He piled Tree into the car, got in, slammed the door, and then realized he had no idea how to explain. Did he even have any money? He pointed in the direction the truck had gone. His back hurt.
The cabbie blinked, stared at his pointing finger. Said a blur of words.
Thom tried again with more urgency, jabbing with the finger.
The cabbie shrugged, gunned down the street. Thom searched his pockets for money, realized the pain in his back was the damn gun. He moved it onto his lap and then stuck it awkwardly in the inside pocket of the suit jacket.
Tree was slouched down in his seat, his eyes closed. Thom searched Tree for money and found a giant wad of bills in his pants pocket. Where’d he gotten all this money? Thom tossed a twenty dollar bill into the passenger seat, and the driver stared at it in puzzlement. Thom tossed another for good measure and thought he felt the car speed up. Out the windshield was a bustle of cars and pedestrians and schoolchildren and no sign of the enemy or the flatbed truck. Please let Jean be okay, please.
“Tree? Help me, where do we go?” Tree slumped as if his bones had left him, his face pale now and the sweat gone, eyes shut. Thom stared. He would be no help. He’d have to figure out where the couch was by himself. He grabbed a chunk of his hair and pulled. They were fucked. Maybe Jean was shot. And then he saw Tree’s mouth move.
“What?”
“Left,” the mouth whispered.
“Left, left! God, what’s the word for left, do you know the word for left?”
Tree didn’t answer.
Thom scooted forward and used his finger again to try to point the cabby. The cabby spewed a bunch of words, put on his left turn signal.
“No . . . no hable español,” Thom said hesitantly.
The cab driver pointed left. “Izquierda.” Pointed right. “Derecha.”
“Izquierda,” Thom repeated with the pointing. “Derecha.” And then to himself, memorizing, izquierda, derecha, izquierda, derecha. Why’d they have to go and make the language so damn complicated? “Tree, you’ve got to help me here. Stay awake to say directions.”
“Mountains.” The only animate part of Tree his lips. “Back the way we came.”
What was the word for mountains? Thom probed around his memory for some reference. Mountainos? Esmountains? He tried both of these on the cab driver with unsatisfactory results. A section of the mountains came into view, and Thom pointed, saying, “Vamos, vamos!”
“Cajas?”
“What?”
“Cajas, se van al Cajas, el parque?”
“Sorry, I . . . uh . . . don’t understand,” Thom said and farted an anxious rhythm.
The cab driver shook his hand in a frustrated never mind and kept driving.
Thom put a ten dollar bill down next to the twenty dollar bills on the passenger seat. That’s not helping comprehension, brain observed. I know, I know, but maybe . . . I don’t know, listen, I’m doing the best I can here. How much gas does a piece of toast equal? he wondered.
They drove into the mountains. Winding up the road, higher and higher, into the unbreathable elevation, the road like a tangle of wire. Thom felt as if he was leaving them behind. The truck couldn’t possibly have gotten up here. Jean, how was Jean, his bottle thrower, his journalist?
They climbed for a half hour, passing ramshackle trout restaurants, men in hats and shawls with burros following, the trees and plant life getting sparser as they climbed in altitude.
And then Tree sprang awake like a mousetrap. “Here! Stop here.” His eyes like puddles, tearing and red.
They were in the middle of nowhere.
“Here?”
“Stop him.”
Thom went through a variety of gestures, trying to find one that meant stop. The cab driver pulled over, looked at them skeptically.
Tree stumbled out, coming to his knees on the side of the road. He leaned over and put his fists on the ground and vomited violently. Thom tried to gesture to the cab driver that it was Okay, this was their stop. Was it? Christ, what were they doing? Tree seemed to be dying.
The cab driver eyed them as he drove off, shaking his head. Tree stayed on all fours.
“Tree, this is crazy. You should be at a doctor.”
Tree spit. “Probably.”
“What the hell do we do now?” Thom tried to keep his voice from sounding like a little kid frightened of the basement.
“We take the trail.”
