They walked along the fence of a big pasture, and she waited to let her heart stop pounding and her slower, deeper breathing come. She kept moving to fight off the cramps that were waiting to grip her calves and ham- strings. Felker swung his arms and walked along, trying to recover from the long run, but she could feel his eyes on her. She reached up behind her head and held up the long hair to cool the nape of her neck in the night air. Finally, she said quietly, 'That road up there is Route 18. It’s the last big highway.'
He said, 'What’s beyond that?'
'A quiet little town.'
Jane decided she couldn’t get close enough to the highway to detect a parked car without its occupants seeing her too. The two shoulders would be at least ten feet each, and forty for the pavement itself. Then, after they were across that, the other side might not be the houses she was hoping for. It might be more open land. She said aloud, 'How does the chicken cross the road?'
'That’s it?' he said.
'If they guessed right, they’ll be waiting for us here. They’ll take us in the open.'
'I guess I walk across and you cover me with the shotgun until something happens or I’m behind something. Then it’s your turn,' he said.
She looked at him for a minute. 'Not very good, but I suppose it’s the only way.'
He shrugged. 'It’s the only way they ever taught me.'
They walked along the field until they could see the road ahead of them. On the other side there was an open field, but the trees beyond it gave her some hope. At least there weren’t a lot of lights on this stretch. They crept closer and closer to the road until they reached an empty lot overgrown with tall weeds that ran up to the shoulder.
She crawled forward in the weeds until she reached a shallow drainage ditch at the edge of the road, and looked hard to her right toward the lights, then down into the darkness to her left. There was nothing on the pavement in either direction, but she still didn’t feel right. Maybe it was just that the long run had made her light- headed. There never had been much chance that any four strangers would realize that she was heading north for Olcott.
She had been driving eastward when they had caught up. When that had failed, it would have made most sense either to walk around their ambush and keep going east or try to go back the other way, toward Niagara Falls. Olcott was a tiny community on the shore of Lake Ontario, at least half of it summer cottages closed from October until May, when the wind off the lake lost some of its cruelty. Besides, Olcott was too far. Nobody would try to run eight miles across country at night, through cornfields and woods and over barbed-wire fences.
She knew Felker was getting impatient. She looked in both directions again, letting her eyes stare at each tree, each distant building, each mailbox along the shoulder, then just looking, letting her eyes go unfocused to detect movement. It was foolish. The barrier was imaginary.
Jane rolled onto her side to nod at Felker, then watched him take a step before she rolled back onto her belly to watch the road. She heard Felker coming through the weeds, then heard his feet hit faster, and then he was stepping onto the open pavement.
Somewhere in the distance she heard the familiar sound of a car starting. She turned her head from side to side quickly, trying to hear the exact direction. Felker had heard it too. He quickened his pace, running now to get across before the car—any car—caught him in its lights. Jane still couldn’t see it, but now there was the sound of tires on gravel, and then the engine’s whispery hum, getting louder and louder as it accelerated. She pumped the shotgun.
The car swung out of the dark driveway of a house a couple of hundred yards off. Its lights were still off, and the hum grew into a deeper roar. It was too dark to see clearly, so the car seemed not to be coming nearer as much as growing in intensity and anger.
She rested on her elbows and hugged the shotgun tightly to her shoulder. She could feel the smooth, familiar stock against her right cheek. She stared down the barrel past the groove cut into the top of the receiver, but she couldn’t see the little ball that formed the front sight above the muzzle. Her finger pushed the safety. 'Not yet,' she whispered. 'Not yet, not yet, not—' and she saw the dark shape of the car that seemed to materialize out of the darkness like something congealing.
She blew out a breath and held it, keeping her forefinger on the trigger just enough so she could feel it. She could sense Felker’s progress without looking at him as she strained to judge the car’s momentum. He was almost across the road now. She whispered, 'Run, damn you.'
The lights came on like a splash of caustic liquid thrown into her face. It was a flash that didn’t go away but burned brighter as the car approached. Suddenly, the car swerved away from her to the left side of the road, trying to hit Felker, but she knew it was too late. There was no Felker. The wind from the car’s backwash whipped the weeds around her as it passed, leaving the road in darkness again.
Jane was up and running now, sprinting for the other side in the dark. She watched the red taillights out of the comer of her eye as she ran. They seemed to expand when the brakes went on, like a pair of eyes widening. There was a squeal of tires, but the driver was good enough not to lock his brakes on a rural highway. As Jane left the pavement and felt the gravel under her feet, the car made a fast turn.
She made her legs pump hard, and slipped between the rails inside the fence, then lay there to look back at the road. The car started to accelerate again, then slowed and veered toward her. This is it, she thought. They were trying to get the lights onto her to pin her to the ground with them. She raised the shotgun again, and this time the front sight seemed to glow, then disappear as she pulled the trigger. There was a deafening boom! and the left headlight was gone.
As she pumped again and leveled the sight, she heard Felker’s pistol. There were three shots, and the car skidded away from her and gained speed. She went to her knees and leveled the shotgun on it, but it kept going down the road, faster and faster.
Felker was at her elbow. 'You okay?'
She stood up. 'We’ve got to get out of here.' She ran northward again, through the field. She could see a light go on in a window of a farmhouse on the other side of the intersection, but it was at least a quarter mile away. The shots had awakened somebody. If the farmer was turning on his light, at least he wasn’t outside with a deer rifle. But he might very well be trying to see the dial of his telephone, arid that was probably worse. She ran through a muddy slough that smelled like a chicken yard. She kept going, trying to outrun the police car that might be on its way to the first real street on the southern edge of Olcott.
Then it occurred to her that she had not been thinking clearly. It had been dark, and the house was too far away. People had probably heard the shots in the middle of town. But the farmer would have heard it best, looked out his window and seen—what? A car with one headlight squealing off down the highway. Felker had been hiding out of sight of the car, and Jane had been lying on her belly inside the wire fence in somebody’s alfalfa. When the farmer called, he was going to report some drunks driving around and shooting road signs. She made it to the next fence and stopped. 'Fence,' she said, and heard Felker stop too.
The fence was a cordon of old wooden posts with little porcelain electrical insulators on them to hold the invisible wires. They had gone through a dozen like this in their eight-mile run. Jane had stopped at the first one and patted the wire, half expecting a jolt that would feel like a punch in the arm. It had been turned off, and so had all the others. Farmers in this part of the world didn’t leave their cattle in the fields at night. She tested this one too, but felt only the cold strand of metal on the tips of her fingers. 'Dead,' she said.
They ducked to step between the strands of wire and then entered a big apple orchard. As she trotted through it with Felker at her heels, she wondered if she had stumbled on one of the old places. The trees weren’t planted in the usual long, straight lines. They were just growing haphazardly at fairly regular intervals here and there. They were old. They couldn’t be old enough, but they could have been descendants. The Seneca had planted orchards wherever they lived: apples, pears, plums.
When the white people had taken the land after the Revolution, they had cut the hardwood trees and burned the stumps so they could plow, but not the orchards. She wished she had been here in daylight, so she could get a better look at the trees. Maybe she would come back when the fruit was on them and verify that they weren’t Macintosh or Rome but the small, hard apples that the women had planted in patterns like this.
She didn’t really need to, though, because she knew that this was a Seneca place. The lake was so close she could smell the change in the air and the Waagwenneyu was just a few miles to the south, down Black Creek or Eighteen-Mile Creek. The women who had planted the trees and tended them were asleep somewhere nearby.
