The Harder They Come

19

THEY WERE UP ON the forks of the Missouri, where the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin rivers come together in what’s now Montana, trapping beaver and stacking up plew after plew because this was virgin territory, under control of the Blackfeet, and the Blackfeet had their own ways of dealing with trespassers, none of them pretty. Depending on their mood, they might cut off your fingers, one by one, then your toes, your ears, your lips. Or jam splinters of pine up under your flesh and set them afire or strip the skin from your limbs and hold the bleeding ropes of it up in front of your eyes so you could focus on what they were doing to you. And through it all you had to laugh in their faces to show how impervious you were to pain in the thin hope they’d put a swifter end to it. Cry out, whimper, whine, plead, and they’d take their time with you. And get creative too.

Colter had a single companion with him this time, a black-bearded trapper named John Potts who talked too much and ate too much but was tough enough and had his own traps, which cost ten dollars each — as much as you’d get for a hide — and were like stacked-up gold out there in the wilderness where there was no way to manufacture or repair them. They were heavy cumbersome things of iron and they had to be set out and held in place in the swift cold water by means of a stake driven into the bottom. The trappers would save the castor glands of beaver they’d killed and work them into a redolent paste that reproduced the scent the animals marked their territory with. They used this to cap a second, thinner stick that stuck up out of the water just high enough so that the beaver would have to step on the pan of the trap to boost himself up and get a sniff of it. Once the jaws closed on him, he’d dive and eventually drown.

Nobody knows how many traps Colter had but Adam liked to think of him as having ten, ten at least — more than Potts, anyway, because Potts was his inferior in everything, whether it was paddling upriver against the current all day or jerking meat or catching beaver to make the money to get him back out into the wilderness to catch more. What time of year was it? Fall. Fall, when the beaver pelts begin to thicken out again with winter coming on. Colter’s leg had healed by this point, though the scar was still puckered and red and he must have been thinking he’d just as soon have grown a new leg as be confined back at Fort Lisa with all those people around him and nothing to look at but bark-peeled logs and a big dull muddy river that had been all beavered out. He didn’t like people. Or not much, anyway. Not as much as being out there under the spreading sky and depending on no one but himself and why he’d taken Potts along no one could figure. Maybe Potts bribed him. Maybe that was it.

But there was a morning, first light, when they were checking the traps they’d set out the previous morning on a fair-sized creek that fed into the Jefferson — dusk and dawn, that was all they could risk, lie low through the day and don’t even think about starting a cookfire, making do with jerky and hardtack and whatever came to hand that didn’t need a flame under it — when Colter’s sixth sense kicked in. They were in their canoes, sticking close to the alder and willow that overhung the banks, silently going about their work. Fog steamed like breath out of the water and hung there, though it would soon burn off and leave them exposed. Colter was for packing it in, but Potts, greedy Potts, wanted to keep on till all the traps had been checked and re-baited. This was the part that always got to him, how Colter, who knew better, had hooked up with this clown and then gone against his own better judgment. But there it was. And still—still—even after they heard the clatter of hooves on the shore above them, Potts insisted that it was just a herd of buffalo coming down for a morning drink. Insisted, and spoke out loud too, though, of course, it was in a whisper. He must have said something like Don’t be a pussy or whatever the equivalent was back in the day.

That was when the Blackfeet appeared, a horde of them, painted, mounted on their ponies. There must have been two or three hundred of them or more. It wasn’t a war party, Colter could see that at a glance — there were women and children with them, crowding in now to peer over the bank at the two interlopers in the canoes. Maybe they’d only be robbed, that was what he was thinking — hopeful, always hopeful — and he made a peace sign and called out a greeting in their own language. He had maybe a dozen phrases in the Blackfoot language and could understand more than he could speak. Crow was the language he knew best. He could speak that fluently, but then the Crows, along with the Flatheads, were the enemies of the Blackfeet, which brought up a further complication — what if one of them recognized him as the sole white man who’d fought on the side of the Crows six months earlier? As for Potts, Potts didn’t speak anything. He just sat there in the canoe, looking as if he was going to shit himself.

