Kineo Town Manager: 'I Don't Know What They 10 page

'Richie Grenadeau,' Pete says, and now he does begin to dance. 'I won't forget.'

'Come on, you dickweed,' Beaver says. One thing about the Beav, he knows a really excellent rank when he hears it. 'I'm gonna break your nose again. What kind of chickenshit quits off the football team cause of a broken nose, anyhow?'

Grenadeau doesn't reply — no longer knows which of them to reply to, maybe — and something rather wonderful is happening: the other boy in the high-school jacket, Duncan, has also started to look uncertain. A flush is spreading on his cheeks and across his forehead. He wets his lips and looks uncertainly at Richie. Only the galoot still looks ready to fight, and Henry almost hopes they will fight, Henry and Jonesy and the Beav will give them a hell of a scrap if they do, hell of a scrap, because of that crying, that fucking awful crying, the way it gets in your head, the beat-beat-beat of that awful crying.

'Hey Rich, maybe we ought to—' Duncan begins.

'Kill em,' the galoot rumbles. 'Fuck em the fuck up.'

This one takes a step forward and for a moment it almost goes down. Henry knows that if the galoot had been allowed to take even one more step he would have been out of Richie Grenadeau's control, like a mean old pitbull that breaks its leash and just goes flying at its prey, a meat arrow.

But Richie doesn't let him get that next step, the one which will turn into a clumsy charge. He grabs the galoot's forearm, which is thicker than Henry's bicep and bristling with reddish-gold hair. 'No, Scotty,' he says, 'wait a minute.'

'Yeah, wait,' Duncan says, sounding almost panicky. He shoots Henry a look which Henry finds, even at the age of fourteen, grotesque. It is a reproachful look. As if Henry and his friends were the ones doing something wrong.

'What do you want?' Richie asks Henry. 'You want us to get out of here, that it?'

Henry nods.

'If we go, what are you gonna do? Who are you going to tell?'

Henry discovers an amazing thing: he is as close to coming unglued as Scotty, the galoot. Part of him wants to actually pro­voke a fight, to scream EVERYBODY! FUCKING EVERYBODY! Knowing that his friends would back him up, would never say a word even if they got trashed and sent to the hospital.

But the kid. That poor little crying retarded kid. Once the big boys finished with Henry, Beaver, and Jonesy (with Pete as well, if they could catch him), they would finish with the retarded kid, too, and it would likely go a lot further than making him eat a piece of dried dog-turd.

'No one,' he says. 'We won't tell anyone.'

'Fuckin liar,' Scotty says. 'He's a fuckin liar, Richie, lookit him.'

Scotty starts forward again, but Richie tightens his grip on the big galoot's forearm.

'If no one gets hurt,' Jonesy says in a blessedly reasonable tone of voice, 'no one's got a story to tell '

'Grenadeau glances at him, then back at Henry. 'Swear to God?'

'Swear to God,' Henry agrees.

'All of you swear to God?' Grenadeau asks.

Jonesy, Beav, and Pete all dutifully swear to God.

Grenadeau thinks about it for a moment that seems very long, and then he nods. 'Okay, fuck this. We're going.'

'If they come, run around the building the other way,' Henry says to Pete, speaking very rapidly because the big boys are already in motion. But Grenadeau still has his hand clamped firmly on Scotty's forearm, and Henry thinks this is a good sign.

'I wouldn't waste my time,' Richie Grenadeau says in a lofty tone of voice that makes Henry feel like laughing . . . but with an effort he manages to keep a straight face. Laughing at this point would be a bad idea. Things are almost fixed up. There's a part of him that hates that, but the rest of him nearly trembles with relief.

'What's up with you, anyway?' Richie Grenadeau asks him. 'What's the big deal?'

Henry wants to ask his own question — wants to ask Richie Grenadeau how he could do it, and it's no rhetorical question, either. That crying! My God! But he keeps silent, knowing anything he says might just provoke the asshole, get him going all over again.

There is a kind of dance going on here; it looks almost like the ones you learn in first and second grade. As Richie, Duncan, and Scott walk toward the driveway (sauntering, attempting to show they are going of their own free will and haven't been frightened off by a bunch of homo junior-high kids), Henry and his friends first move to face them and then step backward in a line toward the weeping kid kneeling there in his underpants, blocking him from them.

