You’re nuts.
No, I’m not. We need a diversion in order to get away, you already know that. This is a diversion.
They’ll be killed anyway!
Some will. Maybe even most of them. But it’s a chance. What chance will they have in a burning barn?
Out loud, Henry said: “And there’s Kurtz. If he’s got a couple of hundred escapees to worry about-most of whom who’d be happy to tell the first reporters they came across that the panic-stricken U.S. government had sanctioned a My Lai massacre right here on American soil-he’s going to be a lot less concerned about us. “You don’t know Abe Kurtz, Owen thought. You don’t know about the Kurtz Line. Of course, neither had he. Not really. Not until today.
Yet Henry’s proposal made a lunatic kind of sense. And it contained at least a measure of atonement. As this endless November fourteenth marched toward midnight and as odds of living until the end of the week grew longer, Owen was not surprised to find that the idea of atonement had its attractions.
“Henry.”
“Yes, Owen. I’m here.”
“I’ve always felt badly about what I did in the Rapeloews” house that day.”
“I know.”
“And yet I’ve done it again and again. How tucked up is that?” Henry, an excellent psychiatrist even after his thoughts had turned to suicide, said nothing. Fucked up was normal human behavior. Sad but true.
“All right,” Owen said at last. “You can buy the house, but I’m going to furnish it. Deal?”
“Deal,” Henry replied at once.
“Can you really teach me that jamming technique? Because I think I may need it.”
“I’m pretty sure I can.”
“All right. Listen.” Owen talked for the next three minutes, sometimes out loud, sometimes mind to mind. The two men had reached a point where they no longer differentiated between the modes of communication; thoughts and words had become one.
Chapter Sixteen
DERRY
1
It’s hot in Gosselin’s-it’s so hot! The sweat pops out on Jonesy’s face almost immediately, and by the time the four of them get to the pay phone (which is near the woodstove, wouldn’t you know it), it’s rolling down his cheeks, and his armpits feel like jungle growth after a heavy rain… not that he has all that much growth there yet, not at fourteen. Don’t you wish, as Pete likes to say.
So it’s hot, and he’s still partly in the grip of the dream, which hasn’t faded the way bad dreams usually do (he can still smell gasoline and burning rubber, can still see Henry holding that moccasin… and the head, he can still see Richie Grenadeau’s awful severed head), and then the operator makes things worse by being a bitch. When Jonesy gives her the Cavells” number, which they call frequently to ask if they can come over (Roberta and Alfie always say yes, but it is only polite to ask permission, they have all been taught that at home), the operator asks: “Do your parents know you’re calling long-distance?” The words come out not in a Yankee drawl but in the slightly Frenchified tones of someone who grew up in this part of the world, where Letourneau and Bissonette are more common than Smith or Jones. The tightwad French, Pete’s Dad calls them. And now he’s got one on the telephone, God help him.
“They let me make toll calls if I pay the charges,” Jonesy says. And boy, he should have known that he would end up being the one to actually make it. He rakes down the zipper of his jacket. God, but it’s boiling in here! How those old geezers can sit around the stove like they’re doing is more than Jonesy can understand. His own friends are pressing in close around him, which is probably understandable-they want to know how things go-but still, Jonesy wishes they would step back a little. Having them so close makes him feel even hotter.
“And if I were to call them, mon fils, your mere et pere, d’ey say the same?”
“Sure,” Jonesy says. Sweat runs into one of his eyes, stinging, and he wipes it away like a tear. “My father’s at work, but my Mom should be home. Nine-four-nine, six-six-five-eight. Only I wish you’d make it quick, because-”
“I’ll jus” ring on your party,” she says, sounding disappointed. Jonesy slips out of his coat, switching the phone from one ear to the other in order to accomplish this, and lets it puddle around his feet. The others are still wearing theirs; Beav, in fact, hasn’t even unzipped his Fonzie Jacket. How they can stand it is beyond Jonesy. Even the smells are getting to him: Musterole and beans and floor-oil and coffee and brine from the pickle-barrel. Usually he likes the smells in Gosselin’s, but today they make Jonesy feel like blowing chunks.