“What trail, there is no trail.” On the left a rocky slope ascended steeply, and behind every slope and peak was another, each more covered in the mist until there were only dim, jagged shapes, sentries in the distance. On the right there was a subtle downhill until it curved up again into the same terrain. The mist everywhere turned to fog in the distance.
Tree stood, moving one limb at a time. He plodded slowly, carefully, climbed over the railing to the right and started walking.
“Tree! They can’t be there, they . . .” Thom’s stomach churned like a blender.
Tree continued, on the verge of tipping over. Thom hustled after him, surprised at how fast Tree was moving for how sick he seemed to be. After fifty yards the trail emerged under his feet, like a snake turned belly-up. A thin stripe of trampled earth.
He struggled to keep up with Tree, who seemed pulled by an invisible thread, a magnetic force, feet moving despite the lack of will. Only their pace kept them warm. The air was chill, and a drizzle of rain came and went. Thom’s breath came in short gasps. They were above ten thousand feet.
They entered the wilderness of Las Cajas, the boxes. Before them hundreds of miles of land too difficult for roads, for human civilization, only the barest, thread-worn pockets of life in the vastness of mountains.
They trudged on for hours. Tree sometimes falling to the ground to vomit uselessly. The mud became intense; their shoes got sucked into it. And then long stretches of ankle-twisting rocks that reached out to graze the skin off their shins. Their clothes dripped from drizzle and mist and trudging through streams. Thom’s nose began to run. The trail wove in and around valleys, past lakes, over streams, up mountainsides, and Thom followed Tree, knowing himself to be ever more lost.
Tree finally fell down for good. His lips barely eking out the need to continue, some part of him not connected to his body urging them on. He lay on the ground with his eyes closed, the wet and cold penetrating his clothes. Thom wondered if it were possible to feel more alone.
He replayed the sequence of events over and over. Tree’s attacker connecting with the parked car, catching Tree, Jean throwing bottles. When did the shooting begin? There was no sign she’d been hit, was there? She had not fallen in the street. He picked Tree up and continued on. The trail crossed over a pass, and with his burden and the thin air, his breath came ragged and shallow and he rested frequently.
Where were they going? It didn’t seem possible that Jean and Erik had come this way, especially with the couch. Tree wouldn’t speak. His eyes were shut, and his head lolled back. Thom tripped along in silence. They were too far in to get back to the road before dark, and so Thom continued in a numb faith, shutting out comments from his brain about hypothermia, starvation, dehydration. His thighs began to shake with the exertion. There was sweat under his arms and a frigid coldness in his ears and toes.
He studied the trail for any signs of Incan stonework and wondered how many previous civilizations he was treading over. His eyes hallucinated rock outcroppings into ruined stone walls, old stone walls into rock outcroppings.
From the top of the pass, he saw the trail dipped down into a broad green valley. Soft rolling hills lined the middle of the valley, with sharp rocky peaks rising close on either side. A stream coursed down through the middle. A view of a strange Eden.
Thom saw a flicker of movement on a trail opposite the pass. There were people on it, a lot of them, and . . . could it be them? Yes, they had a couch. He whooped and plunged off his trail, down a steep muddy slope, slipping and falling with Tree jostling about in his arms,
a mad relief and glee spurring him on.
He came to the bottom of the slope and headed up the other side toward where he’d seen the couch, hollering as he went. The people came into view over a hill, and, winded, he put Tree on his feet, holding him up with one arm, and waved. “Hello!” Was that Erik with a gag on his mouth? Ha ha, I’ve wanted to do that too. There was a loud bang, and Thom squinted to see what might be going on.
They were shooting at him! He grabbed Tree and turned around. He ran down the slope, wove back and forth, slipped and fell heavily onto his back. Now they were both completely covered in mud. There were several more shots, but he didn’t have any idea where the bullets were going. He checked to make sure Tree hadn’t been hit. Tree was completely unconscious but without holes as far as Thom could tell. You have a gun, brain said at last, breaking back into the control tower. He set Tree behind a boulder and pulled the gun out from his coat pocket. Okay, the plan. The plan was . . . the plan was to get Jean back. And also the couch and Erik. He would sneak up and . . . kill them? He began climbing back up the hill. The trail above was obscured from him. He held the gun in his right hand, muddying it in the climbing. To keep from sliding back down, he grabbed the long thin grass he’d seen people working into roofs. Look, his leg had blood on it. He wondered if he’d left Tree dying back behind the boulder. But the blood came from him. He fingered open the rip in his pants where the blood seemed to be coming from and looked at it objectively. Yes, it was him. He appeared to have been shot. There was a ghastly welling of blood and torn skin. Funny there was no pain.
