The Harder They Come

27

COLTER DIDN’T HAVE THE shits. They probably didn’t even have giardia back then, let alone the little yellow 400 mg metronidazole tablets they gave you to cure it. What they did have was hostiles, thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands, though the white race had done their best to bring those numbers down, what with smallpox and gonorrhea and rum, whiskey, vodka and gin. But here they were, the Blackfeet, terminally furious and flinging Potts’ bloody genitalia at him, and the only issue was not if but how they were going to put him to death. Braves kept lurching up to him, right in his face, tomahawks drawn, then jerking back again, as if to rattle him, but he kept calm because he saw that some of the higher-ranking ones, the chiefs, had withdrawn a ways to sit around in a circle and think things through. Why be hasty? They had all day, all night, and if he lasted that long, the day after that. He felt his heart sink, though he wouldn’t let his face show it. After a while the ululations dropped off and the young braves, the hotheads, held back in deference to their elders, but you could see they were aching for the moment they’d be set free — and gloating too over the prospect of what mold of sport the elders were devising for them.

Naked, with Potts’ blood drying on his chest and shoulders, Colter stood rigid, trying to focus his mind. He could make out something of what the elders were saying — some were for the death of a thousand slits, others for making a target out of him so they could improve their aim the way they had with Potts, maybe even take wagers as to which of them could drill him the closest without killing him outright. He had enough of their language to get a sense of all this, but not enough to plead his case — if he was doing anything at that moment it was trying to form the Blackfoot words in his head, when only the language of their enemies, the Crows, or Kee-kat-sa, as they called themselves, would rise up out of the depths of his brain, which was, understandably, under a whole lot of stress at the moment.

Finally, one of the chiefs — tall, bleak-faced, with reddened mucousy eyes and skin jerked by the wind and sun — pushed himself up and ambled over to stand face-to-face with him, practically nose-to-nose. Colter could smell him, the tobacco he sucked through his pipe, the sweat of his horse, the dried buffalo meat and pounded meal he’d had for breakfast. They stood like that for a long moment, Colter naked and vulnerable and wanting only to sprout wings and fly on out of there, the hardest thing to keep your back straight and not give in to the impulse to protect your gut — a reflex, really — and guard against a sneak blow that would double you up and leave you gasping in the dirt. “Are you a fast runner?” the chief asked, but Colter didn’t understand him, so after a long moment, the chief repeated himself and he got the gist of it. This was hope. A particle of it, anyway. He’d heard of similar situations, in which a tribe would let their captive run for his life so they could have the sport of the chase, like fox and hounds, except that the ground was festooned with prickly pear and the fox had no moccasins to protect his feet and even if he did there was nowhere to escape to or even hide in all that flat deserted plain.

And what did Colter say, in his accent that must have been a kind of insult in itself? “Not really.”

The chief bored into him with his rheumy eyes, wondering if he could believe him — or should — or if it even mattered. Even if Colter was the fastest man alive, how could he hope to outrun a hundred or more hopped-up spear-flinging braves, each of them vying to be the one to avenge the death of their tribesman, their friend, their relative, their father or son or brother? After a minute or two of this — enough to make Colter feel the extra weight of paranoia, wondering if the chief had been there for the fight with the Crows and was just now beginning to place him — the chief turned his back on him and returned to the circle of elders. Things got quiet. Children stared at him out of wide unblinking eyes. A dog came up to sniff him and raise its hackles before slinking away. The elders were talking in low voices now, as if they’d reached consensus, and he strained to hear what they were saying but couldn’t catch a word of it.

Another eternity went by, every minute of it precious, however fraught, because he was alive still and thinking and breathing and pumping blood on planet earth. He just stood there, staring straight ahead, as if he didn’t care one way or the other what they did with him. It was cool still, the temperature just above freezing despite the sun that had come up over the horizon now, but he didn’t feel it — if anything, he felt overheated, as if he were wrapped in furs and lying in front of a bonfire. Maybe he had an itch on the back of his neck or under his arm — people had itches all the time — but he didn’t dare scratch it or even move a fraction of an inch. Finally, the first chief, joined now by a younger, angrier-looking one, strolled across the beaten dirt to him, taking his sweet time. He was nodding, nodding assent, and when he was right there in front of Colter again, nose-to-nose, he said, “You go out there on the plain and then”—he gestured to the young braves, who’d begun to remove their leggings and line up for the chase—“we see how fast you run.”

