The story was spoken of rarely, just enough so that it was remembered, the tale like a hibernating bear that rouses itself just enough to keep from slipping into eternity.
Chapter 13
Man, Billy thought, that old fart’s a pretty good bullshitter.
He lay stretched out on the rocks, the heat from the campfire warming his left side. His rifle lay on the rocks to his right; the rest of their arsenal was next to the fire, drying out to prevent rust. Billy didn’t like to leave the guns bunched up, and after his watch he had taken an oily cloth to his rifle, swabbing out the receiver. The inside of the barrel would have to wait until they got back to Highbanks.
Jake and Rachel were a few yards away, sleeping, their toes pointed out over the river, which was dropping rapidly as the night wore on. Warren was closer to Billy, watching him and the fire in alternating glances. Darius, Weasel, and Henry were out cold, their mouths open, their snores coming from way back in their throats. Billy had already done his watch, two hours of tending the fire and watching the three city people, kicking Jake once when he wouldn’t stop whispering to Rachel. Then Garney had relieved him, and now Billy was free to go to sleep, or smoke, or think about old men and their stories.
What the hell was Henry trying to do? Scare them out of taking action?
Maybe it was just cold feet on Henry’s part, because he knew Jake when he was just a kid. Billy got it. He didn’t care about Trueblood, but looking at the girl it was obvious she wasn’t part of some evil empire set on destroying Billy’s homeland. She was a scientist who had come along because it was her job, and she probably thought it was going to be wild and remote and exotic. Even Darius has to recognize that, Billy thought. Drop them off in the woods, see if they can make their way out. If not, oh well.
Except, regardless of whether these people survived or not, someone would be back. There was treasure in the ground, so precious these people had tried to fly in under the radar, take a few scoops for free. They couldn’t allow that, not if they were going to call themselves Okitchawa.
Still, Billy thought, I wish we didn’t have to cross that river.
He’d expected Darius to react more to Henry’s story, to chew on it and stare out into the darkness and say something mystical. Or say nothing, but still look like he had something mystical to say—Darius and his foul old girlfriend, Elsie, tapping into something the rest of them couldn’t even fathom. Jesus, what a bunch of bullshit. But no, Darius just went to bed, went right to sleep.
Overhead, a straggler from the Perseids scratched across the sky, blinking in and out of sight in less than a second. Billy watched the sky, waiting for more. Just a little bit of sleep and his mind would clear up. Would reset.
Surgical was the word Darius had used. They had been surgical in their interception of the three capitalists, as if he was some commando. It was probably Jake’s veteran status that got him thinking along those lines, Darius with his channeling of energies and ideas, few of them original. He had taken on this whole “protect the Cree land” deal from Elsie, and now it was like his religion. Billy had joined up with them because he wanted to do something, wanted to be something.
“It won’t help.”
Billy turned to look at Warren, a white dude who in his nice flannel shirt did look like the establishment, an agent of an evil empire. The kind who a hundred and fifty years ago would slide a piece of paper over for the chief to sign, in exchange for a few copper pots and maybe a few more drinks of devil-water.
Warren jutted his chin out toward the valley. “We don’t have any samples, you know that. I see how smart you are.”
“Shut up,” Billy said.
“But even if we did, so what?” Warren’s voice was low, just loud enough for Billy to hear. Garney was staring at the river as though willing it to keep receding. “You think the demand for this stuff is going to go away because you guys don’t want it in your backyard?”
Billy propped himself up on his elbow. “You’re Warren?”
“Yes, Billy, my name is Warren.”
“Warren, you got maybe one more dawn to see.” He let his hand stray toward his sheathed knife. “Maybe not.”
“I’m not trying to provoke you.”
“You’re annoying me,” Billy said. “If I have to stand up to make you stop, I’m only going to do it once.”
