Stewie was doing remarkably well, considering the circumstances and the tough climbing. As they crawled through the timber his chatter was nonstop. He filled Joe in on what John Coble had told them about how it had been he and Tibbs who had rigged the cow with explosives, and how boring it was to be a fugitive.
“If this was a movie, we would have stayed at the cabin and plotted and then set a bunch of booby traps,” Stewie riffed. “You know, we would have dug a pit and filled it with sharpened sticks or fixed up a trip-wire on a bent-over tree or something so when Charlie came tonight—whoops!—he would get jerked into the air by his feet. Then we’d surround him and beat him like a piñata.
“But this ain’t no movie, man. This is real life. And in real life when some dickhead is shooting at you there is only one thing you can do, and that is to run like a rabbit. Like a scared fucking bunny.”
Joe ignored him.
Occasionally, when a branch snapped dryly or two trees rubbed together with a moan in the wind, Joe would spin and reach back for his pistol. At any time, he expected Charlie Tibbs to appear above them or for long-range rifle shots to start cutting them down.
At the bottom of the slope was a small runoff stream that coursed through boulders. Joe stepped up on the rocks and led them downstream for half a mile before cutting back up the next slope.
Britney objected and Joe explained that the foray was meant to make them more difficult to track since they would leave no marks on the stones.
They stayed in the shadows of a steep granite wall and followed it up the second mountain until the wall finally broke and let them through. After five hundred yards of spindly lodgepole pines, the trees cleared and they started toward the top of the mountain, laboring across loose gray shale. The temperature had dropped ten degrees as they climbed due to the increase in altitude, although it was still hot and the late afternoon sun was piercing.
Stewie’s labored breathing and the cascading shale as it loosened under their feet were the only sounds as they hiked upward.
“Try to get over the top without stopping,” Joe called over his shoulder to Stewie. “If Charlie Tibbs is going to see us with that spotting scope of his, it’s going to be here, while we’re in the open.”
“Stewie can’t get his breath!” Britney pleaded to Joe. She had dropped back and was climbing with Stewie, his good arm over her shoulder.
“He’s fine,” Joe grumbled. “Let’s keep going. We can rest on the other side.”
“What an asshole,” Britney said to Stewie in a remarkably out-of-place Valley Girl intonation. “First he hits you and then he tries to kill you.”
Stewie tried, between attempts to catch his breath, to reassure Britney that he was all right.
Joe sighed and waited for them to catch up, then pulled Stewie’s other arm over his own shoulder. The three of them summitted the mountain and stumbled down the other side, again through loose shale.
Joe kept urging them on until they approached larger trees that provided some cover and shade. He stepped out from Stewie’s arm, letting it flop down, and found a downed log to sit on.
Stewie crumpled into a pile of arms and legs and sat still while he slowly caught his breath. Britney positioned herself behind him in the crux of a weathered branch. Joe noticed that she had gouged her shin sometime while they were climbing and that blood from the wound had dried in two dirty streams running down her leg and into her sandaled foot.
Sitting back, Joe felt cool as the sweat beneath his shirt began to dry. He removed his hat and ran his fingers through hair that was getting stiff with salt from sweating beneath his hatband. Patting his shirt and trouser pockets, he did a quick inventory of what he had brought with him. While he had started the day in the cocoon of his pickup surrounded by radios, firearms, equipment, as well as Lizzie, he now counted among his possessions his clothing, boots, and hat, his holster and belt, the long coil of rope, small binoculars hung by a thong over his neck, and his spiral notebook and pen.
Looking at Stewie and Britney, he saw that they had brought even less with them from the cabin.
Stewie painfully untangled himself and sat up, his arms around his knees. He looked up at Joe.
“Thanks for helping me up the mountain.”
“Sure.”
Britney rolled her eyes.
“What do you think our plan should be?” Stewie asked. “How long should we hide out before we head back?”
Joe had been thinking about this on their long march up the mountainside.
