Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Twelve

The morning after Mame joined them, Guthrie bought an Idaho map at a gas station outside of Vale, and before nightfall they had crossed the Snake into Idaho and made camp outside of Payette. The group had continued to grow — two college students had joined in as they marched through Ontario, Oregon, and a loose-limbed farmhand with a half pint of Mad Dog 20–20 in each of his hip pockets had fallen into step with them shortly after they crossed the state line. Guthrie didn’t have their names straight yet, let alone know what they were about.

He squatted by the fire, studying the new map, and when it burned lower he went off a ways and went on studying it by flashlight. The map was a puzzle, and when he made the mistake of trying to puzzle it out he wound up feeling like a lab rat in an unsolvable maze. The state was all mountains. Except for the Interstate, which did not lend itself to their sort of travel, all of the roads moved in a devious fashion, tracing circuitous paths through the Rockies. He found one promising route, more direct than most, that proceeded east along the Salmon River. But the line on the map suggested that it might be only a rudimentary road, perhaps no more than a foot trail, and when he checked the table of symbols he found out it wasn’t a path at all, it was part of the line of demarcation between the Mountain and Pacific time zones.

Talk about walking a thin line, he thought. Every false step would cost you an hour.

He gave up analyzing, and then the route seemed to jump out at him from the map. He found Sara sitting up beside the dying fire and led her off to one side.

“I think I’ve got our route,” he said. “I don’t know, though. There’s a stretch of 21 through the Sawtooth Range that’s marked ‘Closed in Winter.’”

“It’s still June, Guthrie.”

“I know that. Still, the roads they close in the winter may not open all that wide in the summer. It looks as though we’re in for a lot of steep climbing and bad roads and places with more bears than people. Does our celestial protection plan have a clause about bears?”

“I didn’t read the fine print.”

“What I’m getting at is we’ve got a woman with a kid strapped on her back and another who’s only thirty-odd hours out of an aluminum walker. Are they going to be able to make it?”

“Guthrie, I think Mame can cover any stretch of ground you or I can.”

“I think the same thing, only I feel like an idiot for thinking it. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this all day. What the hell happened?”

“With Mame? She had a healing.”

“That sounds as though she scratched her knee on a thornbush and it mended without leaving a scar. That’s not what Mame had. She had a complete recovery from crippling arthritis.”

“Isn’t it more or less the same thing?”

“The way an ice cube’s the same thing as the chunk that sank the Titanic. What happened to Mame was a miracle.”

“I agree.”

“So—”

“Every healing’s a miracle, Guthrie. Say you scratch yourself on a Thom. The skin is broken, the flesh is torn, and although you don’t even give it a moment’s thought the blood coagulates and the cells reach out to one another and they grow back together. You don’t think that’s miraculous?”

“It may be hard to understand, and it may make you want to congratulate God on designing a good system, but it’s ordinary, isn’t it? It’s the way things work.”

“Just an everyday miracle,” she said. “You know, you can cut a piece of paper with a scissors, then patch it with Scotch tape, and you can leave it like that for a year and not have the paper grow back together again.”

“Sara—”

“I remember when my brother broke the leg off one of the dining room chairs by rocking on it, and my father glued that chair and put a couple of screws into it. But when Eddie broke his own leg skiing they didn’t use glue or screws, they just put it in a cast and it grew back together. Why do you suppose skin and bone mend themselves and wood and paper don’t?”

“I get the point. Life is a fucking miracle. But what happened to Mame wasn’t an everyday miracle. It was unusual, it was impossible, it was harder than your average run-of-the-mill miracle.”

She was shaking her head. “There’s no order of difficulty in miracles. They’re all impossible. You can’t divide them into major and minor miracles. This wasn’t the first miracle we’ve witnessed on this pilgrimage. Look how many of us have had healings of the spirit. Look what’s happened to Jody, to John, to Martha. Even for those of us who haven’t had a lot of tears and high drama, look how our spirits have been healed. We’re all becoming the people we really were all along. The deposits in the joints of our spirits are melting and washing away like Mame’s arthritis, and we can move and laugh and sing again.”

“You’re saying it’s the same thing?”

“Of course it’s the same thing. But Mame’s not the first person with a healing on the physical level. Look at you, for God’s sake.”

“Me?”

