McCarthy kicked his boots off-they made clunking sounds on the wooden floor-then stood up and unbuckled his belt. As he pushed his blue jeans down, revealing the lower half of his thermal underwear, the Beav came back in with a ceramic pot from upstairs. He put it down by the head of the bed. “Just in case you have to, you know, urk. Or if you get one of those collect calls you just have to take right away.”
McCarthy looked at him with a dullness Jonesy found alarming-a stranger in what had been his bedroom, somehow ghostly in his baggy long underwear. An ill stranger. The question was just how ill.
“In case you can’t make the bathroom,” the Beav explained. “Which, by the way, is close by. Just bang a left outside the bedroom door, but remember it’s the second door as you go along the wall, okay? If you forget and go in the first one, you’ll be taking a shit in the linen closet.”
Jonesy was surprised into a laugh and didn’t care for the sound of it in the slightest-high and slightly hysterical.
“I feel better now,” McCarthy said, but Jonesy detected absolutely zero sincerity in the man’s voice. And the guy just stood there in his underwear, like an android whose memory circuits have been about three-quarters erased. Before, he had shown some life, if not exactly vivacity; now that was gone, like the color in his cheeks.
“Go on, Rick,” Beaver said quietly. “Lie down and catch some winks. Work on getting your strength back.”
“Yes, okay.” He sat down on the freshly opened bed and looked out the window. His eyes were wide and blank. Jonesy thought the smell in the room was dissipating, but perhaps he was just getting used to it, the way you got used to the smell of the monkeyhouse at the zoo if you stayed in there long enough. “Gosh, look at it snow.”
“Yeah,” Jonesy said. “How’s your stomach now?”
“Better.” McCarthy’s eyes moved to Jonesy’s face. They were the solemn eyes of a frightened child. “I’m sorry about passing gas that way-I never did anything like that before, not even in the Army when it seemed like we ate beans every day-but I feel better.”
“Sure you don’t need to take a leak before you turn in?” Jonesy had four children, and this question came almost automatically. “No. I went in the woods just before you found me. Thank you for taking me in. Thank you both.” “Ah, hell,” Beaver said, and shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “Anybody woulda.” “maybe,” McCarthy said. “And maybe not. In the Bible it says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” Outside, the wind gusted more fiercely yet, making Hole in the Wall shake. Jonesy waited for McCarthy to finish-it sounded as if he had more to say-but the man just swung his feet into bed and pulled the covers up.
From somewhere deep in Jonesy’s bed there came another of those long, rasping farts, and Jonesy decided that was enough for him. It was one thing to let in a wayfaring stranger when he came to your door just ahead of a storm; it was another to stand around while he laid a series of gas-bombs.
The Beaver followed him out and closed the door gently behind him.
5
When Jonesy started to talk, the Beav shook his head, raised his finger to his lips, and led Jonesy across the big room to the kitchen, which was as far as they could get from McCarthy without going into the shed out back.
“Man, that guy’s in a world of hurt,” Beaver said, and in the harsh glow of the kitchen’s fluorescent strips, Jonesy could see just how worried his old friend was. The Beav rummaged into the wide front pocket of his overalls, found a toothpick, and began to nibble on it. In three minutes-the length of time it took a dedicated smoker to finish a cigarette-he would reduce it to a palmful of flax-fine splinters. Jonesy didn’t know how the Beav’s teeth stood up to it (or his stomach), but he had been doing it his whole life.
“I hope you’re wrong, but…” Jonesy shook his head. “Did you ever smell anything like those farts?”
“Nope,” Beaver said. “But there’s a lot more going on with that guy than just a bad stomach.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he thinks it’s November eleventh, for one thing.”
Jonesy had no idea what the Beav was talking about. November eleventh was the day their own hunting party had arrived, bundled into Henry’s Scout, as always.
“Beav, it’s Wednesday. It’s the fourteenth.”
Beaver nodded, smiling a little in spite of himself. The toothpick, which had already picked up an appreciable warp, rolled from one side of his mouth to the other. “I know that. You know that. Rick, he don’t know that. Rick thinks it’s the Lord’s Day.”
“Beav, what exactly did he say to you?” Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been much-it just didn’t take that long to scramble a couple of eggs and heat a can of soup. That started a train of thought, and as Beaver talked, Jonesy ran water to do up the few dishes. He didn’t mind camping out, but he was damned if he was going to live in squalor, as so many men seemed willing to do when they left their homes and went into the woods.
“What he said was they came up on Saturday so they could hunt a little, then spend Sunday working on the roof, which had a couple of leaks in it. He goes, “At least I didn’t have to break the commandment about working on the Sabbath. When you’re lost in the woods, the only thing you have to work on is not going crazy.””
“Huh,” Jonesy said.
“I guess I couldn’t swear in a court of law that he thinks this is the eleventh, but it’s either that or go back a week further, to the fourth, because he sure does think it’s Sunday. And I just can’t believe he’s been out there ten days.”
Jonesy couldn’t, either. But three? Yes. That he could believe. “It would explain something he told me,” Jonesy said. “He-”
The floor creaked and they both jumped a little, looking toward the closed bedroom door on the other side of the big room, but there was nothing to see. And the floors and walls were always creaking out here, even when the wind wasn’t blowing up high. They looked at each other, a little shamefaced.
“Yeah, I’m jumpy,” Beaver said, perhaps reading Jonesy’s face, perhaps picking the thought out of Jonesy’s mind. “Man, you have to admit it’s a little creepy, him turning up right out of the woods like that.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“That fart sounded like he had something crammed up his butt that was dying of smoke inhalation.”
The Beav looked a little surprised at that, as he always did when he said something funny. They began laughing simultaneously, holding onto each other and doing it through open mouths, expelling the sounds as a series of harsh sighs, trying to keep it down, not wanting the poor guy to hear them if he was still awake, hear and know they were laughing at him. Jonesy had a particularly hard time keeping it quiet because the release was so necessary-it had a hysterical seventy to it and he doubled over, gasping and snorting, water running out of his eyes.
At last Beaver grabbed him and yanked him out the door. There they stood coatless in the deepening snow, finally able to laugh out loud with the booming wind to cover the sounds they made.
6
When they went back in again, Jonesy’s hands were so numb he barely felt the hot water when he plunged his hands into it, but he was laughed out and that was good. He wondered again about Pete and Henry-how they were doing and if they’d make it back okay.
“You said it explained some stuff,” the Beav said. He had started another toothpick. “What stuff?”
“He didn’t know snow was coming,” Jonesy said. He spoke slowly, trying to recall McCarthy’s exact words. “’so much for fair and seasonably cold,” I think that’s what he said. But that would make sense if the last forecast he heard was for the eleventh or twelfth. Because until late yesterday, it was fair, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, and seasonably fuckin cold,” Beaver agreed. He pulled a dishtowel with a pattern of faded ladybugs on it from the drawer by the sink and began to dry the dishes. He looked across at the closed bedroom door as he worked. “What else’d he say?”
“That their camp was in Kineo.”
“Kineo? That’s forty, fifty miles west of here. He-” Beaver took the toothpick out of his mouth, examined the bite-marks on it, and put the other end in his mouth. “Oh, I see.”