HE BEAV

1

'You know I can't call anyone, don't you?' Jonesy said. 'The phone lines don't come anywhere near here. There's a genny for the electric, but that's all.'

McCarthy, only his head showing above the comforter, nodded. 'I was hearing the generator, but you know how it is when you're lost - noises are funny. Sometimes the sound seems to be coming from your left or your right, then you'd swear it's behind you and you better turn back.'

Jonesy nodded, although he did not, in fact, know how it was. Unless you counted the week or so immediately after his accident, time he had spent wandering in a fog of drugs and pain, he had never been lost.

'I'm trying to think what'd be the best thing,' Jonesy said. 'I guess when Pete and Henry get back, we better take you out. How many in your party?'

It seemed McCarthy had to think. That, added to the unsteady way he had been walking, solidified Jonesy's impression that the man was in shock. He wondered that one night lost in the woods would do that; he wondered if it would do it to him.

'Four,' McCarthy said, after that minute to think. 'Just like you guys. We were hunting in pairs. I was with a friend of mine, Steve Otis. He's a lawyer like me, down in Skowhegan. We're all from Skowhegan, you know, and this week for us . . . it's a big deal.' Jonesy nodded, smiling. 'Yeah. Same here.'

'Anyway, I guess I just wandered off.' He shook his head. 'I don't know, I was hearing Steve over on my right, sometimes seeing his vest through the trees, and then I . . . I just don't know. I got thinking about stuff, I guess - one thing the woods are great for is thinking about stuff - and then I was on my own. I guess I tried to backtrack but then it got dark . . .' He shook his head yet again, 'It's all mixed up in my mind, but yeah - there were four of us, I guess that's one thing I'm sure of Me and Steve and Nat Roper and Nat's sister, Becky.'

'They must be worried sick.'

McCarthy looked first startled, then apprehensive. This was clearly a new idea for him. 'Yeah, they must be. Of course they are. Oh dear, Oh gee.'

Jonesy had to restrain a smile at this. When he got going, McCarthy sounded a little like a character in that movie, Fargo.

'So we better take you out. If, that is - '

'I don't want to be a bother - '

'We'll take you out. If we can. I mean, this weather came in fast.'

'It sure did,' McCarthy said bitterly. 'You'd think they could do better with all their darn satellites and doppler radar and gosh knows what else. So much for fair and seasonably cold, huh?'

Jonesy looked at the man under the comforter, just the flushed face and the thatch of thinning brown hair showing, with some perplexity. The forecasts he had heard - he, Pete, Henry, and the Beav - had been full of the prospect of snow for the last two days. Some of the prognosticators hedged their bets, saying the snow could change over to rain, but the fellow on the Castle Rock radio station that morning (WCAS was the only radio they could get up here, and even that was thin and jumbled with static) had been talking about a fast - moving Alberta Clipper, six or eight inches, and maybe a nor'easter to follow, if the temperatures stayed down and the low didn't go out to sea. Jonesy didn't know where McCarthy had gotten his weather forecasts, but it sure hadn't been WCAS. The guy was just mixed up, that was most likely it, and had every right to be.

'You know, I could put on some soup. How would that be, Mr McCarthy?'

McCarthy smiled gratefully. 'I think that would be pretty fine," he said. 'My stomach hurt last night and something fierce this morning, but I feel better now.'

'Stress,' Jonesy said. 'I would have been puking my guts. Probably filling my pants, as well.'

'I didn't throw up,' McCarthy said. 'I'm pretty sure I didn't. But . . .' Another shake of the head, it was like a nervous tic with him. 'I don't know. The way things are jumbled, it's like a nightmare I had.'

'The nightmare's over,' Jonesy said. He felt a little foolish saying such a thing - a little auntie-ish - but it was clear the guy needed reassurance.

'Good,' McCarthy said. 'Thank you. And I would like some soup.'

'There's tomato, chicken, and I think maybe a can of Chunky Sirloin. What do you fancy?'

'Chicken,' McCarthy said. 'My mother always said chicken soup was the thing when you're not feeling your best.'