At the corner of the building Richie pauses and gives them a final look. 'Gonna see you fellas again,' he says. 'One by one or all together.'

'Yeah,' Duncan agrees.

'You're gonna be lookin at the world through a oxygen tent!' Scott adds, and Henry comes perilously close to laughing again. He prays that none of his friends will say anything — let done be done ­— and none of them do. It's almost a miracle.

One final menacing look from Richie and they are gone around the comer. Henry, Jonesy, Beaver, and Pete are left alone with the kid, who is rocking back and forth on his dirty knees, his dirty bloody tearstreaked uncomprehending face cocked to the white sky like the face of a broken clock, all of them wondering what to do next. Talk to him? Tell him it's okay, that the bad boys are gone and the danger has passed? He will never understand. And oh that crying is so freaky. How could those kids, mean and stupid as they were, go on in the face of that crying? Henry will understand later — sort of — but at that moment it's a complete mystery to him.

'I'm gonna try something,' Beaver says abruptly.

'Yeah, sure, anything,' Jonesy says. His voice is shaky.

The Beav starts forward, then looks at his friends. It is an odd look, part shame, part defiance, and — yes, Henry would swear it ­— part hope.

'If you tell anybody I did this,' he says, 'I'll never chum with you guys again.'

'Never mind that crap,' Pete says, and he also sounds shaky. 'If you can shut him up, do it!'

Beaver stands for a moment where Richie was standing while he tried to get the kid to eat the dog-turd, then drops to his knees. Henry sees the kid's underwear shorts are in fact Underoos, and that they feature the Scooby-Doo characters, plus Shaggy's Mystery Machine, just like the kid's lunchbox.

Then Beaver takes the wailing, nearly naked boy into his arms and begins to sing.

Four more miles to Banbury Cross . . . or maybe only three. Four more miles to Banbury Cross . . . or maybe only—

Henry's feet skidded again, and this time he had no chance to get his balance back. He had been in a deep daze of memory, and before he could come out of it, he was flying through the air.

He landed heavily on his back, hitting hard enough to lose his wind in a loud and painful gasp— 'Uh!' Snow rose in a dreamy sugarpuff, and he hit the back of his head hard enough to see stars.

He lay where he was for a moment, giving anything broken ample opportunity to announce itself When nothing did, he reached around and prodded the small of his back. Pain, but no agony. When they were ten and eleven and spent what seemed like whole winters sledding in Strawford Park, he had taken worse hits than this and gotten up laughing. Once, with the idiotic Pete Moore piloting his Flexible Flyer and Henry riding behind him, they had gone head-on into the big pine at the foot of the hill, the one all the kids called the Death Tree, and survived with nothing more than a few bruises and a couple of loose teeth each. The trouble was, he hadn't been ten or eleven for a lot of years.

'Get up, ya baby, you're okay,' he said, and carefully came to a sitting position. Twinges from his back, but nothing worse. just shaken up. Nothing hurt but your fuckin pride, as they used to say. Still, he'd maybe sit here another minute or two. He was making great time and he deserved a rest. Besides, those memories had shaken him. Richie Grenadeau, fucking Richie Grenadeau, who had, it turned out, flunked off the football team — it hadn't been the broken nose at all. Gonna see you fellas again, he had told them, and Henry guessed he had meant it, but the threatened confrontation had never happened, no, never happened. Something else had happened instead.

And all that was a long time ago. Right now Banbury Cross awaited — Hole in the Wall, at least — and he had no cock horse to ride there, only that poor man's steed, shank's mare. Henry got to his feet, began to brush snow from his ass, and then someone screamed inside his head.

'Ow, ow, ow!' he cried. It was like something played through a Walkman you could turn up to concert-hall levels, like a shotgun blast that had gone off directly behind his eyes. He staggered backward, flailing for balance, and had he not run into the stiffly jutting branches of a pine growing at the left side of the road, he surely would have fallen down again.

He disengaged himself from the tree's clutch, ears still ringing — hell, his entire head was ringing — and stepped forward, hardly believing he was still alive. He raised one of his hands to his nose, and the palm of his hand came away wet with blood. There was something loose in his mouth, too. He held his hand under it, spat out a tooth, looked at it wonderingly, then tossed it aside, ignoring his first impulse, which had been to put it in his coat pocket. No one, as far as he knew, did surgical implants of teeth, and he strongly doubted that the Tooth Fairy came this far out in the boonies.

