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"So if one doesn't kill us, the other will."

He reached over and put his hand on her leg.

"We want to be alone," he said.

"We could be alone in Boston."

"They don't have bighorn sheep there. We want to see bighorns in the wild."

"What will we do when we see them?"

"We'll be happy. It's rare that anyone sees them. And it's very remote, where we're going. We'll rejoice and be glad. They're beautiful animals that no one ever sees."

She moved closer to him. She didn't like public affection and even if they were alone on the road it wasn't her apartment, was it, and it wasn't even a room in a lodge with a locked door and drawn curtains, once she'd gotten around to drawing the curtains, but she moved a little closer anyway and told him if she'd known he was going to stroke her thigh she wouldn't have worn thick coarse jeans, would she?

Matt didn't think he'd ever felt so happy. He was happy when she leaned against him and maybe happier still when she read aloud from the small library he'd amassed in preparation for the trip.

They saw hawks installed on utility poles and she looked them up in the bird book and said they were kestrels-falcons, not hawks, and this made him happier yet.

The landscape made him happy. It was a challenge to his lifelong citiness but more than that, a realization of some half-dreamed vision, the otherness of the West, the strange great thing that was all mixed in with nation and spaciousness, with bravery and history and who you are and what you believe and what movies you saw growing up.

After a while he told her to stop looking at the book and look at the scenery but the scenery was empty spaces and lonely roads and this made her very nervous.

When Nick came back from Minnesota, Matty called him the Jesuit.

His catechism days were well behind him now, Matty's were, his days of blind belief, and he liked to gibe at his brother's self-conscious correctness, his attempts at analytical insight. Whatever Nick's experience in correction and however deftly the jebbies worked him over later in their northern fastness, minting intellect and shiny soul, it was still a brother's right to heckle and jeer.

Their mother also called him the Jesuit but never so Nick could hear.

They filled the tank and bought charcoal, food and bottled water. They found the office of the refuge manager at the far end of town and Matt went in and received a permit and signed a liability release. This was called a hold harmless form and it basically pointed out that if they were killed and/or injured during live-fire exercises while they were in the refuge, it would be the giddiest sort of childlike illusion for either or both of them and/or their survivors to think for even a minute about receiving compensation.

Fair enough. They were allowed to enter the refuge but placed on notice that air-to-air exercises were set to commence three days from now. Friendly fire. It put a little edge in their schedule.

He told all this to Janet, conscientiously. He told her they weren't allowed to handle or take possession of any military items found in the area such as fuel drums, flare casings, tow targets, projectiles carrying real or dummy warheads. He told her there were no human inhabitants of the refuge. He told her there was no gas, food, lodging or other facilities. She had a right to know. He told her there were no paved roads or running water.

But he didn't tell her why this excited him. He didn't say anything about this because he didn't understand it, the stark sort of shudder, the leveling out, the sense of knowing he was headed into remote Sonoran waste, where the interplay of terrain and weapons was a kind of neural process remapped in the world, a hollow sort of craving lifted out of the brain stem, or wherever, and painted over with words and sky and diamondback desert.

Janet said, "All right. Go go go go."

"At's the spirit."

"We're going to do it, let's do it."

"At's what I want to hear."

They drove south through a white space on the map, headed for the entrance to the refuge, and he recalled something Eric Deming had told him about this part of Arizona, a rumor, a sort of twilight zone story about people known as sensitives, men and women who were psychically gifted-telepathists, clairvoyants, metal-benders.

There was a secret facility near the Mexican border where sensitives were tested and experiments carried out. The idea was that psychic commandos might be able to jam the enemy's computer networks and weapons systems, perhaps even read the intentions of the defense minister riding in his chauffeured car in the middle of Moscow.

In fact the Russians were thought to be well ahead of us in this endeavor, Eric said, soulful and mystical as they were, and we were desperate to catch up.

Janet said, "There's something else of course."

"What do you mean?"

"Besides sheep. We're not going all this distance to look at sheep."

"Bighorn sheep. We want to be alone. Undistracted. So we can talk. An extended period. So we can figure things out."

"What things?"

"You know what things."

"What things?"

"Do we get married? Do we have kids, children? Do we wait a while? Do we live here, or there, or somewhere in the middle?"

"What else?" she said. "Because I know there's something else," Matt could believe the story about a closed base where sensitives refined their paranormal skills. Thought transfer and remote viewing. Why not believe it? He'd read many an enemy's mind as a ten-year-old, pushing wood across a game board. This was the supernatural underside of the arms race. Miracles and visions. The final wishful weapon is a middle-aged lady from Decatur who can pinpoint the location of Soviet submarines off the East Coast.

Unreal. This is what disturbed him. It was one of the things he wanted to talk about with Janet.

There were ship ridges, great ship rocks with prows thrust upward, and there were hills that resembled rubble heaps. The land seemed to be in open formation, harsh and scarred, and you could almost read upheaval and convergence. It looked like dinosaur country. They saw white mountains and flesh mountains and slags of glassy matter that turned out to be mountains when they drew near.

It took a long time to get anywhere. There was only the one road, one track, and sections were deep sand and other parts were ruts and gulleys. The sun beat down with a swarming sort of density. They came to flooded stretches where they had to leave the track and maneuver the jeep tenderly around the palo verde and cholla.

He looked up the words. He consulted the books all the time. He drove with a book or two in his lap, or asked Janet to look things up, or asked her to drive so he could read.

The dust powdered the hood and windshield and the sun seemed nearly upon them, burning down so squarely and vastly he wanted to laugh in shitface fear.

"I know you can't tell me about your job."

"I can tell you some things. I work with safing mechanisms, they're called. Timers, batteries, switches, actuators. Electromechanical locks. I run endless computer tests. I drink instant coffee and look at cross-section details of great finned weapons on my screen. Then a bunch of guys in California or Nevada or someplace will take a warhead and rocket-launch it into a hardened target at fifteen hundred miles an hour."

"To test your calculations."

"Splat. Not just mine of course. But, yes, that's the idea."

"You make weapons safer. Safer to handle and use."

"That's right."

"Then what's the problem? It's not exactly criminal activity."

"No but it's weapons work. It's what I wanted. I wanted this and more. But now I'm feeling unsure about it."