UDDITS, PART TWO

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1

Henry started off in the direction of the camp at a quick walk, but as the snow subsided to isolated flurries and the wind began to die, he upped the walk to a steady, clocklike jog. He had been jogging for years, and the pace felt natural enough. He might have to pull up for awhile, walk or even rest, but he doubted it. He had run road-races longer than nine miles, although not for a couple of years and never with four inches of snow underfoot. Still, what was there to worry about? Falling down and busting a hip? Maybe having a heart attack? At thirty-seven a heart attack seemed unlikely, but even if he had been a prime candidate for one, worrying about it would have been ludicrous, wouldn't it? Considering what he was planning? So what was there to worry about?

Jonesy and Beaver, that was what. On the face of it that seemed as ludicrous as worrying about suffering a catastrophic cardiac outage here in the middle of nowhere - the trouble was behind him, with Pete and that strange, semi-comatose woman, not up ahead at Hole in the Wall . . . except there was trouble at Hole in the Wall, bad trouble. He didn't know how he knew that, but he did and he accepted the knowing. Even before he started encountering the animals, all hurrying by and none giving him more than the most cursory glance, he knew that.

Once or twice he glanced up into the sky, looking for more foo-lights, but there were none to be seen and after that he just looked straight ahead, sometimes having to zig or zag to keep out of the way of the animals. They weren't quite stampeding, but their eyes had an odd, spooky look that Henry had never seen before.

Once he had to skip handily to keep from being upended by a pair of hurrying foxes.

Eight more miles, he told himself. It became a jogging mantra, different from the ones that usually went through his head when he was running (nursery rhymes were the most common), but not that different - same idea, really. Eight more miles, eight more miles to Banbury Cross. No Banbury Cross, though, just Mr Clarendon's old camp - Beaver's camp, now - and no cock horse to get him there. What was a cock horse, anyway? Who knew? And what in Christ's name was happening out here - the lights, the slow-motion stampede (dear God, what was that in the woods off to his left, was that a fucking bear?), the woman in the road, just sitting there with most of her teeth and most of her brains missing? And those farts, dear God. The only thing he'd ever smelled even remotely like it was the breath of a patient he'd had once, a schizophrenic with intestinal cancer. Always that smell, an internist friend had told Henry when Henry tried to describe it. They can brush their teeth a dozen times a day, use Lavoiis every hour on the hour, and that smell still comes through. It's the smell of the body eating itself, because that's all cancer is when you take the diagnostic masks off: autocannibalism.

Seven more miles, seven more miles, and all the animals are running, all the animals are headed for Disneyland. And when they get there they'll form a conga line and sing 'It's a Small World After All.'

The steady, muted thud of his booted feet. The feel of his glasses bouncing up and down on the bridge of his nose. His breath coming out in balloons of cold vapor. But he felt warm now, felt good, those endorphins kicking in. Whatever was wrong with him, it was no shortage of those; he was suicidal but by no means dysthytmic.

That at least some of his problem - the physical and emotional emptiness that was like a near-whiteout in a blizzard - was physical, hormonal, he had no doubt. That the problem could be addressed if not entirely corrected by pills he himself had prescribed by the bushel . . . he had no doubt of that, either, But like Pete, who undoubtedly knew there was a rehab and years of AA meetings in his most plausible future, Henry did not want to be fixed, was somehow convinced that the fix would be a he, something that would lessen him.

He wondered if Pete had gone back for the beer, and knew the answer was probably yes. Henry would have suggested bringing it along if he'd thought of it, making such a risky return trip (risky for the woman as well as Pete himself) unnecessary, but he'd been pretty freaked out - and the beer hadn't even crossed his mind.

He bet it had crossed Pete's, though. Could Pete make it roundtrip on that sprung knee? It was possible, but Henry would not have bet on it.

They're back! the woman had screamed, looking up at the sky. They're back! They're back!

Henry put his head down and jogged a little faster.

2

Six more miles, six more to Banbury Cross. Was it down to six yet, or was he being optimistic? Giving those old endorphins a little too much free rein? Well, so what if he was? Optimism couldn't hurt at this point. The snow had almost stopped falling and the tide of animals had slackened, and that was also good - What wasn't so good was the thoughts in his head, some of which seemed less and less like his own. Becky, for instance, who was Becky? The name had begun to resonate in his head, had become another part of the mantra. He supposed it was the woman he'd just avoided killing. Whose little girl are you? Becky, why I'm Becky, I'm pretty Becky Shue.

Except she hadn't been pretty, not pretty at all. One heavyset smelly mama was what she'd been, and now she was in Pete Moore's less than reliable care.

Six. Six. Six more miles to Banbury Cross.

Jogging steadily - as steadily as was possible, given the footing - and hearing strange voices in his head. Except only one of them was really strange, and that one wasn't a voice at all but a kind of hum with a rhythmic beat

(whose little girl, whose little girl, pretty Becky Shue)

caught in it. The rest were voices he knew, or voices his friends knew. One was a voice Jonesy had told him about, a voice he'd heard after his accident and associated with all his pain: Please stop, I can't stand it, give me a shot, where's Marcy.

He heard Beaver's voice: Go look in the chamber pot.

Jonesy, answering: Why don't we just knock on the bathroom door and ask him how he is?

A stranger's voice saying that if he could just do a number two he'd be okay . . .