He grinned as he said it, and Jonesy tried to keep the shock off his face. McCarthy's teeth were white and even, really too even to be anything but capped, even the man's age, which had to be forty-five or thereabouts. But at least four of them were missing - the canines on top (what Jonesy's father had called 'the vampire teeth') and two right in front on the bottom - Jonesy didn't know what those were called. He knew one thing, though: McCarthy wasn't aware they were gone. No one who knew about such gaps in the line of his teeth could expose them so unselfconsciously, even under circumstances like these. Or so Jonesy believed. He felt a sick little chill rush through his gut, a telephone call from nowhere. He turned toward the kitchen before McCarthy could see his face change and wonder what was wrong. Maybe ask what was wrong.

'One order chicken soup coming right up. How about a grilled cheese to go with it?'

'If it's no trouble. And call me Richard, will you? Or Rick, that's even better. When people save my life, I like to get on a first-name basis with them as soon as possible.'

'Rick it is, for sure,' Better get those teeth fixed before you step in front of another Jury, Rick.

The feeling that something was wrong here was very strong. It was that click, just as almost guessing McCarthy's name had been. He was a long way from wishing he'd shot the man when he had the chance, but he was already starting to wish McCarthy had stayed the hell away from his tree and out of his life.

2

He had the soup on the stove and was making the cheese sandwiches when the first gust of wind arrived - a big whoop that made the cabin creak and raised the snow in a furious sheet. For a moment even the black scrawled shapes of the trees in The Gulch were erased, and there was nothing outside the big window but white: it was as if someone had set up a drive-in movie screen out there. For the first time, Jonesy felt a thread of unease not just about Pete and Henry, presumably on their way back from Gosselin's in Henry's Scout, but for the Beaver. You would have said that if anybody knew these woods it would have been the Beav, but nobody knew anything in a whiteout - all bets were off, that was another of his ne'er-do-well father's sayings, probably not as good as you can't make yourself be lucky, but not bad. The sound of the genny might help Beav find his way, but as McCarthy had pointed out, sounds had a way of deceiving you. Especially if the wind started kicking up, as it had now apparently decided to do.

His mom had taught him the dozen basic things he knew about cooking, and one of them had to do with the art of making grilled cheese sandwiches. Lay in a little mouseturds first, she said - mouseturds being Janet Jones for mustard - and then butter the goddam bread, not the skillet. Butter the skillet and all's you got's fried bread with some cheese in it. He had never understood how the difference between where you put the butter, on the bread or in the skillet, could change the ultimate results, but he always did it his mother's way, even though it was a pain in the ass buttering the tops of the sandwiches while the bottoms cooked. No more would he have left his rubber boots on once he was in the house . . . because, his mother had always said, 'they draw your feet.' He had no idea just what that meant, but even now, as a man going on forty, he took his boots off as soon as he was in the door, so they wouldn't draw his feet.

'I think I might have one of these babies myself,' Jonesy said, and laid the sandwiches in the skillet, butter side down. The soup had begun to simmer, and it smelled fine - like comfort.

'Good idea. I certainly hope your friends are all right.'

'Yeah,' Jonesy said. He gave the soup a stir. 'Where's your place?'

'Well, we used to hunt in Mars Hill, at a place Nat and Becky's uncle owned, but some god-bless'd idiot burned it down two summers ago. Drinking and then getting careless with the old smokes, that's what the Fire Marshal said, anyway.' Jonesy nodded. 'Not an uncommon story.'

'The insurance paid the value of the place, but we had nowhere to hunt. I thought probably that'd be the end of it, and then Steve found this nice place over in Kineo. I think it's probably an unincorporated township, just another part of the Jefferson Tract, but Kineo's what they call it, the few people who live there. Do you know where I mean?'

'I know it,' Jonesy said, speaking through lips that felt oddly numb. He was getting another of those telephone calls from nowhere. Hole in the Wall was about twenty miles east of Gosselin's. Kineo was maybe thirty miles to the west of the market. That was fifty miles in all. Was he supposed to believe that the man sitting on the couch with just his head sticking out of the down comforter had wandered fifty miles since becoming lost the previous afternoon? It was absurd. It was impossible.

'Smells good,' McCarthy said.

And it did, but Jonesy no longer felt hungry.

3

He was just bringing the chow over to the couch when he heard feet stamping on the stone outside the door. A moment later the door opened and Beaver came in. Snow swirled around his legs in a dancing mist.

