ABOR DAY

The universe, she is a bitch.

- Norman Maclean

Another summer down the tubes, Henry thought.

There was nothing sad about the thought, though; summer had been good, and fall would be good, too. No hunting this year, and there would undoubtedly be the occasional visit from his new military friends (his new military friends wanted to be sure above all things that he wasn't growing any red foliage on his skin), but fall would be good just the same. Cool air, bright days, long nights.

Sometimes, in the post-midnight hours of his nights, Henry's old friend still came to visit, but when it did, he simply sat up in his study with a book in his lap and waited for it to go again. Eventually it always did. Eventually the sun always came up. The sleep you didn't get one night sometimes came to you on the next, and then it came like a lover. This was something he'd learned since last November.

He was drinking a beer on the porch of Jonesy and Carla's cottage in Ware, the one on the shore of Pepper Pond. The south end of the Quabbin Reservoir was about four miles northwest of where he sat. And East Street, of course.

The hand holding the can of Coors only had three fingers. He'd lost the two on the end to frostbite, perhaps while skiing out the Deep Cut Road from Hole in the Wall, perhaps while dragging Jonesy back to the remaining Humvee on a lashed-together travois. Last fall had been his season to drag people through the snow, it seemed, and with mixed results.

Near the little scrape of beach, Carla Jones was tending a barbecue. Noel, the baby, was toddling around the picnic table to her left, diaper sagging. He was waving a charred hot dog cheerily in one hand. The other three Jones kids, ranging in ages from eleven to three, were in the water, splashing around and yelling at each other. Henry supposed there might be some value to that Biblical imperative about being fruitful and multiplying, but it seemed to him that Jonesy and Carla had taken it to absurd lengths.

Behind him, the screen door clapped. Jonesy came out, carrying a bucket filled with iced beers. His limp wasn't all that bad; this time the doc had just said fuck the original equipment and had replaced the whole thing with steel and Teflon. It would have come to that, anyway, the doc had told Jonesy, but if you'd been a little more careful, Chief, you could've gotten another five years out of the old one. He'd had the operation in February, shortly after Henry and Jonesy's six-week 'vacation' with the military intelligence and Psy0ps people had ended.

The military folks had offered to throw in the hip replacement courtesy of Uncle Sam - sort of a coda to their debriefing - but Jonesy had refused with thanks, saying he wouldn't want to deprive his own orthopedist of the work, or his insurance company of the bill.

By then, all the two of them had wanted was to get out of Wyoming. The apartments were nice (if you could get used to living underground, that was), the food was four-star (Jonesy put on ten pounds, Henry close to twenty), and the movies were always first-run. The atmosphere, however, was just a teensy bit on the Dr Strangelove side. For Henry, those six weeks had been infinitely worse than they had been for Jonesy. Jonesy suffered, but mostly with his derailed hip; his memories of sharing a body with Mr Gray had faded to the consistency of dreams in a remarkably short space of time.

Henry's memories, on the other hand, had only grown stronger. Those of the barn were the worst. The debriefers had been com?passionate, not a Kurtz in the bunch, but Henry couldn't block his thoughts of Bill and Marsha and Darren Chiles, Mr Bomber-Joint?-from-Newton. They often came to visit in his dreams.

So did Owen Underhill.

'Reinforcements,' Jonesy said, setting the bucket of beer down. He then lowered himself into the sagging cane-bottomed rocker beside Henry with a grunt and a grimace.

'One more and I'm done,' Henry said. 'I'm driving back to Portland in an hour or so, and an OUI I don't need.'

'Stay the night,' Jonesy said, watching Noel. The baby had plumped down on the grass beneath the picnic table and now seemed intent upon inserting the remains of his hot dog into his navel.

'With your kids squabbling their way toward midnight and maybe beyond?' Henry asked. 'Getting my pick of Mario Bava horror movies?'

'I've pretty well signed off the fright flicks,' Jonesy said. 'We're having a Kevin Costner festival tonight, starting with The Body?guard.'

