Quinn? Could it be? Could it possibly be?
"Drink up, Bob," one of the stumpmen says, and then they're pushing back their barstools, patting their pockets for keys, groaning, wheezing, shuffling. "Got to be going, so long, Vince, see you later."
I'm sitting there rapt, watching the spectacle of the tomato-red door of the van sliding back automatically and a mechanical device lowering a wheelchair from high inside it, when Andrea takes my arm. "We've got to be going too, Ty — I have no idea what kind of shape the cabin is going to be in-sheets, bedding, the basics. We could be in for a disappointment — and a lot of work too. And I don't feature sleeping in the car tonight, uh-uh, no way, absolutely not." She's standing there now, right beside me, the handbag thrown over one shoulder. "I'm just going to use the ladies'-"
Quinn was old thirty-five years ago. A little monkey-man with a dried-up face and a head no bigger than a coconut, the snooping furtive eyes, every walking cell of him preserved in alcohol. He must be ninety, ninety-five. And there he is, outside the window, lowering himself gingerly into the chair and flicking the remote with a clawlike finger as the tomato-red door slides shut behind him. And now the chair is moving and the front door of the bar swings open, and in he comes.
There is no guilt in me, not a shred of it-I'm all done with that. But I'm curious, I am, and maybe a bit angry too. Or vengeful, I suppose. I feel big, I feel notorious all over again, Tyrone 0 'Shaughnessy Tierwater, Eco-Avenger, the Phantom of California, Human Hyena. "Hi," I say, leaning down to smile in his face as the motorized chair pulls him past me, "how they hangin'?"
Nothing. He's as drawn down and shriveled as a shrunken head preserved in salt with the body still attached, a little man of mismatched parts suspended in the gleaming steel and burnished aluminum of the wheelchair. "Vincent," he calls out, and his voice is like the creaking of an old barn door, "I'll have the usual!'
A bottle of scotch-real scotch, Dewar's, an antique treasure-magically appears, and we both watch as the bartender removes a cocktail glass from the rack over his head, measures out a generous pour and adds a splash of water. Then he comes out from behind the bar, all the way round, and inserts the glass carefully between the old insurance man's crabbed fingers_ A shaky ride to the lips, and Quinn takes half the drink in a gulp, then cradles the glass in his lap and turns his battered old face to me. "So, Mr. New Guy," he says, "you're all so friendly with that big smile stuck on your face — but don't I know you from someplace?"
I'm not going to make this easy for him. I just shrug, but I see Andrea out of the corner of my eye, crossing the room in her sensible flats, blusher and lipstick newly applied.
It takes him a minute, the convolutions of a brain even older than the head it's in, and it takes Andrea's appearance at my side too, but then his eyes narrow and he says, "I do know you. I know just who you are."
Andrea tries on a smile. She has no idea what's happening here.
He makes as if to lift the drink to his lips again, a stalled grin on his face, a glint of calculation flashing deep in his clouded eyes. His nose-he's fooling with his nose, working a finger up under the flange, and then he fumbles around in his pocket for a handkerchief and brings it to his face. We watch in silence as he rotates his head on the unsteady prop of his neck and gives his nose a long deliberate cleansing, and then we watch him fold the handkerchief up and carefully replace it in his pocket as if we've never seen anything like it. "Tell me," he says then, "now that all the years-" And he pauses, as if he's lost his train of thought, but it's only a game, and I can see he's enjoying himself. But so am I. So am I. "What I wanted to say is, you did set that fire, didn't you? And destroy all that equipment? Hm? Didn't you?"
The bartender blinks as if he's just wakened from a dream. Andrea puts a hand on my arm. "Just to satisfy an old man's curiosity," Quinn wheezes.
I lean in close, Andrea holding tight to me, the bartender dumped over the rail of the bar like a sack of grain, and take some time with my enunciation and the complications of my dental enhancements. "Yes," I say, as clearly as I can, so there'll be no mistake about it, "I set the fire and demolished it all, and you know what? I'd do it again. Gladly."
Oh, the look. He's the wise man of the ages, the quizmaster, the oracle in his cave. His dewlaps are trembling and the drink, forgotten, is canted dangerously in his lap. "And what did you accomplish? Look around you-just look around you and answer me that."
This is it, the point we've been working toward, the point of it all, through how many years and how many losses I can't begin to count, and the answer is on my lips like a fleck of something so rank and acidic you just have to spit it out: "Nothing," I say. "Absolutely nothing."
Epilogue The Sierra Nevada, June-July 2026 There's a phrase I've always liked- "Not without trepidation," as in "Not without trepidation, they turn the corner onto what used to be Pine Street and catch their first glimpse of the staved-in, stripped-down and gutted shack in which they will have to measure out the remainder of their young-old lives." I'm not going to use that phrase here, though it's on my lips as the sun-blasted roof of Ratchiss' place, obscured by what looks like the work of a dozen forty-ton beavers, comes into view. There are so many trees down we can't actually get to the house, though in some distant era somebody came by with a chainsaw and cut a crude one-lane gap into the street itself — and I can see that person, a vigorous young-old man like me, bearded maybe, in a lumberjack's shirt with a lumberjack's red suspenders holding up his dirt-blackened jeans, and I can see that person giving up in despair as one storm climbs atop another and flings down hundred — and — fifty-foot trees as if they were hollow cane.
I stop the car, get a firm grip on Petunia's leash and step out into the late-afternoon glare of the sun. The air isn't so thick here or so hot, and there's a smell wrapped up in it that brings me back, something indefinable and austere, a smell of the duff, aspen shoots, the first unfolding wildflowers — or meat bees, maybe that's it: meat bees swarming over some dead thing buried out there under the tangle of downed trees. All right. But at least Petunia is no problem-she comes out limp as a rag, blinking her canine eyes, and no, Petunia, this is not Patagonia and these are not the pampas-while Andrea, rested and lit up with sake, slams the passenger's-side door with real vigor, her chin thrust forward, a look I know only too well burning in her own eyes. Right in front of us, five feet from the bumper of the car, is a fallen tree so big around she has to go up on tiptoe to see over it. "It doesn't look too bad," she says. "Considering."
"Considering what?" I counter to the accompaniment of Petunia's urine sizzling on the pavement. "The end of the world? Collapse of the biosphere? Ruination of the forest and everything that lives in it?"
"There's a tree down over the roof, I can see that from here — and it looks like the chimney's gone, or half of it. And the windows. But it looks like-yes, somebody's been here to board them up, most of them anyway." She turns to me, flush with this latest triumph of her surgically assisted vision, and I wonder if I shouldn't start calling her Hawkeye. "You think-?"
"Mag," I say. "Or Mug."
And that's something to contemplate-maybe Mag is in there now, feasting on memories of savannas trodden and gemsbok speared, in no way receptive to our invading his living space. Or no, no, not Mag-he's in a condo someplace, planted in front of the screen in his polo shirt and Dockers, like everybody else. From what I can tell through the refracted lens of a good concentrated squint, the place doesn't look occupied, except maybe by carpenter ants and fence lizards. But there's one way to find out, and Andrea, always a step ahead of me, already has the ax in her hand.