Apart from carrying the piano, Lemuel was also well stocked with general supplies, including ample food for the three of them.
They had sat around a crackling fire at the edge of a huge and impenetrable forest to the west of the trail, by a narrow stream that raced into a deep beaver pool. There was a skillet brimming with fatback and beans, two loaves of fresh-baked bread, all of it washed down with some bottles of locally brewed beer.
“Better than” Dean began, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, stopping when he caught the sudden turn of the head and angry glare of warning from his father. He realized that he’d been about to reveal the unsavory fact that they’d been eating in Ma’s Place around the time that the eatery went up in flames, taking its transvestite owner with it.
“Better than what, young fellow?” Lemuel asked, picking at his teeth with a splinter of peeled pine.
“Better than lots of meals I’ve eaten in lots of other places,” the boy concluded lamely.
“Me too,” Ryan agreed.
Afterward they got ready for the night. Lemuel unpacked some gray blankets. “Best all sleep under the bed of the wag,” he said. “And I got some drinkin’ whiskey to help get off good and sound. Either of you want some?”
“No thanks,” Ryan said. “Boy’s a little too young for it. You don’t think we should post a guard?”
“Why?”
“Talk back in the ville of some serious trouble with a gang of killers up around Harmony. Fire could have been seen for twenty miles or more on a clear night like this.”
Lemuel considered it, rubbing at the side of his nose, where a ragged scar showed that someone had once tried to break a bottle in his eye and narrowly missed.
“No. Fire’s still bright enough to keep off most predators. Bears and wolves likely won’t risk it. Anyways, the mules are good guard dogs. Near as good as geese. Nobody and nothing’ll get close enough to harm us. We can all get to sleep with quiet minds and restful hearts.”
Within a quarter hour, the skinner’s heavy breathing told Ryan and Dean that the liquor had done its stuff.
There was a ten-cent moon in a dollar sky, glinting through ragged tendrils of high cloud.
Ryan had been about to drop off himself when Dean asked him the question.
“Did I love your mother? Did I really love Sharona? Is that your question, Dean?” It wasn’t the first time the boy had asked, and his insecurity tugged at Ryan’s heart.
“Yeah. I know you and her didn’t have too much quality time with each other. The fighting kept you apart after you got married in that chapel in the valley.”
In fact, love and marriage hadn’t had very much to do with it, Ryan thought.
Nothing to do with it.
She had been the wife of a particularly evil baron, and Ryan had literally only spent a few minutes in her company.
During a half dozen of those minutes, twelve years ago now, he had coupled with her. Not made love. It had been more like a pair of wild cats rending at each other’s flesh, fueled more by hatred than by anything approaching love. In all of Ryan’s many sexual encounters since his early teens, there had never been one so powerful and revolting, and memorable, as his time with Sharona Carson.
“Well, did you truly love her, Dad?”
Ryan was lying on his back, between the rear wheels of the creaking wag, looking up through the spokes at the star-spangled velvet of the Colorado sky.
“So many bridges crossed since then, son,” he said.
“Does that mean you didn’t love her after all?” The disappointment rang clearly in the boy’s voice.
“No. Doesn’t mean that. I was just thinking back over the long years when I didn’t know you existed. I’d thought that Sharona was likely long dead.”
“Lost years, Dad.”
At that moment Ryan came suddenly to the brink of abandoning his plans for his son’s education. He regretted all the wasted time when he and Sharona and the boy had been roaming Deathlands, their paths never crossing. It was almost four years since she’d died of rad sickness, trusting a friend to track down Ryan and deliver the boy up to him.