Ah shit, the man said. You fucking dipshits. He looked up at Nat, then at the Datsun, perhaps thinking in that moment that it might be easier to take Nat’s tiny car, but instead he simply said, Next time you won’t be so lucky, and turned and ran back down the slope, past Rick and into the driver’s seat of the El Camino, Rick’s voice calling up at Nat all the while: Help me. Jesus fucking Christ. He shot me. I’m fucking shot.
The lights were coming along the street now, blue and red and illuminating everything, and Nat could not tell if there was one car or a hundred. The sirens loud and screaming. The tattooed man sat behind the wheel of the El Camino and its engine was roaring and roaring but the car did not move and Nat could see that its wheel well was crushed into the front tire from where the Datsun had hit it.
Jesus Christ, Rick called out to him. What are you doing? Come on!
The lights and the sirens. The tattooed man leaping out of the El Camino now, the pistol in his hand, running out beyond the lights, out into the darkness of the town and the desert that held it, the first of the police cars passing the stranded El Camino, sirens blazing, lights flashing everywhere.
Nat had backed to the door and slid now behind the wheel. I’m sorry, he said, his voice quiet, calm, and when he pulled forward it was not into that blaze of rotating police lights but instead to the right, the Datsun following the long stretch of the building toward the far exit, Rick’s voice following him as he drove: What are you doing? Don’t leave me! Don’t fucking leave me here. But he was already out amidst the rows of new cars glistening under the white glow of a quarter moon. He could hear Rick’s voice calling to him long after he was on the road, long after the casinos disappeared in the mirrors and the desert blew out all around him, empty and endless and as black as an ocean, a voice that called and called and called his name and would not stop.
18
HE CAME DOWN THE ROAD AT A DEAD RUN, THE RIFLE IN HIS hands and the zippered case flapping over his shoulder, thirty or forty yards and already panting, his feet slipping every few steps against the icy surface of the plowed asphalt. When he turned and leaped for the embankment he was not sure if he would be able to get through it at all, his body a heavy, floundering shape against the slope, but somehow he managed to scramble through and up and over, snow-covered and heaving for breath, his heart a hammer in his chest. Beyond him, the road was dark and the forest darker still, but in the glow of an approaching pickup, he could see Rick a few dozen yards away where he stood just at the edge of the trees, his body silhouetted for a brief instant as the lights swung out through the forest and the swirling snow as if rotating on some vast dish, that slash of illumination reaching Bill just as Rick looked up in his direction, the pistol already raised before Bill had even managed to regain his feet, trying to stand now and fumbling with the rifle, pulling the trigger only to realize he had not yet levered a shell into the chamber and propelling himself, in a staggering crawl, into the downsloping branches of a black fir as the pistol barked and its bright sharp light bit the air, all the while his own voice like a crazed whine in the darkness.
The shots came quick and fast now, thwacking against the trunks all around him. His own finger pulled the trigger but he was not aiming anymore, had stopped aiming when he saw the flash of Rick’s pistol. His own shot seemed to fly up into the air like some bright yellow flower and he stumbled backward toward the darker forest, pulling the bolt to bring another cartridge into the chamber and then knowing that the rifle was empty. Another shot came as he ran, low and dim through the snow, and then another, Bill’s breath coming in gasps, his feet sinking everywhere into the frozen earth as he stumbled behind a tree. He thought he might break apart, or that he was breaking apart already. And yet he knew he could not simply stand there, that doing so would mean death, and so he breathed in two quick sharp lungfuls of the frozen air and looked around the black trunk, the rifle held tight in his grip. There was nothing there now. No dark figure. What he stared into was a stretch of dim and endless forestland swirling with snow and an angular patchwork of tenebrous shapes that fell into a Möbius strip of distance. No sign of movement anywhere.
He thought of Majer then, of Majer and the animals, and all he could muster for them was an apology for their collective deaths and for his own and a question he could not answer: What good had he been to them? The bear had stared out at him from his cage with eyes that clearly knew him, that recognized him, but what circled through the bear’s mind he would never know. But did he even know what circled through his own? Everything he had done seemed utterly foolish, running out into the storm like a madman. He should have gone with Grace and Jude. He knew that now, and he also knew that he should have understood that from the start.
But it was too late and maybe it had been too late since the beginning. Everything beyond his sight mere abstraction — memory, history, perhaps even love — and the time for such things had ended. Instead there was only his motion as he turned around the trunk and stared into the storm. This time he could see Rick once again, his figure limping and struggling through the snow, not away from him but toward, some fetch or wraith or grim doppelgänger come to end him, and the fear that clutched at his heart held him there, watching in terror for a long, trembling moment until, at last, he turned and began an erratic, panicked stumble uphill, each step postholing up to his thighs, his feet numb but his body pressing forward in desperation. He could not remember how many shells remained in the case but knew that there were not many.
The trees around him had begun to shake and hiss and the snow blew sideways against his face. He stood with his back to a tree again, the rifle spattered with ice, his hands red and burning. The gun case was still hanging from his shoulder and he unslung it and pressed his crabbed hand into the pocket and came up with a single shell. Certainly the last. He loaded it into the rifle and closed the breech and stood panting.
Then the tree next to his head exploded, a burst of wood chips spattering his face. He jerked back, the rifle fumbling in his grip as the flat pop of the pistol repeated, the bullet whizzing past him and into the forest. He spun around the tree and the rifle cracked, the flash arresting each flake so that the storm held, for the briefest moment, in the air all around him. His breath came fast now and the shot still rang in his ears. Goddammit! he screamed. He crouched and ran forward, his breath a wheeze, his motion jerking, spastic, the rifle barrel warm against his freezing hands, stumbling from one tree to the next, the snow blasting, all the while, into his squinting eyes.
The slope upon which he moved rose to a bulbous ridge where only the tops of the trees protruded from the snow, short and twisted shapes that provided no shelter from wind or gunfire and beyond which the slope ran down at an angle precipitous and blind. He staggered out along its edge, his hands shaking, heart trembling in his chest. Across the line of the ridge, exposed rocks stood everywhere like black skulls in the blizzarding night. His breath ragged and his head light and dizzy. He had to stop once when a fit of coughing racked his body and he thought he might vomit but he did not vomit and he stood again and went on in his staggering slow-motion run, expecting at any moment that the killing shot would come to claim him. When he turned again, he could see Rick’s ghost-shape: a bleak shadow lunging from behind a dark tree and then disappearing and reappearing again, moving up the slope toward him in stuttering cuts and edits like some strip of damaged film. And so he ran, his feet heavy, clambering and sliding until he had achieved the top of the ridge.