Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Nine

There were twelve of them by the time they reached Burns.

Gary was a hand at the Kay-Bar-Seven Ranch. Two of the other hands had seen the group pass on the road and cut across the range in their 4-by-4 to check the party out; later that day they sat around laughing about the fools who were trying to walk across the country, and Gary rode out the next morning, found them and fell into step. He was tall and thin, narrow in the hips, his brown hair cropped short and his cheeks pitted with old acne scars. He smoked Marlboros — he could have modeled for their advertising — and he looked wary when Jody told him how Guthrie had spontaneously given up the habit crossing the Cascades.

“You have to quit smoking to stay in this group?”

Sara assured him otherwise. “You may quit,” she said, “and you may not. Nobody gets anything from this walk that he didn’t come here to get.”

“Well, that’s good,” he said. He sounded at once relieved and a little disappointed.

“The thing is,” Jody added, “the only way you’ll know what you came for is when you see what you get.”

Les and Georgia were waiting for them. Their car, a Cadillac Seville, was parked at the side of the road headed toward Burns. The left rear tire was flat.

Les was standing in the road leaning against the car. He was a big man, about six-three and weighing close to two hundred fifty pounds. He was in his mid-fifties and he was wearing white Levi’s, a western shirt with pearl buttons and a lot of silver braid, a string tie with a turquoise slide, and a pearl-gray ten-gallon hat.

Some of the walkers, the ones in front, called out to him. He scowled across the road at them.

John Powers said, “We’ll get that tire changed for you, sir.”

“I already jacked her up and changed her,” he said. “That’s the goddamned spare on there. The goddamned spare is flat, it came from the, goddamned dealer’s that way, and if I ever get this goddamned car back to Pendleton he is goddamned likely to hear about it.”

He was from Pendleton, where he had extensive holdings in timber and ranchland. He had gone down to Reno to celebrate a successful business transaction. He stayed at Harrah’s, saw some shows, ate some good food, drank a lot of first-rate Tennessee whiskey, smoked some cigars that were supposed to have been smuggled in from Cuba, but he frankly didn’t believe it, did reasonably well at the crap table and substantially less well at blackjack, and, somewhere along the way, met up with Georgia, whom he was now bringing back to Pendleton as the fourth Mrs. Lester Pratt Burdine.

He had driven to Reno on US 395, which runs through Pendleton to Reno and all the way south to San Bernardino. He was returning to Pendleton the same way, with his new bride on the front seat beside him. There is a twenty-seven-mile stretch from Burns west to Riley where 395 and 20 run together, and it was there that the Seville’s left rear tire had gone flat, and the spare had revealed itself to be in the same state. It had, however, not done so until he had changed tires and lowered the car from the jack.

“And ever since then,” he said, “I’ve been standing here waiting to see a goddamned state trooper so he can send someone out with a new tire. Drive five miles over the speed limit and you’ll see more goddamned troopers than you can shake a stick at, but get a flat smack in the middle of a goddamned federal highway, make that two goddamned federal highways, and you could about die waiting for one to turn up.”

He’d thought of walking to a service station but he didn’t know which way to walk. He couldn’t remember passing a station since Riley, and that was a good eight or ten miles back. There was a bitty town called Hines a couple miles before you got to Burns, but that was still at least fifteen miles away, and he couldn’t remember for sure if there was a station closer than that.

They told him they were walking on toward Burns anyhow, and they would see that he got help. There might well be a garage in the next few miles; failing that, there would surely be some place with a phone. They could call the Triple-A and make sure that someone came to his assistance.

“I’d walk along with you,” he said, “except I don’t want to leave Georgia here. And I don’t know that I can walk that far myself.”

“Couldn’t you flag a car?”

“Now that is the whole goddamned thing,” he said. “There was no end of cars while I was changing that tire. There were even people who stopped without being asked, wanted to know if I needed help. Well, it doesn’t take more’n one man to change a tire, so I said thanks all the same and sent them on their way. And from the moment I got the jack down and saw the spare was flatter than Floyd’s feet, I never saw another single goddamned car. Not in either direction, not a single car.”