He couldn't say for sure whose scream that had been, but he had an idea Pete Moore had maybe just run into a big load of bad trouble.

Henry listened for other voices, other thoughts, and heard none. Excellent. Although he had to admit that, even without voices, this had certainly turned into the hunting trip of a lifetime.

'Go, big boy, on you huskies,' he said, and started running toward Hole in the Wall again. His sense that something had gone wrong there was stronger than ever, and it was all he could do to hold himself to a fast jog.

Go look in the chamber pot.

Why don't we just knock on the bathroom door and ask him how he is?

Had he actually heard those voices? Yes, they were gone now, but he had heard them, just as he had heard that terrible agonal scream. Pete? Or had it been the woman? Pretty Becky Shue?

'Pete,' he said, the word coming out in a puff of vapor. 'It was Pete.' Not entirely sure, even now, but pretty sure.

At first he was afraid he wouldn't be able to find his rhythm again, but then, while he was still worrying about it, it came back — the synchronicity of his hurrying breath and thudding feet, beautiful in its simplicity.

Three more miles to Banbury Cross, he thought. Going home. Just like we took Duddits home that day.

(if you tell anybody I did this I'll never chum with you guys again)

Henry returned to that October afternoon as to a deep dream. He dropped down the well of memory so far and so fast that at first he didn't sense the cloud rushing toward him, the cloud that was not words or thoughts or screams but only its redblack self, a thing with places to go and things to do.

Beaver steps forward, hesitates for a moment, then drops to his knees. The retard doesn't see him; he is still wailing, eyes squeezed shut and narrow chest heaving. Both the Underoos and Beaver's zipper-studded old motorcycle jacket are comical, but none of the other boys are laughing. Henry only wants the retard to stop crying. That crying is killing him.

Beaver shuffles forward a little bit on his knees, then takes the weeping boy into his arms.

'Baby's boat's a silver dream, sailing near and far . . .'

Henry has never heard Beaver sing before, except maybe along with the radio — the Clarendons are most certainly not churchgoers — and he is astounded by the clear tenor sweetness of his friend's voice. In another year or so the Beav's voice will change completely and become unremarkable, but now, in the weedy vacant lot behind the empty building, it pierces them all, astounds them. The retarded boy reacts as well, stops crying and looks at Beaver with wonder.

'It sails from here in Baby's room and to the nearest star; Sail, Baby, sail, sail on home to me, sail the seas and sail the stars, sail on home to me . . .'

The last note drifts on the air and for a moment nothing in the world breathes for beauty. Henry feels like crying. The retarded boy looks at Beaver, who has been rocking him back and forth in rhythm with the song. On his teary face is an expression of blissful astonishment. He has forgotten his split lip and bruised cheek, his missing clothes, his lost lunchbox. To Beaver he says ooo or, open syllables that could mean almost anything, but Henry understands them perfectly and sees Beaver does, too.

'I can't do more,' the Beav says. He realizes his arm is still around the kid's shirtless shoulders and takes it away.

As soon as he does, the kid's face clouds over, not with fear this time, or with the petulance of one balked of getting his way, but in pure sorrow. Tears fill those amazingly green eyes of his and spill down the clean tracks on his dirty cheeks. He takes Beaver's hand and puts Beaver's arm back over his shoulders. 'Ooo or! Ooo or!' he says. Beaver looks at them, panicked. 'That's all my mother ever sang me, he says. 'I always went right to fuckin sleep.'

Henry and Jonesy exchange a look and burst out laughing. Not a good idea, it'll probably scare the kid and he'll start that terrible bawling again, but neither of them can help it. And the kid doesn't cry. He smiles at Henry and Jonesy instead, a sunny smile that displays a mouthful of white crammed-together teeth, and then looks back at Beaver. He continues to hold Beaver's arm firmly around his shoulders.

'Ooo or!' he commands.

