The dog seemed to sense her urgency and he didn’t hang back to fawn on her or lick her hand or jump up. He had his head down, his paws moving in a brisk businesslike trot, following the leash and the quick clatter of her boots around the corner of the building, across the pavement and up into the backseat of the Sentra, which was parked just out of sight of the front windows. She fell into her seat, slammed the door, her heart pounding. “Stay,” she growled at the dog. “Stay. Get down!” And then the engine fired up and she put the car in gear, telling herself to be calm, that everything was all right, just fine, no one had seen a thing, but her hand trembled on the wheel as she swerved across the lot and pulled up parallel to the front door.
He was in there still — she could see him through the near window, his scalp shining in the light. What was wrong with him? Why wasn’t he coming? She couldn’t help herself and she knew she shouldn’t do it, but she tapped at the horn, twice, two sharp little bleats, and still he stood there at the desk, apparently jawing on with the Animal Control officer when he hadn’t said twenty words to her all the way up the hill. She leaned forward. Kutya began to whine. And now she hit the horn again, more insistently this time, and saw him glance up, a confused look on his face. They were all four of them staring now and she didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to hit the horn again, but she did, grinding her palm into it.
And now there was movement, a shuffling of position as if he were swapping shirts with the couple at the counter — or dancing with them — and he was still talking, his jaw still going. What was wrong with him? She beeped again. She saw him detach himself from the little group and then he went out of her line of vision until he appeared again at the glass door, which snatched at the light as he pushed it open and came down the walk to her. But — and this was strange too, strange and maddening — he just stood there staring at the car as if he’d never seen it before. She rolled down the window. “Get in!” she said.
He just stared, gone off again.
She barked out his name—“Adam!”—even as Kutya came tumbling over the backseat and into the front where he was plainly visible and the shapes inside the building seemed to coalesce, three faces wedded in one and staring out the window at her. “Goddamn you, get in!
“Adam!” she warned, and she was half a beat from just leaving him there, dumping his pack out into the lot and turning her back on him, when his face changed and he came round the front of the car to pull open the passenger’s-side door, scoot the dog off the seat and slide in. She was already in gear, already tugging at the wheel and hitting the gas, when he turned to her, full-face, and said, “I told you, my name’s Colter.”
PART III Northspur
9
HE COULDN’T STOP LAUGHING, giggling like he was in junior high and Mr. Wilder was throwing his voice to be Huckleberry Finn one minute and Nigger Jim the next, because this was the way it was supposed to be, sticking it to them at the Big 5 and at the animal place too, one-upping them, one-upping the world, and she was giggling too so that every time he found himself winding down she’d start him up all over again, best thing ever, huge, just laughing and laughing, and what he was thinking was that she was all right, cool, or close to it, even though she was too old and didn’t have any qualms about displaying her uptight side for all to see, leaning on the car horn and barking at him in the parking lot to the point where he’d almost told her to go fuck herself and forget about the ride because he could just stick out his thumb and not have to listen to her shit or absorb it either. But he was racing now, the little wheel inside his brain spinning at top speed, everything on the highway shooting by as if they’d gone into hyperspace though there was no one chasing them and when he snatched a look at the speedometer he saw she was doing fifty-five, exactly fifty-five, as if the engine had a governor on it. Or a robot arm. He tried to picture that and all he could see was a bolted-together metal head where her head had been just a second ago and a mechanical arm reaching down under the steering wheel and through the instrument panel and into the superhot engine until she began to say something through the giggles and her real head popped back on her shoulders with all its lines and grooves and stingy retreating bones and the eyes that kept snapping at him like rubber bands. He needed a hit of 151. Or maybe he didn’t. Cars exploded all around them. He lifted the canteen to his lips and drank.
What she was saying was, “So you think you might want to come back to the house? To celebrate?” Another rush of giggles. Her hair was in her face. A silver bracelet sparked on her wrist, Morse code, a signal, a definite signal, long, short, long, long, short. He passed her the canteen and watched her press it to her lips. The dog — the dog had dreadlocks and that rocked him — poked its head between the seats and breathed a gas fog of stinking breath between them. “You up for it?”
The wheel began to slow. He came back to things the way they were or had to be and saw her all over again. She was old and he didn’t like her squirrel-colored hair and he hated the way she’d said I know you and called him Adam, but she had big tits and her boots were made out of snakeskin and they had pointed toes with silver strips worked in, shit-kicking boots, and she was a shit-kicker and so was he. “You don’t know me,” he said.
She grinned at him, big lips, soft lips. The cars had stopped exploding and the highway ran true now so that he knew it and knew where he was and the dog breathed its stinking breath and she said, “Maybe, maybe not.”
“I could rape you,” he said.
“Go ahead and try.”
There was no independence in the world, just dependence, and the animals were dying and the sky was like a sore and everything had a price tag on it. It wasn’t like that when the mountain men came out of the east and went up into the Plains and the Rocky Mountains when the country stopped at the Mississippi and the hostiles ruled all the territory beyond. That was when John Colter went up amongst the Blackfeet on the Missouri River and did his deeds. This much he knew from the history books — and the internet too but the internet had about one fiftieth of the information the books gave you — and when he could concentrate, when the wheel slowed and everything came back into focus, he could sit in one place for hours and read the same passages over and over, Give Your Heart to the Hawks and The Mountain Men and John Colter: His Years in the Rockies, with its picture of Colter on skis in the snow and facing down a whole village of braves and their mad snarling dogs. His favorite place, the place where he kept his Army Survival Guide and his books on trapping and fishing and living off the land, was his grandmother’s house when she was alive and the rain was coming at the windows like the ocean turned upside down and the Noyo swelled up and gouged at the banks and took the big logs and boulders down with it so you could hear them grinding like teeth. Everything was safe then, the room warm with the woodstove, something cooking in the kitchen, the bed made for him in the spare room so he didn’t have to go home and see his father there in the chair in the living room with the what-did-you-do-for-me-lately look scored into his face like a mask out of some sci-fi flick the aliens wore to make them look like upright lizards. The mountain men lived free and they never had to say Yessir, Cap’n, to no man. Beaver, that was what they were after, beaver hides — plews — to make the felt for the high hats everybody wore across the sea in London and in New York and Boston too, and the beaver were theirs for the taking and there was nobody in that day and age tougher and savvier and more independent than Colter.