fucking Pink Floyd discs. And he could go sixty, probably, without putting so much as another ding in the front bumper. Being in the ruts of the Deep Cut, even when they were filled with snow, was like being on rails. If it kept snowing that might change, but for now, all was well.

'Don't worry, Pete - everything's five-by-five.'

'You want a beer?'

'Not while I'm driving.'

'Not even out here in West Overshoe?'

'Later.'

Pete subsided, leaving Henry to follow the bore of the head?lights, to thread his way along this white lane between the trees. Leaving him with his thoughts, which was where he wanted to be. It was like returning to a bloody place inside your mouth, exploring it again and again with the tip of your tongue, but it was where he wanted to be.

There were pills. There was the old Baggie-over-the-head-in-?the-bathtub-trick. There was drowning. There was jumping from a high place. The handgun in the ear was too unsure - too much chance of waking up paralyzed - and so was slitting the wrists, that was for people who were only practicing, but the Japanese had a way of doing it that interested Henry very much. Tie a rope around your neck. Tie the other end to a large rock. Put the rock on the seat of a chair, then sit down with your back braced so you can't fall backward but have to keep sitting. Tip the chair over and the rock rolls off. Subject may live for three to five minutes in a deepening dream of asphyxiation. Gray fades to black; hello darkness, my old friend. He had read about that method in one of Jonesy's beloved Kinsey Milhone detective novels, of all places. Detective novels and horror movies: those were the things that floated Jonesy's boat.

On the whole, Henry leaned toward the Hemingway Solution.

Pete finished his first beer and popped the top on his sec?ond, looking considerably more content. 'What'd you make of it?' Pete asked.

Henry felt called to from that other universe, the one where the living actually wanted to live. As always these days, that made him feel impatient. But it was important that none of them suspect, and he had an idea Jonesy already did, a little. Beaver might, too. They were the ones who could sometimes see inside. Pete didn't have a clue, but he might say the wrong thing to one of the others, about how preoccupied ole Henry had gotten, like there was something on his mind, something heavy, and Henry didn't want that. This was going to be the last trip to Hole in the Wall for the four of them, the old Kansas Street gang, the Crimson Pirates of the third and fourth grades, and he wanted it to be a good one. He wanted them to be shocked when they heard, even Jonesy, who saw into him the most often and always had. He wanted them to say they'd had no idea. Better that than the three of them sitting around with their heads hung, not able to make eye contact with one another except in fleeting glances, thinking that they should have known, they had seen the signs and should have done something. So he came back to that other universe, simulating interest smoothly and convincingly. Who could do that better than a headshrinker?

'What did I make of what?'

Pete rolled his eyes. 'At Gosselin's, dimbulb! All that stuff Old Man Gosselin was talking about.'

'Peter, they don't call him Old Man Gosselin for nothing. He's eighty if he's a day, and if there's one thing old women and old men are not short on, it's hysteria.' The Scout - no spring chicken itself, fourteen years old and far into its second trip around the odometer ?popped out of the ruts and immediately skidded, four-wheel drive or not. Henry steered into the skid, almost laughing when Pete dropped his beer onto the floor and yelled, 'Whoa - fuck, watch out!'

Henry let off on the gas until he felt the Scout start to straighten out, then zapped the go-pedal again, deliberately too fast and too hard. The Scout went into another skid, this time widdershins to the first, and Pete yelled again. Henry let up once more and the Scout thumped back into the ruts and once again ran smoothly, as if on rails. One positive to deciding to end your life, it seemed, was no longer sweating the small stuff. The lights cut through the white and shifting day, full of a billion dancing snowflakes, not one of them the same, if you believed the conventional wisdom.

Pete picked up his beer (only a little had spilled), and patted his chest. 'Aren't you going a little fast?'

'Not even close,' Henry said, and then, as if the skid had never occurred (it had) or interrupted his train of thought (it hadn't), he went on, 'Group hysteria is most common in the very old and the very young. It's a well-documented phenomenon in both my field and that of the sociology heathens who live next door.'

Henry glanced down and saw he was doing thirty-five, which was, in fact, a little fast for these conditions. He slowed down. 'Better?'

Pete nodded. 'Don't get me wrong, you're a great driver, but man, it's snowing. Also, we got the supplies.' He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at the two bags and two boxes in the back seat. 'In addition to hot dogs, we got the last three boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Beaver can't live without that stuff, you know.'

'I know,' Henry said. 'I like it, too. Remember those stories about devil-worship in Washington State, the ones that made the press in the mid-nineties? They were traced back to several old people living with their children - grandchildren, in one case - in two small towns south of Seattle. The mass reports of sexual abuse in daycare centers apparently began with teenage girls working as part-time aides crying wolf at the same time in Delaware and California. Possibly coincidence, or possibly the time was simply ripe for such stories to gain credence and these girls caught a wave out of the air.'

