The field ended with a tree line and he eased over some long-forgotten, rusting barbed-wire fence that had broken and been slowly crushed down by the unstoppable tide of vetch and poison ivy and creeper vine and pigweed and honeysuckle and multifloral rose and God only knows what kind of grass and weed and abomination of Mother Nature. And he was through the trees and weeds and in an overgrown parcel of pastureland that backed up to the property.
He moved steadily and on a perfectly straight line, thinking of nothing in particular but with the mixture of awareness that he carried right beneath his mental surface feeding his on-line terminals. Telling him the field was full of snakes. A few would be poisonous. There were cattle milling off somewhere in the wooded acreage to his right, and water nearby. And he knew there would be dogs. People. The taped tractor chain swung against his leg, the heavy weight a comforting presence.
The junk began before he had cleared the far edge of the pasture. He'd seldom seen anything like it. A panorama of blight. Huge, rust-encrusted mounds of everything imaginable. Filth-covered bedsprings and the guts from a hundred junked television sets. Ancient pumps and what was left from an old hay saw. Broken I-beams and cracked engine blocks and parts of tools and discarded appliances. Pieces of transient lives and memories and throwaways and investments gone bad and farms gone sour and marriages gone awry and a thousand broken, burst, busted, bummed-out vestiges of the American Dream left to mold and mildew and oxidize and collect weeds in the hot sun and cold winters of the great midwestern pastureland. All the white, gray, gunmetal, blue, silver, chrome, oilslick shades and hues and paint jobs had been worn and ground down to the same color—an ugly, ferruginous brownish shit red.
But this is not what he saw as he walked through the snaky weeds. He did not see broken dreams and bedsprings. He did not care about tanks, transmissions, trucks, clodbusters, cultivators, combines, planters, Plymouths, plows, rippers, rollers, refrigerators gutted to make pump houses and left to turn to rust. He saw hiding places, coffins, burial grounds, camouflage, ambush sites, killing zones, field expedient resupply, death and torture and escape and evasion.
He was Chaingang then, not Daniel, walking through the tall fescue and the creeper vine, the heavy chain swinging against a tree-trunk leg, and if you crossed him out here, out in all this overgrown world of desolate junk, you dropped. You disappeared. You bought it. Because this was a world he could relate to. The kind of things he gravitated toward. Junkyard dogs and snakes and lonely, frightening places with no one around to hear a cry for help. Nobody near to blunder onto a freshly dug grave. This was snuffie country.
He was aware of Michael Hora's presence then. Not that be thought Hora was watching him through a scope or anything. It was just a subliminal feeling that there was a dangerous man somewhere nearby. He was close now. And as he walked, guided by that inexplicable compass inside him, never hesitating for even that fraction of a fleeting second, one saw what Chaingang saw as he moved toward his destination, homing in on human heartbeat.
He saw the shape of Stobaugh County the way it fit between the four adjacent, touching land masses, and the surrounding and interlocking blue features, and the way the fishhook looked. This was his name for the part of the state he was now in, and he had looked at it for a long time, then redrawn a portion of it to scale on a page of the ledger, making clean, ultra-precise lines with a draftsman's hand, and the eye of an artist. Very close to true scale he had drawn what he called the fishhook shape of this land mass, bisecting it with the Sandy Road and Lingo Road, and Talbot's Mill Run, and Johnson's and Hunter's Ferry Road and the old Althea School road, crisscrossing the fishhook and neatly printing the names that were still only names to him.
But he had memorized the placement of Hora's to the Big Pasture, and the surrounding Rowe's Field, and South Spur, and Dutch Barrow, and Fast's, and Kerr's Store, and Bayou Landing, and he would know in an emergency situation how to get to Indian Nose and Hurricane Lamp, or where Thurman's property line was, or Texas Corners or the McDermott Cemetery. He'd been there for half an hour but he retained in his memory the place-names and roads and routes and geographic locations of the area better than some old-timers who'd been there for fifteen years.
Because his life might depend on his being able to make it through Lightfoot Swamp to Breen's Hole. He might have to find the burial mound south of Clearmont Church in a hurry, and he wouldn't have the luxury of calling Triple A or stopping a friendly stranger and asking directions. He might have to negotiate the twists and turns and surprises of County 530 in the pitch-black night, escaping with his life up through Dogleg and Hibbler to Whitetail Island, or Number 22, and when the time came it was all filed away inside his computer, the lay of the land and the escape routes. He believed that if you planned hard you won.
He smelled humans now and it was the scent of people nearby. He walked around vehicles, and a barking dog on a chain penetrated his faraway thoughts as he came around part of a rusting pickup and saw a heavy young woman sitting on the porch of a decrepit, tar-paper-covered house.
“Howdy,” he called out from a distance, beaming a smile in the woman's direction.
“Where'd jew come from?” she asked without interest, her mouth not unlike his, a small slit that opened in a shapeless mass of dough.
“This way.” He gestured vaguely, stepping around toward the front of the house but not going up on the porch. “Michael around?"
“Michael?"
“Yeah."
“Michael who?” she asked with a smart tone.
He thought how easily he could snuff her out. Go up on the porch, chain-snap her once, and butcher the fresh hog.
“Tell Michael Hora it's somebody used to work with him,” he said in a voice loud enough to carry to the surrounding buildings. He felt eyes on him for just a second or two before he heard the flat voice to his left and to the rear, “Bunkowski? Chaingang? Jesus!” he said as Chaingang turned and saw the man standing there. He bad not heard him come out of the building. “Whatchew doin’ here?” He didn't seem that happy at the prospect of a reunion.
“I gotta proposition for ya."
“I ain't in that line no more."
“No. Not that."
“Okay. What?"
“Need to go someplace we can talk in private."
“She don't hear nothin'."
“Uh huh."
“Go on. Speak your piece."
“I need a place to stay."
“So?"
“Someplace where people don't get too curious."
“You're hot then, are ya?"
“Oddly enough—no. But I need time to myself."
“Umm."
“I remembered you had a big place down here. I thought we might work out some kind of a deal."
“Howzzat?"
“I need to have something to do to occupy my time. I plan to go on a, uh, training regimen that will include a diet and lots of hard work."
“Diet. Work.” He repeated the words like they were foreign phrases he'd never heard before.
“Right. And you have work that can be done, right?"
“I cain't afford to pay for no work right now."
“No. You don't understand. I'll pay you. Also I'll do some of the work. Whatever fits into my schedule.” They talked some more and Chaingang pulled out a thousand dollars in cash. “For a month in advance?” Hora walked over and reached for the money. “Oh, and I have a woman with me."