He wound up walking toward Burns with them, and Georgia came along rather than stay in the car. She was a honey blonde of thirty who managed to look older by trying to look younger. She had a baby-doll face, but carried so much tension in her facial muscles that she looked as though she was made of pink velvet on a steel frame. She wore a cowgirl outfit, smart and expensive, but had the wit to get a pair of flat shoes from her luggage to replace the high-heeled Tony Lama boots.

There was a roadside telephone a mile and a half down the road. Les made his call, and they took a break from their walk and waited with him and Georgia until the truck arrived from the garage in Burns. Les and Georgia shook hands all around and got into the truck to ride back to the Cadillac. The others watched the truck until it was out of sight, then got underway again.

John said he hadn’t thought they’d go back to the car. “I figured they’d stick with us,” he said.

“And just leave that Caddy there?”

“What’s he care about a car? He can buy another one if he wants. And he seemed real intrigued with everything we were saying. So did she, even more than he did. I thought she’d want to stay with us, and then he’d decide to stay, too.”

Somebody said he could buy another wife as easily as he could buy another car. Jody said he was just as glad they’d gone their separate ways. “They’re not exactly the type for this hike of ours,” he told Guthrie.

“Oh? What type is that?”

“You know what I mean. She’s not a whole lot more than a tough little hooker, and how he got to be so tall is by standing on his money. I don’t figure they’d be a whole lot of fun to be around.”

“That’s not who they are. That’s just the package they’re wrapped in.”

“Maybe.”

“Remember the fellow in the Datsun pickup?”

“Fellow in a Datsun? No, when was that?”

“Oh, about ten days ago on Route 95. He wanted to give me a ride when I wasn’t even looking for one.”

“Oh, that guy,” Jody said. “Oh, come on, hoss. I wasn’t all that bad.”

“Never said you were.”

“But I do get your drift.”

“I thought you would.”

To Sara, Guthrie confided a certain amount of surprise that the Burdines had turned back. “There’s always a fair amount of traffic on this road,” he said. “At least there is since 395 came in. It’s not a parade, but you see a car every few minutes. But the traffic shut down the minute they needed help, and it didn’t start to flow again until they’d joined up with us.”

“And you don’t think that could be coincidental?”

“No more than you do. Anyway, coincidence is just God’s way of remaining anonymous. No, they were supposed to meet up with us. And while I agree with Jody that they’re an unlikely pair of pilgrims, at least on the surface of it, I thought they’d get caught up in the flow of whatever it is that’s happening.” He hesitated. “I thought we were irresistible, I guess. That once you walked a mile or so with us you were hooked.”

For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to respond. Then, her hand light in his, she said, “The path is not for everyone, Guthrie.”

“No, I don’t suppose it is.”

“And that’s very sad, because there are people who ought to be here and they never will. But I think it’s partly true, what you suggested. Once you start on the path, I don’t think you can really stop. You can slow down, you can get sidetracked, you can drag your feet, but I don’t think you can turn your back on it completely. I’m not absolutely positive about this, but I don’t think you can.”

Les and Georgia Burdine couldn’t. A few miles down the road the tow truck caught up with them, the Caddy’s back end winched up and the big car rolling on its front wheels. The truck stopped, the door opened, and Les and Georgia stepped down. Les said something to the driver, and the truck pulled away, towing the Caddy in its wake.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Les announced. “The fool brought the wrong size tire. I told him what size tire to bring and he brought one that won’t fit on the goddamned automobile. Can you believe that?”

“Easily,” Martha told him.

“You can? I have to tell you I couldn’t. So he’s hauling the car back to his garage in Burns, where he’s got a whole pile of tires the right size, and he’s going to see if he can’t put one of them on for me.”

“How come you didn’t ride there with him?”

“Well, there’s not a great deal to do in Burns. There’s an Indian reservation, and there’s a whole lot of places selling supplies to ranchers, but if you’ve been to Burns once you wouldn’t call life a failure if it never brought you back there again.”

