“Men,” she said after she hung up. But it was clear she took great pleasure in being needed. “If you’d like, we can go over the rest of tomorrow’s protocols in my office.”

28

PRIEST RIVER, IDAHO

Evan rolled aimlessly around the house. He felt full of an anxious, twitchy energy now that he was off the pills. His mind was a kaleidoscope of splintery questions about this whole ethanol thing with John Collier and his dad. Why had his father been so emotional? And what was up with the African woman who’d run out of the woods? None of the explanations quite made sense, but he hoped to find some answers in the woods. A few days earlier, he’d seen a pillar of smoke rising over the treetops a half mile away.

Outside the sky had gone leaden. A storm was gathering.

“I’m going outside for a while, Margie,” he said.

Margie stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. “It’s too cold.”

“Just for a few minutes.”

“No.” She shook her head.

“What do you mean ‘no’?”

“Mr. Wilmot won’t allow it.”

“I am Mr. Wilmot,” he said with an edge in his voice that made her flinch. He felt the tiniest bit bad. It was kind of an asshole thing to say. But it was also true. He was not some kid who could be told what to do in his own house.

Other than a brief flash in her eyes, her big ham of a face did not move. “Your father would not allow it,” she repeated.

Evan rolled toward her, stopping only just short of whacking her on the shins. “I served my country through one tour of Iraq and two tours of Afghaniem“”“”“”" juststan, and I’ll be damned if you’re going to stop me from going out in my own yard.”

“Mr. Wilmot would not allow it.”

Evan slammed the joystick forward on his wheelchair, but Margie grabbed the arms of the chair and held it like a nose tackle on a blocking sled. The electric motor whined loudly, and after a moment the chair began to emit a burned rubber smell. Finally Evan let go of the joystick. It wouldn’t do him any good burning out the motor on his sled.

“All right, whatever,” he said. He hit the reverse on his joystick, backed up, and rolled to the chairlift that took him up the stairs to his room.

When he got upstairs, he called down the stairs, “If you’re going to be a pain in the ass, can you make me a sandwich? Ham and swiss on rye, okay? With a pickle.”

He knew that there was no rye bread in the kitchen, that the only rye bread in the house was in the basement freezer. He waited until he heard Margie clumping down into the basement, then rolled his wheelchair out onto the side balcony of the house. The house was built on a hillside. His father had installed a wheelchair ramp, but he’d never really used it because the hillside was too steep to navigate in the chair.

Today, though, he figured he’d be okay because the remnants of the last snow still left on the ground would slow the wheels of the chair and keep him from accelerating down the hill too fast and turning over.

He figured wrong. The minute he came off the ramp, he could feel that his center of gravity was too high. He slammed the joystick forward, hoping to power down the hill without tipping, but the wheels caught, and the chair went end over end down the hill.

Next thing he knew he was lying in a heap about eight feet from his overturned chair.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. Luckily he was unhurt. He had the wind knocked out of him, but that was about all. It was no worse than a good solid hit on the football field. He grinned and stared up at the ominous gray sky. It actually felt kind of good. “Pain is just the feeling of weakness leaving the body,” he said out loud, recalling one of the many goading comments that Master Sergeant Finch used to yell at everybody during Ranger training down at Benning.

He wormed himself across the ice over to the chair. Getting back into the chair took nearly five minutes of struggle. But curiously he didn’t feel daunted or angry or depressed the way he’d always felt doing therapy back at Walter Reed. In fact, he felt a steely determination, the same quality he thought had been blown away in the explosion.

Finally he settled back into the chair and moved down the walk, the nubby tires of the chair biting into the ice and snow with surprising efficiency.

Jesus but it was cold.

He’d put on a coat before leaving the house, but now his chest and hair and legs were wet from the snow he’d been lying on. And he should have worn a hat.

Nothing to do but keep moving.

He powered on down past the stables and onto the trail heading back into the forest. He was about five minutes down the trail when the first snow started falling. Within another ten minutes, the snow wa“0et=”s coming down so hard that he kept having to knock the flakes off his eyelashes in order to see. Visibility was down to thirty or forty feet.

He didn’t feel nervous, though. The wheelchair actually started riding better once half an inch of snow had accumulated. Soon, however, he was shivering.

But he was on a mission. He didn’t have gloves, but he’d pulled his ruined hand back inside the sleeve of his coat.

The snow was beautiful, sifting down out of the sky in fat gray-white lumps. Every sensation felt bold, sharp, clear. Even the cold and the lump on his head where he’d whacked himself in the fall lifted his spirits, made him feel complete for the first time in a long time.

Why the hell had he been sitting around feeling sorry for himself all this time? Yes, it sucked having no legs. Yes, it sucked having to rely on Nurse Margie. Yes, it sucked having a face like Freddy Krueger. But there were guys who didn’t make it back, who would never again feel the clear, bracing cold of a day like this.

He hummed to himself as he bumped down the trail. He realized the place was farther than he’d thought. The chair was all charged up, so it would be able to make it there and back. But still, as he got deeper into the forest, he couldn’t help feeling this was not the smartest thing he’d ever done in his life.

Finally, he came around a bend, and there it was: a large metal building that seemed unusually high. To the left was another structure, lower but longer than the first. Between them was some sort of massive air-conditioning unit, connected to the building by huge steel ducts. There seemed to be nothing going on, though. No African women, no vehicles, no steam coming from the chimneys, no lights. It was completely desolate.

He rolled to the taller building, found the door locked. There was a small window, but he couldn’t see in. He rolled to the second building. The door to this one was open. He looked inside. In one corner lay a very large pile of what appeared to be sweet potatoes. The rest of the building contained a variety of industrial machines. Judging from the work flow, it looked like the potatoes were going into some sort of masher, which piped something to large stainless steel vats, which then led to a number of smaller vats or cookers. There was a lot of stainless steel piping.

Could he have been wrong about his suspicions? Sweet potatoes, he knew, yielded even more ethanol than corn. Was that all that was going on out here? How stupid he had been. A wave of shame crashed over him as he realized how susceptible he’d been to some imagined conspiracy between Collier and his father. He wished he could call his father now and apologize for his misguided fears.

Evan turned his wheelchair around and went back outside. The wind had picked up a little. He touched his hair, found it frozen solid. He was shivering pretty hard now.

This was not so good. He needed to get back to the house.

He rolled out behind the two buildings, using them to shield himself from the wind. By the edge of the second one he found his father’s Cat D8 parked in the snow. Dale Wilmot had started in the business driving a Caterpillar, and he enjoyed using it around the property, knocking shit down or flattening ground. Like everything he did, the old man was a perfectionist with the Cat. Whether moving a pile of earth or digging a trench, his work was meticulous.