She did have a telephone, but he didn’t care about that. It was the same ugly sort of thing his grandmother’d had, no cellphone, cellphones didn’t work out here, but just a big black box of a thing that was so heavy you could have beaten an elephant to death with it. He didn’t want to alarm her so he didn’t jerk the wires out of the socket but just bent down and gently removed them, then straightened up and dodged past her with the phone and its trailing wires in one hand and the .22 in the other, and tossed the whole business out into the rain. (The phone, that is. Not the .22. The .22 he was going to need.) Then he pushed the door shut behind her—she still hadn’t moved, though the dog was really tapping up a storm now on the bare boards of the floor, all worked up about something.
“Listen,” he said, and the look on her face was breaking his heart because it was exactly the look his grandmother used to give him when she was pissed at him, “I really want to thank you for your hospitality. And I’m going to have to go soon. I’ve got, well, a lot”—and he waved one arm to show just how much he did have to do—“but with this rain and all, I think we might as well get comfortable, at least for a while. Don’t you?”
The time he drove the car through the fence at the playground he’d gone outside of himself for a moment there and knew what he’d done the minute the kids started scattering like rabbits across the dead grass and the scooped-out sandpit under the monkey bars, which were what stopped the car finally. The monkey bars were made of hollowed-out steel and they were cemented in place like a big metal beehive, and that was what set him off in the first place. To this day he couldn’t go past it without picturing the thing as some alien Chinese spacecraft just touched down and disgorging all these shrieking little half-sized hostiles who turned out to be kids, just kids. It was hard to explain, and he’d tried to explain it, tried hard, first to the pigs on the scene, then to the court-appointed lawyer and then to the judge and the shrink they assigned him. “Hey,” he said, “give me a break, it was an accident. And yeah, okay, I was on ’shrooms, all right? Is that a crime?” But it was. And he shouldn’t have said that or admitted it or whatever and he knew he’d fucked up the minute it was out of his mouth.
They sent him away for evaluation but he didn’t have a record and he was mostly clear while he was in the facility as they liked to call it euphemistically and they gave him meds, more meds, and released him to the custody of his parents and he went back to school and got bored and hung out with Cody and got high and higher and finally moved in with his grandmother and turned eighteen and began to get serious about the outdoors because he saw his destiny then as the first true mountain man of modern times. He read all the books. He worshipped Hugh Glass, who in some ways was as tough as Colter, a former pirate turned mountain man who had a run-in with a grizzly that left him mauled and broken and all but dead so that his so-called friends abandoned him and he had to crawl a hundred fifty miles and live on roots and lizards till he got his strength back and hunted them down and put the fear of God in them. He was going to call himself Glass at first, just Glass, but then Colter came into his life, and the name was so much cooler, and so was the man too.
The rest was history. And maybe someday they’d be writing him up in books. The scene at Piero’s was the one they’d have to embroider a bit because the fact was he’d seen some things there he didn’t like and got into it with some of the resident aliens and if truth be told got the living shit beat out of him to the tune of two fractured ribs, a chipped tooth and a seriously disarranged nose. He knew better now. Now he had his Norinco and his .22 and his Jungle King fourteen-inch hunting knife with the serrated edge on top, which was enough to discourage twenty hostiles. As for the thing at the Chinese consulate in S.F., that wasn’t even worth mentioning.