He stood that way for another fifteen minutes, and when he could bear it no more, he set his back to the flames and started back the way he had come.
7
There was no hustle left in him. He had twenty miles to go (22.2 to be exact, he told himself), and if he didn’t pace himself he’d never make it. He stayed in the packed track of the snowmobile, and stopped to rest more frequently than he had going the other way.
Ah, but I was younger then, he thought with only slight irony.
Twice he checked his watch, forgetting that it was now Eastern Standard No Time At All in the Jefferson Tract. With the mat of clouds firmly in place overhead, all he knew for sure was that it was daytime. Afternoon, of course, but whether mid or late he couldn’t tell. On another afternoon his appetite might have served as a gauge, but not today. Not after the thing on Jonesy’s bed, and the eggs, and the hairs with their protuberant black eyes. Not after the foot sticking out of the bathtub. He felt that he would never eat again… and if he did, he would never eat anything with even a slight tinge of red. And mushrooms? No thanks.
Skiing, at least on cross-country stubs like these, was sort of like riding a bike, he discovered: you never forgot how to do it. He fell once going up the first hill, the skis slipping out from under him, but glided giddily down the other side with only a couple of wobbles and no spills. He guessed that the skis hadn’t been waxed since the peanut-farmer was President, but if he stayed in the crimped and flattened track of the snowmobile, he should be all right. He marvelled at the stippling of animal tracks on the Deep Cut Road he had never seen a tenth as many. A few critters had gone walking along it, but most of the tracks only crossed it, west to east. The Deep Cut took a lazy northwest course, and west was clearly a point of the compass the local animal population wanted to avoid.
I’m on a journey, he told himself. Maybe someday someone will write an epic poem about it: “Henry’s journey”.
“Yeah,” he said. “’Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went.”” He laughed at that, and in his dry throat the laughter turned to hacking coughs. He skied to the side of the snowmobile track, got another double handful of snow, and ate it down.
“Tasty and good for you!” he proclaimed. “Snow! Not just for breakfast anymore!”
He looked up at the sky, and that was a mistake. For a moment he was overwhelmed with dizziness and thought he might go right over on his back. Then the vertigo retreated. The clouds overhead looked a little darker. Snow coming? Night coming? Both coming at the same time? His knees and ankles hurt from the steady shuffle-shuffle of the skis, and his arms hurt even worse from wielding the poles. The pads of muscle on his chest were the worst. He had already accepted as certainty that he wouldn’t make it to Gosselin’s before dark; now, standing here and eating more snow, it occurred to him that he might not make it at all.
He loosened the Red Sox tee-shirt he’d tied around his leg, and terror leaped in him when he saw a brilliant thread of scarlet against his bluejeans. His heart beat so hard that white dots appeared in his field of vision, flocking and pumping. He reached down to the red with shaking fingers.
What do you think you’re going to do? he jeered at himself. Pick it off like it was a thread or a piece of lint?
Which was exactly what he did do, because it was a thread: a red one from the shirt’s printed logo. He dropped it and watched it float down to the snow. Then he retied the shirt around the tear in his jeans. For a man who had been considering all sorts of final options not four hours ago-the rope and the noose, the tub and the plastic bag, the bridge abutment and the ever-popular Hemingway Solution, known in some quarters as The Policeman’s Farewell-he had been pretty goddamned scared there for a second or two.
Because I don’t want to go like that, he told himself. Not eaten alive by…
“By toadstools from Planet X,” he said.
The eggman got moving again.
8
The world shrank, as it always does when we approach exhaustion with our work not done, or even close to done. Henry’s life was reduced to four simple, repetitive motions: the pump of his arms on the poles and the push of the skis in the snow. His aches and pains faded, at least for the time being, as he entered some other zone. He only remembered anything remotely like this happening once before, in high school, when he’d been the starting center on the Derry Tigers basketball team. During a crucial pre-playoff game, three of their four best players had somehow fouled out before three minutes of the third quarter were gone. Coach had left Henry in for the rest of the game-he didn’t get a single blow except for time-outs and trips to the foul line. He made it, but by the time the final buzzer honked and put an end to the affair (the Tigers had lost gaudily), he had been floating in a kind of happy dream. Halfway down the corridor to the boys” locker room, his legs had given out and down he had gone, with a silly smile still on his face, while his teammates, clad in their red travelling unis, laughed and cheered and clapped and whistled.
No one to clap or whistle here; only the steady crackle-and-stutter of gunfire off to the east. Slowing a little bit now, maybe, but still heavy.More ominous were the occasional gunshots from up ahead. Maybe from Gosselin’s? It was impossible to tell.
He heard himself singing his least favorite Polling Stones song, “Sympathy for the Devil” (Made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed His fate, thank you very much, you’ve been a wonderful audience, good night), and made himself stop when lie realized the song had gotten all mixed up with memories of Jonesy in the hospital, Jonesy as he had looked last March, not just gaunt but somehow reduced, as if his essence had pulled itself in to form a protective shield around his surprised and outraged body. Jonesy had looked to Henry like someone who was probably going to die, and although he hadn’t died, Henry realized now that it was around that time that his own thoughts of suicide had become really serious. To the rogues gallery of images that haunted him in the middle of the night blue-white milk running down his father’s chin, Barry Newman’s giant economy-sized buttocks jiggling as he flew from the office, Richie Grenadeau holding out a dog-turd to the weeping and nearly naked Duddits Cavell, telling him to eat it, he had to eat it-there was now the image of Jonesy’s too-thin face and addled eyes, Jonesy who had been swopped into the street without a single rhyme or reason, Jonesy who looked all too ready to put on his boogie shoes and get out of town. They said he was in stable condition, but Henry had read critical in his old fi7iend’s eyes. Sympathy for the devil? Please. There was no god, no devil, no sympathy. And once you realized that, you were in trouble. Your days as a viable, paying customer in the great funhouse that was Kulture Amerika were numbered.
He heard himself signing it again-But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game-and made himself stop it. What, then? Something really Undress. Mindless and pointless and tasty, something just oozing Kulture Amerika. How about that one by the Pointer Sisters? That was a good one.
Looking down at his shuffling skis and the horizontal crimps left by the snowmobile treads, he began to sing it. Soon he was droning it over and over in a whispery, tuneless monotone while the sweat soaked through his shirts and clear mucus ran from his nose to freeze on his upper lip: “I know we can make it, I know we can, we can work it out, yes we can-can yes we can yes we can…”
Better. Much better. All those yes we can-cans were as Amerikan Kulture as a Ford pickup in a bowling alley parking lot, a lingerie sale at JC Penney, or a dead rock star in a bathtub.
9
And so he eventually returned to the shelter where he had left Pete and the woman. Pete was gone. No sign of him at all.
The rusty tin roof of the lean-to had fallen, and Henry lifted it, peeking under it like a metal bedsheet to make sure Pete wasn’t there. He wasn’t, but the woman was. She had crawled or been moved from where she’d been when Henry set out for Hole in the Wall, and somewhere along the line she’d come down with a bad case of dead. Her clothes and face were covered with the rust-colored mold that had choked the cabin, but Henry noticed an interesting thing: while the growth on her was doing pretty well (especially in her nostrils and her visible eye, which had sprouted a jungle), the stuff which had spread out from her, outlining her body in a ragged sunburst, was in trouble. The fungus behind her, on the side blocked from the fire, had turned gray and stopped spreading. The stuff in front of her was doing a little better-it had had warmth, and ground to grow on which had been melted clear of snow-but the tips of the tendrils were turning the powdery gray of volcanic ash.