Monks walked to the washhouse, taking advantage of his aloneness to look around for possible routes out of here. Nothing seemed promising. The mist was so thick that the tops of the trees ringing the camp were lost in it.
Monks had enough experience in mountain hiking to know that even open terrain was likely to be treacherous. Trails petered out, branched bewilderingly, led into deadfall-choked ravines or unscalable chasms. Without a compass, in poor visibility, getting turned around was almost a given. And this terrain was anything but open. Then there were the other obstacles-starting with armed guards.
The only faint chance, he decided, would be to enlist an ally-someone who knew the turf.
And a weapon would come in mighty handy.
“The Indians thought white men were really weird,” said a voice in his ear.
Monks jerked away in shock and twisted to see Freeboot, standing close enough to touch him. Where did he come from? Monks hadn’t heard a whisper of his approach.
“For wanting to shit inside,” Freeboot finished. He was watching Monks benignly, thumbs hooked in his belt. “The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. So feel free to use the woods, Rasp.” Freeboot swept his hand in an expansive, offering gesture.
Then he focused on the side of Monks’s head, squinting in almost comic puzzlement.
“You decide to give yourself a haircut?” Freeboot said.
“I cut myself shaving,” Monks said.
Freeboot seemed amused by the comeback. In fact, Monks’s stubble of beard was bristling noticeably.
“I’m going to remind you that we’ve got to get your son out of here,” Monks said. “I’ll make you a deal. Let me take him, and-”
“You won’t say nothing about us, and nobody will know where he came from,” Freeboot interrupted. “Shrinkwrap already told me.”
“Well?”
“Sorry, dude. No can do, not right now. How are the supplies holding up?”
“It’s not about how the supplies are holding up,” Monks said. “It’s about how Mandrake’s holding up.”
“I thought he was getting better.”
“The insulin helped stabilize him, but that’s not going to last.”
“You gotta get a more positive attitude,” Freeboot said, shaking his head.
“I’m just telling you how it is.”
Freeboot’s eyes flared, in his characteristic instant transition from seeming tranquility to menace.
“You don’t tell me how it is. I tell you.”
Freeboot turned away suddenly, toward a wrist-thick dead branch jutting out from a pine tree, about the height of a basketball hoop. He was less than six feet tall but he leaped up, caught it with his right hand, and dangled there.
“I was a punk kid,” he yelled out. “Spent a lot of my life in jail. Dope, petty theft, finally pulled five years for armed robbery. I was looking at that third strike.”
He started chinning himself with the one arm. Monks counted ten before he paused again. He did not seem to be straining.
“Then I had a epiphany,” Freeboot bellowed. It was another term, like virtu, that didn’t come naturally from his lips. “I don’t mean like all the guys in the joint who get religion. I saw through this fucked-up society-what it did to me, and how stupid I was to let it. That’s when everything changed. I started to read, man. I started to think.”
He switched hands in midair and did ten more chin-ups with his left arm. Finished, he dropped to the ground, still breathing easily.
“I got my head together and I got my body in shape,” he said. “I got where I need to be.” He folded his arms and waited, his gaze steady on Monks.
It seemed that whatever challenge existed between them in Freeboot’s mind had reached the point where the line was drawn in the dirt.
“To start Revolution Number 9?” Monks said.
Freeboot nodded, looking pleased. “Right on. John Lennon saw this coming.” He spoke with the air of having privileged information. “That song was a message, kicking it off. That’s why he got killed. The deal about the guy being a fan is bullshit. It was the CIA that zapped him.”
“I don’t recall that there was any message in the song,” Monks said.
“That’s the point, man,” Freeboot said mysteriously. “He who hath ears, let him hear.”
So-the Bible, the Beatles, and conspiracy theories had joined the mix. It was impossible to take seriously-and yet, the more that Monks saw and heard, the scarier it got.
“I still don’t get why you care what I think,” Monks said.
Freeboot’s face took on a sly look. “I hear you got fucked over by the system yourself.”
Monks realized that Glenn must have told Freeboot about this, too-an incident from a dozen years earlier, when paramedics had killed an elderly woman by ignoring Monks’s radioed orders from a hospital ER. Then, to cover themselves, they had destroyed the recorded tape of the radio conversation. Monks was eventually vindicated, but by then he had lost his job, marriage, and a lot of his friends, and he had plunged into a rage-driven alcoholic depression that he almost hadn’t come out of.
Freeboot was right. He had been fucked over by the system.
“True enough,” Monks said.
“Cost you big, huh?”
“In a lot of ways.”
“So maybe you and me aren’t so far apart,” Freeboot said.
“Maybe,” Monks said. “Except that one of us is the other’s prisoner.”
“That could change. Let’s say I was thinking about giving you a chance to get on this bus.”
A crow cawed suddenly in the forest, a harsh grating anhhh-anhhh that seemed to tumble in on the wind. The big black shape swooped down out of the foggy treetops a second later. It landed near the edge of the clearing, folded its wings, and hopped to investigate something on the ground, pausing to caw again and glare around, warding off competition.
Monks kept his expression careful, as if appraising the offer.
“You don’t seem to think much of doctors,” he said.
“Oh, they got their uses, don’t get me wrong. What it comes down to is virtu, see?”
“No,” Monks said, “I don’t.”
Freeboot turned away, clasping his hands behind his back. He raised his face to the cloudy sky, as if searching for an answer. The pose seemed staged, like others that Monks had seen-and yet he had the sudden sense that this was a crucial moment-that Freeboot was about to impart something weighty, and that everything that happened from here on would depend on how it played out. Monks shifted uneasily and realized that he was getting cold. The fresh wet wind was picking up, tossing the mist-shrouded treetops.
“My son is ordained to be the root of my dynasty,” Freeboot said, still facing the sky. “I know Mandrake’s just a kid. I’m giving him some time, with the insulin. It’s like training wheels. But if you don’t take the training wheels away, he’s never going to learn to ride without them. He’s got to prove he’s got virtu.”
“You mean Mandrake has to pull himself out of his sickness,” Monks said.
“It’s not his fault, I understand that. It’s his mother. No way I could have known she had bad genes. But I can’t be passing my genes down through a kid who’s damaged goods, you know what I’m saying?”
A day ago, Monks would have been astounded. Now, this only filled in another piece of the puzzle. Bound up with Freeboot’s concept of himself as Nietzschean superman was a facile, distorted understanding of genetics.
Then, in an instant of electric clarity, Monks grasped the real reason that Freeboot refused to take the little boy to a hospital-the reason why a man who would eat the raw heart of a deer quailed in terror at being tainted by the urine of his own son. The issues of faith, the distortion of virtu into a mystical healing power, the need to be sure he could trust Monks, were all a sham. The truth stemmed from Freeboot’s diabetic uncle.