How smoothly the words rolled out of his mouth, almost as if they mattered. Henry talked, the man beside him listened with dumb admiration, and no one (certainly not Pete) could have surmised that he was thinking of the shotgun, the rope, the exhaust pipe, the pills. His head was full of tape-loops, that was all. And his tongue was the cassette player.

'In Salem,' Henry went on, 'the old men and the young girls combined their hysteria, and voil��, you have the Salem Witch Trials.'

'I saw that movie with Jonesy,' Pete said. 'Vincent Price was in it. Scared the shit out of me.'

'I'm sure,' Henry said, and laughed. For one wild moment he'd thought Pete was talking about The Crucible. 'And when are hysterical ideas most likely to gain credence? Once the crops are in and the bad weather closes down, of course - then there's time for telling stories and making mischief In Wenatchee, Washington, it's devil-worship and child sacrifices in the woods. In Salem it was witches. And in the Jefferson Tract, home of the one and only Gosselin's Market, it's strange lights in the sky, missing hunters, and troop maneuvers. Not to mention weird red stuff growing on the trees.'

'I don't know about the helicopters and the soldiers, but enough people have seen those lights so they're having a special town meeting. Old Man Gosselin told me so while you were getting the canned stuff. Also, those folks over Kineo way are really missing. That ain't hysteria.'

'Four quick points,' Henry said. 'First, you can't have a town meeting in the Jefferson Tract because there's no town - even Kineo's just an unincorporated township with a name. Second, the meeting will be held around Old Man Gosselin's Franklin stove and half those attending will be shot on peppermint schnapps or coffee brandy.'

Pete snickered.

'Third, what else have they got to do? And fourth - this concerns the hunters - they probably either got tired of it and went home, or they all got drunk and decided to get rich at the rez casino up in Carrabassett.'

'You think, huh?' Pete looked crestfallen, and Henry felt a great wave of affection for him. He reached over and patted Pete's knee.

'Never fear,' he said. 'The world is full of strange things.' If the world had really been full of strange things, Henry doubted he would have been so eager to leave it, but if there was one thing a psychiatrist knew how to do (other than write prescriptions for Prozac and Paxil and Amblen, that was), it was tell lies.

'Four hunters all disappearing at the same time seems pretty strange to me, all right.'

'Not a bit,' Henry said, and laughed. 'One would be odd. Two would be strange. Four? They went off together, depend on it.'

'How far are we from Hole in the Wall, Henry?' Which, when translated, meant Do I have time for another beer?

Henry had zeroed the Scout's tripmeter at Gosselin's, an old habit that went back to his days working for the State of Massachusetts, where the deal had been twelve cents a mile and all the psychotic geriatrics you could write up. The mileage between the store and the Hole was easy enough to remember: 22.2. The odometer currently read 12.7, which meant -

'Look out!' Pete shouted, and Henry snapped his gaze hack to the windshield.

The Scout had just topped the steep rise of a tree-covered ridge. The snow here was thicker than ever, but Henry was running with the high beams on and clearly saw the person sitting in the road about a hundred feet ahead - a person wearing a duffel coat, an orange vest that blew backward like Superman's cape in the strengthening wind, and one of those Russian fur hats. Orange ribbons had been attached to the hat and they also blew back in the wind, reminding Henry of the streamers you sometimes saw strung over used-car lots. The guy was sitting in the middle of the road like an Indian that wants to smoke-um peace pipe, and he did not move when the headlights struck him. For one moment Henry saw the sitting figure's eyes, wide open but still, so still and bright and blank, and he thought: That's how my eyes would look if I didn't guard them so closely.

There was no time to stop, not with the snow. Henry twisted the wheel to the right and felt the thump as the Scout came out of the ruts again. He caught another glimpse of the white, still face and had time to think, Why, goddam! It's a woman.

Once out of the ruts the Scout began to skid again at once. This time Henry turned against it, deliberately snowplowing the wheels to deepen the skid, knowing without even thinking about it (there was no time to think) that it was the road-sitter's only chance. And he didn't rate it much of one, at that.

Pete screamed, and from thy corner of his eye, Henry saw him raise his hands in front of his face, palms out in a warding-off gesture. The Scout tried to go broadside and now Henry spun the wheel back, trying to control the skid just enough so that the rear end wouldn't smash the road-sitter's face backward into her skull. The wheel spun with greasy, giddy ease under his gloved hands. For perhaps three seconds the Scout shot down the snow-covered Deep Cut Road at a forty-five-degree angle, a thing belonging partly to Henry Devlin and partly to the storm. Snow flew up and around it in a fine spray; the headlights painted the snow-slumped pines on the left side of the road in a pair of moving spots. Three seconds, not long, but just long enough. He saw the figure pass by as if she were moving instead of them, except she never moved, not even when the rusty edge of the Scout's bumper flirted past her with perhaps no more than an inch of snowy air between it and her face.