... only he was no stranger, he was Rick, pretty Becky's friend Rick. Rick what? McCarthy? McKinley? McKeen? Henry wasn't sure, but he leaned toward McCarthy, like Kevin McCarthy in that old horror movie about the pods from space that made themselves look like people. One of Jonesy's raves. Get a few drinks in him and mention that movie and Jonesy would respond with the key line at once: 'They're here! They're here!'

The woman, looking up at the sky and screaming They're back, they're back.

Dear Christ, there'd been nothing like this since they were kids and this was worse, like picking up a power-line filled with voices instead of electricity.

All those patients over the years, complaining of voices in their heads. And Henry, the big psychiatrist (Young Mr God, one state hospital patient called him back in the early days), had nodded as if he knew what they were talking about. Had in fact believed he did know what they were talking about. But maybe only now did he really know.

Voices. Listening to them so hard he missed the whup-whup-?whup of the helicopter passing overhead, a dark rushing shark-shape barely obscured by the bottoms of the clouds. Then the voices began to fade as radio signals from faraway places do when daylight comes and the atmosphere once more begins to thicken. At last there was only the voice of his own thoughts, insisting that something terrible had happened or was about to happen at Hole in the Wall; that something equally terrible was about to happen or had happened back there at the Scout or the loggers' shelter.

Five more miles. Five more miles.

In an effort to turn his mind away from his friend behind and his friends ahead, or what might be happening all around him, he let his mind go to where he knew Pete's mind had already gone: to 1978, and Tracker Brothers, and to Duddits. How Duddits Cavell could have anything to do with this fuckarow Henry didn't understand, but they had all been thinking about him, and Henry didn't even need that old mental connection to know it. Pete had mentioned Duds while they were dragging the woman to the loggers' shelter on that piece of tarp, Beaver had been talking about Duddits Just the other day when Henry and the Beav had been in the woods together - the day Henry had tagged his deer, that had been, The Beav reminiscing about how the four of them had taken Duddits Christmas shopping in Bangor one year. just after Jonesy had gotten his license that was; Jonesy would have driven anyone anywhere that winter. The Beav laughing about how Duddits had worried Santa Claus wasn't real, and all four of them - big high-school galoots by then, thinking they had the world by the tail - working to reconvince Duddits that Santa was a true thing, the real deal. Which of course they'd done. And Jonesy had called Henry from Brookline Just last month, drunk (drunkenness was much rarer for Jonesy, especially since his accident, than it was for Pete, and it was the only maudlin call Henry had ever gotten from the man), saying that he'd never done anything in his life that was as good, as plain and simple baldass fine, as what they had done for poor old Duddits Cavell back in 1978. That was our finest hour, Jonesy had said on the phone, and with a nasty jolt, Henry realized he had told Pete exactly the same thing. Duddits, man. Fucking Duds.

Five more miles . . . or maybe four. Five more miles . . . or maybe four.

They had been going to see a picture of a girl's pussy, the picture supposedly tacked up on the bulletin board of some deserted office. Henry couldn't remember the girl's name, not after all these years, only that she'd been that prick Grenadeau's girlfriend and the 1978 Homecoming Queen at Derry High. Those things had made the prospect of seeing her pussy especially interesting. And then, just as they got to the driveway, they had seen a discarded red-and-white Derry Tigers shirt. And a little way down the driveway there had been something else.

I hate that fuckin show, they never change their clothes, Pete had said, and Henry opened his mouth to reply, only before he could . . .

'The kiddo screamed,' Henry said. He slipped in the snow, tottered for a moment, then ran on again, remembering that October day under that white sky. He ran on remembering Duddits. How Duddits had screamed and changed all their lives. For the better, they had always assumed, but now Henry wondered.

Right now he wondered very much.

3

When they get to the driveway - not much of a driveway, weeds are growing even in the gravelly wheelruts now - Beaver is in the lead. Beaver is, indeed, almost foaming at the jaws. Henry guesses that Pete is nearly as wrought-up, but Pete is holding it in better, even though he's a year younger. Beaver is . . . what's the word? Agog. Henry almost laughs at the aptness of it, and then the Beav stops so suddenly Pete almost runs into him.

'Hey!' Beaver says. 'Fuck me Freddy! Some kid's shirt!'

It is indeed. Red and white, and not old and dirty, as if it had been there a thousand years. In fact, it looks almost new.

'Shirt, schmirt, who gives a shit?' Jonesy wants to know.

'Let's just - '

'Hold your horses,' the Beav says. 'This is a good shirt.' Except when he picks it up, they see that it isn't. New, yes ?a brand-new Derry Tigers shirt, with 19 on the back. Pete doesn't give a shit for football, but the rest of them recognize it as Richie Grenadeau's number. Good, no - not anymore. It's ripped deeply at the back collar, as if the person wearing it had tried to run away, then been grabbed and hauled back.

'Guess I was wrong,' the Beav says sadly, and drops it again. 'Come on.'

But before they get very far, they come across something else - this time it's yellow instead of red, that bright yellow plastic only a kid could love. Henry trots ahead of the others and picks it up. It's a lunchbox with Scooby-Doo and his friends on it, all of them running from what appears to be a haunted house. Like the shirt it looks new, not anything that's been lying out here for any length of time, and all at once Henry is starting to have a bad feeling about this, starting to wish they hadn't detoured into this deserted driveway by this deserted building at all . . . or at least had saved it for another day. Which, even at fourteen, he realizes is stupid. When it comes to pussy, he thinks, you either go or you don 9 t, there's no such thing as saving it for another day.

