“If it is,” Henry said, “we’re both strange.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been thinking of Duddits myself, and for quite awhile. Since at least March. Jonesy and I were going to go see him-”

“You were?”

“Yeah. Then Jonesy had that accident-”

“Crazy old cocksucker that hit him never should have been driving,” Pete said with a dark frown. “Jonesy’s lucky to be alive.”

“You got that right,” Henry said. “His heart stopped in the ambulance. The EMTs had to give him the juice.”

Pete halted, wide-eyed. “No shit? It was that bad? That close?”

It occurred to Henry that he had just been indiscreet. “Yes, but you ought to keep your mouth shut about it. Carla told me, but I don’t think Jonesy knows. I never…” He waved his arm vaguely, and Pete nodded with perfect understanding. I never sensed that he did was what Henry meant.

“I’ll keep it under my hat,” Pete said.

“I think it’s best you do.”

“And you never got to see Duds.”

Henry shook his head. “In all the excitement about Jonesy, I forgot. Then it was summer, and you know how things come up…”

Pete nodded.

“But you know what? I was thinking of him just a little while ago. Back in Gosselin’s.”

“Was it the kid in the Beavis and Butt-head shirt?” Pete asked. His words came out in little puffs of white vapor.

Henry nodded. “The kid” could have been twelve or twenty-five, when it came to Down’s syndrome you just couldn’t tell. He had been red-haired, wandering along the middle aisle of the dark little market next to a man who just about had to be his father-same green-and-black-checked hunting jacket, more importantly the same carroty red hair, the man’s now thin enough to show the scalp underneath, and he had given them a look, the kind that says Don’t you say nothing about my kid unless you want trouble, and of course neither of them had said anything, they had come the twenty or so miles from Hole in the Wall for beer and bread and hot dogs, not trouble, and besides, they had once known Duddits, still knew Duddits in a way-sent him Christmas presents and birthday cards, anyway, Duddits who had once been, in his own peculiar fashion, one of them. What Henry could not very well confide to Pete was that he’d been thinking of Duds at odd moments ever since realizing, some sixteen months ago, that he meant to take his own life and that everything he did had become either a holding action against that event or a preparation for it. Sometimes he even dreamed of Duddits, and of the Beav saying Let me fix that, man and Duddits saying Fit wha?

“Nothing wrong with thinking about Duddits, Pete,” he said as he hauled the makeshift sled with the woman on it into the shelter. He was out of breath himself. “Duddits was how we defined ourselves. He was our finest hour.”

“You think so?”

“Yup.” Henry plopped down to get his breath before going on. to the next thing. He looked at his watch. Almost noon. By now Jonesy and Beaver would be past the point of thinking the snow had just slowed them down; would be almost sure something had gone wrong. Perhaps one of them would fire up the snowmobile (if it works, he reminded himself again, if the damn thing works). Come out looking for them. That would simplify things a bit.

He looked at the woman lying on the tarp. Her hair had fallen over one eye, hiding it; the other looked at Henry-and through him-with chilly indifference.

Henry believed that all children were presented with self-defining moments in early adolescence, and that children in groups were apt to respond more decisively than children alone. Often they behaved badly, answering distress with cruelty. Henry and his friends had behaved well, for whatever reason. It meant no more than anything else in the end, but it did not hurt to remember, especially when your soul was dark, that once you had confounded the odds and behaved decently.

He told Pete what he was going to do and what Pete was going to do, then got to his feet to start doing it-he wanted them all safe behind the doors of Hole in the Wall before the light left the day. A clean, well-lighted place.

“Okay,” Pete said, but he sounded nervous. “Just hope she doesn’t die on me. And that those lights don’t come back.” He craned to look out at the sky, where now there were only dark, low-hanging clouds. “What were they, do you think? Some kind of lightning?”

“Hey, you’re the space expert.” Henry got up. “Start picking up the little sticks-you don’t even have to get up to do that.”

“Kindling, right?”

“Right,” Henry said, then stepped over the woman on the tarp and walked to the edge of the woods, where there was plenty of bigger stuff lying around in the snow. Roughly nine miles, that was the walk ahead of him. But first they were going to light a fire. A nice big one.

Chapter Four

MCCARTHY GOES TO THE JOHN

Jonesy and Beaver sat in the kitchen, playing cribbage, which they simply called the game. That was what Lamar, Beaver’s father, had always called it, as though it were the only game. For Lamar Clarendon, whose life revolved around his central Maine construction company, it probably was the only game, the one most at home in logging camps, railroad sheds, and, of course, construction trailers. A board with a hundred and twenty holes, four pegs, and an old greasy deck of cards; if you had those things, you were in business. The game was mostly played when you were waiting to do something else-for the rain to let up, for a freight order to arrive, or for your friends to get back from the store so you could figure out what to do with the strange fellow now lying behind a closed bedroom door.

Except, Jonesy thought, we’re really waiting for Henry. Pete’s just with him. Henry’s the one who’ll know what to do, Beaver was right. Henry’s the one.

But Henry and Pete were late back. It was too early to say something had happened to them, it could just be the snow slowing them down, but Jonesy was starting to wonder if that was all, and guessed the Beav was, too. Neither of them had said anything about it as yet-it was still on the morning side of noon and things might still turn out okay-but the idea was there, floating unspoken between them.

Jonesy would concentrate on the board and the cards for awhile, and then he’d look at the closed bedroom door behind which McCarthy lay, probably sleeping, but oh boy his color had looked bad. Two or three times he saw Beav’s eyes flicking over there, too.

Jonesy shuffled the old Bikes, dealt, gave himself a couple of cards, then set aside the crib when Beaver slid a couple across to him. Beaver cut and then the preliminaries were done; it was time to peg. You can peg and still lose the game, Lamar told them, that Chesterfield always sticking out from the comer of his mouth, his Clarendon Construction cap always pulled down over his left eye like a man who knows a secret he will only tell if the price is right, Lamar Clarendon a no-play workadaddy dead of a heart attack at forty-eight, but if you peg you won’t never get skunked.

No play, Jonesy thought now. No bounce, no play. And then, on the heels of that, the wavering damned voice that day in the hospital: Please stop, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy? And oh man, why was the world so hard? Why were there so many spokes hungry for your fingers, so many gears eager to grab for your guts?

“Jonesy?”

“Huh?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, why?”

“You shivered.”

“Did I?” Sure he did, he knew he did.

“Yeah.”

“Drafty, maybe. You smell anything?”

“You mean… like him?”

“I wasn’t talking about Meg Ryan’s armpits. Yeah, him.”