'Jesus-Christ-bananas,' the Beav said. Pete had once made a list of Beav-isms, and Jesus-Christ-bananas was high on it, along with such standbys as doodlyfuck and Kiss my bender. They were exclamations both Zen and profane. 'I thought I was gonna end up spendin the night out there, then I saw the light.' Beav raised his hands roofward, fingers spread. 'Seen de light, lawd, yessir, praise Je - ' His glasses started to unfog then, and he saw the stranger on the couch. He lowered his hands, slowly, then smiled. That was one of the reasons Jonesy had loved him ever since grade-school, although the Beav could be tiresome and wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier, by any means: his first reaction to the unplanned and unexpected wasn't a frown but a smile.

'Hi,' he said. 'I'm Joe Clarendon. Who're you?'

'Rick McCarthy,' he said, and got to his feet. The comforter tumbled off him and Jonesy saw he had a pretty good potbelly pooching out the front of his sweater. Well, he thought, nothing strange, about that, at least, it's the middle-aged man's disease, and it's going to kill us in our millions during the next twenty years or so.

McCarthy stuck out his hand, started to step forward, and almost tripped over the fallen comforter. If Jonesy hadn't reached out and grabbed his shoulder, steadying him, McCarthy probably would have fallen forward, very likely cleaning out the coffee-table on which the food was now set. Again Jonesy was struck by the man's queer ungainliness - it made him think of himself a little that past spring, as he had learned to walk all over again. He got a closer look at the patch on the guy's cheek, and sort of wished he hadn't. It wasn't frostbite at all. It looked like a skin-tumor of some kind, or perhaps a portwine stain with stubble growing out of it.

'Who, whoa, shake it but don't break it,' Beaver said, springing forward. He grabbed McCarthy's hand and pumped it until Jonesy thought McCarthy would end up swan-diving into the coffee-table after all. He was glad when the Beav - all five-feet-six of him, with snow still melting into all that long black hippie hair - stepped back. The Beav was still smiling, more broadly than ever. With the shoulder-length hair and the thick glasses, he looked like either a math genius or a serial killer. In fact, he was a carpenter.

'Rick here's had a time of it,' Jonesy said. 'Got lost yesterday and spent last night in the woods.'

Beaver's smile stayed on but became concerned. Jonesy had an idea what was coming next and willed Beaver not to say it ?he had gotten the impression that McCarthy was a fairly religious man who might not care much for profanity - but of course asking Beaver to clean up his mouth was like asking the wind not to blow.

'Bitch-in-a-buzzsaw!' he cried now. 'That's fuckin terrible! Sit down! Eat! You too, Jonesy.'

'Nah,' Jonesy said, 'you go on and eat that. You're the one who just came in out of the snow.'

'You sure?'

'I am. I'll just scramble myself some eggs. Rick can catch you up on his story.' Maybe it'll make more sense to you than it does to me, he thought.

'Okay.' Beaver took off his Jacket (red) and his vest (orange, of course). He started to toss them on the woodpile, then thought better of it. 'Wait, wait, got something you might want.' He stuck his hand deep into one of the pockets of his down jacket, rummaged, and came out with a paperback book, considerably bent but seemingly none the worse for wear otherwise. Little devils with pitchforks danced across the cover - Small Vices, by Robert Parker. It was the book Jonesy had been reading in the stand.

The Beav held it out to him, smiling. 'I left your sleeping-bag, but I figured you wouldn't be able to sleep tonight unless you knew who the fuck done it.'

'You shouldn't have gone up there,' Jonesy said, but he was touched in a way only Beaver could touch him. The Beav had come back through the blowing snow and hadn't been able to make out if Jonesy was up in the tree-stand or not, not for sure. He could have called, but for the Beav, calling wasn't enough, only seeing was believing.

'Not a problem, Beaver said, and sat down next to McCarthy, who was looking at him as a person might look at a new and rather exotic kind of small animal.

'Well, thanks,' Jonesy said. 'You get around that sandwich. I'm going to do eggs.' He started away, then stopped. 'What about Pete and Henry? You think they'll make it back okay?'

he Beav opened his mouth, but before he could answer the wind gasped around the cabin again, making the walls creak and rising to a grim whistle in the eaves.

'Aw, this is just a cap of snow,' Beaver said when the gust died away.

'They'll make it back. Getting out again if there comes a real norther, that might be a different story.' He began to gob?ble the grilled cheese sandwich. Jonesy went over to the kitchen to scramble some eggs and heat up another can of soup. He felt better about McCarthy now that Beaver was here. The truth was he always felt better when the Beav was around. Crazy but true.