'I hate that fuckin show, Pete says, looking over Henry's shoulder at the lunchbox. 'They never change their clothes, did you ever notice that? Wear the same fuckin thing, show in and show out.'

Jonesy takes the Scooby-Doo lunchbox from Henry and turns it to look at something he's seen pasted on the end. The wild look has gone out of Jonesy's eyes, he's frowning slightly, and Henry has an idea Jonesy is also wishing they'd just gone on and played some two-on-two.

The sticker on the side reads: I BELONG TO DOUGLAS CAVELL, 19 MAPLE LANE, DERRY, MAINE. IF THE BOY I BELONG TO IS LOST, CALL 949-1864. THANKS!

Henry opens his mouth to say the lunchbox and the shirt must belong to a kid who goes to The Retard Academy - he's sure of it just looking at the sticker, which is almost like the tag their fucking dog wears - but before he can, there is a scream from the far side of the building, over where the big kids play baseball in the summer. It's full of hurt, that scream, but what starts Henry running before he can even think about it is the surprise in it, the awful surprise of someone who has been hurt or scared (or both) for the very first time.

The others follow him. They run up the weedy right rut of the driveway, the one closest to the building, in single file: Henry, Jonesy, the Beav, and Pete.

There is hearty male laughter. 'Go on and eat it,' someone says. 'Eat it and you can go. Duncan might even give you your pants back.'

'Yeah, if you - ' Another boy, probably Duncan, begins and then he stops, staring at Henry and his friends.

'Hey you guys, quit it!' Beaver shouts. 'Just fucking quit it!' Duncan's friends - there are two of them, both wearing Derry High School jackets - realize they are no longer unobserved at their afternoon's entertainment, and turn. Kneeling on the gravel amid them, dressed only in underpants and one sneaker, his face smeared with blood and dirt and snot and tears, is a child of an age Henry cannot determine. He's not a little kid, not with that powdering of hair on his chest, but he has the look of a little kid just the same. His eyes have a Chinese tilt and are bright green, swimming with tears.

On the red brick wall behind this little group, printed in large white letters which are fading but still legible, is this message: NO BOUNCE, NO PLAY. Which probably means keep the games and the balls away from the building and out in the vacant lot where the deep ruts of the basepaths and the ragged hill of the pitcher's mound can still be seen, but who can say for sure? NO BOUNCE, NO PLAY. In the years to come they will say this often; it will become one of the private catch-phrases of their youth and has no exact meaning. Who knows? perhaps comes closest. Or What can you do? It is always best spoken with a shrug, a smile, and hands tipped up to the sky.

'Who the fuck're you?' one of the big boys asks the Beav. On his left hand he's wearing what looks like a batting glove or maybe a golf glove . . . something athletic, anyway. In it is the dried dog-turd he has been trying to make the mostly naked boy eat.

'What are you doing?' Jonesy asks, horrified. 'You tryin to make him eat that? The fuck's wrong with you?'

The kid holding the dog-turd has a wide swatch of white tape across the bridge of his nose, and Henry utters a bark of recognition that is half surprise and half laughter. It's too per?fect, isn't it? They're here to look at the pussy of the Home?coming Queen and here, by God, is the Homecoming King, whose football season has apparently been ended by nothing worse than a broken nose, and who is currently passing his time doing stuff like this while the rest of the team practices for this week's game.

Richie Grenadeau hasn't noticed Henry's look of recognition; he's staring at Jonesy. Because he has been startled and because Jonesy's tone of disgust is so completely unfeigned, Richie at first takes a step backward. Then he realizes that the kid who has dared to speak to him in such reproving tones is at least three years younger and a hundred pounds lighter than he is. The sagging hand straightens again.

'I'm gonna make him eat this piece of shit,' he says. 'Then he can go. You go now, snotball, unless you want half'

'Yeah, fuck off,' the third boy says. Richie Grenadeau is big but this boy is even bigger, a six-foot-five hulk whose face flames with acne. 'While you got th - '

'I know who you are,' Henry says.

Richie's eyes switch to Henry. He looks suddenly wary . . . but he also looks pissed off. 'Fuck off, sonny. I mean it.'

'You're Richie Grenadeau. Your picture was in the paper.

What do you think people will say if we tell em what we caught you doing?'

'You're not gonna tell anyone anything, because you'll be fuckin dead,' the one named Duncan says. He has dirty-blond hair falling around his face and down to his shoulders. 'Get outta here. Beat feet.'

Henry pays no attention to him. He stares at Richie Grenadeau. He is aware of no fear, although there's no doubt these three boys could stomp them flat; he is burning with an outrage he has never felt before, never even suspected. The kid kneeling on the ground is undoubtedly retarded, but not so retarded he doesn't understand these three big boys intended to hurt him, tore off his shirt, and then -

Henry has never in his life been closer to getting good and beaten up, or been less concerned with it. He takes a step forward, fists clenching. The kid on the ground sobs, head now lowered, and the sound is a constant tone in Henry's head, feeding his fury.

