“Roberta,” Henry said. “Why didn’t you tell any of us this was happening? Why didn’t you call?”
“Why didn’t you ever come?”
Henry might have asked another of his own-Why didn’t Duddits call?-but the very question would have been a lie. Duddits had called repeatedly since March, when Jonesy had had his accident. He thought of Pete, sitting in the snow beside the overturned Scout, drinking beer and writing DUDDITS over and over again in the snow. Duddits, marooned in Never-Never Land and dying there, Duddits sending his messages and receiving back only silence. Finally one of them had come, but only to take him away with nothing but a bag of pills and his old yellow lunchbox. There was no kindness in the dreamcatcher. They had meant only good for Duddits, even on that first day; they had loved him honestly. Still, it came down to this.
“Take care of him, Henry.” Her gaze shifted to Owen. “You too. Take care of my son.”
Henry said, “We’ll try.”
15
There was no place to turn around on Dearborn Street; every driveway had been plowed under. In the strengthening morning light, the sleeping neighborhood looked like a town deep in the Alaskan tundra. Owen threw the Hummer in reverse and went flying backward down the street, the bulky vehicle’s rear end wagging clumsily from side to side. Its high steel bumper smacked some snow-shrouded vehicle parked at the curb, there was a tinkle of breaking glass, and then they again burst through the frozen roadblock of snow at the intersection, swerving wildly back into Kansas Street, pointing toward the turnpike. During all this Duddits sat in the back seat, perfectly complacent, his lunchbox on his lap.
Henry, why did Duddits say Jonesy wants war? What war?
Henry tried to send the answer telepathically, but Owen could no longer hear him. The patches of byrus on Owen’s face had all turned white, and when he scratched absently at his cheek, he pulled clumps of the stuff out with his nails. The skin beneath looked chapped and irritated, but not really hurt. Like getting over a cold, Henry marvelled. Really not more serious than that.
“He didn’t say war, Owen.”
“War,” Duddits agreed from the back seat. He leaned forward to look at the big green sign reading 95 SOUTHBOUND. “Onesy ont war.
Owen’s brow wrinkled; a dust of dead byrus flakes sifted down like dandruff. “What-”
“Water,” Henry said, and reached back to pat Duddit’s bony knee. “Jonesy wants water is what he was trying to say. Only it’s not Jonesy who wants it. It’s the other one. The one he calls Mr Gray.”
16
Roberta went into Duddits’s room and began to pick up the litter of his clothes-the way he left them around drove her crazy, but she supposed she wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore. She had been at it scarcely five minutes before a weakness overcame her legs, and she had to sit in his chair by the window. The sight of the bed, where he had come to spend more and more of his time, haunted her. The dull morning light on the pillow, which still bore the circular indentation of his head, was inexpressibly cruel.
Henry thought she’d let Duddits go because they believed the future of the whole world somehow hinged on finding Jonesy, and finding him fast. But that wasn’t it. She had let him go because it was what Duddits wanted. The dying got signed baseball caps; the dying also got to go on trips with old friends.
But it was hard.
Losing him was so hard.
She put her handful of tee-shirts to her face in order to blot out the sight of the bed and there was his smell: Johnson’s shampoo, Dial soap, and most of all, worst of all, the arnica cream she put on his back and legs when his muscles hurt.
In her desperation she reached out to him, trying to find him with the two men who had come like the dead and taken him away, but his mind was gone.
He’s blocked himself off from me, she thought. They had enjoyed (mostly enjoyed) their own ordinary telepathy over the years, perhaps only different in minor degree from the telepathy most mothers of special children experienced (she had heard the word rapport over and over again at the support-group meetings she and Alfie sometimes attended), but that was gone now. Duddits had blocked himself off, and that meant he knew something terrible was going to happen.
He knew.
Still holding the shirts to her face and inhaling his scent, Roberta began to cry again.
17
Kurtz had been okay (mostly okay) until they saw the road-flares and blue police lightbars flashing in the grim morning light, and beyond it, a huge semi lying on its side like a dead dinosaur. Standing out front, so bundled up his face was completely invisible, was a cop waving them toward an exit ramp.