Missed you! Henry exulted. Missed you, you bitch! Then the last thin thread of control broke and the Scout broached broadside. There was a 'udden'ng vibration as the wheels found the ruts again, only crosswise this time. It was still trying to turn all the way around, swapping ends - Frontsies-backsies! they used to cry when in line back in grammar school - and then it hit a buried rock or perhaps a small fallen tree with a terrific thud and rolled over, first on the passenger side, the windows over there disintegrating into glittering crumbs, then over onto the roof One side of Henry's seatbelt broke, spilling him onto the roof on his left shoulder. His balls thumped against the steering column, producing instant leaden pain. The turnsignal stalk broke off against his thigh and he felt blood begin to run at once, soaking his jeans. The claret, as the old boxing radio announcers used to call it, as in Look out, folks, the claret has begun to flow. Pete was yelling or screaming or both.

For several seconds the overturned Scout's engine continued to run, then gravity did its work and the motor died, Now it was just an overturned hulk in the road, wheels still spinning, lights shining at the snow-loaded trees on the left side of the road. One of them went out, but the other continued to shine.

2

Henry had talked with Jonesy a lot about his accident (listened, really; therapy was creative listening), and he knew that Jonesy had no memory of the actual collision. As far as Henry could tell, he himself never lost consciousness following the Scout's flip, and the chain of recollection remained intact. He remembered fumbling for the seatbelt clasp, wanting to be all the way free of the fucking thing, while Pete bellowed that his leg was broken, his cocksucking leg was broken. He remembered the steady whick-thump, whick-thump of the windshield wipers and the glow of the dashlights, which were now up instead of down. He found the seatbelt clasp, lost it, found it again, and pushed it. The seatbelt's lap-strap released him and he thumped awkwardly against the roof, shattering the domelight's plastic cover.

He flailed with his hand, found the doorhandle, couldn't move it.

'My leg! Oh man, my fucking leg!'

'Shut up about it,' Henry said. 'Your leg's okay.' As if he knew. He found the doorhandle again, yanked, and there was nothing. Then he realized why - he was upside down and yanking the wrong way. He reversed his grip and the domelight's uncovered bulb glared hotly in his eye as the door clicked open. He shoved the door with the back of his hand, sure there would be no real result; the frame was probably bent and he'd be lucky to get six inches.

But the door grated and suddenly he could feel snow swirling coldly around his face and neck. He pushed harder on the door, getting his shoulder into it, and it wasn't until his legs came free of the steering column that he realized they had been hung up. He did half a somersault and was suddenly regarding his own denim-covered crotch at close range, as if he had decided to try and kiss his throbbing balls, make them all well. His diaphragm folded in on itself and it was hard to breathe.

'Henry, help me! I'm caught! I'm fuckin caught!'

'Just a minute.' His voice sounded squeezed and high, hardly his own voice at all. Now he could see the upper left leg of his jeans darkening with blood. The wind in the pines sounded like God's own Electrolux.

He grabbed the doorpost, grateful he'd left his gloves on while he was driving, and gave a tremendous yank - he had to get out, had to unfold his diaphragm so he could breathe.

For a moment nothing happened, and then Henry popped out like a cork out of a bottle. He lay where he was for a moment, panting and looking up into a sifting, falling net of snow. There was nothing odd about the sky then; he would have sworn to it in court on a stack of Bibles. Just the low gray bellies of the clouds and the psychedelic downrush of the snow.

Pete was calling his name again and again, with increasing panic.

Henry rolled over, got to his knees, and when that went all right he lurched to his feet. He only stood for a moment, swaying in the wind and waiting to see if his bleeding left leg would buckle and spill him into the snow again. It didn't, and he limped around the back of the overturned Scout to see what he could do about Pete. He spared one glance at the woman who had caused all this fuckarow. She sat as she had, cross-legged in the middle of the road, her thighs and the front of her parka frosted with snow. Her vest snapped and billowed. So did the ribbons attached to her cap. She had not turned to look at them but stared back in the direction of Gosselin's Market just as she had when they came over the rise and saw her. One swooping, curving tire-track in the snow came within a foot of her cocked left leg, and he had no idea, absolutely none at all, how he could have missed her.

'Henry! Henry, help me!'

He hurried on, slipping in the new snow as he rounded the passenger side. Pete's door was stuck, but when Henry got on his knees and yanked with both hands, it came open about halfway. He reached in, grabbed Pete's shoulder, and yanked. Nothing.