So Colter, taking his sweet time too, ambled out across the plain, expecting at any moment to hear the shout go up behind him but forcing himself to walk so as to get as much distance between himself and his pursuers as he could before he broke into a run and set them off. Most people wouldn’t have had the presence of mind Colter had — they would have taken off sprinting and the Indians would have been on them quicker than flies on shit — but it served him well. He must have gotten a hundred yards out before the shout went up, but it wasn’t so much a shout as a mad blood-crazed shriek of three hundred voices, the women ululating all over again and the braves howling like beasts. Colter didn’t let it distract him and he didn’t look back. He knew right where he was — it was six miles straight across the plain to the forks of the Missouri, the big river, and if he could somehow reach that and maybe get in the water ahead of them and flail his way downstream he had a chance, the smallest, tiniest, infinitesimal chance, of surviving.

Colter ran. He kept his head down, watching his feet, trying to avoid the spines of the cholla and prickly pear and whatever else was out there. His legs felt strong, though he’d spent the better part of the past month sitting in a canoe, and he never slowed his pace, sprinting the first mile as if this wasn’t about endurance but speed, only that. The braves — and what had they been doing all their lives except letting their ponies do the running for them? — began to drop out, one by one. Those closest to him flung their spears at the pale retreating wedge of his back but they weren’t near enough to be accurate and he could hear the spears clatter on the stones behind him. Encouraged, he kept running, and if anything, increased his speed.

Then there was the second mile, the third, and he was halfway there by his calculation and still alive and in one piece, though his feet were bloody and pierced with cholla spines and his lungs were on fire. But at least he still had lungs and that was better than the alternative, better than Potts, whose own innards were just food for dogs at this point. After a while, and he was running now for the sake of it, for nothing else but that, just running as if he’d never done anything else in his life, he risked a glance over his shoulder and saw to his amazement that there were only three braves anywhere near him. So what did he do? He poured it on, running faster than anybody before or since, and by the time he reached what he guessed was the fifth mile and could see the distant declivity where the river cut its banks, there was only one brave behind him, the fittest one in the whole camp, young, streamlined, his spear stabbing out before him as he pumped his arms with each stride.

No matter. Colter was outrunning him. Or could have or would have but for the fact that he felt something hot and viscid running down the front of him, his own blood, some essential thing ruptured inside of him from the sheer pounding stress and high anxiety he was putting his body through. He was bleeding out both nostrils, that was what it was, his chest and even his thighs smeared with blood as if he’d been plunged in a vat in one of the slaughterhouses back in St. Louis, and he knew that things had come to a head, to the point of crisis, flip a coin, live or die. So what he did, even as the brave gained on him and was about to take aim and hurl his spear at any second, was stop in his tracks and whirl around to face him. It was a good move. Because the brave, fittest and fleetest of the whole tribe, had been focused all this time on the shifting target of Colter’s soap white shoulders and now suddenly here was Colter’s face and chest bright with blood and Colter running no more. “Spare me,” he called out, but the brave had no such intention. He cocked the spear over his right shoulder, leaning into his throw in midstride, but unfortunately for him he caught his foot at that moment and pitched face-forward into the dirt, the spear slamming down in front of him to quiver in the ground.

Colter was on him in that instant, jerking the shaft out of the earth and bringing the business end of the spear down on the writhing Indian with such force that it went right through his ribcage and pinned him to the turf like an insect. That was a moment. And Colter felt it not so much in his brain or his heart, but in his legs. He was bloody. His feet were raw. One of his pursuers lay dead on the ground, but here came the rest of them letting out a collective howl of rage and disbelief when they saw their fallen comrade, and there went Colter, running, running.

