The other parents respond, too-it is as if they have just been waiting to be asked. The calls started shortly after Duddits and his friends trooped out the door (to play, Roberta assumed, and someplace close by, because Henry’s old jalopy is still parked in the driveway), and by the time the boys return, there are almost two dozen people crammed into the Cavells” living room, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. The man currently addressing them is a guy Henry has seen before, a lawyer named Dave Bocklin. His son, Kendall, sometimes plays with Duddits.
Ken Bocklin also has Down’s, and he’s a good enough guy, but he’s not like Duds. Get serious, though-who is?
The boys stand at the entrance to the living room, Josie among them. She is once more carrying her great big purse, with BarbieKen tucked away inside. Even her face is almost clean, because Beaver, seeing all the cars, has done a little work on it with his handkerchief out in the driveway. (“Tell you what, it made me feel funny,” the Beav confides later, after all the hoopdedoo and fuckaree has died down. “Here I’m cleanin up this girl, she’s got the bod of a Playboy Bunny and the brain, roughly speaking, of a lawn-sprinkler.”) At first no one sees them but Mr Bocklin, and Mr Bocklin doesn’t seem to realize what he’s looking at, because he goes right on talking.
“So what we need to do, folks, is divide up into a number of teams, let’s say three couples to each… each team… and we’ll… we… we Mr Bocklin slows like one of those toys you need to wind up and then just stands there in front of the Cavells” TV, staring. There’s a nervous rustle among the hastily assembled parents, who don’t understand what can be wrong with him-he was going along so confidently.
“Joise,” he says in a flat, uninflected voice utterly unlike his usual confident courthouse boom.
“Yes,” says Hector Rinkenhauer, “that’s her name. What’s up, Dave? Are you all r-”
“Josie,” Dave says again, and raises a trembling hand. To Henry (and hence to Owen, who is seeing this through Henry’s eyes) he looks like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing at Ebenezer Scrooge’s grave.
One face turns… two… four… Alfie Cavell’s eyes, huge and unbelieving behind his specs… and finally, Mrs Rinkenhauer’s. “Hi, Mom,” Josie says nonchalantly. She holds up her purse. “Duddie found my BarbieKen. I was stuck in a-” The rest is blotted out by the woman’s shriek of joy. Henry has never heard such a cry in his life, and although it is wonderful, it is also somehow terrible. “Fuck me Freddy,” Beaver says… low, under his breath. Jonesy is holding Duddits, who has been frightened by the scream.
Pete looks at Henry and gives a little nod: We did okay.
And Henry nods back. Yeah, we did.
It may not have been their finest hour, but surely it is a close second. And as Mrs Rinkenhauer sweeps her daughter into her arms, now sobbing, Henry taps Duddits on the arm. When Duddits turns to look at him, Henry kisses him softly on the cheek. Good old Duddits, Henry thinks. Good old-
6
“This is it, Owen,” Henry said quietly. “Exit 27.”
Owen’s vision of the Cavell living room popped like a soap bubble and he looked at the looming sign: KEEP RIGHT FOR EXIT 27-KANSAS STREET. He could still hear the woman’s happy, unbelieving cries echoing in his ears.
“You okay?” Henry asked.
“Yeah. At least I guess so.” He turned up the exit ramp, the Humvee shouldering its way through the snow. The clock built into the dashboard had gone as dead as Henry’s wristwatch, but he thought he could see the faintest lightening in the air. “Right or left at the top of the ramp? Tell me now, because I don’t want to risk stopping.”
“Left, left.”
Owen swung the Hummer left under a dancing blinker-light, rode it through another skid, and then moved south on Kansas Street. It had been plowed, and not that long ago, but it was drifting in again already.
“Snow’s letting up,” Henry said.
“Yeah, but the wind’s a bitch. You’re looking forward to seeing him, aren’t you? Duddits.”
