Except, Jonesy thought, we’re really waiting for Henry. Pete’s just with him. Henry’s the one who’ll know what to do, Beaver was right. Henry’s the one.
But Henry and Pete were late back. It was too early to say something had happened to them, it could just be the snow slowing them down, but Jonesy was starting to wonder if that was all, and guessed the Beav was, too. Neither of them had said anything about it as yet-it was still on the morning side of noon and things might still turn out okay-but the idea was there, floating unspoken between them.
Jonesy would concentrate on the board and the cards for awhile, and then he’d look at the closed bedroom door behind which McCarthy lay, probably sleeping, but oh boy his color had looked bad. Two or three times he saw Beav’s eyes flicking over there, too.
Jonesy shuffled the old Bikes, dealt, gave himself a couple of cards, then set aside the crib when Beaver slid a couple across to him. Beaver cut and then the preliminaries were done; it was time to peg. You can peg and still lose the game, Lamar told them, that Chesterfield always sticking out from the comer of his mouth, his Clarendon Construction cap always pulled down over his left eye like a man who knows a secret he will only tell if the price is right, Lamar Clarendon a no-play workadaddy dead of a heart attack at forty-eight, but if you peg you won’t never get skunked.
No play, Jonesy thought now. No bounce, no play. And then, on the heels of that, the wavering damned voice that day in the hospital: Please stop, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy? And oh man, why was the world so hard? Why were there so many spokes hungry for your fingers, so many gears eager to grab for your guts?
“Jonesy?”
“Huh?”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You shivered.”
“Did I?” Sure he did, he knew he did.
“Yeah.”
“Drafty, maybe. You smell anything?”
“You mean… like him?”
“I wasn’t talking about Meg Ryan’s armpits. Yeah, him.”
“No,” Beaver said. “A couple of times I thought… but it was just imagination. Because those farts, you know-”-smelled so bad. “’Yeah. They did. The burps, too. I thought he was gonna blow chunks, man. For sure.” Jonesy nodded. I’m scared, he thought. Sitting here shit scared in a snowstorm. I want Henry, goddammit. How about that.
“Jonesy?”
“What? Are we ever gonna play this hand or not?”
“Sure, but… do you think Henry and Pete are okay?”
“How the hell do I know?”
“You don’t… have a feeling? Maybe see-”
“I don’t see anything but your face.”
Beav sighed. “But do you think they’re okay?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Yet his eyes stole first to the clock half past eleven, now-and then to the closed bedroom door with McCarthy behind it. In the middle of the room, the dreamcatcher danced and slowly turned in some breath of air. “Just going slow. They’ll be right along. Come on, let’s play.”
“All right. Eight.”
“Fifteen for two.”
“Fuck.” Beaver put a toothpick in his mouth. “Twenty-five.”
“Thirty.”
“Go.”
“One for two.”
“Doodlyfuck!” Beaver gave an exasperated little laugh as Jonesy turned the corner onto Third Street. “You peg my ass off every time you deal.” “I peg your ass when you deal, too,” Jonesy said. “The truth hurts. Come on, play.” “Nine.” “Sixteen.”
“And one for last card,” the Beav said, as if he had won a moral victory. He stood up. “I’m
gonna go out, take a leak.” “Why? We’ve got a perfectly good john, in case you didn’t know it.” “I know it. I just want to see if I can write my name in the snow.” Jonesy laughed. “Are you ever gonna grow up?”Not if I can help it. And keep it down. Don’t wake the guy up.
Jonesy swept the cards together and began to shuffle them as Beaver walked to the back door. He found himself thinking about a version of the game they had played when they were kids. They called it the Duddits Game, and they usually played in the Cavell rec room. It was the same as regular cribbage, except they let Duddits peg. I got ten, Henry would say, peg me ten, Duddits. And Duddits, grinning that loopy grin of his that never failed to make Jonesy feel happy, might peg four or six or ten or two fucking dozen. The rule when you played the Duddits Game was that you never complained, never said Duddits, that’s too many or Duddits, that’s not enough. And man, they’d laugh. Mr and Mrs Cavell, they’d laugh, too, if they happened to be in the room, and Jonesy remembered once, they must have been fifteen, sixteen, and Duddits of course was whatever he was, Duddits Cavell’s age was never going to change, that was what was so beautiful and scary about him, and this one time Alfie Cavell had started crying, saying Boys, if you only knew what this means, to me and to the missus, if you only knew what it means to Douglas-
“Jonesy.” Beaver’s voice, oddly flat. Cold air came in through the open kitchen door, raising a rash of gooseflesh on Jonesy’s arms.
“Close the door, Beav, was you born in a barn?”
“Come over here. You need to look at this.”
Jonesy got up and went to the door. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. The backyard was filled with enough animals to stock a petting zoo. Deer, mostly, a couple of dozen assorted does and bucks. But moving with them were raccoons, waddling woodchucks, and a contingent of squirrels that seemed to move effortlessly along the top of the snow. From around the side of the shed where the Arctic Cat and assorted tools and engine parts were stored, came three large canines Jonesy at first mistook for wolves. Then he saw the old discolored length of clothesline hanging around the neck of one of them and realized they were dogs, probably gone feral. They were all moving east, up the slope from The Gulch. Jonesy saw a pair of good-sized wildcats moving between two little groups of deer and actually rubbed his eyes, as if to clear them of a mirage. The cats were still there. So were the deer, the woodchucks, the coons and squirrels. They moved steadily, barely giving the men in the doorway a glance, but without the panic of creatures running before a fire. Nor was there any smell of fire. The animals were simply moving cast, vacating the area.
“Holy Christ, Beav,” Jonesy said in a low, awed voice. Beaver had been looking up. Now he gave the animals a quick, cursory glance and lifted his gaze to the sky again. “Yeah. Now look up there.”
Jonesy looked up and saw a dozen glaring lights-some red, some blue-white-dancing around up there. They lit the clouds, and he suddenly understood that they were what McCarthy had seen when he was lost. They ran back and forth, dodging each other or sometimes briefly merging, making a glow so bright he couldn’t look at it without squinting. “What are they?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Beaver said, not looking away. On his pale face, the stubble stood out with almost eerie clarity. “But the animals don’t like it. That’s what they’re trying to get away from.”
2
They watched for ten, perhaps fifteen minutes, and Jonesy became aware of a low humming, like the sound of an electrical transformer. Jonesy asked Beaver if he heard it, and the Beav simply nodded, not taking his eyes off the dancing lights in the sky, which to Jonesy looked to be the size of manhole covers. He had an idea that it was the sound the animals wanted to escape, not the lights, but said nothing. Speech all at once seemed hard; he felt a debilitating fear grip him, something feverish and constant, like a low-grade flu.
At last the lights began to dim, and although Jonesy hadn’t seen any of them wink out, there seemed to be fewer of them. Fewer animals, too, and that nagging hum was fading.
Beaver started, like a man awakening from a deep sleep. “Camera,” he said. “I want to get some pictures before they’re gone.” “I don’t think you’ll be able to-”
“I got to try!” Beaver almost shouted. Then, in a lower tone of voice: “I got to try. At least I can get some of the deers and such before they…” He was turning away, heading back across the kitchen, probably trying to remember what heap of dirty clothes he’d left his old battered camera under, when he stopped suddenly. In a flat and decidedly unbeaverish voice, he said, “Oh, Jonesy. I think we got a problem.”
Jonesy took a final look at the remaining lights, still fading (smaller, too), then turned around. Beaver was standing beside the sink, looking across the counter and the big central room.