“I could have laughed out loud when I realized that there in the near shadows I was seeing two pairs of Levi’s, and two holsters with pistols, and that in the deeper shadow there was a couple fucking doggie-style, giggling, drunk out of their minds.
“Now, in my years with the Colonel, we were on various sides of a bunch of civil wars all over Central and South America, and those are the kinds of situations in which you really, really lose all concept of sportsmanship. If they’d made themselves that vulnerable, then the evolutionary process needed to remove them before they could breed—and here I was, just in time.
“I figured out my footing and position, got into place, and then dropped in right behind the man, bracing a knee in his back and cutting his throat before he knew more than that he was startled. And just that second, damn if that woman didn’t grab a knife from a back sheath, roll to put the dying man between her and me, and come right at me fast and hard, ready to kill me. Never saw anyone handle anything so fast before, Lyle, and I’ve seen plenty. Shit, Lyle, if my mind isn’t playing tricks on me, I even remember thinking that I had finally met my equal.
“I got a footsweep on her and gave her a good gash in the arm on her way down—I think I must have nicked an artery, to judge by how much blood there was. She came back at me, maybe already getting weak, and I managed to get inside her blade and drive mine into her eye, hard enough to crunch bone and get right into the brain. Nasty, messy way to go, but fast, and she didn’t make a sound as she died.
“Something made me drag the bodies into the moonlight— some part of my mind must have already known, and thought the rest of me should know. I wiped the faces clean.
“The man was Jesús Picardin—or rather a different version of him. And the woman was me. No wonder she was so handy with a knife, and no wonder our little clash of blades seemed almost choreographed, as if we were anticipating each other’s moves and my little advantages—having clothes on, being less surprised, not being drunk—sort of gave me the win on points.”
She shuddered again, violently, and pressed her face against my shoulder.
I hadn’t the slightest idea what to say or do. We sat like that until the sun was fully up and it was time to go down to the others. Despite having been well rested before my watch started, and having only been awake a few hours, I went right to sleep as soon as we rolled north in the esty, sleeping back in the middle seat. Terri sat up with Paula for driving lessons; I think everyone thought that some distraction or other might be good for her, and besides nobody much wanted to be near Iphwin. It didn’t bother me because I was asleep.
I was told later that the ruins of Chihuahua were particularly impressive, for it had once been a big, prosperous city, and thus it had come in for more than its share of looting and burning as the north of the country had gotten more and more dangerous; somehow, though, I was content to be spared the sight of a vast expanse of burned and wrecked human dwellings, silent and empty in the early morning sun.
It was almost noon when the Colonel awakened me and said, “Hate to disturb you, Lyle, but we need to hold a little conference before we go further, and I thought you ought to be part of it.”
“Perfectly all right, Roger.” I sat up, rubbing my eyes, and noticed the esty was no longer moving. We were stopped dead in the middle of the road, sitting in the usual environment—desert surrounded by mountains, on a road that connected a meaningless spot on the southern horizon with an equally meaningless spot on the hills to the north of us. While I was asleep they had “fixed” the rear window by taping clear plastic over it. I gathered my wits and managed to ask, “What’s up?”
“According to our map, which is forty-five years old, this line of hills up ahead is the last one before the Rio Grande. Then we’re about three miles from a bridge that should take us over the river and into the United States. If the bridge is still there. If the United States is still there. You might say there are a few complications.”
I yawned and stretched and said, “All right. I’m with you, more or less.” I dragged myself to the edge of the seat and found that all the others had managed to range themselves in a rough circle among the esty seats and aisles.
“And there’s a few things we want to ask Iphwin about,” Esmé said, making it sound like a threat. To judge by the way Iphwin reacted, he surely heard it as a threat too. Esmé smiled at him, an unpleasant smile that registered satisfaction more than pleasure, and said, “Such as who the hell is Billie Beard—what the hell is Billie Beard—and how come I just ran into versions of people who already exist on this side. I still get a feeling someone is not being perfectly honest with us.”
“Before you answer,” Helen said, “think about what you learned about pain, yesterday.”
Iphwin tried to speak, twice, and then finally drew his knees up to his chest, tears leaking out around his eyes, shaking his head. There must have been three full minutes, or more, during which we just sat and stared at him.
Terri realized before any of us, bent over the huddled little man, and said, “I bet you’re really afraid.”
Iphwin nodded miserably.
“That was the first time you’d ever really been hurt and besides you don’t understand what we want or why we do things, so now all of a sudden you’re really afraid that we might decide to hurt you again. And nobody’s talked to you all day and you’re probably also really lonely.”
His shoulders started to shake and tears gushed down his face. Terri put her arms around him and told him, “No one is going to hurt you. We’re sorry. And we’ll be your friends again, if you forgive us and if you promise to try to learn to respect our feelings. Promise?”
“I promise,” he sniffled.
“Oh, Christ,” Helen said, her voice dripping with contempt. There was an echo in it, somewhere, of the way she had been with me in the bedroom. “The ruler of the economic universe turns out to be a big baby.”
I looked at her with some irritation, but before I could think of some suitably adult and urbane insult to toss at her, youth and energy jumped into the breach.
“I guess you’re never too old to be a bully,” Terri said, straightening up and glaring at Helen over the tops of her small wire-rimmed glasses. “And I suppose once you take it on yourself to bully other people, there’s no such thing as a victim that’s too helpless.” The skinny girl looked even younger than her age—like an angry choir boy who might fly at Helen and start slapping or pulling hair—but she pushed her glasses up her nose, raised her chin, planted her feet, and made it dead clear she wasn’t giving any ground.
After a long pause, Helen shrugged, as if it were simply too trivial to take notice of, and said, “Iphwin, I am sorry I hit you, and I shouldn’t have done it. And if you need to cry, well, that’s none of my business. It was rude of me to make fun of you.”
“It’s all right,” Iphwin said, sniffling. “I do feel awful but I think you were right yesterday that I needed to know this sort of feeling was possible. I had no idea that one human being could do this to another one. I don’t mean as a matter of conscience, I mean I had no idea what the effects could be like. And I’m very afraid I might have done things like this to the rest of you, and I really didn’t know what I was doing, and that’s no excuse at all because I should have known, and ... oh, oh, oh, shit.” He started to cry again, and Terri sat down next to him, patting his arm.