When She Was Bad

7

They left the clearing at a fast walk, then by mutual and unspoken agreement broke into a trot as the trees began to close in overhead until they could no longer see the tiny light clinging doughtily to the side of the canyon.

Irene, a veteran jogger, started to pull ahead, shining her flashlight in front of her. Pender called to her to wait; he was breathing hard when he caught up. “What is it?” she said.

“It could be…a trick…. Max could have…bailed out, he could be…hiding in the bushes waiting to…pick us off.”

She extinguished her flashlight and they started off again, Pender walking ahead of her, gun in hand. When they reached the fork in the road Pender turned to Irene. “Guess what?” he whispered, his big hand resting on her shoulder.

“Forget it,” said Irene.

“One of us has to go for help.” The top half of his face was in deep shadow; against the dark background, the green iguana logo on his baseball cap seemed to be floating an inch or two over his head. “You’re a faster hiker, I’m better with this.” Indicating the Colt in his other hand.

“But-”

“You know I’m right, don’t you?” he whispered, almost tenderly.

Seconds ticked by while she tried to think of a reason to say no, but all she could come up with was an atavistic need to not be alone, and an unreasonable fear that if she left now, she’d never see Pender or Lily again. “Is this one of those Davy Crockett moments?” she said, looking up at him, feeling dwarfed by his height and bulk in the dark as she never had in the light.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Pender, in his best frontier drawl. “Yes ma’am, Ah reckon it is.”

“I reckon we’d better go ahead, then,” said Irene.

The last switchback was the tightest, the steepest, and the most severely banked. As it jolted upward the mule tilted precariously to the right, sending Max sliding sideways across the cracked vinyl padding of the bench. At the last second he managed to hook his elbow over the railing behind him, and found himself leaning out over empty space, staring down into the abyss.

“Jesus fuck,” he said, hauling himself back to safety as the mule righted itself. “You trying to get us both killed?”

No, just you, thought Lily. “Looks like we’re over the worst of it,” she told him, as the track began to level off. They traveled briefly northward along the ridge at the top of the canyon, then turned due west, the mule bumping across the gentle rise of a broad, grassy, humpbacked meadow dotted with widely spaced live oak and madrone.

The road itself, though, seemed to have petered out. Behind them were two shiny tracks made by moonlight refracted off the blades of grass flattened under the mule’s tires; ahead there was only virgin grass. Then the mule topped the rise and Max saw that the grass ended abruptly at the edge of the continent. Far below, beyond the meadow, there was only the flat black expanse of the Pacific, stretching onward beneath a dome of stars toward a nearly indiscernable horizon.

Pender walked ten, jogged ten, walked ten, jogged ten, while his internal Rock-Ola played an appropriate medley of oldies: I’m walkin’, yes indeed: walkin’ in the rain, walkin’ to New Orleans, walkin’ back to happiness, these boots are made for walkin’, and you’ll never walk alone.

Pick ’em up, lay ’em down, pick ’em up, lay ’em down. The footing was treacherous, the incline pitiless, the ache in his thighs relentless. Whether he walked in or out of the ruts, his ankles, unsupported by the Hush Puppies loafers, threatened to turn at every step. Cursing himself for all the miles of exercise he’d blown off riding in golf carts, Pender soon abandoned even the pretense of jogging.

The first time he went down (what looked like shaley rock in moon-shadow turned out to be a shelf of dirt that crumbled underfoot), he landed hard on his left side and lay there in suspense, waiting to see how badly he’d fucked up his ankle.

Not at all, as it turned out-the shooting pain he’d been anticipating never materialized. So he picked up his gun, picked himself up off the ground, and resumed the upward trudge, his infernal jukebox kicking in with “Twenty-five Miles.”

But it soon felt like he’d already gone fifty miles. His breath coming harder now, his stride degenerating to an oldster’s shuffle, at first Pender attributed the pain in his left arm to his earlier tumble. He flexed his shoulder, worked the arm around in a circle. The pain sharpened, grew jagged, turned a screaming crimson. A steel band tightened around his chest. He saw the fireflies again, points of dancing, colored light, then the world tilted crazily onto its side.