Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

One

He was heating water for a second cup of coffee when the phone rang. He crossed the room, answered it.

“Guthrie, it’s Kit. I didn’t wake you?”

“No, the sun beat you to it.”

“Are you sure? Your voice—”

“You’re my first caller. It hasn’t been used.” He coughed, cleared his throat. “There,” he said. “That better?”

“I wasn’t criticizing, I just…” Her voice trailed off. He waited. “Guthrie? I’m not interrupting anything?”

“No,” he said. “You didn’t wake me and you’re not interrupting anything. Hold on, will you?” The kettle was whistling. He measured coffee into the filter, poured water through the grounds, carried the cup back with him and lit a cigarette. Through smoke he said, “Making coffee. Now you’re not interrupting anything. What’s up?”

“You got anything on this afternoon?”

“Not really.”

“Because I was thinking maybe you’d drive me up to Eugene.”

“Sure, I could do that. I guess the car’ll make it.”

“What’s the matter with your car?”

“Nothing in particular. I just—”

“Because we can take my car.”

“We can?”

“Jesus,” she said, “I don’t care whose car we take, we can fucking rent a car if you want.”

“Kit? What’s the matter?”

“Oh, shit,” she said. He waited, drew on his cigarette, took a tentative sip of his coffee. Brilliant invention, the coffee filter. You could make one cup of coffee at a time, and it was as easy as instant and better than what came out of a drip pot or a percolator. And, when you weren’t making coffee, a very tiny person could use the filter to catch very tiny butterflies.

She said, “I don’t need a ride, I need company. I’ve got an appointment at two o’clock.”

“What for?”

“An abortion.”

“Oh.”

“So I sort of thought—”

“You want to figure an hour and a half to drive there,” he said, “plus traffic and time to park.”

“It’s a clinic,” she said. “They have parking.”

“So let’s say I’ll pick you up about noon. It’s ten-thirty now. That give you enough time?”

“Or I’ll pick you up,” she said.

“No, I’ll drive,” he said. “Twelve o’clock, okay?”

She was waiting in front of her apartment building. He watched as she strode to the car, a slender dark-haired woman in Frye boots and straight-leg jeans and an Oregon State sweatshirt. “It doesn’t show yet,” she said. “It’s only nine or ten weeks, for Christ’s sake.”

“Huh?”

“You were staring.”

“Not at your stomach. At your tits.”

“Hah.”

“At your sweatshirt, actually. You didn’t go to State.”

“No, of course not. But I figured since I’m getting the abortion in Eugene, let the people there feel morally superior to a Statie. If I was getting the abortion in Corvallis I’d wear a U of O shirt.”

“I see.”

“If I had a Reed shirt I’d wear that. Everybody likes to feel morally superior to the Greedy Reedies.”

He lit a cigarette. She rolled down her window and said, “Actually, it’s Marvin’s shirt.”

“That asshole.”

“Funny, he always speaks well of you.”

“I’ll bet he does. Is it—”

“His kid? Jesus, no. I haven’t even seen him in six months. Is he even in town? I think I heard he went back to Berkeley.”

“I’m not the person to ask.”

“Well, neither am I.” She fell silent. They were on the Interstate, heading north toward Eugene, when she said, “The thing is, I don’t know whose it is.”

“You’re not talking about the sweatshirt.”

“The kid. There’s three people who might be up for Father of the Year honors. The funny thing is I’ve been a very proper lady lately.”

“I can’t remember the last time you came by Paddy Mac’s.”

“No, I’ve been staying out of the bars. And I’m all alone when I lower my lamp. I haven’t been seeing anybody since Marvin the Asshole, and we broke up in the fall, and it’s June already. Today’s what, the second?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t know how you thought he could have been the father.”

“Well, people have been known to get back together for a quickie even after they’ve broken up.”

“Yeah,” she said, and her face softened into a smile. “Yeah, we did that, didn’t we?”

“Once or twice.”

“Want to pull over at the next rest area? Nothing safer than a pregnant lady. That’s a joke, incidentally.”