4

By the time he got the eggs scrambled and the soup hot, McCarthy was chatting away to Beaver as if the two of them had been friends for the last ten years. If McCarthy was offended by the Beav's litany of mostly comic profanity, that was outweighed by Beav's considerable charm. 'There's no explaining it,' Henry had once told Jonesy. 'He's a tribble, that's all - you can't help liking him. It's why his bed is never empty - it sure isn't his looks women respond to.'

Jonesy brought his eggs and soup into the living area, working not to limp - it was amazing how much more his his hip hurt in bad weather, he had always thought that was an old wives' tale but apparently it was not - and sat in one of the chairs at the end of the couch. McCarthy had been doing more talking than eating, it seemed. He'd barely touched his soup, and had eaten only half of his grilled cheese.

'How you boys doin?' Jonesy asked. He shook pepper onto his eggs and fell to with a will - his appetite had made a complete comeback, it seemed.

'We're two happy whoremasters,' Beaver said, but although he sounded as chipper as ever, Jonesy thought he looked worried, perhaps even alarmed. 'Rick's been telling me about his adventures. It's as good as a story in one of those men's magazines they had in the barber shop when I was a kid.' He turned back to McCarthy, still smiling - that was the Beav, always smiling - and flicked a hand through the heavy fall of his black hair. 'Old Man Castonguay was the barber on our side of Derry when I was a kid, and he scared me so fuckin bad with those clippers of his that I been stayin away from em ever since.'

McCarthy gave a weak little smile but made no reply. He picked up the other half of his cheese sandwich, looked at it, then put it back down again. The red mark on his cheek glowed like a brand. Beaver, meanwhile, rushed on, as if he was afraid of what McCarthy might say if given half a chance. Outside it was snowing harder than ever, blowing, too, and Jonesy thought of Henry and Pete out there, probably on the Deep Cut Road by now, in Henry's old Scout.

'Not only did Rick here just about get eaten up by something in the middle of the night - a bear, he thinks it was - he lost his rifle, too. A brand new Remington .30-.30, fuckin A, you won't never see that again, not a chance in a hundred thousand.'

'I know,' McCarthy said. The color was fading out of his cheeks again, that leaden look coming back in. 'I don't even remember when I put it down, or - '

There was a sudden low rasping noise, like a locust. Jonesy felt the hair on the back of his neck stiffen, thinking it was something caught in the fireplace chimney. Then he realized it was McCarthy. Jonesy had heard some loud farts in his time, some long ones, too, but nothing like this. It seemed to go on forever, although it couldn't have been more than a few seconds. Then the smell hit.

McCarthy had picked up his spoon; now he dropped it back into his barely touched soup and raised his right hand to his blemished cheek in an almost girlish gesture of embarrassment. 'Oh gosh, I'm sorry,' he said.

'Not a bit, more room out than there is in,' Beaver said, but that was just instinct running his mouth, instinct and the habits of a lifetime - Jonesy could see he was as shocked by that smell as Jonesy was himself It wasn't the sulfurous rotten-egg odor that made you laugh and roll your eyes and wave your hand in front of your face, yelling Ah, Jesus, who cut the cheese? Nor one of those methane swamp-gas farts, either. It was the smell Jonesy had detected on McCarthy's breath, only stronger - a mixture of ether and overripe bananas, like the starter-fluid you shot into your carburetor on a subzero morning.

'Oh dear, that's awful,' McCarthy said. 'I am so darned sorry.'

'It's all right, really' Jonesy said, but his stomach had curled up into a ball, like something protecting itself from assault. He wouldn't be finishing his own early lunch; no way in hell could he finish it. He wasn't prissy about farts as a rule, but this one really reeked.

The Beav got up from the couch and opened a window, letting in a swirl of snow and a draft of blessedly fresh air. 'Don't you worry about it, partner . . . but that is pretty ripe. What the hell you been eatin? Woodchuck turds?'

'Bushes and moss and other stuff, I don't know just what,' McCarthy said. 'I was just so hungry, you know, I had to eat something, but I don't know much about that sort of thing, never read any of those books by Euell Gibbons . . . and of course it was dark.' He said this last almost as if struck by an inspiration, and Jonesy looked up at Beaver, catching his eye to see if the Beav knew what Jonesy did - McCarthy was lying. McCarthy didn't know what he'd eaten in the Woods, or if he had eaten anything at all. He just wanted to explain that ghastly unexpected frog's croak. And the stench which had followed it.

The wind gusted again, a big, gaspy whoop that sent a fresh skein of snow in through the open window, but at least it was turning the air over, and thank God for that.

