The people continued up the hill, on two legs, on four legs, on no legs at all.
The drive through the Tennessee mountain country had been startlingly beautiful whenever the storm had eased, and nerve-wracking whenever the rain had pelted down. Town and Laura had talked and talked and talked the whole way. He was so glad he had met her. It was like meeting an old friend, a really good old friend you’d simply never met before. They talked history and movies and music, and she turned out to be the only person, and I mean the only other person, he had ever met who had seen a foreign film (Mr. Town was sure it was Spanish, while Laura was just as certain it was Polish) from the sixties called The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, a film he had been starting to believe he had hallucinated.
When Laura pointed out the first SEE ROCK CITY barn to him he chuckled and admitted that that was where he was headed. She said that was so cool. She always wanted to visit those kinds of places, but she never made the time, and always regretted it later. That was why she was on the road right now. She was having an adventure.
She was a travel agent, she told him. Separated from her husband. She admitted that she didn’t think they could ever get back together, and said it was her fault.
“I can’t believe that.”
She sighed. “It’s true, Mack. I’m just not the woman he married anymore.”
Well, he told her, people change, and before he could think he was telling her everything he could tell her about his life, he was even telling her about Woody and Stoner, how the three of them were the three musketeers, and the two of them were killed, you think you’d get hardened to that kind of thing in government work, but you never did. It never happened.
And she reached out one hand—it was cold enough that he turned up the car’s heating—and squeezed his hand tightly in hers.
Lunchtime, they ate bad Japanese food while a thunderstorm lowered on Knoxville, and Town didn’t care that the food was late, that the miso soup was cold, or that the sushi was warm.
He loved the fact that she was out, with him, having an adventure.
“Well,” confided Laura, “I hated the idea of getting stale. I was just rotting away where I was. So I set off without my car and without my credit cards. I’m just relying on the kindness of strangers. And I’ve had the best time. People have been so good to me.”
“Aren’t you scared?” he asked. “I mean, you could be stranded, you could be mugged, you could starve.”
She shook her head. Then she said, with a hesitant smile, “I met you, didn’t I?” and he couldn’t find anything to say.
When the meal was over they ran through the storm to his car holding Japanese-language newspapers to cover their heads, and they laughed as they ran, like schoolchildren in the rain.
“How far can I take you?” he asked, when they made it back into the car. “I’ll go as far as you’re going, Mack,” she told him, shyly.
He was glad he hadn’t used the Big Mack line. This woman wasn’t a bar-room one-nighter, Mr. Town knew that in his soul. It might have taken him fifty years to find her, but this was finally it, this was the one, this wild, magical woman with the long dark hair.
This was love.
“Look,” he said, as they approached Chattanooga. The wipers slooshed the rain across the windshield, blurring the gray of the city. “How about I find a motel for you tonight? I’ll pay for it. And once I make my delivery, we can. Well, we can take a hot bath together, for a start. Warm you up.”
“That sounds wonderful,” said Laura. “What are you delivering?”
“That stick,” he told her, and chuckled. “The one on the back seat.”
“Okay,” she said, humoring him. “Then don’t tell me, Mister Mysterious.”
He told her it would be best if she waited in the car in the Rock City parking lot while he made his delivery. He drove up the side of Lookout Mountain in the gusting rain, never breaking thirty miles per hour, with his headlights burning.
They parked at the back of the parking lot. He turned off the engine.
“Hey. Mack. Before you get out of the car, don’t I get a hug?” asked Laura with a smile.
“You surely do,” said Mr. Town, and he put his arms around her, and she snuggled close to him while the rain pattered a tattoo on the roof of the Ford Explorer. He could smell her hair. There was a faintly unpleasant scent beneath the perfume. Travel would do it, every time. That bath, he decided, was a real must for both of them. He wondered if there was anyplace in Chattanooga where he could get those scented bath bombs his first wife had loved so much. Laura raised her head against his, and her hand stroked the line of his neck, absently.
“Mack…I keep thinking. You must really want to know what happened to those friends of yours,” she said. “Woody and Stone. Do you?”
“Yeah,” he said, moving his lips down to hers, for their first kiss. “Sure I do.”
So she showed him.
Shadow walked the meadow, making his own slow circles around the trunk of the tree, gradually widening his circle. Sometimes he would stop and pick something up: a flower, or a leaf, or a pebble, or a twig, or a blade of grass. He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the twigness of the twig, the leafness of the leaf, as if he were seeing it for the first time.
Easter found herself reminded of the gaze of a baby, at the point where it learns to focus.
She did not dare to talk to him. At that moment, it would have been sacrilegious. She watched him, exhausted as she was, and she wondered.
About twenty feet out from the base of the tree, half-overgrown with long meadow-grass and dead creepers, he found a canvas bag. Shadow picked it up, untied the knots at the top of the bag, loosened the draw-string.
The clothes he pulled out were his own. They were old, but still serviceable. He turned the shoes over in his hands. He stroked the fabric of the shirt, the wool of the sweater, stared at them as if he were looking at them across a million years.
For some time he looked at them, then, one by one, he put them on.
He put his hands into his pockets, and looked puzzled as he pulled one hand out holding what looked to Easter like a white and gray marble.
He said, “No coins.” It was the first thing he had said in several hours.
“No coins?” echoed Easter.
He shook his head. “It was good to have the coins,” he said. “They gave me something to do with my hands.” He bent down to pull on his shoes.
Once he was dressed, he looked more normal. Grave, though. She wondered how far he had traveled, and what it had cost him to return. He was not the first whose return she had initiated, and she knew that, soon enough, the million-year stare would fade, and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch. That was the way it always went.
She led their way to the rear of the meadow. Her mount waited in the trees.
“It can’t carry both of us,” she told him. “I’ll make my own way home.”
Shadow nodded. He seemed to be trying to remember something. Then he opened his mouth, and he screeched a cry of welcome and of joy.
The thunderbird opened its cruel beak, and it screeched a welcome back at him.