He was drinking a beer on the porch of Jonesy and Carla’s cottage in Ware, the one on the shore of Pepper Pond. The south end of the Quabbin Reservoir was about four miles northwest of where he sat. And East Street, of course.
The hand holding the can of Coors only had three fingers. He’d lost the two on the end to frostbite, perhaps while skiing out the Deep Cut Road from Hole in the Wall, perhaps while dragging Jonesy back to the remaining Humvee on a lashed-together travois. Last fall had been his season to drag people through the snow, it seemed, and with mixed results.
Near the little scrape of beach, Carla Jones was tending a barbecue. Noel, the baby, was toddling around the picnic table to her left, diaper sagging. He was waving a charred hot dog cheerily in one hand. The other three Jones kids, ranging in ages from eleven to three, were in the water, splashing around and yelling at each other. Henry supposed there might be some value to that Biblical imperative about being fruitful and multiplying, but it seemed to him that Jonesy and Carla had taken it to absurd lengths.
Behind him, the screen door clapped. Jonesy came out, carrying a bucket filled with iced beers. His limp wasn’t all that bad; this time the doc had just said fuck the original equipment and had replaced the whole thing with steel and Teflon. It would have come to that, anyway, the doc had told Jonesy, but if you’d been a little more careful, Chief, you could’ve gotten another five years out of the old one. He’d had the operation in February, shortly after Henry and Jonesy’s six-week “vacation” with the military intelligence and Psy0ps people had ended.
The military folks had offered to throw in the hip replacement courtesy of Uncle Sam-sort of a coda to their debriefing-but Jonesy had refused with thanks, saying he wouldn’t want to deprive his own orthopedist of the work, or his insurance company of the bill.
By then, all the two of them had wanted was to get out of Wyoming. The apartments were nice (if you could get used to living underground, that was), the food was four-star (Jonesy put on ten pounds, Henry close to twenty), and the movies were always first-run. The atmosphere, however, was just a teensy bit on the Dr Strangelove side. For Henry, those six weeks had been infinitely worse than they had been for Jonesy. Jonesy suffered, but mostly with his derailed hip; his memories of sharing a body with Mr Gray had faded to the consistency of dreams in a remarkably short space of time.
Henry’s memories, on the other hand, had only grown stronger. Those of the barn were the worst. The debriefers had been compassionate, not a Kurtz in the bunch, but Henry couldn’t block his thoughts of Bill and Marsha and Darren Chiles, Mr Bomber-Joint-from-Newton. They often came to visit in his dreams.
So did Owen Underhill.
“Reinforcements,” Jonesy said, setting the bucket of beer down. He then lowered himself into the sagging cane-bottomed rocker beside Henry with a grunt and a grimace. “One more and I’m done,” Henry said. “I’m driving back to Portland in an hour or so, and an OUI I don’t need.” “Stay the night,” Jonesy said, watching Noel. The baby had plumped down on the grass beneath the picnic table and now seemed intent upon inserting the remains of his hot dog into his navel. “With your kids squabbling their way toward midnight and maybe beyond?” Henry asked. “Getting my pick of Mario Bava horror movies?” “I’ve pretty well signed off the fright flicks,” Jonesy said. “We’re having a Kevin Costner
festival tonight, starting with The Bodyguard.”
“I thought you said no horror movies.”
“Smartass.” Then he shrugged, grinned. “Whatever you feel.”
Henry raised his beer can. “Here’s to absent friends.”
Jonesy raised his own. “Absent friends.”
They clinked cans and drank.
“How’s Roberta?” Jonesy asked.
Henry smiled. “Doing very well. I had my doubts at the funeral…”
Jonesy nodded. At Duddits’s funeral they had flanked her, and that had been a good thing, because Roberta had hardly been able to stand on her own.
“… but now she’s coming on strong. Talking about opening a craft shop. I think it’s a good idea. Of course she misses him. After Alfie died, Duds was her life.”
“He was ours, too,” Jonesy said.
“Yes. I suppose he was.”
