Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Eighteen

Belle Fourche, the first place they reached after cutting across the northeast corner of Wyoming, was a dusty cowtown with wide streets and a population of around five thousand. There were still some banners to be seen proclaiming the annual rodeo, which had taken place the first week of July.

They spent a whole day in Belle Fourche, splitting up into twos and threes and exploring the town. The laundromat got a steady stream of business, and at the Lariat Motel on Elkhorn Street Guthrie made arrangements with the owner for them to take over three of the units for showers. All day long they were drifting over to the Lariat, stripping and bathing and dressing and moving on. The owner, a stolid widow with arms like hams, sat in the office throughout the day and tried not to think what her water bill would come to. She kept reminding herself that she was getting paid six times the day rate for the rooms, and that they’d be vacant and cleaned up in time for her to rent them out that night, and that would pay for a lot of water. Her good feelings were qualified somewhat later on, however, when she had to make up the three rooms herself; the Indian girl who normally took care of those things had walked off with the rest of them, and it didn’t look as though she’d be coming back.

There were half a dozen new walkers, in addition to the Lariat’s chambermaid, when they walked out of town late in the afternoon. It was on their account that Guthrie marched eastward for two and a half hours before making camp. He wanted the new people to walk far enough to get caught up in the group’s energy before settling in for the night. It wasn’t that he was afraid they’d drift away if they made camp closer to Belle Fourche — anyone who was supposed to be part of the group would stay part of the group, no matter where they spent the night. But it seemed to be easier for people to get into the rhythm of things when they started out putting one foot in front of the other.

“Just remember to alternate feet,” he had told Jody their first day together. And that was really all there was to it. The preparations, the supplies, became less important with the miles. Most of the people who’d been walking for more than a couple of weeks carried less than they’d set out with. Extra clothing tended to be passed out to those who’d come with only what they were wearing. If no one had a use for it, it would be abandoned at roadside, along with other items that turned out to be not worth their weight. Not everyone bothered to carry a canteen; some who had had them had lost theirs, and the newer people rarely troubled to obtain one. Someone else always had water to share, and there was often a stream you could drink from.

They were still on US 212, heading more or less due east across the state. At first, studying a state map while people showered at the Lariat, Guthrie had wanted to go down into the Black Hills and then on through the Badlands. He wanted to see Mt. Rushmore and the Crazy Horse monument, he wanted to walk through the surreal lunar landscape of the Badlands that he’d seen only in pictures. He traced a route through the old gold towns of Deadwood and Lead, down through Rapid City.

But it just didn’t feel right, and now he could see reasons to prefer the route they’d actually taken. At this time of year the Black Hills would be alive with the sound of tourists, and people by the hundreds would be camping in the Badlands, and you’d have to get in line and take a number to sneak a peek at Mt. Rushmore.

He still wanted to go there sometime. But it was important to keep one’s priorities in order. First you saved the planet. Then you saw the sights.

The healings went on. Scar tissue disappeared, replaced by new skin. Liver spots faded from the backs of hands. Gray hair grew in dark, and new hair sprouted in bald spots. Eyesight improved for almost everyone; eyeglasses and contact lenses became part of the roadside litter, and a rancher who’d joined the walk just before they crossed from Montana into Wyoming had his cataracts dissolve two nights out of Belle Fourche.

Inspired by Bud’s example, any number of people began growing new teeth. Mame Odegaard was cutting a whole third set, while others merely replaced missing teeth. One woman reported that a filling had fallen out, and wondered when they would come to a town large enough to support a dentist; she wanted to replace the filling before the tooth sustained further damage. The next morning she announced that she wouldn’t need a dentist; the hole was gone, the tooth having filled itself with new growth.

“Skin does that all the time,” Sara said. “Why should teeth be different?” And from that point on, fillings began loosening and falling out left and right, with the resulting cavities rarely remaining unfilled for more than a day.

Just past Mud Butte, where the highway doglegged to the right and began running due east, a crew from the workhouse labored to spruce up a roadside picnic area. Men in county-issue gray clothing painted tables and outhouses and stacked firewood, all under the supervision of a uniformed deputy with a shotgun. When the first of the walkers passed them, one of the prisoners put down his paintbrush and stared at the procession. After a few minutes he walked to the road and fell in step with a pair of walkers.

No one seemed to notice his absence. A few minutes later, two more men deserted and joined the parade. Soon there was only one left of the original eight prisoners, and as the tail end of the group drew even with him, he tossed a length of firewood onto the pile and trotted after them.

The deputy watched him go. He seemed unable to act, and stood motionless until the band of walkers was almost out of sight. Then he put his shotgun on a freshly-painted table, unpinned the star from his breast and set it down beside the gun, and took off after them. He walked at a brisk pace, and it didn’t take him long to catch up.

The next day, halfway between Maurine and Faith, a band of two dozen men, women and children waited patiently at an intersection. They were from Minot, North Dakota, they explained, all of them except a hitchhiker they’d picked up along the way who had decided to stay with them. They had heard the call and wanted to join. They had come down from Minot in three cars and a pickup truck, and they left the four vehicles at the side of the road, the doors unlocked, the keys in the ignition, in case somebody happened along with a use for them.