'Aw, fuck, sing it again,' Pete says. 'The part you know.' Beaver ends up singing it three more times before the kid will let him stop, will let the boys work him into his pants and his tom shirt, the one with Richie Grenadeau's number on it. Henry has never forgotten that haunting fragment and will sometimes recall it at the oddest times: after losing his virginity at a UNH fraternity party with 'Smoke on the Water' pounding through the speakers downstairs; after opening his paper to the obituary page and seeing Barry Newman's rather charming smile above his multiple chins; feeding his father, who had come down with Alzheimer's at the ferociously unfair age of fifty-three, his father insisting that Henry was someone named Sam. 'A real man pays off his debts, Sammy,' his father had said, and when he accepted the next bite of cereal, milk ran down his chin. At these times what he thinks of as Beaver's Lullaby will come back to him, and he will feel transiently comforted. No bounce, no play.

Finally they've got the kid all dressed except for one red sneaker. He's trying to put it on himself, but he's got it pointing backward. He is one fucked-up young American, and Henry is at a loss to know how the three big boys could have bullied up on him. Even aside from the crying, which was like no cry­ing Henry had ever heard before, why would you want to be so mean?

'Let me fix that, man,' Beaver says.

'Fit wha?' the kid asks, so comically perplexed that Henry, Jonesy, and Pete all burst out laughing again. Henry knows you're not supposed to laugh at retards, but he can't help it. The kid just has a naturally funny face, like a cartoon character.

Beaver only smiles. 'Your sneaker, man.'

'Fit neek?'

'Yeah, you can't put it on that way, fuckin imposseeblo, señor.' Beaver takes the sneaker from him and the kid watches with close interest as the Beav slips his foot into it, draws the laces firmly against the tongue, and then ties the ends in a bow. When he's done, the kid looks at the bow for a moment longer, then at Beaver. Then he puts his arms around Beaver's neck and plants a big loud smack on Beaver's cheek.

'If you guys tell anybody he did that—' Beaver begins, but he's smiling, clearly pleased.

'Yeah, yeah, you'll never chum with us again, ya fuckin wank,' Jonesy says, grinning. He has held onto the lunchbox and now squats in front of the kid, holding it out. 'This yours, guy?'

The kid grins with the delight of someone encountering an old friend and snatches it. 'Ooby-Ooby-Doo, where-are-oo?' he sings. 'We gah-sum urk oo-do-now!'

'That's right,' Jonesy agrees. 'Got some work to do now. Gotta get you the fuck home is what we got to do. Douglas Cavell, that's your name, right?'

The boy is holding his lunchbox to his chest in both of his dirty hands. Now he gives it a loud smack, just like the one he put on Beaver's check. 'I Duddits!' he cries.

'Good,' Henry says. He takes one of the boy's hands, Jonesy takes the other, and they help him to his feet. Maple Lane is only three blocks away and they can be there in ten minutes, always assuming that Richie and his friends aren't hanging around and hoping to ambush them. 'Let's get you home, Duddits. Bet your Mom's worried about you.'

But first Henry sends Pete to the corner of the building to look up the driveway. When Pete comes back and reports the coast clear, Henry lets them go that far. Once they are on the sidewalk, where people can see them, they'll be safe. Until then, he will take no chances. He sends Pete out a second time, tells him to scout all the way to the street, then whistle if everything is cool.

'Dey gone,' Duddits says.

'Maybe,' Henry says, 'but I'll feel better if Pete takes a look.' Duddits stands serenely among them, looking at the pictures on his lunchbox, while Pete goes out to look around. Henry feels okay about sending him. He hasn't exaggerated Pete's speed; if Richie and his friends try to jump him, Pete will turn on the jets and leave them in the dust.

'You like this show, man?' Beaver says, taking the lunchbox. He speaks quietly. Henry watches with some interest, curious to see if the retarded boy will cry for his lunchbox. He doesn't.

'Ey Ooby-Doos!' the retarded kid says. His hair is golden, curly. Henry still can't tell what age he is.

'I know they're Scooby-Doos,' the Beav says patiently, 'but they never change their clothes. Pete's right about that. I mean, fuck me Freddy, right?'

'Ite!' He holds out his hands for the lunchbox and Beaver gives it back. The retarded boy hugs it, then smiles at them. It is a beautiful smile, Henry thinks, smiling himself. It makes him think of how you are cold when you have been swimming in the ocean for awhile, but when you come out, you wrap a towel around your bony shoulders and goosepimply back and you're warm again.

Jonesy is also smiling. 'Duddits,' he says, 'which one is the dog?'

The retarded boy looks at him, still smiling, but puzzled now, too.

'The dog,' Henry says. 'Which one's the dog?'

Now the boy looks at Henry, his puzzlement deepening.