One of the braves waved them into shore and they had no choice but to comply. Both canoes hit the sandbank at the same time and Colter sprang out to stand up straight and face them down to show he had no fear, but Potts wouldn’t get out. They’re going to kill us, he said in a choked voice, but they’re going to torture us first, and he tried to back the canoe away but one of the braves took hold of the paddle and then, when Potts went for his rifle, the brave grabbed that. At this point, Colter, who was stronger than any two of them combined, waded in, snatched the rifle away and handed it back to Potts. (Why, Adam always wondered, when they should have just waited them out? What was he thinking? Or maybe he wasn’t thinking, maybe he was just reacting.) That, unfortunately, started a chain of events no one could stop. Potts pushed back in his canoe and it shot out to midstream, at which point one of the Indians let fly with an arrow—shush—and there it was, embedded in Potts’ left hip, blooming there, the feathers trembling like rose petals in a breeze. And what did Potts do next? Snatched up his rifle and shot the closest Indian to him, which was the one who’d tried to take it away from him, now hip-deep in the water and looking hate at him. An instant and it was done. And in the next instant every brave there was using Potts for target practice.

So Potts was dead, dead in a matter of seconds, and Colter was standing there on the shore amidst all the hostiles howling like scorched demons and the women sending up their weird ululations of grief over the dead brave and half a dozen Indians in the creek now and wading to the canoe to drag it back to shore. Where they went at Potts’ corpse like a butchers’ convention, the women especially, hacking at him till he was unrecognizable, just meat, slick and wet and red. And Colter? Still there, still standing, still staring out unflinchingly, in another place altogether, ignoring them.

What was that like, seeing your companion gutted and dismembered out of the corner of your eye and not thirty feet away? How could anybody have just stood there instead of panicking and trying to make a run for it? Colter did. Five minutes, that was all it took for them to finish hacking at Potts till there was no more left of him than a skinned rabbit, and then they turned to Colter. Everybody was jabbering at once, crowding in to threaten him with hatchets, spears, the points of arrows and knives, their faces contorted and their mouths flung open so that every word, every shriek was delivered in a thunderstorm of spit. And they stank. They really stank. Stank worse than corpses come back to life. As if it mattered. As if anything mattered to Colter other than somehow saving his own skin. In the next moment he was stripped naked, his clothes sliced off him by the squaws’ knives, and here was what was left of Potts’ organs flung at him to spatter his chest with blood. One woman — the widow who’d been a married woman ten minutes before — was brandishing something in his face, flailing him with it, and what was it? White, flaccid, a twist of pubic hair and the sorrowful deracinated sack of what had been Potts’ testicles and the other thing attached to it, limp and bright with blood, and it could have been a turkey neck, stripped of skin and feathers, but it wasn’t.

So what was he shooting at? Was she serious? Movement, that was what. Who knew who was out there, whether it was the officers of the law or the Chinese smuggled up from Mexico on the panga boats they abandoned on the beaches till there were more pangas than seals and bundles of kelp combined or just some dog-walking shithead who was already dialing 911? And if he strapped on the night-vision goggles and whoever it was was gone in the space of those twenty seconds, what did that prove? That they were elusive. That they were smart. That they were watching him harder than he was watching them and that they were watching her too. He’d seen movement and so he fired, just to keep them off, just to let them know what his Chinese Norinco SKS Sporter semi-automatic assault rifle could do in the hands of somebody who really knew how to use it no matter what his father said or tried to say when his Aunt Marion gave it to him for his twenty-third birthday because her husband was dead and you didn’t have any use for a rifle when you were dead unless maybe you were a zombie and his Uncle Dave might have been a zombie in real life but definitely wasn’t going to be coming out of his grave anytime soon.

Whatever. But then she was barking at him and he thought she was going to run him down with the car she was in such a panic, which wasn’t cool-headed at all and he was ashamed for her and wanted to say something about that, about tactics and coolness under fire, but the words wouldn’t come. He was flying, the sound and feel of that rifle pumping him full of helium gas like a balloon lifting off into the sky, and for the first few minutes he just sat there seeing the headlights streaming out into the night and knowing how wrong that was. Kill the lights, he told her, knowing they’d be coming, and it was no different from the deeds they’d done in high school, slowing down to hang out the window and obliterate somebody’s mailbox with a baseball bat or egging the gym teacher’s house because he was a Nazi, and always with the lights off so you could slip in under the radar. I can’t, she said, and he was about to reach over and flip the switch himself when the siren started in and he knew just what to do and where to go because the pigs were flat-out stupid and so what if there was only one road going down? Here, he said. Stop here. Turn.