“You spent twenty years addicted to nicotine. You think that’s not a physical condition? Nicotine’s more addictive than heroin. If you run animal experiments, habituating them to a drug and then giving them free choice between the drug and water, you can determine what percentage get addicted. You get different percentages with different drugs, and there’s some variance with species. With nicotine the addiction rate is at or near 100 percent irrespective of species. And you quit. Don’t you think that’s a miracle?”

“Lots of people quit smoking.”

“Without trying? Without even intending to? And with no withdrawal symptoms and no craving?”

“Okay, it’s a miracle.”

“You had an even more obviously physical healing, didn’t you? Didn’t Jody take away your headache?”

“Oh, right. With his hands. He’s been doing that for a lot of people.”

“He takes away pain with his hands.” She smiled softly. “Jody grew up thinking he caused people pain. What better gift could he get than the ability to take their pain away?”

His head whirled, and he thought he’d probably need Jody’s services again soon. He said, “To get back to Mame—”

“She cured herself of arthritis, Guthrie. That’s all. All cures are the same. They happen when you decide on a cure and manifest it on a physical level. Sometimes you go to a doctor and he gives you something that triggers it. Sometimes you go to a church. Sometimes you go to someone like Jody, who gives you a transfer of energy that starts the process in motion. Then your body remembers what it’s supposed to do, and the bone knits or new skin forms or calcium deposits dissolve. That’s what a healing is, that’s what a miracle is. The wonder isn’t that they happen. The wonder is that they only happen some of the time.”

“Her healing was so fast, Sara.”

“I know. We usually don’t let ourselves mend that quickly because we know it’s not possible. But Mame was in a hurry. If she spent a month healing herself we’d be in Idaho before she was ready to walk.”

“I hope we’ll be out of Idaho by then. We’ll be in Montana.”

“The point is we’d be out of reach. Mame needed to heal fast, so she didn’t listen to the part of her mind that knew you couldn’t walk out from under that bad a case of arthritis in a couple of miles. She healed her spirit by undoing all the knots that she’d tied in it over the years, she let go of everything she’d been holding onto too tightly, and every step she took helped make her whole again.” She considered for a moment. “The first step set it all in motion. But she had to stay with it, she had to walk through the parts that hurt more than the arthritis.”

“Could she have done it without us?”

She spread her hands. “I don’t know how to answer that. People cure themselves all the time without walking across the country to do it. Sometimes it’s a cold, sometimes it’s a shaving nick, sometimes it’s a terminal illness. People choose their diseases and sometimes they choose to heal them. So Mame could have healed herself. She didn’t even have to walk to do it, with us or without us. But she probably wouldn’t have been able to make the choice to do it. There’s something magical about this walk of ours, Guthrie.”

“I know that.”

“It lets people make choices they never could make before. Martha’s sinuses are clear for the first time in years. And Gary’s not smoking. He doesn’t know whether or not to be happy about it, he liked smoking, but when he lights a cigarette he takes one drag and puts it out.”

“I remember what that was like.”

“Sue Anne cured herself of cancer. Most people would probably call that a miracle.”

“When was that? I didn’t know she had it.”

“Neither did she. She didn’t know she had it and she doesn’t know it’s gone, and I’m not sure whether I ought to tell her or not. She knows on some level, she had to know or she couldn’t have made it happen, but she doesn’t have any conscious knowledge and maybe she doesn’t need any.”

“How do you know she had it?”

“I picked it up when I first held her hand. I could see it, a mass in her right breast, and it felt — I don’t know, hot, sort of.”

“To the touch?”

“No, I only touched her hand. I felt heat from the lump in my mind when I scanned her. And then I made a point of taking her hand later that day to see if I got the same reading, and I did. There were some similar hot spots in her uterus, and I believe breast cancer frequently metastasizes there.”

“Jesus. And you didn’t say anything?”

“I wasn’t sure what to do, Guthrie. I’m a blind headshrinker, not a board-certified radiologist. I’m willing to trust my diagnostic skills, but why should anybody else be? If I sent her to a doctor and I turned out to be right, then he would remove her breast and her uterus and that might be enough to save her, or the same factors that led her to create the cancer in the first place might bring about a recurrence. In any event, she’d be in a hospital somewhere.” She smiled. “I thought it might be more efficacious to keep my mouth shut and wait for a miracle. But I decided to scan her every day so that I could monitor the condition.”

“‘Trust everybody but cut the cards.’ And when you scanned her—”

“The cancerous mass was reduced in both sites. That was yesterday morning. By last night the uterus was clear and the lump in the breast was smaller and there was no heat coming from it. And this morning it was completely gone.”

“Jesus.”

