Dreamcatcher Read Free

wants to say Hey man, what’s going on and have one of them say back Oh, you know, Beav, SSDD. No bounce, no play.
    He gets up.
    â€œHey, man,” George says. Beaver went to Westbrook Junior College with George, and then he seemed cool enough, but juco was many long beers ago. “Where you goin?”
    â€œTake a leak,” Beaver says, rolling his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.
    â€œWell, you want to hurry your bad ass back, I’m just getting to the good part,” George says, and Beaver thinks crotchless panties. Oh boy, today that old weird vibe is strong, maybe it’s the barometer or something.
    Lowering his voice, George says, “When I got her skirt up—”
    â€œI know, she was wearin crotchless panties,” Beaver says. He registers the look of surprise—almost shock—in George’s eyes but pays no attention. “I sure want to hear that part.”
    He walks away, walks toward the men’s room with its yellow-pink smell of piss and disinfectant, walks past it, walks past the women’s, walks past the door with OFFICE on it, and escapes into the alley. The sky overhead is white and rainy, but the air is good. So good. He breathes it in deep and thinks again. No bounce, no play. He grins a little.
    He walks for ten minutes, just chewing toothpicks and clearing his head. At some point, he can’t remember exactly when, he tosses away the joint that has been in his pocket. And then he calls Henry from the pay phone in Joe’s Smoke Shop, up by Monument Square. He’s expecting the answering machine—Henry is still in school—but Henry is actually there, he picks up on the second ring.
    â€œHow you doing, man?” Beaver asks.
    â€œOh, you know,” Henry says. “Same shit, different day. How about you, Beav?”
    Beav closes his eyes. For a moment everything is all right again; as right as it can be in such a piss-ache world, anyway.
    â€œAbout the same, buddy,” he replies. “Just about the same.”
    1993: Pete Helps a Lady in Distress
    Pete sits behind his desk just off the showroom of Macdonald Motors in Bridgton, twirling his key-chain. The fob consists of four enameled blue letters: NASA .
    Dreams age faster than dreamers, that is a fact of life Pete has discovered as the years pass. Yet the last ones often die surprisingly hard, screaming in low, miserable voices at the back of the brain. It’s been a long time since Pete slept in a bedroom papered with pictures of Apollo and Saturn rockets and astronauts and spacewalks (EVAs, to those in the know) and space capsules with their shields smoked and fused by the fabulous heat of re-entry and LEMs and Voyagers and one photograph of a shiny disc over Interstate 80, people standing in the breakdown lane and looking up with their hands shielding their eyes, the photo’s caption reading T HIS O BJECT , P HOTOGRAPHED N EAR A RVADA , C OLORADO, IN 1971, H AS N EVER B EEN E XPLAINED . I T I S A G ENUINE UFO.
    A long time.
    Yet he still spent one of his two weeks of vacation this year in Washington, D.C., where he went to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum everyday and spent nearly all of his time wandering among the displays with a wondering grin on his face. And most of that time he spent looking at the moon rocks and thinking, Those rocks came from a place where the skies are always black and the silence is everlasting. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took twenty kilograms of another world and now here it is.
    And here he is, sitting behind his desk on a day when he hasn’t sold a single car (people don’t like to buy cars when it’s raining, and it has been drizzling in Pete’s part of the world ever since first light), twirling his NASA keychain and looking up at the clock. Time moves slowly in the afternoons, ever more slowly as the hour of five approaches. At five it will be time for that first beer. Not