Cowboy Angels (17 page)

The next day, a party of whooping warriors brought a new prisoner into the camp, a sturdy Native American whose wrists were fastened to a line tied to the saddle of one of his captors. He had a gunshot wound in his shoulder but walked with straight-backed dignity, looking neither right nor left at the people who jeered and spat at him.

Jack Walker questioned the prisoner in front of Stone. He wanted to know where the man had come from, how many people lived there, how many had been born that year, how many had died, what crops they grew, what they had salvaged from the ruins of the old towns, but the man refused to answer any of the questions, saying only that he was the brother of one of the guides who had been leading Stone into the mountains, that he’d sworn to revenge his brother’s death and had been tracking Walker’s men when they had caught him. When it was clear that the man wasn’t going to give up any useful information, Walker handed him over to the mob. They stripped him naked and hung him by his heels over a fire and slowly roasted him by lowering him inch by inch toward the hot coals. The prisoner began to scream and thrash. A vile stink of burnt hair and roasting flesh filled the air. Black blood burst from his ears and nostrils.

Stone begged Walker to give the man a clean death. At first, the guerrilla leader feigned indifference to both Stone’s pleas and the prisoner’s screams, but after a few minutes he signalled to the youngest of his warriors and told him to finish it. The teenager strolled across the cave, pushed through the crowd around the fire, and cut the prisoner’s throat with a single stroke.

‘I gave him release because he told the truth and he was on an honourable quest,’ Walker said to Stone. ‘Also, if he did not come here alone, as he claimed, his screams would have brought his friends to us by now. Still, we will have to move on from here at first light. If he could find us, so could others. It will delay your martyrdom, my friend, but only by a day or so.’

Stone tried once more to convince the young guerrilla leader that he had started a war he could not win, that instead of fighting against the new government he should become part of it and help shape the new America.

‘This isn’t about power,’ Walker said. ‘This is about ideas. I have studied your people. I have listened to their propaganda broadcasts and read the pamphlets they hand out to settlers. I know that they want to spread the same idea through all the different Americas, to impose a single way of life and obliterate everything else in the name of freedom. Have you never thought how wrong that is? Ideas are like trees. They are shaped by the place where they take root. And they can only take root in the right kind of place, the right kind of soil. Everywhere else, they wither and die.’

‘Frankly, I don’t think much of your ideas. They mostly involve murdering people to prove yourself right.’

Walker’s smile showed all his teeth. ‘Is it murder when the wolves take down a deer?’

‘Is that how you see yourself? As a wolf?’

Behind Walker, the old woman stirred and said in a voice dry as dust, ‘He is the will of the land.’

 

That night, Tom Waverly launched his attack on the guerrillas’ camp.

The emplacement where guards kept watch over the entrance to the canyon went up in a showy fireball fuelled by plastic explosive and jellied gasoline, charges planted above the long, wide ledge brought a dusty avalanche crashing down, and smaller bombs set fire to trees and dry brush. Inside the roofless room where he’d been confined for the night, Stone was jerked awake by the explosions, felt the bare rock shake beneath him, saw light cast by burning trees flicker across raw rock slabs high overhead. The guard who’d been sitting outside the entrance was gone. Stone sat up, palming the sliver of flint he’d spent most of last night flaking to a razor edge. He was sawing at the rawhide that pinioned his wrists behind him when Jack Walker strode into the room.

He kicked Stone in the chest and knocked him flat, pointed a Colt revolver at him and said, ‘Tell me who it is and I’ll give you a quick death.’

Stone felt rawhide part beneath him. He coughed as if winded, mouthed nonsense words. Walker took the bait. He knelt beside Stone, grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled his head up and repeated the question, and Stone rolled sideways and punched the sliver of flint into the soft flesh under the hinge of the boy’s jaw, severing the carotid artery. The gun went off, hot gases scalding Stone’s cheek as the shot sparked off the floor an inch from his face. He caught Walker’s wrists and threw him onto his back and straddled him, but the boy managed to get off another shot. The round hit Stone in the abdomen, just above the crest of his left hip bone, drilled through fat and muscle, clipped the descending flexure of his large intestine, exited beneath his left kidney, and lodged in the pocket of his quilted jacket, where he found it much later, after he’d been discharged from hospital back in the Real.