At the top of the rise, the trail and couch caravan came into view again. There was a mini valley between the rise he was on and them. He stood up and yelled what he hoped was a threatening kamikaze yell. Meanwhile brain churned out the code necessary:
function attack_method(bad_guys)
{
if(bad_guys == “armed”)
attack_method = dodge () . roll () . shoot();
else
attack_method = chase () . overpower();
return attack_method;
}
function use_weapon(weapon)
{
switch (weapon)
{
case: “gun”:
action = “Point, aim, pull trigger”;
case: “knife”:
action = “Move close to opponent, strike blade first”;
case “hand”:
action = “Move close to opponent. Ball fist, strike weak point”;
case “wits”:
action = “Good luck, my friend”;
}
return action;
}
Thom pointed the gun in the direction of what surely were the bad guys and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. The trigger was stuck, and they were firing back. He heard a bullet whiz by. Another made a schlook! in the mud at his feet. He turned and ran back down the hill, out of sight. He studied the gun, his eyes blurred by panic, fixing on a switch and then losing it, fixing again. The safety, of course, of course. He turned off the safety and fired a test shot generally in the direction of the valley. The gun bucked in his hands. Okay, he was in business. He climbed back to the top of the hill and saw that they’d all ducked down. He had them now; they hadn’t known he had a gun. Ha ha! The couch was in the trail, and there were several people hidden behind it. He saw Jean now too—Jean!—and a man behind her holding a gun. That will be a difficult situation, brain observed.
He squeezed the trigger, the gun jumping all over the place. Was he supposed to be counting bullets? Clint Eastwood would be counting bullets. Were there really bullets coming out? They were all ducking. Someone started screaming. A man jumped up from behind the couch gripping his shoulder. How had he hit a man behind the couch? He felt guilty, he’d hurt someone, but then realized he’d probably won. Game over. Time to get the couch and head home. He put the gun back in his pocket and started walking up the trail, but they were shooting back at him again! He ran and dived behind the hill, but the dive didn’t quite work out: more like a belly flop on top of the hill. He rolled the rest of the way out of sight. Okay, think, think. He was panicked, he could see that now, or maybe he was overconfident, or in shock. Maybe they were the same thing. They could fire at him any time they liked. There were no rules. For some reason it had made sense that once he’d hit someone, they’d give up. He wished Erik were here—if he concentrated on freeing Erik, maybe Erik would have a plan. Before Thom could register what he was doing, he was back at the top of the hill squeezing the trigger at the caravan, which was now moving out of sight. After fourteen or eighteen or twenty squeezes, he realized that he was making the bang-bang noise with his mouth and that the gun had stopped making noise, perhaps some time ago. Fuck, he was bad at this. You’re our only hope, Thom Bakker. He needed Han Solo or the Green Lantern or Strider. This wasn’t his calling. He didn’t like shooting at people. But then the shooting was over if the bullets were gone. What about those council guys? This was their job. Or were they only the librarians of the resistance, recruiting unformed unchosen for their foot soldiers? His leg still didn’t hurt, and the thought idly crossed Thom’s mind that perhaps he was invincible. That this was his special role in this whole quest thing. Unstoppable Thom. Azulman. He put the gun in his pocket and ran after the couch.