“Then do it,” Warren said. His voice was calm, and Billy pushed himself up a bit. Did he really think Billy was making empty threats? No, Billy didn’t think he did. There was fear in his eyes, but also a bit of a piss on it, let’s see what happens attitude. The guy had probably defused a few issues in his time with his nerve and his calm voice, run a manicured hand through manicured hair and said, Folks, let’s stop and think about this a moment.
“Do it,” Warren said. “But you better check with your boss first.”
“You said you weren’t trying to provoke me.”
“Listen,” Warren said, leaning forward. “You guys are going to stall out the development of this deposit one, maybe two years. Then they’ll be back up here, someone will be. I don’t really care—I’ve made my career, Billy. I have plenty of money, and I’m not a crusader for all the rah-rah shit about how critical this is for national defense. We need it bad enough, we’ll blow the shit out of China and go take it.”
“What are you a crusader for, then?”
“My life, at the moment.” He held up his wrists. “Being a covert contractor for the DOD has benefits, Billy. I have millions. Better yet, I can direct research, future explorations. I can make them move away from this area. There are other sleeper deposits out there, other places the United States government can stick its nose into.” His eyes gleamed as he locked Billy in his gaze. “You let Darius kill me tomorrow, all of that goes away. Somebody will be back here, and you won’t be a rich man. You might even end up in prison.”
Billy lay back down. A curl of smoke drifted over him, and he breathed it in, bitter and biting. He pushed himself back up. “That all you got?”
“Money and power?”
“Come on. You think I’m going to let you go, hope you do what you say?”
“I never said anything about letting me go off by myself,” Warren said. “I couldn’t find my way out of these woods alone if I tried. Let me free, then go after me in the morning. Convince them you can do it alone. Then we go back and I get the money for you, set it up so they can’t trace it. That’s not a problem, happens all the time. I got plenty of experience there. Then, at that point, you decide if you want to kill me and be a rich man, or whether you want to be a man who takes a chance on being great, as well as rich.”
“By letting you go.”
“Yes.”
“I get the money part. Okay, let’s say we live in a perfect, trusting world and there’s no strings attached,” Billy said. “You go off and direct your research elsewhere. Nobody’s going to know why the development stopped here.”
“You serious about this saving the earth stuff, Billy?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
“You think this is it?” Warren gestured around them, at the fire and the sleeping bodies curled around it like dogs, at the dark river a few yards away. “Direct battle? Come on, you know you’re just screwing around, delaying the inevitable. Kidnapping, killing? Those are some hammer-handed tactics. You’re better than that.”
Billy propped himself into a sitting position and looked around. Garney was slouched over and sleeping on watch, something Darius might kill him for if he discovered it. But Darius and Weasel were out cold, too. Henry, who seemed to never sleep except maybe for a nap in the afternoon sometimes, was out as well. Rachel and Jake were sleeping close together, their breathing deep and regular, hands and legs still neatly trussed. Hammer-handed tactics; yeah, that was about right. Hammer-headed leadership, too. Darius might have some good ideas, but they were wrapped up in his mysticism—what Darius thought of as cold-blooded spiritualism—and he handled adversity by strangli
ng it with his bare hands.
“You’re playing the silver-tongued devil, eh?” Billy said. “Man, you better shut up—I could use me a silver tongue. Cut it right out of you.”
Warren scooted closer to Billy. “You need to evolve, you need to switch your tactics. You know that, I can see it.” Warren’s eyes gleamed in the thin orange light of the campfire embers. “What do you call yourself, the Okitchawa? What’s that, Cree for ass-kickers?”
“It means warriors.”
“Okay, that could work, or maybe you come up with something a bit less . . . aggressive. So we set you up personally, you have your own wealth. That helps. You inherited it, or got some sort of settlement. Doesn’t matter. First thing you do, after you go have some fun for a few months, maybe a year, is you set up a foundation. Native Lands Matter, or you stick with Okitchawa , whatever.” Warren’s voice had risen a bit, and Billy had to motion him to keep it down.