'I'll tell,' he says, and although it is a little kid's threat, he doesn't sound like a little kid to himself. Nor to Richie, apparently; Richie takes a step backward and the gloved hand with the dried turd in it sags again. For the first time he looks alarmed. 'Three against one, a little retarded kid, fuck yeah, man, I'll tell. I'll tell and I know who you are!'

Duncan and the big boy - the only one not wearing a high-?school jacket - step up on either side of Richie. The boy in the underpants is behind them now, but Henry can still hear the pulsing drone of his sobs, it's in his head, beating in his head and driving him fucking crazy.

'All right, okay, that's it,' the biggest boy says. He grins, showing several holes where teeth once lived. 'You're gonna die now.'

'Pete, you run when they come,' Henry says, never taking his eyes from Richie Grenadeau. 'Run home and tell your mother.' And, to Richie: 'You'll never catch him, either. He runs like the fucking wind.'

Pete's voice sounds thin but not scared. 'You got it, Henry.' 'And the worse you beat us up, the worse it's gonna be for you, Jonesy says. Henry has already seen this, but for Jonesy it is a revelation; he's almost laughing. 'Even if you really did kill us, what good would it do you? Because Pete does run fast, and he'll tell.'

'I run fast, too,' Richie says coldly. 'I'll catch him.'

Henry turns first to Jonesy and then to the Beav. Both of them are standing firm. Beaver, in fact, is doing a little more than that. He bends swiftly, picks up a couple of stones - they are the size of eggs, only with jagged edges - and begins to chunk them together. Beav's narrowed eyes shift back and forth between Richie Grenadeau and the biggest boy, the galoot. The toothpick in his mouth jitters aggressively up and down.

'When they come, go for Grenadeau,' Henry says. 'The other two can't even get close to Pete.' He switches his gaze to Pete, who is pale but unafraid - his eyes are shining and he is almost dancing on the balls of his feet, eager to be off 'Tell your ma. Tell her where we are, to send the cops. And don't forget this bully motherfucker's name, whatever you do.' He shoots a district attorney's accusing finger at Grenadeau, who once more looks uncertain. No, more than uncertain. He looks afraid.

'Richie Grenadeau,' Pete says, and now he does begin to dance. 'I won't forget.'

'Come on, you dickweed,' Beaver says. One thing about the Beav, he knows a really excellent rank when he hears it. 'I'm gonna break your nose again. What kind of chickenshit quits off the football team cause of a broken nose, anyhow?'

Grenadeau doesn't reply - no longer knows which of them to reply to, maybe - and something rather wonderful is happening: the other boy in the high-school jacket, Duncan, has also started to look uncertain. A flush is spreading on his cheeks and across his forehead. He wets his lips and looks uncertainly at Richie. Only the galoot still looks ready to fight, and Henry almost hopes they will fight, Henry and Jonesy and the Beav will give them a hell of a scrap if they do, hell of a scrap, because of that crying, that fucking awful crying, the way it gets in your head, the beat-beat-beat of that awful crying.

'Hey Rich, maybe we ought to - ' Duncan begins.

'Kill em,' the galoot rumbles. 'Fuck em the fuck up.'

This one takes a step forward and for a moment it almost goes down. Henry knows that if the galoot had been allowed to take even one more step he would have been out of Richie Grenadeau's control, like a mean old pitbull that breaks its leash and just goes flying at its prey, a meat arrow.

But Richie doesn't let him get that next step, the one which will turn into a clumsy charge. He grabs the galoot's forearm, which is thicker than Henry's bicep and bristling with reddish-gold hair. 'No, Scotty,' he says, 'wait a minute.'

'Yeah, wait,' Duncan says, sounding almost panicky. He shoots Henry a look which Henry finds, even at the age of fourteen, grotesque. It is a reproachful look. As if Henry and his friends were the ones doing something wrong.

'What do you want?' Richie asks Henry. 'You want us to get out of here, that it?'

Henry nods.

'If we go, what are you gonna do? Who are you going to tell?'

Henry discovers an amazing thing: he is as close to coming unglued as Scotty, the galoot. Part of him wants to actually pro?voke a fight, to scream EVERYBODY! FUCKING EVERYBODY! Knowing that his friends would back him up, would never say a word even if they got trashed and sent to the hospital.

But the kid. That poor little crying retarded kid. Once the big boys finished with Henry, Beaver, and Jonesy (with Pete as well, if they could catch him), they would finish with the retarded kid, too, and it would likely go a lot further than making him eat a piece of dried dog-turd.

'No one,' he says. 'We won't tell anyone.'

'Fuckin liar,' Scotty says. 'He's a fuckin liar, Richie, lookit him.'

Scotty starts forward again, but Richie tightens his grip on the big galoot's forearm.

'If no one gets hurt,' Jonesy says in a blessedly reasonable tone of voice, 'no one's got a story to tell '

'Grenadeau glances at him, then back at Henry. 'Swear to God?'

'Swear to God,' Henry agrees.

'All of you swear to God?' Grenadeau asks.

Jonesy, Beav, and Pete all dutifully swear to God.

Grenadeau thinks about it for a moment that seems very long, and then he nods. 'Okay, fuck this. We're going.'

'If they come, run around the building the other way,' Henry says to Pete, speaking very rapidly because the big boys are already in motion. But Grenadeau still has his hand clamped firmly on Scotty's forearm, and Henry thinks this is a good sign.