At first, Stone didn’t know that he’d been shot. Something kicked him hard in the belly and knocked him onto his back, and then the old woman’s crow was smashing its wings in his face. He cuffed it away, but it came for him again in a fierce frantic flurry, its naked feet clawing his chest as it pecked at his fingers and face, trying for his eyes. Stone managed to catch hold of it with both hands and it gave a hoarse cry and tried to break free, but he tightened his grip on its body with his left hand and closed his right around its head and snapping beak, and yanked and twisted until its neck broke.

When he struggled to his feet, he felt a burning wire pull through his belly and knew that he was badly hurt. Jack Walker lay in a spreading pool of his own blood, his legs twitching as he bled out. Wild bursts of gunfire hammered outside. People shouted to each other. A man was laughing hysterically. A child was crying out for its mother. And the old woman was suddenly standing in the doorway, as if she’d coagulated from firelight and shadow. She clutched a broad-bladed hunting knife in both hands, her blind, scarred face tilting left and right like an owl’s. When Stone took a step toward her, she began to scream and slash wildly at the air, and he snatched up Jack Walker’s Colt revolver and shot her dead.

Men and women were crouched behind low walls and fallen rubble along the edge of the cave, firing into smoke boiling up from the box canyon. They turned one by one as Stone walked between them with the body of Jack Walker limp in his arms, the hot wire of his wound twisting in his belly with each step, his shirt wet with blood and sticking and unsticking to his skin, blood running down his left leg into his boot.

A profound silence hung at his back as he staggered down the steep path. He made it past the curved overhang and then he stumbled and fell to his knees. He set Jack Walker’s body on the ground and discovered that he was too weak to get up. Tom Waverly darted from cover then, and dragged him through halls of fire and smoke to the spot where he’d tethered two horses.

‘He’d come in with the local guy Walker’s people had captured,’ Stone told Linda Waverly. ‘As far as the Company was concerned, I was already dead, so he couldn’t get any official support for my rescue. Only the brother of one my guides volunteered to help him. It took them two days to follow the trail left by the guerrillas who’d caught me. They were scouting the perimeter of the camp when the brother was caught by one of the patrols. Tom sat tight, listening to him being tortured and waiting for the cover of darkness, so that he could set up his little package of surprises. He triggered the charges he’d planted and used the confusion to pick off the perimeter guards, and he was getting ready to go in and kill everyone else when I walked out.’

Stone didn’t tell her that Tom had wanted to call in air support to clean out the nest of guerrillas, or that he’d persuaded Tom to spare them. Most disappeared into the mountains; the rest were evacuated to Las Vegas and were swallowed up by the refugee camps. It was possible that some of them were recruited into the army, like so many young men in post-nuclear sheaves, and were sent through the mirror to fight for truth, justice, and the American way in other sheaves. In any case, without their leader, the guerrillas quickly abandoned their campaign.

Jack Walker had been wrong. Ideas are not woven into the fabric of the world: they live only in the minds of men, and when men die, their ideas die too. But Stone never forgot what the boy had said about the immorality of obliterating the variety of all the different Americas in the name of freedom, and that was why he was relieved, really, when he was called to testify in front of the Church Committee. When, for the first time since he had been recruited into Special Operations, he could speak the truth about what he had done.

 

Linda dozed as the road descended through forested hills in lazy switchbacks. She’d had a hard time of it, Stone thought. She must have found it impossible to sleep the past few days, worrying about whether her father would be brought in alive or dead, she’d been being briefed and bugged at first light this morning, and then he’d pulled the switch on her . . . But she’d hung in there. She was inexperienced and too ready to defer to the authority of her superiors, but she was determined to do the right thing by her father.

Stone drove past fields and patches of trees, past houses with porches raised three feet off the ground - snow would be deep here, all through the winter. At the edge of a small town, he passed a sign that stated, with touching precision,
Pottersville, Pop.1748
.

