of your life as a champion.
And: To become a champion, fight one more round.
Julian suspected he didn’t have much time to keep mulling boxing wisdoms. With intense effort he fought the most overpowering urge of all—to lie down in the sand and go to sleep.
But maybe it was like Ali said: Suffer now and live the rest of your life.
He dragged himself to his feet and hunted through the dry chaparral until he spotted the lilac flowers and ashy green leaves of sacred sage. Nearby some common yarrow grew, with its clusters of white buds and pungently sweet scent. Sage was an analgesic, and yarrow stanched blood flow. Sometimes sage was called soldier’s woundwort. Julian pulled off several handfuls of leaves, chopped them up roughly with the knife and used sweat and spit to moisten them. He rubbed the plants between his hands to bring out their strong-smelling natural oils. Carefully he pressed the damp leaves into his head and then fit the beret over it to keep them in place. He took off his T-shirt and wrapped it around the beret. He fixed the contraption in place with the rope he had made. Better a blister burn on his bare back than to pass out alone in the desert.
He found a stick to help him walk and got going again. Walking while leaning on a stick seemed weirdly familiar—and easier. Why didn’t he think of it sooner?
After stumbling through another plain of dying witch grass that like him was being singed into tumbleweed, Julian found a paved road. Valhalla! The place where kings and heroes were received. But this Valhalla was empty and in the middle of nowhere. There were no houses or fences or lights in either direction. But at least it was a road, and it was divided by a yellow line. It ran east–west. He decided to head toward the sun, for in his experience, a path heading west often ended in a large body of water. He would drink salt water now, if he could get to it.
A truck up ahead barreled toward him at rocket speed. Julian couldn’t judge how fast it was traveling and didn’t want to get run over. Tottering he backed off into the sagebrush shoulder, watching the truck slow down, its horn blasting full volume. It whizzed by, knocking him back with a gale of hot air. The driver turned his head to stare at him before stepping on the gas. After the vehicle disappeared from view, Julian got back on the road and resumed his sclerotic pace.
It wasn’t long before he heard a high-pitched siren behind him. Or it could’ve been hours. Julian couldn’t tell. In the distance he saw flashing lights zooming toward him, heard the pitch of another siren, and another. A posse of red and blue lights screamed so loud, he became afraid.
He hated the sound of sirens.
Plus, in their haste to get to wherever they were going, they could run him over and not even know it. He stepped off the road to give them a wide berth and then thought, what if they were coming for him? Hadn’t he killed a man with his bare hands, fought and killed others? Hadn’t he conspired to dispose of a man’s murdered body and stolen a dead man’s gold? Julian had never accounted for his crimes.
In slow motion, he staggered away into the bush.
What was happening? Was the dehydration breaking down his body, his mind? What men did he kill, where?
He was angry he was being forced back into the scrubland after it had taken him so long to find a road. He didn’t want to return to the grasses. But he remembered a dark-haired man telling him to follow his gut, so that’s what Julian did. What was that little man’s name? It was on the tip of his tongue. It would come to him, he was sure of it, come to him when he wasn’t so hot and anxious. He would hide now, Julian decided, but get back on the road as soon as the cops left. Surely there would be regular cars driving by. He would flag one down.
He wondered if the present commotion was the truck’s doing. Could the driver have called Julian in? Sometimes the trucks and the cops were connected by special-frequency wideband radios. Julian should’ve hidden from the truck, not the police. He regretted getting caught off guard, cursed his sugar-deprived, swollen, leaking, non-reactive brain.
He stumbled into the dusty plain