“And we liked you folks,” Georgia put in, “and we thought we’d walk with you a little while, and then when we get to Burns our car’ll be ready and we can go.”

“We might not even get all the way to Burns tonight,” Martha said. “I think Guthrie was saying something about stopping within the next hour. Gary knows whose land this is, and he says there’d be no objection to our camping out on it, so that’s probably what we’ll do.”

“Well, we’d probably wind up staying in Burns otherwise,” Les said, “and the Best Western’s as good as they got there, and it’s no great shakes from what I hear. I can’t remember the last time I slept out under the stars. You think you can manage with the ground for a mattress, little lady?”

Georgia muttered something. “I’ve had worse” is what it sounded like to Martha.

“Then tomorrow we’ll go on to Burns with the rest of you,” he went on, “and I guess you’ll stay on 20 going east, while we collect the car and drive north to Pendleton.”

Jody went around offering five to one that they’d stay with the group after Burns. He couldn’t find anyone who would bet with him.

A couple of things happened that night.

First of all, Martha blew up at Guthrie. He said something innocuous that she took the wrong way, and she had a fit. She told him that he had no right to control her, that no one had elected him God, that she’d been putting up with his crap all her life and she didn’t want to take it anymore. She kept working herself up, and ultimately she began hyperventilating. Jody and Sara got her to lie down and made her keep breathing until her body was vibrating with energy. Then, abruptly, she got up on her knees, laid her head back and roared. Loud wordless cries came one after another from her mouth, rending the night air. She howled for five full minutes, and then her voice cracked in the middle of a howl and she rolled onto her side and curled up in a ball and began to weep quietly. Jody covered one of her hands with his, and Sara laid a hand on her shoulder. After a little while the weeping stopped and she appeared to be asleep.

Not long after that, Richard was formally introduced to his grandfather. This was a neat trick, because the man had died before Richard was born.

What happened is this: Ellie had walked off twenty yards or so in order to nurse Richard without being obvious about it. Just as she was switching the baby from the right to the left breast, she was undeniably aware of her father’s presence. She had been his only child, and Richard was thus his only grandchild, and her father, dying with cancer, had fought to hang onto life until the completion of her pregnancy. He had lasted longer than his doctors thought he would, but still took his last breath a month and three days before Richard was born.

Now, suddenly, he was here in the high desert of western Oregon. She could feel him there with her, she thought she ought to be able to look around and see him. She felt his mind lock onto hers, and she got that he longed to know his grandson.

She looked down at the baby sucking lustily at her breast. Aloud she said, “Richard, I want you to meet your grandfather. His name is Andrew McLeod. Daddy, this is your grandson, his name is Richard Andrew Wilkes. Isn’t he beautiful, Daddy?”

And then Richard’s mouth opened to release her nipple. He turned his head. His eyes held hers but only momentarily, and then they swung around to lock on something Ellie couldn’t see. The baby smiled hugely, and gurgled with pleasure; whatever he saw, it was clearly something that he liked.

For a long moment they stayed like that, the two of them or the three of them. Then Richard sighed and rolled over to seek her breast again, and Ellie felt something relax and let go and leave them.

“Oh, Richard,” she said.

When he finished nursing she carried him back to the group. Before she could ask, Georgia Burdine offered to hold him for her, and Richard accepted the transfer without a murmur. Ellie found Bud and told him what had just happened to her, and in the course of telling him she started to cry, and he held her while she wept. Then the two of them walked slowly off into the night.

Richard never once cried in his mother’s absence but lay in Georgia’s arms beaming up at her like a tiny Buddha. Whenever his eyes met with hers she wanted to weep. She couldn’t even see his eyes clearly in the gathering darkness, but she could feel it when he was looking at her; some current passed from his eyes to hers, and she felt old things welling up in her chest. She didn’t cry, but each time it happened something hard softened, something that was tight became a little looser.

She had been holding the child for ten minutes when Les sat down next to her. Neither of them spoke. After perhaps ten minutes more Ellie appeared to reclaim her baby, and he went to her with a little whoop of delight.

