Henry opened the door, got out into the snow… and his feet immediately flew out from under him. He went on his butt with a thump and scraped his back on the Hummer’s high splashboard. Fuck me Freddy. He got up, slipped again, grabbed the top of the open door, and managed to stay afoot this time. He shuffled his feet around to the back of the vehicle he’d come in, never taking his eyes from its twin, parked behind. He could still see the thing inside, thrashing and shuffling, dining on the driver.
“Stay where you are, beautiful,” Henry said, and began to laugh. The laughter sounded crazy as bell, but that didn’t stop him. “Lay a few eggs. I am the eggman, after all. Your friendly neighborhood eggman. Or how about a copy of How to Be Your Own Best Friend? I got one.”
Laughing so hard now he could barely speak. Sliding in the wet and treacherous snow like a kid let out of school and on his way to the nearest sledding hill. Holding onto the flank of the Hummer as best he could, except there was really nothing to hold onto once you were south of the doors. Watching the thing shift and move… and then he couldn’t see it anymore. Oh-oh. Where the hell had it gotten to? In one of Jonesy’s dopey movies, this is where the scary music would start, Henry thought. Attack of the Killer Shit-Weasels. That got him laughing again.
He was around to the back of the vehicle now. There was a button you could push to unlatch the rear window… unless, of course, it was locked. Probably wasn’t, though. Hadn’t Owen gotten into the back this way? Henry couldn’t remember. Couldn’t for the life of him. He was clearly not being his own best friend.
Still cackling, fresh tears gushing out of his eyes, he thumbed the button and the back window popped open. Henry yanked it wider and looked in. Guns, thank God. Army carbines like the kind that Owen had taken on his last patrol. Henry grabbed one and examined it. Safety, check. Fire-selection switch, check. Clip marked U.S. ARMY 5.56 CAL 120 RNDS, check.
“So simple even a byrum can do it,” Henry said, and laughed some more. He bent over, holding his stomach and slipping around in the slop, trying not to fall again. His legs ached, his back ached, his heart ached most of all… and still he laughed. He was the eggman, he was the eggman, he was the laughing hyena.
He walked around to the driver’s side of Kurtz’s Humvee, gun raised (safety in what he devoutly hoped was the OFF position), spooky music playing in his head, but still laughing. There was the gasoline hatch; no mistaking that. But where was Gamera, The Terror from Beyond Space?
As if it had heard his thought-and, Henry realized, that was perfectly likely-the weasel smashed headfirst against the rear window. The one that was, thankfully, unbroken. Its head was smeared with blood, hair, and bits of flesh. Its dreadful sea-grape eyes stared into Henry’s. Did it know it had a way out, an escape hatch? Perhaps. And perhaps it understood that using it would likely mean a quick death.
It bared its teeth.
Henry Devlin, who had once won the American Psychiatric Association’s Compassionate Caring Award for a New York Times op-ed piece called “The End of Hate”, bared his own in return. It felt good. Then he gave it the finger. For Beaver. And for Pete. That felt good, too.
When he raised the carbine, the weasel-stupid, perhaps, but not utterly stupid-dove out of sight. That was cool; Henry had never had the slightest intention of trying to shoot it through the window. He did like the idea of it down there on the floor, though. Close to the gas as you want to get, darling, he thought. He thumbed the carbine’s selector-switch to full auto and fired a long burst into the gas tank.
The sound of the gun was deafening. A huge ragged hole appeared where the gasoline port had been, but for a moment there was nothing else. So much for the Hollywood version of how shit like this works, Henry thought, and then heard a hoarse whisper of sound, rising to a throaty hiss. He took two steps backward and his feet shot out from under him again. This time falling quite likely saved his eyesight and perhaps his life. The back of Kurtz’s Humvee exploded only a second later, fire lashing out from underneath in big yellow petals. The rear tires jumped out of the snow. Glass sprayed through the snowy air, all of it going over Henry’s head. Then the heat began to bake him and he crawled away rapidly, dragging the carbine by its strap and laughing wildly. There was a second explosion and the air was filled with whirling hooks of shrapnel.
Henry got to his feet like a man climbing a ladder, using the lower branches of a handy tree as rungs. He stood, panting and laughing, legs aching, back aching, neck with an odd sprung feeling. The entire back half of Kurtz’s Humvee was engulfed in flames. He could hear the thing inside, chattering furiously as it burned.
He made a wide circle to the passenger side of the blazing Humvee and aimed the carbine at the broken window. He stood there for a moment, frowning, then realized why this seemed so stupid. All the windows in the Humvee were broken now; all the glass but the windshield. He began to laugh again. What a dork he was! What a total dork!
Through the hell of flames in the Humvee’s cabin, he could still see the weasel lurching back and forth like a drunk. How many rounds did he have left in the clip if the fucking thing did come out? Fifty? Twenty? Five? However many rounds there were, it would have to be enough. He wouldn’t risk retreating to Owen’s Humvee for another clip.
But the thing never came out.
Henry stood guard for five minutes, then stretched it to ten. The snow fell and the Humvee burned, pouring black smoke into the white sky. Henry stood there thinking of the Derry Days Parade, Gary U.S. Bonds singing “New Orleans”, and here comes a tall man on stilts, here comes the legendary cowboy, and how excited Duddits had been, jumping right up and down. Thinking of Pete, standing outside DJHS, hands cupped, pretending to smoke, waiting for the rest of them. Pete, whose plan had been to captain NASA’s first manned Mars expedition. Thinking of Beaver and his Fonzie jacket, Beav and his toothpicks, Beav singing to Duddits, Baby’s boat’s a silver dream. Beav hugging Jonesy at Jonesy’s wedding and saying Jonesy had to be happy, he had to be happy for all of them.
Jonesy.
When Henry was absolutely sure the weasel was dead-incinerated-he started up the path to see if Jonesy was still alive. He didn’t hold out much hope of that… but he discovered he hadn’t given up hope, either.
33
Only pain pinned Jonesy to the world, and at first he thought the haggard, sooty-cheeked man kneeling beside him had to be a dream, or a final figment of his imagination. Because the man appeared to be Henry.
“Jonesy? Hey, Jonesy, are you there?” Henry snapped his fingers in front of Jonesy’s eyes. “Earth to Jonesy.”
“Henry, is it you? Is it really?”
“It’s me,” Henry said. He glanced at the dog still partly stuck into the crack at the top of Shaft 12, then back at Jonesy. He brushed Jonesy’s sweat-soaked hair off his forehead with infinite tenderness.
“Man, it took you…” Jonesy began, and then the world wavered. He closed his eyes, concentrated hard, then opened them again. “… took you long enough to get back from the store. Did you remember the bread””
“Yeah, but I lost the hot dogs.”
“What a fuckin pisser.” Jonesy took a long and wavering breath.
“I’ll go myself, next time.”
“Kiss my bender, pal,” Henry said, and Jonesy slipped into darkness smiling.
Epilogue
LABOR 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.