“Because we’re walkers now,” said the apparent leader, a wheat grower named Arne. “We would have walked down from Minot, but we got the call too late for that. We never would have made it in time.”

There were well over a hundred of them now, and Guthrie was both elated and alarmed at the rate of growth. It was obviously their mission to bring in more and more new people. Whatever it was exactly that they were supposed to accomplish, and his mind kept having trouble coping with what Sara had told him, they could do it more effectively if there were more of them.

“But we don’t get a chance to know people,” he complained to Jody. “A batch of folks turn up, and before you can get their names straight another slew of people join in, and the ones from yesterday are old hands already.”

“Things are happening faster now, hoss. When you and I started walking together it took us three or four days just to get used to each other. The way things are going now, in three or four days a person’s hyperventilated twice, thrown away a cane and a pair of glasses, and grown a new tooth. I liked it better when I knew everybody, sure, but I have to say I like being in the middle of all this growing and healing and love. It just feels good, Guthrie. I used to put away a lot of cold beer trying to feel this good, and I like it a whole lot better without all that swallowing and belching and little cuts on my finger from those ring-top cans.”

Even so, Guthrie wondered, could the group absorb so many people so quickly without losing its own identity? Would the magic continue to work if people walked together without really getting a chance to know each other? And was something lost when people joined in a body? Suppose the Minot people kept to themselves, suppose they constituted a group within a group. Wouldn’t that make for trouble?

After the North Dakotans joined the walk, the first town they came to (pop. 576, according to the sign) was Faith. That’s what this took, he thought. Faith. And a leap of faith, as Sara had once assured him, was never from Point A to Point B. A leap of faith was from Point A.

Just beyond Faith they entered the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation; according to the map, they’d be walking through it for the next hundred miles. Guthrie wasn’t sure what rules they would be violating by pitching camp on Indian ground, but he had come to believe that it didn’t matter. No one seemed to care where they slept.

That first night Sara had everyone lie down in rows just a few feet apart, all of them on their backs with their heads facing north. At her direction, they began doing their rhythmic breathing in unison, drawing the breath into the upper part of the lungs, beginning each inhalation upon the completion of the exhale, making of the breath one unending flow.

As always happened when any of them breathed in this fashion, a strong current of energy was generated in their bodies. But this time, breathing together as one, there was a powerful group energy in evidence as well. Their bodies remained a few feet apart, but whatever had previously separated their spirits dissolved in the white light of their shared breath.

They breathed together for between thirty and forty minutes, by which time everyone had gone unconscious. By the time another hour had passed, they were all awake again, and an easy calm lay upon the group like morning mist in a valley.

They spent three more nights on Indian land, and on each of those nights Sara led them through a similar session of breathing in unison. By the time they left Indian territory and crossed the long bridge over the Missouri River, they knew each other as intimately as if they had shared a womb.

And they all knew what they were there for. One way or another, each of them had been given a taste of Sara’s vision.

East of the Missouri, Route 212 continued across the state, but Guthrie took them south on 83, heading toward Pierre. A number of Indians had walked off the reservation with them, and more people joined as they paraded south through Agar and Onida. They left the highway before it reached Pierre, turning east on 14. They passed through Blunt and Harrold, Holabird and Highmore and Ree Heights, Miller and St. Lawrence.

There was more wheat being grown on this side of the Missouri, and less open range for cattle, but the terrain was otherwise much the same, perfectly flat, and sectioned off by roads that were perfectly straight. A wind from the west had been at their backs all the while they crossed the Indian land, and it was blowing with more force now, never letting up, never changing direction. There was nothing to stop it in this flat treeless land, nothing to slow it down.

Every ten miles or so a road intersected theirs, and at virtually all of those intersections there was a village of a hundred or four hundred or eight hundred people. At each intersection, in each village, people were waiting to join them. Most of them lived within a few miles of the town, but some had traveled long distances, although none yet had come from as far as Minot. There were a few from Nebraska, however, and several from farms close to the North Dakota border.

Some arrived at the roadside just as the procession was reaching it. Others stood for days, scanning the horizon like nineteenth-century Millerites waiting for the world to end. Something kept them from wandering off, and finally the group came into view, and when it reached them they gave themselves up to its embrace.

People reacted to them now in one of three ways. Some, of course, dropped what they were doing and joined in. A farm wife weeding the kitchen garden called her husband from the fields and her children from their play, and before the procession had passed it would be larger by one family. Others waved or spoke to them and wished them well, but either never considered joining in or dismissed the notion easily.

And, finally, there were those people who did not see them at all. Sheriffs and state troopers were generally in this category, but they were not alone; any number of motorists passed them on the highway without taking their eyes for a moment from the road. They were, to be sure, an increasingly visible phenomenon, two hundred of them or close to it, strung out along the highway and edging onto the shoulder when a car neared them. It took a sort of willful blindness to overlook them, but an increasing number of people managed to do just that.

It was, Guthrie decided, much of a piece with the protective shield they seemed to have against harsh weather and extremes of temperature. The same force field screened them from eyes that would not like what they saw.

