“This can’t be real, man. They quit making this kinda movie a long, long time ago. Your people just not get the message or something?”
“We got the message. Is he down there or not?”
“You’re a throwback, Rifken, you know that? You’re in the wrong century. You and him both. You’re driving us all nuts. Two hundred state troopers, seventy-five local cops, twenty of us from Windfield. And two crazy Indians. You and him. Do you hate us that much, Rifken? Is this part of some master plan?”
“Tell me. What did you see?”
For a long time Hargadon says nothing. Finally maneuvers the rifle sheath around to his front and lies back in the snow, gazing at distant stars. Then, without looking down, he draws a cartridge clip from inside his parka, testing the spring with one finger. Then he slips his rifle from its sheath, rolls onto his side and inserts the clip, sliding the bolt back and forth to chamber a round. And raises both lens covers from the telescopic sight. Then answers, “I saw the son of a bitch. Standing in the middle of a lake.”
Rifken waits, settling the image in his mind, trying to believe.
“I swear to God I could go to sleep right here. I could die happy this minute. Except, you know what?” Hargadon unhooks the binoculars and passes them to the older deputy. “Except then, Rifken, I’d never know what you crazy bastards did next.”
Rifken props the binoculars on a crust of snow and studies the circular scene below him on the dark side of the ridge. After an age he says, “Let’s go.”
Finally.
They begin their delicate dance, separating on the downslope, picking their way among dead trees and ragged stumps that look like tombstones.
Rifken wonders what kind of magic could kill an entire forest, leave it looking like the crumbling pillars of a lost civilization. And he worries about creaking snow and skeletal branches under the white powder, any silly sound that could crack the surface of things and set Robert James Henley to flight again. And instead of the brittle wind, he feels the cold emptiness inside of himself that, years ago, replaced the medicine pouch given to him by his grandfather. He makes a slow descent like a hunter, eyes intently upon a man who, just as the kid said, is standing in the middle of a shallow lake.
A man neither fishing nor swimming, but simply exhaling great triangular clouds of fear like a horse standing and stamping as wolves gather. Around a glistening secret lake so sharply cold and dense that the man seems to have been cut at the knees. Wisps of steam drifting above the snowmelt. So that when the figure finally begins to wade, it leaves a shimmering trail of silver like a ghost.
Forty yards upslope, among white riblike branches, Hargadon waits for something to happen, squinting through the telescopic sight of his match rifle, trying to hold steady in the cold, and wondering what is taking his partner so long. Thinking, man, this is crazy. This doesn’t make a lick of sense.
While Rifken watches, working through the legends, trying to remember the old stories, his lips even forming some of the words or maybe a prayer, answered only by snowflakes drifting down through the darkness, that touch the hard reflective water, darken, and disappear.
Then the wading man reaches shore, his coppery hand giving no ripple as it cups the water, and only the faintest lip-lip as he raises it dripping and draws three fingers across his cheek. And then nothing. The end of the spell perhaps, with Rifken rising out of his squat and taking a step forward, further scattering the moment with his flat Appalachian accent. “Robert-James, is that you?”
The man doesn’t even turn. “
Ataghi
.”
“It’s me and Hargadon.”
“Ah. I figured it might be.”
“You about ready now? It’s plumb cold, and we got a ways to walk.”
Now Hargadon comes carelessly down through cracked limbs and snowdrifts, cradling the rifle, fitting fingers back into his thick ski mittens. “You got that right.” Then to the prisoner, “Jeezus Christ, Henley, what were you doing in the middle of a lake? It’s a helluva night for froggin’, ain’t it?”
Rifken gives him a distant look, nods toward the east where the slope is gentle. They work their way back to the trail in zigzags, skirting the ravines and thickets, following the last of the animal tracks where they can. Within minutes Henley’s jeans have stiffened and turned gray-white below the thighs.
“He’s gonna be frostbit ’fore we get back to the truck, and I ain’t carrying his ass down no mountain—you might wanna think about that, Chief. We not gonna cuff him or anything?”
Rifken takes off his gloves, thrusts them at Henley. To Hargadon he says, “Son—it’s cold. It’s night. And we got a ways to go. Why don’t you just drop back a few steps and keep your finger on the trigger if that’d make it more official in your mind.”
