The door is dented steel with a line of rust running like a tear trail from the lock. It groans when he closes it. The room is windowless. Electricity courses through the walls, drawn from the creaking rotor of a wind turbine on the roof, but he keeps no bulb in the ceiling fixture. He lights a linseed oil lamp instead. He likes the room dark, likes the sun shuttered away. Outside he feels exposed, the sun’s eye and their eyes always on him. Here he feels safe, nested.
The lamp’s light makes the mannequins seem to move. There are five of them, collected from a department store with birds roosting in the rafters. Some are missing arms. Their plastic skin, a cancerous shade of yellow, has cracked through the eyes, the mouth, along the neck and belly, their bodies webbed with fissures, some gaping.
They wear clothes, torn and stained. A leather necklace, weighted with a stone, rounds one of their necks. Earrings dangle from another, unevenly, hooked through the cracks in the plastic. He painted four of their faces. Red smears across their mouths. Blue or green or brown pools in their eye sockets. A black smudge of mole. A dusting of freckles. There is a tooth, a canine, embedded in one of the mannequin mouths. Fingernails. All of them have hair, chunks small and large.
“Hello, pretties,” he says.
His bed is pressed up against the wall, a knot of blankets over a metal frame. In the center of the room is a chair, a metal chair with leather straps looping from each of its arms. The seat and the legs and the floor beneath are stained a rusty red, a skirt of dried blood. A table reaches along the wall, and above it a pegboard carrying coils of wire, barbed metal instruments.
He goes there now and grabs a ceramic pot of glue. He approaches the only naked mannequin. To bring their faces together he must crouch. They are similarly ruined, his by acne scars, hers by clefts brought on by heat and time. He breathes out of his mouth. He opens the pot of glue and daubs some across the crown of the mannequin’s head. Then he reaches into his pocket and removes the clump of straw-colored hair and mashes it into the glue.
The mannequin wobbles a few seconds before going still.
“You’re a fierce one,” he says. “I like that.”
Chapter 10
WEEKS PASS, and the six of them chase their way west. There are mountains in the distance, Clark knows. The mountains she has dreamed of all her life. She still cannot see them, but Lewis promises they are there, as they move across Missouri, where the dead forests give way to windbeaten yellowed grass that cooks down to sand.
Her entire life she has spent looking at the same thing—the same ruined buildings, the same defeated faces—and now everything new strikes her as particularly vivid, almost painterly. The heat shimmering in the distance so that the world appears through warped glass. The white snakes of dust that come squiggling out beneath the horses’ hooves with every step.
She is impervious to the heat. And though her body aches for water, she is less thirsty every day for a pint or a tumbler. Maybe because she knows there is no tavern around the corner. Or maybe because her body needs so many other things. Or maybe because her mind is so distracted and hopped-up with constant adrenaline. But probably it is because of her brother. He is the real reason.
She has always felt protective of him, never more than now. People talk about her arrogance. People talk about her recklessness. She and York share the same blood and the same qualities, his exacerbated by the teenage belief that his story is more important than any other, that his body is indestructible, that guts matter more than brains, that his cock is the compass point worth following.
She keeps her eyes on him constantly, watching with a mixture of affection and annoyance and obligation. He might look like a man, taller and broader than she, but younger, younger by a decade, an almost unfathomable amount of time, and not to be mistaken for mature. Since he was nine, she has shielded him, nursed him when sick, comforted him when scared, punished any bullies who taunted him, made sure he was properly fed and dressed. For five years, he slept in her bunk while she slept on the floor. Other than drinking spirits, and ranging beyond the wall, he has been her main interest. She doesn’t want children—who would want to bring something so delicate into this punitive world?—but she has one. He is hers. In the same manner that parents view a child as their body’s extension, the closest they come to reincarnation, she wants his life to be better than hers. That’s the promise that waits for him, that waits for them all, on the horizon.
His expression is arranged in a sleepy smile, as if he is living some dream he knew would come true, unaware or uncaring of any danger. This isn’t a mission to him; it’s an adventure, an entertainment. “Why are you always so serious?” he says to her one day, and she says, “Because everything is at stake, even if you don’t realize it.” When he fires an arrow into a quail and a feather catches the corner of his mouth, Clark tenderly plucks it from his lips. And when he rides beside Gawea or tries to share a canteen with her or juggles stones to entertain her, Clark worries.
Clark does and does not trust Gawea. In part it is the silence, her throat punctured and infected and slow to heal. When she tries to make words, her voice rasps like a rust-deadened hinge, and when she writes, the words come slowly in a mess of bird-scratch letters. Lewis asks who is Aran Burr and she writes, Leeder. Teecher. Lewis asks whom he leads and she says, Everyone, and Lewis asks if he is like a mayor or a governor and she hesitates before writing, Mostly. Lewis asks if she made the birds fall from the sky, if she made them attack the stadium and aid in her escape, and she writes, Did not maek. Her bandaged hand, her dominant hand, clumsily grips the pen and scratches out each letter: Asked.
“You asked?”