Chapter 8 #3
She thought, not for the first time and not for the last, about giving it up.
Not forgetting. But giving up the looking. Giving up the trips to Austin and the conversations with Hollis and the reviewing of the same beads in the same order.
Her father had told her more than once that stubbornness and persistence were not the same quality, that stubbornness was persistence with its eyes closed.
She knew what he was, what the odds said he was.
Two years. A man who knew how to survive in hard country, who had enemies, who had walked out of a house on a September evening and not come home.
Wouldn’t he want her to live?
She knew the answer. She’d known it for a while and kept setting it aside because knowing it and acting on it were different things. He would have told her to go to Florida and see her aunt and let the ocean work on her the way her aunt said it would.
He would have told her her mother needed her more than a cold trail did. He would have said all of this calmly and with the specific reasonableness she’d inherited from him and that she was now using to argue herself toward the opposite conclusion.
That was the problem with knowing how a person thought. It gave you two arguments instead of one.
She pulled her coat tighter and turned to walk back.
She’d gone maybe two hundred yards west along the bank when she saw them.
The river bent ahead of her, the bank curving south, and in the inside of the bend where the water ran slow and shallow a flat-bottomed boat was pulled up on the clay.
Not a proper craft, more a raft with low sides, the kind built for moving weight across a short stretch of water rather than any distance.
It rode low. Whatever it was carrying was heavy.
There were four men that she could see. Two in the water at the bow, steadying the hull as a third man on the bank pulled something long and wrapped in oilcloth off the deck.
The fourth man stood back from the water watching the bank in both directions with the methodical rotation of a man posted to watch.
She stopped where she was. She was in the brush above the waterline and the bank curved enough that they hadn’t seen her yet. She was maybe sixty yards away.
She looked at what the man was pulling off the deck.
Long shapes, five or six feet, wrapped tight in oilcloth and tied with rope.
He stacked them against the bank with a care that was about the objects and not about his back.
A fifth man appeared from above the bank, coming down a cut in the clay, and took the end of one of the bundles and they carried it up together.
She looked at the watching man. He was on the upstream side, positioned to see anyone coming from the east along the bank, which was where she’d come from.
He was looking west, away from her, and then toward the water, and then east, and she was in the brush and still and he was going to look east again in about four seconds.
She took two steps back into the mesquite behind her and stood still.
The watching man’s gaze came east. She was close enough to read the shape of him but not the face.
He was broad and wearing a dark shirt and he had a rifle on a sling at his shoulder, not in his hands, the posture of a man who didn’t expect to need it imminently and was comfortable enough to let it rest.
He looked east for five seconds and then looked away.
She needed to go back the way she’d come. Quietly and immediately, back east along the bank until the bend put the river between her and them, and then cut up to the road and get back to town.
Whatever was in those oilcloth bundles wasn’t wool and it wasn’t foodstuff and it wasn’t anything that needed to come across a river on a low-sided raft at six in the morning with a man posted to watch the banks.
She took one more step back and her boot found a dry branch in the mesquite.
The crack wasn’t loud, but it was loud enough.
The watching man’s head came around.
She went still. The brush around her was thick and the light was still low and she was wearing the dun coat that was close enough to the color of the clay bank that she might be invisible or might not be, depending on how good his eyes were and how hard he looked.
He looked for five seconds. Ten.
He turned away.
She breathed out and took one slow step, placing her foot, and then another, and she had turned to move up the bank away from the water when the hand came over her mouth from behind.
It was a large hand and it covered her mouth and part of her nose both and the arm that came with it was across her chest and she was pulled back hard against a body she hadn’t heard coming and hadn’t felt coming, someone who had come up behind her in the mesquite without sound, which wasn’t a thing most people could do.
She drove her elbow back hard. It connected with something solid that didn’t give, and the grip didn’t loosen, and the man at her back made no sound at all.
Down the bank, the men at the raft went on with their work.