McCarthy leaned forward so suddenly he might have been propelled by a spring, and when he hung his head forward between his knees, Jonesy had a good idea of what was coming next; so long Navajo rug, it's been good to know ya. The Beav clearly thought the same; he pulled back his legs, which had been splayed out before him, to keep them from being splattered.

But instead of vomit, what came out of McCarthy was a long, low buzz - the sound of a factory machine which has been put under severe strain. McCarthy's eyes bulged from his face like glass marbles, and his cheeks were so taut that little crescents of shadow appeared under the comers of his eyes. It went on and on, a rumbling, rasping noise, and when it finally ceased, the genny out back seemed far too loud.

'I've heard some rm'ghty belches, but that's the all-time blue ribbon winner,' Beav said. He spoke with quiet and sincere respect.

McCarthy leaned back against the couch, eyes closing, mouth downturned in what Jonesy took for embarrassment, pain, or both. And once again he could smell that aroma of bananas and ether, a fermenting active smell, like something which has just started to go over.

'Oh God, I am so sorry,' McCarthy said without opening his eyes. 'I've been doing that all day, ever since light. And my stomach hurts again.'

Jonesy and the Beav shared a silent, concerned look.

'You know what I think?' Beaver asked. 'I think you need to lie down and take you a little sleep. You were probably awake all night, listening to that pesky bear and God knows what else. You're tired out and stressed out and fuck-a-duck knows what else out. You just need some shuteye, a few hours and you'll be right as the goddam rain.'

McCarthy looked at Beaver with such wretched gratitude that Jonesy felt a little ashamed to be seeing it. Although McCarthy's complexion was still leaden, he had begun to break a sweat - great big beads that formed on his brow and temples, and then ran down his cheeks like clear oil. This in spite of the cold air now circulating in the room.

'You know,' he said, 'I bet you're right. I'm tired, that's all it is. My stomach hurts, but that part's just stress. And I was eating all sorts of things, bushes and just . . . gosh, oh dear, I don't know . . . all sorts of things.' He scratched his cheek. 'Is this darn thing on my face bad? Is it bleeding?'

'No,' Jonesy said. 'Just red.'

'It's a reaction,' McCarthy said dolefully. 'I get the same thing from peanuts. I'll lie down. That's the ticket, all right.'

He got to his feet, then tottered. Beaver and Jonesy both reached for him, but McCarthy steadied on his feet before either of them could take hold. Jonesy could have sworn that what he had taken for a middle-aged potbelly was almost gone. Was it possible? Could the man have passed that much gas? He didn't know. All he knew for sure was that it had been a mighty fart and an even mightier belch, the sort of thing you could yarn on for twenty years or more, starting off We used to go up to Beaver Clarendon's camp the first week of hunting season every year, and one November - it was '01, the year of the big fall storm - this fella wandered into camp . . . Yes, it would make a good story, people would laugh about the big fart and the big burp, people always laughed at stories about farts and burps. He wouldn't tell the part about how he had come within eight ounces of press on a Garand's trigger of taking McCarthy's life, though. No, he wouldn't want to tell that part. Would he?

Pete and Henry were doubling, and so Beaver led McCarthy to the other downstairs bedroom, the one Jonesy had been using. The Beav shot him a little apologetic look, and Jonesy shrugged. It was the logical place, after all. Jonesy could double in with Beav tonight - Christ knew they'd done it enough as kids - and in truth, he wasn't sure McCarthy could have managed the stairs, anyway. He liked the man's sweaty, leaden look less and less.

Jonesy was the sort of man who made his bed and then buried it - books, papers, clothes, bags, assorted toiletries. He swept all this off as quick as he could, then turned back the coverlet.

'You need to take a squirt, partner?' the Beav asked.

McCarthy shook his head. He seemed almost hypnotized by the clean blue sheet Jonesy had uncovered. Jonesy was once again struck by how glassy the man's eyes were. Like the eyes of a stuffed trophy head. Suddenly and unbidden, he saw his living room back in Brookline, that upscale municipality next door to Boston. Braided rugs, early American furniture . . . and McCarthy's head mounted over the fireplace. Bagged that one up in Maine, he would tell his guests at cocktail parties. Big bastard, dressed out at one-seventy.

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the Beav was looking at him with something like alarm.