'I wouldn't waste my time,' Richie Grenadeau says in a lofty tone of voice that makes Henry feel like laughing . . . but with an effort he manages to keep a straight face. Laughing at this point would be a bad idea. Things are almost fixed up. There's a part of him that hates that, but the rest of him nearly trembles with relief.

'What's up with you, anyway?' Richie Grenadeau asks him. 'What's the big deal?'

Henry wants to ask his own question - wants to ask Richie Grenadeau how he could do it, and it's no rhetorical question, either. That crying! My God! But he keeps silent, knowing anything he says might just provoke the asshole, get him going all over again.

There is a kind of dance going on here; it looks almost like the ones you learn in first and second grade. As Richie, Duncan, and Scott walk toward the driveway (sauntering, attempting to show they are going of their own free will and haven't been frightened off by a bunch of homo junior-high kids), Henry and his friends first move to face them and then step backward in a line toward the weeping kid kneeling there in his underpants, blocking him from them.

At the corner of the building Richie pauses and gives them a final look. 'Gonna see you fellas again,' he says. 'One by one or all together.'

'Yeah,' Duncan agrees.

'You're gonna be lookin at the world through a oxygen tent!' Scott adds, and Henry comes perilously close to laughing again. He prays that none of his friends will say anything - let done be done ? - and none of them do. It's almost a miracle.

One final menacing look from Richie and they are gone around the comer. Henry, Jonesy, Beaver, and Pete are left alone with the kid, who is rocking back and forth on his dirty knees, his dirty bloody tearstreaked uncomprehending face cocked to the white sky like the face of a broken clock, all of them wondering what to do next. Talk to him? Tell him it's okay, that the bad boys are gone and the danger has passed? He will never understand. And oh that crying is so freaky. How could those kids, mean and stupid as they were, go on in the face of that crying? Henry will understand later - sort of - but at that moment it's a complete mystery to him.

'I'm gonna try something,' Beaver says abruptly.

'Yeah, sure, anything,' Jonesy says. His voice is shaky.

The Beav starts forward, then looks at his friends. It is an odd look, part shame, part defiance, and - yes, Henry would swear it ? - part hope.

'If you tell anybody I did this,' he says, 'I'll never chum with you guys again.'

'Never mind that crap,' Pete says, and he also sounds shaky. 'If you can shut him up, do it!'

Beaver stands for a moment where Richie was standing while he tried to get the kid to eat the dog-turd, then drops to his knees. Henry sees the kid's underwear shorts are in fact Underoos, and that they feature the Scooby-Doo characters, plus Shaggy's Mystery Machine, just like the kid's lunchbox.

Then Beaver takes the wailing, nearly naked boy into his arms and begins to sing.

4

Four more miles to Banbury Cross . . . or maybe only three. Four more miles to Banbury Cross . . . or maybe only -

Henry's feet skidded again, and this time he had no chance to get his balance back. He had been in a deep daze of memory, and before he could come out of it, he was flying through the air.

He landed heavily on his back, hitting hard enough to lose his wind in a loud and painful gasp - 'Uh!' Snow rose in a dreamy sugarpuff, and he hit the back of his head hard enough to see stars.

He lay where he was for a moment, giving anything broken ample opportunity to announce itself When nothing did, he reached around and prodded the small of his back. Pain, but no agony. When they were ten and eleven and spent what seemed like whole winters sledding in Strawford Park, he had taken worse hits than this and gotten up laughing. Once, with the idiotic Pete Moore piloting his Flexible Flyer and Henry riding behind him, they had gone head-on into the big pine at the foot of the hill, the one all the kids called the Death Tree, and survived with nothing more than a few bruises and a couple of loose teeth each. The trouble was, he hadn't been ten or eleven for a lot of years.

'Get up, ya baby, you're okay,' he said, and carefully came to a sitting position. Twinges from his back, but nothing worse. just shaken up. Nothing hurt but your fuckin pride, as they used to say. Still, he'd maybe sit here another minute or two. He was making great time and he deserved a rest. Besides, those memories had shaken him. Richie Grenadeau, fucking Richie Grenadeau, who had, it turned out, flunked off the football team - it hadn't been the broken nose at all. Gonna see you fellas again, he had told them, and Henry guessed he had meant it, but the threatened confrontation had never happened, no, never happened. Something else had happened instead.

And all that was a long time ago. Right now Banbury Cross awaited - Hole in the Wall, at least - and he had no cock horse to ride there, only that poor man's steed, shank's mare. Henry got to his feet, began to brush snow from his ass, and then someone screamed inside his head.

'Ow, ow, ow!' he cried. It was like something played through a Walkman you could turn up to concert-hall levels, like a shotgun blast that had gone off directly behind his eyes. He staggered backward, flailing for balance, and had he not run into the stiffly jutting branches of a pine growing at the left side of the road, he surely would have fallen down again.

He disengaged himself from the tree's clutch, ears still ringing - hell, his entire head was ringing - and stepped forward, hardly believing he was still alive. He raised one of his hands to his nose, and the palm of his hand came away wet with blood. There was something loose in his mouth, too. He held his hand under it, spat out a tooth, looked at it wonderingly, then tossed it aside, ignoring his first impulse, which had been to put it in his coat pocket. No one, as far as he knew, did surgical implants of teeth, and he strongly doubted that the Tooth Fairy came this far out in the boonies.