“I sort of thought it might be.”

“Because I feel about as sexy as a burn victim.”

“That’s a pretty image.”

“Yeah, I thought you’d like it.”

They fell silent. Traffic was light and he kept the speed just over sixty miles an hour. The car, a Buick Century, had been originally equipped with a cruise-control device, but it had been broken when he bought it and he had never bothered to get it fixed. The car had been four years old when he got it and that had been four years ago; when the new models came out in the fall, the Buick would be nine years old. It looked its age, too. Cars rusted quickly in western Oregon, and the Buick, never garaged and rarely washed, was going fast. It ran reasonably well, always started and never stalled out, but there were noises under the hood that might well be cause for anxiety if you knew what you were listening to.

Around Exit 154 she said, “I have to tell you, Guthrie. I hate this.”

“You want me to turn the car around?”

“No, of course not.”

“Because you don’t have to go through with it.”

“Yes I do. If I broke the appointment today I’d make another one tomorrow. I’m not gonna have the kid.”

“Well, that’s up to you.”

She nodded. “It’s not as though I’ve never done this before.”

“Oh?”

“Once at college. Once about — what, five years ago? Something like that.”

“Not when you and I—”

“No, earlier. Months earlier, maybe a year earlier. I wouldn’t have aborted a child of yours without telling you.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“I wonder if anybody ever did.”

“Did what? Abort a kid of yours? Didn’t it ever happen that you know of?”

He shook his head.

“You mean this is your first time?” She laid a hand on his. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be gentle.”

“Funny.”

“The irrepressible Kit Winston, cracking jokes even as she goes under the knife. Or under the vacuum cleaner, as the case may be. You could have fathered a child that somebody aborted. I mean, sleeping around, one-nighters. Look at me, there were three guys I slept with during the period of a couple weeks when it must have happened. And they’ll never know. What could I tell them? ‘I just had an abortion and you’ve got one shot in three of being the father’? So if you slept with somebody who slept with other people too—”

“I get the picture.”

“Or if she had the baby, as far as that goes. There could be all these little Guthrie Wagners scattered around, and they wouldn’t know it and neither would you.”

“Hey, cut it out, huh?”

“I’m sorry. Did I touch a nerve?”

“‘I’ll be gentle,’” he said. “Some gentle.”

Halfway between Cottage Grove and Eugene she said, “You figure it’s a sin?”

“Abortion?”

“No, jaywalking. You weren’t brought up Catholic, were you?”

“Baptist, but then my mother had an argument with somebody and we started going to the Methodist church.”

“I suppose there’s a difference.”

“No end of differences.”

“I always figured goyim was goyim. How are the Baptists and Methodists on abortion?”

“I suppose they’re against it, but it was inconceivable that the question would arise, because screwing was sinful enough in the first place. What are you smiling at?”

“Inconceivable.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t think Jews believe it’s a sin. Oh, the orthodox ones do, but not Jews like my parents.”

“What kind of Jews are your parents?”

“Practical Jews.”

He frowned. “Is Winston a Jewish name? I thought it was English. Winston-Salem, Winston cigarettes.”

“Weinstein, darling.”

“Oh.”

“You didn’t know that? My grandfather changed it. His brother stayed Weinstein, but his brother’s sons changed to Winston, too. And for my sixteenth birthday I got this cute little shiksa nose to match my name.”

“That’s not your nose?”

“It is now. Dr. Perlmutter’s finest work, and I should have asked him to sign it, don’t you think?”

“What was your old nose like?”

“You know, there really wasn’t anything wrong with it. It had character, that’s all. Not quite as much character as Streisand’s, but character all the same.”

“Why did you have it—”

“Done,” she supplied. “Why did I have it done? Beverly fucking Hills, man. And sixteen years old, and my nose was one more thing about myself not to like. Maybe it was a rite of passage, you know, circumcision for girls. How do I know why I did it? It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Jesus, the things I’ve said that about.”

“How about you? That your original nose, kid?”

“My original shiksa nose.”

