45

He rises early the next day, already feeling stronger, his aches much abated. He removes the cheek bandage and the one on his forearm. The arm wound is scabbing nicely and he’s pleased to see that his palms are so much better they don’t really require another gauze wrap. He takes a walk around the compound and admires the tidiness of it. Then spies a circular watchtower atop the roof of the main house—it had not been discernible from the courtyard below his room—and for a moment is suffused with a sense of being back in prison. The guard holds a rifle in the crook of his arm, but his face is indistinct in the shaded booth and under his hat brim, and Axel cannot tell if the man is looking at him. Then the guard raises a hand in greeting and Axel returns the gesture.

During breakfast with Quino and Cacho, he remarks that the kid’s bruises are fading even faster than his.

“Always been a fast healer,” Cacho says.

“Always been young is what you always been,” Quino says. “There’s no curative more effective than youth.”

“Means your bruises oughta start fading in about a year,” the kid says to Axel.

Their plates are cleared away and they are finishing the last of their coffee when Quino tells Axel that he and Cacho are going to do some target shooting tomorrow. “If your hands feel up to it,” he says, “you’re welcome to join us. Kid says his hands don’t hurt too much to shoot, and since it’s been a while since you handled a gun, I thought you might want to check yourself out.”

“Hands are fine,” Axel says. “I’d like to go along.”

He spends most of that day with the rancho’s tech expert, who tutors him in the operations of a personal computer. Through reading, he had kept abreast of computer innovations during his years inside, but it is revelatory to actually use one and discover for himself the seemingly limitless scope of digital processes and possibilities, the ease and speed with which information can be accessed, messages sent and received, all of it.

When he gets back to his room he finds that a small refrigerator has been installed next to the television. It is filled with beer, cold cuts, sundry snacks. There is a large bowl of fresh fruit atop the dresser.

After another loud supper in the big dining room, they again go to the lounge to drink and bullshit, play cards, shoot pool. At the bar Axel and Quino converse about their college studies, Axel recalling that they mainly bored him, Quino reflecting on them mostly with affection, especially his philosophy classes. “The most fun I had in class,” Quino says, “was giving an oral report about Death, capital D, as the only true god because she’s the only one who every hour of ever day gives us copious, visible, irrefutable proof of her omnipotence. She gives it mostly by way of her most powerful emissaries—disease, famine, natural catastrophe, and especially by way of the human race itself. We are her most industrious archangels, and we do her work everywhere and in so many ways. The class didn’t know what to think. Some thought I was crazy, some wanted to beat the shit out of me, some thought I was a hell of a lot more fun than reading Bertrand Russell.”

“She?” says Axel.

“Of course, she. And an unsurpassable knockout. Why do you think so many men hurry to her, run to her with open arms?”