Henry grinned. “A little nervous about it, but yeah.” He shook his head. “Duddits, man… Duddits just makes you feel good. He’s a tribble. You’ll see for yourself I just wish we weren’t busting in like this at the crack of dawn.” Owen shrugged. Can’t do anything about it, the gesture said. “They’ve been over here on the west side for four years, I guess, and I’ve never even been to the new place.” And, without even realizing, went on in mindspeak: They moved after Alfie died. Did you-And then, instead of words, a picture: people in black under black umbrellas. A graveyard in the rain. A coffin on trestles with R.I.P. ALFIE carved on top. No, Henry said, feeling ashamed. None of us did.
But Henry didn’t know why they hadn’t gone, although a phrase occurred to him: The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on. Duddits had been an important (he guessed the word he actually wanted was vital) part of their childhood. And once that link was broken, going back would have been painful. Painful was one thing, uselessly painful another. He understood something now. The images he associated with his depression and his growing certainty of suicide-the trickle of milk on his father’s chin, Barry Newman hustling his doublewide butt out of the office-had been hiding another, more potent, image all along: the dreamcatcher. Hadn’t that been the real source of his despair? The grandiosity of the dreamcatcher concept coupled to the banality of the uses to which the concept had been put? Using Duddits to find Josie Rinkenhauer had been like discovering quantum physics and then using it to build a video game. Worse, discovering that was really all quantum physics was good for. Of course they had done a good thing-without them, Josie Rinkenhauer would have died in that pipe like a rat in a rainbarrel. But-come on-it wasn’t as if they’d rescued a future Nobel Peace Prize winner-
I can’t follow everything that just went through your head, Owen said, suddenly deep in Henry’s mind, but it sounds pretty goddam arrogant. Which street?Stung, Henry glared at him. “We haven’t been back to see him lately, okay? Could we just leave it at that?” “Yes,” Owen said. “But we all sent him Christmas cards, okay? Every year, which is how I know they moved to
Dearborn Street, 41 Dearborn Street, West Side Derry, make your right three streets up.”
“Okay. Calm down.”
“Fuck your mother and die.”
“Henry-”
“We just fell out of touch. It happens. Probably never happened to a Mr Perfection like your honored self, but to the rest of us… the rest of us…” Henri looked down, saw that his fists were clenched, and forced them to roll open.
“Okay, I said.”
“Probably Mr Perfection stays in touch with all his junior-high-school friends, right? You guys probably get together once a year to snap bras, play your Motley Crue records, and eat Tuna Surprise just like they used to serve in the cafeteria.”
“I’m sorry if I upset you.”
“Oh, bite me. You act like we fucking abandoned him.” Which, of course, was pretty much what they had done.
Owen said nothing. He was squinting through the swirling snow, looking for the Dearborn Street sign in the pallid gray light of early morning… and there it was, just up ahead. A plow passing along Kansas Street had plugged the end of Dearborn, but Owen thought the Humvee could beat its way past.
“It’s not like I stopped thinking about him,” Henry said. He started to continue by thought, then switched back to words again. Thinking about Duddits was too revealing. “We all thought about him. In fact, Jonesy and I were going to go see him this spring. Then Jonesy had his accident, and I forgot all about it. Is that so surprising?”
“Not at all,” Owen said mildly. He swung the wheel hard to the right, flicked it back the other way to control the skid, then floored the accelerator. The Hummer hit the packed and crusty wall of snow hard enough to throw both of them forward against their seatbelts. Then they were through, Owen jockeying the wheel to keep from hitting the drifted-in cars parked on either side of the street.
“I don’t need a guilt-trip from someone who was planning to barbecue a few hundred civilians,” Henry grumbled. Owen stamped on the brake with both feet, throwing them forward into their harnesses again, this time hard enough to lock them. The Humvee skidded to a diagonal stop in the street. “Shut the fuck up.”
Don’t be talking shit you don’t understand.
“I’m likely going to be a”
dead man because of
“you, so why don’t you just keep all your fucking”