'Unbuckle your belt, Pete.'

Pete fumbled but couldn't seem to find it even though it was right in front of him. Working carefully, with not the slightest feeling of impatience (he supposed he might be in shock), Henry unclipped the belt and Pete thumped to the roof, his head bending sideways. He screamed in mingled surprise and pain and then came floundering and yanking his way out of the half-open door. Henry grabbed him under his arms and pulled backward. They both went over in the snow and Henry was afflicted with d��j�� vu so strong and so sudden it was like swooning. Hadn't they played just this way as kids? Of course they had. The day they'd taught Duddits how to make snow angels, for one. Someone began to laugh, startling him badly. Then he realized it was him.

Pete sat up, wild-eyed and glowering, the back of him covered with snow. 'The fuck are you laughing about? That asshole almost got us killed! I'm gonna strangle the son of a bitch!'

'Not her son but the bitch herself,' Henry said. He was laughing harder than ever and thought it quite likely that Pete didn't understand what he was saying - especially with the wind thrown in - but he didn't care. Seldom had he felt so delicious.

Pete flailed to his feet much as Henry had done himself, and Henry was just about to say something wise, something about how Pete was moving pretty well for a guy with a broken leg, when Pete went back down with a cry of pain. Henry went to him and felt Pete's leg, thrust out in front of him. It seemed intact, but who could tell through two layers of clothing?

'It ain't broke after all,' Pete said, but he was panting with pain. 'Fucker's locked up is all, just like when I was playin football. Where is she? You sure it's a woman?'

'Yes.'

Pete got up and hobbled around the front of the car holding his knee. The remaining headlight still shone bravely into the snow. 'She better be crippled or blind, that's all I can say,' he told Henry. 'If she's not, I'm gonna kick her ass all the way back to Gosselin's.' Henry began to laugh again. It was the mental picture of Pete hopping . . . then kicking. Like some fucked-up Rockette. 'Peter, don't you really hurt her!' he shouted, suspecting any severity he might have managed was negated by the fact that he was speaking between gusts of maniacal laughter.

'I won't unless she puts some sass on me,' Pete said. The words, carried back to Henry on the wind, had an offended-old-lady quality to them that made him laugh harder than ever. He scooted down his jeans and long underwear and stood there in his jockeys to see how badly the turnsignal stalk had wounded him.

It was a shallow gash about three inches long on the inside of his thigh. It had bled copiously - was still oozing - but Henry didn't think it was deep.

'What in the hell did you think you were doing?' Pete scolded from the other side of the overturned Scout, whose wipers were still whick-thumping back and forth. And although Pete's tirade was laced with profanity (much of it decidedly Beaverish), his friend still sounded to Henry like an offended old lady schoolteacher, and this got him laughing again as he hauled up his britches.

'Why you sittin out here in the middle of the motherfuckin road in the middle of a motherfuckin snowstorm? You drunk? High on drugs? What kind of dumb doodlyfuck are you? Hey, talk to me! You almost got me n my buddy killed, the least you can do is . . . oww, FUCK-ME-FREDDY!'

Henry came around the wreck just in time to see Pete fall over beside Ms Buddha. His leg must have locked up again. She never looked at him. The orange ribbons on her hat blew out behind her.

Her face was raised into the storm, wide eyes not blinking as the snowflakes whirled into them to melt on their warm living lenses, and Henry felt, in spite of everything, his professional curiosity aroused. Just what had they found here?

3

'Oww, fuck me sideways, shit-a-goddam, don't that fuckin HURT!'

'Are you all right?' Henry asked, and that started him laughing again. What a foolish question.

'Do I sound all right, shrink-boy?' Pete asked waspishly, but when Henry bent toward him, he raised one hand and waved him away. 'Nah, I got it, it's lettin go, check Princess Dipshit. She just sits there.'

Henry dropped to his knees in front of the woman, wincing at the pain - his legs, yes, but his shoulder also hurt where he had banged it on the roof and his neck was stiffening rapidly - but still chuckling.

This was no dewy damsel in distress. She was forty at least, and heavyset. Although her parka was thick and she was wearing God knew how many layers beneath it, it swelled noticeably in front, indicating the sort of prodigious jugs for which breast-reduction surgery had been made. The hair whipping out from beneath and around the flaps of her cap was cut in no particular style. Like them, she was wearing jeans, but one of her thighs would have made two of Henry's. The first word to occur to him was countrywoman - the kind of woman you saw hanging out her wash in the toy-littered yard beside her doublewide trailer while Garth or Shania blared from a radio stuck in an open window . . . or maybe buying a few groceries at Gosselin's. The orange gear suggested that she might have been hunting, but if so, where was her rifle? Already covered in snow? Her wide eyes were dark blue and utterly blank. Henry looked for her tracks and saw none. The wind had erased them, no doubt, but it was still eerie; she might have dropped from the sky.