'Twinge in the hip,' he said. 'Sorry. Mr McCarthy - Rick - you'll want to take off your sweater and pants. Boots too, of course.

McCarthy looked around at him like a man roused from a dream. 'Sure,' he said. 'You bet.'

'Need help?' Beaver asked.

'No, gosh no.' McCarthy looked alarmed or amused or both. 'I'm not that far gone.'

'Then I'll leave Jonesy to supervise.'

Beaver slipped out and McCarthy began to undress, starting by pulling his sweater off over his head. Beneath it he wore a red-and-black hunter's shirt, and beneath that a thermal undershirt. And yes, there was less gut poking out the front of that shirt, Jonesy was sure of it.

Well . . . almost sure. Only an hour ago, he reminded himself, he had been sure McCarthy's coat was the head of a deer.

McCarthy sat down in the chair beside the window to take off his shoes, and when he did there was another fart - not as long as the first one, but just as loud and hoarse. Neither of them commented on it, or the resulting smell, which was strong enough in the little room to make Jonesy's eyes feel like watering.

McCarthy kicked his boots off - they made clunking sounds on the wooden floor - then stood up and unbuckled his belt. As he pushed his blue jeans down, revealing the lower half of his thermal underwear, the Beav came back in with a ceramic pot from upstairs. He put it down by the head of the bed. 'Just in case you have to, you know, urk. Or if you get one of those collect calls you just have to take right away.'

McCarthy looked at him with a dullness Jonesy found alarming - a stranger in what had been his bedroom, somehow ghostly in his baggy long underwear. An ill stranger. The question was just how ill.

'In case you can't make the bathroom,' the Beav explained. 'Which, by the way, is close by. Just bang a left outside the bedroom door, but remember it's the second door as you go along the wall, okay? If you forget and go in the first one, you'll be taking a shit in the linen closet.'

Jonesy was surprised into a laugh and didn't care for the sound of it in the slightest - high and slightly hysterical.

'I feel better now,' McCarthy said, but Jonesy detected absol?utely zero sincerity in the man's voice. And the guy just stood there in his underwear, like an android whose memory circuits have been about three-quarters erased. Before, he had shown some life, if not exactly vivacity; now that was gone, like the color in his cheeks.

'Go on, Rick,' Beaver said quietly. 'Lie down and catch some winks. Work on getting your strength back.'

'Yes, okay.' He sat down on the freshly opened bed and looked out the window. His eyes were wide and blank. Jonesy thought the smell in the room was dissipating, but perhaps he was just getting used to it, the way you got used to the smell of the monkeyhouse at the zoo if you stayed in there long enough. 'Gosh, look at it snow.'

'Yeah,' Jonesy said. 'How's your stomach now?'

'Better.' McCarthy's eyes moved to Jonesy's face. They were the solemn eyes of a frightened child. 'I'm sorry about passing gas that way - I never did anything like that before, not even in the Army when it seemed like we ate beans every day - but I feel better.'

'Sure you don't need to take a leak before you turn in?' Jonesy had four children, and this question came almost auto?matically.

'No. I went in the woods just before you found me. Thank you for taking me in. Thank you both.'

'Ah, hell,' Beaver said, and shuffled his feet uncomfortably. 'Anybody woulda.'

'Maybe,' McCarthy said. 'And maybe not. In the Bible it says, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock."' Outside, the wind gusted more fiercely yet, making Hole in the Wall shake. Jonesy waited for McCarthy to finish - it sounded as if he had more to say - but the man just swung his feet into bed and pulled the covers up.

From somewhere deep in Jonesy's bed there came another of those long, rasping farts, and Jonesy decided that was enough for him. It was one thing to let in a wayfaring stranger when he came to your door just ahead of a storm; it was another to stand around while he laid a series of gas-bombs.

The Beaver followed him out and closed the door gently behind him.

5

When Jonesy started to talk, the Beav shook his head, raised his finger to his lips, and led Jonesy across the big room to the kitchen, which was as far as they could get from McCarthy without going into the shed out back.

'Man, that guy's in a world of hurt,' Beaver said, and in the harsh glow of the kitchen's fluorescent strips, Jonesy could see just how worried his old friend was. The Beav rummaged into the wide front pocket of his overalls, found a toothpick, and began to nibble on it. In three minutes - the length of time it took a dedicated smoker to finish a cigarette - he would reduce it to a palmful of flax-fine splinters. Jonesy didn't know how the Beav's teeth stood up to it (or his stomach), but he had been doing it his whole life.