“We aren’t opposed to resource extraction,” Warren went on in a softer voice, and Billy understood Warren was talking for this fictional foundation, explaining their position to a media outlet, a potential funder, a judge. “Okay? We just want to make sure the best science is used to evaluate whether it makes sense to do it in this particular location. What the social costs would be, what the impacts would be on the society, on our way of life.” Billy had the sense that if Warren’s hands weren’t tied, the man would be gesturing like a lawyer expounding on certain damning facts. “That message, Billy, would drive fear into the hearts of the men who want to use this place. And the best thing? You don’t oppose every project. You’re not one of these people, ‘don’t do anything ever.’ Some projects are okay, the benefits are worth more than the negatives. That way you build trust, credibility. You build respect. You start to be funded by the government, start getting money from the same corporations you’re sticking it to, because they know they need you on their side.”
Billy shook his head. “You think I could do something like that?”
“You got the smarts, the looks. The charisma. You fund the best engineers, the best scientists, the best strategists. Dig into the real issues, not just the emotional aspects. Let them do the heavy work, the modeling and statistics. You communicate it to the public, to regulators, to the courts if need be. To the great unwashed masses. You’d win, Billy, more than you’d lose. And even our losses would be magnificent.”
Billy was silent, thinking. He knew he should lie down and go to sleep, or maybe kick Warren in the throat and go to sleep.
“I let you free,” he said, slowly, “and you do what? Let me know what’s going on? Let me know what fights to pick?”
“Not me,” Warren said. “Someone, though. I’d make some recommendations to a few companies that they might want to make a contribution to your organization, call it an act of good faith. I have lots of favors owed me, Billy. The money would roll in, and you would be able to hire who you wanted. I’d give advice, or my person would. You could take it or leave it.”
“It all sounds good,” Billy said. “Except.”
“Yes,” Warren said. “Except how do you know I won’t just walk away, forget about all this?”
“There you go.”
Warren leaned in close. “What would you do if I betrayed you, Billy?”
“You know what I’d do. If you were here, if I could get my hands on you.”
Warren nodded. “My wallet’s in my left back pocket, Billy. Grab it, please.”
“If I want to take your money, I don’t need an invite.”
“I know,” Warren said. “The wallet, please. There’s something I want to show you.”
Billy scooted over to Warren, moving slowly so as not to cause the rocks to scrape against each other. He reached into Warren’s back pocket and extracted a thin leather wallet. He opened it, pulled out a wad of Canadian and American currency, and held it up to Warren. “You think this is enough?”
“No,” Warren said, and his voice was different. Subdued. “The pictures.”
Billy frowned, then pulled the two photos from their plastic sheaths. One was of a girl of about sixteen, beautiful and bright-eyed, wearing a sweatshirt with an image of a volleyball being spiked over a net. The sweatshirt read WEST FLAGSTAFF HIGH CHAMPS, and the previous year’s date was printed in block lettering underneath. The other was of a boy, perhaps ten or eleven, holding up a brown trout with a streamer fly sticking out of its lip. The boy held a fly rod in the crook of his elbow. Billy turned them over and saw that both had been signed “To Dad,” with “Love ya bunches, Kayla” on the back of the girl’s picture and the other signed “Tommy the Trout Whisperer.”
“So?” Billy put the pictures back into the sheaths. “This supposed to make me feel bad about what we’re going to do to you?”
“No,” Warren said. “It’s your insurance.”
Billy glanced at the pictures inside their plastic casing, then up at Warren’s face. His visage was almost completely dark, the starlight catching the edge of his nose, the embers from the fire winking in his eyes. But there was something soft inside those hard lines, something that hadn’t been there before. And there was a strong resemblance to both of the children in the pictures: the same Roman nose, the same wide-spaced eyes, more pronounced in the boy but there in the girl, too.
“What?”
“They go to West Flagstaff,” Warren said. “That’s in Arizona. Now you know where they are, what they look like. Keep the wallet, keep the pictures, Billy. If I move my kids to a different town, to a different country, there’s a chance that you will use your money to take your revenge on me that way.” Warren went on, before Billy could talk. “I don’t know if you’d do something like that. It’s enough for me to know it’s possible, because they are literally the only things in life that I care enough about that I can use as insurance. Look me in the eyes and tell me I’m lying.”
