A forest. The air cool, the light a dark green, even the shadows were green, the sweet scent of peat, the sounds of springs burbling and streams trickling down the stones. The shapes of deer bounded across the trails, through the panels of sunshine that filtered through the green canopies of treetops. I was happy for a while making my way through the woods so free and clean. Then my feet got to hurting, already those boots I'd gotten at The Mission were giving out, and mosquitoes began to nip at me, I was thirsty and the streams had gone underground, and I started feeling like freedom wasn't any kind of bargain.
I came up to the cabin when the daylight was growing long, built into the side of the mountain, the only place in sight. Two scrawny girls with dirty feet were sitting Indian-style on the front porch. A branch snapped to one side, and I looked over and it was then I saw him. I about pissed my pants. Some tall, bony geek with a Fu Manchu was holding a shotgun on me, a backpacker with stubby barrel but a muzzle that looked deep and dark as the mouth of a cave. I guess I put up my hands. The fella didn't blink, just kept looking past me like he was checking to see if more like me would emerge from the woods. I tried talking but words weren't with me. The fella's name was Dexter. I know 'cause he told me.
I guess he took a liking to me. Next thing I know I was in the house. He told me to sit, leaned the shotgun against the wall. The place looked clean enough—hell, it was bare, almost empty—but it smelled something god-awful. Like beeswax mixed with cat shit, if you can fathom. The girls came inside. I saw one was holding a round mirror between her hands. They sat on the floor. The girl with the mirror held it out to Dexter, like a kid with a bowl wanting a refill. He ignored her for a time but she kept waving the mirror around, mewling in a weird, freak language that must have been some kind of special code they shared 'cause finally he got up and went into the hall, and I heard a door open and the sound of him trudging down some steps. The smell got worse, putrid. I looked at that shotgun. I considered. Then I heard his steps on the stairs again, heard the door close, Dexter came back into the front room holding a packet of folded tinfoil. The first girl clapped her hands, the second gave a rancid little squeal. He handed over the packet, the girls fell on it like dogs on a table scrap. The second girl chopped up tiny yellow scratches of lines on the glass with a razorblade. Now, I'm no newcomer. I knew what was going on. They were running a lab here, cooking up that crank. I hate that shit—you know that shit took down a cousin of mine? But I was stuck, and when the mirror was passed to me, and they were all looking, I didn't know what else to do and I pinched the straw and took a little sniff.
We left the girls inside and he took me out back. A hill ran in back of the cabin, Dexter had a shed down there, a lean-to really, drums of Benzene and cans of paint thinner stashed under a tarp of nylon netting. He pointed to the ground and said there had been a river there once, back when he was a kid. Then somebody somewhere built a dam and choked off the river and for a long time afterwards they were forever cleaning up the bodies of carp and fish skeletons. The ground looked to me impossible for a river ever to have run there; it was more dry than any other earth I'd seen, gray sand and gray grit like chalk and dead leaves that turned to gray powder when you stepped on them. I didn't know what to say to him about his missing river. Mostly I talked about you.
After two or three days the girls fell asleep, curled on a pallet in each other's arms like two chick embryos yoked together , and Dex got off talking about his river and started in on the Grand Canyon. We were down in the basement, he was checking the gauge on his scalding pot, me drinking one of his beers, he talking on and on about the Grand Canyon and asking if I'd ever been there. Course not, I told him. He nodded, slow, and started acting like a decision had been reached. He took the heat off the batch, locked all the padlocks on the basement door, left the girls laying there, took me out to his jeep, remembered the jeep didn't have its transmission anymore, went back inside and grabbed the keys to a beat-to-shit Lincoln parked over by a mound of compost, and next thing I knew we were coming down from the mountaintop at a goodly rate of speed.
He drove south and west, south and west. The green of the mountains turned to the pale pink and orange of the desert. Ashamed as I am to admit it, I spent most of the ride smoking that nasty cristy, burning the bottom out of a ball of foil and huffing on a glass tube. Now there's a chance I saw this wrong, but over a rise in the highway came the sight of a squadron of blue lights flashing, the police flagging down cars over to the shoulder. Searching them, a checkpoint. I yelled for Dex to pull over; I didn't know, I thought it might be all over the news about me and the guy in the parking lot in Kingsport (I mentioned him to you earlier), and I jumped out and went and hid in the trunk. It was graveyard black in there and hotter than a boiler room, as Dex pressed on I could hear the highway churning close to my head. I don't believe they pulled us over, and if they did they sure didn't check the trunk. I figured Dex would go a couple more miles, make sure we were clear, and pull over and let me out. But we just kept going. The tires kept bouncing over seams in the tarmac, and I was drowning in sweat. Then I got too hot to sweat. I hollered and beat at the trunk panels. Still the car went on. I banged my head against the lid but it wouldn't give. Some time later, a hundred miles or a thousand, I felt the engine slow and heard the tire treads crunching gravel. I heard his door open and slam. I tried working up another scream but I had no spit; it was all I could do to give the lid one good kick. Then the latch clicked and the trunk opened and a blind white light washed me down. Dexter leaned in like a scraggly moon making a purple eclipse over the sun. Sonofabitch had forgotten about me. I tried swinging at him but just ended up falling over the bumper and into the dust. "We're here," he said.
I blinked, walked over to a ledge, and looked down. A bent row of chain link fencing ran the length of a parched gully, with a few shallows of rusty water swimming with dead birds, heaped across with soda cans, beer bottles, diapers and rubbers. A swarm of gnats swirled in the air. It was just some drainage ditch, not more than a dozen feet deep.
"'Grand' my fucking ass," I said.
"It's just the way I pictured it," said Dex.
Me and Dex split up that night. We got in a fistfight; I'm not positive but I think he was trying to steal from me. I won't go into where all I went from there, first Flagstaff to Fairbank, Fairbank to Glendale, Glendale onwards. I got busted in a laundromat in Carson City, which was really just a big misunderstanding—but I won't go into all that. I won't go into how when they first bring a tweaker into custody they got to keep him isolated, or else the cluckers and other animals in the tank will set on him and gnash at his scabs that might have some meth seeping in them. I won't tell you how when I catch a look at myself in a mirror—and this is the truth—I imagine I have my old face back and you're there beside me and we're sitting together for a portrait or something. I will tell you I'm flat-tired; nowadays, Baby, I feel like a rowboat adrift on an ocean, trying to break the waves to get home to you and only getting pulled to some farther shore, a place I never wanted to go in the first place. But that's enough of that—I well know every man has his problems. I've turned a corner, though. I'm getting stronger. If nothing else I've learned that your man is a hard one to kill. So I'm on the comeback trail and one day soon we'll be together again. Until then, though, I didn't want to leave you without any word.
