For too long he has let hate and hurt take hold of his heart. If there were a word that captured dreams of bodies set aflame, glass smashed into open eyes, blades drawn slowly across genitals, then that would be the name of the demon that so often possessed him. He is here to seek atonement. He is here to serve the son of the one he served before. He shouldn’t have come in the night and he shouldn’t have come in the storm, but his eagerness for reunion was such that he could not stop himself once close.
“Hold your fire!” That was what he tried to yell to them that night. “I’m here for you.” It was hard to say then and harder to say now that his wolves are dead and his arm ruined, but he says it all the same: “I’m here to help.”
At first they don’t believe him, and at night they tie his wrist to his thigh and his ankle to a tree. Every now and then Clark will wander over and stand beside him with a gun dangling from her hand. She watches him curiously, as he alternates between sweating and shivering. “I could put a bullet in your head and no one would complain.”
“Don’t.”
“Because you want to join us?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a long way from earning our trust.”
“And you’re a long fucking way from mine.”
“Language like that isn’t going to help.”
He doesn’t hold back. That’s not his way. Prison won’t stop him, the desert won’t stop him, lightning won’t stop him, and neither will she, no matter if there’s a gun in her hand. “You listen. You listen good. You might think you’ve got a dick, though you’re a woman and one I’d like to lay, and you might think you’re stronger than me, but that won’t last and I’ll be strong again, and you might think you can tell me what to do, but you can’t, because I came here for Lewis and not for some red-haired, hatchet-faced bitch to tell me my business when my business is my own. I’m here to help and that’s the short and the tall and slow and the fast of it.”
She points her revolver at him, twists it one way, then the other, and makes a soft explosion with her lips. Then she drops her arm and says, “I guess we’ll see about that, won’t we?”
“Guess we will.”
At first they carry him in a thick plastic utility sled, maybe two feet deep, once used to haul gear for ice fishing. They take turns dragging him, and Colter uses the front lip as a backrest, so that everybody else looks forward while he looks back.
The doctor bandages his stump. Twice a day, when she unwraps it and cleans it, the blackened flesh sputters and crackles and he cries out for her to help, to make it stop, in a voice he doesn’t recognize as his own for its jerky neediness.
Afterward he raises his head to swallow from the canteen she brings to his lips. The water dribbles down his chin as the tears dribble from his eyes. “What the hell did Lewis do to me and how the hell is it possible? I don’t understand, and don’t tell me you do either.”
“We don’t.”
“You don’t know that and you don’t know this. You don’t know how far we have to travel and you don’t know what lies ahead and you don’t know why a man can piss lightning. I go away for a year and nobody knows one fucking thing.”
“Are you always so angry?”
“Who’s angry? I’ve got no arm and my wolves are dead and it’s so cold my dick has curled up inside me so that it looks like I’ve got a second belly button between my legs. This is me in a good mood.”
She gives him a mirthless grin, the best bedside manner she can manage. “I’m going to ask you something and I want you to tell me the truth. Did you come here to hurt us?”
“No.” It is the truth. “No, I don’t want that at all.”
She wraps the bandage tight and offers it a gentle pat. “I believe you.”
And maybe she does and maybe she says something to Lewis, because Colter wakes the next morning to find him standing nearby. His long, thin figure towers over him, like one more tree in the dim-lit forest. He has been avoiding Colter, and maybe that has something to do with guilt or maybe that has something to do with fear, since back in the day, on more than one occasion, Colter crushed him against a wall and made him eat dirt and told him to stop being such a book-eating puss.
But now he’s here to talk, Colter can tell, give him the eye-to-eye, make it clear where he stands and figure out where Colter stands and see if they can find a balance. He looks different than Colter remembers him. Not a boy, but a man, and maybe not a man at all. His forehead is marked with weary lines. His firm mouth beneath the black beard he has grown seems to suck on something bitter. But it’s his eyes — the blue-gray eyes, like cold moons — they glint with some curious power and make Colter shrink back a bit and feel small and chastened, aware of his defeat in a way he had never felt when jailed.
“How do I know,” Lewis says, “that this is not all some convenient lie to keep you alive?”
“Swear it.”
“On what?”
“Your father’s grave.”
Something splits open in Lewis’s face and just as quickly resolves itself. “You put him there. Swearing on his grave means nothing.”
“It means everything. Don’t you see? Don’t you see why I’m here? The old man is why.” He is not one to show any emotion beyond anger. He sometimes jokes that the last time he cried, a pebble fell from his eye. And then a rat came along and tasted the pebble and died. But he feels something now, cracking the edge of his voice and dampening the corners of his eyes. “Don’t you see that the old man was like a father and I did him wrong?”
Lewis doesn’t say anything for a long time. Snow falls and melts on his face and dribbles down his cheek.
“You could have killed me,” Colter says.
“I could have, yes.”
“But you didn’t. You let me live. A part of you must want to believe in the good. There’s some good in me once you get past the shit. A man can change, Lewis. You’re living proof of that.”
* * *
They complain about following the river. If they cannot canoe it, then why bother? Why not bear west more directly? Gawea tells them, more than once, that with the constant clouds, she cannot guide them using the stars, and with the vast gray sameness of the snow-swept plains, their maps are made useless. The river is their known conductor, the channel that will lead them. This is the way she came and this is the way they will go. And the water, even when scrimmed with ice, attracts life. Their best chance in finding game is to follow its course. The water will eventually thaw, and when that time comes, perhaps they will find more canoes and take to paddling again.
Questions. They have so many questions for her. And the way she must answer them, always guarded, always worried she will forget or contradict one of her half lies, exhausts her. No, no one ever goes hungry in Oregon, and yes, there are pastures busy with sheep and cattle, pens with pigs, houses with hens, just as there are fields of corn and oats and barley and soybean and wheat, orchards of apples, tangles of blackberries. Hops for beer, grapes for wine. No, there isn’t a wall. There isn’t a curfew. There are ever-expanding towns and cities with roads threaded between them, the ligature of a larger organism. In the Sanctuary, they were trapped. Because of this, because they were walled in, they considered time and construction vertically, a layering — but out west, people have a horizontal perspective, spreading their fences and buildings outward. “Everything is bigger there.”
This keeps them going. The dream of what awaits them. And sometimes she can’t help but believe in it too. That everything will be better when they arrive. They trust her. This pleases her and hurts her. At night, they all cram together for heat. York always manages to tuck in beside her and she often wakes up to find his arm around her. She does not knock it away. The closeness feels good.