Лоуренс Блок - Random Walk - A Novel for a New Age

“That’s okay,” he said. “I sort of get it.”

Explaining to Thom, she spoke with powerful assurance. Alone, she was less supremely confident. There were doubts, there were fears. But there was always enough certainty to overcome them.

She felt guided.

She sat down with a vice president at her bank and arranged to pay the mortgage payments and taxes out of a line of credit secured by a second mortgage. Angert Motors sent a man out to look at her car, and she wound up getting twelve hundred dollars for her equity in it. Hal Rysbeck cut through a maze of red tape at the school and got her a check for most of what she had coming; the rest would go to her bank and be credited to her account. And a very nice woman at Klopfer & Klopfer Realty listed her house for rent and agreed to have a moving firm pack and store her personal articles.

It all went so smoothly that she took it for confirmation that she was acting appropriately. The universe was endorsing her action by cooperating at every turn. But if there had been any snags she would simply have let go of whatever was stuck. She was willing to leave the car in the driveway for someone to repossess, willing to let the mortgage go unpaid until the bank foreclosed or the city sold the house for back taxes. None of that really mattered because something else, something new, something still incomprehensible, mattered so very much more.

She had had her last appointment with the ophthalmologist on Monday. That Thursday, she and Thom took a taxi to the Greyhound Terminal downtown, where a very helpful black man worked out their route for them and sold them their tickets. They would go from Fort Wayne to Chicago, where they would change to an express bus that went through Davenport and Omaha and Cheyenne en route to Salt Lake City. There they would change to another bus that slanted northwest through Idaho, stopping at Boise en route to Portland.

“Now that’s Portland, Oregon,” the man said, grinning. “You absolutely sure you want Portland, Oregon, and not Portland, Maine?”

“As sure as I am of anything,” she said.

Oregon 138 extends east from Roseburg, terminating when it runs into US 97 at Diamond Lake Junction. The distance between the two points is about eighty miles as the crow flies, but the road meanders, following rivers and creeks and finding its way through the Cascade Range, and that adds another fifteen miles.

Guthrie Wagner covered fourteen miles the first day. Some years back, when he’d been running, he’d reached the point where he was doing seven-minute miles in short races. His regular training pace was slower, between nine and ten minutes a mile, which translated into a little better than six miles an hour. He wasn’t sure what a comfortable walking pace would turn out to be, and he found out it was somewhere between three and four miles an hour. Even with a pack on his back, and without having done anything to condition himself, he seemed able to sustain that pace without effort for hours at a time.

He didn’t know this the first day because he couldn’t tell how fast he was going or how much ground he was covering. It was around four by the time he got out on the two-lane blacktop, and it was getting dark by the time he found a place to stay, a little mom-and-pop motel in Glide. But his map told him he’d covered fourteen miles, and it was ten minutes of nine when he thought to look at his watch, so he felt he could figure on managing a three-mile-an-hour pace without difficulty. Of course the going would get tougher when he started to get into the mountains, but he’d be in better shape by then.

Twenty miles a day, say. Three hours in the morning, three hours in the afternoon.

He showered off the road dust, then ran a hot tub and soaked some of the soreness out of his feet and legs. He ached a little, but in a satisfying way. He dried off and sat in a chair with his feet up, studying his map. There was a television set in the room but he didn’t think to turn it on.

Six miles to Idleyld Park, eighteen to Steamboat, sixteen to Toketee Falls. Then nineteen to Diamond Lake and twenty-two to Diamond Lake Junction. At that point he’d have to decide whether to go north or south on 97, but for the next four days or so all he had to do was keep on walking west.

It might not always be convenient to stop in the towns, and they wouldn’t all necessarily have motels, as far as that went. They were small towns, pinpoint dots on the map, little more than wide places in a narrow road.

Early June was a little cold for sleeping out. Especially when you got into the high ground of the Cascades. Especially when you didn’t have a tent or a sleeping bag, or even a blanket.

He stopped for lunch the next day in Idleyld Park. He ate a hamburger, drank a cup of coffee, smoked a cigarette, and headed on toward Steamboat. The road hugged the northern bank of the North Fork of the Umpqua River, and about ten miles out of Idleyld it entered the Umpqua National Forest.

The road was rolling and winding, with a noticeable overall upgrade. Running, he used to hate hills; walking, they were less of a hassle, but he could feel them.

Dense stands of mixed evergreens lined both sides of the road. When there was a gap in the trees, or when he reached the top of a rise and could see for some distance, he looked out over rich green forest and saw mountains still crowned with snow. At first he was taking note of each beautiful scene, clicking off mental snapshots, but after an hour or so he stopped noticing the beauty and instead let himself become one with it.

There was very little traffic on the road. He walked on the left, facing oncoming cars, and he stepped off onto the shoulder when a vehicle approached. Around the middle of the afternoon, without any conscious intent, he realized he was giving a wave to passing cars. Most of them waved back. Some of them honked.

He stayed that night at the Modoc Motel in Steamboat. The third day he woke to birdsong outside his window and got an early start. Even with the grade slowing him down he was in Toketee Falls by early afternoon. He had a thick bowl of soup and a couple of sandwiches at a lunch counter run by two women, sisters. They were members of the Worldwide Church of God and their restaurant was closed Saturdays and Sundays. You could smoke, there were ashtrays on the counter and at the three tables, but two hand-lettered signs warned against the use of profanity on the premises.

He lit a cigarette and tried to imagine Kit’s reaction to the signs. It would be verbal, he decided, and no doubt eloquent, and it would probably get the two of them thrown out of the place.

There was a motel on the western edge of Toketee Falls, and a court of tourist cabins farther on, but he didn’t really feel like stopping this early. He had the sisters pack him up a couple of sandwiches and a piece of pound cake, and he bought a candy bar and two packages of salted nuts at the Arco station.

He walked for another couple of hours, taking it slowly now, giving way to the upgrade instead of fighting it, reducing his pace and resting whenever he felt the need. While it was still light he left the road and walked fifty yards or so into the forest. He found a spot where the trees were a little farther apart — you couldn’t really call it a clearing — and he cleared the pine needles from a circle ten feet across. In the center of the circle he arranged pine needles and a few scraps of paper for tinder, then gathered twigs and heavier branches from the forest floor. He brought back several armloads of wood, more than he figured to need, because it would be difficult to replenish the supply in the dark.

The fire caught quickly and burned well. He sat cross-legged in front of it, feeding wood to it, getting half-hypnotized gazing into the flames.