'I thought you said no horror movies.'

'Smartass.' Then he shrugged, grinned. 'Whatever you feel.'

Henry raised his beer can. 'Here's to absent friends.'

Jonesy raised his own. 'Absent friends.'

They clinked cans and drank.

'How's Roberta?' Jonesy asked.

Henry smiled. 'Doing very well. I had my doubts at the funeral . . .'

Jonesy nodded. At Duddits's funeral they had flanked her, and that had been a good thing, because Roberta had hardly been able to stand on her own.

'. . . but now she's coming on strong. Talking about opening a craft shop. I think it's a good idea. Of course she misses him. After Alfie died, Duds was her life.'

'He was ours, too,' Jonesy said.

'Yes. I suppose he was.'

'I feel so bad about the way we left him on his own all those years. I mean, he had leukemia and we didn't even fucking know.'

'Sure we knew,' Henry said.

Jonesy looked at him, eyebrows raised.

'Hey, Henry!' Carla called. 'How do you want your burger?'

'Cooked!' he yelled back.

'I will make it so, sire. Would you be a love and get the baby? That hot dog's rapidly turning into a dirt-dog. Take it away from him and give him to his Dad.'

Henry went down the steps, fished Noel out from under the table, and carried him back toward the porch.

'Ennie!' Noel cried brightly. He was now eighteen months old.

Henry stopped, feeling a chill spread up his back. It was as if he had been hailed by a ghost.

'Eee foo, Ennie! Eee foo!' Noel hopped Henry briskly on the nose with his dirt-dog to underline the thrust of his thesis.

'I'll wait for my burger, thanks,' he said, and resumed walking.

'No eee my foo?'

'Ennie eee his own foo, honeybunch. But maybe I ought to have that nasty thing. You can have another one as soon as they're ready.' He tweezed the dirt-dog out of Noel's little hand, then plumped him down in Jonesy's lap and resumed his seat. By the time Jonesy had finished swabbing mustard and ketchup out of his son's belly-button, the kid was almost asleep.

'What did you mean, "Sure we knew"?' Jonesy asked.

'Ah, Jonesy, come on. Maybe we left him, or tried, but do you think Duddits ever left us? After all that happened, do you really believe that?'

Very slowly, Jonesy shook his head.

'Some of it was growing up - growing apart - but some of it was the Richie Grenadeau thing. That worked on us the way the business of the Rapeloews' serving platter worked on Owen Underhill.' Jonesy didn't need to ask what this meant; in Wyoming, they'd had all the time they needed to catch up on each other's story.

'There's an old poem about a man trying to outrun God,' Henry said. "'The Hound of Heaven", it's called. Duddits wasn't God - ?God forbid - but he was our hound. We ran as fast and as far as we could, but - '

'We could never run off the dreamcatcher, could we?' Jonesy said. 'None of us could do that. And then they came. The byrum. Stupid spores in spaceships built by some other race. Is that what they were? All they were?'

'I don't think we'll ever know. Only one question got answered last fall. For centuries we've looked up at the stars and asked ourselves if we're alone in the universe. Well, now we know we're not. Big whoop, huh? Gerritsen . . . do you remember Gerritsen?'

Jonesy nodded. Of course he remembered Terry Gerritsen. Navy psychologist, in charge of the Wyoming debriefing team, always joking about how typical it was that Uncle Sammy would post him to a place where the nearest water was Lars Kilborn's cow-wallow. Gerritsen and Henry had become close - if not quite friends, only because the situation didn't quite allow it. Jonesy and Henry had been well-treated in Wyoming, but they hadn't been guests. Still, Henry Devlin and Terry Gerritsen were professional colleagues, and such things made a difference.

'Gerritsen started by assuming two questions had been answered: that we're not alone in the universe and that we're not the only intelligent beings in the universe. I labored hard to convince him that the second postulate was based on faulty logic, a house built on sand. I don't think I entirely succeeded in getting through, but I may have planted a seed of doubt, at least. Whatever else the byrum may be, they're not shipbuilders, and the race that built the ships may be gone. May in fact be byrum themselves by now.'

