Go With Me (12 page)

“We could,” said Lester. “We could get as far as the log road, probably. Everybody could know about it, too. You can hear a vehicle a mile away up here. We don’t need that. We’ll walk from here.”

“Three miles?” said Lillian. “It’ll be dark before we get to Blackway’s.”

“Probably it will,” said Lester.

“You don’t care?” asked Lillian. “You won’t be able to see what you’re doing. Will you?”

“Neither will Blackway,” said Lester.

“What’s he want up there, anyway?” Conrad asked.

“Blackway?” said Coop. “Blackway likes it up there. It’s quiet up there — in the Towns.”

“Nothing up there but bears and moose and birds,” said D.B.

“Them and whatever it was got all those people,” said Whizzer.

“What people?” Conrad asked.

“Nothing got them,” said Coop. “They got lost. They died in the woods. Anything else is a crock.”

“Who got lost?” Conrad asked.

“You’ve been up there,” Coop went on. “You know what it’s like. Those woods. You get fifty feet off the trail and you can’t see a god damned thing. You don’t know where you are. You get turned around, you’ll never find your way out. It ain’t like down here, where you’ll always come to somebody’s line, somebody’s fence, some brook you can follow down to the road. Up there, there ain’t no lines, there ain’t no fences. The brooks don’t go no place. The thing is, there’s nothing up there. Those people didn’t understand that. They got lost and they never got found. That’s all that happened.”

“Well,” said Whizzer, “maybe that’s so for that college girl, maybe for the bird-watchers, even the hunters. But are you going to say those four choppers got lost? They lived in there.”

“What college girl?” Conrad asked.

“Oh, few years ago,” said Whizzer. “Girl was in college over there in Bennington. Told her friends she was going to drive up into the Towns. Camp out, I guess.”

“Get back to Nature,” said Coop.

“A Bennington girl?” Conrad asked. “It can’t be.”

“She didn’t come back,” Whizzer went on. “Next day, her friends went up there looking for her. Nothing.”

“They found her car,” said D.B.

“They sure didn’t,” said Whizzer. “They found nothing.”

“They found her car, Whiz,” said D.B.“Remember? They had to get a wrecker in there and tow it out. It sat outside the garage there in Searsburg for years. It might still be there.”

“That was Mackenzie’s car they towed out of there, that other time, when he threw the rod,” said Whizzer, “not the college girl’s.”

“Another college girl,” said D.B.

“What do you mean, another?” Whizzer asked him.

“Like What’s-her-name,” said D.B. “Goes around, thinks she’s something special. Gets jammed up.”

“This one’s no college girl,” said Whizzer. “Our girl ain’t.”

“Ain’t she?” D.B. asked. “She thinks she is. Acts like she is. Her and her
You people.
Thinks she’s something.”

“Still,” said Whizzer, “she ain’t no college girl. I told you that before.”

“Con’s a college man,” said D.B. “What do you say?” he asked Conrad. “She look like a college girl to you?”

“Probably not,” said Conrad.

“See, there?” said Whizzer. “What did I say?”

“Hard to tell sometimes, though,” said Conrad.

“Point is,” said Coop. “Nobody ever heard from the girl again. The other one. She just disappeared up there.”

“Somebody said she took off because she was in trouble,” said D.B. “She was getting ready to have the wrong guy’s kid.”

“For that she vanishes into the wilderness?” Conrad asked. “Because she’s knocked up? Because she’s been screwing around? A Bennington girl? Come on. I’m a college man, you know. My sister went to Bennington. At Bennington for screwing around you get Phi Beta Kappa.”

“What’s Phi Beta Kappa?” asked D.B.

From the turnout where they had left the truck, a trail, two wheel ruts with wild grasses growing waist-high between them, went sharply uphill. To either side, in the brush growth, hardhack lifted its fuzzy flowers like pink tapers, and wild blackberries reached for them with their barbed canes. The three walked in single file: first Nate, then Lillian, then Lester, limping along in the rear carrying his parcel snug under his right arm. Little orange butterflies skipped back and forth across the track in front of them, like ragged children running in front of a procession, and overhead a hawk or some other such bird sailed high above them in the blue, its wings unmoving, rising and falling lazily on the wind that passed over the mountain’s side and breathed faintly in the thick woods around them.

