Guns [John Hardin 01] (22 page)

“You must also be aware that one among your enemies may have learned to call on that same power, although he may not even realize it himself, so if somehow that one becomes the hunter you will know to quiet your mind and still your body so you don’t betray yourself with movement or sound or fear-scent or even thought, until you can become the hunter again.”

“It all sounds difficult to achieve.”

“I’ll help you. But I think you’ve already begun. When you run the path to the top of the mountain sit down there and be still for a time. Wash out your mind. Push away all regrets, all doubts, all thoughts of tomorrow except how you might set out to do what you must do. Think of how it once was for your nameless ancestors. Their blood runs in your veins. Drive away all emotion, even anger. Above all, blinding anger. Make your heart cold and hardened. Try to hear every single sound in the woods and know what each means. Be aware of every sound you make yourself and always try to move more quietly. Smell the breeze and know all it tells you. Go walk in the town and try to know what the others around you are thinking. If you try hard enough the power will slowly awaken in you. And then you can unchain the killing-will.”

During the days he jogged and then gradually ran on the path and helped the old man do chores around the place. He found downed hardwood trees in the forest, used a bow saw to cut them into lengths that he could drag back to the house with a heavy rope looped around his shoulders, then he cut them up and split them to build up a store of firewood, stacking it high between two trees at the edge of the woods behind the house. He repaired and repainted the shed on two long warm days. He stocked the refrigerator and pantry but left the cooking to the old man, who made mysterious Indian dishes using different herbs that he claimed had magical healing powers.

In the evenings they sat by the fireplace drinking an herbal tea. One night the old man asked, “Do you have enough money?”

“Yes. My plane was insured and paid off. The Marshals got the money for me. Over forty thousand dollars.”

He began to grow a beard, which he would keep closely trimmed. He put on an old hat and dark glasses and ran down into the town and walked along by the crafts, souvenir, and leather shops, trying hard to read the thoughts of those around him and actually seeming to get fleeting impressions from this person or that one. He went through the museum, taking in every bit of knowledge it offered about the Cherokee people. He didn’t engage in any conversations.

The big casino on the edge of town sat at the end of a vast and ugly parking lot to accommodate the lines of tour buses and the hundreds upon hundreds of cars bearing plates from many states, which fed a steady stream of hopeful people into the neon fantasyland inside the low imposing building of massive laminated beams and stone. The action among the rank upon rank of electronic slots and games went on around the clock as the slick operation gathered in millions from the dreamers and offered only ephemeral cold glitter in return. “It’s a palace for fools,” the old man said of it.

As he worked or ran, pushing his body harshly, he thought of how he might go after them. There had been at least two in that silver Blazer. The one with the bulldog face, the one Marshal Nelson had said was probably the street thug known as Winston. The other had most probably been Montgomery Davis. A third could have been the young one in fatigues who had been seen in the Ocracoke General Store asking about an airplane charter. He had first spotted that Blazer near the store. So find out for sure who and how many had come in the Blazer and then go after them one at a time, he thought.

He would begin with the one called Winston, whose real name Nelson had said was Walter Calzo, from Newark. Strake was different. Strake was most often surrounded by tight security, either in one of his homes or in his warehouse office, and there were often other people nearby, innocent people who could get hurt or serve as witnesses. He had to strike with total surprise when the man was isolated somewhere. If possible make it look like an accident. Gradually he imagined a fitting way it could be done cleanly and with absolute finality. He began turning the raw plan over in his mind, looking for flaws, thinking of specific ways he might carry it out.

Wasituna took him to several different mountain trails, the old Indian usually walking by himself for a time and then waiting placidly in the car while Hardin ran the trails to near exhaustion. Wasituna urged him to buy a pair of deerskin moccasins, which the old man first soaked in water and then instructed him to wear while he ran until they dried on his feet and so fit like his own skin. “You’ll feel every stick and rock on a trail,” Wasituna said, “so you’ll soon learn to place your feet more carefully, even while you’re running as fast as you can. The moccasins will make you quieter and more sure-footed. You’ll see.” He punished and bruised his feet at first, stumbling and slowing on the mountain path, once tripping on a root and falling headlong, painfully scraping his knees and forearms on sharp slate rock. Gradually he learned to run at speed while still placing each foot in the best spots almost instinctively. His feet began to toughen along with the rest of his body.

On a gray heavily misted day after a light snow the night before, five weeks after he had arrived, Wasituna drove him in the pickup over poor back roads to a new trail a long way from the town on the edge of the sprawling Great Smoky Mountains National Forest. He ran for miles along the trail as it climbed and fell and climbed again, forking three times and winding through the rugged terrain. He lost track of time and was on a sustained runner’s high, feeling at times as though he could glide along the rough ground without even touching it, sweating freely, his legs sure and strong and his lungs inflating and expelling deeply and smoothly.

As he climbed on the faint twisting path strewn with forest debris he ran alongside a narrow swift stream and the path became even more indistinct, as though nobody else had been this way in a very long time. The ground became steeper and more rocky, the stream eventually disappearing into jumbled rocks. Then the trees thinned and opened onto a foggy meadow surrounded by cliffs on three sides.

He slowed and stopped, breathing deeply, his blood singing. He stretched his shoulders and torso and dropped for fifty pushups. He wiped his face with his hand and sat on a log to rest. He knew he was miles from anywhere. He could not pick out where the trail went from here. As his breathing calmed he rested his hands on his knees and stilled himself, listening intently to the forest all around. There was a fitful breeze building, rustling through the conifers up high and at times clattering in the topmost branches of the hardwoods. The air seemed to warm and thicken. He could hear drops of mist hitting the heavily-matted forest floor and tried to pinpoint where each fell. Some small animal, a squirrel or more likely a chipmunk, judging by the furtive quickness of the movements, suddenly skittered up a tree, its tiny claws scratching at the bark.

