Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  “The stability of the world currency markets is at stake,” he insisted.

  She was not going to bite.

  “We’ll talk later. You know anyone with autism spectrum disorder?”

  “Yes,” she blurted out, staring at him directly now.

  “Could you work with someone like that?”

  Her eyes strayed to her boyfriend.

  Peter was struggling with the reloading. He was trying to put the rounds into the magazine backward. This had really been bothering Richard for the last half minute or so. He was trying to think of a nonhumiliating way to mention this when Peter figured it out on his own and flipped the thing around in his hand.

  Richard had assumed, based on how Peter handled the gun, that he’d done it before. Now he reconsidered. This might be the first time Peter had ever touched a semiautomatic. But he was a quick study. An autodidact. Anything that was technical, that was logical, that ran according to rules, Peter could figure out. And knew it. Didn’t bother to ask for help. So much quicker to work it out on his own than suffer through someone’s well-meaning efforts to educate him—and to forge an emotional connection with him in so doing. There was something, somewhere, that he could do better than most ­people. Something of a technical nature.

  “What have you been doing, Uncle Richard?” Zula asked brightly. She might have gotten in touch with her Zula-ness, but she kept the Sue-ness holstered for ready use at times like this.

  “Waiting for cancer” would have been too honest an answer. “Fighting a bitter rear-guard action against clinical depression” would have given the impression that he was depressed today, which he wasn’t.

  “Worrying about palette drift,” Richard said.

  Peter and Zula seemed oddly satisfied with that nonanswer, as if it fit in perfectly with their expectations of men in their fifties. Or perhaps Zula had already told Peter everything that she knew, or suspected, about Richard, and they knew better than to pry.

  “You fly through Seattle?” Peter asked, jumping rather hastily to the last-resort topic of air travel.

  Richard shook his head. “I drove to Spokane. Takes three or four hours depending on snow and the wait at the border. One-hop to Minneapolis. Then I rented a big fat American car and drove it down here.” He nodded in the direction of the road, where a maroon Mercury Grand Marquis was blotting out two houses of the Zodiac.

  “This would be the place for it,” Peter remarked. He turned his head around to take in a broad view of the farm, then glanced innocently at Richard.

  Richard’s reaction to this was more complicated than Peter might have imagined. He was gratified that Peter and Zula had identified him as one of the cool kids and were now inviting him to share their wryness. On the other hand, he had grown up on this farm, and part of him didn’t much care for their attitude. He suspected that they were already facebooking and twittering this, that hipsters in San Francisco coffee bars were even now ROFLing and OMGing at photos of Peter with the Glock.

  But then he heard the voice of a certain ex-girlfriend telling him he was too young to begin acting like such a crabby old man.

  A second voice chimed in, reminding him that, when he had rented the colossal Grand Marquis in Minneapolis, he had done so ironically.

  Richard’s ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleaguered id, making sure he didn’t enjoy that last cigarette.

  All this internal complexity must have come across, to Peter and Zula, as a sudden withdrawal from the conversation. Perhaps a precursor of senility. It was okay. The magazines were about as loaded as you could get them with frozen fingers. Zula, then Richard, took turns firing the Glock. By the time they were done, the rate of fire, up and down the barbed-wire fence, had dropped almost to nothing. Ammunition was running low, people were cold, kids were complaining, guns needed to be cleaned. The camo chairs were being collapsed and tossed into the backs of the SUVs. Zula drifted over to exchange hugs and delighted, high-pitched chatter with some of her cousins. Richard stooped down, which was a little more difficult than it used to be, and started to collect empty shotgun shells. In the corner of his eye he saw Peter following his lead. But Peter gave up on the chore quickly, because he didn’t want to stray far from Zula. He had no interest in social chitchat with Zula’s retinue of cousins, but neither did he want to leave her alone. He was swivel-headedly alert and protective of her in a way that Richard both admired and resented. Richard wasn’t above feeling ever so slightly jealous of the fact that Peter had appointed himself Zula’s protector.

  Peter glanced across the field at the house, looked away for a moment, then turned back to give it a thorough examination.

  He knew. Zula had told him about what happened to her adopted mom. Peter had probably googled it. He probably knew that there were fifty to sixty lightning-related fatalities a year and that it was hard for Zula to talk about because most people thought it was such a weird way to die, thought she might even be joking.

  THE GRAND MARQUIS was blocking an SUV full of kids and moms who had just had it with being out there in the noise and the cold, so Richard—glad of an excuse to leave—moved quickly toward it, passing between Peter and Zula. Not too loudly, he announced, “I’m going into town,” which meant that he was going to Walmart. He got into the huge Mercury, heard doors opening behind him, saw Peter and Zula sliding into the plunging sofa of the backseat. The passenger door swung open too, and in came another twentysomething woman whose name Richard should have known but couldn’t recall. He would have to ferret it out during the drive.

  The young funsters had much to say about the Grand Marquis as he was gunning it out onto the road; they had got the joke of it, decided that Richard was hip. The girl in the passenger seat said she had never before been in “a car like this,” meaning, apparently, a sedan. Richard felt far beyond merely old.

