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

“That’s right.”

“You’re kidding. That must be eighty fucking miles!”

“More like seventy, I think.”

“Seventy miles. You’re planning on walking seventy miles?”

“Not all today.”

“Not all today. Well, shit, I just hope not. Where’d you come from?”

“Diamond Lake Junction.”

“Just down the road? You live there?”

“No, I stayed there last night. I live in Roseburg.”

“You mean to say you walked all the way from Roseburg? You know what you did, hoss? You walked across a fucking mountain range.” He snorted. “I never heard of anybody doing that before. And I sure as shit never heard of anybody walking to Bend.”

“Well—”

“How far you planning to go today?”

“That depends. Maybe all the way to Crescent, maybe just to where the cutoff to Eugene is.”

“That’s 58, runs to Eugene. Hop in and I’ll run you to Crescent. Not that there’s anything in Crescent. Hell, I’ll run you clear to Bend, save you three or four days if you want. That’s where I’m headed.”

“Thanks, but—”

The fellow squinted, focusing pale blue eyes at Guthrie. “You got a real thing about walking,” he said. “Don’t you?”

“I guess I do.”

“Say it was raining. You’d take a ride then, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I don’t think so, but I can’t really say for sure.”

“Might depend how hard it was coming down.”

“It might.”

“Well, hell, I won’t keep you. You got a lot of ground to cover. I got to go to Bend, take care of my business, then turn the truck around and go back home to Klamath. Maybe I’ll see you again on the way back.”

“Give a honk if you do.”

“Well, I’ll do that.”

“And thanks for the offer. It was decent of you.” He waited while some cars passed, then crossed to the other side of the road. The fellow in the truck pulled off the shoulder onto the road, honked twice, and headed off to the north.

Walking to Bend, Jody Ledbetter thought. Walked across from Roseburg, and now he was walking to Bend. You met all kinds and sooner or later you heard every damn thing, but whoever heard of anybody walking from Roseburg to Bend?

And he’d said he was going east. Going to Bend first, and then going east.

East where? East to the Idaho line, say? Or east to Chicago?

Nice enough sort of a dude. Course there was a minute there when he’d thought the guy was turning him down because either Jody or the truck wasn’t good enough for him, but fortunately that little misunderstanding hadn’t blown up into anything. No, he was an okay-seeming guy, and you didn’t get the feeling he was crazy. A lot of the people you ran into these days tended to be on the weird side, and it wouldn’t make any difference if they told you they were walking to Chicago or flying to Paris. But this dude looked okay and sounded okay. The only thing crazy about him was what he was doing.

And how crazy was that? The dude was going to Bend, and then from Bend he was going someplace else. Jody, on the other hand, was also going to Bend, and from there he was going right back where he started from.

And it wasn’t as though there was anything that sensational to get back to in Klamath Falls. Lumber was bad and farming was worse, which didn’t leave a whole lot, so he wasn’t exactly living in the middle of the land of opportunity. What he was living in the middle of was a trailer, and a hell of a messy one at that, messier ever since Carlene had gone back to her mother, but not all that neat before she left, as far as that went. Seventy miles was a long way to walk just to get to Bend, but two hundred and seventy miles was a long way to drive, and that’s what the round trip amounted to, and when he was done he’d be back in Klamath Falls.

Well, shit.

There was a Circle K up ahead and he braked and downshifted and pulled in. He had plenty of gas but he was dry even if the truck wasn’t. He went back to the cooler and started to pull a couple of cans of Coors loose from the plastic webbing, then changed his mind and grabbed the whole six-pack.

The kid at the counter said, “I think we got Olympia.”

“Say what?”

“Olympia. I think we got some in the cooler. You’re wearing an Olympia cap.”

“Well, shit,” Jody said. “I got a John Deere cap home. If I was wearing that would you try an’ sell me a tractor?”

He got back in the truck, started it up, and headed back south in the direction he’d come from.

He saw the walker a long way down the road. He waited a minute to make sure it was him, then gave a honk. The dude waved, but Jody didn’t think he recognized him or the truck. Which stood to reason, because he wouldn’t be expecting to see Jody so soon; a Lear jet couldn’t have made it to Bend and back that quickly.

He braked to a stop alongside of the dude and leaned across to roll down the window on the passenger side.

“It’s a pretty warm day out and that sun’s startin’ to cook some,” he said, “and I was thinking you might could use a beer about now.” He handed a can of Coors through the window. “You do drink the stuff, don’t you?”

“I sure do, and this is the right day for it.” He cracked the can, and Jody broke one open for himself, and they raised the cans aloft and drank. “Ah, that’s good,” he said. “I thought you said you were going to Bend.”

“I did.”

“What did you do, fly?”

“Didn’t go yet. Decided I’d rather buy you a beer than clutter up the back of the truck with machine parts.”

“That what you were going to Bend for?”

“More or less. This farmer outside of Klamath’s looking to save on energy by generating his own electricity with a windmill. Well, I guess it makes sense, you get all that damn wind and you might as well use it. Me an’ my brother are doing the work for him, and there’s a gear assembly we need, and the closest one we can run down is in Bend.” He threw the door open, climbed down with his beer in tow. “Exciting way to spend a Saturday, huh?”

“Working with windmills sounds interesting.”

“Does it? I guess.”

“This stuff goes down easy. You know, I can’t believe you drove back here just to bring me a beer.”

“That right? I got to tell you, hoss, I can’t believe it myself. I can’t even believe I stopped to give you a ride first shot out of the box. I don’t hardly never stop for people I don’t know, and I sure don’t stop if they aren’t even hitching, and I definitely don’t when they’re all to hell and gone on the other side of the road. Anybody walks facing oncoming traffic, he’s not looking for a ride, he’s out for a walk, right?”

“Generally, yeah.”

“So why’d I stop? Crazy, I guess. Though not a whole lot crazier than a man who sets out to walk to Chicago.”

“Who said anything about Chicago?”

“Nobody, I don’t guess. Where are you headed? After Bend, I mean.”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You said east.”

“That’s as much as I know.”

“Guess you take it as it comes.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“You mind a personal question? Are you by any chance Jewish?”

“No. Why?”

“I didn’t really think so. I was thinking today’s Saturday, and I know there’s some Jewish people won’t ride in a car on their Sabbath. But if that was it you’d say that, you wouldn’t come up with a whole story about walking from Roseburg to Bend.”

“Not hardly.”

“Of course not, but it was going through my mind so I thought I’d ask. The Jewish people I know, they all ride on Saturdays anyway.”

“Same with the ones I know.”