Henry pulled his glove off and snapped his fingers in front of those staring eyes. They blinked. It wasn't much, but more than he had expected, given the fact that a multi-ton vehicle had just missed her by inches and never a twitch from her.

'Hey!' he shouted in her face. 'Hey, come back! Come back!' He snapped his fingers again and could hardly feel them - when had it turned so cold? We're in a goddam situation here, he thought.

The woman burped. The sound was startlingly loud even with the wind in the trees, and before it was snatched away by the moving air, he got a whiff of something both bitter and pungent ?it smelled like medicinal alcohol. The woman shifted and grimaced, then broke wind - a long, purring fart that sounded like ripping cloth. Maybe, Henry thought, it's how the locals say hello. The idea got him laughing again.

'Holy shit,' Pete said, almost in his ear. 'Sounds like she nipped out the seat of her pants with that one. What you been drinkin, lady, Prestone?' And then, to Henry: 'She's been drinkin somethin, by Christ, and if it ain't antifreeze, I'm a monkey.'

Henry could smell it, too.

The woman's eyes suddenly shifted, met Henry's own. He was shocked by the pain he saw in them. 'Where's Rick?' she asked. 'I have to find Rick - he's the only one left.' She grimaced, and when her lips peeled back, Henry saw that half her teeth were gone. Those remaining looked like stakes in a dilapidated fence. She belched again, and the smell was strong enough to make his eyes water.

'Aw, holy Christ!' Pete nearly screamed. 'What's wrong with her?'

'I don't know,' Henry said. The only things he knew for sure were that the woman's eyes had gone blank again and that they were in a goddam situation here. Had he been alone, he might have considered sitting down next to the woman and putting his arm around her - a much more interesting and unique answer to the final problem than the Hemingway Solution. But there was Pete to think about - Pete hadn't even been through his first alcohol rehab yet, although that was undoubtedly in the cards.

And besides, he was curious.

4

Pete was sitting in the snow, working at his knee again with his hands, looking at Henry, waiting for him to do something, which was fair enough, since so often he had been the idea man of their quartet. They hadn't had a leader, but Henry had been the closest thing to it. Even back in junior high school that had been true. The woman, meanwhile, was looking at no one, just staring off into the snow again.

Settle, Henry thought. Just take a deep breath and settle.

He took the breath, held it, and let it out. Better. A little better. All right, what was up with this lady? Never mind where she'd come from, what she was doing here, or why she smelled like diluted antifreeze when she burped. What was up with her right now?

Shock, obviously. Shock so deep it was like a form of catatonia - witness how she had not so much as stirred when the Scout went skidding by her at shaving distance. And yet she hadn't retreated so far inside that only a hypo of something excitable could reach her; she had responded to the snap of his fingers, and she had spoken. Had inquired about someone named Rick.

'Henry - '

'Quiet a minute.'

He took off his gloves again, held his hands in front of her face, and clapped them smartly. He thought the sound very small compared to the steady whoosh of the wind in the trees, but she blinked again.

'On your feet!'

Henry took her gloved hands and was encouraged when they closed reflexively around his. He leaned forward, getting into her face, smelling that ethery odor. No one who smelled like that could be very well.

'On your feet, get up! With me! On three! One, two, three!'

He stood, holding her hands. She rose, her knees popping, and burped again. She broke wind again as well. Her hat went askew, dipping over one eye. When she made no move to straighten it, Henry said. 'Fix her hat.'

'Hub?' Pete had also gotten up, although he didn't look very steady.

'I don't want to let go of her. Fix her hat, get it out of her eye.'

Gingerly, Pete reached out and straightened her hat. The woman bent slightly, grimaced, farted.

'Thank you very much,' Pete said sourly. 'You've been a wonderful audience, good night.'

Henry could feel her sagging and tightened his grip.

'Walk!' he shouted, getting into her face again. 'Walk with me!

On three! One, two, three!'

He began walking backwards, toward the front of the Scout. She was looking at him now and he held her gaze. Without glancing at Pete - he didn't want to risk losing her - he said, 'Take my belt. Lead me.'

'Where?'

'Around the other side of the Scout.'

'I'm not sure I can - '

'You have to, Pete, now do it.'

For a moment there was nothing, and then he felt Pete's hand slip under his coat, fumble, and catch hold of his belt. They shuffled across the narrow string of road in an awkward conga-line, through the staring yellow spotlight of the Scout's remaining headlamp. On the far side of the overturned vehicle they were at least partly sheltered from the wind, and that was good.

