He angled up the loggers' road, if "road" was what it could still be called. No one had come up here for some time. There were bushes in the ruts, pine needles, fallen leaves, young trees growing in the mound between the ruts, and branches dipping down from all the large trees on each side. The place was shadowy, cool, yet strangely humid. Slaughter suddenly was worried that, if he got stuck, he wouldn't have the room to turn around, that backing down would be a problem, given all the ruts and bends, and several times he had to squeeze around some young trees that he couldn't just drive over, narrowly avoiding large trees at the side. He wished he hadn't been impulsive. Hell, I need a Jeep to get up in here. Why'd I do this? But he had no choice now, and he eased his foot off the gas pedal, slowing, bumping, working up this god-forsaken lane to nowhere. "What kind of place is this to build a commune anyhow?"
"I asked myself that several times," Dunlap said.
Slaughter glanced at him. "Not too happy where they sent you, huh?"
"I've had a little trouble. But I'm working on it. This is what you'd call my penance."
"I can see that from the way your hands are shaking." "It's a bumpy ride." "But wouldn't a beer go good now?" Dunlap stared at him. "I said I'm working on it." "Hey, I don't mean to rile you. I'm just making conversation."
Dunlap's stern gaze weakened. "All right, I apologize."
"It's my fault. I was mixing in your business."
"But the fact is, you're right. I shouldn't be so jumpy when somebody says the truth. You really like it here?"
"Love it."
"I find that baffling."
"It's simple. Back east in Detroit, things got out of hand. I got so I couldn't keep control. My wife divorced me. I was fed up with my work."
"You were a cop?"
"That's right, and finally I simply quit. I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't keep doing what I had, however. So I spread a map out on my kitchen table, and I asked myself where I'd rather be."
"And you chose here?" Dunlap looked incredulous.
"Sure. Because I'd never been here. I was having daydreams. Mountains. Horses running free. I'd never really seen those things, never been around them. What they represented were the things I wanted, though. I knew that much. So I came here."
"Just like that."
"I left the next day, and I loved it. Oh, I had some hard times at the start. I tried my hand at raising horses, but I made a mess of it. The next thing I was in police work again. But I was talking earlier about control, and that's the point. My life here is exactly what I want to make of it. Things aren't so complicated that I have to give in to them. I have freedom."
Slaughter looked ahead and eased the cruiser past a clump of bushes. He didn't see the pothole just beyond them and felt the cruiser jolt down into it. "Now it's me I'm being personal about. I'd better watch it."
Dunlap rubbed his forehead. "I think I'll soon be divorced as well."
"Who wants it? Her or you?"
"Oh, she's the one who'll do it, I suppose."
"Is that why you drink so much?"
"It's that obvious, is it? No, I started drinking long before. It could be I caused the problem with her. But you know, a person has ambitions in his work. He wants to prove how really good he is, and I just never lived up to my expectations."
"Or you maybe liked the booze so much that it distracted you."
Dunlap shrugged. "The chicken or the egg. What difference does it make? I ended here. No matter how it happened, I know where it got me. Nowhere. Nothing personal."
"Well, why not just give in then? Maybe settle in a place like this?"
Dunlap started laughing.
"No, I mean it," Slaughter told him. "Things could be a whole lot worse. Sometimes we end up exactly where we should be."
"Or deserve to be."
Slaughter gave up trying to convince him.
"They were all idealists," Dunlap said.
"Who? What are you talking about?"
"Quiller and the others up here," Dunlap said. 'They truly thought that, if they left the world and went up in here, they could live the kind of life they'd always wanted. They were fools."
"It's worked out fine for me."
"I wonder how it all worked out for them, however," Dun-lap said. "This Quiller. Do you know about him?"
"Just from talk I pick up now and then."
"Well, he was evidently something. Six foot eight. Thin beyond grotesqueness, and that maybe helped him. Newsmen who were near him said he wasn't real. You know, as if they couldn't quite believe that he was there. It's like he radiated something holy. Charismatic like the best of that type, and those newsmen saw the best, believe me. If this way of life had any chance, Quiller was the man to do it."
"He was rich, I hear."
"An understatement, and that money would have helped as well."
They squeezed up past a fallen pine tree. Its needles were dead, dried and scattered across the road, the branches skeletal, and Slaughter looked up past them toward a wall of vines and bushes, slats of brown that showed through, and he knew that they were almost there. He slowed around a curve and, before he even stopped the cruiser, said to Dunlap, "See if you can budge that gate."
But Dunlap only stared ahead. "I said-"
"I'm going." Dunlap stepped from the cruiser. First he viewed the wall of vines from several angles, took several photographs; then he left the camera in the cruiser, and he walked up to the weed-shrouded gate.
Slaughter watched him through the windshield. With the filtered sun, the frame around his windshield, Slaughter sensed that Dunlap was much farther than he really was. Sitting here, the motor idling, Slaughter was abruptly conscious that there weren't any other sounds around him in the forest. Sure, the noise we made has frightened everything away, he guessed.
He watched as Dunlap stopped and looked at all the vines and weeds that wound around the gate posts. Dunlap reached out. Then he brought his hand back.
"Poison ivy?" Dunlap called.
Slaughter laughed. "A city boy. No, I don't know exactly what they are, but they're not poison ivy."
Dunlap nodded. Then he turned back to the vines and almost touched them before looking at him again. "You're sure?"
"For Christ sake."
"Never mind. I'll do it."
Dunlap tugged some vines away. He did it cautiously at first, and then he used more strength against them. He was pushing at the gate.
"We'll maybe have to clear the whole bunch," Slaughter leaned out, saying.
"More than that. We'll have to break the lock here."
"What?"
"A rusted chain and lock."
"Tug at it. The chain might be so old you'll break it."
"That's what I've been doing."
"Hell, I thought that was more weeds."
"You'd better have a look."
Slaughter thought about all the time they were wasting, thought about the town, and shut the motor off. He stepped from the cruiser, walking toward the gate. "I should have known they'd have fixed the gate once Wheeler drove up through it," Dunlap said.
Slaughter didn't understand the reference.
"I'll tell you later. But they fixed it, all right. Christ, they really did. Just look at those thick timbers. They'd stop any pickup truck."
The two men stood in the shadowy, cool, yet humid forest that was close around them, grass and fallen pine tree needles underfoot, and they were silent for a moment.
"Here, let me try it," Slaughter said. He put his full weight against the gate and pushed, but nothing happened. Oh, a little creaking in the wood and some slight movement as the chain went taut, but nothing else, and Slaughter felt the awkward pressure in his shoulder, stepping back and rubbing at it. "What about the hinges?" he asked.