And then they were in the dark and the lights were off and he guided her the first part of the way with the goggles, at least until they’d put a couple of curves between them and the main road so there was no chance of any U-turning pig seeing their running lights or anything else and then he let her switch the headlights back on and everything was cool. She calmed down finally and when she calmed down she started chattering away about anything that came into her head as they went bumping over washboard ripples and slamming through potholes, everything a uniform drifting dirt-brown and the leaves more gray than green and the tree trunks like pillars supporting a whole other road above them, a black road and starless. He wasn’t listening. The wheel was spinning but spinning slower now and she was there beside him, Sara, a human being, a word mill, a talking dictionary, big tits jouncing with the up and down of the car springs, her voice coming too fast at first but gradually slowing as she got used to the fact that they’d one-upped them yet again and there was no chance of being caught by anybody, not now or later.

Some time passed, or must have passed, but he didn’t notice. She was still talking. “So what did you think of Christabel?” was one thing she said but he didn’t answer so she said it again and this time he was right there with her.

“Is she Chinese?”

“Chinese? Christabel? What are you talking about? Christabel Walsh? That’s Irish. And her mother was a McCoy.”

“She looks Chinese.”

“Christabel? Come on, Adam, what planet are you on? She’s no more Chinese than I am. Or you, for that matter.” Her big tits bounced. The trees caught the light. “What is this obsession with the Chinese, anyway?”

He didn’t want to tell her about the incident in San Francisco, whenever that was, years ago, he guessed, and he didn’t want to tell her that the Orientals were conduits to the other worlds and the Chinese star proved it. It was too complicated. And he didn’t really feel like getting into all that now, so he unscrewed the cap on his canteen and had a hit of 151 and just repeated what he’d already told her because she was trying to understand and he had to give her credit for that. “They’re the new hostiles,” he said. “I told you.”

More ruts, more bouncing. The car spoke its own language, low and steady, a kind of robot growl that never gave up and he could look right through the dashboard and into the engine and see the pistons there, the valves and connecting rods, pumping and pumping like sex, robot sex, car sex, steel on steel. “What do you mean,” she said, “like economically?”

“Are you crazy? Who’s talking about economics? Economics is shit.” He stopped there, looking for the words that right then started marching across his line of vision, left to right, as if he was reading from a script and that was nothing new because everything in this world was scripted like some lame reality show and everything had been said before a billion trillion times, How are you today, Fine, How are you, Fine, Have a nice day, You too. His head hurt where he’d banged it on the windshield, but there was no blood. She drove. The car growled. “Let me ask you something”—she was pissing him off she was so stupid and he wanted her to know it—“because sometimes I wonder about the college you went to and if you were paying attention at all.”

“So ask.”

“Where did the Indians come from?”

It took her a minute. “Asia? The land bridge, you mean?”

“What we ought to do?” he said. “If I was president?”

“What?” A little bleat, and that was funny, because her voice got jerked on a string by the next pothole.

“Nuke ’em. Nuke ’em before they nuke us,” and he was picturing it now, everything melted, everything ash. “Or hack all our computers and send us back to the Stone Age. No money, no food, no electricity, no nothing.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? It’d give the animals and the environment a chance to come back. We’d need more Colters then, wouldn’t we? People that could live off the land?” Her face was turned toward him, light on one side, dark on the other, quarter moon. She was right. Back to the Stone Age. More Colters. Live off the land. And get ready for the hostiles, because they were coming and they would just take what they wanted and nobody to stop them.

She was quiet a moment. The car thumped. The night squeezed in. She didn’t know it yet but they were going to have to stay out here all night long, at the campground, where they’d blend in with the others. It would be cramped in the car and she might not like it but that was how it was. There was a blanket in back. He had a couple PowerBars and she always carried a bottle of water in the car. They’d sit there in the dark. They’d get high. And not just on rum and marijuana, but what he had in his shirt pocket, a surprise, first fruit of his poppies, the sap he’d worked into little dried-out balls you could smoke just like that in a pipe you made out of foil and could use once and toss away and nobody the wiser. Then they’d have sex. She’d open up to him — she always opened up to him, hot and greasy and with that smell of her like some animal with its scent glands on display, like a beaver, and it came to him then that that was why it was called beaver. Beaver shot, he said in his head. And then he said it aloud: “Beaver shot.”