Connections click in his ear. So slow. His friends pushing in too close to the pay phone on the back wall, crowding him. Two or three aisles over, Lamar is looking fixedly at the cereal shelf and rubbing his forehead like a man with a severe headache. Considering how much beer he put away last night, Jonesy thinks, a headache would be natural. He’s coming down with a headache himself, one that beer has nothing to do with, it’s just so gosh-damn hot in h-
He straightens up a little. “Ringing,” he says to his friends, and immediately wishes he’d kept his mouth shut, because they lean in closer than ever. Pete’s breath is fuckin awful, and Jonesy thinks, What do you do, Petesky? Brush em once a year, whether they need it or not?
The phone is picked up on the third ring. “Yes, hello?” It’s Roberta, but sounding distracted and upset rather than cheery, as she usually does. Not that it’s very hard to figure out why; in the background he can hear Duddits bawling. Jonesy knows that Alfie and Roberta don’t feel that crying the way Jonesy and his friends do-they are grownups. But they are also his parents, they feel some of it, and he doubts if this has exactly been Mrs Cavell’s favorite morning.
Christ, how can it be so hot in here”, What did they load that fuckin woodstove up with this morning, anyway? Plutonium?
“Come on, who is it?” Impatient, which is also completely unlike Mrs Cavell. If being the mother of a special person like Duddits teaches you anything, she has told the boys on many occasions, it’s patience. Not this morning, though. This morning she sounds almost pissed off, which is unthinkable. “If you’re selling something, I can’t talk to you. I’m busy right now, and…”
Duddits in the background, trumpeting and walling. You’re busy, all right, Jonesy thinks. He’s been going on like that since dawn, and by now you must be just about out of your sneaker.
Henry throws an elbow into Jonesy’s side and flicks a hand at him-Go on! Hurry up!-and although it hurts, the elbow is still a good thing. If she hangs up on him, Jonesy will have to deal with that bitch of an operator again.
“Miz Cavell-Roberta? It’s me, Jonesy.”
“Jonesy?” He senses her deep relief, she has wanted so badly for Duddie’s friends to call that she half-believes she is imagining this. “Is it really you?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Me and the other guys.” He holds out the telephone.
“Hi, Mrs Cavell,” Henry says.
“Hey, what’s up?” is Pete’s contribution.
“Hi, beautiful,” Beaver says with a goony grin. He has been more or less in love with Roberta from the day they met her.
Lamar Clarendon looks over at the sound of his son’s voice, winces, then goes back to his contemplation of the Cheerios and Shredded Wheat. Go right ahead, Lamar told the Beav when Beaver said they wanted to call Duddits. Dunno why you’d want to talk to that meringue-head, but it’s your buffalo nickel.
When Jonesy puts the phone back to his ear, Roberta Cavell is saying:-get back to Derry? I thought you were hunting up in Kineo or someplace.”
“We’re still up here,” Jonesy says. He looks around at his friends and is astounded to see they are hardly sweating at all-a slight sheen on Henry’s forehead, a few beads on Pete’s upper lip, and that’s all. Totally Weirdsville. “We just thought… um… that we better call.”
“You knew.” Her voice was flat-not unfriendly but unquestioning.
“Um…” He pulls at his flannel shirt, fanning it against his chest. “Yeah.”
There are a thousand questions most people would ask at this point, probably starting with How did you know? or What in God’s name is wrong with him? but Roberta isn’t most people, and she has already had the best part of a month to see how they are with her son. What she says is, “Hold on, Jonesy. I’ll get him.”
Jonesy waits. Far off he can still hear Duddits wailing and Roberta, softer. Talking to him. Cajoling him to the phone. Using what are now magic words in the Cavell household: Jonesy, Beaver,Pete, Henry. The blatting moves closer, and even over the phone Jonesy can feel it working its way into his head, a blunt knife that digs and gouges instead of cutting. Yowch. Duddits’s crying makes Henry’s elbow seem like a love-tap. Meanwhile, the old jungle-juice is rolling down his neck in rivers. His eyes fix on the two signs above the phone. PLEASE LIMIT ALL CALLS TO 5 MINS, reads one. PROFAINITY NOT TOLERIDED, reads the other. Beneath this someone has gouged Who the fuck says so. Then Duddits is on, those awful bellowing cries right there in his ear. Jonesy winces against them, but in spite of the pain it is impossible to be mad at Duds. Up here they are four, all together. Down there he is one, all alone, and what a strange one he is. God has hurt him and blessed him at the same time, it makes Jonesy giddy just to think of it.