York lets out a whoop and shifts out of his saddle and falls to the ground and scrabbles on all fours to the edge of the puddle and splashes a handful into his hair before dunking his face beneath the surface to taste it. He reels back, his face distorted. He heaves several times. A line of bile hangs from his lips when he looks up at them. Gawea nudges her horse and shakes her head and tsk-tsks him with her tongue. York laughs, the laugh cut short when Clark spurs her horse between him and the girl and berates him for his damned fool idiotness.
The way is now impassable, too swampy for them to ride, and they clamber up the banks and parallel its winding course for an hour. Algae thickens. Bushes cluster. Reeds spring up. Leaves unfurl from branches. To Lewis’s eyes, so accustomed to browns and grays, everything seems obscenely green. There is a whine at his ear, and then a sting at his cheek. He slaps it and studies the bloody smear on his hand.
He hears another slap behind him and the doctor says, “What is that? What are they?”
Lewis wipes his hand on his thigh. “Mosquitoes, I think. They drink blood and carry disease.”
The bugs thicken, swarming in hazy clouds, and the slapping and clapping becomes as frequent as applause. York says, “Why couldn’t they have been wiped out with everything else?”
“Purely to harass you,” Lewis says.
York laughs. They all do, despite the welts rising from their skin, because there is water. There is actual water beside them, oozing along thickly at first, then clearing and broadening, creeping up the banks. And where there is water, there is life. The desert has filled their heads with questions and defiled their spirits. But now all those bad feelings wash away. Gawea was right—there is an end to the desert waste—which means they have been right to follow her. She has led them to life, and they are going to live.
When the sun eases toward the horizon, when the shadows begin to cluster, the doctor walks her horse onto a rocky shoal and stares out over a calm stretch of water dimpling with bugs and says, “Let’s stay here. And I don’t just mean for the night. Let’s rest. We need our rest.”
When no one says anything—the water has stolen their words—she says, “I insist on it. This will be good medicine for us all.”
Right then a possum with a long pink tail and a mouth full of needlelike teeth clambers down a tree and hisses at them before Reed puts an arrow in its side.
Lewis knows that with prey come predators. North America was once home to big mammals that long ago went extinct. Once humans crossed the land bridge, once they notched out shell-shaped projectile points, once they learned to fire arrows and hurl spears with atlatls, the big animals began to die off. The mammoths, the dire wolves and lipoterns, the saber-toothed lions, the giant ground sloths and giant short-faced bears. All gone, replaced by scrawnier, deadlier humans. Nature fills a void. Now that humans are gone, something big will be clambering its way to the top of the predatory chain. He remembers what Gawea wrote in the sand, Goblins, and while they butcher the possum and talk excitedly about what tomorrow might bring, he keeps his eyes on the dark forests that wall the riverbank.
Chapter 14
THE MELANOMA RISES from the tip of his ear. It has been bothering Thomas for weeks, a faint itching at first, then a throbbing. It is a raised lump, darkly pigmented, purplish at its center, pink and yellow along the edges. Vincent insists he get it removed.
The mayor is not overly worried. He does not feel weak or nauseous. Removing suspicious lesions is as commonplace as getting a haircut, clipping toenails. Everyone is dotted with moles. Everyone has growths lumping them. Their sunburned skin husks away like the peelings of an onion. The UV exposure, with no ozone layer to filter, cooks them, mutates their cells.
His doctor—a man with an eggishly bald head and a nest of black hair rimming it—seats him in a chair and gives him an opiate that a few minutes later makes everything fuzzy around the edges. “It feels like nothing could ever possibly hurt,” Thomas says, and the doctor says, “I’m sorry to contradict you,” and slices off the top of his ear with a pair of clippers.
He hears the snip. Blood runs into his ear. The doctor smashes a towel against it and tells Thomas to hold it. The pain takes a moment to arrive. A rising heat. Thomas begins to say, “Ah-ah-ah,” and the doctor says, “You’ll be all right.”
Then he smears glue over the wound and bandages it and tells Thomas to follow up with him if he has any questions.
Thomas is late because of the procedure. But then again, he is always late. People wait for him. And they will continue to wait for him, whether for five or fifty minutes, as long as it takes. When he walks late into a room, any room, people feel both relief and exasperation. For so many decisions he makes, this is his intention. To make clear his power.
Slade meets him in the hallway. “How are they?” Thomas asks, and Slade says, “They’re impatient. Pimpton threatened to leave.”
“Perfect.”
He opens the tall oak door and together they walk into the high-ceilinged chamber. Slade stands in the corner. A chandelier fitted with candles hangs over a long wooden table around which six councilmen are seated. They stand when he enters, though none of them greet him. Only a few even look at him. Some are men; some are women. Some are young, and some have been serving longer than Thomas has been alive, and they look it, graybeards with hunchbacks taking too long to wobble upright at his entrance.
Thomas takes his seat in a tall leather-backed chair at the head of the table. “I call this meeting to order. The minutes, please.”
Councilman Pimpton falls back into his chair and sighs theatrically. He walks with a cane made from a crooked length of wood. His eyebrows are combed up his forehead like white feathers. “I’ve lost too many minutes already. Waiting.” He says this at a mutter just loud enough for everyone to hear.