“What?”

He didn’t say it again, only thought it: Beaver shot. And money shot, that was when you pulled it out and squirted their beaver or their tits or belly. Spermatized them.

“I said, if the whole corrupt society broke down, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

“No,” he said softly, “no, it wouldn’t.”

Days flipped by, he wasn’t sure how many. She was there in the house, cooking, cleaning, picking lint out of the Rasta dog’s fur and spreading for him every night, and he was out working his plants, slitting the seed pods with a razor and letting the milky stuff drip out till he scraped it off and rolled it into a ball. When he had enough of it, when he was satisfied with the product, he was going to sell it — Cody, Cody was going to help him out on that end because he really couldn’t feature tramping up and down the street looking for heads and freaks and tourists who might or might not be interested — and he was going to take the money and put it in a jar and hide that jar in a secret place so he could be independent of everybody and everything forever. He’d build another bunker, deeper, farther, and he wasn’t ever going to come back.

Problem was, he had a wicked case of poison oak. It was in between his fingers, blisters so big there it hurt to make a fist. And he’d somehow managed to get it on his cock, pissing, most likely, but then you had to piss and to get it out you had to touch yourself and that’s where the poison oak got in. He’d heard that if you ate some of the leaves you’d be immune and he’d tried that when he was twelve or thirteen and all that had happened was he had blisters on his lips and in his mouth and halfway down his throat so he couldn’t even eat for a week, so that, to put it mildly, was bullshit. Anyway, he needed calamine lotion and she’d gone to the store and gotten it for him and now, right now, with the sun straight up overhead, he was skirting the dog-face’s property and heading back to the house to dose himself with it, especially down there where every step chafed him and the itch was a thing you couldn’t scratch because that would only make it worse but he was scratching it anyway and it was bringing tears to his eyes.

Down one slope, across the river that was less a river every day, up the other slope and through the trees to the house, the wall there, and then up and over the wall and into the yard. Two whispers: his feet touching down. The dirt. Yellow weeds. Sun. A hole the Rasta dog had dug, no bigger than a birdbath. One tree, puny, leaves drooping. And what was this? A bicycle up against the wall, cinnamon red, with dirty white tape wrapped around the handlebars, and that was strange because Colter didn’t have a bicycle, bicycles hadn’t even been invented yet, and where had that come from? He’d already shrugged out of the backpack and propped the rifle against the wall, but now he straightened up, alert suddenly, his sixth sense kicking in. That was when he heard the voices. That was when he made himself small and slipped round the corner of the house to peer in the window and see his mother there and now his father too, shapes shifting in the sun raking through the glass to cut their heads off and replace them with haloes like in the church with Jesus and Mary but his father wasn’t Jesus and his mother was no saint either.

Slip away, a voice was telling him, whispering to him, slip away over the wall and go deep before they know you’re here, and he realized he could see through the house because the curtains were gone, see all the way across the rugless bare boards, out through the windows on the other side and beyond that to the door his father had cut in the wall. Which stood open. Propped open. And why, if every time his father showed he was going to prop the door open, had he bothered to put that door there in the first place? For security? To keep everybody out? Or in? But there was something there, a vehicle, the broad white flank of it suddenly blasting up at warp speed to spread itself atop the wall, black lettering there, or the tops of letters, letters wearing hats, and for the tiniest hemidemisemiquaver of a second it was a puzzle but a puzzle anybody could have solved: U-Haul. That’s what it said. They had a U-Haul here. And what did that mean? That meant they were taking things. That meant the alien was moving in, into his house, into his grandma’s house, and he could see it now, the alien in the cemetery with his shovel and digging, digging, digging till he had her dead body dripping beetles and grubs and he threw it over his shoulder and came right back and laid her out on the bed to be his bride like in The Evil Dead or one of those movies, he couldn’t remember because they were all the same.