The woman abruptly pulled her hands out of Henry's and leaned forward, mouth opening. Henry stepped back, not wanting to be splattered when she let go . . . but instead of vomiting she belched, the loudest one yet. Then, while still bent over, she broke wind again. The sound was like nothing Henry had ever heard before, and he would have sworn he'd heard everything on the wards in western Massachusetts. She kept her feet, though, breathing through her nose in big horselike snuffles of air.

'Henry,' Pete said. His voice was hoarse with terror, awe, or both. 'My God, look.'

He was staring up at the sky, jaw loose and mouth gaping. Henry followed his gaze and could hardly believe what he was seeing. Bright circles of light, nine or ten of them, cruised slowly across the low-hanging clouds. Henry had to squint to look at them. He thought briefly of spotlights stabbing the night sky at Hollywood film premieres, but of course there were no such lights out here in the woods, and if there had been he would have seen the beams themselves, rising in the snowy air. Whatever was projecting those lights was above or in the clouds, not below them. They ran back and forth, seemingly at random, and Henry felt a sudden atavistic terror invade him . . . except it actually seemed to rise up from inside, somewhere deep inside. All at once his spinal cord felt like a column of ice.

'What is it?' Pete asked, nearly whining. 'Christ, Henry, what is it?'

'I don't - '

The woman looked up, saw the dancing lights, and began to shriek. They were amazingly loud, those shrieks, and so full of terror they made Henry feel like shrieking himself

'They're back!' she screamed. 'They're back! They're back!'

Then she covered her eyes and put her head against the front tire of the overturned Scout. She quit screaming and only moaned, like something caught in a trap with no hope of getting free.

5

For some unknown length of time (probably no more than five minutes, although it felt longer) they watched those brilliant lights run across the sky - circling, skidding, hanging lefts and rights, appearing to leapfrog each other. At some point Henry became aware there were only five instead of nearly a dozen, and then there were only three. Beside him the woman with her face against the tire fatted again, and Henry realized they were standing out here in the middle of nowhere, gawping at some sort of storm-related celestial phenomenon which, while interesting, would contribute absolutely nothing toward getting them into a place that was dry and warm. He could remember the final reading on the tripmeter with perfect clarity: 12.7. They were nearly ten miles from Hole in the Wall, a good hike under the best of circumstances, and here they were in a storm only two steps below a blizzard. Plus, he thought, I'm the only one who can walk.

'Pete.'

'It's somethin, isn't it?' Pete breathed. 'They're fucking UFOS, just like on The X-Files. What d'you suppose - '

'Pete.' He took Pete's chin in his hand and turned his face away from the sky, to his own. Overhead, the last two lights were paling.

'It's some sort of electrical phenomenon, that's all.'

'You think?' Pete looked absurdly disappointed.

'Yeah - something related to the storm. But even if it's the first wave of the Butterfly Aliens from Planet Alnitak, it isn't going to make any difference to us if we turn into Popsicles out here. Now I need you to help me. I need you to do that trick of yours. Can you?'

'I don't know,' Pete said, venturing one final look at the sky. There was only one light now, and so dim you wouldn't have known it was there if you hadn't been looking for it. 'Ma'am? Ma'am, they're almost gone. Mellow out, okay?'

She made no reply, only stood with her face pressed against the tire. The streamers on her hat flapped and flew. Pete sighed and turned to Henry.

'What do you want?'

'You know the loggers' shelters along this road?' There were eight or nine of them, Henry thought, nothing but four posts each, with pieces of rusty corrugated tin on top for roofs. The pulpers stored cut logs or pieces of equipment beneath them until spring.

'Sure,' Pete said.

'Where's the closest one? Can you tell me?'

Pete closed his eyes, raised one finger, and began moving it back and forth. At the same time he made a little ticking sound with the tip of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. This had been a part of Pete ever since high school. It didn't go back as far as Beaver's gnawed pencils and chewed toothpicks, or Jonesy's love of horror movies and murder stories, but it went back a long way. And it was usually reliable. Henry waited, hoping it would be reliable now.

The woman, her ears perhaps catching that small regular ticking sound beneath the boom of the wind, raised her head and looked around. There was a large dark smear across her forehead from the tire.

At last Pete opened his eyes. 'Right up there,' he said, pointing in the direction of Hole in the Wall. 'Go around that curve and then there's a hill. Go down the other side of the hill and there's a straight stretch. At the end of the straight there's one of those shelters. It's on the left. Part of the roof's fallen in. A man named Stevenson had a nosebleed there once.'

'Yeah?'

'Aw, man, I don't know.' And Pete looked away, as if embar?rassed.

Henry vaguely remembered the shelter . . . and the fact that the roof had partially fallen in was good, or could be; if it had fallen the right way, it would have turned the wall-less shelter into a lean-to.

