Some nights, dreaming of that end, she thought about fighting it out. She’d be armed, she knew how to use her guns, but she had no illusions about the cops who’d be hunting her. They’d know how to use theirs, too. She’d die, but she’d be a legend.
On other nights, she thought of accepting her capture—if they’d let her do that—and then standing mute during her trial and imprisonment. Once inside the Bureau of Prisons, wherever they sent her, she’d continue her writings. They couldn’t entirely stop that; her work could be smuggled out, if nothing else.
Would that make her a legend? She was unsure of that. She wrote reasonably well, she thought, but wasn’t exactly a poet. Low spoke better than she did, where the rage and hurt was right out there for everybody to see and hear. Still, as a writer, she was good enough.
Sometimes she imagined herself in movie-like visions, hiking through the mountains with a rifle on her shoulder or, alternatively, riding through the mountains on a sorrel stallion, and then she’d laugh at herself, for the vanity. She’d have a Subaru for the beginning of her run, there wouldn’t be any sorrel stallions in her future . . .
All she really wanted was for people to recognize that she’d never had a chance and that seventy percent of them were the same way—people without a chance. To understand that the bottom people were all in it together.
You might sympathize with the immigrants from the south on an individual basis, but their effect was to create an even lower bottom than already existed, she believed. There was no way to raise yourself up, if the bottom kept falling out beneath you. The Democrats bragged about the idea of a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage: How many of those Democrats could live on thirty-one thousand dollars a year? And the Republicans were worse: they pretended to believe that paying fifteen dollars an hour would cause McDonald’s to go broke. Poor fuckin’ McDonald’s.
She rolled over in the night, the anger causing her to thrash about like a beached salmon, tangle herself up in the sheets.
Not for much longer. In a week, she’d be up in the Rocky Mountains.
Or dead.
TWELVE
Hyman Drago’s Hunting and Tactical Equipment was a gun nut’s dream store, Letty thought, as she cruised slowly down two long aisles of rifles and shotguns. She’d been in a lot of gun stores, but she had to admit that Drago’s was a good one. Kaiser was walking on the opposite side of the gun aisles, totally focused. He would stop, touch a gun, move on. A clerk had asked each of them if they needed help, and they’d both politely declined, saying they would call for it when they needed it.
The guns were locked in the racks, most with metal or synthetic stocks, a surprising number with wood. Letty favored wood, found wood warm in the winter. With an inadequate pair of gloves, a metal stock would freeze your fingers . . .
Letty’s natural mother had survived on child support checks and drank away a good part of the money. Letty had eaten school lunches eagerly, unsweetened instant oatmeal at breakfast with powdered milk that came in huge blue-and-white boxes that seemed to last forever, and, too often, peanut butter sandwiches for dinner, especially in the last week before a new support check came in.
After the Davenports adopted her, she never again drank powdered milk or ate peanut butter, in any form; real whole milk she barely tolerated.
Letty started trapping when she was six, initially coached by a farmer named Bartles, who also loaned her rusty Victor jump traps until she could buy some of her own. When a muskrat or racoon survived the initial trapping, she killed it with a corn knife she’d found in a shed behind her house. Later, when the trapping started to bring in some discretionary funds, the same farmer sold her an ancient break-open .22 rifle, accurate out to about ten feet, for eight dollars, plus a partially used brick of .22-short ammunition, good for killing racoons.
At first, she hated killing animals. The distaste faded as she killed more of them. She never liked it, but something in her heart changed. If it was necessary, she’d do it, and it was necessary to eat.