Henry was pretty sure it was dying.
So was the daylight-no question of that now. Henry dropped the rusty piece of corrugated tin back on the body of Becky Shue and on the embery remains of the fire. Then he looked at the track of the Cat again, wishing as he had back at the cabin that he had Natty Bumppo with him to explain what he was seeing. Or maybe Jonesy’s good friend Hercule Poirot, he of the little gray cells.
The track swerved in toward the collapsed roof of the lean-to before continuing on northwest toward Gosselin’s. There was a pressed-down area in the snow that almost made the shape of a human body. To either side, there were round divots in the snow.
“What do you say, Hercule?” Henry asked. “What means this, mon ami?” But Hercule said nothing.
Henry began to sing under his breath again and leaned closer to one of the round divots, unaware that he had left the Pointer Sisters behind and switched back to the Rolling Stones.
There was enough light for him to see a pattern in the three dimples to the left of the body shape, and he recalled the patch on the right elbow of Pete’s duffel coat. Pete had told him with an odd sort of pride that his girlfriend had sewed that on there, declaring he had no business going off hunting with a ripped jacket. Henry remembered thinking it was sad and funny at the same time, how Pete had built up a wistful fantasy of a happy future from that single act of kindness… an act which probably had more to do, in the end, with how the lady in question had been raised than with any feelings she might have for her beer-soaked boyfriend.
Not that it mattered. What mattered was that Henry felt he could draw a bona fide deduction at last. Pete had crawled out from under the collapsed roof Jonesy-or whatever was now running Jonesy, the cloud-had come along, swerved over to the remains of the lean-to, and picked Pete up.
Why?
Henry didn’t know.
Not all of the splotches in the flattened shape of his thrashing friend, who had crawled out from under the piece of tin by hooking himself along on his elbows, were that mold stuff. Some of it was dried blood. Pete had been hurt. Cut when the roof fell in? Was that all?
Henry spotted a wavering trail leading away from the depression which had held Pete’s body. At the end of it was what he first took to be a fire-charred stick. Closer examination changed his mind. It was another of the weasel things, this one burned and dead, now turning gray where it wasn’t seared. Henry flipped it aside with the toe of his boot. Beneath it was a small frozen mass. More eggs. It must have been laying them even as it died.
Henry kicked snow over both the eggs and the little monster’s corpse, shuddering. He unwrapped the makeshift bandage for another look at the wound on his leg, and as he did it he realized what song was coming out of his mouth. He quit singing. New snow, just a scattering of light flakes, began to skirt down.
“Why do I keep singing that?” he asked. “Why does that fucking song keep coming back?” He expected no answer; these were questions uttered aloud mostly for the comfort of hearing his own voice (this was a death place, perhaps even a haunted place), but one came anyway. “Because it’s our song. It’s the Squad Anthem, the one we play when we go in hot. We’re Cruise’s boys.” Cruise? Was that right? As in Tom Cruise? Maybe not quite.
The gunfire from the east was much lighter now. The slaughter of the animals was almost done. But there were men, a long skirmish line of hunters who were wearing green or black instead of orange, and they were listening to that song over and over again as they did their work, adding up the numbers of an incredible butcher’s bill: I rode a tank, held a general’s rank, when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank… Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.
What exactly was going on here? Not in the wild, wonderful, wacky Outside World, but inside his own head? He’d had flashes of understanding his whole life-his life since Duddits, anyway-but nothing like this. What was this? Was it time to examine this new and powerful way of seeing the line?
No. No, no, no.
And, as if mocking him, the song in his head: general’s rank, bodies stank.
“Duddits!” he exclaimed in the graying, dying afternoon; lazy flakes falling like feathers from a split pillow. Some thought struggled to be born but it was too big, too big.
“Duddits!” he cried again in his hortatory eggman’s voice, and one thing he did understand: the luxury of suicide had been denied him. Which was the most horrible thing of all, because these weird thoughts-I shouted out who killed the Kennedys-were tearing him apart. He began to weep again, bewildered and afraid, alone in the woods. All his friends except Jonesy were dead, and Jonesy was in the hospital. A movie star in the hospital with Mr Gray.
“What does that mean?” Henry groaned. He clapped his hands to his temples (he felt as though his head were bulging, bulging) and his rusty old ski-poles flapped aimlessly at the ends of their wrist-loops like broken propeller blades. “Oh Christ, what does that MEAN?”
Only the song came in answer: Pleased to meet you! Hope you guess my name!
Only the snow: red with the blood of slaughtered animals and they lay everywhere, a Dachau of deer and raccoon and rabbit and weasel and bear and groundhog and-
Henry screamed, held his head and screamed so loud and so hard that he felt sure for a moment that he was going to pass out. Then his lightheartedness passed and his rm’nd seemed to clear, at least for the time being. He was left with a brilliant image of Duddits as he had been when they first met him, Duddits not under the light of a blitzkrieg winter as in that Stones song but under the sane light of a cloudy October afternoon, Duddits looking up at them with his tilted, somehow wise Chinese eyes. Duddits was our finest hour, he had told Pete.
“Fit wha?” Henry said now. “Fit neek?”
Yeah, fit neek. Turn it around, put it on the right way, fit neek.
Smiling a little now (although his cheeks were still wet with tears that were beginning to freeze), Henry began to ski along the crimped track of the snowmobile again.
10
Ten minutes later he came to the overturned wreck of the Scout. He suddenly realized two things: that he was ragingly hungry after all and that there was food in there. He had seen the tracks both going and coming and hadn’t needed Natty Bumppo to know that Pete had left the woman and returned to the Scout. Nor did he need Hercule Poirot to tell him that the food they’d bought at the store-most of it, at least-would still be in there. He knew what Pete had come back for.
He skied around to the passenger side, following Pete’s tracks, then froze in the act of loosening the ski bindings. This side was away from the wind, and what Pete had written in the snow as he sat drinking his two beers was mostly still here: DUDDITS, printed over and over again. As he looked at the name in the snow, Henry began to shiver. It was like coming to the grave of a loved one and hearing a voice speak out of the ground.
11
There was broken glass inside the Scout. Blood, as well. Because most of the blood was on the back seat, Henry felt sure it hadn’t been spilled in the original accident; Pete had cut himself on his return trip. To Henry, the interesting thing was that there was none of the red-gold fuzz. It grew rapidly, and so the logical conclusion was that Pete hadn’t been infected when he’d come for the beer. Later, maybe, but not then.
He grabbed the bread, the peanut butter, the milk, and the carton of orange juice. Then he backed out of the Scout and sat with his shoulders against the overturned rear end, watching the fresh snow sift down and gobbling bread and peanut butter as fast as he could, using his index finger as a knife and licking it clean between spreads. The peanut butter was good and the orange juice went down in two long drafts, but it wasn’t enough.
“What you’re thinking of,” he announced to the darkening afternoon, “is grotesque. Not to mention red. Red food.”
Red or not, he was thinking of it, and surely it wasn’t all that grotesque; he was, after all, a man who had spent long nights thinking about guns and ropes and plastic bags. All of that seemed a little childish just now, but it was him, all right. And so-