This was what he knew, what the history books revealed, and if he closed his eyes while she sat beside him in the driver’s seat humming one of her lame country songs and the dog hung his head over the seat and breathed its meat-reeking breath in his face as the car yawed down Route 20 on the way to his place, he could picture how it must have been, Colter fighting down the pain till it went from something that filled him like an air pump inflating his skin to a hot white pinpoint of light that cooled with every step he took. Three hundred miles. Who could walk three hundred miles today, even on two good legs? Not to mention that Colter had no PowerBars or beef jerky or anything else, not even an apple, which people today took totally for granted as if apples were like air, and he had to forage all the way, subsisting on roots, frogs, snakes, the things he shot and feasted on only to leave what he couldn’t carry to rot when he moved on. That was legendary, that was a feat, but it was nothing compared to what came next—Colter’s Run, when he was naked and barefoot and a whole army of Blackfeet braves was chasing him down, all of them pissed-off and screaming and taking aim at his naked shoulders with their spears held high. He ran, and they chased him. And if he was faster than they were, even on their own ground and with their feet protected by moccasins, it was because he was John Colter and they weren’t.
He knew something was wrong the minute they turned into the dirt road and heard the distant discontinuous clanging as if the world were made of steel and coming apart at the seams. The windows were down. He’d been staring into the side mirror, staring into his own jolting eye and seeing the door panels fixed there like blistered skin and the dog slavering out the back and smearing the fender with a shiny outwardly radiating web of spit and mucus that immediately turned brown with flung-up dust when they went from pavement to dirt, and he wouldn’t look up. He wasn’t ready yet. He was listening to the tires, a clean spinning whine of perfect harmony on the blacktop that gave way to an angry thump and pop as they rocked over the washboard corrugations worked into the road to his grandmother’s house—to his house—because it was better than listening to her, to Sara, who kept trying to radicalize him against the government when he was already a thousand times more radical than she was. Nobody governed him. They were all just criminals anyway, every politician bought and sold by the special interests and the cops nothing more than their private army—he knew that and she didn’t have to tell him. But she did. On and on till her voice seemed to be coming from someplace other than her mouth and lips and larynx, as if it was riding radio waves on its own special channel.
But that clanging. Somehow he knew what it was and who was making it, though he’d never heard that exact sound before and couldn’t have said how he knew unless it was some sixth sense like the sense that told Colter when there were hostiles about. She was saying, “They might come to my house but I’ll just play dumb and say, ‘I thought you had him’ and then get angry and say, ‘What are you telling me—that he got away? Or what, you didn’t . . .’”—she turned to him, grinning, pretending to be someplace else talking to somebody else and not him at all—“‘send him out for adoption?’ And then I’ll pause and let my face go dark. ‘Or no, don’t tell me you put him down? Because if you did—’”
The house was there under the trees and the river was down below it. Ever since the cops had taken his car away he’d had to hitch into town for groceries, though his mother would come pick him up, was happy to come pick him up—and she’d done it a couple of times—but that wasn’t independent, and after a while when she pulled up to the house that used to have a phone before he uprooted it and tossed it in the river where it could go deep and talk to the minnows and steelhead in every human language, he would duck out the back door, slip over the wall and into the woods, and then he went to the locksmith and changed the locks so she couldn’t get in.
Sara said, “Is this it?,” and he nodded and she put on her blinker to turn into the gravel drive even as he saw the bishop pines screaming with sunlight and the three brown plastic overflowing trash cans no one ever seemed to come and pick up and the big object, the real thing, the thing that slammed at him like a missile shot out of nowhere—his father’s car, parked in the shadow of the wall like it belonged there.
“Shit,” he said. “Shit.”
The car lurched to a stop. She put it in park, cut the engine and turned to him. “What’s wrong?”
He just pointed at the car in front of them, a new Toyota hybrid his father had bought as a retirement present to himself, a statement on four wheels that might as well have had a loudspeaker attached to it trumpeting its miles per gallon and crying out against the spoliation of the earth and the four hundred parts per million of CO2 in the air. That was a good thing, he wouldn’t argue with that—it made sense to cut down on gas-guzzling, of course it did—but if you really wanted to get serious you’d just send the car back to Japan and use your own two legs to get around. His father didn’t need a car. Nobody needed a car. That was what feet were for. Tell it to Colter: he didn’t even have a horse.