clear. Stars were out. You can read the stars, can't you?'
'Ayuh.' Del looked deeply ashamed. 'Always could, anyway.'
'And the moss. 'Twas you who told me about how to read north by the moss on the trees when we was kids.'
'Ayuh,' Del repeated. Just that. Ev gave him time, then pressed.
'Well, what happened?'
For a long time Del still said nothing. Then, in a voice which was almost inaudible, he said: 'I got turned around.'
Ev let the silence spin out, as difficult as that was.
'Everything was all right for a while,' Del resumed at last. 'I hunted most of the morning but didn't see no fresh sign. I sat down and ate m'dinner and had a bottle of my ma's beer. Made me sleepy and I napped. I had some funny dreams ... can't remember 'em, but I know they was funny. And, look! This happened while I was sleepin'.'
Del McCready raised his upper lip and showed Ev a hole there.
'Lost a tooth?'
'Ayuh ... it was layin in the crotch of m'pants when I woke up. Fell out when I was sleepin', I guess, but I ain't hardly ever had any trouble with my teeth, at least not since that one wisdom tooth got impacted and damn near killed me. By then it coming on dark
'Dark!'
'I know how it sounds, don't you worry,' Del said crossly - but it was the crossness of someone who is deeply ashamed. 'I just slept all the afternoon away, and when I got up, Ev -'
His eyes rolled up to meet Ev's for one miserable second and then shifted away, as if he could not bear to look his old friend in the eye for longer than that one second.
'It was like somethin' stole m'brains. The tooth fairy, mayhap.'
Del laughed, but there hadn't been much humor in the sound. 'I wandered around for a while, thinking I was following the polestar, and when I still hadn't come out on the Hammer Cut Road by nine o'clock or so, I kinda rubbed my eyes and saw it wasn't Polaris at all, but one of the planets - Mars or Sat'n, I guess. I laid down to sleep, and until I came out along Preston Stream a week later, I don't remember nothing but little bits and pieces.'
'Well . . .' Ev halted. lt sounded entirely unlike Del, whose head was as level as a carpenter's plane. 'Well, was you panicked, Del?'
Del's eyes rolled up to meet Ev's, and they were still ashamed, but there was also a leaven of real humor in them now. 'A man can't stay in a panic for a whole week, I don't b'lieve,' he said dryly. 'It's awful tirin'.'
'So you just . . .'
'I just,' Del agreed, 'but just what, I don't know. I know that when I woke up from that nap my feet and my ass was both asleep and all numb, and I know that in one of those dreams it seemed like I heard somethin' hummin' - the way you can hear power lines hum on a still day, you know - and that's all. I forgot all m'woodcraft and wandered around in the woods like somebody who'd never even seen the woods before. When I hit Preston Stream I knew enough to follow it out, and I woke up in here, and I guess I'm a laughingstock in town, but I'm grateful to be alive. It's God's mercy that I am.'
'You ain't a laughingstock, Del,' Ev said, and of course that was a lie, because that was exactly what Del was. He worked at overcoming it for nearly five years, and when he saw for sure that the barbershop wits were never going to let him live it down, he moved up to East Eddington and opened a combination garage and small engine-repair shop. Ev still got up to see him once in a while, but Del didn't come down to Haven much anymore. Ev guessed he knew why.
10
Sitting in his rented room, Ev closed the compass up as tight as it would go and drew the tiniest circle yet, the smallest the compass would make. There was only one house inside this marble-sized circle, and he thought: That house is the closest one there is to the center of Haven. Funny I never thought about it before.
It was the old Garrick place, sitting there on Derry Road with Big Injun Woods widening out behind it.
Should have drawn this last circle in red, if no other.,