She underlines the word: Asked.
One morning, Clark wakes to find Gawea standing at the edge of their camp, a single moth dancing above her. Clark closes her eyes, eking out another minute of sleep, and when she opens them again finds dozens of moths now swirling around Gawea, dirtying the air. The girl does not often smile but she is smiling then, with her hands outstretched and moths balanced on her fingertips. Clark sits up in her bedroll and says, “Hey,” and Gawea drops her smile and her arms and the moths flutter off like a blown cloud of ashes.
She did this alone. That’s what Clark has to keep reminding herself. That’s what makes the distance seem bridgeable, possible, even when they come to the Nebraska border, where the bluffs drop into plains that roll on and on, the color of aged parchment, like one of Lewis’s maps forever unscrolled. The girl came all this way without anyone. The balls on her.
“How much longer?” Clark asks her. “When does this end? You said it would end.”
It ends, she writes.
“But when?”
Weeks.
“How many?”
Gawea shrugs.
Their water halves, and halves again, and their mouths go to cotton from rationing. At some farms they find iron pumps tapped into deep wells. Besides ceramics, which have the same basic composition as fossils, nothing has lasted like iron. Gates and pans and pipes like this one. The metal was once red, but except for a few specks, the paint is chipped from it. The handle juts out like a one-armed man trying to keep his balance. They take turns priming the arm, and when they first call up the water, it sometimes carries rust and muck for an hour before running clear.
They follow the girl and she follows the river, the Missouri River. “Do you really trust her?” Reed says, and Clark says, “I trust that she knows how to survive out here, but for now, that’s all.” They ride through crumbling towns and cities, everything a splintered mess, and they ride through the empty spaces between them. They ride around trees that fell years ago and trees that fell last week, through fences, onto houses and cars, across streets. Trees on top of trees on top of trees. They ride past leaning electrical poles with their snapped and frayed wires. They ride past roads buckled to pieces, crumbled to gravel. They ride past the litter of ripped balloons, shriveled condoms, six-pack rings, diapers, and chip bags and Ziploc bags and grocery bags, plastic bags, so many of them, that flutter from bushes and trees and gutters and fences like ruined egg sacs.
At one point, York says, “God, would you look at all this dead shit.” There isn’t much more to say than that.
The wind creaks and knocks things over with a crash so that the world seems to be muttering about them in their passing. And everywhere—in windows, doorways, the knots of trees—there is the sense of eyes watching.
Coyotes yip and howl at night. Snakes rattle their tails and startle the horses. They surprise a huddle of javelinas, the big bristly pigs snorting and squealing, rushing toward them and hoofing up a big cloud of dust and swinging their tusks from side to side, and Clark drops two of them with arrows before the drove escapes.
They need to be able to protect themselves, but none of them know how to use the guns they carry. When Reed asks if the ammunition will even fire, Lewis says there is only one way to find out. He says the desert climate is to their advantage, the dryness a preservative. That’s why archaeologists, he tells them, pulled scrolls thousands of years old out of Egyptian tombs. “It would take moisture to neutralize the powder or primer,” he says, and because the bullets have been stored in ammo boxes—in a relatively cool, intensely dry basement—they should ignite.
The bullets rattle when they finger open the .357 boxes. Their metal has oxidized, giving them a slight green crust, but otherwise they have not visibly degraded. The cartridges for the .30-06 rifles appear much the same. And though some of the shotgun shells are a loss, their plastic cracked and spilling buckshot, most seem serviceable.
That morning, everyone sits in a half circle and Lewis stands before them holding a revolver. The sky, still pinpricked with stars, pinkens behind him. He has to hold the weapon with two hands, its weight too great for his thin arms. He lectures everyone first on the mechanics. He thumbs the safety on and off, swings out the cylinder and spins it. The hammer cocks and releases. He goes on for some time about the double-action mechanism, about safety concerns, about how to break down the weapon, clean it with a brush and rag and oil, when York says, “Shut up already and let me try.”
The others whistle and clap when he jumps up and smacks the dust from his rear and snatches the revolver Lewis reaches to him, grip first.
York smiles for his audience. He shoves the gun in his belt, crabs out his arms, then draws and pops an imaginary round at each of them. He spins the gun on his finger—then loses his grip and it thuds to the ground.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Clark says, “you idiot.”
He slides the bullets into their chambers, then slams the cylinder home as if he has done so a thousand times before, his hands moving with a magician’s adeptness. “What should I aim at?”
The doctor is smoking her pipe, blowing smoke rings. “The moon,” she says.
“Yeah, the moon,” Reed says. “Blast it out of the sky.”
The sun is rising and the moon is sinking out of sight, its crescent like a clean slash. York spreads his legs and raises his arms and draws a bead on it. He holds his breath, then compresses the trigger. The hammer falls with a sharp click.