It was when he was dishing up the beef stew (blowing on it, actually; it was still too hot to eat) that an ugly thought occurred to him. It was the kind of thought a groundhog might have had studying his own burrow from outside in the hard light of day, a gnawing, paranoid kind of feeling that poisoned the smell of the beef stew and killed his mood dead. He shifted uneasily. His crotch was wet and it was going to start itching with the crotch fungus that made it feel as if your balls were on fire if he didn’t change into something dry pretty soon—and what was he going to do, go to the drugstore every day? But here came that thought roaring into his head and he cursed himself again. Fucker. Idiot. Moron. Shit for brains. Here he’d been sitting around in hospital waiting rooms and fucking Sara in the dark and jawing away with a random old lady like some—it hurt to have to say it—like some mental case, and not a thought to the plantation, which he hadn’t laid eyes on for two full days now.
He had to get a grip. There’d been a storm, rain falling in sheets and beating like a whole ship full of aliens on that old lady’s split-shake roof, and what if it had damaged the plants? What if it had broken the stems supporting the pods that were only viable now, right now, because the growing cycle was something like ninety days and he’d been late receiving his seeds in the mail and then getting them in the dirt of his two hundred twenty-seven gopher-proof pots? Worse, what if the whole thing had washed away, the pots and plants and the brown balls of opium in the screw-top jar hidden in the secret recess behind the back wall of the bunker? What then?
The stew was hot, too hot to eat, but he ate it anyway, the wheel cranking round now as if it had no stop on it, as if it was going to break loose and tear right out of his head like a freak accident on the roller coaster. He didn’t bother to scrape the can, just threw it down in the mud. The spoon too. And then he had his pack on, the rifle shouldered and the knife strapped to his thigh, and he was heading downhill, double time becoming triple time and then quadruple time till he was running full-out, running like Colter.
29.
SO MAYBE HE SLIPPED and fell a couple of times, the mud slick underfoot, the tread of his boots clogged with it till he might as well have had no tread at all, everything rushing downward and the rain starting in again. His pants were filthy, basted with mud and long filarial streaks of some green shit he didn’t know what it was, and he’d managed to tear the sleeve of his shirt slamming into a tree to keep from pitching headlong into a ravine like some clumsy-ass motherfucker, but it was nothing more than what you would expect out here this time of year when the rain started in and just kept on coming, the kind of thing the average person didn’t even know about or even suspect because the average person was sitting in front of a TV in a dry house with a remote in one hand and a bag of wasabi peas in the other. Plus he was on a mission here and whether he broke a leg or both legs or not really didn’t enter into it—if he couldn’t keep on his feet and hurtle every obstacle then he didn’t deserve to have a plantation or live free or even think of calling himself a mountain man. So what he did was let his instincts take over and just go for it.
The plantation was a good four-mile trek from Camp 2 and it would normally take something like an hour to get there but he made it in record time, or at least that was what it felt like since he didn’t have a watch or a cellphone because no mountain man ever carried a watch and cellphones hadn’t been invented back then and plus in a state of nature you just knew the time the way the animals did, by the sun, by the shadows, by another sense altogether that wasn’t a sixth sense—that was reserved for danger—but a seventh sense, that was what it was. He liked the idea of it, seventh sense, and he began wondering if there were more senses yet, like an eighth sense or a ninth, and what they would be. The eighth sense—that would allow you to get inside the hostiles’ heads and know what they were thinking before they did, right when they got up in the morning and were taking their first steaming piss up against a tree, and the ninth, the ninth would not only allow you to know what they were thinking but change it like tuning a radio so you could make them skin themselves alive instead of you or Potts or any white men at all.