Bill listened to the steady creak of the oarlocks as the bright bands of headlight receded on the bank. The current underneath made the subtlest throb, and Bill’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark so that he could discern the gloomy country around them, sandstone bluffs and hoodoos divided by the dusky gleam of the river.
“Don’t let me hit anything,” said Paul with a friendly trill in his voice.
“How far we goin’?”
“A long damn way.”
Sometime before sunup, waking from a restless nap, Bill said, “What’s the cargo?”
“It’s medicine, Pops. And it’s had a long trip: Afghanistan, Siberia, Alaska, the Yukon, Alberta, and next stop Montana. Once it hits the High Line, it goes all over, and a lot of sick folks are going to get well. It’ll be a new morning for a bunch of folks who right now are trying to remember their own names.”
At first light, Bill took over the rowing. A cold, black storm was forming to the west. Daybreak had given him infinite keenness, whereas Paul complained of backache from rowing. This, Bill wanted to tell him, was not going to be a problem.
When it was Paul’s turn to row again, he gave a great yawn and stood up clenching his fists behind his head, elbows out in a luxurious stretch. Rising silently behind him, Bill followed the outline of Paul’s face against the black current. Paul bent back from the waist, rotating this way and that, bent his head back for a long gasping yawn. With deceptive ease, Bill shoved him over the bow into the river.
Paul made a tremendous splash close alongside and surfaced with a shout at the shock of the cold. Bill stood with one of the oars and fended off his attempts to return to the boat.
“Let me in, Pops. Honest, I’m not mad at you!” Only Paul’s head showed among the shapes of floating ice. “I can help you get ahead!” The absurdity of this remark was not lost on its author, and he began to laugh.
Bill could hear the scream inside the laugh even before it dissolved into curses, and stood there, imperturbably trailing the oar by one hand, and sat down only when Paul’s head went under. Bill suddenly thought he was going to be sick. The boat began to drift unguided as he leaned on his knees with his head in his arms.
He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting when Paul’s voice brought him upright, not a word but a groan that came from deep within his chest.
Paul was crouched in the bow gasping, arms hanging at his sides, a length of pipe in one hand, his eyes fastened on Bill. As soon as his breath quieted, he said, “I need the clothes, Pops.”
He began to undress, throwing his clothes in a sodden heap onto the floor of the boat. Slowly, Bill took off his old stockman’s coat, folded it carefully and handed it to Paul, who gestured impatiently for the rest and put them on as fast as Bill could get them off, including the boots with the undershot heels that he could barely pull on. Sitting at the stern, the wind blowing snow against his bare body, Bill declined to shiver.
Paul took the oars and angled toward shore, crossing several streams of current before the boat ground softly onto the sand. “Here’s your stop,” he said, slumping at the oars. “I know you’re a religious person, Bill. Think of this as a rain check and curl up some place warm.”
Bill climbed out and waded barefoot through the thin sheet ice rimming the shore, then watched the boat move away from him, just a smudge on the silver of river and then not even that, only the river and its steady sound. He turned away from it and began to walk.
Watching him, Paul thought, I’m not a violent person like that old cowboy, I let God decide.
But he was not happy with these clothes. It was like being in a costume. He hated that everything had gotten so serious and his head hurt. He was comfortable with the idea of the old man walking into nowhere, though he felt this without great emotion because Bill had been, when you got right down to it, a worthy adversary. He knew how Bill saw him, had seen him from the beginning, and he had to hand it to him. At seventy-five, you’ve got to know something.
Whitelaw had thought of himself as tough, but he was crippled by his fanatical ideas about loyalty. Paul’s mother taught him long ago that we are acted upon by forces, period, and that imagining we go through life with those principles was just further evidence of the arrogance of man. Still, it was hard to avoid. Paul would deliver this load and take his reward down there to Evelyn and save the ranch, just as Whitelaw delivered all the bottles for half a million square miles and saved the ranch. Old Bill was heading into his last snowstorm to save the ranch. It’s as if, Paul thought, we’re all in some Gary Cooper movie and can’t get out! He hung on the oars and let his most genuine smile warm his face. Thank God I still have my sense of humor, he thought, then threw his old clothes into the river.
