Gawea is gone, foraging in the woods, when the doctor approaches him tonight with a rag and a bowl of water. She strips him, bathes his thin, wasted body by roughing the rag across his skin. The campfire crackles nearby. The stars are like a fistful of salt flung across a black blanket. His ribs are too visible, pressing painfully against his skin. His black hair, once so short, is now a messy corona. He smells strangely metallic. “What’s going on inside of you?” she asks, not expecting an answer, but when she dips the rag in the bowl and wrings it out and brings it to his face, his eyes spring open.
Before she can cry out, he has seized her by the wrist and shot straight up. “Where is my tin?” he says.
She tries to pull away from him. “Clark threw it in the river.”
He blinks a few times, swallows hard. “She what?”
“She was right to do it.” She explains that there is no better time than now to wean himself, when his body is restive, healing. “She gave up the hooch. Now it’s your turn to be strong enough to do the same.”
“That bitch.” At this point the others have gathered around them. “You bitch!” he screams at Clark.
He blinks hard, as if he remains unsure of his whereabouts. The doctor knows his mind and body must feel gripped by an arthritic fist. He releases her then. His face tightens and he brings a hand to his chest.
“What’s wrong?” the doctor says, and he says his heart. It feels like one big wound, like nails have been pumped through his veins and clustered there. He lets his head fall back and struggles to breathe and struggles to keep his eyes open.
He obviously wants to say something more — to curse them, wish them dead — but can’t find the breath. Sleep pulls him away like a current. His mouth is moving, but they don’t hear what he says, the words seeming filtered through water so that he might as well be sinking past the reaches of moonlight to the stony bottom of the nearby river.
Chapter 24
SOMETIMES, WHEN no one else is looking, Reed takes out the box. The one Danica gave him. The wood is black and slick, as long as his hand and as wide as his wrist, and heavy, the weight of a book with many words inside it. He runs a finger along its edges, smears a thumb across its lid.
He imagines tossing it in the fire. He imagines digging a deep hole and burying it and rolling a boulder over the top of the disturbed earth so that no one would ever find it. But he also dreams darkly about turning the knob, flipping the latch, leaning forward to see what springs out.
It would be so much easier to give up, to stop plodding forward, to put an end to the heat and the hunger and the thirst and the fear and the suffering. The others see so much promise in the river, but he knows that the lushness does not extend beyond the green vein of it, the desert still reaching on all sides of them like a sea of yellow ash and the sun so blinding it seems to take up the entire sky. There must have been a time when he believed. Why else would he have come if he had not dreamed of a better life? But that time has passed.
The other day, when kicking their way through a house and salvaging what they could from it, he came upon a body in a brass bed, the mattress rotted down to springs, the corpse shrunken down to mummified skin with the hair still clinging to it. He stared for a long time and thought how nice it must be to be dead, how comfortable to lie down and let darkness take you. You would never have to worry about anything again. The others must feel the same way. Even if they don’t say it. The weight of this dead world pressing down on them. Even if they’re not, like him, fondling their revolver and considering how a bullet might taste when swallowed, there are so many others ways to surrender.
Lewis sleeps most of the day, but when he is awake, for an hour, sometimes two, he writes in his journal or takes short, wobbling walks along the river using a long white branch as a staff to keep his balance. On occasion he sits around the campfire with a blanket thrown over his shoulders, though no one but Gawea and Clark seem comfortable speaking to him. Reed has always been wary of him but now feels repulsed. Can Lewis even be categorized as human, or is he more a mutation, like some giant white bat or hairless sand wolf, a product of this world and not the last? Other.
Soon, when Lewis is strong enough, they will pack their things and press forward. Because Clark demands it. She demands they think of their country and not merely themselves. She demands they consider the implications of what they’re doing, their small rebellion against the Sanctuary a gateway to something much larger: national redefinition. Ever since they dragged her from the basement, ever since Lewis brought his wrist to hers, she woke with a renewed life and vigor, and when she speaks of their mission, when she speaks of this new America, she manages to somehow make it feel real, not some ridiculous abstraction.
They listen to her. They believe in her. She brought them all this far. Not Reed. He is a totem leader, and not even that, not any longer. She gives them the hope that allows them to be led. Hope is a good and dangerous thing, Reed thinks. Hope is the moment that never comes and life is the shit you wallow through when chasing it.
They have not slept together in weeks. More and more often he has trouble keeping his patience around her. He tries to sit by himself — he tries to lie by himself — but she always finds him. When she asks a question, sometimes he does not respond at all, and when he does, his answers are often clipped, sullen. She wants to know why he is so angry and he tells her he is tired; that’s all. He’s so tired. Which is and is not the truth.
He has fantasized about her death. A snake will bite her. Her horse will throw her. She will eat a poisonous mushroom. When the bats stole her, he couldn’t help but feel a kind of relief. Now we can rest. Now we can stop this race to nowhere. That’s what he thought.
Every morning, when Lewis wakes, his hand goes immediately to his pocket, searching for the tin that isn’t there. Reed has seen him suffer through his days and nights. He knows about the sweats and cramps and headaches and bad-tempered hallucinations. He understands because he feels much the same without her, Danica.
He misses her like a drug. His nose in her hair. His tongue along her collarbone. Her nipples tightening into points when traced by his fingertip. He hates himself for his weakness but cannot deny it. His need for her. She once, when they were still naked and breathing hard and pressed together damply, said the word love into his neck. When he asked her to repeat herself, she said, “It was nothing,” and he said, “No, you said something,” but she would only dart her tongue from her mouth and trace the shape of his ear.
Whether she actually feels love for him, he doesn’t know. But he must for her. What else would have drawn him back to her, again and again, despite the danger? What else could make him feel so bruised inside now that she is out of reach? He hears her breathing in the river. He tastes her in the salt of a pebble he clacks between his teeth. And, for so long, he has imagined her face over Clark’s. Sometimes the only thing that keeps him going is the thought of them together in a lush, green space with rain falling softly.
Earlier today, they speared seven trout from the river, and now they crisp and brown over the fire. They offer Lewis some, but he waves it away. His skin appears as pale and brittle as an eggshell. Clark asks how he is feeling and he says his joints burn as if padded by coals and every blink feels like a snuffed candle. She asks when he might be ready to pack up and move on, and he says another day or two. Then he coughs into his fist and says that before they go any farther, this one time and one time only, he plans to send his owl to the skies and deliver a message to the Sanctuary.