“Get out of here,” she says. “Leave me alone.” She tries to push past him. He slaps her and forces her to the floor with an elbow to the throat, and she burbles like a toad at the pressure. “No,” she says, but seems again to be looking behind him. “Don’t!”
From his pocket he removes a pair of pliers. He fingers open her mouth and shoves the pliers inside and says, “Steady now.” With a wrenching crack he removes one of her molars.
He holds up the red-rooted tooth as he departs her. “That’s for what you wrote on the wall and all the trouble it’s caused me. The next time you do something stupid, I’ll come back for the rest of you.”
Now, in the basement, in the dark, he holds the molar in his palm. He pops it in his mouth and sucks on it and tongues its grooves and tastes her sour blood. Then he spits it out and dries it on his shirt and retrieves a pot of glue and patiently holds it to the mouth of her dummy as if suffocating it. When he lets his hand fall, the tooth remains, jeweled to the face of the thing.
Chapter 44
THE MOUNTAINS grow nearer, gradually dominating the horizon, their peaks cutting into the clouds. In their foothills the snow begins again, whiter now than before. They rest in Billings for several days, and again in Bozeman. Here the downtown is surrounded by a defensive perimeter made from logs with sharpened points. It has been burned and breached. Blackened wood and blackened bones rise out of the snow. The smell of smoke still lingers in the air. The people here have been dead weeks, maybe months.
“Who did this?” Lewis says. He kneels beside a skull, small enough to fit into his hand, a child’s. “What happened here?”
“Are you sure we should be going this way?” Colter says.
Gawea shakes her head — maybe she doesn’t know or maybe she doesn’t care or maybe she doesn’t want to tell.
Not so long ago Lewis believed in the end of the rainbow. A shire. An emerald city. Elysian fields. What his childhood storybooks promised. He believed, back when they first set out from the Sanctuary, that something arcadian awaited them. Not anymore. Not now. Not when he sees the bone-riddled ruins of Bozeman. It is not only the landscape that disappoints. It is humankind. Inside and outside the wall, humans remain the same, capable of wonderful things, yes, but more often excelling in ruin. And Burr is human.
He cups a handful of snow over the skull and stands and wipes his hands off. “Is there something you need to tell me, Gawea?”
“No,” she says and keeps her head down and continues hiking forward.
At the edge of town they enter a pole shed with rust trails weeping from every bolt. Inside they find a sign, BOZEMAN FOUNDRY, hanging above a desk with a pile of paper squared on it. Lewis picks up a work order for two dozen horseshoes, a sharpened saw, a repaired scythe. There is some dust but not a lot that he runs a finger through. This was a working site, a working community, home to however many thousands.
Gawea shrugs off her pack and lies on the floor and shoves her fists against her eyes. Colter says, “You all right?” and when she doesn’t respond, he begins opening and closing drawers, closets, cupboards, not knowing what he might find, something of use, while Lewis walks through the entry office and into the cavernous work space. His boots crunch over metal shavings. Hammers and clamps and files hang from the wall. He wanders past forges, stacks of casings and molds, an induction furnace and an electric arc furnace, a small hill of firewood. The air is dirty with the scorched-nut smell of molten metal. His foot clatters a ladle lying on the floor and the noise brings Colter out of the office.
He’s gnawing on something and holds out a handful of it. “Found a stash of jerky. Not bad.”
Lewis tours the equipment and then settles his gaze on Colter.
“What?”
“I’m sorry I doubted you.”
“Only a fool wouldn’t have doubted me.”
“I want to do something for you.”
They spend the rest of the day burning wood, pumping bellows, stirring coals, scraping designs into sand castings. They melt scrap metals and refine the alloy and pour it into the molds and let it cool before tumbling the component from it. They sweat. Their skin blackens with soot. They wield tongs and sledgehammers and scythe hammers and embossing hammers that chirp against the heated metal set upon the bullhorn anvil. Red and yellow sparks fall around their feet. They grind and sand and polish. They fit together hinges, tighten bolts, oil gears, and when they finally finish, Colter slides the stump of his arm into the prosthetic and Lewis tightens the leather straps around his shoulders and buckles them.
In the place of bones there are fitted pipes, and in the place of a hand, three barbed fingers that open into a claw and close into a fist. He experiments with it, bending his elbow, extending his arm for a slash.
“They used to call me the Black Fist, you know?”
“I know.” Lewis crumples onto a stool and wipes the soot from his face with a rag. “What do you think?”
Colter bends over and picks up a cinder block. His claw crushes it and a spray of gray gravel dusts the air and dirties the floor. “I think it will do quite nicely.”
* * *
Gawea presses her fists against her eyes and pushes until colors violet and rose red and dandelion yellow explode against the lids. They remind her of flowers, fields of flowers that she might dive into, roll around in, tangled in their stalks, bombed by their perfume. It’s so much easier to dream in color than to open her eyes to the gray nothing of the world.
She should have known better. She shouldn’t have let herself get close to them. But York wouldn’t leave her alone, his face always dodging into her field of vision, his hands always touching her on the shoulder, the waist, the cheek. That day she swiped the trout from his plate and shoved it in her mouth was only the beginning of the tastes shared between them. Now he is gone, just like her parents, like her oma, everyone close to her punished and then killed, so that living feels like a rehearsal for dying. She was just so lonely and felt antidoted by his company, warmed by his touch.
She was sent to retrieve Lewis. Not Clark, not Reed, and not the doctor and not Colter. Not York. Just Lewis. But she had no choice. They came as a group. She planned to deliver Lewis, as promised, and then Burr would give her what she requested. Whatever happened to the rest of them, she did not care. Initially, if they got in her way, she might have killed them herself. They were irrelevant to her. That’s what she told herself. That’s why she maintained such a cool distance, until she couldn’t anymore. They became relevant to her, more than names, but people, friends.
The hard part was supposed to be the journey. The unforgiving temperatures, the cruel landscape, the scarcity of food and water. But it is the mental assault that has been unendurable. Maybe this mission means nothing. On the one side, Burr is a false prophet. On the other side, Lewis strives for irrelevance. There is no human endeavor. No matter how much people clung to family, breeding more children, and to community, building more houses and businesses and roads to bind them, everyone dies alone. Whether from sickness or injury or old age, you die alone, and there is nothing bad or good about death, just as there is nothing redemptive or admirable about being human. It doesn’t matter how powerful you are or how far you travel or how many books you read or where you live — that’s all one big distraction from the open grave waiting to swallow you in the end. There is no escape for humankind, and there is no escape for her, and none for Lewis either.
But despite all these feelings thrashing inside her, she has continued to put one foot in front of the other, leading them toward Oregon. Trees don’t love and they don’t mourn, but they strive for sun and for water. They live. That is the one true impulse, she supposes, that everything wants to live. Something waits for her in Oregon that is the equivalent of sun and water. A promise. Burr promised her.