George Chesbro - Two Songs This Archangel Sings

For lunch we ate sandwiches from our large, well-stocked ice locker, then turned on gas-powered space heaters and waited in the Jeep until nightfall. We took turns sleeping and searching the tapestry of night for the tiniest speck of fire on the mountain, but sighted nothing. At dawn we crossed that mountain off one of the five topological maps we had brought with us, started up the Jeep, and headed for the next mountain.

We spent three days and nights driving through the mountains in a twenty-five-mile radius around the town of Colletville and were about to give up when, near midnight of the third night, I glanced to my right through the binoculars and clearly saw wisps of smoke rising in the distance into a sky brightly illuminated by a full moon. I quickly checked the map, saw that we were ten miles away from the nearest town. We parked the Jeep off the road, slept for a few hours, and at dawn loaded and hitched on our backpacks. We checked our pocket compasses, then headed off in the direction where I had seen the smoke.

After a day of hiking west, we both began to suspect that my sighting of smoke might have been as phantasmagorical as Garth's sighting of fire in the schoolhouse window back in Colletville. By nightfall, two city boys were thoroughly exhausted from tramping over hill and dale. We pitched camp, built a huge fire to cheer ourselves up, but didn't have the energy to cook. We ate cold cuts washed down with beer, then talked strategy-or lack of it. Just before sundown we had spotted, far in the distance, the top of what appeared to be a fire-lookout tower, close to the top of yet another mountain. Before going to sleep, we decided that we would try to make it as far as that tower the next day, and then turn back if there was no sign of Gary Worde; there seemed no sense in throwing away good time after that we would have already wasted in a futile search.

Over the river and through the woods…

We were again up at dawn at the beginning of what looked to be a fine, bright day. Refreshed, we cooked ourselves a big breakfast of eggs and Canadian bacon, cleaned up the campsite, and started off again in the direction of the lookout tower. After a half hour of walking we reached the top of a rise and were relieved to see below us a dry streambed which looked like easy walking and which appeared to meander off in the general direction of the tower. I led the way down the hill, entering a thick outcropping of fir trees. I was the first to see the streambed again when we emerged from the trees, and it was almost enough to give me a heart attack; thoroughly startled, I yelped in astonishment and jumped backward, bumping into Garth.

In the few minutes that it had taken us to walk down the forested hillside, something had appeared in the streambed that definitely hadn't been there when we'd started down; sitting on a huge boulder not ten yards away from us was a fairly large man. He was wearing a blue, fur-lined parka, faded jeans tucked into high-top laced hiking boots. His thinning brown hair looked clean but was very long, pulled back from his face and tied in a pony tail, and he had a full beard which reached the center of his broad chest. His eyes were large and brown, perhaps a bit too bright. Large hands were wrapped around a sturdy walking stick which he had laid across his knees. Powerful field binoculars hung on a leather strap around his neck.

"You've got to be Mongo Frederickson," the man said, pointing a stubby index finger in my direction. He looked more than a bit bemused.

Garth and I glanced at each other, then back at the man. Our rifles were stuck in sleeves in our backpacks, not easily accessible. "Who the hell are you?!" I snapped.

"My name's Gary Worde," the man said easily in a deep, rather pleasing baritone. "If you are Mongo, then the sour-looking big guy with you is your brother, the cop. Are you two looking for me?"

"How the hell do you know who we are, and what makes you think we're looking for you?" I asked, feeling rather foolish.

The bearded man shrugged his broad shoulders, touched the binoculars slung around his neck. "I've been tracking you for the past two hours from the top of the lookout tower back there. From the way the two of you trip over your own feet, you're sure as hell not hikers-and there are no hiking trails in this area, anyway. So I asked myself, what would an odd pair like you two be doing around here? A mutual friend, Veil Kendry, talks about you a lot. Let's just say I put one big guy and one little guy together and came up with your names. Did Veil send you with a message for me? Is he all right?"

Garth unhurriedly unzipped his parka, reached inside, and withdrew his service revolver. He cocked the hammer, walked out into the streambed, and put the gun to the man's head. It wasn't a very friendly thing to do, but I definitely agreed with his next point. "For some reason I don't believe you, pal," Garth said in a quiet voice that carried clearly in the sharp, cold air. "I try to put you together, and I don't come up with any answer at all. Now, what's your real name, and what are you doing here?"

The gun bore touching his forehead didn't seem to bother the man. His expression didn't change at all as he rolled his eyes in my direction and raised his eyebrows slightly. "Mongo? Tell me why I shouldn't be who I say I am."

"You don't match up with the report we got. Gary Worde's supposed to be the wild man of these mountains, and nobody's even seen him for nine years. You don't look or sound very crazy to us, but you do look too Goddamn well fed and well dressed to be the man we're looking for."

"Who told you all this?"

"A friend of Worde's in Colletville."

The man frowned slightly. "Then Veil didn't send you?"

"No. As a matter of fact, you might say we're looking for him."

"Why are you looking for him?"

Confused and uncertain of what to say, I said nothing. While it was certainly true that this man casually sitting on a boulder in the middle of a dry streambed didn't match up with anything Jan Garvey had told us about Gary Worde, it was also true that it wouldn't make any sense for our trackers-assuming they knew about Gary Worde, which was a big assumption-to sit this man down in our path to try to trick us. It bothered me, as did the man's seeming indifference to Garth's gun at his head.

"You'd best answer my question," the man cautioned in a tone of voice that sounded oddly like a threat.

"When was the last time you saw Veil Kendry?"

"I don't measure time the way you do. It was three seasons ago."

Spring. Veil had pulled one of his disappearing acts in the spring, for about three weeks. "He came here?"

"Yeah. He visits me at least once, sometimes twice, a year."

"Why does he visit you?"

"Because he's my friend," the man said with a slight shrug of his shoulders. "We practice together in these mountains."

"Practice what? Martial arts?"

His answer was to execute a series of maneuvers so fast I couldn't follow them. The bearded man ducked forward and to his left beneath Garth's gun, which clattered to the rocks as the side of the man's hand hit Garth's wrist. In what seemed less than the flicker of an eyelid, Garth had been disarmed and turned around, with one of his arms held in a tight hammerlock. The bearded man's right forearm was across my brother's windpipe.

Feeling like nothing so much as a winded commuter who has just seen his train pull out of the station, I drew my Beretta and started to circle around to where I might get a clear shot at the man who called himself Gary Worde. "Let go of my brother, or I'm going to put a bullet through your head."

"Put the gun away, Mongo," the man said easily. "You're lucky I recognized you as the Frederickson brothers, or you'd both have been dead a few seconds after your brother here pulled his gun on me. Put yours away."