“Your original sheggitz nose, you mean. Speaking of names, how’d you get named Guthrie? They name you after Woody?”

“You asked me this before.”

“I did?”

“Years ago.”

“Ms. Memory. So tell me again. They named you after Woody?”

He shook his head. “Arlo.”

“Come on.”

“What’s the matter?”

“How old are you? Thirty-six?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“And when did Alice’s Restaurant come out? Twenty years ago?”

“My parents were always on the cutting edge.”

“Anyway, imagine naming a kid after Arlo Guthrie.”

“What’s wrong with Arlo Guthrie?”

“Nothing, you lunatic. Did they name you after Woody or didn’t they?”

“I don’t think they ever heard of Woody Guthrie, and if they had they wouldn’t have named a dog after him. Guthrie was a family name, my mother’s mother’s maiden name. I told you all this.”

“You told some other girl.”

“I told several other girls, but I definitely told you.”

“It does have a faintly familiar ring,” she admitted. “If it’s a family name, maybe you’re related to Woody.”

“Maybe.”

“That’d make you related to Arlo, too.”

“I guess it would, wouldn’t it.”

“I think take the next exit. Not this one but the next one.”

“All right.”

“Guthrie? Honey?” Her hand again, cool on his. “Thanks for doing this. Really.”

The clinic was a compact white clapboard building with parking space in front for a dozen cars. The waiting room was done in Grand Rapids Early American — maple furniture, an oval braided rug. He sat with Kit for twenty minutes. Then her name was called and she followed a nurse through a door.

Another woman, much younger than Kit, sat across from him turning the pages of Runner’s World. The magazines all seemed to be either running magazines or business publications like Forbes and Business Week. They probably indicated the interests of the doctor or doctors who ran the place, he decided, rather than that of the clientele. No Parents’ Magazine, no Modern Bride, no Jack and Jill—

I’m not the father, he wanted to tell the woman across from him. I’m just a friend, just a shoulder to lean on.

Jesus.

You couldn’t smoke in there. One sign told him so, while another thanked him for not smoking. The carrot and the stick, he thought. The good cop and the bad cop.

Outside, he lit a cigarette. There were seven cars in the parking area, he noted, and all of the others looked better than his. Maybe it was time to start feeding the savings account so he’d be able to trade before the end of the year. Of course he could trade now, as far as that went; he had a few dollars in the bank, and the Buick would serve as the down payment if he didn’t go after something fancy. He made good steady money behind the bar at Paddy McGuire’s. His rent was cheap, he owned the Buick free and clear.

No alimony to pay. Thirteen years since he married Aileen, almost eleven since the divorce, and she hadn’t sought alimony. He hadn’t the slightest idea if she’d remarried, or where she was living.

No child support. No children — unless Kit’s fantasy was true and one of his one-nighters had borne fruit.

Not that there had been so many one-nighters. But every once in a while some lady thought it was a good idea to go home with the bartender, and over the years all those ladies added up.

But at least the kids you didn’t know about didn’t cost you anything. Well, check that — there might be a karmic debt, that was always a possibility, but even if there was it didn’t amount to much in dollars and cents. Bastards or no bastards, he could certainly handle a car payment.

Except that he didn’t want to buy a new car. Or another used one.

Nor did he much want to hang onto this one, with its fenders rusting out and its springs starting to sag and its paint checking and God knew what going on under the hood.

He leaned against the car now, a tall lean man with a thick growth of shaggy nut-brown hair. He wore a red plaid flannel shirt and a pair of Lee jeans with the cuffs folded up. His belt had a large brass buckle with Coors in flowing script, a promotional gift from the salesman. He had a pair of waffle-soled Nikes on his feet, good running shoes, but he’d never run in them. He’d gone through a couple pairs of shoes since the last time he did any running.

A year and a half, maybe two years of running in his late twenties. Then almost a year when he went to the Y religiously three times a week and worked out with free weights. Flirtations, brief ones, with Tai Chi and aikido. Yoga. Transcendental Meditation. Silva Mind Control and est.

