Chapter Two
THE 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.”