28

IT WAS A LONG hike from her place, down through the wooded canyon that was like her two spread legs with the river the wet part in the middle of it, but it was nothing to him and he could have walked it five times a day if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to. He’d got his prescription and that was going to stop the shits — it already had — and he’d got the sex he really didn’t need but wanted, anyway, another weakness. Poison oak. The shits. Sex. If he stopped to think about it, it scared him. A voice — and it wasn’t in his head, but out there in front of him somewhere, hidden in the leaves — started ragging on him. Boy Scout, it called him. Girl Scout. Brownie. Weakling. Dude. Fag. Wannabe. After the first hour he stopped listening because that voice was the voice of defeat and if you had discipline you could take your weakness and transform it into strength, the same as you could take a fat kid with a bag of Doritos and make him lift weights and run a treadmill instead of playing video games and firm him up in a month. Basic training. Run the hills, climb the ropes, get hard and stay hard. His father had been a Marine and he’d been hard once but now he was old. And soft. Still — and this came to him at odd moments, like now — he had gone over there and waxed gooks and then as an old man went down to waste some Costa Rican alien with his bare hands and you had to give him credit for that. Even if he was clueless. Even if he didn’t have even the faintest hint of the threat the hostiles posed, but then why would he, living in his clean and perfect upscale ocean-view house in Yuppiesville, California?

The day was cool and he hardly sweated at all, plus his clothes were clean, courtesy of Sara’s washer and dryer, and if he regretted not having stayed on at least for one day more, at least till he could have gotten to the grocery store and maybe Big 5, he had to dismiss it. He was on a mission, never forget that. Maybe that alien had interrupted him, had showed him how weak and mindless and just plain stupid his first attempt at establishing a backup position was, and maybe that was for the best because he hadn’t been prepared, had he, but now he was or he was going to be. He’d already cached some things at the second camp, which was an hour’s hike from the one he’d had to abandon, the one he’d had to say mission aborted to, and on a different watercourse entirely, high ground, absolutely, and no road within miles. He was on his way there now, hurrying, hurrying, and there were planes overhead, always planes, glinting, and it was just a matter of time before it was drones, which were just another kind of robot, and his wind was good and his legs were strong even if his pack was overloaded and pulling ever so slightly to the right and he really didn’t feel like stopping to shift things around. What he had in there were the items he’d acquired from Sara that she wouldn’t be needing, anyway, like what was left of the bottle of bourbon and some cans of beef stew (extra weight, but totally tasty, especially over a campfire, and easy too because all you needed was a can opener and you could set the can down in the coals and then eat right out of it when it was ready), plus a hatchet and an adjustable wrench he’d found in some alien’s cabin on the way up and then stashed for the return trip.

But wait: was he lost? He seemed to wake up suddenly, the sun a jolt to his system the way coffee was, but she hadn’t made coffee and he hadn’t wanted it because she was asleep in bed and snoring with her mouth thrown open when he slipped out the door, and he realized he was disoriented, to the south of where he wanted to be, and how he came to realize it — and come awake — was because here was somebody’s cabin hidden in the trees and a dirt road curling up in front of it like a cat taking a nap. All right, he was thinking, why not? And he circled the place three times, doing his recon, until he determined with ninety-nine percent accuracy that there was nobody home. Up on the porch now, locked door, casement windows, drawn curtains. Hello, anybody there?

A tap of the stone he dug out of the dirt and the near window had a fist-sized hole in it that allowed him to put his hand in, rotate the latch and pull the windows open so that anybody could have just stepped right over the sill and into the place that was only two rooms, woodstove, rag rug on the floor, a rusty dusty musty smell, and what was this? A.22 rifle hanging from two hooks over the stove and wouldn’t that make a nice close-up kind of weapon if somebody sawed off the barrel and filed it clean?

He lost himself there for a while and that wasn’t cool, that wasn’t military, and he would have been the first to admit it. But so what. He liked the feel of the place, liked the old armchair with the dog hair on it and the stuffed deer head sticking out of the knotty-pine wall across from it — and he liked the liquor too, a handle of vodka, two-thirds full, papa bear, mama bear, baby bear. He found a hacksaw in the toolshed and a vise and file there too. Food in the refrigerator, ham and cheese, yellow mustard, soft white sourdough bread that toasted up just perfect. And what was that tapping on the roof? It was rain, that was what it was, first rain of the season, and if it swelled the streams he wasn’t worried. All that hurry, and for what? In fact, he just took a time-out and built a fire in the woodstove and sat there through the back end of the morning and into the afternoon, drinking somebody else’s vodka and modifying somebody else’s.22 rifle, and didn’t think anything at all.