He closed his eyes and tried to pick out other sounds. A particular branch tapping another. The trickling headwaters of the stream that was now five hundred feet off, barely distinguishable from the breeze sounds above. A bird calling plaintively in the distance, higher up on this nameless mountain.

The breeze increased until it was a steady susurration, mesmerizing, sighing throughout the forest. Still with his eyes closed he listened closely and he could pick out what sounded like the soft beatings of wings. Hundreds of wings. Birds wheeling and climbing and settling. But there was a quality of unreality to it and he did not dare to open his eyes because if it was a mere sensory illusion he desperately did not want to lose it. He knew the mists were swirling around him now; he felt it, but he didn’t move. There was a startlingly heavy sound behind him. He froze every muscle. Then it came again, moving up on his left now, a dragging shuffle that broke twigs and scattered damp leaves.

It was a black bear. He heard it clearly, its breathing uneven and chuffing, and smelled the rank odor of its matted coat, but he also
saw
it in some strange way even though his eyes were closed. It moved past him, lurching, and there was a glistening runnel of dark blood leaking from a wound in its shoulder. It ignored him as it lumbered slowly on. The moisture on the high cliffs was thickening and flowing down the rugged granite in violet rivulets. The mist-filled meadow was not a meadow but an ethereal lake. A lake that was real and yet not real. There were ghostly birds above it. Hundreds of them performing exuberant aerial dances in the violet mist.

He thought he had pushed her far back in his mind where she would be safe until he had done what he had to do, but she stepped out from behind a tree, her back to him, wearing a dark green robe, her long black hair sheened with the chilled moist air.

He did not dare move. He called out to her quietly but she did not turn around, just raised her left hand in acknowledgment and reassurance and moved on. Close by the lake shore she let the robe fall. The bear moved painfully down alongside her and looked up at her, its paw lifted and dripping blood. She motioned for it to go on and it moved awkwardly into the water until only its humped back and head showed and it was swimming out into the mist. She entered the water, her back finely muscled, her hair iridescent, her skin exquisitely supple. The lake waters flowed around her waist and the mists swirled and enfolded her and she called out something but it was lost in the breeze.

He stood abruptly, his heart hammering and his breath coming in ragged gasps, searching wide-eyed ahead in the mist, but the bear was nothing more than a black boulder, the lake just a vale of low-hanging mist. The robe only a lush patch of moss. And although he strained to hear, the sounds of the birds were fading into the strengthening breeze.

Shaken, he stood there for a long time, his eyes streaming hot tears, until he dimly realized the light was failing. He shook his head to clear it and walked back, looking repeatedly over his shoulder. Then he ran, filled with heartache, until he cut the trail close by a familiar cliff and suddenly knew his way again. The old Cherokee was waiting patiently in the darkened pickup and said nothing.

Over the next two weeks he went back to the same trail three times but, despite running for hours and following each of the forks, he could never find the particular stream branch or the high meadow—or
Ataga’hi,
the magic lake—again.

Wasituna bought ten boxes of .45 ACP cartridges, a pistol cleaning kit, and a yellowed Army manual from an old white man he knew who owned a gun shop off the reservation, and Hardin took the old Colt that Hank had given him to a clearing deep in the woods. First he spread out a square of canvas on a rock shelf and taught himself how to strip the gun and clean it. He did it over and over, enough times so that he could finally do it with his eyes closed. He felt its heft and balance and practiced with it loaded but without a round chambered, drawing and aiming it, from behind his belt buckle and then from behind his belt at the small of his back, over and over, trying to improve his speed and confidence so he would not fumble it. He spent long hours at it every day, and carried the gun with him at all times, becoming intimately familiar with it, learning to conceal it under a sweatshirt or windbreaker, in a leather fanny pack, or slid into the top of his boot under loose-legged jeans. He learned to draw and aim it with his right hand quickly while standing or seated, aiming with both eyes open and his left palm cupped under the butt to steady it.

He took it back to the clearing day after day and fired it at cans and dead trees. It was startlingly loud and had a kick that jolted his whole arm. The fat slugs could inflict heavy damage on a tree stump. He fired first for accuracy at ranges from ten feet to a hundred feet, then for speed, not using anything to protect his eardrums, getting used to the noise and the recoil, squeezing the trigger for each shot. He learned to reload quickly with the spare magazine, doing it over and over. He carried it with a round in the chamber, the hammer back and the safety on—what they called cocked and locked—and drew and fired, drew and fired, until his hand was sore from it.

He and the old man devised a training run. Wasituna got a stock of plastic gallon and half-gallon jugs from a recycling center. The Indian first went out and placed a dozen or more water-filled jugs along both sides of a particularly rugged stretch of trail. Hardin ran the trail, drawing and firing when he spotted the first jug, moving on and firing when he saw the next, and so on. Wasituna was creative with the placement, using tree forks, swinging some from ropes, partially hiding others behind rocks, putting two close together, varying the range, and keeping careful score of hits, which were few at first but gradually increased until Hardin was getting frequent hits almost instinctively. He kept the gun meticulously clean and it never failed to fire, never jammed. He could see why the Colt had remained in service for so long and had been praised by so many servicemen over those decades. Wasituna had to go back to the gun shop for more cartridges.