He was beyond the noise now, beyond the helicopters and the squawk and squelch, legging uphill, up and up, nothing but trees around him and once in a while a meadow where there’d once been a clear-cut, but he skirted the meadows for tactical reasons. No sense in taking chances when all he was doing was taking chances because you had to be smart if you were going to be a one-man army. Like Colter. But these trees with the slivers of light caught up there in the tops of them like shining silver blades, they were the real thing, the thing that endures, and they’d been here long before Colter had gone into Yellowstone and if the aliens didn’t get to them they’d be here long after everybody alive now was dead. His father. His mother. Sara, with her big tits. He saw those trees—maybe he’d been in this spot before, maybe not—and just stopped and looked up into them for so long he began to go outside of himself again so that the wheel slowed and there was no hurry and hassle and paranoia, no state of war, only wonder at how they could be and how they could pull down deep and hold all these mountains together, because they were the beginning of it all, weren’t they? Or close enough.
What snapped him out of it wasn’t a noise, but something else, and not his sixth sense either because there were no hostiles anywhere near him. It was the kind of thing that happens when you’re dreaming awake and then come awake again, two textures, two worlds, slipping against each other like the plates that were one day going to slide this whole mountain range back into the ocean. Whatever it was, it made him feel refreshed suddenly, as if he’d been humping up a mountain peak in the Andes and been lifted off the snowfield and set down on the beach under a full warm tilting sun. He shook his head, tugged at the strap of his pack, and started off again.
It might have been another hour (again, time didn’t matter, not out here) and he figured he’d covered at least half the distance to Sara’s, not that he was seriously considering showing up there, but just by way of figuring. That was when he came across what at first looked to be a natural clearing where maybe a couple of the giants had fallen and the understory had taken over, but which turned out to be something entirely different. It was a clearing, all right, but it had been made by humans—and not loggers, but growers. Suddenly all his senses were on alert. He’d been playing cat and mouse with the hostiles and their dogs and here he was just about to blunder into some cartel’s plantation. They were outlaws too but they weren’t mountain men. Not even close. They were campesinos maybe, farmers, or maybe just punks recruited to suffer a little downtime in the wild. They didn’t like the hills or the trees or anything that scampered or swam or walked and breathed out here. They were scum. Booby-trappers. And they’d shoot you as soon as look at you, a whole new kind of hostile and they were worse than the Blackfeet because they didn’t know the land and only wanted to rape it. For profit. Profit only.
The voice again, the one deep inside: Skirt it. Get out. But the wheel was spinning and the other voice was saying, Fuck them. Because they can die too. For a long while, he drifted from cover to cover on the fringes of the clearing, glassing the place, looking for movement. There was none. Not so much as a bird or squirrel. In fact, as he was coming to realize, this was an abandoned operation, already harvested, the land poisoned and the garbage piled high, an irregular plot that was just dead now, a dead zone, and it wasn’t ever going to come back.
How did he feel about that? He felt that life was shit and more shit. He felt that aliens were aliens, no matter where you found them. He just wished he’d found them earlier, right in the act, so the Norinco could have had something to say about it.
38.
THE COPS MIGHT HAVE been thick as locusts—or cockroaches, thick as cockroaches—but their ranks thinned out considerably the higher he climbed. He came up out of the dead zone shaking his head in disgust, all that crap, all that waste, poisons and pesticides and every can and wrapper of every bite they’d taken just screaming there where they’d dropped it and not even burned up in a fire ring, which even the Boy Scouts would have employed, a new tribe of hostiles up here and what were the cops and the fly fishermen and the Sierra Club nerds going to do about them? It was getting dark, dark below already, but the light lingering here toward the crest. Double time, hut one, hut two. He moved like a spirit, moved like Colter, and the only thing that worried him now was the drones because you had no defense against drones. They were up there, way up there, alien spacecraft, Made in China, and before you suspected anything you were just meat. But still, you had to look on the bright side, and the bright side was this: it was a whole lot easier to use drones on ragheads out in the treeless desert than it was here, where the BIGGEST LIVING THINGS ON EARTH threw up their branches to shelter everything beneath. Everything that wasn’t already dead and poisoned, that is.
It was full dark by the time he reached the field across from her house because that was where he was going whether he wanted to admit it or not and he spent a whole lot of time there on his belly, glassing everything, and it was just like that night when they’d come to get her personal things because the aliens wouldn’t let them come in daylight. He felt sick still, but he chalked that up to the fact that he was hungry, starving really, just like Colter coming up naked and filthy and sore-footed on Fort Lisa. She’d make him pasta, that was what he was thinking, and then he’d fuck her in the dark and sleep in her bed and have a shower and be gone before the sun came up. The problem was the aliens. They might have thinned out their ranks way up here on the outskirts of Willits, but there was that patrol car parked up on the shoulder of the road under cover of a big flat-topped bush, and who did they think they were fooling? Willits Police. The County Sheriff. SWAT and swat again. He could have picked them off without even trying, putting two neat holes in the windshield, one on each side, just over the dash, two rounds and done with it. But he didn’t want that. He wanted Sara.