What woke him was his sixth sense. He heard the rain, heavy now, sizzling like the deep fryer at McDonald’s, and something else, an automotive noise, but the wheel inside him was barely turning at all and the vodka seemed to just press down on him till he felt like a deep-sea diver in one of those old-fashioned deep-sea suits with the riveted helmet and the long trailing air hose that seemed to rise up into infinity. It wasn’t weakness and it wasn’t the vodka, or not exactly, and it wasn’t the warmth of the woodstove or the fact that he could have lived in this cabin himself, all by himself, and built a wall around it too. . it was just that he was feeling cool, equal to anything, and he was just waiting to see who or what was coming through that door because he had a sawed-off.22 in his hand that was just like a pistol, that he could use as a pistol in any tight place, and a box of shells for it too that was just lying there in the drawer of the coffee table next to a deck of cards that had been thumbed through so many times the lamination was practically worn right off each and every one of them. And he’d looked. He had. And saw that the deck was missing the ace of diamonds — not the ace of spades, the ace of diamonds — and what that meant or didn’t mean he couldn’t say. He wasn’t superstitious. Or maybe he was.

Footsteps on the porch. Key in the lock. And there she was, an old lady with white hair and a what’s-up face who could have been his grandmother if his grandmother wasn’t dead already and buried and probably being dug up at that very minute by Art Tolleson, whoever he was or turned out to be when you peeled his mask off. It took her a minute, hanging there in the doorway as if she couldn’t decide whether to stay or go, the rain hanging like a gray sheet behind her and smelling of release and new life for the plants, the animals, the gullies and creeks and rivers. “Who are you?” she asked and before he could answer asked what he was doing there. Or what he thought he was doing there.

The door stood open. The old lady had three plastic bags of groceries dangling from her purple-veined hands. Her hair was wet on top and two long strands of it, one on either side of her puzzled face, were plastered wet to the skin there. “Who am I?” he said. “I’m Colter. What was the second question again?”

The rain sizzled behind her. It was really coming down, a real worm-washer. She didn’t seem to have heard him. She just stood there, the bags dangling. “What are you doing in my house?” That was what she wanted to know, and if there was an edge to her voice now, that was because she’d begun to take in the scene, the open window, the vodka, the fire, the metal shavings on the floor and the vise he’d clamped to the edge of the coffee table to steady the blade. And the guns: his rifle, propped up against the armchair with the dog hair on it, and the modified.22 he held in his hand. Which used to be a rifle. And used to be hers.

She deserved an answer and he felt so lazy and peaceful and calm he decided to give her one — and to be as pleasant about it as he could too. “Enjoying your hospitality,” was what he said, even as another sound entered the mix, the rattle of a dog’s toenails on the boards of the porch, and here came the dog himself, a miniature poodle sort of thing, old and arthritic and with the dark stains of his drooling eye fluids darkening the white fluff of fur on either side of his snout. He didn’t even bother to bark. Just stood there next to the old lady, dripping.

“You get out of here,” the old lady said then, and it wasn’t the dog she was talking to.

He held up a hand. Everything was okay, couldn’t she see that? There were no aliens here. And she wasn’t Chinese, not even close. So what he did was push himself up from the chair and go over to the window and pull it shut. “Sorry about the glass,” he said, and then, forgive him, he couldn’t help himself, he was laughing. “But you forgot to leave me a key.”

She did have a telephone, but he didn’t care about that. It was the same ugly sort of thing his grandmother’d had, no cellphone, cellphones didn’t work out here, but just a big black box of a thing that was so heavy you could have beaten an elephant to death with it. He didn’t want to alarm her so he didn’t jerk the wires out of the socket but just bent down and gently removed them, then straightened up and dodged past her with the phone and its trailing wires in one hand and the.22 in the other, and tossed the whole business out into the rain. (The phone, that is. Not the.22. The.22 he was going to need.) Then he pushed the door shut behind her — she still hadn’t moved, though the dog was really tapping up a storm now on the bare boards of the floor, all worked up about something.

