“Cool,” he said.
And then she was striding briskly back up the walk, pressing the glass cylinder close to her body on the side away from the hospital with its lights and windows and the patients in their beds there who might or might not be looking out on the parking lot. Anyone seeing her would assume she was going to her car or heading back into the emergency room because she’d just gone out for a breath of air—or a smoke, a verboten smoke—and here was the cruiser, still running, the light atop it still revolving, and she was right there, her fingers working at the metal flap of the gas tank, thinking it must be locked, they’d have to keep it locked or everybody’d be doing this all day long, the shits, the pathetic wasteful cruel inhuman shits, only to find that it was true—it was locked and it wouldn’t give. A quick look around: nothing, nobody. The gumball machine chopped up the light. Her heart was pounding. In the next moment she slipped around to the driver’s side—gliding, flowing as if she were made of silk—cracked the door and reached in to run her hand over the dash, and where was it, where was the release? On the floor. Yes, on the floor. Then she had it and it gave and she was back around the car again—thirty seconds, that was all it took. And every gurgling ounce of the sugar water, every drop, went home, right into the greedy gullet of that cage on wheels, that tool of the oppressors that was a tool no more.
Let them suck on that. See how they liked it.
Adam was all right behind the wheel—no Dale Earnhardt, but fine just the same. He kept the car between the lines and he didn’t go over the speed limit though he couldn’t seem to stop laughing. “Just wait,” he kept saying, snorting with laughter, “just wait till they, what, go to nail somebody, and the engine seizes up on them. That was great. That was genius.”
It was. It was great. She’d gotten her little bit back and she’d got Adam back too. They went home and went to bed and he couldn’t get enough of her, hard and hot and sweating in the dark, her man, her beautiful man. He’d missed her. And he didn’t have to tell her, not in words, because she could feel it, oh, blessed lord, yes, feel it all night long.
But then—and she wasn’t surprised or at least that’s what she told herself—she woke to daylight poking through the blinds and the bed was empty and the house too. She didn’t have to go out into the hallway and look to see if his pack was there or run barefoot out the back door to watch for him in the field across the way. He was gone and she knew it, vanished like smoke, human smoke, as if he wasn’t made of flesh at all. But he was, oh yes—flesh and bone and hard unyielding muscle—and she knew that better than anybody. He should have stayed—she’d wanted him to and would have told him as much if she’d had the chance—but he had his own agenda, doing whatever it was he did out there in the woods.
It wasn’t ideal, far from it. She’d rather have him there, rather be making coffee for two instead of one—and eggs and toast and whatever else he wanted. The house felt empty without him, though he’d been in it no more than what, twelve, thirteen hours? It saddened her. Standing at the counter in the kitchen that still vibrated with the aura of him, she poured herself a cup of coffee and gazed out the window to where a hummingbird no bigger than her thumb was sucking sugar water from the feeder through the miniature syringe of its bill, a creature innocent of cops, internal combustion engines, wages, taxes, slavery. A free bird, a free bird on the land. She blew on her coffee to cool it and told herself to be patient—one way or the other he’d get tired of it out there and then he’d be back, she was sure of it.
Just give him time.
PART IX
The Plantation
27.