'Mr Gray wasn't stupid.'

'Not once he got inside your head, that much I agree with. Mr Gray was you, Jonesy. He stole your emotions, your memories, your taste for bacon - '

'I don't eat it anymore.'

'I'm not surprised. He also stole your basic personality. That included the subconscious kinks. Whatever there is in you that liked the Mario Bava horror movies and the Sergio Leone westerns, whatever it is that got off on the fear and the violence . . . man, Mr Gray loved that shit. And why wouldn't he? Those things are primitive survival tools. As the last of his kind in a hostile environment, he grabbed every damned tool he could lay his hands on.'

'Bullshit.' Jonesy's dislike of this idea was plain on his face.

'It's not. At Hole in the Wall, you saw what you expected to see, which was an X-Files-slash-Close Encounters of the Third Kind alien. You inhaled the byrus. . . I have no doubt there was at least that much physical contact. . . but you were completely immune to it. As, we now know, at least fifty per cent of the human race seems to be. What you caught was an intention . . . a kind of blind imperative. Fuck, there's no word for it, because there's no word for them. But I think it got in because you believed it was there.'

'You are telling me,' Jonesy said, looking at Henry over the top of his sleeping son's head, 'that I almost destroyed the human race because I had a hysterical pregnancy?'

'Oh, no,' Henry said. 'If that had been all, it would have passed off. Would have amounted to no more than a . . . a fugue. But in you, the idea of Mr Gray stuck like a fly in a spiderweb.'

'It stuck in the dreamcatcher.'

'Yes.'

They fell quiet. Soon Carla would call them and they would eat hot dogs and hamburgers, potato salad and watermelon, beneath the blue shield of the infinitely permeable sky.

'And will you say it was all coincidence?' Jonesy asked. 'That they just happened to come down in the Jefferson Tract and I just happened to be there? And not just me, either. You and Peter and Beav. Plus Duddits, Just a couple of hundred miles to the south, don't forget that. Because it was Duddits who held us together.'

'Duddits was always a sword with two edges,' Henry said, 'Josie Rinkenhauer on one - Duddits the finder, Duddits the savior. Richie Grenadeau on the other - Duddits the killer. Only Duddits needed us to help him kin. I'm sure of that. We were the ones with the deeper subconscious layer. We supplied the hate and the fear - the fear that Richie really would get us, the way he promised he would. We always had more of the dark stuff than Duds. His idea of being mean was counting your crib backward, and that was more in the spirit of fun than anything else. Still . . . do you remember the time Pete pulled Duddits's hat over his eyes and Duds walked into the wall?'

Jonesy did, vaguely. Out at the mall, that had been. When they had been young and the mall had been the place to go. Same shit, different day.

'For quite awhile after that, Pete lost whenever we played the Duddits game. Duddits always counted him backward, and none of us tipped to it. We probably thought it was just coincidence, but in light of everything I know now, I tend to doubt that.'

'You think even Duddits knew payback's a bitch?'

'He learned it from us, Jonesy.'

'Duddits gave Mr Gray his foothold. His mindhold.'

'Yeah, but he also gave you a stronghold - a place where you could hide from Mr Gray. Don't forget that.'

No, Jonesy thought, he would never forget that.

'All of it on our end started with Duddits,' Henry said. 'We've been odd, Jonesy, ever since we knew him. You know it's true. The things with Richie Grenadeau were only the big things, the ones that stood out. If you look back over your life, you'll see other things. I'm sure of it.'

'Defuniak,' Jonesy murmured.

'Who's that?'

'The kid I caught cheating just before my accident. I caught him even though I wasn't there on the day the test was given.'

'You see? But in the end, it was Duddits who broke the little gray son of a bitch. I'll tell you something else: I think Duddits saved my life at the end of East Street. I think it's entirely possible that when Kurtz's sidekick looked into the back of the Humvee at us - the first time, I'm talking about - he had a little Duddits in his head saying "Don't worry, old hoss, go on about your business, they dead."'