“Well, I suppose he may have had something to do with it. Depending on your belief system.”

“What happened, Sara? I don’t mean metaphysically. Where did the cancer go?”

“To cancer heaven, I suppose. Who knows what happens in spontaneous remissions? The cancer cells died. Maybe they killed themselves, maybe the other cells ganged up on them and ate them. The body does this sort of thing all the time, there are all these little SWAT teams cruising around the bloodstream on search-and-destroy missions.”

“‘The Walk That Cures Cancer.’ It sounds like something from the Enquirer.”

“I know it does. You know what they say, just because it’s in the Enquirer doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a lie.”

“I know, some of that shit actually happens.”

“My gums are getting better. My dentist says I’ve had significant bone loss, he’s been after me to have periodontal surgery for the past year and a half. My gums bleed easily and some of the teeth are a little loose in their sockets. But make that past tense. My gums don’t bleed anymore, and my teeth are no longer loose, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m regenerating some of that bone. That’s supposed to be impossible, but so what? ‘The difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a little longer.’”

“Except when it doesn’t.”

“Except when it doesn’t. ‘The Walk That Cures Periodontal Disease’ wouldn’t sell as many tabloids, but if it means I get to keep my teeth, I’m not complaining.”

“No, I don’t blame you.”

They fell silent. The moon was a pale sliver, and every possible star glinted overhead. The sky tonight seemed to Guthrie to have depth. Usually it looked two-dimensional to him, like the painted interior ceiling of a great dome, but now the stars appeared strewn at random across an infinity of space.

An owl called in the distance. The sound died, leaving the silence more pronounced. Guthrie said, “Is that what we’re walking for, Sara? Healing?”

“That certainly seems to be a part of it.”

“Sometimes it feels like an encounter group and other times like a visit to a faith healer.”

“It has elements of both, but the intensity is greater here, I think. And so are the results. And when something really dramatic happens, like Mame’s walk, it gives everybody a sense of the possibilities. I don’t know what the limits are. Maybe there aren’t any.”

“Why are some of us getting healed while others aren’t? Douglas has a bum hip, he’s had it since he was in high school, and I haven’t noticed any improvement since he got here. Mame walked away from her arthritis just like that, and his limp’s no better than when he joined us.”

“Maybe he’s not ready to give it up. Or maybe it’s not the healing he came for. Yes, we’re here to be healed. But that’s not the only reason we’re here.”

“What else is there?”

“I don’t know yet. I get flashes of it but I can’t see enough to guess the shape of it.”

He had another question, but he had to force himself to ask it. “Sara? What about your eyes?”

“What about them?”

“Has there been any healing?”

“Of my vision?” She patted his hand. “I’m not going to be getting my eyesight back, love. It’s gone.”

“What does that mean? That it would take a miracle?”

She shook her head. “That’s not the point. I didn’t come here to heal my eyesight, Guthrie. I came here to sacrifice it.”

“I know that.”

“I thought you did.”

“It’s just that, oh, when we were on the bridge today, crossing the Snake River? I couldn’t help wishing you could have seen it.”

“Oh, Guthrie,” she cried. “Would you like me to tell you what I see when I look at a river?”

Route 52 along the banks of the Payette River to Horseshoe Bend. Then a gravel road running right to a ghost town just below Placerville, and a turn onto another gravel road cutting southeast through New Centerville to Idaho City. Then Route 21 northeast through national forest and into the Sawtooth Range, and cutting southeast again to Stanley, and Route 75 east through Sunbeam and Clayton and north past Bald Mountain and a petrified forest and into US 93, and north along the Salmon River all the way to the town of Salmon, and Idaho 28 switching southeast to Tendoy, and then a road, unnumbered on his map, first gravel and then dirt, heading east over the Bitterroots and crossing through Lemhi Pass into Montana.

That was the route Guthrie had traced out for them, and it would have been a hard trip in a car. On foot it was harder, the sort of trek where you’d expect a certain amount of attrition, with some people dropping out and deciding to head back.

Nobody dropped out. On the contrary, people kept dropping in. Not all that many, because there was not that large a population base to draw from, but enough so that the group kept growing.

Dingo was an outlaw biker. He had a full beard, a shaved head, one black front tooth, a single gold earring, and a lot of scar tissue on his face and body. He wore jeans and a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off. He had an Iron Cross around his neck and a studded leather wristband on each wrist and heavy ass-kicking boots on his feet. He looked like a middle-class nightmare.

