Duddits has no selective perception; to him the wino looking for returnables over by the trash barrels, the girls playing softball, and the squirrels running around on the branches of the trees

are equally fascinating. It is part of what makes him special. “Duddits,” Henry says. “There’s this girl you went to school with at the Academy, her name was Josie? Josie Rinkenhauer?”

Duddits looks politely interested because his friend Henry is talking to him, but there is no recognition of the name, and why would there be? Duds can’t remember what he had for breakfast, so why would he remember a little girl he went to school with three or four years ago? Henry feels a wave of hopelessness, which is strangely mixed with amusement. What were they thinking about?

Josie,” Pete says, but he doesn’t look very hopeful, either. “We used to tease you about how she was your girlfriend, remember? She had brown eyes… all this blonde hair sticking out from her head… and…” He sighs disgustedly. “Fuck.”

“Ay ih, iffun-nay,” Duddits says, because this usually makes them smile: same shit, different day. It doesn’t work, so Duddits tries another one: “No-wounce, no-lay.” “Yeah,” Jonesy says. “No bounce, no play, that’s right. We might as well take him home, guys, this isn’t gonna-”

“No,” Beaver says, and they all look at him. Beaver’s eyes are both bright and troubled. He’s chewing on the toothpick in his mouth so fast and hard that it jitters up and down between his lips like a piston. “Dreamcatcher,” he says.

“Dreamcatcher?” Owen asked. His voice seemed to come from far away, even to his own ears. The Humvee’s headlights conned the endless snowy wasteland ahead, which resembled a road only because of the marching yellow reflectors. Dreamcatcher, he thought, and once more his head filled up with Henry’s past, almost drowning him in the sights and sounds and smells of that day on the edge of summer:

Dreamcatcher.

“Dreamcatcher,” Beav says, and they understand each other as they sometimes do, as they think (mistakenly, Henry will later realize) all friends do. Although they have never spoken directly of the dream they all shared on their first hunting trip to Hole in the Wall, they know Beaver believed that it had somehow been caused by Lamar’s dreamcatcher. None of the others have tried to tell him differently, partly because they don’t want to challenge Beaver’s superstition about that harmless little string spiderweb and mostly because they don’t want to talk about that day at all. But now they understand that Beaver has latched onto at least half a truth. A dreamcatcher has indeed bound them, but not Lamar’s.

Duddits is their dreamcatcher.

“Come on,” Beaver says quietly. “Come on, you guys, don’t be afraid. Grab hold of him.”

And so they do, although they are afraid a little anyway; Beaver… too.

Jonesy takes Duddits’s right hand, which has become so clever with machinery out there at Voke. Duddits looks surprised, then smiles and closes his fingers over Jonesy’s. Pete takes Duddits’s left hand. Beaver and Henry crowd in and slip their arms around Duddits’s waist.

And so the five of them stand beneath one of Strawford Park’s vast old oaks, with a lace of Junelight and shadows dappling their faces. They are like boys in a huddle before some big game. The softball girls in their bright yellow shirts ignore them; so do the squirrels; so does the industrious wino, who is putting together a bottle of dinner one empty soda-can at a time.

Henry feels the light steal into him and understands that the light is his friends and himself, they make it together, that lovely lace of light and green shadow, and of them all, Duddits shines brightest. He is their hall; without him there is no bounce, there is no play. He is their dreamcatcher, he makes them one. Henry’s heart fills up as it never will again (and the void of that lack will grow and darken as the years pile up around him), and he thinks: Is it to find one lost retarded girl who probably matters to no one but her parents? Was it to kill one brainless bully-boy, joining together to somehow make him drive off the road, doing it, oh for God’s sake doing it in our sleep? Can that be all? Something so great, something so wondrous, for such tiny matters? Can that be all?

Because if it is-he thinks this even in the ecstasy of their joining-then what is the use? What can anything possibly mean?

Then that and all thought is swept away by the force of the experience. The face of Josie Rinkenhauer rises in front of them, a shifting image that is composed first of four perceptions and memories… then a fifth, as Duddits understands who it is they’re making all this fuss about.

When Duddits weighs in, the image grows a hundred times brighter, a hundred times sharper. Henry hears someone-Jonesy-gasp, and he would gasp himself, if he had the breath to do so. Because Duddits may be retarded in some ways, but not in this way; in this way, they are the poor stumbling enfeebled idiots and Duddits is the genius.

“Oh my God,” Henry hears Beaver cry, and in his voice there are equal parts ecstasy and dismay.

Because Josie is standing here with them. Their differing perceptions of her age have turned her into a child of about twelve, older than she was when they first encountered her waiting outside The Retard Academy, surely younger than she must be now. They have settled on a sailor dress with an unsteady color that cycles from blue to pink to red to pink to blue again. She is holding the great big plastic purse with BarbieKen peeking out the top and her knees are splendidly scabby. Ladybug earrings appear and disappear below her lobes and Henry thinks Oh yeah, I remember those and then they steady into the mix.

She opens her mouth and says, Hi, Duddie. Looks around and says, Hi, you guys.

Then, just like that, she’s gone. Just like that they are five instead of six, five big boys standing under the old oak with June’s ancient light printing their faces and the excited cries of the softball girls in their cars. Pete is crying. So is Jonesy. The wino is gone-he’s apparently collected enough for his bottle-but another man has come, a solemn man dressed in a winter parka in spite of the day’s warmth. His left check is covered with red stuff that could be a birthmark, except Henry knows it isn’t. It’s byrus. Owen Underhill has joined them in Strawford Park, is watching them, but that’s all right; no one sees this visitor from the far side of the dreamcatcher except for Henry himself.

Duddits is smiling, but he looks puzzled at the tears on two of his friends” cheeks. “Eye-ooo ine?” he asks Jonesy-why you cryin? “It doesn’t matter,” Jonesy says. When he slips his hand out of Duddits’s, the last of the connection breaks. Jonesy wipes at his face and so does Pete. Beav utters a sobbing little laugh. “I think I swallowed my toothpick,” he says.

“Nah, there it is, ya fag,” Henry says, and points to the grass, where the chewed-up pick is lying.

“Fine Osie?” Duddits asks.

“Can you, Duds?” Henry asks.

Duddits walks toward the softball field, and they follow him in a respectful little cluster. Duds walks right past Owen but of course doesn’t see him; to Duds, Owen Underhill doesn’t exist, at least not yet. He walks past the bleachers, past third base, past the little snackbar. Then he stops.

Beside him, Pete gasps.

Duddits turns and looks at him, bright-eyed and interested, almost laughing. Pete is holding out one finger, ticking it back and forth, looking past the moving finger at the ground. Henry follows his gaze and for a moment thinks he sees something-a bright flash of yellow on the grass, like paint-and then it’s gone. There’s only Pete, doing what he does when he’s using his special remembering gift.