A life drawing class. A Berlitz home study course in French. Subliminal tapes — Improved Self-Image, Stop Smoking, Stop Procrastination.

The year with the weights had left him broader in the shoulders and stronger in the chest, and he suspected the other disciplines had had a few good lasting effects of their own, although it was hard to see what he’d gained from the Stop Smoking tape, or how his performance in that area might have improved his self-image.

And an uncertain self-image it seemed these days. He had worn a beard until recently, its color a little ruddier than the hair on his head, but it had started to show a little gray, and he supposed that had probably had something to do with the decision to shave it off. He still wasn’t used to his face without the beard; he would catch sight of himself in the back bar mirror at work and be surprised by the face that looked back at him. It seemed to him that he looked younger without the beard, that was what everyone told him, and yet his face now showed signs of age that the beard had concealed.

Lincolnesque was how a girl had described him, years ago. He supposed by that she had meant interestingly ugly, but he didn’t know that it really suited him; his face seemed to him neither that interesting nor that ugly, and certainly not that presidential. Still, he wasn’t sure but that her comment might not have prompted him to grow his first beard, back in college.

He could always grow it back now. And shave it off again if he didn’t like it. And then regrow it and buy a new car, and sell the car if he didn’t like that, and—

You could take a walk, a voice in his head said.

Clear as a bell, clear as a fucking bell, as if some little man crawled up inside his head and spoke to him. Great, he thought. Just like all those people who get messages from the CIA beamed in through the fillings in their teeth. Voices. Just what he needed.

He finished his cigarette and went back into the waiting room.

Twenty minutes later the need for a cigarette drove him outside again. By now it was raining, a light drizzle that was just enough to make him get in the car. He lit the cigarette, and, as he breathed out smoke, fatigue washed over him in a wave. He put the cigarette in the ashtray and closed his eyes for a moment.

He woke abruptly with the sensation of having dreamed vividly but no recollection of the dream, no sense at all of what it might have been. His cigarette was gone, burned to ash in the dashboard ashtray. He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past four, but he didn’t know how long he’d been out because he had no idea when he’d gotten into the car.

He went back to the clinic to wait for Kit.

“Piece of cake,” she said.

“Rough, huh?”

“No,” she said. “No irony intended. It was really nothing. I’ve had worse times in the dentist’s chair.”

“I’ve had the worst times of my life in the dentist’s chair.”

“Well, this was nothing. Really.”

“Great.”

“I guess.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, this doesn’t make any sense, but I sort of feel it ought to be more unpleasant.”

“They ought to hurt you.”

“And lecture you and tell you you’re bad. Yeah. I don’t really mean that, but yeah, sort of. I figure I killed something today. I committed a sin.”

“Cut it out.”

“I’m not beating myself up, I’m stating an opinion. I think it’s a sin. I don’t think it’s a crime, I don’t think it shouldn’t be legal, I’m not sorry I did it, but I think it’s a sin, I think it’s fucking wrong.”

“So you’re a bad girl.”

“I’m not a bad girl. But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna sit around and feel terrific about this.”

“Okay.”

It was raining again. It had stopped, and now it had started again. She said, “It was a girl.”

“The uh—”

“The growth I had removed. I wish they didn’t tell you. It makes the whole thing a lot more personal.”

“That’s terrible. They just tell you?”

“No, you have to ask.”

“Oh.”

“Even then he didn’t want to tell me. I insisted.”

“Oh.”

“I always have to know. The first one was a girl, the second was a boy, and now this one. Girl boy girl.”

“Keep it up, Kit.”

“This is called cauterizing the wound, man. Otherwise it’ll fester later on.”

“It doesn’t sound like such a piece of cake to me.”

She sighed. “Physically it was nothing. Emotionally it was nothing at the time, but I seem to be having trouble passing the afterbirth. I’ll be okay.”

“I know.”