'Which one's Scooby, Duddits?' Beaver asks, and Duddits's face clears. He points.

'Ooby! Ooby-Ooby-Doo! Eee a dog!'

They all burst out laughing, Duddits is laughing too, and then Pete whistles. They start moving and have gone about a quarter of the way up the driveway when Jonesy says, 'Wait! Wait!'

He runs to one of the dirty office windows and peers in, cupping his hands to the sides of his face to cut the glare, and Henry suddenly remembers why they came. Tina Jean What's-Her-Face's pussy. All that seems about a thousand years ago.

After about ten seconds, Jonesy calls, 'Henry! Beav! Come here! Leave the kid there!'

Beaver runs to Jonesy's side. Henry turns to the retarded boy and says, 'Stand right there, Duddits. Right there with your lunchbox, okay?'

Duddits looks up at him, green eyes shining, lunchbox held to his chest. After a moment he nods, and Henry runs to join his friends at the window. They have to squeeze together, and Beaver grumbles that someone is steppin on his fuckin feet, but they manage. After a minute or so, puzzled by their failure to show up on the sidewalk, Pete joins them, poking his face in between Henry's and Jonesy's shoulders. Here are four boys at a dirty office window, three with their hands cupped to the sides of their faces to cut the glare, and a fifth boy standing behind them in the weedy driveway, holding his lunchbox against his narrow chest and looking up at the white sky, where the sun is trying to break through. Beyond the dirty glass (where they will leave clean crescents to mark the places where their foreheads rested) is an empty room. Scattered across the dusty floor are a number of deflated white tadpoles that Henry recognizes as jizzbags. On one wall, the one directly across from the window, is a bulletin board. Tacked to it is a map of northern New England and a Polaroid photograph of a woman holding her skirt up. You can't see her pussy, though, just some white panties. And she's no high-school girl. She's old. She must be at least thirty.

'Holy God,' Pete says at last, giving Jonesy a disgusted look. 'We came all the way down here for that?'

For a moment Jonesy looks defensive, then grins and jerks his thumb back over his shoulder. 'No,' he says. 'We came for him.'

Henry was pulled from recall by an amazing and totally unexpected realization: he was terrified, had been terrified for some time. Some new thing had been hovering just below the threshold of his consciousness, held down by the vivid memory of meeting Duddits. Now it had burst forward with a frightened yell, insisting on recognition.

He skidded to a stop in the middle of the road, flailing his arms to keep from falling down in the snow again, and then simply stood there panting, eyes wide. What now? He was only two and a half miles from Hole in the Wall, almost there, so what the Christ now?

There's a cloud, he thought. Some kind of cloud, that's what. I can't tell what it is but I can't tell it — I never felt anything so clearly in my life. My adult life, anyway. I have to get off the road. I have to get away from it. Get away from the movie. There's a movie in the cloud. The kind Jonesy likes. A scary one.

'That's stupid,' he muttered, knowing it wasn't.

He could hear the approaching wasp-whine of an engine. It was coming from the direction of Hole in the Wall and coming fast, a snowmobile engine, almost certainly the Arctic Cat stored at camp . . . but it was also the redblack cloud with the movie going on inside it, some terrible black energy rushing toward him.

For a moment Henry was frozen with a hundred childish horrors, things under beds and things in coffins, squirming bugs beneath overturned rocks and the furry jelly that was the remains of a long-dead baked rat the time Dad had moved the stove out from the wall to check the plug. And horrors that weren't childish at all: his father, lost in his own bedroom and bawling with fear; Barry Newman, running from Henry's office with that vast look of terror on his face, terror because he had been asked to look at something he wouldn't, perhaps couldn't, acknowledge; sitting awake at four in the morning with a glass of Scotch, all the world a dead socket, his own mind a dead socket and oh baby it was a thousand years till dawn and all lullabys had been cancelled. Those things were in the redblack cloud rushing down on him like that pale horse in the Bible, those things and more. Every bad thing he had ever suspected was now coming toward him, not on a pale horse but on an old snowmobile with a rusty cowling. Not death but worse than death. It was Mr Gray.

Get off the road! his mind screamed. Get off the road now! Hide!

