“If you guys tell anybody he did that-” Beaver begins, but he’s smiling, clearly pleased. “Yeah, yeah, you’ll never chum with us again, ya fuckin wank,” Jonesy says, grinning. He has held onto the lunchbox and now squats in front of the kid, holding it out. “This yours, guy?’The kid grins with the delight of someone encountering an old friend and snatches it. “Ooby-Ooby-Doo, where-are-oo?” he sings. “We gah-sum urk oo-do-now!” “That’s right,” Jonesy agrees. “Got some work to do now. Gotta get you the fuck home is what we got to do. Douglas Cavell, that’s your name, right?’The boy is holding his lunchbox to his chest in both of his dirty hands. Now he gives it a loud smack, just like the one he put on Beaver’s check. “I Duddits!” he cries.
“Good,” Henry says. He takes one of the boy’s hands, Jonesy takes the other, and they help him to his feet. Maple Lane is only three blocks away and they can be there in ten minutes, always assuming that Richie and his friends aren’t hanging around and hoping to ambush them. “Let’s get you home, Duddits. Bet your Mom’s worried about you.”
But first Henry sends Pete to the corner of the building to look up the driveway. When Pete comes back and reports the coast clear, Henry lets them go that far. Once they are on the sidewalk, where people can see them, they’ll be safe. Until then, he will take no chances. He sends Pete out a second time, tells him to scout all the way to the street, then whistle if everything is cool.
“Dey gone,” Duddits says.
“Maybe,” Henry says, “but I’ll feel better if Pete takes a look.” Duddits stands serenely among them, looking at the pictures on his lunchbox, while Pete goes out to look around. Henry feels okay about sending him. He hasn’t exaggerated Pete’s speed; if Richie and his friends try to jump him, Pete will turn on the jets and leave them in the dust.
“You like this show, man?” Beaver says, taking the lunchbox. He speaks quietly. Henry watches with some interest, curious to see if the retarded boy will cry for his lunchbox. He doesn’t.
“Ey Ooby-Doos!” the retarded kid says. His hair is golden, curly. Henry still can’t tell what age he is.
“I know they’re Scooby-Doos,” the Beav says patiently, “but they never change their clothes. Pete’s right about that. I mean, fuck me Freddy, right?”
“Ite!” He holds out his hands for the lunchbox and Beaver gives it back. The retarded boy hugs it, then smiles at them. It is a beautiful smile, Henry thinks, smiling himself. It makes him think of how you are cold when you have been swimming in the ocean for awhile, but when you come out, you wrap a towel around your bony shoulders and goosepimply back and you’re warm again.
Jonesy is also smiling. “Duddits,” he says, “which one is the dog?”
The retarded boy looks at him, still smiling, but puzzled now, too.
“The dog,” Henry says. “Which one’s the dog?”
Now the boy looks at Henry, his puzzlement deepening.
“Which one’s Scooby, Duddits?” Beaver asks, and Duddits’s face clears. He points.
“Ooby! Ooby-Ooby-Doo! Eee a dog!”
They all burst out laughing, Duddits is laughing too, and then Pete whistles. They start moving and have gone about a quarter of the way up the driveway when Jonesy says, “Wait! Wait!”
He runs to one of the dirty office windows and peers in, cupping his hands to the sides of his face to cut the glare, and Henry suddenly remembers why they came. Tina Jean What’s-Her-Face’s pussy. All that seems about a thousand years ago.
After about ten seconds, Jonesy calls, “Henry! Beav! Come here! Leave the kid there!”
Beaver runs to Jonesy’s side. Henry turns to the retarded boy and says, “Stand right there, Duddits. Right there with your lunchbox, okay?”
Duddits looks up at him, green eyes shining, lunchbox held to his chest. After a moment he nods, and Henry runs to join his friends at the window. They have to squeeze together, and Beaver grumbles that someone is steppin on his fuckin feet, but they manage. After a minute or so, puzzled by their failure to show up on the sidewalk, Pete joins them, poking his face in between Henry’s and Jonesy’s shoulders. Here are four boys at a dirty office window, three with their hands cupped to the sides of their faces to cut the glare, and a fifth boy standing behind them in the weedy driveway, holding his lunchbox against his narrow chest and looking up at the white sky, where the sun is trying to break through. Beyond the dirty glass (where they will leave clean crescents to mark the places where their foreheads rested) is an empty room. Scattered across the dusty floor are a number of deflated white tadpoles that Henry recognizes as jizzbags. On one wall, the one directly across from the window, is a bulletin board. Tacked to it is a map of northern New England and a Polaroid photograph of a woman holding her skirt up. You can’t see her pussy, though, just some white panties. And she’s no high-school girl. She’s old. She must be at least thirty.
“Holy God,” Pete says at last, giving Jonesy a disgusted look. “We came all the way down here for that?”
For a moment Jonesy looks defensive, then grins and jerks his thumb back over his shoulder. “No,” he says. “We came for him.”
6
Henry was pulled from recall by an amazing and totally unexpected realization: he was terrified, had been terrified for some time. Some new thing had been hovering just below the threshold of his consciousness, held down by the vivid memory of meeting Duddits. Now it had burst forward with a frightened yell, insisting on recognition.
He skidded to a stop in the middle of the road, flailing his arms to keep from falling down in the snow again, and then simply stood there panting, eyes wide. What now? He was only two and a half miles from Hole in the Wall, almost there, so what the Christ now?
There’s a cloud, he thought. Some kind of cloud, that’s what. I can’t tell what it is but I can’t tell it-I never felt anything so clearly in my life. My adult life, anyway. I have to get off the road. I have to get away from it. Get away from the movie. There’s a movie in the cloud. The kind Jonesy likes. A scary one.
“That’s stupid,” he muttered, knowing it wasn’t.
He could hear the approaching wasp-whine of an engine. It was coming from the direction of Hole in the Wall and coming fast, a snowmobile engine, almost certainly the Arctic Cat stored at camp… but it was also the redblack cloud with the movie going on inside it, some terrible black energy rushing toward him.
For a moment Henry was frozen with a hundred childish horrors, things under beds and things in coffins, squirming bugs beneath overturned rocks and the furry jelly that was the remains of a long-dead baked rat the time Dad had moved the stove out from the wall to check the plug. And horrors that weren’t childish at all: his father, lost in his own bedroom and bawling with fear; Barry Newman, running from Henry’s office with that vast look of terror on his face, terror because he had been asked to look at something he wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, acknowledge; sitting awake at four in the morning with a glass of Scotch, all the world a dead socket, his own mind a dead socket and oh baby it was a thousand years till dawn and all lullabys had been cancelled. Those things were in the redblack cloud rushing down on him like that pale horse in the Bible, those things and more. Every bad thing he had ever suspected was now coming toward him, not on a pale horse but on an old snowmobile with a rusty cowling. Not death but worse than death. It was Mr Gray.
Get off the road! his mind screamed. Get off the road now! Hide!
For a moment he couldn’t move-his feet seemed to grow heavy. The gash on his thigh, the one the turnsignal had made, burned like a brand. Now he understood how a deer caught in the headlights felt, or a chipmunk hopping stupidly back and forth in front of an oncoming lawnmower. The cloud had robbed him of his ability to help himself He was frozen in its rushing path.
What got him going, oddly enough, was all those thoughts of suicide. Had he agonized his way to that decision on five hundred sleepless nights only to be robbed of his option by a kind of buck-fever? No, by God, no, it wouldn’t be, Suffering was bad enough; allowing his own terrified body to mock that suffering by locking up and just standing here while a demon ran him down… no, he would not allow that to happen.