“Fucking diaphragms,” she said savagely. “You feel about as spontaneous as a commencement address, and you’re all gummed up with glop so that a person would have to be crazy to go down on you, and then the fucking thing doesn’t even do what it’s supposed to. Some women wear diaphragms for years and never have a problem. Maybe they don’t fuck. Maybe that’s their secret.”

“Didn’t you have an IUD?”

“You bet I did. I got it after the second abortion because I didn’t want to go through all that again. I had it for five or six years, however long it was.”

“Did you have problems with it?”

“Never.”

“Then—”

“Then I started hearing all this crap on the news about women dying because of IUDs, or giving birth to otters, or whatever was happening to them, and I went to my doctor and had him remove it and got fitted for a diaphragm, and the rest is fucking history.” She closed her eyes. “Besides,” she said quietly, “I was thinking about getting pregnant.”

“You were what?”

“I wasn’t going to mention this,” she said. “I’m thirty-two, I’ll be thirty-three in September.”

“Ah, the old biological clock.”

“Tick fucking tock. And I got to thinking. I’m nowhere near getting married. There wasn’t even anybody I wanted to have an affair with. I was with Marvin, and I didn’t even like him enough to have an affair with him, but I did because there was nobody else around I liked better. And when we broke up I knew I didn’t want to get married, and you don’t really have to get married to have a kid. So I had the IUD removed.”

“And got pregnant on purpose?”

“No! Of course not.”

“Well—”

“I had the IUD removed partly because I was scared, I already explained that, and also so that if I did decide to get pregnant, I could just do it, I wouldn’t have to make a doctor’s appointment first. ‘Hi, you’re neat, let’s have a baby together, excuse me, I gotta call my gynecologist.’ So this way I had the option of leaving the diaphragm out, but I never made that decision and I never did leave the diaphragm out, and I got pregnant anyway without intending to. Unless you’re gonna get into unconscious motivations, in which case please stop the car and let me out now, because I don’t want to have to listen to that.”

“Jesus, Kit.”

“Well, you know what I mean. ‘You must have wanted to be pregnant or you wouldn’t be pregnant. You must have wanted to get a splinter under your thumbnail or you wouldn’t have a splinter under your thumbnail.’”

“You must have wanted a hair up your ass,” he said, “or you wouldn’t have—”

“A hair up my ass,” she finished. “Well, who in her right mind wouldn’t want one? Anyway, before I could explore the possibility of getting intentionally pregnant, I got unintentionally pregnant.”

“Got it.”

She sighed. “And of course I thought about keeping the kid.” She looked at him. “But that seemed like such an ass-backwards way of doing it, you know? I mean it’s not fucking parthenogenesis, who the father is is important, you know? Even if you raise him yourself half his cells come from somebody else, and that makes a difference, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“One of the guys I slept with was an Indian. American Indian. Now I don’t think I’m a racist, or at least not that much of one, and I don’t think I’d object to having a child whose father was an Indian, but the idea of not knowing. What do you do, wait and see if the kid can track game in order to figure out who his father was?”

A little later she said, “This is crazy.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“You’ll think it’s crazy.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll tell you anyway. What would you think about the idea of having a child?”

“You and me?”

“Ain’t nobody else here, boss.”

“Jesus, Kit.”

“I’d take care of it. The financial part and all that, and you could be as much or as little of a father as you wanted. I know it’s crazy. Please remember that I said in front it was crazy.”

“Just this afternoon—”

“I got rid of a kid, I know, and now I’m talking about getting pregnant again. I don’t mean tonight, all right? I don’t mean right away. I just mean it’s something to think about, okay? Because you’re healthy and decent-looking and smart and you’ve got good genes. There isn’t any insanity in your family, is there?”

“I’m the only one.”

“And you’ve got a sense of humor, and that’s important, because who would want to have a humorless kid? And you’re, fuck, you’re nice, Guthrie. And I think if you’re gonna have a kid, the father ought to be nice. You know?”

His shift at Paddy Mac’s was supposed to start at six, but he’d called and told Harry he might be late. It was close to eight by the time he got there. He took over behind the stick, and after a few minutes he had his rhythm and he was into it.

