Normally she would gut the deer where it lies, but not today. She heaves the deer onto York’s back, and then, as he buckles beneath the weight of it, they escape to the woods.
She might be imagining it, but she believes she hears something behind her, a shifting of air, as if the house were drawing in its breath.
Chapter 16
PIMPTON LIVES NEAR the Dome in a building called the manor. He shares it with the other council members, along with the chair of the farming bureau, the chair of waste management, the chair of finance, and all other elected or appointed officials. Like the Dome, like the museum, their building stands apart from the rest of the Sanctuary, with its marble floors and high, airy ceilings and dark-wooded wainscoting. Paintings hang from the walls. A swing-shift deputy remains stationed at the entrance.
Pimpton’s is a second-story apartment. One flight of stairs is enough to exhaust him. He leans hard on his cane and the handrail. He fumbles with his key, his fingernails long and his knuckles twisted with arthritis. Once he pushes inside, he calls for his wife, but she doesn’t answer, maybe out with a friend, shopping the bazaar.
The room is dark except for a square of light. The window is open, allowing in the heat of the day. He mumbles a string of obscenities, caning his way across the room to pull it shut, draw the curtains, bringing a cool shadow to the sitting area.
Then he collapses into his reading chair. Something bulges at his back, a decorative pillow that he spends a minute fussing with, renegotiating onto his lap. He folds his hands over it. His chair faces the window and he stares at the line of sunlight burning between the curtains. It grows narrower as his eyelids sag. He can feel sleep pulling at him, almost there. What never comes to him at night always finds him easily during the day. A sudden, pressing exhaustion. He will take a little nap. He always feels better after a little nap. An escape from the heat. An escape from the troubles the Sanctuary faces and the cruel idiocy of Thomas, who seems less a man and more a boy clutching a wooden sword and pretending his power. He must be punished. He must be put in his place. And he will be, once the next election cycles through, but that is a long ways off, longer than Pimpton may live. His eyes ache. His knees ache. His back aches. A nap will be good medicine for what ails him. Yes, a nap is just what he needs. The darkness takes him like a flung blanket.
He can’t be sure how long he sleeps, maybe an hour, maybe a minute, but he feels that disoriented dream-tug when he wakes, the edges of the world slippery. He could so easily close his eyes again, but he knows something must have woken him. He calls out for his wife and receives no answer. She is hard of hearing, so he repeats himself, louder this time. With some difficulty, he rocks forward in his chair and twists around, looking behind him.
The living room is shadowy enough that he at first does not recognize the darkness beside him as a man — as Rickett Slade — until the sheriff says, “This will only take a minute,” lifting the decorative pillow from his lap and pressing it to his face.
Chapter 17
DANGER SEEMS far away from this bend in the river. Lewis bathes until his toes and fingers wrinkle. He drinks until his stomach aches. The horses splash along the banks and feast on grass, and when Lewis walks past his own mount, she whickers and nuzzles his neck and stares at him with her soft black eyes and he pets her and can’t help but smile.
The doctor takes a knife and hacks down some leafy willow branches and hands them out for everyone to swing over their shoulders to warn away the mosquitoes and deerflies. The earth has greened and blued. Water unspools beside them, the river ever widening. Flowers bloom in explosions of color that match the feeling inside them all. Gawea helps them forage, showing them what to look for — strawberries and raspberries and blueberries and gooseberries — until their fingers and lips are stained, the flavors impossibly good. They eat bird eggs, sorrel leaves, basswood leaves, oyster mushrooms, currants, clover, worms, grubs. If things are this good now, their mood seems to say, how much better might they be in Oregon? It is unimaginable.
They dig a hole and surround it with stones and fill it with a pyramid of wood and the fire snaps and pops and sends sparks swirling up to join the stars beginning to burn in the iron-colored sky. They eat the venison cut into chops and steaks. York takes a flask of tequila from his saddlebag and says he wasn’t planning on sharing, but what the hell — it feels right — it feels like one of those nights.
“You’ve been hiding that all this time?” Clark says. Her mouth quavers as if eager to accept the flask.
“There’s water in the world, after all,” he says. “So let’s drink!”
They pass around the flask and shudder and hoot at the taste. All except Clark. She takes it and stares at it a long time. Her mouth goes damp. Her teeth click together. Her throat feels as though it is widening to accommodate whatever she might pour down it. The coldness of its metal like a gun in her hand.
Then she shakes her head — hard — and hands the flask to Gawea. “Take a taste for me,” she says. “A lot of tastes.”
The girl no longer wears bandages, her neck healed, scarred an angry red. Still she doesn’t talk. Clark bothers her as often as possible, no longer believing in the injury, believing instead that the girl is holding back, hiding something from them. It is more than her silence. It is her distance, the thin thread that binds her to them. She rarely engages, often staring off into the distance as if listening to instructions only she can hear. And her looks — eyes black, face dead — indicate her utter indifference, which seems at odds with her mission. Clark forces the flask on her now and hopes the liquor might loosen her, surprise a word out of her.
But Gawea only takes a nip and then cringes and trembles. She passes the flask to York, who throws back his head and guzzles. York, York, everyone keeps saying his name, York. They smack him on the side of his head and thank him for the booze and the meat and he grins around a handful of flank steak.
The flask circles the fire twice and then twice again and York’s voice grows louder and louder and soon he wobbles upright and tells them to make way, make room, he wants to show them something. This is his standard over the past few weeks — teasing, joking, storytelling — always trying to distract or surprise them with a laugh. He is known for his mouth. He claims to have bedded more than five hundred women, and every woman seems to have something strange or ridiculous about her. This one had nipples so long and rigid a bird might have roosted on them. Another used her teeth so generously when fellating him — he pronounced it filleting—that he rolled out of bed the next morning circumcised.
He brings a hand to his stomach, feigning stomach cramps. His tongue peeks between his lips. He begins to dry heave. Out of his mouth — one, two, three — come yellow agates. He bulges his eyes in mock surprise. He tosses one of the stones up and catches it. Then tosses another, and soon he is juggling them in wider and wider arcs. Two he lets fall into his pants pocket — but the third he launches at his sister.
It whizzes through the air. If her reflexes were not as sharp as they are, the rock would strike her square in the forehead. But her hand rises up to snatch it. There is a smack. Everyone goes quiet for a moment. Everyone expects her to scold her brother, maybe hurl the rock back his way.
But the river has mellowed her. She slowly brings the rock to her temple and makes a doink sound and crosses her eyes and slumps backward in a mock faint. Everyone applauds.