He wanted something. It wasn’t 151, it wasn’t pot or opium or acid or a two-foot-long submarine sandwich heaped with prosciutto, provolone and pickled Tuscan peppers. No. It wasn’t any of that. It was Sara. Sara was what he wanted. And he rose now, confused, because where was she, and that was when the Rasta dog must have seen his shadow because the Rasta dog was barking and they saw him there in the yard and his father was waving him in, waving like the braves on the shore before they peppered Potts. Peppered Potts—he was saying it, saying it aloud — and here they were, his father, his mother and Sara, all of them out the back door and into the yard and the Rasta dog too, barking and inciting the trees till the trees were barking along with him.

“Adam,” and it was like a chorus, “you’re here.”

There was no denying it though he wished he didn’t have poison oak and wished he’d just stayed out there in the woods so he wouldn’t have to crawl through this big dripping heaped-up pile of bullshit and worse bullshit yet to come, so he didn’t deny it. “Yeah,” he said, and he tried to put a smile on his face but it wouldn’t come. He stared down at the ground.

And now his father: “Art Tolleson’s moving in tomorrow. So that’s it. All she wrote. If you want anything, personal things, you better take it now.”

And his mother: “We fixed up a room for you? At the new house? It’s just temporary, I know, and we’ll help you find something, I don’t know, more suitable—”

His father: “When the time comes.”

Sara said nothing. She was just standing there. He was staring at the ground — or no, at her shit-kickers. “What about Sara?” he heard himself say. “What are you going to do, bury her too?”

His father: “What in Christ’s name are you talking about? Stop with this crap. Enough. I’ve had it up to here.” A glare. “You can turn it on and off just like that, can’t you? Isn’t that right?” Nothing. Nobody. The sun, the dirt, the weeds, the shit-kickers. “Well, turn it off. Or take your meds or whatever it is you need because the fact is — the reality — the house is no longer ours.”

His mother: “Sten. Don’t be like that.” Softer now: “Adam, come on, it’s all right. She can, she can maybe, for a few days, I mean, at our house—”

And Sara, finally: “He can come with me. Stay at my place. For as long as he wants.” And then, shifting her face or at least the voice coming out of it as if her head was a loudspeaker but he couldn’t say, not really, because he wasn’t going to look up because if he looked up he’d be part of their reality and he didn’t want any part of being a part of that: “It’s okay, the thirty days are up, no problem. We’ll just help your parents clean up a bit and then tonight”—a pause for his father’s benefit, and she was the saint now and where was her halo? — “we’ll go up the hill. Sound good?”

It didn’t sound good. Nothing sounded good. He wanted his parents out of there — hit “enter” and just beam them up, haloes and all — and he wanted it to be night so he could go in and fuck Sara in the dark. “Personal things,” he said, spitting out the words. “Peppered Potts. Dog-face Moody. And Art Tolleson, I don’t know if you noticed”—raising his eyes now as if they were the high beams on the car—“is an alien.”

His father took two strides forward, his father the giant with his hands like catcher’s mitts, and he was livid. “That’s rum on your breath. You’re drunk. And Jesus knows what else.”

He just shrugged, but it was afternoon and afternoons were never good and here went the wheel, spinning, spinning.

“Now you get your ass in there and pack up your crap”—stinking breath, hostile breath—“and you can come to our house tonight, both of you, or you can go to her house, I don’t really care—”

“Yeah,” he was saying in that other voice, the one that was like vinegar up your nose, “and you can go fuck yourself too. Big hero. Why don’t you just kill me too — wouldn’t that be easier? Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t it?”

Then his father shoved him, hard, didn’t hit him but shoved him, and he was a rock because he hardly felt it and didn’t even take a step back but when his own arms jerked out and he was doing the shoving they were like two pistons pulled right up out of the engine block and his father reeled, his father stepped back, but then his father came at him again and it was ugly, he was ugly, as ugly as Potts, and maybe his mother got into it too, trying to separate them, her voice gone up into the high register till it was like an air-raid siren, and that really was all she wrote, finally and absolutely, because his father was in the dirt now and his mother too and he was gone, rifle, backpack, knife in its sheath, up over the wall and into the high weeds and gone, pure gone.

