Still, he didn’t want to alarm these poor people any more than he apparently had already, so he waited until they had gone inside the main building before opening the truck’s door and climbing down to the pavement.
And then he stopped for a few moments and gazed almost vertically upward at a bright prodigy blotting out much of the sky.
Visible nearby, out the truck’s side windows, had been a pair of stout pillars: steel tubes, anchored to concrete plinths by nuts the size of his head, erupting vertically until they passed above his field of view. Now that he was outside, though, he could follow them up and see what they supported: a sign that, laid flat, would have covered half of a football field. It was thrust high into the air so that it could be recognized by travelers from miles away. It was a cartoon rendering of a smiling and winking man with a white cowboy hat pushed jauntily back on his head. He wore a checked shirt. One hand was extended invitingly toward the truck stop. The other hand was thumb-hooked into a wide orange belt with a buckle shaped like Texas. Below that, the sign consisted of huge glowing letters: T.R. MICK’S.
Some kind of chain operation, evidently.
When Laks had had his fill of that and enjoyed the starry sweep of the big western sky, he lowered his gaze and began walking in toward the central building. A moving walkway was available. Normally he’d have walked, just to stretch his legs, but his inner ear was acting up suddenly, as if trying to pull him back to the truck. So he stepped aboard and grabbed the handrail. In the distance behind him, barely perceptible under the whoosh of tires on the interstate, he could hear the comforting whir of drones shadowing him in the dark.
UNCLE ED’S
Interesting developments up at the mine!”
This exclamation, in English, came from a man of a certain age sitting in a folding chair by the side of Uncle Ed’s badminton court, apparently taking a breather between sets.
Almost twenty-four hours had passed since Sister Catherine had dropped off Willem and Amelia. Sometimes, when a lot happened at once, time got compressed, or something, and then it had to relax to bring the universe back into balance. Willem had passed the remainder of yesterday doing nothing in particular, then failed to get to sleep until well past midnight, then slept until almost noon. Now he was stumbling around feeling like he’d missed the whole day, and these eager beaver geriatric badminton players just accentuated that. He blinked and looked at the guy who had just spoken to him. White sneakers, white socks, lime-green gym shorts, a loose sleeveless T-shirt providing an all too graphic view of a physique that, if it had ever seen better days, had not seen them in a long time. A floppy cloth hat to keep the sun off his head, big sunglasses. He was guzzling tea from a stainless-steel thermos. He sat apart from the other gaffers. An out of town visitor, perhaps, an invited guest but not one of the regulars.
Willem felt blood rushing into his face as he realized that this man was Bo.
“Holy shit,” he said. “You do get around.”
“No more than you do,” Bo pointed out.
Willem could not gainsay Bo’s logic. “Hang on, I have to piss and so on.”
“Don’t let me stop you. There’s still some time.”
Willem did not get the sense that Bo meant “some time before the next badminton match.”
He went back to his room and spent a few minutes doing the usual things in the toilet. When he could, he glanced at the screen of his phone. More violence had happened locally. The Sneeuwberg mine had gone to full shutdown. He decided to simply ignore most of his email and message traffic—he’d already marked himself “safe” on all the platforms that mattered, and he’d checked in with Remi. He peered out the window to the trailer where Amelia was lodging and saw her moving around in there.
“India is getting feisty!” Bo declared, when Willem came back out and snapped out a folding chair next to him.
“Just saber rattling?” Willem asked. “Or is it the real deal?”
“Now you are asking me to read the minds of our good friends south of the great mountains,” Bo admonished him. “Never easy. But they have dropped a hint.”
“Which is?”
“A new phrase they have just begun using in their public pronouncements. ‘Climate Peacekeeping.’”
Willem rolled it around in his head. Interesting. “And what do you think of this phrase, Bo?”
“Oh, I quite like it. Covers a lot of political territory.”
“Too much, in my mind,” Willem said. “It could be used to justify almost anything. But then, I live in a democracy.”