He was one of seven bikers on five Harley-Davidsons who caught up with the group early one afternoon. Dingo would have looked menacing all by himself. With his companions, he looked like Attila on the march.

But the bikers were curious, not hostile. They asked their questions, cracked their jokes, offered various illegal substances around, then gunned their engines and took off.

A few miles away, Dingo accelerated to pull up even with two brothers who were riding double. “Hey, let Weasel ride with me some,” he said.

“What, are you two sweethearts?”

“Yeah, I want a cock to play with while I ride and I can’t reach my own.”

“If it wasn’t so fuckin’ small you could reach it.”

“Yeah, well, your mama never complained. Pull the fuck over, will you?”

Riding with Weasel, he said, “How’d you like those people we met just now?”

“The walkers? Assholes.”

“Maybe. Got to be some kind of righteous duty, though. Walking across the country.”

“Got to be crazy to do it.”

“Maybe,” he said. Then he said, “Hey, Weeze, you like my hog?”

“This here bike?”

“Yeah. You like it?”

“Shit yes.”

“You want it?”

“Huh?”

“I said do you want it?”

“The bike? Do I want it?”

“Do you?”

“Fuck, man. Would a dog lick hisself? Of course I want it.”

“It’s yours.”

“Huh?”

“It’s yours, Weasel. All you got to do is run back with me to where the walkers are, and you can keep the bike.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Walk.”

“You gotta be crazy, Dingo.”

“So?”

When they’d caught up with the group Dingo uncoupled a bag with his gear in it and slung it over his shoulder. He gave the Harley a pat and told Weasel to take over.

“Just treat her good,” he said. “You do right by her and she’ll always give you her best.”

“Like a woman,” Weasel said.

“Well, no,” Dingo said. “You got to kick the shit out of a woman now and then.”

He started walking, picked up his pace, and took a position around the middle of the group, falling into step with John Powers. “Hey, nice day, huh?” he said.

“Real nice,” John said.

“My name’s Dingo.”

“Mine’s John.”

“Oh, yeah? My name used to be John. Before it was Dingo.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. It sure is a beautiful day.”

Later, walking with Gary, he said, “Cowboys and bikers, now there’s two kind of people never did get along.”

“I know. We always hated you people.”

“Yeah, we felt the same about you. Cowboy walks into a biker bar, he’s askin’ to get stomped. No other way to look at it.”

“That’s a true statement. Only thing dumber is for a biker to walk into a cowboy bar.”

“I saw a cowboy get killed once.”

“Yeah?”

“Biker hit on a girl, cowboy and his friends didn’t like it, biker took a beating. Biker came back with his brothers, couldn’t find but one cowboy, and it was nothing but boots and chains. He wasn’t even the one who started the whole thing, I don’t know if he was even part of it.”

“If you saw it,” Gary said slowly, “you must have been one of the bikers.”

“Well, fuck, I wasn’t the girl. Man, we were fucked up. I mean, crank and reds is a destructive combination.”

“I don’t know about drugs,” Gary said. “Seems to me cowboys get mean enough on beer and whiskey. I never saw nobody killed, but I did see a biker get cut once.”

“What, stabbed?”

“Nutted. You know, castrated. His balls cut off.”

“Is that true?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“What’d he do?”

“Nothin’. He was just there, is all. There was a bunch of hands spent the whole day nuttin’ calves.”

“What for?”

“Are you shitting me? That’s how you get steers, man. You take the calves and cut their balls off. You order a steak, that’s what you’re eating.”

“You’re eating the calves’ nuts?”

“No, shit, don’t you know anything?” He laughed. “You get a bull calf, you nut him, and then he’s a steer and that’s what your beef is. If you don’t cut him he grows up to be a bull and you can’t control him on the range and the meat’s not right. I thought everybody knew that.”

“I grew up in Oakland, man. Meat came in packages wrapped in plastic. Milk came in cartons. Chicken came fried. What happened to this biker? You wouldn’t know what bunch he rode with, by any chance? Like Hell’s Angels, Rebels, Savage Skulls? One of those?”

“Hell, I don’t know. He was a biker is all, and he was there. And these guys been cutting calves all day, and big surprise they’re drinking pretty good, and somebody gets the idea of cutting the biker same as they been cutting the calves. And so they do it.”

“He lets ’em?”

“They didn’t give him much choice. There was six or eight of them, and they just held him down and did it.”

“They cut off his whole works?”

“No, just his balls. You cut the cock, a man might bleed to death.”