“Listen,” he said, and the look on her face was breaking his heart because it was exactly the look his grandmother used to give him when she was pissed at him, “I really want to thank you for your hospitality. And I’m going to have to go soon. I’ve got, well, a lot”—and he waved one arm to show just how much he did have to do—“but with this rain and all, I think we might as well get comfortable, at least for a while. Don’t you?”

The time he drove the car through the fence at the playground he’d gone outside of himself for a moment there and knew what he’d done the minute the kids started scattering like rabbits across the dead grass and the scooped-out sandpit under the monkey bars, which were what stopped the car finally. The monkey bars were made of hollowed-out steel and they were cemented in place like a big metal beehive, and that was what set him off in the first place. To this day he couldn’t go past it without picturing the thing as some alien Chinese spacecraft just touched down and disgorging all these shrieking little half-sized hostiles who turned out to be kids, just kids. It was hard to explain, and he’d tried to explain it, tried hard, first to the pigs on the scene, then to the court-appointed lawyer and then to the judge and the shrink they assigned him. “Hey,” he said, “give me a break, it was an accident. And yeah, okay, I was on ’shrooms, all right? Is that a crime?” But it was. And he shouldn’t have said that or admitted it or whatever and he knew he’d fucked up the minute it was out of his mouth.

They sent him away for evaluation but he didn’t have a record and he was mostly clear while he was in the facility as they liked to call it euphemistically and they gave him meds, more meds, and released him to the custody of his parents and he went back to school and got bored and hung out with Cody and got high and higher and finally moved in with his grandmother and turned eighteen and began to get serious about the outdoors because he saw his destiny then as the first true mountain man of modern times. He read all the books. He worshipped Hugh Glass, who in some ways was as tough as Colter, a former pirate turned mountain man who had a run-in with a grizzly that left him mauled and broken and all but dead so that his so-called friends abandoned him and he had to crawl a hundred fifty miles and live on roots and lizards till he got his strength back and hunted them down and put the fear of God in them. He was going to call himself Glass at first, just Glass, but then Colter came into his life, and the name was so much cooler, and so was the man too.

The rest was history. And maybe someday they’d be writing him up in books. The scene at Piero’s was the one they’d have to embroider a bit because the fact was he’d seen some things there he didn’t like and got into it with some of the resident aliens and if truth be told got the living shit beat out of him to the tune of two fractured ribs, a chipped tooth and a seriously disarranged nose. He knew better now. Now he had his Norinco and his.22 and his Jungle King fourteen-inch hunting knife with the serrated edge on top, which was enough to discourage twenty hostiles. As for the thing at the Chinese consulate in S.F., that wasn’t even worth mentioning.

What brought it all up though was the old lady who looked more and more like his dead grandma as the afternoon fell off into evening and the rain kept up and he tipped back the bottle and just talked his heart out to her because that was what the peacefulness of her cabin and her presence too brought out in him. She was pissed, no doubt about that, and when he told her to just sit down and stop fussing she did it, but she didn’t like it. He was talking and she kept interrupting him, kept complaining, kept bitching, till he had to tell her, twice, to shut the fuck up. At some hour — it was still gray out and that was good because he had to find his way back — he thanked her one more time, gathered up his things and went on out to the door to flip the hood on her car and rip out the distributor cap before hunching his shoulders under the straps of his pack and humping into the woods, already wet through to the skin.

He woke shivering in his sleeping bag, which had somehow got wet too, despite the fact that he’d spread a camo tarp over the bunker and dug a runoff trench with the stainless-steel folding shovel he’d borrowed from the Boy Scouts. Permanently. The thing was, though, he was clear and knew right where he was, which was Camp 2, the one high above everybody and everything. He opened his eyes on the tarp, bellied now with accumulated water so that it looked like the bottom end of a brontosaur — or a dragon, Smaug the Impenetrable, scalier than shit — and heard the soft spatter of the dying rain in the trees, along with the crash and roar of the swollen creek coming out of the spring, and right away felt sick in his stomach. It wasn’t the shits. Or maybe it was, but only partially. He was hungover, that was what it was, drunk-sick, because he’d taken the old lady’s handle of vodka with him and never got around to building a fire for the beef stew or anything else and had just lain there under the tarp, listening to the rain and smelling the deep ferment of the woods while sucking on the bottle like some half-witted mewling little baby that didn’t know any better till his mind went blank and he passed out to wake up now, here, with the rain spattering and the spring roaring. Feeling like crap. Or no, warmed-over crap, crap that wasn’t even fresh but just heated up in a pan and served to all the shit-eaters of the world in some alien soup kitchen.

