'Remember me?' she said.
He made a croaking noise.
'Remember tying me up and gagging me?' she said.
He moved his right hand again. She aimed the nickel plated.32 revolver at his temple and pulled the trigger. A small black hole appeared in his temple and he slumped against the tree. The labored breathing stopped.
'I hope you went to hell,' she said. She still held the revolver straight out ahead of her, pointed as it had been.
'Jesus,' Newman said. He walked to her and pushed her arm down to her side. She didn't resist but neither was her arm limp. With one hand on each shoulder he turned her away, and then, with his arm around her waist, he moved her to the trail. Behind them the woods closed. The dead men were no more. Ahead of them the trail led gently downward.
Toward the water. Out of the woods.
'One more,' he said.
'Yes.'
The sun appeared above the edge of the trees in the eastern sky, the top rim of it. And the woods, while shadowy, seemed pleasant and warm after the storm. They walked in silence along the trail for a quarter of a mile.
'You are going to have to run him down,' she said.
'Without you?'
'You know I can't run like you can.'
'You can go several miles.'
'I'll have to carry your pack, unless you want to run with it on.'
He shook his head. They stopped.
'If he gets away it means our death,' she said. 'It means our daughters' death, probably, it means the destruction of everything you've ever cherished. We've come this far. We've almost won. You'll have to do it.'
His arm hurt. It had hurt all along, but in the fire fight in the darkness he'd forgotten. It throbbed and the pain ran into his shoulder and neck.
Janet said, 'I can't chase him. I'm exhausted. I probably couldn't, even if I weren't.' She spoke very quietly, standing right in front of him, her face close to his.
'Yes,' he said. He felt heavy and slow. His legs felt weak and stiff.
He was in pain. He edged the knapsack down over the wound in his arm and dropped it on the ground. He slipped off the nylon pullover and rolled it tightly and, squatting, put it into the pack. He slipped out of the down vest, rolled it tightly, and put it into the pack. Then he stripped off his shirt and stowed it.
'You've lost weight,' she said.
He handed her the hatchet and she slipped it into her belt.
'You take the carbine,' he said. She took it. He took from her the.32 gun and holster and strapped it to his belt, in back, near the small of his back. He was naked to the waist, shivering in the early sunlight. He had on near white corduroy pants, and boots that laced up over the ankle. They were expensive and weighed very little. He put two granola bars in his pants pocket.
'What if he's waiting ahead, like we did?' she said.
He shrugged. 'If he is, he is. You're right, I got no choice.'
'Maybe he won't be.'
'Maybe. He doesn't know how many of us there are. His whole party's been shot. He's alone in the woods. He must be scared. I hope he'll just run.' 'I'm glad we destroyed the boats,' she said.
'I wish we'd destroyed the canoe. If he finds it we've lost.'
'He won't,' she said.
He looked again at her. She still had the green nylon pullover on, the hood over her head, the drawstring tight. It framed her face like a nun's habit. There was no makeup left, and her face was gray with fatigue. But there was no uncertainty in the face. He'd looked at the same face with the strong planes and the wide mouth for almost as long as he could remember. Without makeup a few freckles showed against her pale skin. There were deep parenthetical lines around her mouth.
Deeper than he remembered. He was enough taller than she was so that she tilted her head slightly to look at him.
'You can do this,' she said. 'He won't find the canoe. You will catch him.'
There were tiny lines at the corners of her eyes, a tiny red mark under her right eye. He could see the pores in her skin.
'You can,' she said.
He nodded. 'Here I go,' he said. And turned and began to jog down the trail away from her, toward the lake.
CHAPTER 30.
He jogged slowly. He wasn't used to running in boots and they felt heavy on his feet. But he remembered running in boots in the Army.
I'll get used to it. He watched the trail ahead of him; it was narrow and it turned frequently. There were fallen branches occasionally, and tree roots that reared here and there above ground, and rocks, some as big as softballs. What seemed easy to walk on became dangerous to run on. He knew that. The years of jogging had left him so sensitive to footing that he could feel the difference between running on sidewalk and running in the street. Street's better. More give. Smooth. Shows what we care about in our culture. He took short steps. Running, even running slowly, increased his sense of the trail's downward pitch. He felt clumsy and stiff, the joints awkward-feeling, and slow.
His breathing was ragged. I'll never make a mile, he thought, and thought how often he'd said that. He always felt this way when he started. As if today he couldn't do it. But he pressed on and always he loosened up and the breath came easy and he found he could make it.
It'll happen this time too, he thought. The sun rose higher. In places among the trees a thin fog steamed up from the wet leaves. The pitch of the trail flattened slightly. As he ran, his eyes moved steadily back and forth across the trail into the woods on either side.
He could almost feel the threat of gunfire, the bullet hitting him in the chest, a massive thump. A green garter snake with black stripes glided across the path in front of him, moving as if without volition.
He began to feel warmer. He stayed on the pace, slow, easy, his arms held slightly above his waist moved in rhythm with his steps. When he'd first begun to run regularly, he remembered, he'd worked on the rhythm, getting the feet to move steadily, and the arms. When he'd been teaching his daughters he used to emphasize it: 'Get the rhythm down,' he'd told them. 'Later it will be much easier to run if you run in an organized way. If you look good or at least better.' They hadn't stuck with the running, though, and had never got beyond the stage where their arms and legs moved in ragged asymmetry. Above him two sparrows chased a crow, darting about it in flight, looking ludicrously small next to the great black scavenger. But the crow fled, and the sparrows pursued. Watch the path he said to himself. Twist your ankle and you might as well be dead. Never mind the fucking birds. He was conscious as he jogged of the weight of the revolver banging against his coccyx. It was the best place for it. It would be more bothersome anywhere else. He began to loosen. His legs felt freer, stretched out more. His arms moved easier, he felt sweat begin to form on his bare back. He felt lighter. I probably have lost weight. I ought to. Haven't eaten anything to speak of in… He couldn't remember how long they'd been in the woods. A ground squirrel crossed his path, its tail out straight behind it, its feet moving very rapidly. He remembered how he used to try to keep his cat from killing chipmunks as a boy and how determined the cat was, dodging his broom, circling back to torment and toy with the half-crippled chipmunk, too quick for him to grab, until his father had told him not to interfere, that even if he saved the chipmunk its spine was probably broken and it would die a lingering death anyway. At night the cat slept on his bed.
The fall of his feet sounded in his listening mind like the beat behind music. It always did, and songs moved