“I don’t know.”
Britney huffed, blowing her bangs up off her forehead. The Valley Girl speech pattern was back. “What do you mean you don’t know? Why did you lead us up that freaking mountain, then?”
Joe grimaced. This was not where he wanted to be, he thought, and these were not people he wanted to be there with.
“We don’t know if Charlie Tibbs is tracking us,” Joe explained patiently. “If he is coming after us, he has a horse and he seems to know what he’s doing. Even I could follow our sloppy tracks up this mountain.”
“I didn’t know we were supposed to tiptoe,” Britney whined.
“John Coble said that Tibbs was the best tracker he had ever seen,” Stewie said.
Joe addressed Stewie. “If he turns away and goes back to where he came from, we’ll know it tonight, I think. He might even follow our tracks down to the stream, where I hope he’ll get confused about where we came out and turn back. I can’t imagine him trying to run us down at night. If he leaves, we can sneak back to the cabin tomorrow. You’ve got a cell phone and a radio in there, right?”
Stewie nodded yes. How do you think I called your wife? was what Joe expected him to say. But Stewie wisely kept his mouth shut.
“The phone only works at certain times,” Britney said. “Like when the weather is just perfect or the sunspots are lined up or something. Most of the time we can’t reach anybody and nobody can call us.”
Joe nodded. “I’ve got a phone and a radio in my truck, if we can get to it. Provided Charlie Tibbs doesn’t get there first.” He thought of Tibbs’s methodical work on the SUV and imagined him doing the same to his pickup. “Plus they’ll be looking for us by tomorrow, is my guess.”
“At least when I was in the tree I had electricity and could use my cell phone to call my friends,” Britney said, speaking as much to herself as to Stewie or Joe. “I had food, at least. But I guess that was California and this isn’t.”
Stewie’s misshapen mouth exaggerated his frown. “And if he comes after us?”
“Then we die,” Britney offered.
In a thick pocket of aspen trees below where Stewie and Britney were resting, Joe found a spring that burbled out of a granite shelf into a small shallow pool that had been eroded into the rock. From the shelf, trickles of water dribbled down the rock face and, with the help of other spring-fed trickles further down the mountain, worked their way in unison toward the valley floor to birth the next stream. Joe drank from the pool, pressing his cheek against the cool lip of it, sucking the water in through his teeth to catch the pine needles that floated on the surface. If there was bacteria in the water, he didn’t care. Giardiasis was the last thing he was worried about right now.
He put his hat in the water, crown down, and filled it as much as he could. Holding it in his hands like a newborn puppy, he walked back up the mountain to give Stewie and Britney a drink.
Stewie accepted the hatful of water and Britney crinkled her nose at the very idea. She left to find the spring for herself.
After drinking, Stewie wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“I’ll bet you ten thousand dollars that he’s already coming after us,” Stewie said.
“No bet.”
“A thousand?”
“No bet.”
“Can you hit anything with that pistol?” Stewie asked, gesturing with his head toward Joe’s holster.
“Nope.”
“How well do you know this co
untry?”
“Not as well as I wish I did,” Joe confessed, sitting back down on the log.
Stewie cursed the fact that they didn’t have a map.
He looked beyond Joe to the jagged peaks of the mountains, which were brilliant blue and snow-capped. “Unless I’m completely wrong, it seems to me if we keep going west we will hit a big canyon that will stop us cold.”
Joe nodded. “Savage Run.”
“I always wanted to see that canyon.” Stewie’s face screwed up in a clownish, pathetic grimace. “But not like this.”
29
The sun ballooned and settled into a notch between massive and distant peaks, as if it were being put away for the night. There was a spectacular farewell on the westward sides of the mountains and bellies of the cumulus clouds as they lit up in brilliant fuchsia.
