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

All along his route that day he had passed areas specifically set aside for public camping. For a couple of dollars you got a place to pitch your tent, a barbecue pit with firewood cut and stacked for you, and access to running water and indoor plumbing. Pitching camp on his own like this was probably against regulations, and he was certain he risked a stiff fine with his fire.

He was unworried. He knew he wasn’t going to set the woods on fire, and no one would be able to see flames or smoke from the road.

He ate the food he’d brought, putting aside half a sandwich and a Clark Bar for breakfast. He would have liked coffee, but the spring water in his canteen was no hardship. He tended his fire and breathed fresh air tinged with wood smoke while the sky darkened and the birds quieted down around him.

For perhaps two hours he did nothing but feed branches to the fire and listen to the night sounds of the forest. His mind was still. He barely thought. When his eyelids started to droop he wrapped a spare shirt around his extra pair of jeans for a pillow and stretched out alongside the fire.

When he awoke the sky was light and his fire was cold ashes. He packed up, stomped the ashes to make sure there wasn’t an ember still alive, shouldered his pack and made his way back to the road.

There were several motels in Diamond Lake and he stayed at one called the Fair Harbor Inn. There was a coin-operated washer and dryer alongside the Coke and ice machines, and after he’d taken a long hot shower he got change at the desk and did a load of wash. He sat in a redwood lounge chair beside the pool while each machine in turn went through its cycle.

When he’d put his laundry away he returned to the office and asked the round-shouldered owner where he could get a decent meal. “You don’t have a car,” the man said.

“No.”

“Well, the Blue Bonnet’s real good if you like plain cooking, but it’s about half a mile down the road.”

“I think I can manage that.”

“If you like chili,” the man said, “I’d have to say you can’t go wrong there.”

The chili wasn’t bad. It was a little mild for his taste, but the girl brought him a bottle of Tabasco and that gave it a little more authority. He drank a beer with it and had a second beer for dessert, and it was while he was drinking the second beer that he realized he hadn’t had a cigarette since morning. He’d reached the top of a rise around nine-thirty and had taken a few minutes to check out the view, referring to his map to determine what mountains he was looking at. Mount Bailey, Mount Thielsen, Black Rock Mountain, Pig Iron Mountain — there were great names and imposing mountains, but he wasn’t confident he was matching them up correctly. Nor did he suppose it mattered much.

And, looking at the mountains, he’d lit the first cigarette of the day. And it had thus far been the last cigarette of the day, and that was strange.

In fact, he’d hardly been smoking at all since he left Roseburg. He’d started out with a carton in his backpack and three loose packs, one of them about half gone when he set out. This was his fourth day on the road, and he hadn’t touched the carton, and he had an unopened pack in his jacket and another pack in his shirt pocket with, let’s see, three cigarettes left in it. Which meant he’d smoked something like a pack and a half in the past four days, and he normally smoked close to twice that much in a day. Two to three packs a day, that’s what he’d been smoking for nearly twenty years.

That he should reduce his cigarette consumption so dramatically was remarkable. When he was running he had several times tried to quit, and he’d managed to cut down some, but at the best of times he never got much under a pack a day. But what was astonishing was that he’d cut down without even knowing it. Except cut down didn’t really say it. Why, he’d virtually stopped altogether.

He took a cigarette and held it between his thumb and forefinger. It felt funny in his hand. He put it in his mouth, took it out, put it back, shrugged, and lit it. He took a puff, inhaled, blew out the smoke and watched it rise to the ceiling.

It tasted all right, but he didn’t seem to want to finish it. He started to force himself to take another puff, then changed his mind and stubbed it out in the ashtray.

Back at the Fair Harbor Inn the owner emerged from the office as Guthrie was heading up the graveled drive. He said, “Well, did you have that chili?”

“I did, and it was real good.”

“They do all right by you,” the man said. “You want to stop by for a minute? I just made some coffee, if you could do with a cup.”

The motel office had a pair of wooden armchairs with vinyl cushions flanking a console television. A drama about a Los Angeles law firm was playing, the sound pitched almost inaudibly low. Guthrie took his coffee black; the owner, whose name was McLemore, stirred in a powdered creamer and two sugars. His wife was in Grants Pass, he said, spending a few days visiting her mother.

“She has Alzheimer’s,” he said. “By God, that’s an awful way to end up. Here’s a woman who never did any harm her whole life and she finished up like that. You read about that man, I think he was down in Florida, his wife had Alzheimer’s and he shot her?”

“Didn’t he go to jail?”

“Isn’t that terrible? You got the scum of the earth walking around free and that man has to go to jail. I’ll tell you, if my wife got like that, I’d put her down. What kind of man wouldn’t do for his wife what he’d do for a dog? And I’ll tell you something else, I don’t believe people around here would convict you. I don’t know what kind of people live in Florida, but we’re not like that here.”

The coffee wasn’t bad. It could have been stronger, but it wasn’t bad.

“Now you’re doing some hiking,” McLemore said. “I’ll tell you, it’s not every day someone comes in here on foot. Where’d you walk from?”

“Roseburg.”

“Roseburg! Why, that’s got to be seventy-five miles.”

“Just about.”

“How long you been walking?”

“Today was the fourth day.”

“Four days. So you’re making pretty close to twenty miles a day. Where you headed? Crater Lake, I guess?”

“I don’t think so.”

“No? You ought to see it if you never have, as close as you are to it now.”

“I was there a couple of years ago. I think I’ll pass this time around.”

“And just head on back to Roseburg? Least you’ll be going downhill on the way back.”

“No, I think I’ll keep going for a while.”

“Headed where?”

“East, I think.”

“East!”

“I think so.”

“How far you gonna go? You thinking to cross the whole country?”

“I might.”

“Your shoes holding up?”

“So far.”

“How ’bout your feet?”

“They’re all right.”

“By God,” McLemore said. “Twenty miles a day, well, yes, you just about could find places to stay, couldn’t you? Where’d you put up last night in Toketee? His cabins aren’t worth a damn, and the motel’s not a whole lot better.”

“Well,” he said, “actually, last night I camped out. I got a few miles past Toketee and just walked off the road into the woods and spent the night there.”

“You probably weren’t a lot worse off than in one of those cabins, from what I hear about ’em.” McLemore frowned in thought. “None of my business, but I could have sworn you weren’t carrying but a little knapsack when you checked in.”

“That’s right.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you could fit a sleeping bag in there.”

“I don’t have one. I slept in my clothes.”

“In your clothes. You mean what you’re wearing now?”