“I might just do that. How about you, Henley? You mind if I keep the crosshairs on you for a while?”
“I don’t much care.”
“Well, what about your buddy Willie T? Way I figure it, today or tomorrow’s gotta be the day. Your very large neighbor on D Block might be nice and toasty warm about now. Does that have any appeal to you, Henley? It does to me.”
“Why are you talking like this?” says Rifken. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Jeezus, Rifken! You’re making me nervous. Kind of glad I’m the one with the gun.” The two Indians stop and together stare at Hargadon, who takes a step back. “I don’t like weirdness, man. And that’s what we got here. I mean, help me out, Henley, you do know that you’re an escaped murderer, don’t you? I’m not going to
wake up in a few minutes with the big headache and blankets on the floor, am I?”
Henley stares. Rifken turns and continues down the ridge, breaking trail.
“Okay then. But just tell me one thing, I mean if it don’t trouble you too much. What the hell you doing in the middle of a pond a freezing water?”
“I don’t remember,” says Henley.
2
They are four hours from the truck when it begins to sleet.
At first Hargadon thinks it might be a warm rain drifting up from the Gulf since he feels the familiar tapping on his shoulder and hears the patter. But there are no pocks in the snow, and the air has begun to hiss like dry aspen. Soon enough he notices tiny ice particles bouncing off the scope of his rifle and, after a time, more particles clinging to the smooth blue barrel. It takes another indefinite distance along a narrow ledge for the stomach-fear to hit him and for him to realize that he has heard this sound before—in the warm, safe summer—when you kick over a rock and discover a nest of rattlers. It’s a picture so vivid and a feeling so strong that for a moment Hargadon stares absurdly at the rocky outcroppings all around him, unmoving until a fresh gust reminds him that the only rattlers are safe below ground. He shakes the idea out of his mind, resheaths the rifle, and closes the gap between himself and Henley, looking back only once and noticing how the sleet gradually obscures the trail behind him. Then goes hurrying after the two silent figures ahead of him as they traverse a saddleback and cross two low ridges before heading back up toward gathering clouds.
“Hey, Rifken, you know what? There might be a bounty on this guy. I mean, I know we don’t get a real bounty but maybe a little recognition, you know, like some time off or something. A little palm trees and sand, that’s what I’m thinking about. Some place warm. Hell, I’d settle
for a cup of hot coffee right this minute, you know what I mean? You got any hot coffee up there? Hey! I’m talking to you.”
Rifken finds a gray-white boulder with enough of an overhang for the three of them, then waits for the two younger men to catch up. “I got part of a sandwich,” he says, “and a little sip of water,” ignoring whatever it is that Hargadon is saying as he slides against the lichen-crusted rock and settles into a tight tuck next to Henley. Instead, Rifken takes a long-barreled flashlight from his pack and studies the prisoner’s face. Touches the ears and cheek with his bare hand. “Give him your scarf,” he says to Hargadon.
“What?”
“Give him your scarf. And anything else you can spare.”
Hargadon unwinds the scarf and helps to wrap Henley’s ears and face. “Man, what the hell did any of us do to deserve this?”
“I’m sorry,” the prisoner says. “I didn’t expect to get this far.”
“Yeah? Well, have a drink of water—or have you already had enough of that for one night?”
“I’m fine. I’m not even cold.”
“We need to keep moving,” says Rifken.
“What we need is a damn fire, or a radio that works.”
“If we drop down into those trees, we won’t find any dry wood, and we’ll be lost in an hour. Best to stick to the high route.” He plays the flashlight out over the void and watches the light scatter among sparkling droplets of ice. “And even if your radio did work …, who do you think’s going to helicopter you out of here tonight?”
“Yeah, well, this ain’t the way we came in.”
“I know.”
“You
are
Cherokee, right?”
“Enough.”
“What I mean is, you know where we are. Right?”
“There.” Rifken nods toward a ragged silhouette that looks like the edge of the earth. “That’s where we’re headed.”
“Jesus Christ. This is crazy. The hunting part is over, man. We got him. Or haven’t you figured that out yet?”