'I hope you're wrong, but . . .' Jonesy shook his head. 'Did you ever smell anything like those farts?'

'Nope,' Beaver said. 'But there's a lot more going on with that guy than just a bad stomach.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, he thinks it's November eleventh, for one thing.'

Jonesy had no idea what the Beav was talking about. November eleventh was the day their own hunting party had arrived, bundled into Henry's Scout, as always.

'Beav, it's Wednesday. It's the fourteenth.'

Beaver nodded, smiling a little in spite of himself. The tooth?pick, which had already picked up an appreciable warp, rolled from one side of his mouth to the other. 'I know that. You know that. Rick, he don't know that. Rick thinks it's the Lord's Day.'

'Beav, what exactly did he say to you?' Whatever it was, it couldn't have been much - it just didn't take that long to scramble a couple of eggs and heat a can of soup. That started a train of thought, and as Beaver talked, Jonesy ran water to do up the few dishes. He didn't mind camping out, but he was damned if he was going to live in squalor, as so many men seemed willing to do when they left their homes and went into the woods.

'What he said was they came up on Saturday so they could hunt a little, then spend Sunday working on the roof, which had a couple of leaks in it. He goes, "At least I didn't have to break the commandment about working on the Sabbath. When you're lost in the woods, the only thing you have to work on is not going crazy."'

'Huh,' Jonesy said.

'I guess I couldn't swear in a court of law that he thinks this is the eleventh, but it's either that or go back a week further, to the fourth, because he sure does think it's Sunday. And I just can't believe he's been out there ten days.'

Jonesy couldn't, either. But three? Yes. That he could believe. 'It would explain something he told me,' Jonesy said. 'He - '

The floor creaked and they both jumped a little, looking toward the closed bedroom door on the other side of the big room, but there was nothing to see. And the floors and walls were always creaking out here, even when the wind wasn't blowing up high. They looked at each other, a little shamefaced.

'Yeah, I'm jumpy,' Beaver said, perhaps reading Jonesy's face, perhaps picking the thought out of Jonesy's mind. 'Man, you have to admit it's a little creepy, him turning up right out of the woods like that.'

'Yeah, it is.'

'That fart sounded like he had something crammed up his butt that was dying of smoke inhalation.'

The Beav looked a little surprised at that, as he always did when he said something funny. They began laughing simultaneously, holding onto each other and doing it through open mouths, expelling the sounds as a series of harsh sighs, trying to keep it down, not wanting the poor guy to hear them if he was still awake, hear and know they were laughing at him. Jonesy had a particularly hard time keeping it quiet because the release was so necessary - it had a hysterical seventy to it and he doubled over, gasping and snorting, water running out of his eyes.

At last Beaver grabbed him and yanked him out the door. There they stood coatless in the deepening snow, finally able to laugh out loud with the booming wind to cover the sounds they made.

6

When they went back in again, Jonesy's hands were so numb he barely felt the hot water when he plunged his hands into it, but he was laughed out and that was good. He wondered again about Pete and Henry - how they were doing and if they'd make it back okay.

'You said it explained some stuff,' the Beav said. He had started another toothpick. 'What stuff?'

'He didn't know snow was coming,' Jonesy said. He spoke slowly, trying to recall McCarthy's exact words. "'So much for fair and seasonably cold," I think that's what he said. But that would make sense if the last forecast he heard was for the eleventh or twelfth. Because until late yesterday, it was fair, wasn't it?'

'Yeah, and seasonably fuckin cold,' Beaver agreed. He pulled a dishtowel with a pattern of faded ladybugs on it from the drawer by the sink and began to dry the dishes. He looked across at the closed bedroom door as he worked. 'What else'd he say?'

'That their camp was in Kineo.'

'Kineo? That's forty, fifty miles west of here. He - ' Beaver took the toothpick out of his mouth, examined the bite-marks on it, and put the other end in his mouth. 'Oh, I see.'

'Yeah. He couldn't have done all that in a single night, but if he was out there for three days - '

' - and four nights, if he got lost on Saturday afternoon that makes four nights - '

'Yeah, and four nights. So, supposing he kept pretty much headed dead east that whole time . . .' Jonesy calculated fifteen miles a day. 'I'd say it's possible.'

