With a two-inch barrel, the gun could be for nothing but close work: inside the car, for self-defense. Parker nodded, and put it away again, and Beaghler’s smile relaxed; he shifted to a more comfortable position on the seat, moved his hands away from the wheel and shift, and said, “We’ll just let her run for a couple minutes first.”
“Fine.”
The engine sounded pretty much like an ordinary pickup truck, strong, but not the powerful growl of the Chevy. Parker said. “What other guns have you got?”
“Rifle in the back, under the blankets. And another pistol.”
“I’ll take a look.”
“Help yourself,” Beaghler said, but his eyes glinted again.
Parker stepped down to the ground and walked around to the back, where the top half hinged up like a station wagon. Parker opened it, put the metal rod in place that propped it open, and moved the blankets to look at the other guns.
The rifle, wrapped in a pink baby’s blanket, was ordinary enough—a Sears Model 53 bolt-action in .30-06 caliber. Three and a half feet long, seven pounds, with a five-shot magazine and folding rear sight, it would hit what it was aimed at if it hadn’t been knocked around too long, but the bolt-action made it slow and cumbersome for anything but the simplest kind of hunting; no good against anything that could shoot back.
The pistol was something else again. A Colt Python chambered for the .357 Magnum, it had an extra-heavy six-inch barrel and weighed nearly three pounds. Beaghler kept it in a felt-lined small wooden box, with a little package of cartridges; he obviously knew he had something good here. The Python would probably have an accuracy in the middle ranges that would beat out the Model 53. But even this gun wasn’t being treated well enough; it should be fastened down to keep it from bouncing around, and if it was kept out in the car all the time it should be wrapped in oilcloth or plastic. Beaghler came close to doing well, but he always missed by just a little.
Parker went back around to the passenger seat again, and Beaghler grinned at him, saying, “Nice? Like them?”
“You keep them in the car all the time?”
“Sure. They’re safe here, my friends keep an eye on things for me.”
Parker thought of the children down by the trailers, and of the condition of the weapons in the car, and of the doors having been left unlocked. He said, “You keep this car here all the time?”
“Mostly. I told you, I don’t like to take it into town.”
Parker nodded.
Looking at his dashboard gauges, Beaghler said, “We might as well get started. Get it over with.”
”Good.”
They had to back around in a tight half-circle to face away from the house. The tall grass under the car made rustling shushing sounds along the axles and the front bumper—soft, but audible against the deeper tones of the engine. Parker looked out at the grass and thought about a car parked here all the time without killing the grass under it. And parked here unlocked with guns in it and children playing not fifty feet away, none of whom had ever come to this interesting-looking vehicle to investigate it. And guns left out in the air all the time without showing any signs of exposure.
Beaghler shifted from reverse into first. “We’re off,” he said.
“Yes,” Parker said.
Seven
Beaghler braked, and they jounced to a stop. “We’ll walk up from here,” he said. “The farmhouse is just the other side of that hill.”
They had been driving nearly an hour. Except for one five-minute period when they’d stumbled across an overgrown old dirt road and followed it for a while, they’d traveled exclusively cross-country—through meadows and open woods and an occasional rocky dry streambed. Their general trend had been upward, into mountains that looked wild at a distance and wilder up close. But there hadn’t been any heavy tangles of brush to get through, or thick woods to work their way around, or deep streams or canyons to avoid. The way had been fairly straight, the dashboard compass generally reading somewhere between northeast and southeast, and the rough ground hadn’t thrown them around as much as Parker had anticipated.
Now Beaghler had come to a stop where a shallow dry streambed they’d been following up a gradual slope split into a pair of narrow tributaries, each of them too small for the car to get into. One tributary came from a steep high heavily wooded slope to the right, the other from a more open and gentle incline straight ahead, where the trees and bushes were thinner and the ground had a loose sandy look to it.
Parker and Beaghler both stepped out onto the stony streambed and walked around to the back of the vehicle. Beaghler opened the tailgate, and Parker said, “I’ll borrow the Colt.”
Beaghler looked startled. “I was gonna offer you the rifle,” he said. “You’ll get a damn good shot down at him from the top of the hill.”
“I know handguns better,” Parker said. While Beaghler’s hands were still occupied with the tailgate, Parker reached in and took out the small box containing the revolver and its ammunition. He lifted the lid and picked up the gun, holding it pointed nowhere in particular. It was fully loaded; he could see the corners of the cartridges at the rear of the barrel. He put the box and the extra ammunition back in on the blankets.
Beaghler meanwhile had taken out the rifle and was unwrapping it from the pink baby blanket. He looked troubled, and a little confused. He said, “You sure you don’t want the rifle? It’s got a real easy action on it.”
“Don’t need it,” Parker said, and stepped backward a pace from the vehicle, where he stood watching Beaghler, waiting for his next move.
Beaghler gave the rifle an unhappy childish look, and then tossed the baby blanket into the vehicle with a fatalistic gesture, as though abandoning some idea. “Doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “Go ahead.”
“You lead the way,” Parker said. “You know this territory.”
Beaghler nodded, as though he’d expected that answer, and went crunching off around the car, following the streambed. Parker followed, and the two of them headed up the tributary straight ahead, the one that climbed through dry semi-desert soil and thin trees and shrubbery toward a well-defined hilltop.
Partway up, the streambed angled off to the right. Beaghler stepped up onto the ground, and continued straight toward the top of the hill, Parker two paces back. Once Beaghler stopped and glanced around, as though he might say something. Parker stayed where he was and watched the rifle barrel, but the pause was only for a second; then Beaghler faced front and trudged uphill again.
It took about ten minutes to climb to the top. At a couple of spots, they had to pull themselves up by holding onto bushes, and each time Parker waited for Beaghler to move a few steps beyond before following; but most of the way the going was easy, the slope gradual and soft, the ground crumbly but not difficult to get a footing in.
At the top, Beaghler dropped to the ground and inched up the last foot or so until he could see over the ridge-line. Then he glanced down over his shoulder at Parker and said, “There it is. Come on and take a look.” He sounded tired, more tired than the climb should have made him, and the expression in his eyes was slightly disgusted.
Parker moved up on Beaghler’s right side, about four feet away, and looked over the top. What he saw was a humped and rocky treeless slope leading down to a flat plain below. The slope looked gutted and pockmarked, as though eroded by a million flash floods, and the plain contained only wild grass and small bushes. Hills were leftward, to the north, but the semi-desert plain extended away to the right, south.
Down below was a house. It looked as though it had been brought here intact from the Kansas wheatfields, like the house in The Wizard of Oz. Two stories high, clapboard, with small windows and a front porch and a couple of obvious later additions on the rear. The thin dusty line of a dirt road stretched away eastward across the plain.