Billy looked down at the pictures again, flipping them back and forth. “You’d use your own kids to save your skin?”
“They need me,” Warren said softly. “This is the only way I might make it back to them.”
Billy closed the wallet and laid it on top of his thigh. It had been a long day and a longer night, and the dawn was coming on, finally, a slight gray fraying at the edges of the black horizon. The darkest part of the night was behind them and now there would be a new dawn, new choices. He let his eyes wander over the men sleeping by the dying campfire. Hard men who were able to make hard choices. That was what had appealed to Billy, not because he lacked the ability himself but because it was something, perhaps one of the few things, he admired about himself. It was good to be around those you admired. But hard choices weren’t always the right choices.
Remember that, he thought. If you lead people someday, remember that they will admire you for the hard decisions, and they’ll leave you for the wrong ones.
He looked at Darius, who sounded like he was choking on his snores. Garney was asleep, his chin down on his chest. Behind them the river burbled and whispered.
“What do you think, Billy?”
“I think you’re still annoying me,” Billy said, pulling his knife from its sheath. “We’re going to have to do something about that.”
* * *
“Hell,” Weasel said. “I don’t believe it.”
They stood looking at the shrunken river, the top of the sun just peeking over the horizon. They could see two distinct waterlines on the far shore. The higher one was from the flood of the day before, the vegetation on the far shoreline flattened and muddy. Logs and driftwood were deposited along the edge, some weathered and worn from years of aging, others splintered and fresh, the yellow wood hinting at the force of the flood in the upper watershed. The second waterline was much lower, marked by dark brown sediment. It extended several feet down, the green-slimed sediment covering the rocks. Water wept out of the banks from the saturated soil and trickled down to the river, which had shrunk to a mere thirty yards wide.
Their rifles, all except the one Billy had slept next to, were gone.
Garney’s bow remained, as did Henry’s Walther pistol. Billy still had his mistik, and they all had their knives. But the rest of the long rifles, Weasel’s and Darius’s moose hunting rifles as well as Henry’s and Jake’s 30-30s, which had been placed next to the fire to dry out and prevent rust, were as gone as Warren. Billy’s .308 was slung over his shoulder.
“We’re outgunned,” Weasel said. “He could get up in a high spot and pick us off, one by one.”
“Spread out,” Henry said. He had been the first one up, and had awakened the rest of them to alert them Warren had escaped. “See if you can cut his track. Weasel and Garney upstream, Darius and Billy downstream. I’ll stay with these two.”
Weasel spat between his boots and glared at Garney. “I gotta be next to him, I’ll cut his belly open. Come on, Billy.” They started upstream, moving along the edge of the narrow beach.
Garney waited while Darius knelt where Warren had been, passing a hand over the rocks as if he was trying to see if there was any residual heat left from Warren’s body. Then he reached down and plucked up something very small from between the pebbles, a tiny fiber of rope, less than a centimeter long. He peered at the end of it, then studied the rocks nearby, letting his eyes roam over the sharper edges for several minutes. Finally, he let the fiber drop and looked up at the bluff, at the spine of rock that snaked above them.
“I’d like to find him,” Darius said mildly. “I’d like to talk to him a bit about how he escaped.”
“Darius, I’m sorry,” Garney said. “I was just so exhausted—”
“It’s over now. Come on.”
They had only gone a little way downriver when Weasel whooped from upstream. Darius and Garney ran up to join them. Henry yanked Rachel and Jake to their feet and prodded them forward, marching them up the gravel beach with his Walther. Weasel was pointing at a set of tracks on the far side of the river. Someone had tried to cover them up, smearing the boot prints with his hands and throwing some cattails over others. It may have looked good in the dark, Jake thought, but it’s not fooling anyone now. He looked at Billy, who was studying the tracks intently.
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