“Cut the balls off and he’ll just wish he did. I never heard anything like that. Didn’t his brothers come back at you?”

“Never.”

“Maybe he never said anything. Maybe he didn’t want to spread it around. Fuck. That is some story.”

“Well, cowboys got a lot of stories,” Gary said. “I guess bikers got a few, too.”

“I guess,” said Dingo.

Gene was a jack-Mormon who lived in a shack on federal land. He trapped, hunted, and made a little beer and whiskey. He had two wives, Essica and Lily, and five children between the ages of eight and eleven. The first chance he got, Thom asked one of the older boys whether there were any Chinese Mormons. The boy said he’d never met any.

“You got a nice little family,” Jody told Gene. “I didn’t think Mormons could still have more’n one wife.”

“You can’t,” Gene said, “but there’s a lot that do. What are they going to do, run around locking people up? Of course you can’t be in good standing with the church, but that only matters if you give a shit about it. Which I don’t.”

“Yeah. How is it having two wives, anyway?”

“Well, I’d say it’s good,” Gene said judiciously. “They sort of keep each other company. They’re in the kitchen together, they care for the children together, they do their chores together. It works real good that way.”

“They don’t get jealous?”

“Naw.”

“You have some kind of schedule?”

“Schedule? Oh, you mean for who to sleep with? No, we just all three sleep together.”

“Oh.”

“It works real fine that way.”

“I guess,” Jody said, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Just one more question, hoss. Who do I see if I want to join this church of yours?”

Kate and Jamie were picking raspberries at roadside just east of Lowman. Kate was Boston Irish, and she had gone through a period in her late teens when she had Gaelicized her name to Caitlin. Jamie was a black woman from the South Side of Chicago. Both were nearing thirty, both had short hair, and both were dressed alike in baggy fatigues from Banana Republic and unpatterned flannel shirts from Norm Thompson and duck hunter boots from L. L. Bean.

They lived together at a lesbian commune half a mile up a dirt road, and the group waited while they went back there to fill a pair of backpacks and say their good-byes. They returned with a couple of spare backpacks and some extra canteens, a hamper of food, and two half-gallon jugs of homemade elderflower wine. They also brought Neila, a big-eyed thin-limbed waif of a woman with a skittish manner and a haunted look about her.

“She doesn’t say much,” Kate told Martha and Sara, “but you should have seen her when she turned up back in November. I don’t think she spoke a word the first week she was with us. Somebody must have done a number on her. I thought she probably should have stayed with the other women, but she wanted to come. Something told her to come to the Hen House when she needed us, and the same thing must be telling her to leave.”

Sara grasped Neila’s hands and saw child abuse that started in the cradle, a tough little brute of a father with a predilection for sexual torture, a slow-witted mother, herself terrified of her husband, who acquiesced in and abetted her daughter’s exploitation. She saw more than she wanted to see, and had to fight the impulse to close her inner eyes and draw away. Instead she made herself center her energies in her heart, letting herself feel Neila’s pain and revulsion and beaming back love in return.

“It’s right for her to be with us,” was all she said.

A mile or so on down the road, Sue Anne found herself walking alongside Neila. Neither of them spoke. After they had walked together for a few minutes, Sue Anne opened the clasp of the gold chain and hung it around Neila’s neck. The blue crystal lay between Neila’s breasts. Neila stiffened at first, but then she took the crystal in her hand and looked at it, and her features relaxed into what was almost a smile.

Later on, Sue Anne caught up with Lissa. She said, “That crystal you gave me? The one you got from Grace?”

“What about it?”

“I gave it to Neila.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know why I did that. I liked wearing it, you know? But something just told me to give it to her.”

“Well, something just told me to give it to you.”

“I thought maybe I should keep it because you gave it to me.”

“Grace gave it to me, and I had the same kind of thought, but it seemed the right thing to pass it on.”

Walking with Jordan, Thom said, “You must be glad to see Jamie.”

“Why? We supposed to be old friends or something?”

“Well, she’s black. Now you’re not the only black person in the group.”

“She doesn’t like me.”

“What are you talking about? She hasn’t even met you yet.”

“We already know she hates guys,” Jordan said. “She’s probably got no use for Indians, either.”

Jerry Arbison was the man who had abandoned his Ford Taurus as a prelude to discarding his car keys, tie, jacket, his vest and his wristwatch. The last was a Rolex, he confided, but not the expensive Rolex.