For a moment he couldn't move — his feet seemed to grow heavy. The gash on his thigh, the one the turnsignal had made, burned like a brand. Now he understood how a deer caught in the headlights felt, or a chipmunk hopping stupidly back and forth in front of an oncoming lawnmower. The cloud had robbed him of his ability to help himself He was frozen in its rushing path.

What got him going, oddly enough, was all those thoughts of suicide. Had he agonized his way to that decision on five hundred sleepless nights only to be robbed of his option by a kind of buck-fever? No, by God, no, it wouldn't be, Suffering was bad enough; allowing his own terrified body to mock that suffering by locking up and just standing here while a demon ran him down . . . no, he would not allow that to happen.

And so he moved, but it was like moving in a nightmare, fighting his way through air which seemed to have grown as thick as taffy. His legs rose and fell with the slowness of an underwater ballet. Had he been running down this road? Actually running? The idea now seemed impossible, no matter how strong the memory.

Still, he kept moving while the whine of the approaching engine grew closer, deepening to a stuttery roar. And at last he was able to get into the trees on the south side of the road. He managed perhaps fifteen feet, far enough so there was no snow cover, only a dust of white on the aromatic orange-brown needles. There Henry fell on his knees, sobbing with terror and putting his gloved hands to his mouth to stifle the sound, because what if it heard? It was Mr Gray, the cloud was Mr Gray, and what if it heard?

He crawled behind the moss-girdled trunk of a spruce tree, clutched it, then peered around it through the tumbled screen of his sweaty hair. He saw a spark of light in the dark afternoon. It jittered, wavered, and rounded. It became a headlight.

Henry began to moan helplessly as the blackness neared. It seemed to hover over his mind like an eclipse, obliterating thought, replacing it with terrible images: milk on his father's chin, panic in Barry Newman's eyes, scrawny bodies and staring eyes behind barbed wire, flayed women and hanged men. For a moment his understanding of the world seemed to turn inside out like a pocket and he realized that everything was infected . . . or could be. Everything. His reasons for contemplating suicide were paltry in the face of this oncoming thing.

He pressed his mouth against the tree to keep from screaming, felt his lips tattoo a kiss into the springy moss all the way down to where it was moist and tasted of bark. In that moment the Arctic Cat flashed past and Henry recognized the figure which straddled it, the person who was generating the redblack cloud which now filled Henry's head like a dry fever.

He bit into the moss, screamed against the tree, inhaled frag­ments of moss without being aware of it, and screamed again. Then he simply knelt there, holding onto the tree and shuddering, as the sound of the Arctic Cat began to diminish into the west. He was still there when it had died away to a troublesome whine again; still there when it faded away entirely.

Pete's back there somewhere, he thought. It'll come to Pete, and to the woman.

Henry stumbled back to the road, unaware that his nose had begun bleeding again, unaware that he was crying. He began moving toward Hole in the Wall once more, although now the best pace he could manage was a shambling limp. But maybe that was all right, because it was all over back at camp.

Whatever the horrible thing was that he had been sensing, it had happened. One of his friends was dead, one was dying, and one, God help him, had become a movie star.

CHAPTER SEVEN

JONESY AND THE BEAV

Beaver said it again. No Beaver-isms now; just that bare Anglo-Saxon syllable you came to when you were up against the wall and had no other way to express the horror you saw. 'Ah, fuck, man —fuck.'

However much pain McCarthy had been in, he had taken time to snap on both of the switches just inside the bathroom door, lighting the fluorescent bars on either side of the medicine chest mirror and the overhead fluorescent ring. These threw a bright, even glare that gave the bathroom the feel of a crime-scene photograph . . . and yet there was a kind of stealthy surrealism, too, because the light wasn't quite steady; there was just enough flicker for you to know the power was coming from a genny and not through a line maintained by Derry and Bangor Hydroelectric.

The tile on the floor was baby blue. There were only spots and splatters of blood on it near the door, but as they approached the toilet next to the tub, the splotches ran together and became a red snake. Scarlet capillaries had spread off from this. The tiles were tattooed with the footprints of their boots, which neither Jonesy nor Beaver had taken off. On the blue vinyl shower curtain were four blurred fingerprints, and Jonesy thought: He must have reached out and grabbed at the curtain to keep from falling when he turned to sit.

Yes, but that wasn't the awful part. The awful part was what Jonesy saw in his mind's eye: McCarthy scuttling across the baby-blue tiles with one hand behind him, clutching himself, trying to hold something in.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 541