She did have a telephone, but he didn’t care about that. It was the same ugly sort of thing his grandmother’d had, no cellphone, cellphones didn’t work out here, but just a big black box of a thing that was so heavy you could have beaten an elephant to death with it. He didn’t want to alarm her so he didn’t jerk the wires out of the socket but just bent down and gently removed them, then straightened up and dodged past her with the phone and its trailing wires in one hand and the.22 in the other, and tossed the whole business out into the rain. (The phone, that is. Not the.22. The.22 he was going to need.) Then he pushed the door shut behind her — she still hadn’t moved, though the dog was really tapping up a storm now on the bare boards of the floor, all worked up about something.
“Listen,” he said, and the look on her face was breaking his heart because it was exactly the look his grandmother used to give him when she was pissed at him, “I really want to thank you for your hospitality. And I’m going to have to go soon. I’ve got, well, a lot”—and he waved one arm to show just how much he did have to do—“but with this rain and all, I think we might as well get comfortable, at least for a while. Don’t you?”
The time he drove the car through the fence at the playground he’d gone outside of himself for a moment there and knew what he’d done the minute the kids started scattering like rabbits across the dead grass and the scooped-out sandpit under the monkey bars, which were what stopped the car finally. The monkey bars were made of hollowed-out steel and they were cemented in place like a big metal beehive, and that was what set him off in the first place. To this day he couldn’t go past it without picturing the thing as some alien Chinese spacecraft just touched down and disgorging all these shrieking little half-sized hostiles who turned out to be kids, just kids. It was hard to explain, and he’d tried to explain it, tried hard, first to the pigs on the scene, then to the court-appointed lawyer and then to the judge and the shrink they assigned him. “Hey,” he said, “give me a break, it was an accident. And yeah, okay, I was on ’shrooms, all right? Is that a crime?” But it was. And he shouldn’t have said that or admitted it or whatever and he knew he’d fucked up the minute it was out of his mouth.
They sent him away for evaluation but he didn’t have a record and he was mostly clear while he was in the facility as they liked to call it euphemistically and they gave him meds, more meds, and released him to the custody of his parents and he went back to school and got bored and hung out with Cody and got high and higher and finally moved in with his grandmother and turned eighteen and began to get serious about the outdoors because he saw his destiny then as the first true mountain man of modern times. He read all the books. He worshipped Hugh Glass, who in some ways was as tough as Colter, a former pirate turned mountain man who had a run-in with a grizzly that left him mauled and broken and all but dead so that his so-called friends abandoned him and he had to crawl a hundred fifty miles and live on roots and lizards till he got his strength back and hunted them down and put the fear of God in them. He was going to call himself Glass at first, just Glass, but then Colter came into his life, and the name was so much cooler, and so was the man too.
The rest was history. And maybe someday they’d be writing him up in books. The scene at Piero’s was the one they’d have to embroider a bit because the fact was he’d seen some things there he didn’t like and got into it with some of the resident aliens and if truth be told got the living shit beat out of him to the tune of two fractured ribs, a chipped tooth and a seriously disarranged nose. He knew better now. Now he had his Norinco and his.22 and his Jungle King fourteen-inch hunting knife with the serrated edge on top, which was enough to discourage twenty hostiles. As for the thing at the Chinese consulate in S.F., that wasn’t even worth mentioning.
What brought it all up though was the old lady who looked more and more like his dead grandma as the afternoon fell off into evening and the rain kept up and he tipped back the bottle and just talked his heart out to her because that was what the peacefulness of her cabin and her presence too brought out in him. She was pissed, no doubt about that, and when he told her to just sit down and stop fussing she did it, but she didn’t like it. He was talking and she kept interrupting him, kept complaining, kept bitching, till he had to tell her, twice, to shut the fuck up. At some hour — it was still gray out and that was good because he had to find his way back — he thanked her one more time, gathered up his things and went on out to the door to flip the hood on her car and rip out the distributor cap before hunching his shoulders under the straps of his pack and humping into the woods, already wet through to the skin.
He woke shivering in his sleeping bag, which had somehow got wet too, despite the fact that he’d spread a camo tarp over the bunker and dug a runoff trench with the stainless-steel folding shovel he’d borrowed from the Boy Scouts. Permanently. The thing was, though, he was clear and knew right where he was, which was Camp 2, the one high above everybody and everything. He opened his eyes on the tarp, bellied now with accumulated water so that it looked like the bottom end of a brontosaur — or a dragon, Smaug the Impenetrable, scalier than shit — and heard the soft spatter of the dying rain in the trees, along with the crash and roar of the swollen creek coming out of the spring, and right away felt sick in his stomach. It wasn’t the shits. Or maybe it was, but only partially. He was hungover, that was what it was, drunk-sick, because he’d taken the old lady’s handle of vodka with him and never got around to building a fire for the beef stew or anything else and had just lain there under the tarp, listening to the rain and smelling the deep ferment of the woods while sucking on the bottle like some half-witted mewling little baby that didn’t know any better till his mind went blank and he passed out to wake up now, here, with the rain spattering and the spring roaring. Feeling like crap. Or no, warmed-over crap, crap that wasn’t even fresh but just heated up in a pan and served to all the shit-eaters of the world in some alien soup kitchen.
First thing he did was climb up over the lip of the bunker, which was three feet high, just exactly right for cover and defense both, and get down on all fours to puke, and then he dug out one of the little yellow giardia pills and washed it down with spring water because no one was going to tell him this spring was contaminated because if it was then the whole planet was just a big cesspool and the aliens could have it and welcome to it. For a long while he sat there wet and shivering on the near wall of the bunker, which was constructed of bark-on logs he’d dragged from a long ways out so as to cover his tracks if anyone should come upon the stumps. And no, it wasn’t anything like the forts he and Cody and Billy Julian built when they were like ten years old, just hammering anything together they could find, but the real deal, straight out of the U.S. Army Field Manual, Chapter 20: “Survival Movement in Hostile Areas,” most of which he could have quoted verbatim if somebody asked him, but really all you had to know was the acronym BLISS:
B — Blends in with the surroundings
L–Low in silhouette
I–Irregular in shape
S — Small in size
S — Secluded
Secluded, that was for sure, and you had to be secluded or they’d find you with their car doors slamming and their barking worked-up irate old man’s voices crowing, What do you think you’re doing in there? He never did get a chance to answer that day, whenever it was, a long time ago or maybe not, but if he’d had the chance he would have said, “I think I’m getting away from assholes like you.” That’s what he should have said and he was saying it now to the dripping trees and thinking about starting a little campfire to heat up a can of beef stew or just boil some water for freeze-dried chicken cashew curry, hungry now, hungry all over again since he’d just puked up a whole wad of nothing, not even chunks, just mucus, and he went around doing that, gathering up twigs that weren’t too sodden and some scraps of newspaper and then laying some of the bigger stuff he kept under his tarp across the top of it. He didn’t like showing smoke in hostile territory — a thing Colter would never have done — but he wanted something hot. And besides, the war really hadn’t started yet.