20

LATE, BLACK DARK, THE frogs doing their thing along the creek and the crickets in the high grass, no other sound but the whisper of his boots. He circled the place twice to make sure there was nobody around and it wasn’t till the second recon that he noticed her car there because he wasn’t expecting it and the shadows were like loam and the loam was piled up till it was buried, absolutely. What did he feel about that? He felt a quickening, not the wheel now, though it was humming along, all right, but in his blood, in his cock. Her car. Her car was there though it should have been gone by now and her with it. He was in cover, crouching, and if he itched, he was going to take care of that because he was going to go into that house whether his father liked it or not — or Art Tolleson the alien or whoever — and he was going to get the calamine lotion he’d come for earlier and, more importantly, he was going to go down behind the couch Art Tolleson was inheriting as part and parcel of the deal and extract the sweet pickle relish jar with the six hundred dollars in it and then they’d see just how independent he was. He lifted the night-vision goggles to his face and took a good long look at the car and there she was, her head lolling back and no doubt the Rasta dog there too on the floor someplace or the seat beside her and what was she thinking, what was she doing? It made his skin prickle to think of the answer, made his cock hard: she was waiting for him.

The Rasta dog let out with a whole boiling cauldron of yips, snarls, barks and high-throated yowls the minute he touched his hand to the car door and here was her face, dumb with sleep and pale as the underside of her feet, fixed in the gap where the scrolling-down window slipped into the doorframe. She called him by name, his old name, the one he’d rejected, but he didn’t care, not now, and he didn’t bother to correct her. Then she asked if he’d had anything to eat, but he didn’t answer. He said, “I want to get in the house. He didn’t change the locks again, did he?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice sticky, like taffy. “I don’t think so.”

“Because I’ll smash every fucking window in the place. .”

Stickier still: “What do you need, baby?”

“Calamine.”

“I’ve got it here with me in the car. Come on, get in. We’ll go up to my place — just for tonight. Or longer. However long you want. It’s okay. It is.”

He held out his hand. “Give it to me.”

It took her about six weeks, fumbling around with her purse and her suitcase and all the bags of groceries and crap, the dog whining and stinking and breathing out his meat-eating breath and her turning on the dome light, which was so wrong and so untactical and so just plain idiotic he couldn’t have even begun to explain it to her, but there it was, the plastic bottle cool and round in the palm of his hand and their skin touching like two flames as she handed it over.

She tried again. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go. I’m tired.”

He ignored her. Yes, his cock was hard, but so was Colter’s through a thousand black nights and freezing dawns, and it was something you just had to deal with. Discipline, that was what it was called. What soldier, what mountain man, worried about sex? You got it when you could and if you didn’t have it you just learned to do without. It wasn’t like food. Or plews. Or balls and powder for your rifle. Of course he could have gone through the front gate, which was unlocked — he tried it — but that would be giving in to his father and his father’s scheme, so he went over the wall, and when he got to the front door he tried his key and his key worked but that didn’t mean anything because it was just more of the same. No, what he was going to do was what he’d envisioned all the way back: he was going to break in, break things, let people — let his father — know just how he felt.

There were rocks in the yard that fit his fist as if they’d been shaped and eroded and pressed deep in the earth over all the eons just for this purpose, just for smashing windows, and no one to hear or care. Except Sara. She was there shouting at him after the picture window in front gave up the ghost — the ghost, and that was funny, this one’s for you, Grandma — and then she actually tried to stop him, to grab at his arm as he went for the next window and the next one after that, methodical now, with all the time and purpose in the world.

Sometimes it was a good thing to put the brakes on the wheel and slow everything down and the 151 and the opium did that but then you were vulnerable because you weren’t alert and ready for action and when you shouldered your rifle and went up the trail to your bunker you felt like you were wading through water, as if the air wasn’t air anymore but something thicker, denser, something dragging you down like the too-thick atmosphere and too-heavy gravity of the aliens’ planet. The Chinese planet. The planet where they lived and bred and sent out their scouts to come after you. So he stopped the opium — Colter didn’t need it and neither did he — and traded off a couple marble-sized balls of it to Cody at the pizza place in exchange for six hits of acid and a chintzy little baggie of what Cody said was coke but was really meth. No matter. Stay awake, get awake, and march, march all day long till your legs didn’t know they were attached to your body.