He couldn't say for sure whose scream that had been, but he had an idea Pete Moore had maybe just run into a big load of bad trouble.

Henry listened for other voices, other thoughts, and heard none. Excellent. Although he had to admit that, even without voices, this had certainly turned into the hunting trip of a lifetime.

'Go, big boy, on you huskies,' he said, and started running toward Hole in the Wall again. His sense that something had gone wrong there was stronger than ever, and it was all he could do to hold himself to a fast jog.

Go look in the chamber pot.

Why don't we just knock on the bathroom door and ask him how he is?

Had he actually heard those voices? Yes, they were gone now, but he had heard them, just as he had heard that terrible agonal scream. Pete? Or had it been the woman? Pretty Becky Shue?

'Pete,' he said, the word coming out in a puff of vapor. 'It was Pete.' Not entirely sure, even now, but pretty sure.

At first he was afraid he wouldn't be able to find his rhythm again, but then, while he was still worrying about it, it came back - the synchronicity of his hurrying breath and thudding feet, beautiful in its simplicity.

Three more miles to Banbury Cross, he thought. Going home. Just like we took Duddits home that day.

(if you tell anybody I did this I'll never chum with you guys again)

Henry returned to that October afternoon as to a deep dream. He dropped down the well of memory so far and so fast that at first he didn't sense the cloud rushing toward him, the cloud that was not words or thoughts or screams but only its redblack self, a thing with places to go and things to do.

5

Beaver steps forward, hesitates for a moment, then drops to his knees. The retard doesn't see him; he is still wailing, eyes squeezed shut and narrow chest heaving. Both the Underoos and Beaver's zipper-studded old motorcycle jacket are comical, but none of the other boys are laughing. Henry only wants the retard to stop crying. That crying is killing him.

Beaver shuffles forward a little bit on his knees, then takes the weeping boy into his arms.

'Baby's boat's a silver dream, sailing near and far . . .'

Henry has never heard Beaver sing before, except maybe along with the radio - the Clarendons are most certainly not churchgoers - and he is astounded by the clear tenor sweetness of his friend's voice. In another year or so the Beav's voice will change completely and become unremarkable, but now, in the weedy vacant lot behind the empty building, it pierces them all, astounds them. The retarded boy reacts as well, stops crying and looks at Beaver with wonder.

'It sails from here in Baby's room and to the nearest star; Sail, Baby, sail, sail on home to me, sail the seas and sail the stars, sail on home to me . . .'

The last note drifts on the air and for a moment nothing in the world breathes for beauty. Henry feels like crying. The retarded boy looks at Beaver, who has been rocking him back and forth in rhythm with the song. On his teary face is an expression of blissful astonishment. He has forgotten his split lip and bruised cheek, his missing clothes, his lost lunchbox. To Beaver he says ooo or, open syllables that could mean almost anything, but Henry understands them perfectly and sees Beaver does, too.

'I can't do more,' the Beav says. He realizes his arm is still around the kid's shirtless shoulders and takes it away.

As soon as he does, the kid's face clouds over, not with fear this time, or with the petulance of one balked of getting his way, but in pure sorrow. Tears fill those amazingly green eyes of his and spill down the clean tracks on his dirty cheeks. He takes Beaver's hand and puts Beaver's arm back over his shoulders. 'Ooo or! Ooo or!' he says. Beaver looks at them, panicked. 'That's all my mother ever sang me, he says. 'I always went right to fuckin sleep.'

Henry and Jonesy exchange a look and burst out laughing. Not a good idea, it'll probably scare the kid and he'll start that terrible bawling again, but neither of them can help it. And the kid doesn't cry. He smiles at Henry and Jonesy instead, a sunny smile that displays a mouthful of white crammed-together teeth, and then looks back at Beaver. He continues to hold Beaver's arm firmly around his shoulders.

'Ooo or!' he commands.

'Aw, fuck, sing it again,' Pete says. 'The part you know.' Beaver ends up singing it three more times before the kid will let him stop, will let the boys work him into his pants and his tom shirt, the one with Richie Grenadeau's number on it. Henry has never forgotten that haunting fragment and will sometimes recall it at the oddest times: after losing his virginity at a UNH fraternity party with 'Smoke on the Water' pounding through the speakers downstairs; after opening his paper to the obituary page and seeing Barry Newman's rather charming smile above his multiple chins; feeding his father, who had come down with Alzheimer's at the ferociously unfair age of fifty-three, his father insisting that Henry was someone named Sam. 'A real man pays off his debts, Sammy,' his father had said, and when he accepted the next bite of cereal, milk ran down his chin. At these times what he thinks of as Beaver's Lullaby will come back to him, and he will feel transiently comforted. No bounce, no play.

Finally they've got the kid all dressed except for one red sneaker. He's trying to put it on himself, but he's got it pointing backward. He is one fucked-up young American, and Henry is at a loss to know how the three big boys could have bullied up on him. Even aside from the crying, which was like no cry?ing Henry had ever heard before, why would you want to be so mean?

'Let me fix that, man,' Beaver says.

'Fit wha?' the kid asks, so comically perplexed that Henry, Jonesy, and Pete all burst out laughing again. Henry knows you're not supposed to laugh at retards, but he can't help it. The kid just has a naturally funny face, like a cartoon character.