But Jonesy had not left his earlier thought. 'And are we supposed to believe that the byrum connecting with us - us, of all the people in the world - was just random coincidence? Because that's what Gerritsen believed. He never said it in so many words, but his take on it was clear enough.'

'Why not? There are scientists, brilliant men like Stephen Jay Gould, who believe that our own species exists thanks to an even longer and more improbable chain of coincidences.'

'Is that what you believe?'

Henry lifted his hands. He hardly knew how to reply without invoking God, who had crept back into his life over these last few months. By the back door, as it were, and in the dead of many sleepless nights. But did one have to invoke that old deus ex machina to make sense of this?

'What I believe is that Duddits is us, Jonesy. L'enfant c'est moi . . . toi . . . tout le monde. Race, species, genus; game, set, and match. We are, in our sum, Duddits, and all our noblest aspirations come down to no more than keeping track of the yellow lunchbox and learning to put our shoes on the right way - fit wha, fit neek. Our wickedest motions, in a cosmic sense, come down to no more than counting someone's crib, pegging it backward, then playing dumb about it.'

Jonesy was regarding him with fascination. 'That's either inspir?ing or horrible. I can't tell which.'

'And it doesn't matter.'

Jonesy thought about this, then asked: 'If we're Duddits, who sings to us? Who sings the lullaby, helps us go to sleep when we're sad and scared?'

'Oh, God still does that,' Henry said, and could have kicked himself. There it was, out in spite of all his intentions.

'And did God keep that last weasel out of Shaft 12? Because if that thing had gotten in the water, Henry - '

Technically, the weasel that had incubated inside of Perlmutter had actually been the last, but it was a fine point, a hair that needed no splitting.

'It would have caused trouble, I don't dispute that; for a couple of years, whether or not to tear down Fenway Park would have been the least of Boston's concerns. But destroy us? I don't think so. We were a new thing to them. Mr Gray knew it; those tapes of you under hypnosis '

'Don't talk about those.' Jonesy had listened to two of them, and believed doing so had been the biggest mistake he'd made during his time in Wyoming. Listening to himself speak as Mr Gray - under deep hypnosis to become Mr Gray - had been like listening to a malevolent ghost. There were times when he thought he might be the only man on earth who truly understood what it was to be raped. Some things were better forgotten.

'Sorry.'

Jonesy waved his hand to show it was okay - not a problem ?but he had paled considerably.

'All I'm saying is that, to a greater or lesser degree, we are a species living in the dreamcatcher. I hate the way that sounds, phony transcendentalism, rings on the ear like pure tin, but we don't have the right words for this part of it, either. We may have to invent some eventually, but in the meantime, dreamcatcher will have to do.'

Henry turned in his seat. Jonesy did the same, shifting Noel a little bit on his lap. A dreamcatcher hung over the door to the cabin. Henry had brought it as a house present, and Jonesy had put it up at once, like a Catholic peasant nailing a crucifix to the door of his cottage during a time of vampires.

'Maybe they were just drawn to you,' Henry said. 'To us. The way flowers turn to follow the sun, or the way iron filings line up when they feel the pull of a magnet. We can't tell for sure, because the byrum is so different from us.'

'Will they be back?'

'Oh yes,' Henry said. 'Them or others.'

He looked up at the blue sky of this late-summer day. Some?where in the distance, toward the Quabbin Reservoir, an eagle screamed. 'I think you can take that to the bank. But not today.'

'Guys!' Carla shouted. 'Lunch is ready!'

Henry took Noel from Jonesy. For a moment their hands touched, their eyes touched, and their minds touched - for a moment they saw the line. Henry smiled. Jonesy smiled back. Then they walked down the steps and across the lawn side by side, Jonesy limping, Henry with the sleeping child in his arms, and for that moment the only darkness was their shadows trailing behind them on the grass.

Lovell, Maine

May 29, 2000