She tried again. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go. I’m tired.”
He ignored her. Yes, his cock was hard, but so was Colter’s through a thousand black nights and freezing dawns, and it was something you just had to deal with. Discipline, that was what it was called. What soldier, what mountain man, worried about sex? You got it when you could and if you didn’t have it you just learned to do without. It wasn’t like food. Or plews. Or balls and powder for your rifle. Of course he could have gone through the front gate, which was unlocked—he tried it—but that would be giving in to his father and his father’s scheme, so he went over the wall, and when he got to the front door he tried his key and his key worked but that didn’t mean anything because it was just more of the same. No, what he was going to do was what he’d envisioned all the way back: he was going to break in, break things, let people—let his father—know just how he felt.
There were rocks in the yard that fit his fist as if they’d been shaped and eroded and pressed deep in the earth over all the eons just for this purpose, just for smashing windows, and no one to hear or care. Except Sara. She was there shouting at him after the picture window in front gave up the ghost—the ghost, and that was funny, this one’s for you, Grandma—and then she actually tried to stop him, to grab at his arm as he went for the next window and the next one after that, methodical now, with all the time and purpose in the world.
Sometimes it was a good thing to put the brakes on the wheel and slow everything down and the 151 and the opium did that but then you were vulnerable because you weren’t alert and ready for action and when you shouldered your rifle and went up the trail to your bunker you felt like you were wading through water, as if the air wasn’t air anymore but something thicker, denser, something dragging you down like the too-thick atmosphere and too-heavy gravity of the aliens’ planet. The Chinese planet. The planet where they lived and bred and sent out their scouts to come after you. So he stopped the opium—Colter didn’t need it and neither did he—and traded off a couple marble-sized balls of it to Cody at the pizza place in exchange for six hits of acid and a chintzy little baggie of what Cody said was coke but was really meth. No matter. Stay awake, get awake, and march, march all day long till your legs didn’t know they were attached to your body.
Weeks went by. Or he thought it was weeks. Maybe it was days, maybe it was months, but the important thing was he was in training and he could go like Colter when Colter walked those three hundred miles and he knew every trail in all these woods and forests and he didn’t even need trails because there was nobody in that whole poisoned corrupt police state of Mendo who knew the country better than him and never had been, not since the mountain men themselves. He was doing it, he was finally doing it, living free, and no, he’d said no to Sara that night, the night of the broken glass, because he didn’t want to be dependent, didn’t want to go soft on her baked lasagna and her big soft lips and big soft tits and all the rest of it. No, he’d said, no, get off me! And she did. She got off him. She gave up. He smashed glass and a whole lot more and she got back in her car with the Rasta dog and the taillights cut a stencil out of the night, red stencil, red stencil receding, Have a nice day, You too.