They were still in the tall trees below the rim, and Joe had searched in vain for a natural shelter of some kind. But he had not located a cave, or a protected wash, or even an exposed root pan large enough for the three of them. As the evening sky darkened, there were no signs of thunderheads, so he hoped there wouldn’t be rain. The temperature had dropped quickly as the sun had gone down. At this elevation, there were wide swings of temperature every day. Joe had estimated that it had been about eighty degrees that afternoon, and he expected it to drop to forty by the predawn hours.
They were, by Joe’s guess, only five miles from the cabin. That was all the progress they had made, despite an entire afternoon of climbing, hiking, and crawling over exceedingly rough terrain.
The place they had chosen to stop had its advantages. It was close enough to the top of the ridge that they could peer over it into the valley. Because they were on the other side of the second mountain, their camp could not be seen if Tibbs was glassing the country with his spotting scope. There was water nearby, and the grade of the slope behind them was not nearly as difficult as the two they had already come across. If Tibbs suddenly appeared, they could move into the trees and down the mountain fairly quickly. And if a helicopter arrived, on the remote chance that one had been called out, they could scramble out into the open areas and be seen from above.
Joe lay on the still-warm shale at the top of the ridge and looked through his binoculars at the first mountain and the valley below them. As it got darker, the forest appeared to soften. There was no way, looking at the country now, to know how rough and ragged it was beneath the darkening velvet green cover of treetops.
Joe looked for movement, and listened for sounds in a vast silence so awesome it was intimidating. Although he didn’t expect to see Charlie Tibbs riding brazenly through an open meadow, there was the chance that Tibbs might spook deer or grouse and give away his location. That is, Joe thought, if he were out there at all.
Joe didn’t turn when he heard the crunching of heavy steps as Stewie joined him on the top of the ridge.
“See anything?” Stewie asked, settling into the shale with a grunt.
“Trees.”
“Britney’s not in a very good mood, so I thought I would join you,” Stewie said. “She tried to wash John Coble’s blood out of her shirt but she couldn’t get it all out.”
“Mmm.”
“Damn, it’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yup.”
“Do you ever actually talk?”
Joe lowered the binoculars for a moment. “I talk with my wife.” Then he cautioned Stewie: “But I don’t talk about my wife.”
Stewie nodded, smiled, and looked away.
“Have you wondered how it is I came to be?” Stewie spoke in hushed tones, barely above a whisper. “I mean, now. After getting blown up by a cow?”
“I did wonder about that.”
“But you haven’t asked.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“It’s an amazing story. A horrible story. You got a minute?”
Joe smiled in spite of himself. Did he have a minute?
“The force of the explosion pinned you to a tree trunk,” Joe said. “I saw the branch you hung from. I even climbed up to look at it.”
Stewie nodded. That’s where it began, he said.
He was alive.
Either that, or he was in a state of being that was at least similar to being alive, in the worst kind of way. He could see things and comprehend movement. His imagination flowed around and through his brain, like warm fingers of sludge, and the sludge had taken over his consciousness. He imagined that a thin sinewy blue string or vein, a tight wet cord that looked somewhat like a tendon, tenuously secured his life. He thought that the tendon could snap and blink out the light, and that his death would come with a heavy thumping sound like a wet bundle of canvas dropped onto pavement. An impulse inside him, but outside his control, was working like mad to keep him living, to keep things functioning, to maintain the grip of the tendon. If the impulse ran out of whatever was fueling this effort, he would welcome the relief and invite whatever would happen next. And for a moment his senses focused.
Blood painted the trees. Bits of clothing and strips of both human and bovine flesh hung from branches. The smell of cordite from the explosion was overpowering and it hung in the air, refusing to leave.
He was not on the ground. He was in the air. He was an angel!
Which made Joe laugh out loud, the way Stewie said it.
He watched from above as the three men wearing cowboy hats approached the smoking crater. He could not hear anything beyond a high-static whooshing noise that resembled the sound of angry ocean breakers. Red and yellow globules that his own damaged head had manufactured floated across his field of vision. It reminded him of the time he ate peyote buttons with four members of the Salish-Kootenai Nation in northwestern Montana. Then, however, he had been laughing.