So what he did was wait while everything alive spoke to him from the deep grass and the bushes and the hollows in the dirt. Crickets. And scorpions too, rustling around in their hard shiny shells, looking for something to paralyze with that big stinger so they could have some food to put in their stomachs, same as anything else. After a while, and they were talking their many languages, he could begin to understand them, to hear them clearly, and what were they saying? They were saying Make War, Not Love. Because they were at war down there too, war that began the minute they hatched from their eggs or crawled out of their mother’s body, eat or be eaten and then go ahead and sing about it. Spiders there too, the big quick wolf spiders that made their meal of anything they could catch and overpower. And what if one of them climbed up the inside of his pantleg and bit him? What if a scorpion lanced him with that wicked stinger? He’d enjoy it. He’d welcome it. At least it would wake him up because he’d been here now, flat out on his belly, for the whole of his life.
And then some alien shut the lights out in the house up the hill from hers and the dark rushed in to fill the void and he was crawling, his weapon at the ready, crawling all the way across that field like he was in ambush training, like he was his father in Vietnam, inch by inch and nothing for anybody to see because he was invisible. Even from the drones. He had to rise to a running crouch when he crossed the road because he couldn’t risk lingering there where some car might come along with its lights and tires and three thousand pounds of steel and glass and plastic that no thing made out of flesh could resist. A car. People drove cars. He used to drive a car. But now he was in the fringe of bushes that separated her house from the house of the aliens on the hill, back to the belly, back to the crawl, and of course there was a window open in the bedroom, coolish night or not, because she liked to feel the fresh air on her face when she went to bed.
She was sitting in front of the TV. The TV flickered like gunfire. The dog, Rasta dog, cool dog, just lay wrapped up in dog oblivion, hear no evil, smell none either. “Turn out the lights,” he said.
“Adam,” she said.
“Do it,” he said.
And the
n there was a whole lot of discussion, but he didn’t want discussion, he wanted spaghetti and meatballs, he wanted 151, he wanted her, her big tits, her wet cunt, wanted a shower, wanted bed, wanted surcease. Or a treaty. At least for tonight. “I want to sleep with you,” he said. She said no. She said she was going to call the police if he didn’t get out. All that made him feel very weary, weary and depressed, and where was the person he used to be, the one who humped planting soil and good rich guano out to his plantation with nothing more than a good strong back, who had a grandmother and a life and built walls and one-upped the hostiles everywhere he went?
“You’re not going to call the police,” he said.
“I am. I swear I am.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Just try me.”
He tried her.
She didn’t call.
What she did was give him a look that brought out all the lines in her face because she was old, never forget that, and then she got up and flicked off the sound on the TV, though the images still jumped and shifted there on the screen till he had a moment when he couldn’t really tell what was the TV and what was the room. With her in it. And the stove. And the dog. Then she came over and took his hand, her touch there, softest thing, and led him into the kitchen. What she said was, “Right after you eat, you promise me, you’re out of here.”
This was funny, because that wasn’t what was going to happen and they both knew it, and so he started laughing then, or sniggering, actually. Through his nose.
“What?” she said. “What’s so funny?” And she was smiling for the first time since he’d walked into the room, her big soft lips spreading open across her teeth that were like polished stones in the weak light dropping out of the fixture recessed in the hood of the stove.
“First things first.”
“First things?”
“Or second things. First we eat, then we go into the bedroom.”
He might have fallen asleep. He did. He definitely did. Because she was there, shaking him awake, her voice drawn down to a whisper. “It’s quarter past four,” she said.
Black dark. Dog on the floor. Light from the clock.
“I washed your clothes.”
He didn’t say anything. And he didn’t want to get up out of that bed but he had to. First thing he did, after he got dressed and laced up his boots, was check the Norinco, eject the magazine and shove it home again. Then he shouldered the pack that had crackers in it, a loaf of bread, canned tuna, Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Corn Chowder, a bottle of red wine with a yellow fish on the label he’d go through in an hour. It was very still. The dog never stirred. And she was there, giving him a look in the gray ghosted light that was like a look of sorrow, as if she knew what was coming. He knew what was coming too. But he was a soldier. He was Colter. And when he went out the door he never looked back.
Yes. And this time he just humped across that road and that field on his two windmilling legs, no more belly-crawling for him, and if the aliens in that cruiser were awake and watching, he was ready, more than ready, to engage the enemy. But they weren’t awake and they weren’t watching. Maybe they weren’t even there. So what he had was freedom, back down into the cleft of that canyon, the light opening up around him and nobody and nothing to say where he could or couldn’t go. Maybe he would head north. Or maybe just go back to camp and wait them out. They were pussies, they were amateurs. Once winter came on, really came on, when it rained like the deluge, the original deluge that came after the original Adam, the somebody Adam, the legendary Adam, they’d forget all about him and go back to their TV remotes and their fat wives and their fat kids and, what, fat dogs too.
