Jonesy sees he has their full attention, nods, goes on. “Davey says all you have to do is go around on the driveway side and look in the third or fourth window. It used to be Phil and Tony Tracker’s office. There’s still a bulletin board on the wall. And Davey said the only two things on the bulletin board are a map of New England showing all the truck routes, and a picture of Tina jean Schlossinger showing all of her pussy.”
They look at him with breathless interest, and Pete asks the question which has occurred to all of them. “Is she bollocky?”
“No,” Jonesy admits. “Davey says you can’t even see her tits, but she’s holding her skirt up and she isn’t wearing pants and you can see it, just as clear as day.”
Pete is disappointed that this year’s Tiger Homecoming Queen isn’t bollocky bare-ass, but the thing about how she’s holding her skirt up inflames them all, feeding some primal, semi-secret notion of how sex really works. A girl could hold her skirt up, after all; any girl could.
Not even Henry asks any more questions. The only question comes from the Beav, who asks if Jonesy is sure they won’t have to go inside in order to see. And they are already moving in the direction of the driveway running down the far side of the building toward the vacant lot, powerful as a spring tide in their nearly mindless motion.
5
Pete finished the second beer and heaved the bottle deep into the woods. Feeling better now, he got cautiously to his feet and dusted the snow from his ass. And was his knee a little bit looser? He thought maybe it was. Looked awful, of course-looked like he had a little model of the Minnesota goddam Metrodome under there-but felt a bit better. Still, he walked carefully, swinging his plastic sack of beer in short arcs beside him. Now that the small but powerful voice insisting that he had to have a beer, just goddam had to, had been silenced, he thought of the woman with new solicitude, hoping she hadn’t noticed he was gone. He would walk slowly, he would stop to massage his knee every five minutes or so (and maybe talk to it, encourage it, a crazy idea, but he was out here on his own and it couldn’t hurt), and he would get back to the woman. Then he would have another beer. He did not look back at the overturned Scout, did not see that he had written DUDDITS in the snow, over and over again, as he sat thinking of that day back in 1978.
Only Henry had asked why the Schlossinger girl’s picture would be there in the empty office of an empty freight depot, and Pete thought now that Henry had only asked because he had to fulfill his role as Group Skeptic. Certainly he’d only asked once; as for the rest of them, they had simply believed, and why not? At thirteen, Pete had still spent half his life believing in Santa Claus. And besides-
Pete stopped near the top of the big hill, not because he was out of breath or because his leg was cramping up, but because he could suddenly feel a low humming sound in his head, sort of like an electrical transformer, only with a kind of cycling quality to it, a low thud-thud-thud. And no, it wasn’t “suddenly” as in “suddenly started up’; he had an idea the sound had been there for awhile and he was just becoming aware of it. And he had started to think some funny stuff. All that about Henry’s cologne, for instance… and Marcy. Someone named Marcy. He didn’t think he knew anyone named Marcy but the name was suddenly in his head, as in Marcy I need you or Marcy I want you or maybe Zounds, Marcy, bring the gasogene.
He stood where he was, licking his dry lips, the bag of beer hanging straight down from his hand now, its pendulum motion stilled. He looked up in the sky, suddenly sure the lights would be there… and they were there, only just two of them now, and very faint.
“Tell Marcy to make them give me a shot,” Pete said, enunciating each word carefully in the stillness, and knew they were exactly the right words. Right why or right how he couldn’t say, but yes, those were the words in his head. Was it the click, or had the lights caused those thoughts? Pete couldn’t say for sure.
“Maybe nyther,” he said.
Pete realized the last of the snow had stopped. The world around him was only three colors: the deep gray of the sky, the deep green of the firs, and the perfect unblemished white of the new snow. And hushed.
Pete cocked his head first to one side and then to the other, listening. Yes, hushed. Nothing. No sound in the world and the humming noise had stopped as completely as the snow. When he looked up, he saw that the pale, mothlike glow of the lights was also gone.
“Marcy?” he said, as if calling someone. It occurred to him that Marcy might be the name of the woman who had caused them to wreck, but he dismissed the idea. That woman’s name was Becky, he knew it as surely as he had known the name of the real estate woman that time. Marcy was just a word now, and nothing about it called to him. Probably he’d just had a brain-cramp. Wouldn’t be the first time.
He finished climbing the hill and started down the other side, his thoughts returning to that day in the fall of 1978, the day they had met Duddits.
He was almost back to the place where the road leveled when his knee abruptly let go, not locking up this time but seeming to explode like a pine knot in a hot fire.
Pete pitched forward into the snow. He didn’t hear the Bud bottles break inside the bag-all but two of them. He was screaming too loudly.
Chapter Six
DUDDITS, PART TWO
1
Henry started off in the direction of the camp at a quick walk, but as the snow subsided to isolated flurries and the wind began to die, he upped the walk to a steady, clocklike jog. He had been jogging for years, and the pace felt natural enough. He might have to pull up for awhile, walk or even rest, but he doubted it. He had run road-races longer than nine miles, although not for a couple of years and never with four inches of snow underfoot. Still, what was there to worry about? Falling down and busting a hip? Maybe having a heart attack? At thirty-seven a heart attack seemed unlikely, but even if he had been a prime candidate for one, worrying about it would have been ludicrous, wouldn’t it? Considering what he was planning? So what was there to worry about?
Jonesy and Beaver, that was what. On the face of it that seemed as ludicrous as worrying about suffering a catastrophic cardiac outage here in the middle of nowhere-the trouble was behind him, with Pete and that strange, semi-comatose woman, not up ahead at Hole in the Wall… except there was trouble at Hole in the Wall, bad trouble. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did and he accepted the knowing. Even before he started encountering the animals, all hurrying by and none giving him more than the most cursory glance, he knew that.
Once or twice he glanced up into the sky, looking for more foo-lights, but there were none to be seen and after that he just looked straight ahead, sometimes having to zig or zag to keep out of the way of the animals. They weren’t quite stampeding, but their eyes had an odd, spooky look that Henry had never seen before.
Once he had to skip handily to keep from being upended by a pair of hurrying foxes.
Eight more miles, he told himself. It became a jogging mantra, different from the ones that usually went through his head when he was running (nursery rhymes were the most common), but not that different-same idea, really. Eight more miles, eight more miles to Banbury Cross. No Banbury Cross, though, just Mr Clarendon’s old camp-Beaver’s camp, now-and no cock horse to get him there. What was a cock horse, anyway? Who knew? And what in Christ’s name was happening out here-the lights, the slow-motion stampede (dear God, what was that in the woods off to his left, was that a fucking bear?), the woman in the road, just sitting there with most of her teeth and most of her brains missing? And those farts, dear God. The only thing he’d ever smelled even remotely like it was the breath of a patient he’d had once, a schizophrenic with intestinal cancer. Always that smell, an internist friend had told Henry when Henry tried to describe it. They can brush their teeth a dozen times a day, use Lavoiis every hour on the hour, and that smell still comes through. It’s the smell of the body eating itself, because that’s all cancer is when you take the diagnostic masks off: autocannibalism.