appeared, they could move into the trees and down the mountain fairly quickly And if a helicopter arrived, on the remote chance that one had been called out, they could scramble out into the open areas and be seen from above.
Joe lay on the still-warm shale at the top of the ridge and looked through his binoculars at the first mountain and the valley below them. As it got darker, the forest appeared to soften. There was no way looking at the country now, to know how rough and ragged it was beneath the darkening velvet green cover of treetops.
Joe looked for movement, and listened for sounds in a vast silence so awesome it was intimidating. Although he didn't expect to see Charlie Tibbs riding brazenly through an open meadow, there was the chance that Tibbs might Spock deer or grouse and give away his location. That is, Joe thought, if he were out there at all.
Joe didn't turn when he heard the crunching of heavy steps as Stewie joined him on the top of the ridge.
'See anything?' Stewie asked, settling into the shale with a grunt.
'Trees.'
'Britney's not in a very good mood, so I thought I would join you,' Stewie said. 'She tried to wash John Coble's blood out of her shirt but she couldn't get it all out.'
'Mmm.'
'Damn, it's beautiful, isn't it?'
'Yup.'
'Do you ever actually talk?'
Joe lowered the binoculars for a moment. 'I talk with my wife.' Then he cautioned Stewie: 'But I don't talk about my wife.'
Stewie nodded, smiled, and looked away
'Have you wondered how it is I came to be?' Stewie spoke in hushed tones, barely above a whisper. 'I mean, now After getting blown up by a cow?'
'I did wonder about that.'
'But you haven't asked.'
'I've been busy'
'It's an amazing story A horrible story You got a minute?'
Joe smiled in spite of himself. Did he have a minute?
'The force of the explosion pinned you to a tree trunk,' Joe said. 'I saw the branch you hung from. I even climbed up to look at it.'
Stewie nodded. That's where it began, he said.
***
HE WAS ALIVE. Either that, or he was in a state of being that was at least similar to being alive, in the worst kind of way. He could see things and comprehend movement. His imagination flowed around and through his brain, like warm fingers of sludge, and the sludge had taken over his consciousness. He imagined that a thin sinewy blue string or vein, a tight wet cord that looked somewhat like a tendon, tenuously secured his life. He thought that the tendon could snap and blink out the light, and that his death would come with a heavy thumping sound like a wet bundle of canvas dropped onto pavement. An impulse inside him, but outside his control, was working like mad to keep him living, to keep things functioning, to maintain the grip of the tendon. If the impulse ran out of whatever was fueling this effort, he would welcome the relief and invite whatever would happen next And for a moment his senses focused.
Blood painted the trees. Bits of clothing and strips of both human and bovine flesh hung from branches. The smell of cordite from the explosion was overpowering and it hung in the air, refusing to leave.
He was not on the ground. He was in the air. He was an angel!
Which made Joe laugh out loud, the way Stewie said it.
He watched from above as the three men wearing cowboy hats approached the smoking crater. He could not hear anything beyond a high-static whooshing noise that resembled the sound of angry ocean breakers. Red and yellow globules that his own damaged head had manufactured floated across his field of vision. It reminded him of the time he ate peyote buttons with four members of the Salish-Kootenai Nation in northwestern Montana. Then, however, he had been laughing.
But he was not an angel--the thought of that alone was preposterous --and he was not having an out-of-body experience, although he couldn't be sure since this was his first. His soul had not left his body and had not floated above in the blood-flecked branches of the trees.
When the heifer went up, so did he. He had flown upward and back, launched out of his shoes until stopped fast, skewered through his shoulder by a thick pine bow. His feet, one sock off and one sock on, had floated below. They swung a hit in the wind.
He had not thought such things were possible.
What an awful tragedy it was that his wife was dead, atomized, before he had really known much about her. Conversely, he wondered if perhaps he had known her at her absolute best and that he was blessed to have known her at all. Nevertheless, she had done nothing to deserve what had happened to her. Her only crime was to be with him. Blinking hard, he had tried to stay awake and conscious.
The men below had stretched yellow tape around the crater and had left in the dark. Two of them were talking, their cowboy hats pointed at each other and their heads bobbing. He waited for the man who was standing to the side to look up. He wondered if the pattering of his blood on the leaves far below the leaves made any sound.
'That was me,' Joe said.
