confusion, as his body went hard against the ground. He staggered to his feet, trying to find the release lever for the chute in case it filled with air and pulled him away. He could not, it puffed and began to drag him, and the Plexiglas before him splintered, his face began to sting and bleed. His arm was numb. The equipment bag banged over the rocks as he slid along and seemed to rack his leg a couple of extra inches. He clawed at the harness, and then it popped open and the harness somehow rid itself of him, as if he were unwanted baggage, and deposited him in the snow as it went its merry way.
Oh, Christ, he thought, blinking, feeling pain everywhere.
He looked around and saw nothing at all recognizable.
He struggled to pop off his helmet, and felt just a second's worth of air until the air turned frozen. He pulled a white watch cap from his pocket and yanked a snow mask down from its folds. He pulled the equipment bag over, opened it and got the parka and the leggings on.
The warmth comforted him. Then he yanked out the night-vision goggles, fiddled for the switch and looked around.
Oh, Christ, he thought.
Nothing was as it seemed. He was on a slope, not a flat, there was no ranch house ahead because in the most obvious possible way there was no ahead.
There was only down, barren and remote.
He was way up.
He was lost in the mountains.
CHAPTER forty-seven.
Julie was dreaming. In the dream she and Bob and Donny were at a picnic somewhere in the green mountains by a lake. It felt very real, but was still clearly a dream. Everybody was so happy, much happier than they'd ever been in their conscious lives. Bob and Donny were drinking beer and laughing. Her father was there, too, and Bob's father, Earl, who'd been killed way back in 1955, and she was cooking hamburgers on a grill and all the men were drinking beer and laughing and tossing a ball around and flirting with Nikki.
Maybe it wasn't a dream. Maybe it had begun as a dream, something spun out of her subconscious, but now she was aware that she was controlling it, and somehow trying to keep it alive, to make it last longer as she hung in a gray zone just between wakefulness and sleep. Peter was there too. Earnest, decent, dedicated Peter Farris, who'd loved her so, his ardency poignant. He looked strange because Bob and Donny were so Marine-straight with their short, neat hair and Peter was the complete hippie, with a splotchy purple tie-dyed T-shirt, a headband, his hair a mess, a sad little Jesus beard. Peter's feelings got very hurt because he felt so powerless next to the two stronger men, and that somehow made him more poignant.
He loved her so! Donny apologized, because it wasn't in him to hurt anybody's feelings. Bob was just watching them, Mr. Southern Cracker Alpha Male, amused by their silly youthfulness, and his dad and her dad were having a good laugh, though what a state trooper and a heart surgeon, one dead in 1955, the other in 1983, would have had to talk about was anybody's guess.
And there was someone else.
He was by himself, a graceful young man, also amused by the manhood convention here on the shores of the Gitche Gumee or wherever it was, and it took her a while to figure out who he was, and then at last she knew it was Trig.
She'd seen him twice, no, three times. She'd seen him that night when Peter had dragged her to that party in Georgetown and he lived in that funny little place with all the bird paintings, and she'd seen him when he'd driven Donny out in the red Triumph to find her at West Potomac Park just before the last big May Day demonstration, and she saw him again, three nights later, at the farm in Germantown, where he and that Irishman were loading bags of fertilizer into the truck.
Trig: another of the lost boys of the Vietnam War. All of them were linked in some terrible chain, forever changed, forever mutilated. Nobody ever came back from that one. No one got home free. Donny, dead on DEROS. Peter, smashed, somehow, and found with a broken spine months later. Trig, blown to pieces in Madison, Wisconsin. And Bob, the only survivor but maybe the most hurting of them all, with his black-dog moods and his lost years and his self-hatred and his need to test himself against gunfire again and again and again, as if to finally earn the death he yearned for so intently and join his friends. Death or DEROS: which would come to Bob Lee Swagger first?
'Mommy?' her daughter asked her.
'Oh, honey,' she said, but it was not in the dream, it was here in the dark, warm bedroom.
Julie blinked and came out of it. No, it wasn't a dream.
It couldn't have been a dream. It was too real to be a dream.
'Mommy, please, I want to go ride the sled.'
'Oh, Lord, honey, it's--' 'Please, Mommy.'
She turned and looked at the clock. It was close to seven. Outside, just the faintest hint of light pressed through the margins of the shade.
'Oh, baby,' she said, 'it's so early. The snow's going to be around for a long, long time.'
The deep ache in her body was there and the awkwardness conferred by the arm cast. She hadn't taken a painkiller since last night, halfway through Singin' in the Rain when her baby girl had fallen asleep on her lap.
'Please, Mommy. I'll go get Aunt Sally.'
'Don't you dare wake Aunt Sally. God bless her, she's earned her escape from the Swaggers and all their problems.
I'll get up, baby. Just give me a moment or two.'
'Yes, Mommy. I'll go get dressed.'
The child ran out.