They weren’t the first to have come up this way recently. The grass in the center of the track was knocked down flat, and here and there they passed a rock in one of the ruts with a black graze of rubber on it, or they saw a place where a heavy tire had come down and printed its tread into the bare dirt.

Lillian watched Nate walking in front of her. Nate walked with his head down, staring at the ground before him. His strides were long and heavy; his shoulders rose and fell. Nate wore a dirty gray T-shirt that was printed across the back in blue letters:
S.T.U.D.

“What’s
S.T.U.D.?
” Lillian asked.

Lester snorted from the rear, but Nate walked on without answering.

“Hey, Nate?” Lillian asked.

“Yo.”

“What’s
S.T.U.D.?
”

“What?”

“
S.T.U.D.,
” Lillian said. “Your shirt.”

“What about it?”

“Well,” Lillian asked, “what is it? What does it mean?”

“What do you think it means?” Lester asked her from behind.

“It don’t mean nothing,” said Nate. “They were giving them away.”

“Don’t believe him,” said Lester. “His girlfriend gave it to him. Didn’t she, Nate? That Rowena gave it to you, didn’t she?”

“No,” said Nate.

“Rowena?” asked Lillian.

“Works at the clinic,” said Lester. “She’s a nurse, ain’t she? Ain’t she some kind of a nurse?”

“She’s a technician,” said Nate.

“I’ll bet she is,” said Lester.

“What?” said Nate.

“Gave the boy that
S.T.U.D.
shirt for his birthday,” said Lester. “You know why.”

“She didn’t,” said Nate. “They were giving them away.”

“She was, anyway,” said Lester.

“What?” said Nate.

“Nothing,” said Lester.

“She ain’t my girlfriend,” said Nate.

Lillian walked on. She watched Nate. She watched the T-shirt stretch across his shoulders and over the muscle in his back. It wasn’t a bad-looking back, come to it. Come to it, Nate wasn’t badlooking goods. Not at all. Not from the back. But Rowena? What kind of a name was Rowena, anyway? It was a woodchuck name. It was a name like Tiffany or Brittney — the name of a girl who marries a guy with a large back. A back like Nate’s. She marries a guy like Nate. He marries her. They live in East Schmuckville. What would Kevin have had to say about them? She could hear Kevin. She could hear Kevin talking about Nate and Rowena. She could hear Kevin’s contempt. But Kevin was gone, wasn’t he?

“She ain’t either my girlfriend,” said Nate, walking ahead.

“Like you say, ‘into the wilderness’?” said Coop. “That ain’t wilderness. The Towns ain’t wilderness like you’ve got in Maine, Canada, out West.”

“Well,” said Whizzer, “but this ain’t out West. Here, if the Towns ain’t wilderness, they’ll do until the real thing comes along.”

“Which it won’t,” said Coop.

“Won’t what?” D.B. asked him.

“You know,” said Coop. “The woods. The Towns. They ain’t coming, they’re going. They’re going now. People moving in, clearing, building. Roads and what have you. It’s all going away.”

“Not in the Towns,” said D.B. “That’s all government land, up there.”

“There, too,” said Coop. “Government land? So what if it is? The government bought it, the government can sell it. If people want that land, they’ll have it. The government can’t stop them.”

“They are the government,” said Conrad.

“There you go,” said Coop. “Someday that will be like the suburbs up there: little streets, little houses.”

“Lawns,” said Whizzer. “Guys out after work, cutting the grass.”

“Schools,” said Coop.

“Wal-Mart,” said Conrad. “Colonel Sanders.”

“Taco Bell,” said D.B.

“Bars,” said Coop. “You can stop off for a beer.”

“Don’t sound so bad, at that, does it?” said Whizzer.

Nate turned back to look for Lester. He pointed up the trail ahead of them. There, visible through the green woods, a shining, a flashing — something bright.

Lester came from the rear and signaled to Lillian and Nate to stay where they were. Then he went forward toward the bright object. The track took a bend, and Lester disappeared around it, into the trees.