He was a new man.
The river wound on into a distance that was darkening under a winter storm, and Paul kept looking to the south for Devil’s Tower. But he was happy and continued to have thoughts like, I gotta find a better way to get to Great Falls! which helped to pass the time. At last his monument appeared, just a stack of rocks, faintly lit by what light got through scudding clouds, and the river seemed to slow, making a deep bend to the east; the lantern appeared on the bank.
The three men dragged the boat ashore and the first thing Majub said was “Where’s the old guy?” The cat-face man lifted the lantern high over the boat, then peered under a corner of the tarpaulin. The others watched Paul as he stood up and stretched.
“He fell overboard,” Paul said blandly.
“Fell overboard! Didn’t you try to save him?”
“Not too much.”
This delighted Majub. “Not too much?” Then he turned to the other two and repeated it in French—“Pas beaucoup!”—which produced laughter all around until cat-face commented grimly, “Putain de merde, eh!”
Turning back to Paul, Majub said, “Well, that is how it is, isn’t it? If you dance with the devil, you don’t want to step on his toes. Unless you’re tired of living.”
Removing the tarpaulin that covered the cargo revealed numerous small bricks wrapped in dark cloth and tied in bundles, and emitting the same sweet smell that had filled the rowboat. Paul helped move these to the truck, where they were covered by heavy bales of alfalfa and piled to the height of the cab’s rear window. The tarp from the boat went over the bales and was lashed down by its grommets to the stake pockets of the truck’s bed.
Majub looked closely at Paul and said, “Hey, your outfit is shrunk. You need to buy stuff in your own size.” Then he turned to his crew. “One more thing to do and we’re on our way.”
Paul and the other two followed a game trail into the brush and before long Paul got the feeling he was being escorted. He remembered what he’d learned in prison: Never let them see you sweat: That’s ignorant. Something was gnawing its way up his spine, and he knew he had to let it go right through and out. Peace was the goaclass="underline" Easy Street. But Paul knew that he wasn’t going to make it.
There was a small clearing you couldn’t discern from twenty feet away; in the middle was a deep, rectangular hole, and the shovel used to dig it sticking up beside it in the ground. “Seems like a funny place to put an outhouse,” Paul said. It was his last joke but much appreciated both in its original form and in translation.
The three men found his sobs almost deafening. Afterward, Majub said to his companions, “The music has stopped. Let us return to our seats.”
Bill didn’t know where to go so he walked straight away from the North Star. The air was so cold it felt like heat. He ought to be running, he told himself, but he was too old to run so instead he imagined that he was walking toward his babies, Evelyn and Natalie, all the while doubting he would make it very far. In fact, no straight line worked long before it came up against a sandstone ledge or the base of a hoodoo that made him turn toward the North Star, and with every turn that way there seemed to be less of him able to go in any direction. At the same time, he was growing comfortable and the earth around him more accepting. Night birds flew off between his legs, and when he walked past a snowy owl perched at eye level, it merely rotated its head with his passing; but when he’d gone another while into the darkness, he noticed the owl was not far behind him, easily seen because of its terrible whiteness. Several coyotes returning from a hunt came downhill, and he stepped aside to let them pass, thinking that if they had anything to say to him, surely they would’ve stopped. They must have known he had his own appointment to keep. He did think about having a word with the owl, to make it clear that he didn’t mind company but being followed was an abomination. Otherwise, he was enjoying the new lightness in his step. He felt, even as he fell more and more frequently, that his lightness made every sort of contact a delicacy. Keeping a watchful eye on that owl would be a good thing. This far away, he may be the only fellow that can tell us anything, even if he don’t want to just now. The North Star had got in behind a cloud — a really good cloud all white and tongue-shaped and lit up at its edges by stars — that Bill thought to follow until he couldn’t make out which way he was pointing and turned back to the owl for advice.