“Look, you’ve done all right so far. You got nothing to be ashamed of.”
“But what?”
“But we’ve got a rough spell ahead. And a few hours yet before dawn.”
Hargadon is surprised at how difficult it is to stand. He has to leverage himself to his feet and pull upright using handholds in the rock. As he rubs circulation back into legs, he notices that Henley has not moved, that he is still propped against a pillowlike stone with his feet already covered by a filmy blanket of sleet and snow. The white scarf has come loose from his head and fallen about his neck so that it looks casual, like a proper scarf, with one end draped over his shoulder and the other hanging down like a tie. His breathing is low and regular, like a man about to fall asleep, and his arms lie limp, not clenched against the cold. From the thigh down, his jeans are black ice.
Rifken kneels and begins to massage him awake. “Help me get him up.”
“What’s wrong?”
They rewrap the scarf and get Henley moving toward the black rocks ahead. Then, after they have climbed another hundred feet, Rifken answers. “I think he’s dying.”
And gradually, like the cold night itself that seems to be working its way through the layers and folds of his clothing, a realization reaches Hargadon. That they are not headed back toward the truck. That the two hundred state troopers and seventy-five local police and eighteen deputized guards from Windfield are somewhere safe and warm in a world far below. And that what Rifken really means is that all three of them are dying. Like it was part of a plan.
In his mind Hargadon drifts away from the trail trying to make sense of what is happening. It’s hard work. The thinking is as slow as walking.
But finally it comes to him. He closes his eyes and backtracks over the past several hours, reading the signs and at last making his way to a half-formed idea. That Rifken is doing this on purpose. That he’s going to let them die, the three of them, rather than take Henley back. Like it was some kind of Indian thing. It’s an idea that grows more obvious and definite the closer he gets to it. Until finally Hargadon can open his eyes and look down at his own legs, coated with a powdery snow like pollen on a bee, and realize that he’s following two dead men into oblivion. It’s hard to think otherwise. The cold is like a weight pulling him down. He tries to blink his way back to consciousness, but the eyelids creak up and down without revealing any fork in the trail. Thinking Rifken will kill us if I don’t do something. It’s such an elegant answer to the riddling night that Hargadon can almost admire the way Rifken glides through the snow without lifting his feet. Or leaving tracks. As if he’s skiing an inch or two below the surface. So that there is only a ruffled wake where he has gone and, after a few minutes, hardly a hint that he has passed this way at all.
3
It’s still dark when they stop to rest again, this time beside the bank of a frozen stream where the water has been caught spurting from the mountain. The layers of ice look like a stepwork of nickels and quarters, but there is also a dry horseshoe of rock where Hargadon scrapes together some leaves and works to light a fire. With his last match he produces a minute’s worth of smoke and despair. And then silence—a black and bottomless crevasse from which he contemplates Rifken who, suddenly and inexplicably, has turned talkative.
“Pure mountain honey,” he says. “You can’t go a hundred yards along any of those roads down there without seeing a sign that says pure mountain honey. That’s what I’d give a million dollars for right now.”
They are closer to the treeline now, the soggy pine needles and all the useless lumber of a national forest. From where they sit the trees
swell up like an angry ocean, and Hargadon looks upon the sloping branches like a man who has been given his choice of ways to die, withdrawing deeper and deeper into his own thoughts. Verifying that everything Rifken has done for the past hour has been insane—massaging Henley like a fallen horse, stuffing frozen moss into the man’s shirt, babbling about pure mountain honey. It’s enough to make Hargadon shift his weight and work the rifle around to his side, casually, without seeming to think about the still-chambered round. Or the possibility of getting off two shots rather than just one.
“We need fuel more than we need fire, kid. How do you think the Eskimos do it? How do you think the ancestors did it? Here, help me get his boots off.”
Hargadon narrows his eyes and retreats further into the abyss, until soon Rifken is only a speck and Henley has become one of the ageless boulders lying scattered on the side of the mountain. And there is a certain peace, though from very far away he can still hear Rifken’s patter, a low, dangerous chant that tempts him back out into the frozen night, away from the warm place he has found, where he can listen without moving.