But he was not an angel—the thought of that alone was preposterous—and he was not having an out-of-body experience, although he couldn’t be sure since this was his first. His soul had not left his body and had not floated above in the blood-flecked branches of the trees.
When the heifer went up, so did he. He had flown upward and back, launched out of his shoes until stopped fast, skewered through his shoulder by a thick pine bow. His feet, one sock off and one sock on, had floated below. They swung a bit in the wind.
He had not thought such things were possible.
What an awful tragedy it was that his wife was dead, atomized, before he had really known much about her. Conversely, he wondered if perhaps he had known her at her absolute best and that he was blessed to have known her at all. Nevertheless, she had done nothing to deserve what had happened to her. Her only crime was to be with him. Blinking hard, he had tried to stay awake and conscious.
The men below had stretched yellow tape around the crater and had left in the dark. Two of them were talking, their cowboy hats pointed at each other and their heads bobbing. He waited for the man who was standing to the side to look up. He wondered if the pattering of his blood on the leaves far below the leaves made any sound.
“That was me,” Joe said.
“I know that now.”
I will be dead soon, he had thought, and sleep took him.
But he wasn’t dead yet. The thoughts of his bride had, strangely, given him strength. When he awoke, the men were gone and the forest was dark and quiet.
A raven landed directly in front of him on the bloody branch. Its wings were so large that they thumped both sides of his head as it settled. He had never seen a live wild bird this close. This was not a Disney bird. This was an Alfred Hitchcock bird. The raven’s feathers were black and had a blue sheen, and the bird hopped so closely to Stewie’s face that he could see his reflection in the beads of water on its wings. The raven cocked its head from side to side with clipped, seemingly mechanized movements. The raven’s eyes looked intense and passionless, he thought, like glistening ebony buttons. Then the raven dug its black beak into Stewie’s neck and emerged with a piece of red flesh.
He had closed his eyelid
s tightly so the raven could not pluck his eyes out. The raven began to strip flesh from his face. The raven’s beak would pierce his skin near his jaw and clamp hard, then the bird’s body would brace as it pulled and ripped a strip upward, where it would eventually weaken and break near his scalp. Then the raven would sit back calmly and with lightning nods of its head devour the stringy piece whole, as if it were a thick, bloody worm.
The thought he had, as the wind increased and his body swayed gently, was that he really hated this bird.
“I saw the same bird when I climbed your tree,” Joe said. “The bird made me fall out of it.”
He freed himself by forcing his body up and over the branch, sliding along the grain of the wood, in the single most painful experience of his life. Disengaging himself from the skewer left him weak and trembling, and he fell more than climbed from the tree. For ten days he crawled. He had become an animal and he had learned to behave like an animal. He tried to kill something to eat but he was hampered by his bulk and lack of skill. Once, he spent an entire agonizing day at the mouth of a prairie dog hole with a makeshift snare, missing the fat rodent though it raised its head more than forty times. So he became a scavenger.
As he crawled southwest, through the forest, he competed with coyotes for fresh deer and elk carcasses. Plunging his head into fresh mountain springs, he had crunched peppery wild watercress. He had stripped the hard shells from puffballs and had gorged on mountain mushrooms, grazing in the wet grass like a cow. A thick stand of rose hips near a stream had provided vitamin C. He had even, he was ashamed to say, raided a campsite near Crazy Woman Creek and had gorged on a two-pound bag of Doritos and six BallPark franks while the campers snored in their dome tent. He had seen the earth from inches away for weeks on end. It was a very humbling experience. His clothing was rags. He slept in the shelter of downed trees. He wept often.
He had purposely not crawled to a road or campsite where he could be found, because he thought to do so would be to invite his death—when the men who had already tried to kill him once found out about it.