Lillian went to a boulder beside the trail and rested against it.

“Nate?” she asked.

“Yo,” said Nate.

“What’s the plan, here?”

“What?”

“What’s the plan, for Blackway?” asked Lillian. “Your and Lester’s plan, for when we find him?”

“Plan?”

“That’s right. Like with the others — Murdock, the rest of them. You’ve got a plan, right?”

“I ain’t afraid of Blackway,” said Nate.

“No, but Lester,” said Lillian. “He’s got a plan, doesn’t he? With the gun he’s got? Something?”

“Thought you didn’t want no guns in this,” said Nate. “Before, you didn’t want no guns.”

“Look,” said Lillian. “What I want is for this to be over with. I want you — I want us — to take care of Blackway. I want to know how that’s going to happen.”

“Well,” said Nate, “all I know is I ain’t afraid of Blackway.”

Lester came back around the bend. “Come ahead,” he said. Lillian pushed herself up off her seat and followed Nate.

A big Ford pickup truck was parked beside the trail. It was fairly new, black, with the body cranked up high off its axles atop oversized tires.

“That’s Blackway’s,” said Lillian.

Nate was beside the truck, looking into the driver’s-side window.

“Keys are in it,” he said.

“He forgot the keys?” Lillian asked.

“He didn’t forget them,” Lester said. “He left them. Why not? Anybody who knows whose truck this is ain’t about to steal it.”

“What if they don’t know whose it is?” Lillian asked.

“They know,” said Lester. “If they’re up here, they know.” To Nate he said, “Go ahead.”

Nate opened the truck’s door and took the keys from the ignition. He tossed them over the hood to Lester. Lester caught the keys and held them up, showing them to Lillian.

“You understand,” Lester said. He was speaking to both of them. “You understand we’re about down on it, now.” He jingled the keys. “If we take Blackway’s keys, here — what I mean, once we take them, he’s stuck, but so are we. We can’t turn this thing around. If we do this, we got to finish it. We got to go through. You see that.”

“I do,” said Lillian.

“I ain’t afraid of Blackway,” said Nate.

15

GOING THROUGH

“Beer’s by you, ain’t it?” Whizzer said to Conrad.

“It is,” said Conrad. He reached into the case and brought forth four more cans.

D.B. opened his beer, drank, belched.

“All right,” he said. “You were talking about the Towns? All right, you can argue about whether to call it wilderness up there and how much longer you’re going to be able to call it whatever you decide to call it. Point is, now, today, that’s still wild country, the Towns.”

“A man can be free up there,” said Coop.

“Blackway thinks so,” said Whizzer.

“No women,” said D.B.

“No kids,” said Coop.

“No traffic,” said D.B.

“No phones,” said Coop.

“No cops,” said Whizzer.

“No cops?” said Conrad. “What about Wingate?”

“What about him?” asked Coop.

“Wingate’s sheriff,” said Whizzer. “Sheriff’s a county officer. The Towns are over the line.”

“Sheriff’s office can go in there if they have to, though,” said D.B.

“Not by law, they can’t,” said Whizzer.

“Not by law,” said Coop. “Whiz is right. By law, the Towns are out of Wingate’s beat. By law, they are. And we all know how Wingate feels about the law.”

“Here we go,” said Whizzer.

“We all know,” Coop went on, “how Wingate will ride the law even when it don’t make sense to ride it, even when the law ain’t what it’s all about. Like with that girl and Blackway.”

“That wasn’t about the law?” Whizzer asked him.

“No,” said Coop. “It wasn’t. The law ain’t what What’s-hername needed. She needed help. Wingate and his law blew her off. Where is she now?”

“Don’t know,” said D.B. “Do you?”

“Listen,” said Whizzer. “Wingate knows what he’s doing. He knew she needed help. She told him. If he didn’t go to help her himself, it was because he had a better plan.”

“Right,” said Coop. “Scotty Cavanaugh. Scotty was a hell of a plan of Wingate’s, wasn’t he?”

“Well,” said Whizzer. “Where’s Scotty now?”

“Far away as he can get,” said Coop.

“So, what do you make of that?” Whizzer asked him.