'How far?'

'Half a mile. Maybe three-quarters.'

'And you're sure.'

'Yeah.'

'Can you walk that far on your knee?'

'I think so - but will she?'

'She better,' Henry said. He put his hands on the woman's shoulders, turned her wide-eyed face to his, and moved in until they were almost nose to nose. The smell of her breath was awful - antifreeze with something oily and organic beneath it - but he stayed close, and made no move to draw back.

'We need to walk!' he told her, not quite shouting but speaking loudly and in a tone of command. 'Walk with me now, on three! One, two, three!'

He took her hand and led her back around the Scout and into the road. There was one moment of resistance and then she followed with perfect docility, not seeming to feel the push of the wind when it struck them. They walked for about five minutes, Henry holding the woman's gloved right hand in his left one, and then Pete lurched.

'Wait,' he said. 'Bastardly knee's tryin to lock up on me again.

While he bent and massaged it, Henry looked up at the sky. There were no lights up there now. 'Are you all right? Can you make it?'

'I'll make it,' Pete said. 'Come on, let's go.'

6

They made it around the curve all right and halfway up the hill all right and then Pete dropped, groaning and cursing and clutching his knee. He saw the way Henry was looking at him and made a peculiar sound, something caught between a laugh and a snarl. 'Don't you worry about me,' he said. 'Petie-bird's gonna make it.'

'You sure?'

'Ayuh.' And to Henry's alarm (although there was amusement, too, that dark amusement which never seemed to leave him now), Pete balled his gloved hands into fists and began pounding on his knee.

'Pete - '

'Let go, you hump, let go!' Pete cried, ignoring him completely. And during this the woman stood slump-shouldered with the wind now at her back and the orange hat-ribbons blowing out in front of her, as silent as a piece of equipment that has been turned off.

'Pete?'

'I'm all right now,' Pete said. He looked up at Henry with exhausted eyes . . . but they, too, were not without amusement. 'Is this a total fuckarow or not?'

'It is.'

'I don't think I could walk all the way back to Derry, but I'll get to that shelter.' He held out a hand. 'Help me up, chief'

Henry took his old friend's hand and pulled. Pete came up stiff-legged, like a man rising from a formal bow, stood still for a moment, then said: 'Let's go. I'm lookin forward to gettin out of this wind.' He paused, then added: 'We should have brought a few beers.'

They got to the top of the hill and the wind was better on the other side. By the time they got to the straight stretch at the bottom, Henry had begun allowing himself to hope that this part of it, at least, was going to go all right. Then, halfway along the straight with a shape up ahead that just about had to be the loggers' shelter, the woman collapsed - first to her knees, then onto her front. She lay like that for a moment, head turned, only the breath rising from her open mouth to indicate she was still alive (and how much simpler this would be if she wasn't, Henry thought). Then she rolled over on her side and let out another long bray of a belch.

'Oh you troublesome cunt,' Pete said, sounding not angry but only tired. He looked at Henry. 'What now?'

Henry knelt by her, told her in his loudest voice to get up, snapped his fingers, clapped his hands, and counted to three several times. Nothing worked.

'Stay here with her. Maybe I can find something up there to drag her on.'

'Good luck.'

'You have a better idea?'

Pete sat down in the snow with a grimace, his bad leg stretched out in front of him. 'Nosir,' he said, 'I do not. I'm fresh out of ideas.'

7

It took Henry five minutes to walk up to the shelter. His own leg was stiffening where the turnsignal lever had gouged it, but he thought he was all right. If he could get Pete and the woman to shelter, and if the Arctic Cat back at Hole in the Wall would start, he thought this might still turn out okay. And damn, it was interesting, there was that. Those lights in the sky . . .

The shelter's corrugated top had fallen perfectly: the front, facing the road, was open, but the back was almost entirely closed off And poking out of the thin scrim of snow that had drifted inside was a swatch of dirty gray tarpaulin with a coating of sawdust and ancient splinters clinging to it.

'Bingo,' Henry said, and grabbed it. At first it stuck to the ground, but when he put his back to it, the tarp came loose with a hoarse ripping sound that made him think of the woman farting.

Dragging it behind him, he plodded back toward where Pete, his leg still pointed out stiffly before him, sat in the snow next to the prone woman.

8

It was far easier than Henry had dared hope. In fact, once they got her on the tarpaulin, it was a breeze. She was a hefty woman, but she slid on the snow like grease. Henry was glad it wasn't five degrees warmer; sticky snow might have changed things considerably. And, of course, it helped being on a straight stretch.

The snow was now ankle deep and falling more thickly than ever, but the flakes had gotten bigger. It's stopping, they'd tell each other in tones of disappointment when they saw flakes like that as kids.