'But how come he didn't freeze?' Beaver had lowered his voice to a near-whisper, probably without being aware of it. 'He's got a nice heavy coat and he's wearin longies, but nights have been in the twenties everywhere north of the county line since Halloween. So you tell me how he spends four nights out there and doesn't freeze. Doesn't even look like he's got any frostbite, just that mess on his cheek.'

'I don't know. And there's something else,' Jonesy said. 'How come he doesn't have the start of a beard?'

'Huh?' Beaver's mouth opened. The toothpick hung from his lower lip. Then, very slowly, he nodded. 'Yeah. All he's got is stubble.'

'I'd say less than a day's growth.'

'I guess he was shavin, huh?'

'Right,' Jonesy said, picturing McCarthy lost in the woods, scared and cold and hungry (not that he looked like he'd missed many meals, that was another thing), but still kneeling by a stream every morning, breaking the ice with a booted foot so he could get to the water beneath, then taking his trusty Gillette from . . . where? His coat pocket?

'And then this morning he lost his razor, which is why he's got the stubble,' the Beav said. He was smiling again, but there didn't seem to be a lot of humor in it.

'Yeah. Same time he lost his gun. Did you see his teeth?'

Beaver made a what-now grimace.

'Four gone. Two on top, two on the bottom. He looks like the What-me-worry kid that's always on the front of Mad magazine.'

'Not a big deal, buddy. I've got a couple of AWOL choppers myself.' Beaver hooked back one comer of his mouth, baring his left gum in a one-sided grin Jonesy could have done without. 'Eee? Ight ack ere.'

Jonesy shook his head. It wasn't the same. 'The guy's a lawyer, Beav - he's out in public all the time, his looks are part of his living. And these babies are right out in front. He didn't know they were gone. I'd swear to it.'

'You don't suppose he got exposed to radiation or something, do you?' Beaver asked uneasily. 'Your teeth fall out when you get fuckin radiation poisonin, I saw that in a movie one time. One of the ones you're always watching, those monster shows. You don't suppose it's that, do you? Maybe he got that red mark the same time.'

'Yeah, he got a dose when the Mars Hill Nuclear Power Plant blew up,' Jonesy said, and Beaver's puzzled expression made him immediately sorry for the crack. 'Beav, when you get radiation poisoning, I think your hair falls out, too.'

The Beaver's face cleared. 'Yeah, that's right. The guy in the movie ended up as bald as Telly what's-his-fuck, used to play that cop on TV.' He paused. 'Then the guy died. The one in the movie, I mean, not Telly, although now that I think of it - '

'This guy's got plenty of hair,' Jonesy interrupted. Let Beaver get off on a tangent and they would likely never get back to the point. He noticed that, out of the stranger's presence, neither of them called him Rick, or even McCarthy. Just 'the guy,' as if they subconsciously wanted to turn him into something less important than a man - something generic, as if that would make it matter less if . . . well, if.

'Yeah,' Beaver said. 'He does, doesn't he? Plenty of hair.'

'He must have amnesia.'

'Maybe, but he remembers who he is, who he was with, shit like that. Man, that was some trumpet - blast he blew, wasn't it? And the stink! Like ether!'

'Yeah,' Jonesy said. 'I kept thinking of starter fluid. Diabetics get a smell when they're tipping over. I read that in a mystery novel, I think.'

'Is it like starter fluid?'

'I can't remember.'

They stood there looking at each other, listening to the wind. It crossed Jonesy's mind to tell Beaver about the lightning the guy claimed to have seen, but why bother? Enough was enough.

'I thought he was going to blow his cookies when he leaned forward like that,' the Beav said. 'Didn't you?'

Jonesy nodded.

'And he don't look well, not at all well.'

'No.'

Beaver sighed, tossed his toothpick in the trash, and looked out the window, where the snow was coming down harder and heavier than ever. He flicked his fingers through his hair. 'Man, I wish Henry and Pete were here. Henry especially.'

'Beav, Henry's a psychiatrist.'

'I know, but he's the closest thing to a doctor we got - and I think that fellow needs doctoring.'

Henry actually was a physician - had to be, in order to get his certificate of shrinkology - but he'd never practiced anything except psychiatry, as far as Jonesy knew. Still, he understood what Beaver meant.

'Do you still think they'll make it back, Beav?'

Beaver sighed. 'Half an hour ago I would have said for sure, but it's really comin heavy. I think so.' He looked at Jonesy somberly; there was not much of the usually happy-go-lucky Beaver Clarendon in that look. 'I hope so,' he said.