“I feel so bad about the way we left him on his own all those years. I mean, he had leukemia and we didn’t even fucking know.”
“Sure we knew,” Henry said.
Jonesy looked at him, eyebrows raised.
“Hey, Henry!” Carla called. “How do you want your burger?”
“Cooked!” he yelled back.
“I will make it so, sire. Would you be a love and get the baby? That hot dog’s rapidly turning into a dirt-dog. Take it away from him and give him to his Dad.”
Henry went down the steps, fished Noel out from under the table, and carried him back toward the porch.
“Ennie!” Noel cried brightly. He was now eighteen months old.
Henry stopped, feeling a chill spread up his back. It was as if he had been hailed by a ghost.
“Eee foo, Ennie! Eee foo!” Noel hopped Henry briskly on the nose with his dirt-dog to underline the thrust of his thesis.
“I’ll wait for my burger, thanks,” he said, and resumed walking.
“No eee my foo?”
“Ennie eee his own foo, honeybunch. But maybe I ought to have that nasty thing. You can have another one as soon as they’re ready.” He tweezed the dirt-dog out of Noel’s little hand, then plumped him down in Jonesy’s lap and resumed his seat. By the time Jonesy had finished swabbing mustard and ketchup out of his son’s belly-button, the kid was almost asleep.
“What did you mean, “Sure we knew”?” Jonesy asked.
“Ah, Jonesy, come on. Maybe we left him, or tried, but do you think Duddits ever left us? After all that happened, do you really believe that?”
Very slowly, Jonesy shook his head.
“Some of it was growing up-growing apart-but some of it was the Richie Grenadeau thing. That worked on us the way the business of the Rapeloews” serving platter worked on Owen Underhill.” Jonesy didn’t need to ask what this meant; in Wyoming, they’d had all the time they needed to catch up on each other’s story.
“There’s an old poem about a man trying to outrun God,” Henry said. “’The Hound of Heaven”, it’s called. Duddits wasn’t God-God forbid-but he was our hound. We ran as fast and as far as we could, but-”
“We could never run off the dreamcatcher, could we?” Jonesy said. “None of us could do that. And then they came. The byrum. Stupid spores in spaceships built by some other race. Is that what they were? All they were?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know. Only one question got answered last fall. For centuries we’ve looked up at the stars and asked ourselves if we’re alone in the universe. Well, now we know we’re not. Big whoop, huh? Gerritsen… do you remember Gerritsen?”
Jonesy nodded. Of course he remembered Terry Gerritsen. Navy psychologist, in charge of the Wyoming debriefing team, always joking about how typical it was that Uncle Sammy would post him to a place where the nearest water was Lars Kilborn’s cow-wallow. Gerritsen and Henry had become close-if not quite friends, only because the situation didn’t quite allow it. Jonesy and Henry had been well-treated in Wyoming, but they hadn’t been guests. Still, Henry Devlin and Terry Gerritsen were professional colleagues, and such things made a difference.
“Gerritsen started by assuming two questions had been answered: that we’re not alone in the universe and that we’re not the only intelligent beings in the universe. I labored hard to convince him that the second postulate was based on faulty logic, a house built on sand. I don’t think I entirely succeeded in getting through, but I may have planted a seed of doubt, at least. Whatever else the byrum may be, they’re not shipbuilders, and the race that built the ships may be gone. May in fact be byrum themselves by now.”
“Mr Gray wasn’t stupid.” “Not once he got inside your head, that much I agree with. Mr Gray was you, Jonesy. He stole your emotions, your memories, your taste for bacon-” “I don’t eat it anymore.”
“I’m not surprised. He also stole your basic personality. That included the subconscious kinks. Whatever there is in you that liked the Mario Bava horror movies and the Sergio Leone westerns, whatever it is that got off on the fear and the violence… man, Mr Gray loved that shit. And why wouldn’t he? Those things are primitive survival tools. As the last of his kind in a hostile environment, he grabbed every damned tool he could lay his hands on.”