He got into the car, inserted the key, turned over the engine.
“Then,” she said, “we go back home.” She paused, leaning in the window to reach out and touch him on the shoulder — she was always touching him, she loved to touch him, to put her imprint on him, her skin to his.
“Cool,” he said.
And then she was striding briskly back up the walk, pressing the glass cylinder close to her body on the side away from the hospital with its lights and windows and the patients in their beds there who might or might not be looking out on the parking lot. Anyone seeing her would assume she was going to her car or heading back into the emergency room because she’d just gone out for a breath of air — or a smoke, a verboten smoke — and here was the cruiser, still running, the light atop it still revolving, and she was right there, her fingers working at the metal flap of the gas tank, thinking it must be locked, they’d have to keep it locked or everybody’d be doing this all day long, the shits, the pathetic wasteful cruel inhuman shits, only to find that it was true — it was locked and it wouldn’t give. A quick look around: nothing, nobody. The gumball machine chopped up the light. Her heart was pounding. In the next moment she slipped around to the driver’s side — gliding, flowing as if she were made of silk — cracked the door and reached in to run her hand over the dash, and where was it, where was the release? On the floor. Yes, on the floor. Then she had it and it gave and she was back around the car again — thirty seconds, that was all it took. And every gurgling ounce of the sugar water, every drop, went home, right into the greedy gullet of that cage on wheels, that tool of the oppressors that was a tool no more.
Let them suck on that. See how they liked it.
Adam was all right behind the wheel — no Dale Earnhardt, but fine just the same. He kept the car between the lines and he didn’t go over the speed limit though he couldn’t seem to stop laughing. “Just wait,” he kept saying, snorting with laughter, “just wait till they, what, go to nail somebody, and the engine seizes up on them. That was great. That was genius.”
It was. It was great. She’d gotten her little bit back and she’d got Adam back too. They went home and went to bed and he couldn’t get enough of her, hard and hot and sweating in the dark, her man, her beautiful man. He’d missed her. And he didn’t have to tell her, not in words, because she could feel it, oh, blessed lord, yes, feel it all night long.
But then — and she wasn’t surprised or at least that’s what she told herself — she woke to daylight poking through the blinds and the bed was empty and the house too. She didn’t have to go out into the hallway and look to see if his pack was there or run barefoot out the back door to watch for him in the field across the way. He was gone and she knew it, vanished like smoke, human smoke, as if he wasn’t made of flesh at all. But he was, oh yes — flesh and bone and hard unyielding muscle — and she knew that better than anybody. He should have stayed — she’d wanted him to and would have told him as much if she’d had the chance — but he had his own agenda, doing whatever it was he did out there in the woods.
It wasn’t ideal, far from it. She’d rather have him there, rather be making coffee for two instead of one — and eggs and toast and whatever else he wanted. The house felt empty without him, though he’d been in it no more than what, twelve, thirteen hours? It saddened her. Standing at the counter in the kitchen that still vibrated with the aura of him, she poured herself a cup of coffee and gazed out the window to where a hummingbird no bigger than her thumb was sucking sugar water from the feeder through the miniature syringe of its bill, a creature innocent of cops, internal combustion engines, wages, taxes, slavery. A free bird, a free bird on the land. She blew on her coffee to cool it and told herself to be patient — one way or the other he’d get tired of it out there and then he’d be back, she was sure of it.
Just give him time.
PART IX The Plantation
27
COLTER DIDN’T HAVE THE shits. They probably didn’t even have giardia back then, let alone the little yellow 400 mg metronidazole tablets they gave you to cure it. What they did have was hostiles, thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands, though the white race had done their best to bring those numbers down, what with smallpox and gonorrhea and rum, whiskey, vodka and gin. But here they were, the Blackfeet, terminally furious and flinging Potts’ bloody genitalia at him, and the only issue was not if but how they were going to put him to death. Braves kept lurching up to him, right in his face, tomahawks drawn, then jerking back again, as if to rattle him, but he kept calm because he saw that some of the higher-ranking ones, the chiefs, had withdrawn a ways to sit around in a circle and think things through. Why be hasty? They had all day, all night, and if he lasted that long, the day after that. He felt his heart sink, though he wouldn’t let his face show it. After a while the ululations dropped off and the young braves, the hotheads, held back in deference to their elders, but you could see they were aching for the moment they’d be set free — and gloating too over the prospect of what mold of sport the elders were devising for them.
Naked, with Potts’ blood drying on his chest and shoulders, Colter stood rigid, trying to focus his mind. He could make out something of what the elders were saying — some were for the death of a thousand slits, others for making a target out of him so they could improve their aim the way they had with Potts, maybe even take wagers as to which of them could drill him the closest without killing him outright. He had enough of their language to get a sense of all this, but not enough to plead his case — if he was doing anything at that moment it was trying to form the Blackfoot words in his head, when only the language of their enemies, the Crows, or Kee-kat-sa, as they called themselves, would rise up out of the depths of his brain, which was, understandably, under a whole lot of stress at the moment.
Finally, one of the chiefs — tall, bleak-faced, with reddened mucousy eyes and skin jerked by the wind and sun — pushed himself up and ambled over to stand face-to-face with him, practically nose-to-nose. Colter could smell him, the tobacco he sucked through his pipe, the sweat of his horse, the dried buffalo meat and pounded meal he’d had for breakfast. They stood like that for a long moment, Colter naked and vulnerable and wanting only to sprout wings and fly on out of there, the hardest thing to keep your back straight and not give in to the impulse to protect your gut — a reflex, really — and guard against a sneak blow that would double you up and leave you gasping in the dirt. “Are you a fast runner?” the chief asked, but Colter didn’t understand him, so after a long moment, the chief repeated himself and he got the gist of it. This was hope. A particle of it, anyway. He’d heard of similar situations, in which a tribe would let their captive run for his life so they could have the sport of the chase, like fox and hounds, except that the ground was festooned with prickly pear and the fox had no moccasins to protect his feet and even if he did there was nowhere to escape to or even hide in all that flat deserted plain.
And what did Colter say, in his accent that must have been a kind of insult in itself? “Not really.”