A bit of onion and pepper, he thought. And a fry pan. No need for grease-he could’ve gotten that easily enough from the elk’s belly. Still, the liver itself was delicious, roasted on a sharpened stick over a small fire. He picked his teeth with the tip of his knife, felt the wildness warm his belly. It had been weeks since he’d eaten anything this fresh.
He decided to cut his picnic short and not cook the heart. He wrapped the dripping organ in a plastic grocery bag and stuck it into his long coat. It’ll hold up for at least another day, he thought.
The woods were dense and in no time he was soaked to the bone. But walking the highway was risky. Some small town deputy was bound to stop him just because he didn’t look right. And then he’d have to make a decision, his life or the deputy’s? He wondered how far he’d have to go before he would encounter more railroad tracks. It was hard to be away from them for very long. Since he only rode trains, being too far from the iron veins that reached across the country set him on edge, gave him a vulnerable feeling that he could only tolerate for so long.
Thanks to the heavy rain, his wet clothes became too cumbersome and he was forced to walk up on the road. It was either that or strip naked and carry them in a bundle. But it wasn’t warm enough for that. Not like last week, with the Arizona sun baking his bare shoulders as he hiked the tracks, rattlesnakes sometimes stretched lengthwise on the heated rails, sliding off only after detecting the vibrations of oncoming trains or his approaching shadow. At least tonight’s storm helped keep the usual stream of traffic to a minimum, he thought. If he listened carefully for cars, he could easily slip back into the screen of dense underbrush only a few hops off the blacktop.
The young woman had been a complete surprise. He hadn’t heard her car-only the snapping branches as she made her way down to the elk-and leaving him barely enough time to kick some dirt over the coals. Hiding in the shadow of a large cedar trunk, he was surprised to see her gently stroking the elk’s side. She’d also talked to it, but too faintly for him to hear, like his mother did when he’d gone with her to church. What was the woman doing here? Was she a cultist, like some of his mother’s family back in Russia? Americans these days never ceased to puzzle him-so many were soft and pliable and anxious to put their lives into the hands of others, to believe in something.
The last time he’d heard his name was when he’d left his mother. “Mikhail,” she’d pleaded, “Don’t leave with those men.”
That had been over twenty years ago.
No one was allowed to call him by his name anymore, not even the one he’d been given on a fake passport long ago. To speak his name now was forbidden even within his innermost circles. There were ears everywhere, he’d warned. That bottle fly on the windowsill could be a microphone, that innocent looking child riding a bicycle an accomplished spy. The only way to refer to him in conversation was to place your hand on the tattoo, as if you were making a pledge to the crude image of the Goyaesque Cyclops he’d ordered needled into your arm.
He feared the lawmen would come again someday. Life had taught him that a secret could only stay buried for so long. They were like stones the earth worked to the surface, the cobble he’d helped clear from his family’s field every year. On moonlit nights he used to watch them push upward from the dark loosened soil, as if they were the tops of skulls. No matter how many you stacked in a pile every year, there were always more coming, and he used to imagine they might have been troops that had once frozen to death there, only they weren’t aware of it, had believed they’d only just awakened from a long night’s sleep in their earthen cribs.
Shortly after his release from prison, a rumor had spread that he’d been killed by an old enemy. Over time even the lawmen began to accept it. In five years there hadn’t been a single confirmed sighting of the one-eyed, longhaired con that some newspapers once called the mad monk. Still, Cyclops had known better than to get too comfortable. A cop only had to suspect you were up to no good to take you in and feed you through his national computer system, a giant brain Cyclops hated the most in the world because it didn’t bleed as a man did.
The second thing in the world Cyclops hated most was the pursuit of money-it drained him, made him feel like a dog rather than a man. For many years it stole from his proud, fiery inner core and forced it into prostitution, sent it drifting through dark alleyways until he found his way out and on top. But even having the hard work done by others didn’t matter much. You still had the worries, the heavy tax on a fertile imagination that should have been reserved for higher pursuits.
It wasn’t necessarily the money itself that he had a problem with. Cyclops never harbored any illusions that he could live without it. He’d chosen to live frugally, as years of riding the rails had taught him. He’d learned early on that no one was immune to robbery, and he’d quietly taken his money and converted it into silver and gold, buried Coleman coolers full of it across the country in a pattern he’d once drawn on a map during one of his frequent visions. But there was more than enough now in his “constellation of hoards” that Cyclops would never have to worry for money again, and yet he could no longer stop himself from wanting to accumulate more. What was once a need to make a living had somehow transformed into an obsession and he loathed himself for it.