He’d stopped at Kit’s for a cup of coffee and between that and the day’s events he was pretty wired, so he had himself a couple ounces of scotch to take the edge off, then nursed two bottles of St. Pauli Girl all the way to closing time. The crowd was enough to keep you busy but not enough to drive you crazy, the drunks didn’t cause any trouble, and all in all it was the right kind of night to come down from the days craziness with.

After he closed up he poured himself an Irish Mist and sipped at it while he swept up and cleared the register for Harry’s shift the next day. He drove home, took a hot shower, and went to bed.

He slept late the next morning, made himself a cup of coffee, then went out for a big breakfast at the Greek place on the next block. When he got home the phone was ringing, but it quit before he could answer it. A little later it rang again and it was Kit — she felt fine, he’d been wonderful, and she was sorry she’d been so crazy.

“You’d think you would want a woman friend along for something like that,” she said, “but I couldn’t think of a woman in this town I wanted for company yesterday. You know, there are certain occasions when only an ex-lover will do.”

“I know.”

“Assuming it’s an ex-lover you’re on good terms with. As opposed to, say, Marvin the Asshole.”

“Funny, he always speaks well of you.”

“He never even spoke well of me when we were an item. Anyway, thanks, huh?”

“Forget it.”

“And what I was babbling about toward the end there, that proposal I made for our biochemical collaboration, just forget I said anything, okay?”

“It’s forgotten, Kit.”

“Good,” she said. “But, uh, give it some thought, Guthrie.”

“Forget about it but give it some thought.”

“Oh, you know what I mean.”

He spent the afternoon at home watching a baseball game. NBC had the Mariners playing the Yankees, and he watched it without paying too much attention. He got to the bar in time to start his shift at six. The crowd was typical for a Saturday night, a little too raucous and a little too loud, but that was part of the deal, it came with the territory. In the quiet bars with light crowds you couldn’t make any money.

You could take a walk.

He didn’t hear that voice again, he’d only heard it the once, but he remembered it and he found himself thinking about it. At first it seemed to be saying that he could step out of his life, that he could walk away from it and everything and everybody in it. But he’d done that, for God’s sake, walked out of one job and into another, out of one apartment and into another, out of one town and into another. Paddy McGuire’s was as good as any place he was likely to work, and tending bar was as good an occupation as he was likely to find for himself. It wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he went to college, but it was hard to remember what he might have had in mind, and he suspected none of them had been things he’d wanted, just things he’d thought he was supposed to want.

Roseburg wasn’t heaven, but neither was it hell. He had lived in Eugene and he could move back there. He’d never lived in Portland but he liked Portland and he could go there. But he couldn’t think of any reason to do that. He had lived, years ago, in California, and he had been born and raised in Ohio, but there was no reason to believe that his life would improve if he returned to either of those places.

There was no real reason even to believe it would be different. It was like the car. He could get a new car, or a newer old car, but he wouldn’t garage it or run it through a car wash regularly, and he’d forget to get the oil changed, and before too long he’d re-create the car he already had.

Around eleven-thirty a girl at the end of the bar started finding excuses to chat with him, and an hour before closing she yawned theatrically and said she guessed she’d better be heading on home. She was looking for him to suggest she hang around until he closed the place, but he decided not to get the hint. “Well, I guess I’d better go,” she said finally, annoyed. Her hips rolled as she walked, perhaps to show him what he was missing.

He went home alone and went to bed sober. Lying there, waiting for sleep to come, he felt on the verge of something.

If there were dreams, he didn’t remember them. But when he woke the idea was simply there. He knew what he was going to do.

He gave it a day. He did a load of wash at the laundromat, found an old backpack on a high shelf in the closet. There was a state map in the Buick’s glove compartment. It had been there when he bought the car. He spread it out on his kitchen table and sat staring at it, then folded it and tucked it into the zippered compartment on the front of the backpack.

Not a very large backpack. He’d originally picked it up to use as a book bag at college, and he’d hardly used it since. Surprising he still owned it.

