“I’ll go as far as you’re going, Mack,” she told him, shyly.
He was glad he hadn’t used the Big Mack line. This woman wasn’t a barroom one-nighter, Mr. Town knew that in his soul. It might have taken him fifty years to find her, but this was finally it, this was the one, this wild, magical woman with the long dark hair.
This was love.
“Look,” he said, as they approached Chattanooga. The wipers slooshed the rain across the windshield, blurring the gray of the city. “How about I find a motel for you tonight? I’ll pay for it. And once I make my delivery, we can. Well, we can take a hot bath together, for a start. Warm you up.”
“That sounds wonderful,” said Laura. “What are you delivering?”
“That stick,” he told her, and chuckled. “The one on the backseat.”
“Okay,” she said, humoring him. “Then don’t tell me, Mister Mysterious.”
He told her it would be best if she waited in the car in the Rock City parking lot while he made his delivery. He drove up the side of Lookout Mountain in the driving rain, never breaking thirty miles per hour, with his headlights burning. They parked at the back of the parking lot. He turned off the engine.
“Hey, Mack. Before you get out of the car, don’t I get a hug?” asked Laura with a smile.
“You surely do,” said Mr. Town, and he put his arms around her, and she snuggled close to him while the rain pattered a tattoo on the roof of the Ford Explorer. He could smell her hair. There was a faintly unpleasant scent beneath the smell of the perfume. Travel would do it, every time. That bath, he decided, was a real must for both of them. He wondered if there was anyplace in Chattanooga where he could get those lavender bath-bombs his first wife had loved so much. Laura raised her head against his, and her hand stroked the line of his neck, absently.
“Mack ... I keep thinking. You must really want to know what happened to those friends of yours?” she asked. “Woody and Stone. Do you?”
“Yeah,” he said, moving his lips down to hers, for their first kiss. “Sure I do.”
So she showed him.
Shadow walked the meadow, making his own slew circles around the trunk of the tree, gradually widening his circle. Sometimes he would stop and pick something up: a flower, or a leaf, or a pebble, or a twig, or a blade ef grass. He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the twigness of the twig, the leajhess of the leaf.
Easter found herself reminded of the gaze of a baby, at the point where it learns to focus.
She did not dare to talk to him. At that moment, it would have been sacrilegious. She watched him, exhausted as she was, and she wondered.
About twenty feet out from the base of the tree, half-overgrown with long meadow grass and dead creepers, he found a canvas bag. Shadow picked it up, untied the knots at the top of the bag, loosened the drawstring. The clothes he pulled out were his own. They were old, but still serviceable. He turned the shoes over in his hands. He stroked the fabric of the shirt, the wool of the sweater, stared at them as if he were looking at them across a million years.
One by one, he put them on.
He put his hands into his pockets, and looked puzzled as he pulled one hand out, holding what looked to Easter like a white-and-gray marble.
He said, “No coins.” It was the first thing he had said in several hours.
“No coins?” echoed Easter.
He shook his head. “They gave me something to do with my hands.” He bent down to pull on his shoes.
Once he was dressed, he looked more normal. Grave, though. She wondered how far he had traveled, and what it had cost him to return. He was not the first whose return she had initiated; and she knew that, soon enough, the million-year stare would fade, and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch. That was the way it always went.
She led their way to the rear of the meadow. Her mount waited in the trees.
“It can’t carry both of us,” she told him. “I’ll make my own way home.”
Shadow nodded. He seemed to be trying to remember something. Then he opened his mouth, and he screeched a cry of welcome and of joy.
The thunderbird opened its cruel beak, and it screeched a welcome back at him.
Superficially, at least, it resembled a condor. Its feathers were black, with a purplish sheen, and its neck was banded with white. Its beak was black and cruel: a raptor’s beak, made for tearing. At rest, on the ground, with its wings folded away, it was the size of a black bear, and its head was on a level with Shadow’s own.
Horus said, proudly, “I brought him. They live in the mountains.”
Shadow nodded. “I had a dream of thunderbirds once,” he said. “Damndest dream I ever had.”