Only Aby…
He knew, dammit. He knew the woman and he’d been the one to fail, thinking she’d changed. He didn’t know what the debt was—he didn’t have to know. She’d have paid it. If silence was what the man asked, regarding those shipments, and she owed Cassivey—
She’d done all she could to get him into Cassivey’s employ, cajoled, pleaded. Truth be told—he’d refused to go up to Anveney for many more reasons than the smell on the money. He’d offered his own proposaclass="underline" Come down to Malvey.
Why’s it always your way? he’d asked, he thought, reasonably. They’d quarreled. He’d been mad. Aby’d gone off mad—and hurt, he’d picked that up in the ambient.
But nothing of her reasons. Aby could throw that anger up like a wall. And had.
They’d thought there was forever.
But she’d owed a man. And, damn, the woman he knew never betrayed a trust. Never. Hehad.
A sudden apprehension came shivering its way through his consciousness that he’d just slipped into Aby’s last set of motions, working for the same man, following the same route—retracing, in short, everything Aby’d done down to leaving Anveney in Cassivey’s employ, exactly where Aby’d wanted him to be when they’d had their last quarrel.
So he’d just taken that job Aby had wanted him to take—more, heowed Cassivey. It was her job he inherited, her obligation, her promises.
He wasn’t superstitious like the preacher-men, but he kept thinking about that first step they kept talking about, the one on the slide to hell. He’d failed Aby; she’d have lived if he’d been there. He wouldn’t have been riding at the rear, leaving Aby on point at the worst damn turn on the mountain. He’d sent her off to partners who’d failed her. He’d sent her off to die; and maybe, in the economy of the preachers’ God, maybe he was going up where he was somehow supposed to have been in the first place.
Only this time Aby wouldn’t be there for him. Turn about was fair play.
Got her back and the woman began to bother him again.
Got her back and he had to ask—where in hell did she spend the money?
Or had she spent it? She’d never said exactly what she’d had in the account. Hecouldn’t read the damn card. No more than she could. And she’d never said.
How much did the bank giveto Hawley, anyway?
His legs wobbled. The sky went violet and brass. His shortness of breath took him by surprise. The rifle, the pistol—a winter’s ammunition, the food, all added up, considering he’d taken no few knocks. But he needed the gun. Needed the supplies. Couldn’t lay anything down.
And Burn depended on him—Burn couldn’t afford to have him go down on his face out here and freeze in the coming storm. He couldn’t bet Burn’s life that Burn would use the road to come looking for him. A nighthorse wasn’t held to roads.
He couldn’t faint out here, for Burn’s sake, he couldn’t faint and he couldn’t quit. He set his goal as the next hill down the barren road and walked that far. Then he set his intention as another hill—struggled up to its crest, telling himself now that he’d done the hard part, he could make the downhill, at least.
But his breath was short and when he looked up his blurred vision was starting to give him two barren, eroded horizons, two road-traces among doubled rocks.
His head was light. His heart began to pound. Straight line was more efficient. Wandering used up his strength faster. Had to walk straight, had to stay conscious, above all else—if he was conscious, he persuaded himself, Burn might find him; if he wasn’t, Burn might not hear him and go right by.
He walked the next uphill—and sat down at the top, in an act of prudence, to nurse his splitting headache at the road edge, rather than the middle of it, in the vague notion a truck couldcome along. Which common sense then told him wasn’t possibly going to happen again in this country until next spring, but that had been his thought when he sat down—he didn’t want to be hit by traffic.
He didn’t want to freeze, either. He could sit here till winter snows covered him, the way he felt now. The pain shot through his skull from front to back and off his temples. He squinted and it was worse.
So he rested his head on his arms and sat that way to wait for his breathing to slow down. Raw air burned his throat. He coughed and coughing hurt his head. The cold of the bare ground had numbed his feet, and the bite of the wind that swept down off the mountain wall chilled his back. He wished he’d sent Cassivey’s man after that sweater he’d seen. Rust and black one. Aby’d have liked it.
Then he must have shut his eyes for a moment—he couldn’t tell whether the sudden darkening of the land and the advent of a brassy light was the thickness of the clouds overhead or the cumulative effect of blows to the head.
He heard the sound of thunder, and thought—damn!—with the kind of sinking feeling a man got when he’d realized a serious, serious mistake.
He knew he had to move. He sat there a time more, breathing deep to gather his strength, needing to be sure he could get up and not pass out; and while he sat, a colder wind began to gust along the ridge, raising dust. He saw it coming, adjusted his hat and scarf and pulled the cuffs of the sweater he did have down over his gloves as the first fat drops spatted into the barren dust at his feet.
That was it. God had decided. He had to move. He drew a breath tinged with copper and the smell of cold rain, and put an all-out effort into getting up.
Muscles had stiffened. He used the rifle for a prop—might not have made it to his feet, he feared, without it.
He used it for a support to bend and heft the two-pack, slung its not inconsiderable weight and the rifle-strap over his shoulder. Then he started walking, heavy drops spattering the powdery dust around him, making small red craters. It felt like liquid ice where a drop found its way past the brim of his hat, down his neck or into his face.
Then—fool, he thought, remembering in the general haze of his thoughts that he’d bought a slicker—he slung the two-pack around to get at it, and had to take his gloves off.
The slicker was one of those new plastic things that didn’t hold body heat worth a damn, but he hadn’t wanted to carry the weight of canvas, especially on the climb they faced; and the thin plastic at least kept you dry, life and death in the cold seasons, when a soaking and a cold wind could freeze a man faster than he could make a shelter. Cassivey’s man had sworn it was tough—it could double as a ground sheet, and kept you drier than canvas.
If it wasn’t flapping and cracking in the gale. If your fingers didn’t freeze, finding the catches.
He had to drop the rest of the stuff to wrestle it as it snapped and fluttered in the wind, threatening escape from his numbed fingers, but he fastened latches one after the other and held it fast. It smelled worse than Anveney smokestacks, even in the gusting wind, but between that and the coat and the sweater and all, he had to own it kept the wind out. He felt warmer.
He put his gloves back on, gathered up his gear again, took the weight and walked all the way up to the top of the next hill before he ran out of breath and had to stand there leaning on the rifle and gasping and coughing.
But when he cleared the cold-weather tearing from his eyes, he saw clumps of grass around him, sparse, twisted, and brown with the season. He’d almost reached the junction with the boundary road. He was that close.
<Burn,> he sent into the silent ambient, knees wobbling; desperate for some sense of presence, feeling the wind cold against his legs as the slicker flapped open. He had to keep going, he said to himself, and walked, using the rifle for a stick.