She was sitting in front of the TV. The TV flickered like gunfire. The dog, Rasta dog, cool dog, just lay wrapped up in dog oblivion, hear no evil, smell none either. “Turn out the lights,” he said.
“Adam,” she said.
“Do it,” he said.
And then there was a whole lot of discussion, but he didn’t want discussion, he wanted spaghetti and meatballs, he wanted 151, he wanted her, her big tits, her wet cunt, wanted a shower, wanted bed, wanted surcease. Or a treaty. At least for tonight. “I want to sleep with you,” he said. She said no. She said she was going to call the police if he didn’t get out. All that made him feel very weary, weary and depressed, and where was the person he used to be, the one who humped planting soil and good rich guano out to his plantation with nothing more than a good strong back, who had a grandmother and a life and built walls and one-upped the hostiles everywhere he went?
“You’re not going to call the police,” he said.
“I am. I swear I am.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Just try me.”
He tried her.
She didn’t call.
What she did was give him a look that brought out all the lines in her face because she was old, never forget that, and then she got up and flicked off the sound on the TV, though the images still jumped and shifted there on the screen till he had a moment when he couldn’t really tell what was the TV and what was the room. With her in it. And the stove. And the dog. Then she came over and took his hand, her touch there, softest thing, and led him into the kitchen. What she said was, “Right after you eat, you promise me, you’re out of here.”
This was funny, because that wasn’t what was going to happen and they both knew it, and so he started laughing then, or sniggering, actually. Through his nose.
“What?” she said. “What’s so funny?” And she was smiling for the first time since he’d walked into the room, her big soft lips spreading open across her teeth that were like polished stones in the weak light dropping out of the fixture recessed in the hood of the stove.
“First things first.”
“First things?”
“Or second things. First we eat, then we go into the bedroom.”
He might have fallen asleep. He did. He definitely did. Because she was there, shaking him awake, her voice drawn down to a whisper. “It’s quarter past four,” she said.
Black dark. Dog on the floor. Light from the clock.
“I washed your clothes.”
He didn’t say anything. And he didn’t want to get up out of that bed but he had to. First thing he did, after he got dressed and laced up his boots, was check the Norinco, eject the magazine and shove it home again. Then he shouldered the pack that had crackers in it, a loaf of bread, canned tuna, Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Corn Chowder, a bottle of red wine with a yellow fish on the label he’d go through in an hour. It was very still. The dog never stirred. And she was there, giving him a look in the gray ghosted light that was like a look of sorrow, as if she knew what was coming. He knew what was coming too. But he was a soldier. He was Colter. And when he went out the door he never looked back.
Yes. And this time he just humped across that road and that field on his two windmilling legs, no more belly-crawling for him, and if the aliens in that cruiser were awake and watching, he was ready, more than ready, to engage the enemy. But they weren’t awake and they weren’t watching. Maybe they weren’t even there. So what he had was freedom, back down into the cleft of that canyon, the light opening up around him and nobody and nothing to say where he could or couldn’t go. Maybe he would head north. Or maybe just go back to camp and wait them out. They were pussies, they were amateurs. Once winter came on, really came on, when it rained like the deluge, the original deluge that came after the original Adam, the somebody Adam, the legendary Adam, they’d forget all about him and go back to their TV remotes and their fat wives and their fat kids and, what, fat dogs too.
But the thing was, even Colter turned soft, and that was something he could never figure. Or stomach. The whole idea of it was like a sharp stick dipped in the bitterest thing there was and jabbed right through him. He just couldn’t understand how Colter, after all his feats, after his run, could just give it all up and go back to civilization, to a woman named Sallie who probably wasn’t even that good-looking, and live on a farm busting sod like anybody. And just die there, in bed, of jaundice, on a morning that lit the hills, May 7, 1812, when the Blackfeet and the Crows and all the rest of the hostiles were out after the buffalo where the buffalo grazed the spring grass and no white man dared tread.
That was how it turned out. That was how it always turned out. For everybody on this planet. You could be made out of wood and they’d set you on fire. You could be made of steel and they’d hose you down till the rust got you. You could be Colter and give up and die in bed. There was no way out and it didn’t really matter. You just had to be as hard as hard and make your own legend and let the chips fall where they may. That was what he was thinking and then he wasn’t thinking anymore, just letting the wheel spin and his legs conquer the ground, faster and faster, hut one, hut two, and if he didn’t see the two snipers camouflaged in the big mottled arms of a sycamore climbing up out of the streambed in a thick pale grove of them, that didn’t matter either.
His feet hit the dirt, his elbows pumped, double time, triple time, hostiles on the loose, hut one, hut two, got to go, got to go, the wheel churning faster and faster, and he was running now, running like Colter. . and then, abruptly, it stopped. The wheel stopped. And it was never going to start again.
PART XIII Little River
39
THE WINTER RAINS CAME and buried everything. They swelled the streams, scoured the ravines, drove deep to refresh the roots of the big sentinel trees that stood watch over the forest and climbed steadily up into the greening hills. Botanists put on their slickers and went out to take core samples and hoist themselves three hundred feet up into the canopy to measure the new season’s growth and biologists set up bait stations to collect hair samples of fox and marten for DNA analysis. Fishermen fished. Drinkers drank. It wasn’t the tourist season, but a few people ventured up the coast from the Bay Area, mainly on weekends and mainly to stroll arm-in-arm up and down the six streets of Mendocino village, and the Skunk Train started hauling tourists up the Noyo Valley again, though on the usual limited winter schedule.
After the funeral back in the fall, Carolee went to stay with her sister in Newbury Park for a few days, and when she returned, looking haggard, looking unrested and every bit as tragic as when she’d left, she kept harping on the theme of traveling, of getting out and seeing the world. Just a trip. Anywhere. If only to get out of town for a while because she couldn’t take the way people looked at her wherever she went, whether it was the library or the post office or just picking up the dry cleaning, and Sten felt as burdened as she did and gave in without much of a fight. They wound up driving down to Death Valley for the wildflower bloom at the end of February and then continued on to Las Vegas to throw money away and watch some overpriced idiotic revue he could have done without, once and forever. What he said to her was, “This is just like the cruise ship, except it’s floating on dirt instead of water.”