Maybe because nobody else could either. Anything went wrong within a hundred miles, even a flat tire, and Adam was to blame. Like with that whole debacle down at the Burnsides’. How quick they were to pin that on him, even with his mother — their friend, a woman who was just volunteering her time, for god’s sake — standing right there beside them. He shot the sable, that was what Gentian had said, not someone shot the sable, but he shot them. The way it turned out, though, Adam had nothing to do with it.
Of course, the cops were there within five minutes of Gentian’s putting in the call, swarming all over everything, their faces haggard and desperate because the system wasn’t supporting them, the system was breaking down right in front of their eyes and there was nothing they could do about it. They searched the edge of the field and came up with some shell casings and they had one of their butchers slice open these beautiful four-hundred-pound animals and dig the slugs out of them and they tramped hell out of the place but didn’t turn up Adam or anybody else. What they did discover, finally, and they took their sweet time about disclosing it too, was that two junior high kids had been fooling around with a deer rifle one of them found in his father’s gun safe, which had been left unlocked. They found something in the liquor cabinet too. And thought it would be a great idea — or rad, wasn’t that what they would say, a rad idea? — to go out and put holes in these beautiful animals that were fast disappearing from the earth.
She sat at the table to eat, idly paging through one of the magazines Christabel had left behind for her. Christa was a real hound for the gossip sheets—Us Weekly, In Touch, People, The Star—but basically they left her cold because it was just more of the same blindered attitude and slave mentality, as if whoever was dating whoever or buying what fabulous mansion had anything to do with the fact that the system was rotted all the way down to the stump. After dinner she went to her computer and read the latest about Adam, which was basically nothing piled on top of nothing, limiting herself to half an hour, and then she tried to read by the woodstove for a while, Kutya curled up at her feet, and finally turned on the idiot box to see if maybe there was an old movie on, one of the ones where people — Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, take your pick — made all these stirring declarations about democracy and standing up for the little man while the heroine flashed across the screen in all these killer outfits. It was crap, but high-minded crap, crap in layers she could peel away till she found something there that took her back to a simpler time, a time before the corporations had taken over and made a mockery of everything everybody said on the screen. A movie. It was just a movie. A way to pass the time in an empty house on a night when there was nothing going on and the world had been reduced to these four walls and this gently ticking woodstove and the dog, in his dreadlocks, on the rug at her feet.
The funny thing — or odd, odd was a better word — was that it was just like the last time, nothing moving, nothing shaking, but there was a feeling coming over her that she wasn’t alone. She looked over her shoulder. There was no one there. The doors were locked, she was sure of it, and if anyone should try to get in, Kutya, old as he was, would be up and barking his head off. She turned back to the movie, someone sitting by a deathbed on a ship, flimsy walls that were just a stage set and another movie playing through the porthole to give the illusion that the ship was moving and this was all real, and then the feeling stole over her again and she turned around and there he was.
He didn’t say hello or help me or I love you, but just stood there, like Adam, exactly like, only different because of what he’d done and where he’d been and how he’d been putting it to the cops for all these weeks now. Kutya didn’t stir until he spoke and even then he didn’t bark because he must have remembered him, without prejudice, because he was only a dog. Adam said, “Turn out the lights.”
She said his name, but she didn’t get up from the chair, though the dog had crossed the room to him, sniffing.
“Do it,” he said.
She got up then, but she didn’t go to him, instead working her way from lamp to lamp till the room was lit only by the TV. He looked older somehow, thinner, a lot thinner, and his clothes were ragged. She could smell the woods on him, the rot, as if he had been living in a cave. With the bats. And the lice. And the giardia parasites.
“Kill the TV too.”
“We’d be totally in the dark,” she said. “No, no way.” And then, standing poised there in front of the lamp over the desk even as the glow of it faded away, she said, “What are you doing here, anyway? Are you crazy? The cops are watching this place, don’t you realize that?”
He shrugged, dark in his dark clothes. There was a slash across his face, a welt there, fresh and livid, and the first thing she thought was that he’d been grazed by a bullet, but she saw that it wasn’t that at all, more likely a mishap in the dark as he was creeping up on the place. He just stood there, his hands hanging at his sides. And where was his gun, his rifle? There, propped against the wall in the hallway that led to the back room. He looked exhausted, looked beat — beaten, beaten down.
She began to fear for herself then — not out of fear of him because she didn’t care what he’d done, he would never hurt her, she was sure of it, but of the cops. If they found him here, if they found even the minutest scrap of evidence that he’d been here, then she was an accomplice and all the shit they’d brought down on her already was nothing compared to what was coming. “What do you want?” she demanded.
“I’m hungry.”
“I can’t give you food, I can’t give you anything — they’ll put me in jail.”
“Who?” he said, his voice thick with contempt. “The hostiles? The aliens?” And then he laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. “Not while I’m here they won’t.”
“You’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “They’ll kill you.”
He laughed again.
“I’m not kidding, Adam — they’ve been here. They tore the whole place apart. You’ve got to go. Right now. Now, hear me?”
“You won’t give me food?”
“No.”
“Colter would have got food,” he said. “Colter would have—”
She cut him off. “Enough with Colter. Colter has nothing to do with this. Colter’s dead. He’s been dead for like two hundred years and the world isn’t like that anymore, you know it, you of all people—”
“I want to sleep with you.”
They were ten feet apart and he didn’t come to her and she didn’t go to him. They were like statues, talking statues. That moment? That was the moment that tested her more than any other. And if she saw herself packing in a frenzy and sneaking him and Kutya into the car and making a run for Stateline or wherever — Canada — it was because her heart was breaking. She was his mother too. His mother and his lover. And they were going to kill him. “No,” she said. “You have to get out. Get out and never come back.”