“What if-” WHUP! WHUP! WHUP! And from behind the door there came more of those wrenching, liquid sounds, followed by another cry from McCarthy. “Get out there!” Jonesy shouted. “Flag those fuckers down! I don’t care if you have to drop trou and dance the hootchie-koo, just get them to land!”Okay-” Beaver had started to turn away. Now he jerked and screamed.
A number of things Jonesy had been quite successfully not thinking about suddenly leaped out of the closet and came running into the light, capering and leering. When he wheeled around however, all he saw was a doe standing in the kitchen with its head extended over the counter, examining them with its mild brown eyes. Jonesy took a deep, gasping breath and slumped back against the wall.
“Eat snot and rot,” Beaver breathed. Then he advanced on the doe, clapping his hands. “Bug out, Mabel! Don’t you know what time of year this is? Go on! Put an egg in your shoe and beat it! Make like an amoeba and split!”
The deer stayed where she was for a moment, eyes widening in an expression of alarm that was almost human. Then she whirled around, her head skimming the line of pots and ladles and tongs hanging over the stove. They clanged together and some fell from their hooks, adding to the clangor. Then she was out the door, little white tail flipping.
Beaver followed, pausing long enough to look at the cluster of droppings on the linoleum with a jaundiced eye.
4
The mixed migration of animals had pretty well dried up to stragglers. The doe Beav had scared out of their kitchen leaped over a limping fox that had apparently lost one paw to a trap and then disappeared into the woods. Then, from above the low-hanging clouds just beyond the snowmobile shed, a lumbering helicopter the size of a city bus appeared. It was brown, with the letters ANG printed on the side in white.
Ang? Beaver thought. What the hell is Ang? Then he realized: Air National Guard, probably out of Bangor.
It dipped, nose-heavy. Beaver stepped into the back yard, waving his arms over his head. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, little help here! Little help, guys!”
The helicopter descended until it was no more than seventy-five feet off the ground, close enough to raise the fresh snow in a cyclone. Then it moved toward him, carrying the snow cyclone with it.
“Hey! We got a hurt guy here! Hurt guy!” jumping up and down now like one of those numbass bootscooters on The Nashville Network, feeling like a jerk but doing it anyway. The chopper drifted toward him, low but not coming any lower, not showing any sign of actually landing, and a horrid idea filled him. Beav didn’t know if it was something he was getting from the guys in the chopper or just paranoia. All he could be sure of was that he suddenly felt like something pinned to the center ring of a target in a shooting gallery: hit the Beaver and win a clock-radio.
The chopper’s side door slid back. A man holding a bullhorn and wearing the bulkiest parka Beaver had ever seen came tilting out toward him. The parka and the bullhorn didn’t bother the Beav. What bothered him was the oxygen mask the guy was wearing over his mouth and nose. He’d never heard of fliers needing to wear oxygen masks at an attitude of seventy-five feet. Not, that was, if the air they were breathing was okay.
The man in the parka spoke into the bullhorn the words conning out loud and clear over the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter’s rotors but sounding strange anyway, partly because of the amplification but mostly, Beaver thought, because of the mask. It was like being addressed by some strange robot god.
“HOW MANY ARE YOU?” the god-voice called down. “SHOW ME ON YOUR FINGERS.”
Beaver, confused and frightened, at first thought only of himself and Jonesy; Henry and Pete weren’t back from the store, after all. He raised two fingers like a guy giving the peace sign.
“STAY WHERE YOU ARE!” the man leaning out of the helicopter boomed in his robot god’s voice. “THIS AREA IS UNDER TEMPORARY QUARANTINE! SAY AGAIN, THIS AREA IS UNDER TEMPORARY QUARANTINE! YOU MUST NOT LEAVE!”
The snowfall was thinning, but now the wind kicked up and blew a sheet of the snow which had been sucked up by the copter’s rotors into Beaver’s face. He slitted his eyes against it and waved his arms. He sucked in freezing snow, spat out his toothpick to keep from yanking that down his throat, too (it was how he would die, his mother constantly predicted, by pulling a toothpick down his throat and choking on it), and then screamed: “What do you mean, quarantine? We got a sick guy down here, you got to come and get him!”
Knowing they couldn’t hear him under the big whup-whup-whup of the rotor blades, he didn’t have any fucking bullhorn to boost his voice, but yelling anyway. And as the words sick guy passed through his lips, he realized he’d given the guy in the chopper the wrong number of fingers-they were three, not two. He started to raise that number of fingers, then thought of Henry and Pete. They weren’t here yet but unless something had happened to them, they would be-so how many were they? Two was the wrong answer, but was three the right one? Or was it five? As he usually did in such situations, Beaver went into mental dog-lock. When it happened in school, there’d been Henry sitting beside him or Jonesy behind him to give him the answers. Out here there was no one to help, only that big whup-whup-whup smacking into his ears and all that swirling snow going down his throat and into his lungs, making him cough.
“STAY WHERE YOU ARE! THIS SITUATION WILL BE RESOLVED IN TWENTYFOUR TO FORTY-EIGHT HOURS! IF YOU NEED FOOD, CROSS YOUR ARMS OVER, YOUR HEAD!”
“There are more of us!” Beaver screamed at the man leaning out of the helicopter. He screamed so loudly red dots danced in front of his eyes. “We got a hurt guy here! We… have got… A HURT GUY!” The idiot in the helicopter tossed his bullhorn back into the cabin behind him, then made a thumb-and-forefinger circle down at Beaver, as if to say, Okay! Gotcha! Beaver felt like dancing in frustration. Instead, he raised one open hand above his head-a finger each for him and his friends, plus the thumb for McCarthy. The man in the helicopter took this in, then grinned. For one truly wonderful moment, Beaver thought he had gotten through to the mask-wearing fuckwad. Then the fuckwad returned what he thought was Beaver’s wave, said something to the pilot behind him, and the ANG helicopter began to rise. Beaver Clarendon was still standing there, frosted with swirling snow and screaming. There’s five of us and we need help! There’s five of us and we need somefucking HELP!”
The copter vanished back into the clouds.
5
Jonesy heard some of this-certainly he heard the amplified voice from the Thunderbolt helicopter-but registered very little, He was too concerned with McCarthy, who had given a number of small and breathless screams, then fallen silent. The stench coming under the door continued to thicken.
“McCarthy!” he yelled as Beaver came back in. “Open this door or we break it down!” “Get away from me!” McCarthy screamed back in a thin, distracted voice. “I have to shit, that’s all, I HAVE TO SHIT! If I can shit I’ll be all right!”
Such straight talk, coming from a man who seemed to consider oh gosh and oh dear strong language, frightened Jonesy even more than the bloody sheet and underwear. He turned to Beaver, barely noticing that the Beav was powdered with snow and looking like Frosty. “Come on, help me break it down. We’ve got to try and help him.”
Beaver looked scared and worried. Snow was melting on his cheeks. “I dunno. The guy in the helicopter said something about quarantine-what if he’s infected or something? What if that red thing on his face-”
In spite of his own ungenerous feelings about McCarthy, Jonesy felt like striking his old friend. This previous March he himself had lain bleeding in a street in Cambridge. Suppose people had refused to touch him because he might have AIDS? Refused to help him? Just left him there to bleed because there were no rubber gloves handy?
“Beav, we were right down in his face-if he’s got something really infectious, we’ve probably caught it already. Now what do you say?”
For a moment what Beaver said was nothing. Then Jonesy felt that click in his head. For just a moment he saw the Beaver he’d grown up with, a kid in an old beat-up motorcycle jacket who had cried Hey, you guys, quit it! Just fucking QUIT it! and knew it was going to be all right.