“He loves you,” Les told Georgia, “but he wants his mama.”

“Just so his mama wants him. They were gone a long time; I was starting to wonder if I was gonna get to keep him. Where do you suppose they went?”

“A young couple on a moonlit night? Use your imagination, honey.”

“You think so? I hope they were careful or they’ll wind up with Irish twins. You know what that is? That’s babies less than a year apart.”

“Is it supposed to be bad luck?”

She looked at him. “If you’ve got a second baby before the first one’s a year old,” she said, “you’ve already had bad luck.”

“Oh. Of course you and I wouldn’t have to worry about that. I mean, if we were to go off the way Bud and Ellie did—”

“Are you serious? You mean just go lie down in the grass?”

“You lived in cities all your life, didn’t you, Georgie girl? About time you learned some country ways.”

She got to her feet. “If you can even think about it,” she said, “after all that driving, and jacking up the car and changing a tire, and then all that walking—”

“Did I do all that today? That’s the trouble with getting old, your memory goes and you start to forget things.”

“If you can still be in the mood,” she said, “I guess I can at least call and see if you’re bluffing.”

He put an arm around her and led her off toward where Bud and Ellie had wandered earlier. The moon was three-quarters full, the night still and silent. He said, “Bluffing. You think this here is a poker game? Well, you just shove all your chips in the pot, little lady, and I’ll show you what I’ve got in my hand.”

It was well before noon the next morning when they reached Burns. They made plans to meet in front of the post office at one-thirty; that would give them plenty of time to buy what they needed and eat a meal before they reassembled and headed out of town.

They went their separate ways. Gary picked up a pair of soft shoes to spell his boots. Bud and Ellie replenished their supply of Pampers. John wrote a postcard to his parents. Les went to the garage to see if the car was ready. Guthrie picked up a Portland paper and read stories about a world conference on population control, a massacre of Indians by government troops in Brazil, a confrontation of warships in the eastern Mediterranean, and a man in Yakima who had killed his wife and four children with a shotgun before hanging himself with his belt.

When they regrouped at one-thirty, the Burdines showed up with backpacks and canteens, and Les had managed to equip himself with a stout bamboo walking stick. The car was ready, and he’d made arrangements to have it delivered to his home in Pendleton. Everyone was relieved that Les and Georgia were staying with the group, and some of them were gracious enough to pretend to be surprised.

There were five new people who joined the group in front of the post office:

Lissa was a waitress at the restaurant where Martha and Jody had had lunch. She was twenty-four, and she told them that she had had a fantasy for the past three years that a rich handsome man would come into her restaurant and take her away with him. “But the closest I ever get is a cowboy with a mattress in the back of his pickup,” she said, “and as far as he wants to take me is half a mile up a dirt road. Only person’s going to get me out of here is me.”

Sue Anne was working at Wembley’s when Lissa came in to buy a backpack and a canteen. She was a few years older than Lissa and about twelve pounds heavier than she wanted to be, a divorced woman with a son nine and a daughter almost eight. “I don’t believe this,” she said. “All of a sudden everybody wants a backpack. And canteens! I sold three already today and I can’t remember the last time I sold one. There are these people in town—”

Lissa said she knew, that she was going with them.

“You’re not,” Sue Anne said. “Just like that? You mean it? You tell Grace she’s gonna be short a waitress?”

Lissa nodded.

“She holler at you?”

“Started to. Then she said she wished she could go with me, and she would if she didn’t have her ma to look after.” She hooked a finger under a thin gold chain around her neck, raised it to show a pale blue crystal. “She gave me this,” she said.

“Grace gave you that? It’s pretty. What is it?”

“I think she said aquamarine.”

“It’s real pretty.” She reached out, drew in her breath sharply when her fingers touched the cool surface of the crystal. A look passed over her face, and she said, “This here’s the last backpack but one, so you can have it, but there’s only the one canteen and I’m keeping it for myself. You know where I bet they might have canteens? Western Auto. I’ll walk over there with you if you want to go see.”

