Wild Ways

And Rafe was not happy about it.

It was irritating as hell to be thinking about her at all, for a start. But to have her on his mind here, up on Bear Mountain, really ticked him off.

Until now, he’d managed to keep the outside world from intruding up here. His fortress from reality, his sister had called it. She’d used a lot of phrases like that once, shouting them at him as though trying to pierce armorplate with words. But it wasn’t a fortress, just a quiet retreat from the clamor and clang of a world that seemed increasingly irrelevant.

Up here there was nothing but him and the sky and the wind and the mountain itself, its granite roots planted deep in the planet’s heart. It was silent, save for the moan of the wind and the occasional scream of an eagle, and as clean as bone, scoured by that ever-present wind.

Everything was reduced to its simplest form, all softness and artifice and weakness gone until only the core remained. Even the stunted trees had been stripped of nonessentials until they were more like polished stone than living things, gray and hard and elemental, all but unkillable. Tree-thing at its most fundamental level, like the rock and the sky.

Like him.

It had saved him, this mountain. Like the rocks and the twisted trees, he’d been scoured down to his most elemental self until all that was left was hard and pure. He’d come up here almost two years ago intending to kill himself. Eight months before, he’d drunk himself into a stupor and had stayed that way, trying to blot out the memories. But it had never worked. And finally, too exhausted by guilt and pain to go on, he’d decided to stop even trying.

He’d had some plan, he supposed, although he’d never been able to remember it. Later, he’d found the unloaded pistol where it had dropped from his bourbon-numbed fingers, so maybe that had been it. Whatever he’d planned, he’d managed to screw it up, too drunk to put thought into action. Instead, he’d fallen into a pile of boulders near the summit and had lain there for days, drifting in and out of consciousness, soaked by rain and heavy dew at night, burned dry by an unforgiving sun during the day.

He still had no idea how long he’d lain there. Long enough to kill most men, he suspected. Long enough to kill him had he not been so pickled in bourbon. He remembered licking dew from stone, the taste bitter in his mouth. Remembered waking once and seeing clumps of blueberries hanging just above him, growing where no blueberries grew. Knowing they were nothing more than a hallucination, he reached up with fingers that seemed unattached to his body and picked them and ate them, the juice as sweet as wine. Remembered finding apples. Like the blueberries, they were out of place and out of time—it was spring, not fall, and there wasn’t an apple tree for a hundred miles in any direction. But, hallucination or not, he ate them and they were sweet.

He remembered watching the slow spiral of an eagle as it hung in an updraft a hundred feet above him, giant wings unmoving. He talked to it; he remembered that, too. Babbling things he’d never spoken aloud before, shouting his rage to the sky. He remembered screaming threats to God and man alike. Remembered retching dryly for hour after hour, stomach cramping so painfully he could hardly breathe as the wind and sun worked eight months of cheap booze from his system. Remembered weeping finally, exhausted and empty and at the end.

He’d simply let go then, he remembered. Content to lie there and drift into a final sleep, relinquishing control to whatever forces had kept him alive that far. Something had been there, with him, at the end. Real but not real, just a presence half-seen, a Spirit Warrior keeping silent, still watch. And thus watched, he’d slept finally, slipping down into that kind of deep, dreamless renewing sleep that had eluded him for the better part of a year.

He’d awakened just before dawn, chilled to the bone, and had sat up slowly, sober for the first time in months. Everything was still, the crystalline air so pure and cold it hurt to breathe. The sky was the color of skim milk, still dotted by stars and streaked with peach in the east, and he had sat there, shivering uncontrollably, and had realized with surprise that he was alive. Purified inside and out by wind and rain and sun, as smoothed and polished and hard as an obsidian blade.

The sun had risen, warming him a little, and he’d gotten unsteadily to his feet, feeling as delicate and untethered as a cloud, and had stumbled light-headed and shivering down to the trailer. He had no idea where the key was—he’d locked it up after Stephanie had been killed and had never been back—so he just pried the door open and rummaged around until he found some clean, dry clothes. Then he’d gone up to the spring, stripped naked and dived into the icy water, coming up sputtering and breathless and shocked fully awake.

He’d gathered his old clothes up into a pile and burned them, then had cut his hair and burned that, too. He’d made it a ceremony of sorts, tossing a little tobacco into the flames to thank whatever spirits had held him back from dying, smiling at his own whimsy.

His pickup truck was still in a ditch about a mile down the trail where he’d run it into a tree. He’d winched it out, driven it up to the small meadow where the trailer was and cleaned it up, tossing out the empty bottles and then scrubbing out the stink of vomit and stale sweat and despair.

He’d started running the next day. It had nearly killed him at first. He would run twenty feet and stagger the next twenty, pouring with sweat and cursing with the pain as every muscle in his body knotted. But after a week or two the twenty feet stretched to fifty, then a hundred, and then he suddenly broke through and was running like a deer. He ran without thought or purpose those first few months, just pounding down the miles like someone trying to outrun his own demons, and maybe that was what he had been doing.

The healing started sometime during those months. His mind became as lean and healthy as his body, and soon he’d found himself thinking of the future again. Not long-range. Just a day or two at first. But, as with his physical endurance, that got stronger with time and practice, as well. Soon he was planning a whole week ahead, then the week stretched to a month, and somewhere along the line, without even realizing when it had happened, he was thinking in terms of years.

But until now, those thoughts had been solitary ones. Simple things, mostly, like what kind of water pump to buy when he realized the old one was finally beyond repair, and the best direction to angle the woodshed to keep the snow from blowing straight in, things like that. Now and again he would take on a retrieval job, adding his fee to the pile of fifty-dollar bills hidden behind the paneling in his bedroom closet, but mostly he stayed to himself up here.

There was always something to do. Repairing leaks in the trailer’s sunbaked hide alone was almost a full-time job, the generator needed regular tune-ups, and there were books to read and wood to chop. It was a simple life, physical and free of the complexities and confusions and complications of the outside world, and he liked it just fine that way.

Until Mary Margaret Kavanagh had starting turning up in his thoughts for no reason he could figure, and suddenly things weren’t the same at all.

Swearing under his breath, Rafe turned the key in the truck’s ignition. The engine caught instantly and he gunned it a few times, listening carefully. He’d spent the better part of the morning tuning it up and was finally pleased with the way it sounded, although there had been nothing much wrong with it in the first place. He’d blown out the fuel line, replaced a couple of hoses and put in new spark plugs, and short of stripping the thing down to basics and starting all over again, there wasn’t much more he could do.

Filling time. Trying not to think of her.

He refused to let his mind wrap itself around the syllables of her name. He’d been doing that a little too often, too. Her name was like a line of poetry or a bit of music he couldn’t get out of his head, and now and again he would realize he’d been running it over and over in his thoughts like some tribal chant, the rhythm of the words almost hypnotic.

Mary Margaret Kavanagh.

Hell of a mouthful. Maybe her parents had hoped she would grow into it.