Weeks went by. Or he thought it was weeks. Maybe it was days, maybe it was months, but the important thing was he was in training and he could go like Colter when Colter walked those three hundred miles and he knew every trail in all these woods and forests and he didn’t even need trails because there was nobody in that whole poisoned corrupt police state of Mendo who knew the country better than him and never had been, not since the mountain men themselves. He was doing it, he was finally doing it, living free, and no, he’d said no to Sara that night, the night of the broken glass, because he didn’t want to be dependent, didn’t want to go soft on her baked lasagna and her big soft lips and big soft tits and all the rest of it. No, he’d said, no, get off me! And she did. She got off him. She gave up. He smashed glass and a whole lot more and she got back in her car with the Rasta dog and the taillights cut a stencil out of the night, red stencil, red stencil receding, Have a nice day, You too.

But now, today, whatever day today was, he had a problem — and it wasn’t poison oak because that was dried up now and it wasn’t the shits, though come to think of it he did have the shits and that was from drinking out of whatever stream whether it was in the state forest or running through the lumber company property like silver music playing all on its own or maybe the Noyo, never the same river twice, everything in flux, including his fucked-up bowels — and that problem was backup. He’d begun to realize — or no, the realization slammed into him like the hundred arrows that transfixed Potts — that he was vulnerable on his own turf where anybody could see his plants and maybe the bunker too if they looked hard enough and hadn’t he spotted a helicopter going over just the day before? And all those jets, high up, like silver needles threading the sky, every one of them equipped with super-secret spy cameras? Too much, way too much, and he’d really let his guard down this time, hadn’t he?

A new bunker, that was what he needed, a backup plan, a place to retreat to if it came to it, anybody could see that and you didn’t have to be a tactical genius to appreciate the value of it. So he had a shovel and a bow saw he’d taken from the Boy Scout camp on the Noyo which was abandoned now for the season because the Boy Scouts were all back in school and he was heading overland — no sense in showing himself on the roads — to a place he knew of six miles north, very secure, high ground surrounding the pool a spring made when it pushed out of the mountain. Pure water, that was what he was thinking. A spring. None of this bacteria and giardia and human waste the aliens fed into all these other streams. He went through the trees, down a ravine, up the other side, double time, and the air was cool and the bugs asleep, and when he got there he unwrapped a handful of Hershey’s Kisses for the sugar rush and then used the little soft foil wrappers to make himself a blunt and smoke out while he contemplated the arrangements.

The Boy Scouts, that was what he was thinking about. They were another kind of pathetic, crybabies and dudes and the sons of dudes, and they hadn’t really needed the sleeping bag he spread out by the side of the spring so he could lie back and watch the tops of the trees stir and settle and stir again before he got down to digging. And cutting. Maybe he closed his eyes. Maybe he drifted off. It didn’t really matter because he was dreaming when he was asleep and dreaming when he was awake and if the two dreams intertwined that was the way it was meant to be. What it was that woke him out of the one dream and sent him rushing into the other was a noise, the dull airtight thump of a car door slamming shut, but how could that be? How could there be a car out here? Unless—and the qualifier shot out claws to grab him down deep in his gut where he was already cramping — unless he hadn’t done a proper recon because he wasn’t a soldier at all or a mountain man either but just another unhard unprepared unfit version of the fat kids with their bags of Doritos he used to play World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto with before he pulled the plug on all that. Mountain men didn’t need video games. Mountain men didn’t need to waste hostiles by proxy. Who wanted to be connected? Who needed Doritos? Who needed fat kids? And nerds. Half of them were probably in China, Chinese nerds. No, he was disconnected and proud of it and had been since he was what, fourteen, fifteen?

But what about that noise? What about that slamming door? How could you have a secure backup position within earshot of a logging road? Cursing himself, knowing he’d fucked up, he came fully alert in that instant. Silently, he took up the rifle and rose to his knees, listening, trying to determine what direction the threat was coming from. The rifle had a pistol grip, which he’d wrapped in black electrical tape for the feel of it, the tactile sensation of knowing it was in his hand, wedded to it like skin, so he could feel his finger on the trigger with no interference and squeeze off rounds at will, thirty rounds to a clip and two more clips in the backpack and another 208 rounds of dull-silver Wolf 7.62mm bullets in there too. He could hold off an army. He would. Just bring them on.

