Reamde

All this internal complexity must have come across, to Peter and Zula, as a sudden withdrawal from the conversation. Perhaps a precursor of senility. It was okay. The magazines were about as loaded as you could get them with frozen fingers. Zula, then Richard, took turns firing the Glock. By the time they were done, the rate of fire, up and down the barbed-wire fence, had dropped almost to nothing. Ammunition was running low, people were cold, kids were complaining, guns needed to be cleaned. The camo chairs were being collapsed and tossed into the backs of the SUVs. Zula drifted over to exchange hugs and delighted, high-pitched chatter with some of her cousins. Richard stooped down, which was a little more difficult than it used to be, and started to collect empty shotgun shells. In the corner of his eye he saw Peter following his lead. But Peter gave up on the chore quickly, because he didn’t want to stray far from Zula. He had no interest in social chitchat with Zula’s retinue of cousins, but neither did he want to leave her alone. He was swivel-headedly alert and protective of her in a way that Richard both admired and resented. Richard wasn’t above feeling ever so slightly jealous of the fact that Peter had appointed himself Zula’s protector.

Peter glanced across the field at the house, looked away for a moment, then turned back to give it a thorough examination.

He knew. Zula had told him about what happened to her adopted mom. Peter had probably googled it. He probably knew that there were fifty to sixty lightning-related fatalities a year and that it was hard for Zula to talk about because most people thought it was such a weird way to die, thought she might even be joking.

THE GRAND MARQUIS was blocking an SUV full of kids and moms who had just had it with being out there in the noise and the cold, so Richard—glad of an excuse to leave—moved quickly toward it, passing between Peter and Zula. Not too loudly, he announced, “I’m going into town,” which meant that he was going to Walmart. He got into the huge Mercury, heard doors opening behind him, saw Peter and Zula sliding into the plunging sofa of the backseat. The passenger door swung open too, and in came another twentysomething woman whose name Richard should have known but couldn’t recall. He would have to ferret it out during the drive.

The young funsters had much to say about the Grand Marquis as he was gunning it out onto the road; they had got the joke of it, decided that Richard was hip. The girl in the passenger seat said she had never before been in “a car like this,” meaning, apparently, a sedan. Richard felt far beyond merely old.

Their conversation flew back and forth like the twittering of birds for about five minutes, and then they all fell silent. Peter was not exactly chomping at the bit to divulge facts about himself. Richard was fine with that. People who had job titles and business cards could say easily where they worked and what they did for a living, but those who worked for themselves, doing things of a complicated nature, learned over time that it was not worth the trouble of supplying an explanation if its only purpose was to make small talk. Better to just go directly to airline travel.

Their chilly extremities sucked all the energy from their brains. They gazed out the windows at the frost-burned landscape. This was western Iowa. People from anywhere else, traveling across the state, would have been hard-pressed to see any distinction between its east and its west—or, for that matter, between Ohio and South Dakota. But having grown up here, and gone on many a pirate quest and Indian ambush down along the crick, Richard sensed a gradient in the territory, was convinced that they were on the threshold between the Midwest and the West, as though on one side of the crick you were in the land of raking red leaves across the moist, forgiving black soil while listening to Big Ten football games on the transistor radio, but on the other side you were plucking arrows out of your hat.

There was a north-south gradient too. To the south were Missouri and Kansas, whence this branch of the Forthrasts (according to his research) had come around the time of the Civil War to get away from the terrorists and the death squads. To the north—hard to miss on a day like today—you could almost see the shoulder of the world turning inward toward the Pole. Those north-seeking Forthrasts must have thought better of it when they had ascended to this latitude and felt the cold air groping down the necks of their coats and frisking them, and so here they’d stopped and put down roots, not in the way that the old black walnut trees along the crick had roots, but as blackberries and dandelions grow thick when a lucky seed lands and catches on a stretch of unwatched ground.