It would not stop pounding. They would be back. The deer was just a toy. As soon as it leapt into the trees out of sight, they would be back. Since there had been something hidden in those bushes by the pool, then there might be something underneath this fallen tree. He had to get out fast.
But he had to wait until the copter's tail was pointed toward him, the men watching straight ahead at the deer they were chasing. He strained waiting, and finally he could wait no more, rolling out from under the branches, racing where the grass was shortest and would not leave a trail. He was nearing the bushes and rocks. Too soon the noise of the copter changed, roaring higher. The deer had made it to the woods. The copter was circling back. Frantic, he ran stooped toward the cover of the boulders, tumbling under the bushes, bracing himself to shoot if they had seen him make his run.
Ca-rack! Ca-rack! the first shot as the copter came upon the fallen pine tree, the second as it hovered over, lingering, slowly pivoting to continue up the draw. Leaving him. 'This is the police,' the voice was booming again. 'You don't have a chance, give up. Anyone in these woods. A dangerous fugitive may be near you. Show yourselves. Wave if you've seen one young man alone.' A mouthful of undigested carrots and chicken bolted sourly up from his stomach, and he spat it on the grass, the bitterness soaking into his tongue. This was the narrow end of the draw. Cliffs on both sides closed in farther up, and weak from having vomited, be watched through the bushes as the copter swept over the trees that way and then rose up, skirted the top of a cliff, and settled into the next draw, its roar slowly dying away, the voice from the loudspeaker going muffled.
He could not stand, his legs were trembling too much. Because he was trembling, he trembled even more: the helicopter should not have frightened him so. In the war he had been through action far worse than this, and had come out of it badly shaken, but never so extreme that he could not make his body work. His skin was clammy, and he needed to drink, but the pool among the bushes was green and stagnant, and it would make him sicker than he was.
You've been away from fighting too long, that's all, he told himself. You're out of condition is all. You'll get used to it in a while.
Sure, he thought. That has to be the answer.
Gripping a boulder, he forced himself to stand, slowly, and head above the bushes, he turned to see if anyone was near. Satisfied, he leaned against the boulder, his legs yet unsteady, and brushed pine needles from the firing mechanism of his rifle. Regardless of anything, he had to keep his weapon in repair. The smell of the kerosene he had doused on his clothes was gone, in its place the faint acrid smell of turpentine that the pine tree had left on him. It mixed with the bitterness in his mouth, and he thought he might be sick again.
At first he was not sure he heard correctly: a wind blew up and dispersed the sound. Then the air was still and he definitely heard them, the first dim echoes of dogs barking behind him down at the wide end of the draw. A new tremor swept through his legs. He swung to his right where the grass sloped up to rocks and scattered trees and after that a cliff, and bracing his leg muscles, he ran.
5
The kid did not have much headstart, Teasle was figuring, as he and his men pressed forward through the trees and underbrush after the dogs. The kid had broken out of jail at six-thirty, it had got dark at eight-thirty, and he could not have gone far in these hills at night, an hour, possibly two all told. He would have started with the sun, the same as themselves, so that made him altogether just four hours ahead. But other things considered, he was probably only two, and maybe even less: he was naked and that would slow him down; he didn't know this country, so he would now and then head up steep gullies and into hollows that did not have an exit, and that would lose him more time coming out to find another way. Plus he had no food, and that would tire him, slow him more, narrow the distance.
'Less than two hours ahead of us for certain,' Orval said, running. 'He can't be more than one. Look at these dogs. His scent is so fresh they don't even have to nose the ground.'
Orval was in front of Teasle and the others, racing with the dogs, his arm taut like an extension of their master leash he held, and Teasle was climbing, scrambling through bushes, trying to keep up with him. In a way, it was funny, a seventy-two-year-old man setting the pace, running them all into the ground. But then Orval jogged five miles each morning, smoked only four cigarettes a day and never drank, while he himself smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes, drank beer by the six-pack and had not exercised in years. It was something just to be able to keep pace with Orval as much as he was. He was breathing so deeply and rapidly that his lungs were burning, he had the stab of shinsplints in his legs, but at least he was not running as awkwardly as at the start. He had been a boxer in the Marines, and they had taught him how to run to train. His body was long out of practice though, and he was having to learn over again a smooth quick comfortable stride, leaning a little forward, letting the pull of his body force his legs to push him on so he would not fall. Gradually he was getting it, running faster, easier, his pain diminishing, a pleasure of exertion swelling up inside him.
He had last felt like this five years ago, when he came back from Louisville as Madison's new police chief. The town had not changed much, yet it had all looked different. The old brick house he had grown up in, the tree in his backyard where his father had rigged a swing, the gravestones of his parents — in the years he had been away, his memory of them had gone flat and colorless as in black and white photographs. But now they had length and depth, and they were green and brown and red, and the tombstones purple marble. He had not believed seeing the graves again would depress his return that greatly. The baby girl, a fetus really, in a plastic bag by his mother's feet in her coffin. Both bodies long since corrupted into dust. All because she was a Catholic. The fetus had been poisoning her, the Church had refused an abortion, so of course she had obeyed and died and the baby with her. That had been when he was ten, and he had not understood why his father had stopped going to church after that. His father, trying to be a mother as well then, showing him about guns and fish, how to darn his own socks and cook for himself, how to clean house and wash clothes, making him independent, almost as if the man had foreseen his gunshot death in the woods three years later. Then Orval to raise him, then Korea, and Louisville, and then at age thirty-five, he was home again.
Except that it was no more home, just the place where he had grown up, and that first day back, touring the once familiar places only made him realize that he had already lived close to half his life. He was sorry he had come, almost phoned Louisville to see if he could return to work there. Finally just before it closed, he went to a real estate office, and that night he and an agent set out to look at places for sale or rent. But all the houses and apartments he saw were still being lived in, and he could not see himself alone in any of them. The agent gave him a book of listings with photographs to study before he slept, and flipping through it in his small hotel room, he came upon the place he needed: a summer camphouse in the hills near town, with a stream in front, a wooden bridge, and a thick slope of trees in back. The windows were smashed; the roof sagged and the front porch was collapsed; the paint was chipped and peeling; the shutters were split and dangling.