“You’re coming too? What about your kids?”

“Well, what about them? They’re visiting their daddy and that bitch in Spokane. I talked to them on the phone Sunday and all I heard was how they got a heated pool, they got a golden retriever, they got a rear-projection TV with a dish antenna. They like it so damn much, they can just stay there for a while.”

Jordan was Thom’s age, thirteen, but not as tall. He was the son of a black father and a Flathead Indian mother. The two boys had got to talking in front of a shelf of science fiction paperbacks at Goody’s Trading Post, where they discovered that they liked a lot of the same authors. They got Cokes from a machine and stood around drinking them, and Thom told Jordan he was from Indiana, and that he’d never even seen an Indian until he crossed the Mississippi River.

“You got black people back where you are?” Jordan wanted to know.

“Oh, sure. The school I used to go to, I think about a third of the kids were black.”

“No shit? Because it’s the other way around here. We got Indians up the ass, but it’s being half nigger that makes me exotic.”

Jordan never said anything about joining the walk. He didn’t pack any clothes or bring along anything other than what he was wearing. But he stuck close to Thom, joined Thom and Sara and John for lunch, and, when they all met in front of the post office, he was there with them, acting as if it were a foregone conclusion that he was a member of the party.

Douglas was a friend of Gary’s, a transplanted Californian who worked at Western Auto and had a shop at his house where he produced handmade hunting knives as a sideline. The knives sold readily at knife and gun shows for upwards of two hundred dollars, but each one represented a minimum of fifty hours work and a substantial investment in high-grade steel and fancy woods or ivories for the grips, so there was little profit in the trade.

Douglas was ready to go as soon as he learned what Gary was up to. The woman he lived with, also a former San Diegan, thought it was the craziest thing she’d ever heard of. When she learned that the group included a blind woman and a nursing infant, she declared that she’d heard everything.

“The only thing is you’re all headed in the wrong direction,” she said. “Aren’t lemmings supposed to throw themselves into the sea?”

Douglas told her he was going. She said to be sure and have a good time, and send her a postcard now and then. “Why don’t you just meet the people?” he suggested. “You know Gary’s all right.”

“I always used to think he was one of your more normal friends.”

“So give it a try. Meet the people, maybe walk out with them this afternoon. If you don’t feel good about it you can always turn around and come back.”

“Great, I can walk all the way back alone.”

“You can hitch. Besides, if you don’t like it the chances are I won’t like it either, and we can hitch back together. Just join in for a few miles, Bev.”

“This has a familiar ring,” she said. “It’s like a couple of years ago when you swore you were only going to put the tip in.”

“If you don’t like it—”

“That’s the trouble, Douglas. I wind up liking it.”

Douglas was a sort of half-assed survivalist, and Gary had a hard time talking him out of bringing along a ton of camping gear. He was sure they’d be more comfortable with a tent and sleeping bags, and he wanted to bring a mess kit and a compass and water purification tablets and a hatchet and fishhooks and line and God knew what else. “These people are into traveling real light,” Gary told him. “If it weighs a lot or if it won’t fit in a small pack, leave it behind.”

“But you can’t sleep uncovered in the mountains,” Douglas insisted. “You’ll freeze.”

“They’ve been doing it all along.”

“Well, I’m certainly taking the first aid kit. It doesn’t make sense to go anywhere without gauze and tape and antiseptic and aspirin.”

“Don’t really need aspirin,” Gary said, grinning. “We got an old boy from Klamath Falls who puts his hands around your head and cures your headache.”

“How is he with menstrual cramps?” Bev wanted to know. Gary said it hadn’t come up, but he was sure Jody would be willing to try. “Well, why not?” she said. “It won’t be the craziest thing I did all day. But he better watch where he puts his hands.”

They left Burns in a compact group. As they put a little distance between themselves and the city, they tended to spread out along the highway in twos and threes. Here and there someone walked alone, but usually not for long.

Guthrie asked Sara if she’d had a chance to get a reading on Jordan.