They had disappeared around a bend in the trail. Thom made it up to the level of the trail and sprinted and stumbled along. He rounded the bend, and the caravan came into view. They had stopped, and all the bad guys had their guns pointed at him. He let out a roar, and something spun him around, another bullet! It was in his arm, but there was still no pain. He pulled the gun from his pocket and continued running toward them. He threw the gun with all his might at the fellow in the front and miraculously hit him in the forehead. The man pitched over, and then Thom had a bullet in his stomach, or at least there was a lot of blood coming from there. This one made him go a little slower, sort of like running in the sand. Maybe he was only partially invincible. Wasn’t there some film about a guy who healed himself. Maybe he’d take twenty bullets and heal them right up. He reached the unconscious man, the man he’d hit with his gun. He saw Erik, mouth gagged, eyes wide, hands bound, running. Where was he running? Thom picked up the unconscious man by his shirt front and crotch, held him over his head, the strong man, Azulman! He was cut out for this work after all. He threw the man with a tremendous heave and bowled over another of the gunmen. Amazing. He was invincible! But then they must have gotten another bullet in him, because he was on his back, and black spots swarmed like crows in his vision. Must not forget the thin air up here, must be running too much. There was a man standing over him, pointing a gun at his head. Thom kicked up with his leg. I’ll get him in the crotch, Chuck Norris-style! But the leg wouldn’t go. There was no reaction at all. The movies are great, starring in my own movie, the credits will go up and there will be my name, Thom Bakker, playing himself. The kids will practice karate moves on each other in the parking lot afterward, high on the adrenalin, the superactionhero Thom Bakker. Wait. Actually. He was going to die, his body left to rot in the loneliest place on earth.
Erik was trying to keep from pissing himself. He wasn’t having much luck. It wasn’t a fear thing; it was that this last part of the adventure was so damn annoying that the annoyance migrated straight to his bladder. A couple of hot, itchy, frantic squirts had already come out. And his mustache itched like mad so that he kept wrinkling his lip up into his nose, which in turn made his nose itch. What the hell was he supposed to do? He’d tried to scratch it on his shoulder, but his hands were tied too tightly behind his back to raise the shoulder to scratching height. At least he wasn’t carrying the couch. Follow through, his teachers said; follow through, his father said. And how? They’d put a gag on him after he’d made a suggestion or two too many. The men had caught up, and they were taking them back toward the road. The guy in front of him had grabbed Jean’s ass about five times, and Erik w
as just about to ram his head into the guy’s stomach against all survival logic when someone yelled hello from below.
For being such a brain, Thom was the dumbest fuck Erik had ever met. Was he really waving at them? Tree was propped like a mannequin against Thom. If Erik’s hands were free, he’d have covered his face in embarrassment. But then Thom had a gun, and bullets were flying all over the place. They’d stopped, and Erik had crowded himself behind the couch because Thom obviously didn’t know how to handle a gun. A bullet ricocheted off of a boulder over his head and struck the shoulder of the guy next to him, and Erik made himself smaller. A plan, what was his plan? He could head-butt a couple of them off the trail.
Apparently Thom was finished firing his gun, because they’d started to move again. The men all had their guns out and were looking over their shoulders. What was Thom going to do now? How could he create a distraction? But with the way Thom fired his gun, he didn’t have a chance of hitting any of them on purpose, even if they were all tied to the ground. The man behind Erik with the wounded shoulder was cursing and pushing him on roughly now. Then he heard a roar behind him, and Thom was running toward them at full speed. He couldn’t believe it, he was the bravest sonofabitch he’d ever met, but he was going to get killed, that much was obvious. Erik started to run around. The least he could do was to bump into the men as they were firing their guns at Thom, see if he could get them off balance. He saw Thom take a bullet in his arm, and he yelled with rage behind his gag. He drove his head into the face of one of the assailants and heard the crunch of the man’s jaw, watched him fall to the ground. He saw Jean then, kicking the man in the gut. She was running around yelling—they probably both looked like fools, armless attackers. So this was how it was going to end. And then he saw a man standing over Thom with his gun pointed at his head, Thom on the ground covered in blood. He sprinted toward the man, but he was going to be too late. He could see that there was no way he could make it. But then the man fell, and there were more bullets flying around. Was this ever going to end? Whose side were the new bullets on? The men were running around in a panic. He turned and ran back the other way, and then someone rammed into him like a freight train and knocked him to the ground and he saw it was Jean.
Couch Page 25
