“Get up, ya baby, you’re okay,” he said, and carefully came to a sitting position. Twinges from his back, but nothing worse. just shaken up. Nothing hurt but your fuckin pride, as they used to say. Still, he’d maybe sit here another minute or two. He was making great time and he deserved a rest. Besides, those memories had shaken him. Richie Grenadeau, fucking Richie Grenadeau, who had, it turned out, flunked off the football team-it hadn’t been the broken nose at all. Gonna see you fellas again, he had told them, and Henry guessed he had meant it, but the threatened confrontation had never happened, no, never happened. Something else had happened instead.
And all that was a long time ago. Right now Banbury Cross awaited-Hole in the Wall, at least-and he had no cock horse to ride there, only that poor man’s steed, shank’s mare. Henry got to his feet, began to brush snow from his ass, and then someone screamed inside his head.
“Ow, ow, ow!” he cried. It was like something played through a Walkman you could turn up to concert-hall levels, like a shotgun blast that had gone off directly behind his eyes. He staggered backward, flailing for balance, and had he not run into the stiffly jutting branches of a pine growing at the left side of the road, he surely would have fallen down again.
He disengaged himself from the tree’s clutch, ears still ringing-hell, his entire head was ringing-and stepped forward, hardly believing he was still alive. He raised one of his hands to his nose, and the palm of his hand came away wet with blood. There was something loose in his mouth, too. He held his hand under it, spat out a tooth, looked at it wonderingly, then tossed it aside, ignoring his first impulse, which had been to put it in his coat pocket. No one, as far as he knew, did surgical implants of teeth, and he strongly doubted that the Tooth Fairy came this far out in the boonies.
He couldn’t say for sure whose scream that had been, but he had an idea Pete Moore had maybe just run into a big load of bad trouble.Henry listened for other voices, other thoughts, and heard none. Excellent. Although he had to admit that, even without voices, this had certainly turned into the hunting trip of a lifetime.
“Go, big boy, on you huskies,” he said, and started running toward Hole in the Wall again. His sense that something had gone wrong there was stronger than ever, and it was all he could do to hold himself to a fast jog.
Go look in the chamber pot.
Why don’t we just knock on the bathroom door and ask him how he is?
Had he actually heard those voices? Yes, they were gone now, but he had heard them, just as he had heard that terrible agonal scream. Pete? Or had it been the woman? Pretty Becky Shue?
“Pete,” he said, the word coming out in a puff of vapor. “It was Pete.” Not entirely sure, even now, but pretty sure.
At first he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to find his rhythm again, but then, while he was still worrying about it, it came back-the synchronicity of his hurrying breath and thudding feet, beautiful in its simplicity.
Three more miles to Banbury Cross, he thought. Going home. Just like we took Duddits home that day.
(if you tell anybody I did this I’ll never chum with you guys again)
Henry returned to that October afternoon as to a deep dream. He dropped down the well of memory so far and so fast that at first he didn’t sense the cloud rushing toward him, the cloud that was not words or thoughts or screams but only its redblack self, a thing with places to go and things to do.
5
Beaver steps forward, hesitates for a moment, then drops to his knees. The retard doesn’t see him; he is still wailing, eyes squeezed shut and narrow chest heaving. Both the Underoos and Beaver’s zipper-studded old motorcycle jacket are comical, but none of the other boys are laughing. Henry only wants the retard to stop crying. That crying is killing him.
Beaver shuffles forward a little bit on his knees, then takes the weeping boy into his arms.
“Baby’s boat’s a silver dream, sailing near and far…”
Henry has never heard Beaver sing before, except maybe along with the radio-the Clarendons are most certainly not churchgoers-and he is astounded by the clear tenor sweetness of his friend’s voice. In another year or so the Beav’s voice will change completely and become unremarkable, but now, in the weedy vacant lot behind the empty building, it pierces them all, astounds them. The retarded boy reacts as well, stops crying and looks at Beaver with wonder.
“It sails from here in Baby’s room and to the nearest star; Sail, Baby, sail, sail on home to me, sail the seas and sail the stars, sail on home to me…”
The last note drifts on the air and for a moment nothing in the world breathes for beauty. Henry feels like crying. The retarded boy looks at Beaver, who has been rocking him back and forth in rhythm with the song. On his teary face is an expression of blissful astonishment. He has forgotten his split lip and bruised cheek, his missing clothes, his lost lunchbox. To Beaver he says ooo or, open syllables that could mean almost anything, but Henry understands them perfectly and sees Beaver does, too.
“I can’t do more,” the Beav says. He realizes his arm is still around the kid’s shirtless shoulders and takes it away.
As soon as he does, the kid’s face clouds over, not with fear this time, or with the petulance of one balked of getting his way, but in pure sorrow. Tears fill those amazingly green eyes of his and spill down the clean tracks on his dirty cheeks. He takes Beaver’s hand and puts Beaver’s arm back over his shoulders. “Ooo or! Ooo or!” he says. Beaver looks at them, panicked. “That’s all my mother ever sang me, he says. “I always went right to fuckin sleep.”
Henry and Jonesy exchange a look and burst out laughing. Not a good idea, it’ll probably scare the kid and he’ll start that terrible bawling again, but neither of them can help it. And the kid doesn’t cry. He smiles at Henry and Jonesy instead, a sunny smile that displays a mouthful of white crammed-together teeth, and then looks back at Beaver. He continues to hold Beaver’s arm firmly around his shoulders.
“Ooo or!” he commands.
“Aw, fuck, sing it again,” Pete says. “The part you know.” Beaver ends up singing it three more times before the kid will let him stop, will let the boys work him into his pants and his tom shirt, the one with Richie Grenadeau’s number on it. Henry has never forgotten that haunting fragment and will sometimes recall it at the oddest times: after losing his virginity at a UNH fraternity party with “Smoke on the Water” pounding through the speakers downstairs; after opening his paper to the obituary page and seeing Barry Newman’s rather charming smile above his multiple chins; feeding his father, who had come down with Alzheimer’s at the ferociously unfair age of fifty-three, his father insisting that Henry was someone named Sam. “A real man pays off his debts, Sammy,” his father had said, and when he accepted the next bite of cereal, milk ran down his chin. At these times what he thinks of as Beaver’s Lullaby will come back to him, and he will feel transiently comforted. No bounce, no play.
Finally they’ve got the kid all dressed except for one red sneaker. He’s trying to put it on himself, but he’s got it pointing backward. He is one fucked-up young American, and Henry is at a loss to know how the three big boys could have bullied up on him. Even aside from the crying, which was like no crying Henry had ever heard before, why would you want to be so mean?
“Let me fix that, man,” Beaver says.
“Fit wha?” the kid asks, so comically perplexed that Henry, Jonesy, and Pete all burst out laughing again. Henry knows you’re not supposed to laugh at retards, but he can’t help it. The kid just has a naturally funny face, like a cartoon character.
Beaver only smiles. “Your sneaker, man.”
“Fit neek?”
“Yeah, you can’t put it on that way, fuckin imposseeblo, senor.” Beaver takes the sneaker from him and the kid watches with close interest as the Beav slips his foot into it, draws the laces firmly against the tongue, and then ties the ends in a bow. When he’s done, the kid looks at the bow for a moment longer, then at Beaver. Then he puts his arms around Beaver’s neck and plants a big loud smack on Beaver’s cheek.