Everything was silent. Some kind of peeping started up — a bird, or no, one of those chickaree squirrels, the kind that don’t know a thing beyond eating and shitting and fucking but cling to the high branches and bitch all day long, anyway — and that peeping was an unfortunate thing because it covered the sound of footsteps coming up the slope along the streambed. That and the noise of the stream itself. And that was crazy. How could you develop a defensive position and anticipate the enemy with all this racket? An electric bolt shot through him. He wanted to shout out to the squirrel to shut the fuck up. He wanted to blow him away, eradicate him with one blast, and then what? Then stomp his rodent head till it was just mush. .

The voice came out of nowhere. “Hey, you,” the voice said, the voice demanded, “what do you think you’re doing in there?”

He was startled, he admitted it, and he hated himself for that, taken by surprise because he hadn’t done a proper recon and even after he’d been alerted to the presence of hostiles he had to go off dreaming about squirrels. He was still on his knees. He could feel his fatigues getting wet because there was moss here beside the sleeping bag and moss was like a sponge and now he felt the pressure on his bowels too until he was like Potts about to shit himself in that canoe. The source of the voice, where was it? It seemed to be everywhere. And he was a fool, a fool. He slipped off the safety, hating himself.

“There’s no camping here,” the voice went on, and here was the source, a hostile with fish eyes and a flat fish head and shorts and hiking boots, coming toward him through the draw where the stream started down out of the spring and carved its own way, silver music, “and no trespassing either. This is Georgia Pacific property. Can’t you read?”

His defenses were down and so he said that, said, “My defenses are down.”

The hostile was fifty feet from him, red-faced, barking, everybody barking twenty-four/seven and he was tired of that, give it a break, give my ears a fucking break, and the hostile was saying, “You pack up your crap and get out of here,” and that was when he pulled the trigger, twice, pop-pop, and it wasn’t like I didn’t even know my finger was on the trigger because he did know and he took aim the way he had a thousand times in target practice and the two shots went home and dropped that hostile like he was a suit of clothes with nobody in it.

Long time. Long, long time. He just sat there, right where he was, and smoked another blunt, the chickaree still at it, the spring pumping out water like it was never going to quit. A few mosquitoes came to visit and after a while there were meat bees and a couple bluebottle flies dancing over the dead man who might have needed to be buried and might not have. Colter never buried anybody, not hostiles, anyway, and Fish-Eyes was definitely a hostile, even if he did look like that teacher from school. What he did do though, finally, was push himself up to go and stand over the corpse the way Colter would have done and he briefly entertained the notion of collecting a scalp here, his first scalp, but rejected that. The man was on his back. He’d been shot through the gut and then, in recoiling from that shot, he must have turned slightly so that the second shot went through his right arm and on into the side of his ribcage. A hole there, but not as big as the one in his gut. His shirt — a T-shirt with some stupid logo of some stupid organization on it — was very wet and very red with the color of the cinnamon bicycle that was propped up against the wall back at the house that used to be his. The eyes weren’t looking at anything. And the mouth — the mouth definitely wasn’t giving any commands or issuing any threats, not anymore. But the whole thing didn’t look right to him and he was seeing a bright shearing radiance of colors and things breaking down into their constituent parts and then reassembling again, only not in the same way, not the same way at all, and what he was feeling was pain, sharp and demanding, pain in his own gut, and he didn’t think twice about it, just pulled down his pants and squatted there and took a rank and violent shit.

He needed something, that was what he was thinking, Imodium or maybe if it was giardia, some kind of prescription. He couldn’t just go around sick in his stomach and shitting all the time, could he? No. That wasn’t going to work. He’d have to go into town, to the drugstore there. But if he needed a prescription, where was he going to get that? For the moment though the problem was the shit he could smell in his own nostrils and so he hiked his pants halfway and crabwalked over to sit in the spring and clean himself off, then he dried himself with leaves — not poison oak, just leaves — pulled his pants back up, collected his things and went off into the woods, heading upslope. He knew a place up there, remembered it, could picture it even now, where there was another spring. Maybe, he was thinking, just maybe, if he gave it a real good recon, it would turn out to be a primo spot, exactly what he was looking for.

And then let them come. Just let them.