Beaver only smiles. 'Your sneaker, man.'

'Fit neek?'

'Yeah, you can't put it on that way, fuckin imposseeblo, se?or.' Beaver takes the sneaker from him and the kid watches with close interest as the Beav slips his foot into it, draws the laces firmly against the tongue, and then ties the ends in a bow. When he's done, the kid looks at the bow for a moment longer, then at Beaver. Then he puts his arms around Beaver's neck and plants a big loud smack on Beaver's cheek.

'If you guys tell anybody he did that - ' Beaver begins, but he's smiling, clearly pleased.

'Yeah, yeah, you'll never chum with us again, ya fuckin wank,' Jonesy says, grinning. He has held onto the lunchbox and now squats in front of the kid, holding it out. 'This yours, guy?'

The kid grins with the delight of someone encountering an old friend and snatches it. 'Ooby-Ooby-Doo, where-are-oo?' he sings. 'We gah-sum urk oo-do-now!'

'That's right,' Jonesy agrees. 'Got some work to do now. Gotta get you the fuck home is what we got to do. Douglas Cavell, that's your name, right?'

The boy is holding his lunchbox to his chest in both of his dirty hands. Now he gives it a loud smack, just like the one he put on Beaver's check. 'I Duddits!' he cries.

'Good,' Henry says. He takes one of the boy's hands, Jonesy takes the other, and they help him to his feet. Maple Lane is only three blocks away and they can be there in ten minutes, always assuming that Richie and his friends aren't hanging around and hoping to ambush them. 'Let's get you home, Duddits. Bet your Mom's worried about you.'

But first Henry sends Pete to the corner of the building to look up the driveway. When Pete comes back and reports the coast clear, Henry lets them go that far. Once they are on the sidewalk, where people can see them, they'll be safe. Until then, he will take no chances. He sends Pete out a second time, tells him to scout all the way to the street, then whistle if everything is cool.

'Dey gone,' Duddits says.

'Maybe,' Henry says, 'but I'll feel better if Pete takes a look.' Duddits stands serenely among them, looking at the pictures on his lunchbox, while Pete goes out to look around. Henry feels okay about sending him. He hasn't exaggerated Pete's speed; if Richie and his friends try to jump him, Pete will turn on the jets and leave them in the dust.

'You like this show, man?' Beaver says, taking the lunchbox. He speaks quietly. Henry watches with some interest, curious to see if the retarded boy will cry for his lunchbox. He doesn't.

'Ey Ooby-Doos!' the retarded kid says. His hair is golden, curly. Henry still can't tell what age he is.

'I know they're Scooby-Doos,' the Beav says patiently, 'but they never change their clothes. Pete's right about that. I mean, fuck me Freddy, right?'

'Ite!' He holds out his hands for the lunchbox and Beaver gives it back. The retarded boy hugs it, then smiles at them. It is a beautiful smile, Henry thinks, smiling himself. It makes him think of how you are cold when you have been swimming in the ocean for awhile, but when you come out, you wrap a towel around your bony shoulders and goosepimply back and you're warm again.

Jonesy is also smiling. 'Duddits,' he says, 'which one is the dog?'

The retarded boy looks at him, still smiling, but puzzled now, too.

'The dog,' Henry says. 'Which one's the dog?'

Now the boy looks at Henry, his puzzlement deepening.

'Which one's Scooby, Duddits?' Beaver asks, and Duddits's face clears. He points.

'Ooby! Ooby-Ooby-Doo! Eee a dog!'

They all burst out laughing, Duddits is laughing too, and then Pete whistles. They start moving and have gone about a quarter of the way up the driveway when Jonesy says, 'Wait! Wait!'

He runs to one of the dirty office windows and peers in, cupping his hands to the sides of his face to cut the glare, and Henry suddenly remembers why they came. Tina Jean What's-Her-Face's pussy. All that seems about a thousand years ago.

After about ten seconds, Jonesy calls, 'Henry! Beav! Come here! Leave the kid there!'

Beaver runs to Jonesy's side. Henry turns to the retarded boy and says, 'Stand right there, Duddits. Right there with your lunchbox, okay?'

Duddits looks up at him, green eyes shining, lunchbox held to his chest. After a moment he nods, and Henry runs to join his friends at the window. They have to squeeze together, and Beaver grumbles that someone is steppin on his fuckin feet, but they manage. After a minute or so, puzzled by their failure to show up on the sidewalk, Pete joins them, poking his face in between Henry's and Jonesy's shoulders. Here are four boys at a dirty office window, three with their hands cupped to the sides of their faces to cut the glare, and a fifth boy standing behind them in the weedy driveway, holding his lunchbox against his narrow chest and looking up at the white sky, where the sun is trying to break through. Beyond the dirty glass (where they will leave clean crescents to mark the places where their foreheads rested) is an empty room. Scattered across the dusty floor are a number of deflated white tadpoles that Henry recognizes as jizzbags. On one wall, the one directly across from the window, is a bulletin board. Tacked to it is a map of northern New England and a Polaroid photograph of a woman holding her skirt up. You can't see her pussy, though, just some white panties. And she's no high-school girl. She's old. She must be at least thirty.

'Holy God,' Pete says at last, giving Jonesy a disgusted look. 'We came all the way down here for that?'