White clapboard houses, a green, the white spire of a Colonial church rising behind a row of young maples that had already turned, their leaves the colour of old blood in the glow of the dim street lamps. Yet even this quiet little town, sunk in a deep reverie of its own history, had been touched by war. The Stars and Stripes hung above the porch of almost every house. There were yellow ribbons tied around gateposts or trees, and in the windows of some of the houses pictures of fresh-faced young men were lit by flickering night lights and framed by black crêpe and red, white and blue ribbons, memorials to casualties of the Texas War.

Stone drove past a diner and a string of factory buildings that ran alongside railroad tracks. There was a little motel on the far side of the railroad crossing, a short, single-storey string of rooms with an office at right angles to them, woods rising steeply behind. An illuminated sign sat on the office’s flat roof:
The Crest Inn
.

As Stone pulled into the parking lot, Linda stirred, looked around.

‘This town is where your father was born,’ Stone told her. ‘And this motel, it’s where he told me to wait for him.’

While Linda Waverly took a shower, Stone used the room phone to place an order with the diner across the railroad tracks, then sat on the end of one of the twin beds and watched the late-night news he’d found on a local channel.

The TV stood four-square on the green shag-pile carpet, wood-cased and the size of a sideboard, the black-and-white picture on its fourteen-inch screen fuzzy with ghost images. Stone felt that he was beginning to get a feel for the Johnson sheaf’s recent history. Technology had stalled after the nuclear war. Twenty years on, cars were still made with quarter-inch Detroit steel, secretaries used typewriters instead of word processors, telephones had dials instead of push-buttons, TVs were powered by vacuum tubes, and you had to change channels by getting off your ass and turning the selector dial.

Half the news was about the war in Texas. Most of the rest was concerned with local issues: produce and livestock prices, an early frost that had damaged the apple harvest, the winner of a local beauty contest, a two-headed pig born all alive-o on a farm near Rockingham. After the grandfatherly anchor handed over to the weatherman, Stone clicked through channels and settled on a movie - a piece of patriotic nonsense about the Army Engineering Corps, Richard Widmark trying to do his best as a stern colonel who wouldn’t admit that the idea about a floating harbour put forward by his secretary - Kim Basinger in big hair and big glasses - could be crucial to the success of the invasion of France in World War Two. They’d had Nazis here, then. A Second World War instead of the Russian Campaigns.

Linda came out of the bathroom in a puff of fragrant steam, barefoot in blue jeans and checked shirt. ‘Is this what we’re going to do? Sit and watch TV?’

‘Your father told me to wait for him here. I’m waiting. Besides, there’s no point trying to look for him in the dark, is there?’

Linda sat cross-legged on the other bed and combed her damp hair with her fingers. After a minute or so, she said, ‘This has to be one of the corniest movies I’ve ever seen.’

‘I’m learning a lot from it.’

‘Such as?’

‘She’s cutting up that dress so she can remodel it and make a big impression at the Christmas dance, show her boss she’s really Kim Basinger, not some mousy secretary. And if you’d been watching this ten minutes ago, you would have seen that her rival is the spoilt general’s daughter who swans around in designer clothes. In other words, it’s more virtuous to make do and mend than buy new. And did you notice what was missing from every single ad?’

‘I can’t say that I paid them any attention.’

‘Telephone numbers for credit-card purchases. Five years after contact with the Real, this still hasn’t become a consumer society. If you want to get up to speed as quickly as possible on current affairs in a sheaf, you should read the
New York Times
. But if you want to get under its skin, if you want to know what people are thinking, how they live, what they fear, what they dream about, then you should watch TV. It’s a direct line to the subconscious of the nation. The ads, the set-dressing of sitcoms and movies, the monologues of talk-show hosts, they all give you a feel of a place, of how people want to live their lives.’

‘So this is what you did back in the old days, when you were scouting out all those different sheaves for the first time. You weren’t cracking safes, planting bugs, listening to chatter piped direct from the Oval Office. You were watching TV.’