Sunday was his night off. He stayed home and watched Sixty Minutes and Murder, She Wrote and an early Woody Alien movie on cable. He felt keyed up and thought he wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, but he fell asleep early and woke up early, and awoke knowing that he hadn’t changed his mind, that he was really going to do it.

He went to his bank, drew all but ten dollars from his savings account, left enough in the checking account to cover the checks that hadn’t cleared yet. At a surplus store on Front Street he bought a nylon money belt and looked at hiking boots. He tried on a couple pairs but they were stiff and uncomfortable compared to his running shoes and he figured they’d take forever to break in.

Besides, he wasn’t going to be climbing mountains or slogging through swamps. He went to the sporting goods store down the block and picked up a new pair of Nikes and let it go at that.

He packed socks and underwear and T-shirts and an extra flannel shirt and a sweatshirt, then returned to the surplus store for a light nylon windbreaker, presumably waterproof, and a cotton hat. He saw a canteen, an aluminum flask in a khaki canvas wrapper and sling, and thought it was probably a good idea. He looked at other camping gear, but it all seemed complicated, and a pain in the ass to carry.

He went over to Cactus Jack’s for a bowl of chili and a beer, then drove to Paddy McGuire’s and got there around one-thirty. He told Harry he was leaving, that he wouldn’t be coming in that night.

“That’s a lot of notice,” Harry said. “That’s really great, man.”

“Something came up.”

“Yeah, right. We straight financially? You paid yourself from the till Sa’day night, right?”

He nodded. “I was thinking,” he said. “You want to buy my car?”

“Your car?”

“You know. The Buick.”

“Don’t you need it, man?”

“Not really.”

“Where are you going?”

“Heading east.”

“Uh-huh, and you don’t want to say more than that. You in any kind of trouble, Guthrie? Stupid question, if you are you don’t want to say, but are you, you know, short? You want to borrow a couple of bucks?”

“I just want to sell the car,” he said. “I’d take it to a dealer but I really don’t want the hassle. Whatever I got for it I’d worry I got screwed.”

“What do you want for it?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it’s worth.”

“You know the book on it?”

“It’s eight years old, I don’t think the book goes that far back.”

“Well, let’s look at it.” Outside, Harry walked around the car, started the engine and listened to it. He opened the hood, listened some more, slammed it shut. “I don’t really know what I’m looking at. How’s it run?”

“Drive it around the block.”

“Just tell me how it runs.”

“I think it runs okay. I had some transmission work done on it about six months ago. The tires aren’t bad. The spare’s bald but the rest are decent.”

“You got a lot of rust.”

“No kidding.”

“What do you want for it?”

“I don’t know. Five hundred bucks?”

“I don’t honestly know if that’s high or low. Be different if I needed it, but I really don’t. Shit. Three hundred?”

“All right.”

“No, that’s probably screwing you. Three hundred dollars, a bicycle’s three hundred dollars these days. More than that, even. Split the difference, four hundred. How’s that?”

“Better than three.”

All in all, he had twenty-three hundred dollars and change. He stashed an even two thousand in the money belt and centered it in the small of his back, adjusting the straps around his waist. He added an extra pair of jeans to his pack. There wasn’t room for much else, and he couldn’t think what he was forgetting.

Cigarettes. He had an open pack and two others, all amounting to perhaps a day’s supply. He went around the corner for a carton.

What else? He tried to think if there was anyone he had to call and decided there wasn’t. Roseburg was a small town; everybody at Paddy Mac’s would know tonight, and everybody else in town would know in a day or two.

The apartment? The rent was paid through the end of the month. By then, well, either he’d be back dealing with things or it would be somebody else’s problem. Because you could just walk away from things. They couldn’t make you come back for your clothes and books and records.

By three-thirty he was out of there. The pack rode easily on his back. The old Nikes — the new ones were packed — felt as comfortable as ever on his feet. The sun, obscured by clouds most of the day, was shining.

At the edge of town he stopped at a gas station to use the men’s room and fill his canteen. By four he was heading east on Route 138.