First thing he did was climb up over the lip of the bunker, which was three feet high, just exactly right for cover and defense both, and get down on all fours to puke, and then he dug out one of the little yellow giardia pills and washed it down with spring water because no one was going to tell him this spring was contaminated because if it was then the whole planet was just a big cesspool and the aliens could have it and welcome to it. For a long while he sat there wet and shivering on the near wall of the bunker, which was constructed of bark-on logs he’d dragged from a long ways out so as to cover his tracks if anyone should come upon the stumps. And no, it wasn’t anything like the forts he and Cody and Billy Julian built when they were like ten years old, just hammering anything together they could find, but the real deal, straight out of the U.S. Army Field Manual, Chapter 20: “Survival Movement in Hostile Areas,” most of which he could have quoted verbatim if somebody asked him, but really all you had to know was the acronym BLISS:

B — Blends in with the surroundings

L–Low in silhouette

I–Irregular in shape

S — Small in size

S — Secluded

Secluded, that was for sure, and you had to be secluded or they’d find you with their car doors slamming and their barking worked-up irate old man’s voices crowing, What do you think you’re doing in there? He never did get a chance to answer that day, whenever it was, a long time ago or maybe not, but if he’d had the chance he would have said, “I think I’m getting away from assholes like you.” That’s what he should have said and he was saying it now to the dripping trees and thinking about starting a little campfire to heat up a can of beef stew or just boil some water for freeze-dried chicken cashew curry, hungry now, hungry all over again since he’d just puked up a whole wad of nothing, not even chunks, just mucus, and he went around doing that, gathering up twigs that weren’t too sodden and some scraps of newspaper and then laying some of the bigger stuff he kept under his tarp across the top of it. He didn’t like showing smoke in hostile territory — a thing Colter would never have done — but he wanted something hot. And besides, the war really hadn’t started yet.

It was when he was dishing up the beef stew (blowing on it, actually; it was still too hot to eat) that an ugly thought occurred to him. It was the kind of thought a groundhog might have had studying his own burrow from outside in the hard light of day, a gnawing, paranoid kind of feeling that poisoned the smell of the beef stew and killed his mood dead. He shifted uneasily. His crotch was wet and it was going to start itching with the crotch fungus that made it feel as if your balls were on fire if he didn’t change into something dry pretty soon — and what was he going to do, go to the drugstore every day? But here came that thought roaring into his head and he cursed himself again. Fucker. Idiot. Moron. Shit for brains. Here he’d been sitting around in hospital waiting rooms and fucking Sara in the dark and jawing away with a random old lady like some — it hurt to have to say it — like some mental case, and not a thought to the plantation, which he hadn’t laid eyes on for two full days now.

He had to get a grip. There’d been a storm, rain falling in sheets and beating like a whole ship full of aliens on that old lady’s split-shake roof, and what if it had damaged the plants? What if it had broken the stems supporting the pods that were only viable now, right now, because the growing cycle was something like ninety days and he’d been late receiving his seeds in the mail and then getting them in the dirt of his two hundred twenty-seven gopher-proof pots? Worse, what if the whole thing had washed away, the pots and plants and the brown balls of opium in the screw-top jar hidden in the secret recess behind the back wall of the bunker? What then?

The stew was hot, too hot to eat, but he ate it anyway, the wheel cranking round now as if it had no stop on it, as if it was going to break loose and tear right out of his head like a freak accident on the roller coaster. He didn’t bother to scrape the can, just threw it down in the mud. The spoon too. And then he had his pack on, the rifle shouldered and the knife strapped to his thigh, and he was heading downhill, double time becoming triple time and then quadruple time till he was running full-out, running like Colter.

