This was funny, because that wasn’t what was going to happen and they both knew it, and so he started laughing then, or sniggering, actually. Through his nose.
“What?” she said. “What’s so funny?” And she was smiling for the first time since he’d walked into the room, her big soft lips spreading open across her teeth that were like polished stones in the weak light dropping out of the fixture recessed in the hood of the stove.
“First things first.”
“First things?”
“Or second things. First we eat, then we go into the bedroom.”
He might have fallen asleep. He did. He definitely did. Because she was there, shaking him awake, her voice drawn down to a whisper. “It’s quarter past four,” she said.
Black dark. Dog on the floor. Light from the clock.
“I washed your clothes.”
He didn’t say anything. And he didn’t want to get up out of that bed but he had to. First thing he did, after he got dressed and laced up his boots, was check the Norinco, eject the magazine and shove it home again. Then he shouldered the pack that had crackers in it, a loaf of bread, canned tuna, Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Corn Chowder, a bottle of red wine with a yellow fish on the label he’d go through in an hour. It was very still. The dog never stirred. And she was there, giving him a look in the gray ghosted light that was like a look of sorrow, as if she knew what was coming. He knew what was coming too. But he was a soldier. He was Colter. And when he went out the door he never looked back.
Yes. And this time he just humped across that road and that field on his two windmilling legs, no more belly-crawling for him, and if the aliens in that cruiser were awake and watching, he was ready, more than ready, to engage the enemy. But they weren’t awake and they weren’t watching. Maybe they weren’t even there. So what he had was freedom, back down into the cleft of that canyon, the light opening up around him and nobody and nothing to say where he could or couldn’t go. Maybe he would head north. Or maybe just go back to camp and wait them out. They were pussies, they were amateurs. Once winter came on, really came on, when it rained like the deluge, the original deluge that came after the original Adam, the somebody Adam, the legendary Adam, they’d forget all about him and go back to their TV remotes and their fat wives and their fat kids and, what, fat dogs too.
But the thing was, even Colter turned soft, and that was something he could never figure. Or stomach. The whole idea of it was like a sharp stick dipped in the bitterest thing there was and jabbed right through him. He just couldn’t understand how Colter, after all his feats, after his run, could just give it all up and go back to civilization, to a woman named Sallie who probably wasn’t even that good-looking, and live on a farm busting sod like anybody. And just die there, in bed, of jaundice, on a morning that lit the hills, May 7, 1812, when the Blackfeet and the Crows and all the rest of the hostiles were out after the buffalo where the buffalo grazed the spring grass and no white man dared tread.
That was how it turned out. That was how it always turned out. For everybody on this planet. You could be made out of wood and they’d set you on fire. You could be made of steel and they’d hose you down till the rust got you. You could be Colter and give up and die in bed. There was no way out and it didn’t really matter. You just had to be as hard as hard and make your own legend and let the chips fall where they may. That was what he was thinking and then he wasn’t thinking anymore, just letting the wheel spin and his legs conquer the ground, faster and faster, hut one, hut two, and if he didn’t see the two snipers camouflaged in the big mottled arms of a sycamore climbing up out of the streambed in a thick pale grove of them, that didn’t matter either.
His feet hit the dirt, his elbows pumped, double time, triple time, hostiles on the loose, hut one, hut two, got to go, got to go, the wheel churning faster and faster, and he was running now, running like Colter . . . and then, abruptly, it stopped. The wheel stopped. And it was never going to start again.
PART XIII
Little River
39.