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

He’d thought of walking to a service station but he didn’t know which way to walk. He couldn’t remember passing a station since Riley, and that was a good eight or ten miles back. There was a bitty town called Hines a couple miles before you got to Burns, but that was still at least fifteen miles away, and he couldn’t remember for sure if there was a station closer than that.

They told him they were walking on toward Burns anyhow, and they would see that he got help. There might well be a garage in the next few miles; failing that, there would surely be some place with a phone. They could call the Triple-A and make sure that someone came to his assistance.

“I’d walk along with you,” he said, “except I don’t want to leave Georgia here. And I don’t know that I can walk that far myself.”

“Couldn’t you flag a car?”

“Now that is the whole goddamned thing,” he said. “There was no end of cars while I was changing that tire. There were even people who stopped without being asked, wanted to know if I needed help. Well, it doesn’t take more’n one man to change a tire, so I said thanks all the same and sent them on their way. And from the moment I got the jack down and saw the spare was flatter than Floyd’s feet, I never saw another single goddamned car. Not in either direction, not a single car.”

He wound up walking toward Burns with them, and Georgia came along rather than stay in the car. She was a honey blonde of thirty who managed to look older by trying to look younger. She had a baby-doll face, but carried so much tension in her facial muscles that she looked as though she was made of pink velvet on a steel frame. She wore a cowgirl outfit, smart and expensive, but had the wit to get a pair of flat shoes from her luggage to replace the high-heeled Tony Lama boots.

There was a roadside telephone a mile and a half down the road. Les made his call, and they took a break from their walk and waited with him and Georgia until the truck arrived from the garage in Burns. Les and Georgia shook hands all around and got into the truck to ride back to the Cadillac. The others watched the truck until it was out of sight, then got underway again.

John said he hadn’t thought they’d go back to the car. “I figured they’d stick with us,” he said.

“And just leave that Caddy there?”

“What’s he care about a car? He can buy another one if he wants. And he seemed real intrigued with everything we were saying. So did she, even more than he did. I thought she’d want to stay with us, and then he’d decide to stay, too.”

Somebody said he could buy another wife as easily as he could buy another car. Jody said he was just as glad they’d gone their separate ways. “They’re not exactly the type for this hike of ours,” he told Guthrie.

“Oh? What type is that?”

“You know what I mean. She’s not a whole lot more than a tough little hooker, and how he got to be so tall is by standing on his money. I don’t figure they’d be a whole lot of fun to be around.”

“That’s not who they are. That’s just the package they’re wrapped in.”

“Maybe.”

“Remember the fellow in the Datsun pickup?”

“Fellow in a Datsun? No, when was that?”

“Oh, about ten days ago on Route 95. He wanted to give me a ride when I wasn’t even looking for one.”

“Oh, that guy,” Jody said. “Oh, come on, hoss. I wasn’t all that bad.”

“Never said you were.”

“But I do get your drift.”

“I thought you would.”

To Sara, Guthrie confided a certain amount of surprise that the Burdines had turned back. “There’s always a fair amount of traffic on this road,” he said. “At least there is since 395 came in. It’s not a parade, but you see a car every few minutes. But the traffic shut down the minute they needed help, and it didn’t start to flow again until they’d joined up with us.”

“And you don’t think that could be coincidental?”

“No more than you do. Anyway, coincidence is just God’s way of remaining anonymous. No, they were supposed to meet up with us. And while I agree with Jody that they’re an unlikely pair of pilgrims, at least on the surface of it, I thought they’d get caught up in the flow of whatever it is that’s happening.” He hesitated. “I thought we were irresistible, I guess. That once you walked a mile or so with us you were hooked.”

For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to respond. Then, her hand light in his, she said, “The path is not for everyone, Guthrie.”

“No, I don’t suppose it is.”

“And that’s very sad, because there are people who ought to be here and they never will. But I think it’s partly true, what you suggested. Once you start on the path, I don’t think you can really stop. You can slow down, you can get sidetracked, you can drag your feet, but I don’t think you can turn your back on it completely. I’m not absolutely positive about this, but I don’t think you can.”

Les and Georgia Burdine couldn’t. A few miles down the road the tow truck caught up with them, the Caddy’s back end winched up and the big car rolling on its front wheels. The truck stopped, the door opened, and Les and Georgia stepped down. Les said something to the driver, and the truck pulled away, towing the Caddy in its wake.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Les announced. “The fool brought the wrong size tire. I told him what size tire to bring and he brought one that won’t fit on the goddamned automobile. Can you believe that?”

“Easily,” Martha told him.

“You can? I have to tell you I couldn’t. So he’s hauling the car back to his garage in Burns, where he’s got a whole pile of tires the right size, and he’s going to see if he can’t put one of them on for me.”

“How come you didn’t ride there with him?”

“Well, there’s not a great deal to do in Burns. There’s an Indian reservation, and there’s a whole lot of places selling supplies to ranchers, but if you’ve been to Burns once you wouldn’t call life a failure if it never brought you back there again.”

“And we liked you folks,” Georgia put in, “and we thought we’d walk with you a little while, and then when we get to Burns our car’ll be ready and we can go.”

“We might not even get all the way to Burns tonight,” Martha said. “I think Guthrie was saying something about stopping within the next hour. Gary knows whose land this is, and he says there’d be no objection to our camping out on it, so that’s probably what we’ll do.”

“Well, we’d probably wind up staying in Burns otherwise,” Les said, “and the Best Western’s as good as they got there, and it’s no great shakes from what I hear. I can’t remember the last time I slept out under the stars. You think you can manage with the ground for a mattress, little lady?”

Georgia muttered something. “I’ve had worse” is what it sounded like to Martha.

“Then tomorrow we’ll go on to Burns with the rest of you,” he went on, “and I guess you’ll stay on 20 going east, while we collect the car and drive north to Pendleton.”

Jody went around offering five to one that they’d stay with the group after Burns. He couldn’t find anyone who would bet with him.

A couple of things happened that night.

First of all, Martha blew up at Guthrie. He said something innocuous that she took the wrong way, and she had a fit. She told him that he had no right to control her, that no one had elected him God, that she’d been putting up with his crap all her life and she didn’t want to take it anymore. She kept working herself up, and ultimately she began hyperventilating. Jody and Sara got her to lie down and made her keep breathing until her body was vibrating with energy. Then, abruptly, she got up on her knees, laid her head back and roared. Loud wordless cries came one after another from her mouth, rending the night air. She howled for five full minutes, and then her voice cracked in the middle of a howl and she rolled onto her side and curled up in a ball and began to weep quietly. Jody covered one of her hands with his, and Sara laid a hand on her shoulder. After a little while the weeping stopped and she appeared to be asleep.