But the thing was, even Colter turned soft, and that was something he could never figure. Or stomach. The whole idea of it was like a sharp stick dipped in the bitterest thing there was and jabbed right through him. He just couldn’t understand how Colter, after all his feats, after his run, could just give it all up and go back to civilization, to a woman named Sallie who probably wasn’t even that good-looking, and live on a farm busting sod like anybody. And just die there, in bed, of jaundice, on a morning that lit the hills, May 7, 1812, when the Blackfeet and the Crows and all the rest of the hostiles were out after the buffalo where the buffalo grazed the spring grass and no white man dared tread.
That was how it turned out. That was how it always turned out. For everybody on this planet. You could be made out of wood and they’d set you on fire. You could be made of steel and they’d hose you down till the rust got you. You could be Colter and give up and die in bed. There was no way out and it didn’t really matter. You just had to be as hard as hard and make your own legend and let the chips fall where they may. That was what he was thinking and then he wasn’t thinking anymore, just letting the wheel spin and his legs conquer the ground, faster and faster, hut one, hut two, and if he didn’t see the two snipers camouflaged in the big mottled arms of a sycamore climbing up out of the streambed in a thick pale grove of them, that didn’t matter either.
His feet hit the dirt, his elbows pumped, double time, triple time, hostiles on the loose, hut one, hut two, got to go, got to go, the wheel churning faster and faster, and he was running now, running like Colter . . . and then, abruptly, it stopped. The wheel stopped. And it was never going to start again.
PART XIII
Little River
39.
THE WINTER RAINS CAME and buried everything. They swelled the streams, scoured the ravines, drove deep to refresh the roots of the big sentinel trees that stood watch over the forest and climbed steadily up into the greening hills. Botanists put on their slickers and went out to take core samples and hoist themselves three hundred feet up into the canopy to measure the new season’s growth and biologists set up bait stations to collect hair samples of fox and marten for DNA analysis. Fishermen fished. Drinkers drank. It wasn’t the tourist season, but a few people ventured up the coast from the Bay Area, mainly on weekends and mainly to stroll arm-in-arm up and down the six streets of Mendocino village, and the Skunk Train started hauling tourists up the Noyo Valley again, though on the usual limited winter schedule.
After the funeral back in the fall, Carolee went to stay with her sister in Newbury Park for a few days, and when she returned, looking haggard, looking unrested and every bit as tragic as when she’d left, she kept harping on the theme of traveling, of getting out and seeing the world. Just a trip. Anywhere. If only to get out of town for a while because she couldn’t take the way people looked at her wherever she went, whether it was the library or the post office or just picking up the dry cleaning, and Sten felt as burdened as she did and gave in without much of a fight. They wound up driving down to Death Valley for the wildflower bloom at the end of February and then continued on to Las Vegas to throw money away and watch some overpriced idiotic revue he could have done without, once and forever. What he said to her was, “This is just like the cruise ship, except it’s floating on dirt instead of water.”
And she said, “Without the world-class indulgence,” smiling when she said it, because she was beginning to climb up out of the pit Adam had dug, the steps and handholds shaky at first but firming up as the days passed. They came home to an empty house, but then the house had been empty of Adam for years now, and if Carolee had ever harbored any dreams of grandchildren, whether produced by Sara Hovarty Jennings or some other woman unstable enough to hook up with their son, those dreams were buried now too. It was for the better, it really was, and he told her that, though he meant it to be comforting and not just purely cold-blooded. The truth was, he couldn’t imagine going through this all over again and couldn’t even begin to guess at what a child of that union, of Sara and Adam, would have had to cope with. Or no, he could. And that was why, all things considered, Adam’s death had been a kind of blessing, the true blessing, and not his odds-defying birth or the sweetness of his early childhood or the sense of completeness this kicking perfect blue-eyed baby lying there in
his cradle had given them. He was their son, evidence in the flesh of the interlocking of the genes they’d separately inherited, genes their parents and parents’ parents had held on to through all the generations there ever were. More biology. Reproductio ad absurdum. Adam, the product of an older mother. An old mother.
He could adapt. Carolee could adapt too. But the thing that lingered longer than the sorrow, the thing he just couldn’t shake, was the shame. It was like a dream you can’t wake from, the vision of himself up there on the stage in the high school auditorium, urging everyone to remain calm and not rush off on some sort of witch hunt. Or chasing down those Mexicans with Carey, dead Carey, posturing beside him. Sitting there at the picnic table and trying to deny the evidence Rob Rankin presented in his little plastic bags. Living with the guilt. He wasn’t used to hanging his head or ducking away from anybody, all his life one of the big men in town, from his years on the football field in high school to his return as a decorated veteran and then a college grad working his way up from history teacher to assistant principal and finally principal and master of all he surveyed. He tried to be bigger than the shame, tried to get on with his life, but he found he couldn’t really face people anymore, couldn’t look anybody in the eye, even strangers, without wondering if they knew and how much they knew—it got to the point where he began to think there was no other solution but to pack up and move. Sun City, in Arizona, wasn’t that where old people went? Or Florida. What was wrong with Florida?
He came in from a walk one afternoon, his mind churning over the possibilities, and sat Carolee down and told her there was no other way, they were just going to have to move.
The Harder They Come Page 34