'Hey Henry?' Pete sounded out of breath, but that was okay; the shelter was just up ahead. In the meantime Pete walked in a kind of stiff-legged strut to keep his knee from coming out of whack again.

'What?'

'I been thinkin about Duddits a lot just lately - how strange is that?'

'No, bounce,' Henry said at once, without even thinking about it.

'That's right.' Pete gave a somehow nervous laugh. 'No bounce, no play. You do think it's strange, don't you?'

'If it is,' Henry said, 'we're both strange.'

'What do you mean?'

'I've been thinking of Duddits myself, and for quite awhile. Since at least March. Jonesy and I were going to go see him - '

'You were?'

'Yeah. Then Jonesy had that accident - '

'Crazy old cocksucker that hit him never should have been driving,' Pete said with a dark frown. 'Jonesy's lucky to be alive.'

'You got that right,' Henry said. 'His heart stopped in the ambulance. The EMTs had to give him the juice.'

Pete halted, wide-eyed. 'No shit? It was that bad? That close?'

It occurred to Henry that he had just been indiscreet. 'Yes, but you ought to keep your mouth shut about it. Carla told me, but I don't think Jonesy knows. I never . . .' He waved his arm vaguely, and Pete nodded with perfect understanding. I never sensed that he did was what Henry meant.

'I'll keep it under my hat,' Pete said.

'I think it's best you do.'

'And you never got to see Duds.'

Henry shook his head. 'In all the excitement about Jonesy, I for?got. Then it was summer, and you know how things come up . . .'

Pete nodded.

'But you know what? I was thinking of him just a little while ago. Back in Gosselin's.'

'Was it the kid in the Beavis and Butt-head shirt?' Pete asked. His words came out in little puffs of white vapor.

Henry nodded. 'The kid' could have been twelve or twenty-?five, when it came to Down's syndrome you just couldn't tell. He had been red - haired, wandering along the middle aisle of the dark little market next to a man who just about had to be his father - same green-and-black-checked hunting jacket, more importantly the same carroty red hair, the man's now thin enough to show the scalp underneath, and he had given them a look, the kind that says Don't you say nothing about my kid unless you want trouble, and of course neither of them had said anything, they had come the twenty or so miles from Hole in the Wall for beer and bread and hot dogs, not trouble, and besides, they had once known Duddits, still knew Duddits in a way - sent him Christmas presents and birthday cards, anyway, Duddits who had once been, in his own peculiar fashion, one of them. What Henry could not very well confide to Pete was that he'd been thinking of Duds at odd moments ever since realizing, some sixteen months ago, that he meant to take his own life and that everything he did had become either a holding action against that event or a preparation for it. Sometimes he even dreamed of Duddits, and of the Beav saying Let me fix that, man and Duddits saying Fit wha?

'Nothing wrong with thinking about Duddits, Pete,' he said as he hauled the makeshift sled with the woman on it into the shelter. He was out of breath himself. 'Duddits was how we defined ourselves. He was our finest hour.'

'You think so?'

'Yup.' Henry plopped down to get his breath before going on. to the next thing. He looked at his watch. Almost noon. By now Jonesy and Beaver would be past the point of thinking the snow had just slowed them down; would be almost sure something had gone wrong. Perhaps one of them would fire up the snowmobile (if it works, he reminded himself again, if the damn thing works). Come out looking for them. That would simplify things a bit.

He looked at the woman lying on the tarp. Her hair had fallen over one eye, hiding it; the other looked at Henry - and through him - with chilly indifference.

Henry believed that all children were presented with self?-defining moments in early adolescence, and that children in groups were apt to respond more decisively than children alone. Often they behaved badly, answering distress with cruelty. Henry and his friends had behaved well, for whatever reason. It meant no more than anything else in the end, but it did not hurt to remember, especially when your soul was dark, that once you had confounded the odds and behaved decently.

He told Pete what he was going to do and what Pete was going to do, then got to his feet to start doing it - he wanted them all safe behind the doors of Hole in the Wall before the light left the day. A clean, well-lighted place.

'Okay,' Pete said, but he sounded nervous. 'Just hope she doesn't die on me. And that those lights don't come back.' He craned to look out at the sky, where now there were only dark, low-hanging clouds. 'What were they, do you think? Some kind of lightning?'

'Hey, you're the space expert.' Henry got up. 'Start picking up the little sticks - you don't even have to get up to do that.'

'Kindling, right?'

'Right,' Henry said, then stepped over the woman on the tarp and walked to the edge of the woods, where there was plenty of bigger stuff lying around in the snow. Roughly nine miles, that was the walk ahead of him. But first they were going to light a fire. A nice big one.