52
The road tunneled in wide swings through the woods and was not too steep, the snow not too deep, and he made good progress with the Bronco’s tracks before him. The road looped back upon itself, and on the far side of every loop he expected to see no more road and the Bronco parked before some ordinary mountain homestead, the man, Steve, stepping out of the car to the ordinary jubilation of dog and wife and children, and nothing for Billy to do but laugh and drive away. But around every turn there was more road, more trees, another turn, and no Bronco, and no house and no wife.
The road narrowed as it climbed. Trees and scrub trees crowding in, low-hanging boughs lapping at the windows. If a man were to stop he could not turn around but would have to back all the way down and good luck with that, pardner. He drove on and the road grew steeper, a fact he could not see or feel but knew by the increasing slippage of his tires. He shifted on the fly into his lowest gear and pressed on more slowly, all his senses wired to the messages of the climb, and still the tires spun, the tail swinging drunkenly toward tree trunks, righting, yawing again the opposite way, and he understood with a rising fury that she would not make it and that he’d known she wouldn’t. He made one more bend, tires spraying a wet slag over the undercarriage, and with his fingers light on the wheel he worked her with all his skill but the rubber spun and the motor raced and there was nothing to do but stop and hope the car held. It didn’t. Brake, no brake, it would go back the way it came. He hooked an elbow over the seat and attempted to take the curve one-handed but he overshot it and the bed of the El Camino slammed into the sudden, ungiving trunk of a pine and went no farther.
He killed the engine. He lit a cigarette and sat watching the snow mutely finding the windshield. Falling heavier now. The Bronco’s tracks were filling.
He pulled the keys from the ignition and pocketed them and buttoned the leather jacket and collected the rawhide gloves from the glovebox, and then he reached under his seat and hunted down the bottle and took a swig. He reached again under the seat, groping deeper, “Come here you motherfucker,” the blow to the tree having sent it to the very back of the cab, and at last he felt it and tugged it free. He peeled away the black watch cap and put it on his head and checked to see that the gun, a nine-millimeter he’d bought off a man in Nevada, was loaded, the safety on, then he dropped the gun into his right pocket. He picked up his phone from the seat and put that in his pocket too but then took it out again and left it on the passenger’s seat, centering it on the cover of a magazine. Finally he pulled on his gloves and got out.
He took a few steps up the road and turned to look back. His car rested nearly abeam to the road so that any vehicle coming up or going down could not pass. He stood thinking about that, then dropped his cigarette into the Bronco’s track and continued on.
The treadless cowboy boots he’d won at billiards sent him to his hands and knees, and sent him there again before he adopted a wider, splay-footed stance, digging the inside edges of the soles into the snow. By the time he reached the next bend, no more than thirty yards from the car, his legs were burning and his lungs felt pierced through by the thin air. He stopped, hands to knees, unable to curse for his wheezing and his wheezing the only sound made by any living thing on the mountain.
Before him the road looked less a road than some wide chute carved out by falling rocks or by water or both, and still the Bronco’s tracks went on, and finally so did he, staggering on until he reached the next bend where he rested again. When he came to the bend after that and there was still no sign of the Bronco other than its fading tracks, he fell once more into his wheezing stance of rest and fought with all his heart the desire to drop to his knees, to his back, in the snow.
The day was now all but gone, the sun fallen behind some distant peak. He judged that within a few minutes there’d be no light at all but the light of the snow itself where it lay on the trail.
He glanced back down the mountain at the tracks of the Bronco and his own thin herringbone footprints between. He removed a glove with his teeth and found his cigarettes and the Zippo.
“You got to the end of this to decide,” he said, and when he finished the cigarette he dropped it in the snow and went on, and he’d not gone very far before the tracks of the Bronco turned abruptly from the trail, plunging down into a deeper, scrappier woods.
He stood at the top of this gully looking down, his heart thudding in his neck. He studied the trees for possible handholds and felt for the nine-
millimeter in his pocket, making sure it was secure, and then he reached out for the first tree and stopped. There was a bootprint in the snow. Nearly as fresh as his own but not his own, the floor of this print waffled with good tread. It led to its left-footed counterpart, and he saw that the tracks had come up out of the gully and continued up the trail. He looked ahead and saw nothing in the snowfall but the white, snaking trail and the dark pattern of prints along its back.
He looked down the gully once more where the Bronco was stashed, and he looked back up the mountain.
“All right, asshole,” he said, addressing himself. “It’s a fair fight now.”
HE KNEW BY THE clarity of the tread that the man’s lead on him was not great, and he tried to stare not at the snow but into the darker woods ahead so that his eyes would be rightly adjusted to see the man before the man saw him. But he never saw the man. He’d climbed another fifty steep yards of mountain when he saw to his right, or thought he saw, a wink of light deep in the woods, so faint that had he come by this spot only a few minutes sooner, a few shades earlier in the gradients of dusk, he would not have seen it at all.
The man he tracked had seen the light or not seen it or didn’t care. His tracks had gone on, stamping their regular seal on the trail until both trail and tracks curved around a low rampart of boulders and passed out of sight.
Billy stared into the woods where he thought he’d seen the light. He began to believe he’d not seen it at all, that it had been some trick of the high altitude, of the mixed fuels of exhaustion and adrenaline. Then he saw it again, far back through the trees, dully orange and faintly guttering like a candle orphaned in the woods, and on nothing more than the lurching of his heart at the sight of it, he abandoned the trail and began to make his way through the pines and the snow toward this light.