“I just picked up a lot of self-hatred,” she said. “Nobody wants him and he doesn’t belong anywhere.”

“Yeah, I got that much and I’m not even blind. I was a little concerned about him just joining up with us. As far as I can tell he didn’t say a word to anyone back in Burns. He just walked on out of town. So I asked him if his people wouldn’t come after us to get him back. You read about these cults spiriting children away from their parents; I sure don’t want to turn into something like that.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he didn’t think the people of Burns were going to get up a posse to bring back a half-nigger Indian. He said his mother was in the state hospital and his father was doing time for manslaughter, and the aunt he lived with would do a victory dance if she ever noticed he was gone. I’m glad he’s with us, the poor little son of a bitch. I don’t think he could have had too good a life in Burns.”

“Or too long a one, either.”

“He’ll be good company for your boy, too.”

“He’ll be good company for all of us.”

“Uh-huh.” They walked a little ways in silence, and then he said, “People have so goddam much to walk away from. Every time I find myself wondering what we’re walking toward, I tell myself that’s beside the point. Sara, I read a newspaper back in Burns and there wasn’t a single good thing in it. The baseball scores were the closest thing to good news, and even there somebody had to lose for everybody who won. I don’t usually get bothered by the fact that major league baseball is a zero-sum universe, but that puts it ahead of the rest of the world, where one person can lose without somebody else winning.”

“I suppose I’ll miss being able to read a paper,” she said. “But so far I haven’t.”

“There was a man in Washington State who killed his wife and kids with a shotgun and then hanged himself with his belt. All that went through my mind reading the story was wondering why he’d used the shotgun on the rest of them and then used a different method on himself. I asked Jody.”

“I’ll bet he had an answer.”

“He had several suggestions. Maybe the guy ran out of shells. Maybe he was sickened by the mess a shotgun makes. Maybe the gun barrel was longer than his arm, and it didn’t occur to him that he could work the trigger with his toe.”

“Maybe he knew you could get an erection by hanging yourself.”

“You can?”

“So I understand. There are accidental suicides all the time, people trying to half hang themselves for sexual pleasure who go a little farther than they intended.”

“This really happens?”

“Oh, the literature’s full of it. It happens quite frequently.”

He shook his head. “I suppose all knowledge is valuable,” he said, “but I’d have a hard time saying how my life is richer for knowing that.”

Three hours out of Burns, a Ford Taurus passed them at high speed, heading west. A few minutes later the same car returned in the eastbound lane, braking hard and fishtailing to a stop, then pulling onto the shoulder across the road from the main body of walkers.

The driver got out of the car, slammed the door, and stalked across the road. He was a man in his mid-thirties, average in height and build. He was wearing a three-piece navy pinstripe suit, a yellow tie with black pin dots, and a pair of black scotch-grain wingtip shoes. He had taken his car keys with him, and he strode along with them clutched in one hand.

A couple of people tried speaking to him. He didn’t reply, or give any clear indication that he had heard them. There was a wild look in his eyes; they seemed to be focused off in the middle distance somewhere. He walked at a good pace, his arms swinging madly at his sides, his back ramrod-straight.

After he had gone perhaps half a mile he became aware of the car keys. He looked at them as if unable to guess what they were or where they’d come from. Then he reared back and hurled them into the field to his left.

Another half mile down the road he shrugged out of his suit jacket, compressed it into a ball, and flung it into the field. His vest was the next to go, after another quarter mile. Then his necktie. Then his wristwatch.

Not too surprisingly, he had attracted a great deal of attention. No one was quite prepared to interfere, but everybody was waiting to see what he would litter the landscape with next.

But instead he walked for the next half hour without discarding anything. Gradually his arm movements became less exaggerated and his face lost its look of manic concentration. He had been staring straight ahead; now he occasionally looked to the left or right. Twice he yawned.

Then he said, “My name’s Jerry. Christ, I’m hungry, I don’t mind telling you. Anybody know where you can get a sandwich around here?”

“You win,” Bev told Douglas. “The hell with it, I don’t care, I’ll be a lemming too. You win.”