  Their conversation flew back and forth like the twittering of birds for about five minutes, and then they all fell silent. Peter was not exactly chomping at the bit to divulge facts about himself. Richard was fine with that. People who had job titles and business cards could say easily where they worked and what they did for a living, but those who worked for themselves, doing things of a complicated nature, learned over time that it was not worth the trouble of supplying an explanation if its only purpose was to make small talk. Better to just go directly to airline travel.

  Their chilly extremities sucked all the energy from their brains. They gazed out the windows at the frost-burned landscape. This was western Iowa. People from anywhere else, traveling across the state, would have been hard-pressed to see any distinction between its east and its west—or, for that matter, between Ohio and South Dakota. But having grown up here, and gone on many a pirate quest and Indian ambush down along the crick, Richard sensed a gradient in the territory, was convinced that they were on the threshold between the Midwest and the West, as though on one side of the crick you were in the land of raking red leaves across the moist, forgiving black soil while listening to Big Ten football games on the transistor radio, but on the other side you were plucking arrows out of your hat.

  There was a north-south gradient too. To the south were Missouri and Kansas, whence this branch of the Forthrasts (according to his research) had come around the time of the Civil War to get away from the terrorists and the death squads. To the north—hard to miss on a day like today—you could almost see the shoulder of the world turning inward toward the Pole. Those north-seeking Forthrasts must have thought better of it when they had ascended to this latitude and felt the cold air groping down the necks of their coats and frisking them, and so here they’d stopped and put down roots, not in the way that the old black walnut trees along the crick had roots, but as blackberries and dandelions grow thick when a lucky seed lands and catches on a stretch of unwatched ground.

  The Walmart was l
ike a starship that had landed in the soybean fields. Richard drove past the part of it where food was sold, past the pharmacy and the eye care center, and parked at the end where they stocked merchandise. The parking spaces were platted for full-sized pickup trucks, a detail useful to him now.

  They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power. Richard kept moving, since he was the one with a mission. He’d seen a way to contribute to the re-u without stepping in, or turning an ankle on, any of the cow pies strewn so intricately across his path.

  He kept walking until everything in his field of vision was camouflage or fluorescent orange, then looked around for the ammunition counter. An elderly man came out wearing a blue vest and rested his wrinkly hands on the glass like an Old West barkeeper. Richard nodded at the man’s pro forma greeting and then announced that he wanted three large boxes of the 5.56-millimeter NATO cartridges. The man nodded and turned around to unlock the glass case where the good stuff was stockpiled. On the back of his vest was a large yellow smiley face that was thrust out and made almost hemispherical by his widower’s hump.

  “Len was handing it out three rounds at a time,” he explained to the others, as they caught up with him. “Everyone wants to fire his carbine, but no one buys ammo—and 5.56 is kind of expensive these days because all the nut jobs are convinced it’s going to be banned.”

  The clerk set the heavy boxes carefully on the glass counter, drew a pistol-shaped barcode scanner from its plastic holster, and zapped each of the three boxes in turn: three pulls of the trigger, three direct hits. He quoted an impressively high figure. Richard already had his wallet out. When he opened it up, the niece or second cousin (he still hadn’t contrived a way to get her name) glanced into the valley of nice leather so indiscreetly that he was tempted to just hand the whole thing over to her. She was astonished to see the face of Queen Elizabeth and colorful pictures of hockey players and doughboys. He hadn’t thought to change money, and now he was in a place with no bureaux de change. He paid with a debit card.

  “When did you move to Canada?” asked the young woman.

  “1972,” he answered.

  The old man gave him a look over his bifocals: Draft dodger!

  None of the younger people made the connection. He wondered if they even knew that the country had once had a draft, and that people had been at pains to avoid it.

  “Just need your PIN number, Mr. Forrest,” said the clerk.

  Richard, like many who’d moved away, pronounced his name forTHRAST, but he answered to FORthrast, which was how everyone here said it. He even recognized “Forrest,” which was what the name would probably erode into pretty soon, if the family didn’t up stakes.

  By the time they’d made it to the exit, he’d decided that the Walmart was not so much a starship as an interdimensional portal to every other Walmart in the known universe, and that when they walked out the doors past the greeters they might find themselves in Pocatello or Wichita. But as it turned out they were still in Iowa.

  “Why’d you move up there?” asked the girl on the drive back. She was profoundly affected by the nasal, singsongy speech pathology that was so common to girls in her cohort and that Zula had made great strides toward getting rid of.

  Richard checked the rearview mirror and saw Peter and Zula exchanging a significant glance.

  Girl, haven’t you heard of Wikipedia!?

  Instead of telling her why he’d moved, he told her what he’d done when he’d gotten there: “I worked as a guide.”

  “Like a hunting guide?”

  “No, I’m not a hunter.”

  “I was wondering why you knew so much about guns.”

  “Because I grew up here,” he explained. “And in Canada some of us carried them on the job. It’s harder to own guns there. You have to take special courses, belong to a gun club and so on.”