For a moment Jonesy looks defensive, then grins and jerks his thumb back over his shoulder. 'No,' he says. 'We came for him.'

6

Henry was pulled from recall by an amazing and totally unexpected realization: he was terrified, had been terrified for some time. Some new thing had been hovering just below the threshold of his consciousness, held down by the vivid memory of meeting Duddits. Now it had burst forward with a frightened yell, insisting on recognition.

He skidded to a stop in the middle of the road, flailing his arms to keep from falling down in the snow again, and then simply stood there panting, eyes wide. What now? He was only two and a half miles from Hole in the Wall, almost there, so what the Christ now?

There's a cloud, he thought. Some kind of cloud, that's what. I can't tell what it is but I can't tell it - I never felt anything so clearly in my life. My adult life, anyway. I have to get off the road. I have to get away from it. Get away from the movie. There's a movie in the cloud. The kind Jonesy likes. A scary one.

'That's stupid,' he muttered, knowing it wasn't.

He could hear the approaching wasp-whine of an engine. It was coming from the direction of Hole in the Wall and coming fast, a snowmobile engine, almost certainly the Arctic Cat stored at camp . . . but it was also the redblack cloud with the movie going on inside it, some terrible black energy rushing toward him.

For a moment Henry was frozen with a hundred childish horrors, things under beds and things in coffins, squirming bugs beneath overturned rocks and the furry jelly that was the remains of a long-dead baked rat the time Dad had moved the stove out from the wall to check the plug. And horrors that weren't childish at all: his father, lost in his own bedroom and bawling with fear; Barry Newman, running from Henry's office with that vast look of terror on his face, terror because he had been asked to look at something he wouldn't, perhaps couldn't, acknowledge; sitting awake at four in the morning with a glass of Scotch, all the world a dead socket, his own mind a dead socket and oh baby it was a thousand years till dawn and all lullabys had been cancelled. Those things were in the redblack cloud rushing down on him like that pale horse in the Bible, those things and more. Every bad thing he had ever suspected was now coming toward him, not on a pale horse but on an old snowmobile with a rusty cowling. Not death but worse than death. It was Mr Gray.

Get off the road! his mind screamed. Get off the road now! Hide!

For a moment he couldn't move - his feet seemed to grow heavy. The gash on his thigh, the one the turnsignal had made, burned like a brand. Now he understood how a deer caught in the headlights felt, or a chipmunk hopping stupidly back and forth in front of an oncoming lawnmower. The cloud had robbed him of his ability to help himself He was frozen in its rushing path.

What got him going, oddly enough, was all those thoughts of suicide. Had he agonized his way to that decision on five hundred sleepless nights only to be robbed of his option by a kind of buck-fever? No, by God, no, it wouldn't be, Suffering was bad enough; allowing his own terrified body to mock that suffering by locking up and just standing here while a demon ran him down . . . no, he would not allow that to happen.

And so he moved, but it was like moving in a nightmare, fighting his way through air which seemed to have grown as thick as taffy. His legs rose and fell with the slowness of an underwater ballet. Had he been running down this road? Actually running? The idea now seemed impossible, no matter how strong the memory.

Still, he kept moving while the whine of the approaching engine grew closer, deepening to a stuttery roar. And at last he was able to get into the trees on the south side of the road. He managed perhaps fifteen feet, far enough so there was no snow cover, only a dust of white on the aromatic orange-brown needles. There Henry fell on his knees, sobbing with terror and putting his gloved hands to his mouth to stifle the sound, because what if it heard? It was Mr Gray, the cloud was Mr Gray, and what if it heard?

He crawled behind the moss-girdled trunk of a spruce tree, clutched it, then peered around it through the tumbled screen of his sweaty hair. He saw a spark of light in the dark afternoon. It jittered, wavered, and rounded. It became a headlight.

Henry began to moan helplessly as the blackness neared. It seemed to hover over his mind like an eclipse, obliterating thought, replacing it with terrible images: milk on his father's chin, panic in Barry Newman's eyes, scrawny bodies and staring eyes behind barbed wire, flayed women and hanged men. For a moment his understanding of the world seemed to turn inside out like a pocket and he realized that everything was infected . . . or could be. Everything. His reasons for contemplating suicide were paltry in the face of this oncoming thing.

He pressed his mouth against the tree to keep from screaming, felt his lips tattoo a kiss into the springy moss all the way down to where it was moist and tasted of bark. In that moment the Arctic Cat flashed past and Henry recognized the figure which straddled it, the person who was generating the redblack cloud which now filled Henry's head like a dry fever.

He bit into the moss, screamed against the tree, inhaled frag?ments of moss without being aware of it, and screamed again. Then he simply knelt there, holding onto the tree and shuddering, as the sound of the Arctic Cat began to diminish into the west. He was still there when it had died away to a troublesome whine again; still there when it faded away entirely.

Pete's back there somewhere, he thought. It'll come to Pete, and to the woman.

Henry stumbled back to the road, unaware that his nose had begun bleeding again, unaware that he was crying. He began moving toward Hole in the Wall once more, although now the best pace he could manage was a shambling limp. But maybe that was all right, because it was all over back at camp.

Whatever the horrible thing was that he had been sensing, it had happened. One of his friends was dead, one was dying, and one, God help him, had become a movie star.