29

SO MAYBE HE SLIPPED and fell a couple of times, the mud slick underfoot, the tread of his boots clogged with it till he might as well have had no tread at all, everything rushing downward and the rain starting in again. His pants were filthy, basted with mud and long filarial streaks of some green shit he didn’t know what it was, and he’d managed to tear the sleeve of his shirt slamming into a tree to keep from pitching headlong into a ravine like some clumsy-ass motherfucker, but it was nothing more than what you would expect out here this time of year when the rain started in and just kept on coming, the kind of thing the average person didn’t even know about or even suspect because the average person was sitting in front of a TV in a dry house with a remote in one hand and a bag of wasabi peas in the other. Plus he was on a mission here and whether he broke a leg or both legs or not really didn’t enter into it — if he couldn’t keep on his feet and hurtle every obstacle then he didn’t deserve to have a plantation or live free or even think of calling himself a mountain man. So what he did was let his instincts take over and just go for it.

The plantation was a good four-mile trek from Camp 2 and it would normally take something like an hour to get there but he made it in record time, or at least that was what it felt like since he didn’t have a watch or a cellphone because no mountain man ever carried a watch and cellphones hadn’t been invented back then and plus in a state of nature you just knew the time the way the animals did, by the sun, by the shadows, by another sense altogether that wasn’t a sixth sense — that was reserved for danger — but a seventh sense, that was what it was. He liked the idea of it, seventh sense, and he began wondering if there were more senses yet, like an eighth sense or a ninth, and what they would be. The eighth sense — that would allow you to get inside the hostiles’ heads and know what they were thinking before they did, right when they got up in the morning and were taking their first steaming piss up against a tree, and the ninth, the ninth would not only allow you to know what they were thinking but change it like tuning a radio so you could make them skin themselves alive instead of you or Potts or any white men at all.

Of course, no matter how fast the wheel was spinning he hadn’t lost all control or forgotten his tactics and so when he got close he put on the brakes and went low to the ground till he was mud all over, till he was indistinguishable from the mud, and crept up on his elbows and knees to take up a recon position and glass the plantation to be sure there were no aliens or hostiles snooping around or helping themselves to his crop. What he saw took the heart out of him. Half the pots, at least half, had been tipped over by the violence of the storm and another half of those had washed down a series of gullies that hadn’t been there the last time he’d looked. That upset him, of course it did, and maybe it made him careless too, because he jumped to his feet and just burst right out into the clearing and started righting the pots and checking on the seedpods he’d painstakingly slit in six places with a razor blade so he could milk the sap out of them, backbreaking work. Boring work. Work he’d come to hate. Which was why he’d been two days away from it, distracting himself with little yellow pills and getting laid. Stupidly.

A lot of the stems had been bent out of shape or even snapped in two when the pots tipped over and the ones that had washed downhill were just a total loss, but what he could do was salvage as many seedpods as possible, dry them out and grind them up to make a sort of tea, tea that would get you high, or at least that was what he’d heard. But then he couldn’t sell that and if he couldn’t sell it then it just defeated the whole purpose of trying to raise some cash out of all this work and worry so he would have the wherewithal to do it again next year and the year after that because those little toast-brown balls of opium were his beaver hides, the modern-day equivalent of the plews that would make him independent and never have to say Yessir, Cap’n, to no man.

Truth be told, he was in a kind of frenzy, trying to put things right when he should have realized he’d just have to cut his losses, but every plant meant something to him because he’d grown them from the little black gnat-sized seeds he’d mixed with a handful of sand so they’d scatter nicely across the surface of the five-gallon plastic pots he and Cody had lifted from the back of a nursery one socked-in night when the only way you could see anything was with night-vision goggles. Some of the seeds never germinated. Others got chewed down to the stub by a mysterious nighttime presence he never was able to track down, whether it was bugs or rabbits or even deer. Or aliens. Could have been aliens. He wouldn’t put it past them. But then why would they attack the half-grown plants instead of waiting for the flowers and the seedpods and the milky white drip of opium that made it all worthwhile?

