us.
Then there were grizzlies, also very hungry in the spring, and some hunters had found out the hard way that bears were learning to associate the sound of a gunshot with a fresh kill. That was no rumor.
'We'll leave them the guts,' Madbird said, not looking up. 'That'll make mama happy.'
'We're taking the meat?'
He looked at me like I was an eighteen-year-old who'd asked how babies were made.
'What the fuck you think this is, Dances with Wolves? Start cutting, we ain't got all day.'
I pulled out my knife and went for the scent glands in the rear hocks.
Mom probably would have smelled the gut pile, but Madbird wanted to make sure. He draped the carcass over my shoulders to take back to the van while he dragged the intestines to the creek. She'd start there and follow the scent trail to the rest. It seemed to me that it took him longer than it should have. Maybe they were conversing some more, or maybe I was just nervous about getting caught. But we made it home fine, and for the first time in my life, I grilled fresh venison steaks for Memorial Day.
Laurie had relaxed in stages while I'd talked, first back against the van's front seat, then on one elbow, then down to horizontal again. Her eyes were still open, but she looked like she'd fallen back into that same kind of trance as beside the fire. I'd always had a talent for edge-of-the-seat storytelling.
I gathered up my sleeping gear and eased away.
'Do you know any poetry?' she murmured.
'Not much. Why?'
'There's this line that's been coming into my mind. 'Build a thousand bridges.''
I stopped, almost choking.
'Where'd you hear that?' I said.
'I don't know. It's like it's from a poem I read a long time ago and can't remember. It sounds so exotic. Do you recognize it?'
'No.' I started to close the van's doors.
'Leave them open-please?' she said. 'And don't go far?'
I broke up the last of the embers with the shovel and smothered them with dirt. I found a reasonably flat spot without too many rocks and spread out my bedding, then wrapped up my boots in my jacket and put them under the bag's head flap. It made a decent pillow, and would keep them warm enough. Stretching out on the cold hard ground felt so good I almost groaned. I could have slept on a bed of nails-except that now I had yet another something on my mind.
I recognized that line, all right. You could call it exotic if you wanted, but it didn't come from any poem. It was an old construction workers' riff, tossed around with grim humor when competent men busting their asses on tough jobs under bad conditions got hassled by bean counters who rode around in heated pickup trucks wearing clean white hard hats.
'Build a thousand bridges, they'll never call you an engineer,' was how it went. 'Suck one cock, they'll call you a cocksucker for the rest of your life.' The sentiment probably dated back to the Stone Age. Laurie must have picked it up somewhere, without any notion of the tag line or meaning.
But what shook me was that it had been Celia's favorite bad-girl taunt.
Growing up like she had on ranches and around workingmen, she'd learned that kind of stuff early, and by the time she'd come to live with us, she had it honed into a multipurpose weapon. Most often, she'd used it when somebody took her to task for a chore she'd done poorly or not at all. She'd roll her eyes, sigh, and say those first few words, 'Build a thousand bridges.' Men, in particular, would tend to stop cold and back off in confusion. Then she'd go right on doing as she pleased.
I couldn't for the life of me come up with a reason why that would appear in Laurie Balcomb's mind right now.
As I drifted off, the movie screen behind my closed eyes started playing an image of Laurie or Celia or the two of them together inside one bare shining skin, rising up out of Lone Creek with a million crystal shards of water exploding into my face.
38
I awoke to the sound of a woman weeping. That had happened a number of times before in my life, almost always because she was wishing that one of us was someplace, or somebody, else.
Lord knew that Laurie Balcomb had plenty of cause for that.
It was still night. I couldn't tell how late. I knew I'd slept a while, and I sure could have kept on going. But her muffled sobs pierced me like little stabs. Whatever bond of kinship she might have felt had been safely abstract, but now it was shattered by the waffle-head hammer of reality. She was in a hell of a spot, and all because of me.
I crawled out of my sleeping bag into the near-freezing chill, hobbled to the van, and sat beside her feet again, trying to drag up words of reassurance that I didn't feel.
'I know you're scared,' I started, but she cut me off.
'Of course I'm scared.' She was curled up like a child, her face hidden by her hair. 'Not of Wesley. I mean, I am, but that's not it.' She shook her head. 'I don't know how to explain. There's something happening to me. It's almost like a voice in my mind. Maybe I'm going crazy. But it seems so right.'
I was still groggy, and this bewildered me. It wasn't at all what I'd expected.
'What does this voice say?' I said.
'That I'm not really who I always thought I was. Like I've been living in a dream that's pretty, but all for show, and I'm starting to wake up.'
She pushed her hair aside and looked at me. Her face was a shadow, but her legs, pressed against me now, were warm.
'That you and I go way far back,' she said.
'How do you mean?'
She turned away again. 'Now you'll think I'm crazy. I started feeling it when I first saw you, months ago. It wouldn't leave me alone.'
'Months ago? I thought you didn't know who I was until yesterday.'
'I had to pretend. I couldn't just come out and tell you,' she said impatiently.
'No, I guess I can see that.'
'So I arranged for us to accidentally meet.'
'You arranged it?'
'I knew your routine, knew you'd go get rid of that trash at the end of the day. So I went riding out there. I'd finally decided-this isn't a nice thing to say, but I thought if I got to know you a little, I'd see how silly it was.'
'That would have worked pretty quick, all right. It's just your bad luck that all this other stuff happened instead.'
But she shook her head again. 'It's here right now, stronger than ever,' she said quietly. 'Not an 'it'-a 'she.''
My scalp started to bristle.
Laurie rose up on one elbow and put her other hand on my arm. Her shoulders were bare.
'Do you know at all what I'm talking about?' she said, with a hint of pleading. 'Or is it just me?'
I stared at her hidden eyes.
'What do you know about her?' I said.
'That she died young. That you were in love with her.'
My rational mind told me this was insane, some kind of folie a deux. But that came about when two people developed it together-it didn't arise in them independently.
Then there was the fact that my whole world had gone insane.
'It's not just you,' I said.
She sank down again, exhaling like she was letting out a breath that she'd held to the lung-bursting
