THE EVENING PASSED all too quickly, with reminiscences from all four men, overlaid with bringing one another up to date with what had been happening during the missing times.
Ryan told about his relationship with Krysty, and the unexpected finding of his son, Dean. Trader had nodded at that particular story.
“I remember Sharona,” he said. “That sort of bitch makes a young man come in his breeches and an old man wish that he was a young man again.”
Ryan also told about Jak Lauren, how they’d met in the bayous, the way the lad had settled down with a wife and a little child. And how things had turned against him.
“Some men get snake eyes all their life,” Trader commented, pouring himself another shot of the milky moonshine that he’d discovered in a closet in the main bedroom of the house, “and some don’t.”
As the darkness gathered around them and the fire burned with the brightness that told of a frost outside, Ryan began to realize that Trader wasn’t all that interested in what had been happening when he wasn’t there himself.
Nor was he keen to talk about what he’d been doing since he’d disappeared. He wouldn’t elaborate on the mysterious Native American who’d been around the deep forest at the time that he’d taken the long walk.
Ryan had seen him clearly, could recreate him from his memoryelderly, shy of medium height; hair as bright as polished silver, tied back in two long braids with scraps of vermilion ribbon; wore a robe of animal skins, decorated with a fantastic and complicated pattern of multicolored silken threads. His eyes had been set deep in sockets of wind-washed bone, and there had been a single feather, white as snow, in his hair.
All Trader would say was that the old man had been a shaman. “Silver Light Feet was what they called him. He was the one first gave me an Indian name. Man Who Walks Without Friends. I went with him because I thought I was on the last stretch of my life’s highway.”
“You wrote a letter,” J.B. said.
Trader grinned at the Armorer. “Know better than that, friend. I never rightly mastered the skill of putting little black scratches on paper. Got myself a scribbler out of Mocsin to do it for me.”
“I can remember most of it,” Abe said, barely stifling a belch from the rich stew. “Went on about how you were dying with that rad cancer eating out your guts.”
Trader stared into the fire’s glow, straining for the memory. “This is me saying goodbye and the best of luck. If it goes the way I want, I’ll just walk away in the night. Don’t come after me. I asked you not to follow me. Not anyone.” He paused for a few moments. “And then I finished saying that you and J.B. were to look out for each other.”
“We’ve done that,” the Armorer said quietly.
“Then Abe here got the itch to come and start digging under the boulders.”
The little gunner shrugged. “Too many whispers that you hadn’t gotten on that last wag west. I even started to hear them in my sleep. So”
“Close to midnight.” Ryan had glanced at his chron, for something to do during the sudden silence. “Least you know now where we’ve been and what we’ve all been doing, Trader. Can’t say the same about you.”
“Shaman held a singing ceremony for me. Sweated in a kiva with peyote and sand paintings and all that shit.” He laughed. “All that shit! All that shit saved my life. Said he found what was wrong in my heart that caused the rad cancer in my guts’. I’d always figured it had been living too long in some pesthole rad hot spot in the deserts.”
“You and Abe talked about what went down after you met up. The gang after you on the vengeance trail. Way you got clear of them. Blood price. Nothing else you want to tell us about?” J.B. asked. “Like where you wandered?”
“I been up the snow-tops of the Rockies and down the length of the old Sippi. From the great Lantic to the wide blue Cific. Highlands and lowlands. Came to a time when the hills didn’t seem to get any taller. Just that the valleys were getting deeper and deeper.”