He had been born in Ohio in a Cleveland suburb and had majored in English at Western Reserve. After graduation he went west to get a master’s in film studies at UCLA. He wrote two unsuccessful screenplays before landing a job at the William Morris Agency. After a few years there he opened his own office as an agent, representing film and television writers. He closed the agency after a year and a half and became a stockbroker with Smith Campbell Hamilton, where his client list consisted largely of screenwriters and their friends.

He had gone back to Cleveland for his grandmother’s funeral. He’d flown east for the funeral, but he hadn’t wanted to fly back so he’d bought the car in Cleveland. He planned to drive straight back, but first he drove down to Dayton to visit an old college buddy. He stayed three days, and from the buddy’s house he called an old girlfriend, divorced now and living in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. He stayed at her apartment and they spent three days drinking chilled Beaujolais and fucking like weasels, and on the third night he asked her to marry him.

“Let’s not move too fast, Jerry,” she said. “You’ve never been married. I have. I’m still getting over the divorce. Let’s live together, you can move right in here or I’ll come out to L.A., whichever you’d rather. I don’t really care where I live. And then, you know, we’ll take it from there.”

The next morning she went to work. As soon as her car was out of the driveway he threw all his things in his suitcase, jumped in the Ford, and got the hell out of there.

Jesus, talk about your narrow escapes.

He drove across the country, but he kept getting off the Interstate and just driving around. When he got back to L.A. he’d step back into his life, but he didn’t seem willing to do that. In Grand Junction, Colorado, he took a room at a Ramada Inn and couldn’t leave the room. The first day he went downstairs to the coffee shop for his meals, but then he stopped being able to do that, and he would call up Domino’s Pizza two or three times a day and have a pizza and a couple of Cokes delivered. There was a Coke machine on his floor, next to the elevator, but he didn’t even want to go that far.

After four days of Coke and pizza he got in his car and split. He didn’t even stop at the desk to check out. They had run a slip with his credit card, they could take care of it, and he didn’t want to talk to anybody. He hadn’t eaten since noon the previous day because he hadn’t wanted to talk to the girl at Domino’s Pizza, not even over the phone.

At Salt Lake City something made him head north. At Baker, Oregon, something made him get off 1-84 and take roads without even consulting a map or paying heed to the highway markers. He had known something was coming moments before he saw them walking at the side of the road. He had felt something waiting for him, feared it, and yet was drawn to rush forward to meet it. He had thought it might be a car wreck, an accident waiting for him to happen into it, and so he had failed to recognize them as he sped past them, but something must have registered, because he had almost wrecked the car, braking savagely to a stop, swinging around, and racing back after them.

Now he was quiet most of the time, his silence pierced periodically by manic episodes and furious rambling monologues. Several members of the group had had experiences similar to Martha’s, with a siege of physical or mental agitation leading them spontaneously into hyperventilation, at which point someone would get them to lie down and breathe in a fluid rhythm, with no pause between one breath and the next. The breathing seemed to produce a cleansing energy in the body. Already Jerry had gone into hyperventilation three times. The first time he panicked and couldn’t breathe, but Martha talked him through it. The other times were easier, and in each instance he maintained the breathing rhythm for about an hour, rested for an hour afterward, and emerged from the experience refreshed and lighter, cleaner, clearer.

Now, after walking in silence for a mile or so alongside Lissa and Georgia Burdine, he looked off to his left and was struck by the way a long cigar-shaped cloud was just floating across the face of a snowcapped mountain.

It was as if he had never seen a cloud before, or a mountain.

“My God!” he cried. “Will you look at that. You don’t see a thing when you drive, do you? Even if you’re not watching the road, even if somebody else is driving. Even if you look out the window, even if you see all this, you don’t really see it, you know? You get a movie, you never get a still photo. You just move through it, you say how beautiful it all is and you remember how it looked and you never really saw it.”

He walked off the shoulder of the road, clambered up onto a small outcropping of rock. “Just look!” he commanded. “Everything is different. Every step you take you see a different thing. Every cloud is different. You look at a cloud, I mean really look at it, and it floats off and you’ll never see a cloud exactly like it again. They say every snowflake’s different. Billions and billions of snowflakes and there’s never two identical. I always thought how do they know? Who keeps tabs on the snowflakes? How many billion billions of them fall and melt away and no one ever sees them, let alone holds a magnifying glass to them? How could each and every one of them really be different? Because how much variation is possible in a simple fucking thing like a snowflake?