Kate, the Boston Irish woman who had reached them by way of the Hen House commune in Idaho, had an alternate explanation. They were, she pointed out, an extraordinary lot, workers of miracles, altogether miraculous in their own right. As such they existed somewhere outside the boundaries of the belief systems of some people, and so they became like leprechauns in Ireland, quite invisible to those who did not believe in them.

It was hard to think of people like Dingo and Jody and Les Burdine as leprechauns, but Guthrie could see her point. At the beginning, when he had set out across Oregon on his own, he had never run into anyone who had failed to notice him. Every person he talked to answered him, every driver he waved at raised a hand or an index finger in response. But then he had not yet constituted any great threat to anyone’s belief system. McLemore, the motel owner, had been outraged at the idea of his sleeping out in his clothes, and had maintained the integrity of his understanding of how the world worked by dismissing Guthrie as a liar. Transport McLemore across half a continent, confront him with people who were growing new teeth and walking away from their wheelchairs, and their mere existence would be a serious threat to his sanity. If he couldn’t stretch his mind, he could at least protect himself by closing his eyes.

On a Tuesday morning, midway between the little towns of Cavour and Iroquois, Ellie woke up, fed and changed Richard, and went down to the stream to fill her canteen. She got a sudden painful tingling sensation in her left thumb, and responded to it by putting it in her mouth. Georgia Burdine, who was washing her hands and face in the stream, accused her of having learned the trick from Richard.

“Richard doesn’t suck his thumb,” Ellie said. Then, without thinking, she added, “By the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes.”

“Gosh, I hope not,” Georgia said. “Is that from something?”

“Macbeth. The witches say it. Well, one of the witches says it. Ouch!”

“It hurts, huh? Let me see it, Ellie. I don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s not swollen or infected.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“There were bees around yesterday. Did you get stung?”

“I don’t think so. It’s the sort of thing you tend to notice when it happens, isn’t it?”

“Maybe you stuck yourself on a thorn then. Well, what the hell, let’s deal with it.” She closed her eyes, rubbed her hands together briskly, held them down at her sides, and breathed deeply three times, willing energy into her hands with each exhalation. When her own hands were tingling she held them on either side of Ellie’s thumb. She kept up the treatment for about a minute, then withdrew her hands.

“How’s that? Better?”

“All better. Thanks.”

“’Snothing. Hey, say that again, will you? From Macbeth?’”

“‘By the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes.’ Except I think it’s thumbs, plural, which would rhyme better, wouldn’t it? ‘By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.’ Yeah, I’m sure that’s it. I got it wrong because I only had a pricking in one of my thumbs.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“Why?”

“It means we don’t have to worry,” Georgia said. “About something wicked this way coming.”

They were just a mile or two past the town of Manchester that afternoon when a car passed. Many of them waved but the driver didn’t wave back. He had looked at them, though. Usually the drivers who looked right at them responded in some way or other. But not always.

A few minutes later the same car passed them going the other way. At least it looked like the same car. And a few minutes after that it appeared a third time, and this time the driver pulled off onto the shoulder and asked directions to the Laura Ingalls Wilder memorial.

“That’s in De Smet,” a young woman named Kimberley said. She was a native South Dakotan and had just joined them three days ago in Wessington. “We haven’t come to it yet. You must have passed it, it’s eight or ten miles back the way you came.”

“I saw signs,” he said, “and then I must have missed it because the signs stopped. My kids read all her books, and of course there was the television show. I figure if I’m this close, I ought to be able to tell my daughter I saw the original little house on the prairie.”

“There are a couple of houses that she lived in,” Kimberley told him, “and pots and pans from their kitchen, and lots of great stuff. I went when I was a kid and I loved it.”

“Maybe I’ll walk with you,” he said. “Is that where you’re all headed?”

“Well, we’ll be passing through De Smet. I don’t think we’ll stop. We stopped in Huron yesterday to look at the world’s largest pheasant, but that only took a few minutes. You just stood there and looked at it.”

“How large could the world’s largest pheasant be?”

“Pretty large. I’d seen it before, of course, because we lived around here and we used to go into Huron all the time. The world’s largest pheasant is forty feet high and weighs twenty-two tons.”

“That’s a pretty big pheasant.”

“I told you. Or wait a minute, did I get that right? Maybe it’s twenty-two feet high and weighs forty tons. No, I think I had it right the first time. It’s made of steel and fiberglass.”

“No feathers?”

“No feathers. We’ll pass close to the Ingalls memorial, but I don’t think we’ll actually go in. I mean, look how many there are of us. And it’s just a little house.”

“On a prairie.”

“In town, actually. They don’t have the prairie house, but there are pictures of it. You’re welcome to walk with us, and that way you won’t miss it this time.”

They had been walking as they talked, and his car was by now quite a ways behind. But this was not unusual; every day someone walked away from a car to join them.

“Eight or ten miles,” he said. “I guess I can walk that far. And you’re going on from there? That’s a lot of walking.”

She laughed. “Some of these people have been walking all the way from Oregon.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. I wish I could have been with them all the way, but here I was in South Dakota, so I let the parade come to me. I’m Kimberley, by the way.”

“I’m Mark.”