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

“Motels cost, too. Not everybody’s got money.”

“I know. Last night was great, having supper with the Powerses and sleeping in the barn. And it’s good we did it last night, because there’s too many of us to do it again. It’s a good thing we can sleep out safely because we don’t have a whole lot of other choices.”

“You sound like it bothers you some, hoss.”

“Maybe I just have trouble adjusting to new realities. What are we going to do if it rains?”

“Grab a bar of soap and take a shower.”

“That’s another thing. How are we going to take showers if we never get motel rooms?”

“They’ve got showers at public campgrounds, and we can pay a fee and use them even if we don’t stay at the site. And there’s no law says we have to all stay in a bunch every damn minute, you know. Some of us could stay at a motel or in somebody’s barn and some more could find a place on down the road. We stay flexible, we’ll know what to do when we have to do it.”

“You’re right.”

“Besides,” Jody said, “we got good people today. John’s got something stuck in his throat, but soon as he spits it out he’ll have a lot to say. He’s got two older brothers, and he grew up thinking nothing he had to say was important. He’ll get over that. And Martha’s purely a no-bullshit type, she cuts right through the crap. She’s been madder’n hell at somebody, and when she quits sittin’ on it she may carry on enough to make the hills shake some, but you just wait an’ see what she’s like afterward.”

“Sara tell you all this stuff?”

“No.”

“Where’d you get it, then?”

“I don’t know.” Jody tugged at his beard. “Just come to me, I guess. Now Bud an’ Ellie, they’re real neat, and ol’ Richard’s just loving the whole trip. He looks out at the mountains like they belong to him.”

“I just hope they don’t slow us down too much.”

“They won’t. I noticed something. The first day somebody walks with us they’re a little slow, or their feet bother them, or whatever it is. But once they get caught up in the flow, why, the others just carry them. It’s like we pass energy back and forth, and the more it gets passed around the more there is of it. I tell you, hoss, I feel stronger the more of us there are.”

“How do you mean stronger?”

“Every way there is. Stronger in the body and stronger in my mind and spirit. Don’t you feel it?”

He thought for a moment. “I guess I do feel it,” he admitted. “I just don’t trust it.”

“Sara’d say that’s just your mind.”

“Right, don’t pay any attention to your thoughts, they’re just coming out of your mind.”

“You can trust it, Guthrie. It’s real.”

“I suppose.”

“You all right? You look a little ragged around the edges.”

“Just a headache. One of the women probably has an aspirin.”

“A headache? Stand up a minute.”

“What for?”

“Stand up,” Jody said, and got to his feet himself. He steadied himself, took several deep breaths, gave his hands a shake and held them down at his sides. Guthrie asked him what the hell he was doing.

“Letting my hands tingle,” he said. “Don’t talk, just let me do this.” He kept his hands at his sides for another twenty seconds, then placed them on either side of Guthrie’s head. He held them in that position for half a minute, let them drop, and heaved a sigh.

“There,” he said.

“What was that all about?”

“First tell me how’s your headache.”

“It’s gone. How’d you do that?”

“Beats the hell out of me, hoss. You saw what I did. I just let the power flow down into my hands, and then I sent it into the part that hurts.”

“When did you learn how to do that?”

“I don’t know. An hour ago? Martha had a cramp in her shoulder and I was massaging it and not getting anywhere, and suddenly it came to me to try getting energy in my hands and putting the energy on her. So I did, and it worked.” He shrugged. “Guess it works on headaches, too.”

“It’s amazing,” Guthrie said. “The headache’s really gone. Uh, thanks.”

“All part of the service. Just pay the nurse on the way out.” He laughed. “Don’t get too carried away, hoss. It’s not like curing cancer or casting out devils, and I didn’t heal nothing that an aspirin wouldn’t have got rid of. But I’ll tell you, it sure is a nice feeling to be able to take away a person’s pain.”

There were twelve of them by the time they reached Burns.

Gary was a hand at the Kay-Bar-Seven Ranch. Two of the other hands had seen the group pass on the road and cut across the range in their 4-by-4 to check the party out; later that day they sat around laughing about the fools who were trying to walk across the country, and Gary rode out the next morning, found them and fell into step. He was tall and thin, narrow in the hips, his brown hair cropped short and his cheeks pitted with old acne scars. He smoked Marlboros — he could have modeled for their advertising — and he looked wary when Jody told him how Guthrie had spontaneously given up the habit crossing the Cascades.

“You have to quit smoking to stay in this group?”

Sara assured him otherwise. “You may quit,” she said, “and you may not. Nobody gets anything from this walk that he didn’t come here to get.”

“Well, that’s good,” he said. He sounded at once relieved and a little disappointed.

“The thing is,” Jody added, “the only way you’ll know what you came for is when you see what you get.”

Les and Georgia were waiting for them. Their car, a Cadillac Seville, was parked at the side of the road headed toward Burns. The left rear tire was flat.

Les was standing in the road leaning against the car. He was a big man, about six-three and weighing close to two hundred fifty pounds. He was in his mid-fifties and he was wearing white Levi’s, a western shirt with pearl buttons and a lot of silver braid, a string tie with a turquoise slide, and a pearl-gray ten-gallon hat.

Some of the walkers, the ones in front, called out to him. He scowled across the road at them.

John Powers said, “We’ll get that tire changed for you, sir.”

“I already jacked her up and changed her,” he said. “That’s the goddamned spare on there. The goddamned spare is flat, it came from the, goddamned dealer’s that way, and if I ever get this goddamned car back to Pendleton he is goddamned likely to hear about it.”

He was from Pendleton, where he had extensive holdings in timber and ranchland. He had gone down to Reno to celebrate a successful business transaction. He stayed at Harrah’s, saw some shows, ate some good food, drank a lot of first-rate Tennessee whiskey, smoked some cigars that were supposed to have been smuggled in from Cuba, but he frankly didn’t believe it, did reasonably well at the crap table and substantially less well at blackjack, and, somewhere along the way, met up with Georgia, whom he was now bringing back to Pendleton as the fourth Mrs. Lester Pratt Burdine.

He had driven to Reno on US 395, which runs through Pendleton to Reno and all the way south to San Bernardino. He was returning to Pendleton the same way, with his new bride on the front seat beside him. There is a twenty-seven-mile stretch from Burns west to Riley where 395 and 20 run together, and it was there that the Seville’s left rear tire had gone flat, and the spare had revealed itself to be in the same state. It had, however, not done so until he had changed tires and lowered the car from the jack.

“And ever since then,” he said, “I’ve been standing here waiting to see a goddamned state trooper so he can send someone out with a new tire. Drive five miles over the speed limit and you’ll see more goddamned troopers than you can shake a stick at, but get a flat smack in the middle of a goddamned federal highway, make that two goddamned federal highways, and you could about die waiting for one to turn up.”