“Except I believe it now. I believe it. Every man’s got different fingerprints. All the prints they’ve taken and recorded and classified, and they never yet found two sets the same. You see ants swarming in an anthill, and they all look the same, but I’ll bet you that there’s no two ants alike. If you got close enough and if you knew what to look for, you’d see differences. The ants see differences. Maybe they think we all look alike. Or maybe they think we look like boulders, like mountains, like continents. Or maybe they don’t think at all, maybe they have other ant things to do that serve them better than thinking.

“There’s no two people alike. There’s no two cells exactly the same in your body. A man and woman go to make a baby and there’s billions of sperm cells come out of the man, and no two of them are alike, and one of them gets to make the baby and it’s a baby like no other in the world.

“And there’s never two days that are the same, or two hours of a day, or two minutes of an hour. ‘As like as two peas in a pod,’ my grandmother used to say, but there’s no two peas alike no matter how many pods you open. There’s always a difference, and do you know why?

“Because God never repeats himself. He never does! He’d be bored to do the same thing over and so he never does. He finds a new way to do it every time!”

He jumped down from the rock. “Man repeats himself,” he said. “Or tries to. As much as God tries to do it different, and does, man tries to do it the same. A million Ford Tauruses rolling off the assembly line, and they’re all the same.

“Except they’re not, not exactly, and they get less and less alike as time gets a chance to go to work on them. This one gets a dented fender, and this one has a lot of wear on the right side of the brake pedal, and this one gets driven in Cleveland where they put salt on the roads to cut the ice and it rusts out in four years, and this one winds up in New Mexico and doesn’t show a drop of rust fifteen years later, and this one gets a new muffler, and this one gets a gash in the seat cover, and this one develops an engine knock, and I could go on like this, I could go on forever, I could think of new things to happen to those cars as long as I have breath in my body—”

Lissa said, “Easy, Jerry. Easy.”

“I’m all right. I could do that but I don’t have to. But it’s all different, do you understand that? Do you realize how fantastic that is?” He got down on his hands and knees. “This square foot of earth,” he said, framing it with his hands, “and this square foot next to it, and you can walk over them and never even look where you’re putting your feet. But they’re different! And they’re always changing! And it’s… it’s wonderful!”

He stood there, looking at them, and he breathed, in and out. In and out.

Georgia said, “Jerry, honey, do you want to lie down and breathe?”

“I’m not hyperventilating.”

“You could do it anyway. Just breathe for an hour. I’ll stay by you and breathe you.”

“We’d get left behind.”

“It’s okay. We could catch up.”

He thought about it. “No, I’m okay,” he decided. “But maybe tonight, after we settle in. If the offer still holds.”

“Any time.”

Later, watching the sun drop behind the western skyline, Guthrie recalled Jerry’s speech, which he’d already privately entitled “The Sermon on the Rock.” There were no two sunsets the same, either, and there was no such thing as a bad one.

Douglas said, “Guthrie, you got a minute?”

“Sure.”

They walked off a few yards, and Guthrie asked what was up.

“Well, it’s no biggie,” Douglas said. “It’s this knife I’ve been carrying. You seen it?”

“Not to look at closely.”

Douglas wore the knife in a leather sheath on his belt. He unclasped the sheath, withdrew the knife and gripped it by the blade to offer it to Guthrie. It was a handmade hunting knife with a four-and-a-half-inch blade. The grip was of nickel silver, Douglas explained, with inlaid panels of boar’s tusk.

“See, it’s fancy,” he said, “but it’s a working knife. The blade’s 440 stainless and that boar ivory holds up better than elephant ivory. You can skin game all day with that knife, you can cut bone with it. It’s serviceable and it holds an edge.”

“You made it yourself?”

“I did. Made quite a few similar to it. If I ever made one I liked better I’d put this one aside to sell and keep the new favorite. But I haven’t replaced this one yet and I’ve had her awhile. I like the balance and I like the markings on the boar-tooth grips. Pretty, aren’t they?”

“Very.”

“The thing is, should I be carrying it?”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s a weapon,” Douglas said, “even if it’s not a true fighting knife. It’s a tool first, but even as a tool it’s an instrument of violence. Hunting’s violent, and skinning and dressing game is bloody work. And this walk of ours, hell, Guthrie, I don’t know. I wonder what people think about me going around with a knife on my hip.”

“I don’t know that anybody has any thoughts about it.”