  “Why’d you carry them on the job…”

  “… if I wasn’t a hunting guide?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Grizzlies.”

  “Oh, like in case one of them attacked you?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “You could, like, shoot in the air and scare it off?”

  “In the heart and kill it.”

  “Did that ever happen?”

  Richard checked the rearview again, hoping to make eye contact and send the telepathic message For God’s sake, will someone back there rescue me from this conversation, but Peter and Zula merely looked interested.

  “Yes,” Richard said. He was tempted to lie. But this was the re-u. It would out.

  “The bear rug in Grandpa’s den,” Zula explained from the back.

  “That’s real!?” asked the girl.

  “Of course it’s real, Vicki! What did you think it was, polyester!?”

  “You killed that bear, Uncle Dick?”

  “I fired two slugs into its body while my client was rediscovering long-forgotten tree-climbing skills. Not long after, its heart stopped beating.”

  “And then you skinned it?”

  No, it politely climbed out of its own pelt before giving up the ghost. Richard was finding it more and more difficult to resist firing off snappy rejoinders. Only the Furious Muses were holding him at bay.

  “I carried it on my back across the United States border,” Richard heard himself explaining. “With the skull and everything, it weighed about half as much as I did at that age.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Because it was illegal. Not shooting the bear. That’s okay, if it’s self-defense. But then you’re supposed to turn it over to the authorities.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” said Peter, figuring it out, “otherwise, people would just go out and kill bears. They would claim it was self-defense and keep the trophies.”

  “How far was it?”

  “Two hundred miles.”

  “You must have wanted it pretty bad!”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Why did you carry it on your back two hundred miles then?”

  “Because the client wanted it.”

  “I’m confused!” Vicki complained, as if her emotional state were really the important thing here. “You did that just for the client?”

  “It’s the opposite of that!” Zula said, slightly indignant.

  Peter said, “Wait a sec. The bear attacked you and your client—”

  “I’ll tell the story!” Richard announced, holding up a hand. He didn’t want it told, wished it hadn’t come up in the first place. But it was the only story he had about himself that he could tell in decent company, and if it were going to be told, he wanted to do it himself. “The client’s dog started it. Hassled the poor bear. The bear picked the dog up in its jaws and started shaking it like a squirrel.”

  “Was it like a poodle or something?” Vicki asked.

  “It was an eighty-pound golden lab,” Richard said.

  “Ohmygod!”

  “That is kind of what I was saying. When the lab stopped struggling, which didn’t take long, the bear tossed it into the bushes and advanced on us like If you had anything whatsoever to do with that fucking dog, you’re dead. That’s when the shooting happened.”

  Peter snorted at this choice of phrase.

  “There was no bravery involved, if that’s what you’re thinking. There was only one climbable tree. The client was not setting any speed records getting up it. We couldn’t both climb it at the same time, is all I’m saying. And not even a horse can outrun a grizzly. I was just standing there with a slug gun. What was I going to do?”

  Silence, as they considered the rhetorical question.

  “Slug gun?” Zula asked, dropping into engineer mode.

  “A twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with slugs rather than shells. Optimized for this one purpose. Two barrels, side by side: an Elmer Fudd special. So I went down on one knee because I was shaking so
badly and emptied it into the bear. The bear ran away and died a few hundred yards from our camp. We went and found the carcass. The client wanted the skin. I told him it was illegal. He offered me money to do this thing for him. So I started skinning it. This took days. A horrible job. Butchering even domesticated, farm-bred animals is pretty unspeakable, which is why we bring Mexicans to Iowa to do it,” said Richard, warming to the task, “but a bear is worse. It’s gamy.” This word had no punch at all. It was one of those words that everyone had heard but no one knew really what it meant. “It has almost a fishy smell to it. It’s like you’re being just steeped in the thing’s hormones.”

  Vicki shuddered. He considered getting into detail about the physical dimensions of a grizzly bear’s testicles, but, judging from her body language, he’d already driven the point home firmly enough.

  Actually, he had been tempted to rush the job of skinning the grizzly. But the problem was that he started with the claws. And he remembered from his boyhood reading about the Lakota braves taking the claws off after they’d killed the bear as a rite of manhood, making them into a necklace. Boys of his vintage took that stuff seriously; he knew as much about Crazy Horse as a man of an earlier generation might have known about Caesar. So he felt compelled to go about the job in a sacred way. Having begun it thus, he could not find the right moment to switch into rough butchery mode.

  “The more time I spent—the deeper I got into it—the more I didn’t want the client to have it,” Richard continued. “He wanted it so badly. I was down there covered in gore, fighting off yellow jackets, and he’d mosey down from camp and size it up, you know. I could see him visualizing it on the floor of his office or his den. Broker from New York. I just knew he would tell lies about it—use it to impress people. Claim he’d bagged it himself while his chickenshit guide climbed a tree. We got to arguing. Stupid of me because I was already deep into the illegality of it. I’d placed myself in a totally vulnerable position. He threatened to turn me in, get me fired, if I didn’t give him the trophy. So I said fuck you and just walked away with it. Left him with the keys to the truck so he could get home.”