What you had to do was score the pods late in the day so the sap wouldn’t coagulate like blood but instead just drip in a nice wet flow all night long so you could collect it in the morning and set it aside to dry from milky white to golden brown for a couple of days and just store it up in your screw-top jar for personal use or sale on the street or maybe under the counter at the Big 5, and no, he had no interest in making heroin from it because that required boiling out the impurities and using chemicals and no mountain man wanted to go near chemicals. That wasn’t natural. That wasn’t organic. Dry it and smoke it, that was as far as he wanted to go, but he didn’t even want to go there, not anymore, because really all he needed was 151 and pot and maybe, when the wheel was spinning out of control, a medicinal hit of acid to bring it back into line.

But here he was, in his frenzy, everything mud and half the plants ruined, the beautiful tall stiff green stems he’d watched climbing higher day by day till they flowered and the petals dropped off and the seed pods started nodding under their own weight now just bent and broken and pretty much useless, the rain slacking off to a mist that climbed up the back of his neck like a slug and the beef stew sitting on his stomach like its own kind of death. Talk about miserable. He just wanted to raise his face to the sky and scream till his lungs gave out. And he might have, except that soldiers didn’t complain or blame anybody for anything except themselves, and it was a good thing too because it was right then that he spotted movement at the far end of the plantation, in the treeline there, and just about jumped out of his skin. But he didn’t do that either. He kept his cool and retreated, silent and swift, sluicing uphill through the mud till he slipped over the edge of the bunker and snatched up his binoculars, and he was bummed, of course he was, but there was something inside of him that kept swelling and swelling until it began to feel like joy. This was it. Finally. Definitively. The moment he’d been waiting for since the seeds arrived on his doorstep in a neat tan box with raised silver lettering you could run your fingers over again and again just for the sheer transference of it: Russo & Ayers, Horticulturists. And wasn’t that a beautiful thing? The box? The seeds? The moment?

Had they seen him? No. They were there in the distance, bending over his plants, two of them, two aliens in olive-drab rain slickers and muddy boots and he was glassing them now, picking their faces out of the misting rain that hung over everything like poison gas and he was calm, utterly calm, as calm as Colter standing there naked while they decided his fate. But nobody was going to decide his fate. He was the one in charge here, he was the one in cover and he was no trespasser — they were. One of them he didn’t recognize, or not right away, but the other one was turning his face to him now, looking up the hill toward the bunker, and that one turned out to be the Dog-Face himself, Chip Moody. He set down the binoculars and took up his rifle.

They moved across the field, making little discoveries as they went, gesturing to each other and conferring in low voices. One of them — the Dog-Face — bent down and pulled out a knife to cut through a section of black irrigation hose that had been left exposed by the rain. And now the other one did too. They kicked over a couple of the pots as if they didn’t belong to anybody, as if they were just garbage, and that made him furious, all the work he’d put in, and for what? When they got close, close enough to hear what they were saying (Mexicans? I don’t think so, to tell you the truth, because they wouldn’t bother with—) he just couldn’t hold it in any longer and before he knew what he was doing he came hurtling out of the bunker with his weapon in hand and shouting the first thing that came into his head, “FBI, FBI, you’re under arrest!” And that was stupid, he could see that in retrospect, because what he wanted was to scare them off when he should have just dropped them both right then and there so they wouldn’t go rat him out to the sheriff and all the aliens in his command and the helicopters too and the drones that were soulless metal and just kept after you till you were dead and wasted and giving up the maggots.

“What in hell?” the Dog-Face said. Or no, he barked. Just like a dog.

That was when the other one, his compadre, his backup, became very specific, his face constructing itself in a flash and never mind the hood of the slicker or the rain beads on his shoulders or the poison-gas mist drifting across the ground to conceal his person from view and his purposes too, he was the worst alien of them all, number one, pure poison himself. “Adam?” he said. “What are you—?” He didn’t get to say anything more. There was no need. Just let the Norinco do the talking. Two bursts to spin him around and one to take him down. Smell it on the air. Adios, alien.

“Art!” the Dog-Face was barking and the Dog-Face was next, of course he was, another burst, clean as thrusters, clean as going to hyperspace, but the Dog-Face was taking cover and the Dog-Face was armed with a semi-automatic pistol that talked right back and there was nothing to do but take cover too and let the poison gas bring him down. Either that or outflank him and see how fast he could run.