“Well, I guess I have thoughts of my own about it, and I’m not sure what they amount to. I got no real use for the knife now. I’m not about to slip off into the woods and hunt something. I can cut a piece of string with it, but I could do that easier with a bitty pocketknife.”

“So you don’t know whether or not you should be wearing it.”

“I’m proud of the workmanship in it and I think it’s a beautiful object and I like it as an object, but all the same it’s an object of violence. Like I said, it’s no big deal, but—”

“Do you know who William Penn was?”

“Founder of Pennsylvania?”

“That’s right,” Guthrie said. “But before he left England he was a military man, and then he converted to the Quaker religion and joined the Society of Friends.”

“I knew he was a Quaker. Pennsylvania, Quaker State and all.”

“Right. Well, one day Penn went to see George Fox, who was the founder of Quakerism. Fox was evidently a great spiritual leader, but he was also pretty eccentric. I don’t know a whole lot about him, but I gather he was sort of an inspired flake.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Penn explained to Fox that he had a problem. As a former military man, it was his custom to wear a dress sword. He didn’t think of it as a weapon. For him it was an article of dress and he felt incomplete without it, but he was concerned that other members of the society might not look at it that way. He didn’t want to offend his new friends, and at the same time he felt funny giving up his sword, and he didn’t know what to do.”

“Yeah, that about says it, doesn’t it? What did Fox tell him?”

“Fox thought about it for a few minutes, and then he smiled and said, ‘Why don’t you wear it as long as you can?’”

“Far out.”

“So all I can say—”

“I get it. ‘Wear it as long as you can.’ Hey, thanks, Guthrie.”

A few days after that Guthrie was leaning against a rock eating a cheese sandwich when Dingo hunkered down next to him. “Great day, huh?” he said. “Say, Guthrie, something I wanted to ask you.”

“Sure.”

“Well, it’s this,” Dingo said. He held up the Iron Cross that hung from a gold chain around his thick neck. “I been wearing this thing a long time,” he said. “The bro who gave it to me was good people, man. His name was Robbo, he was a North Florida boy. He hauled my ass out of the fire a time or two, and I guess I did the same for him. And he gave me this.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Robbo, he died some years back. We’d gone down separate roads by then, but you hear what happens to people. He wiped out coming around a turn coming down the coast road from Carmel heading into Big Sur. He just lost it and spread hisself and his hog over a mile of rocks and ocean. If there’s such a thing as a good place to die, I guess that’s it. If there’s prettier spots, I haven’t seen ’em yet.”

“I know the road.”

“Then you can dig what I’m saying. Anyway, that’s the farm for Robbo. An’ I been wearin’ this ever since he gave it to me, but since he died it’s not just for myself, but it’s more or less of a memorial to him.” He drew a breath, ran a hand over his shaved head. “An’ now I don’t know if I should keep on wearin’ it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, do you know what it is, man?”

“It’s an Iron Cross, isn’t it?”

“You got that right. It’s a Nazi thing, they gave it out to soldiers for heroism in battle and shit like that. Bikers love Nazi stuff, man. They go nuts for it because it drives the citizens crazy. ‘How can you wear a swastika after what those people did?’ Plus the Nazis had great fucking designers. I used to have this Luftwaffe dagger and it was beautiful. I wonder whatever happened to it.”

He shrugged. “The thing is,” he went on, “there’s people here I wouldn’t want to freak out, you know? And it’s a Nazi thing, and the Nazis did a lot of evil shit, man. You wear a Nazi medal around a Jewish person, you’re saying, hey, fuck you, and fuck your whole family that went up in smoke in the camps. And a person wouldn’t have to be a Jew to pick up negative vibes off Nazi stuff.”

“So you don’t know how you feel about wearing it.”

“Well, I don’t know how everybody else feels, Guthrie. I don’t know how many years I wore this thing, never taking it off, and then the other day I took it off and put it in my pocket. And that felt funny, so I put it back on, and that felt funny, so I took it off again, and it feels funny no matter what I do.”

“I know what you mean,” Guthrie said. “Let me ask you something, Dingo. Do you know who William Penn was?”

“Shit, yes. I used to smoke his cigars. Cheap little fuckers but they didn’t taste too bad.”

“He was also the founder of Pennsylvania.”

“I been there. Philly, Pittsburgh. McKeesport.”

“Before he left England, Penn was a military man. Then he converted to the Quaker religion and joined the Society of Friends.”

It was a cinch, he thought, to be a leader of men. All you had to do was find a good story and tell it whenever the occasion arose.