“Fuck!” Kurtz spat. He had to fight an urge to draw the nine and just start spraying away. He knew that would be disaster-there were other cops running around the stalled semi-but he felt the urge, all but ungovernable, just the same. They were so close! Closing in, by the hands of the nailed-up Christ! And then stopped like this! “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“What do you want me to do, boss?” Freddy had asked. Impassive behind the wheel, but he had drawn his own weapon-an automatic rifle-across his lap. “If I nail it, I think we can skate by on the night. Gone in sixty seconds.”
Again Kurtz had to fight the urge to just say Yeah, punch it, Freddy, and if one of those bluesuits gets in the way, bust his gut for him. Freddy might get by… but he might not. He wasn’t the driver he thought he was, that Kurtz had already ascertained. Like too many pilots, Freddy had the erroneous belief that his skills in the sky were mirrored by skills on the ground. And even if they did get by, they’d be marked. And that was not acceptable, not after General Yellow-Balls Randall had hollered Blue Exit. His Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card had been revoked. He was strictly a vigilante now.
Got to do the smart thing, he thought. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.
“Be a good boy and just go the way he’s pointing you,” Kurtz said. “In fact, I want you to give him a wave and a big thumb’s-up when you take the ramp. Then keep moving south and get back on the turnpike at your earliest opportunity.” He sighed. “Lord love a duck.” He leaned forward, close enough to Freddy to see the whitening fuzz of Ripley in his right ear. He whispered, ardent as a lover, “And if you ditch us, laddie-buck, I’ll put a round in the back of your neck.” Kurtz touched the place where the soft nape joined the hard skull. “Right here.”
Freddy’s wooden-Indian face didn’t change. “Yes, boss.” Next, Kurtz had gripped the now-nearl-comatose Perlmutter by the shoulder and had shaken him until Pearly’s eyes at last fluttered open.
“Lea” me “lone, boss. Need to sleep.”
Kurtz placed the muzzle of his nine-millimeter against the back of his former aide’s head. “Nope. Rise and shine, buck. Time for a little debriefing.”
Pearly had groaned, but he had also sat up. When he opened his mouth to say something, a tooth had tumbled out onto the front of his parka. The tooth had looked perfect to Kurtz. Look, Ma, no cavities.
Pearly said that Owen and his new buddy were still stopped, still in Derry. Very good. Yummy. Not so good fifteen minutes later, as Freddy sent the Humvee trudging down another snow-covered entrance ramp and back onto the turnpike. This was Exit 28, only one interchange away from their target, but a miss was as good as a mile.
“They’re on the move again,” Perlmutter said. He sounded weak and washed out.
“Goddammit!” He was full of rage-sick and useless rage at Owen Underhill, who now symbolized (at least to Abe Kurtz) the whole sorry, busted operation.
Pearly uttered a deep groan, a sound of utter, hollow despair. His stomach had begun to rise again. He was clutching it, his cheeks wet with perspiration. His normally unremarkable face had become almost handsome in his pain.
Now he let another long and ghastly fart, a passage of wind which seemed to go on and on. The sound of it made Kurtz think of gadgets they’d constructed at summer camp a thousand or so years ago, noisemakers that consisted of tin cans and lengths of waxed string. Bullroarers, they’d called them.
The stench that filled the Humvee was the smell of the red cancer growing in Pearly’s sewage-treatment plant, first feeding on his wastes, then getting to the good stuff. Pretty horrible. Still, there was an upside. Freddy was getting better and Kurtz had never caught the damned Ripley in the first place (perhaps he was immune; in any case, he had taken off the mask and tossed it indifferently in back fifteen minutes ago). And Pearly, although undoubtedly ill, was also valuable, a man with a really good radar jammed up his ass. So Kurtz patted Perlmutter on the shoulder, ignoring the stench. Sooner or later the thing inside him would get out, and that would likely mean an end to Pearly’s usefulness, but Kurtz wouldn’t worry about that until he had to.