Full Dark, No Stars

were rumors of a regional post in his future. He took Janet to Cancún, and they had a fabulous time. She began cal ing him “my nuzzle-bunny.”

Tom’s accountant at Goodhugh Waste Removal embezzled two mil ion dol ars and departed for parts unknown. The subsequent accounting review revealed that the business was on very shaky

ground; that bad old accountant had been nibbling away for years, it seemed.

Nibbling? Streeter thought, reading the story in The Derry News. Taking it a chomp at a time is more like it.

Tom no longer looked thirty-five; he looked sixty. And must have known it, because he stopped dying his hair. Streeter was delighted to see that it hadn’t gone white underneath the artificial color;

Goodhugh’s hair was the dul and listless gray of Elvid’s umbrel a when he had furled it. The hair-color, Streeter decided, of the old men you see sitting on park benches and feeding the pigeons. Cal it Just For Losers.

In 2005, Jacob the footbal player, who had gone to work in his father’s dying company instead of to col ege (which he could have attended on a ful -boat athletic scholarship), met a girl and got

married. Bubbly little brunette named Cammy Dorrington. Streeter and his wife agreed it was a beautiful ceremony, even though Carl Goodhugh hooted, gurgled, and burbled al the way through it, and

even though Goodhugh’s oldest child—Gracie—tripped over the hem of her dress on the church steps as she was leaving, fel down, and broke her leg in two places. Until that happened, Tom Goodhugh

had looked almost like his former self. Happy, in other words. Streeter did not begrudge him a little happiness. He supposed that even in hel , people got an occasional sip of water, if only so they could appreciate the ful horror of unrequited thirst when it set in again.

The honeymooning couple went to Belize. I’ll bet it rains the whole time, Streeter thought. It didn’t, but Jacob spent most of the week in a run-down hospital, suffering from violent gastroenteritis and pooping into paper didies. He had only drunk bottled water, but then forgot and brushed his teeth from the tap. “My own darn fault,” he said.

Over eight hundred US troops died in Iraq. Bad luck for those boys and girls.

Tom Goodhugh began to suffer from gout, developed a limp, started using a cane.

That year’s check to The Non-Sectarian Children’s Fund was of an extremely good size, but Streeter didn’t begrudge it. It was more blessed to give than to receive. Al the best people said so.

In 2006, Tom’s daughter Gracie fel victim to pyorrhea and lost al her teeth. She also lost her sense of smel . One night shortly thereafter, at Goodhugh and Streeter’s weekly dinner (it was just the two men; Carl’s attendant had taken Carl on an “outing”), Tom Goodhugh broke down in tears. He had given up microbrews in favor of Bombay Sapphire gin, and he was very drunk. “I don’t understand what’s

happened to me!” he sobbed. “I feel like… I don’t know… fucking Job!”

Streeter took him in his arms and comforted him. He told his old friend that clouds always rol in, and sooner or later they always rol out.

“Wel , these clouds have been here a fuck of a long time!” Goodhugh cried, and thumped Streeter on the back with a closed fist. Streeter didn’t mind. His old friend wasn’t as strong as he used to be.

Charlie Sheen, Tori Spel ing, and David Hasselhoff got divorces, but in Derry, David and Janet Streeter celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary. There was a party. Toward the end of it, Streeter escorted his wife out back. He had arranged fireworks. Everybody applauded except for Carl Goodhugh. He tried, but kept missing his hands. Final y the former Emerson student gave up on the clapping

thing and pointed at the sky, hooting.

In 2007, Kiefer Sutherland went to jail (not for the first time) on DUI charges, and Gracie Goodhugh Dickerson’s husband was kil ed in a car crash. A drunk driver veered into his lane while Andy

Dickerson was on his way home from work. The good news was that the drunk wasn’t Kiefer Sutherland. The bad news was that Gracie Dickerson was four months pregnant and broke. Her husband had

let his life insurance lapse to save on expenses. Gracie moved back in with her father and her brother Carl.

“With their luck, that baby wil be born deformed,” Streeter said one night as he and his wife lay in bed after making love.

“Hush!” Janet cried, shocked.

“If you say it, it won’t come true,” Streeter explained, and soon the two nuzzle-bunnies were asleep in each other’s arms.

That year’s check to the Children’s Fund was for thirty thousand dol ars. Streeter wrote it without a qualm.

Gracie’s baby came at the height of a February snowstorm in 2008. The good news was that it wasn’t deformed. The bad news was that it was born dead. That damned family heart defect. Gracie—