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

“What does that mean? That it would take a miracle?”

She shook her head. “That’s not the point. I didn’t come here to heal my eyesight, Guthrie. I came here to sacrifice it.”

“I know that.”

“I thought you did.”

“It’s just that, oh, when we were on the bridge today, crossing the Snake River? I couldn’t help wishing you could have seen it.”

“Oh, Guthrie,” she cried. “Would you like me to tell you what I see when I look at a river?”

Route 52 along the banks of the Payette River to Horseshoe Bend. Then a gravel road running right to a ghost town just below Placerville, and a turn onto another gravel road cutting southeast through New Centerville to Idaho City. Then Route 21 northeast through national forest and into the Sawtooth Range, and cutting southeast again to Stanley, and Route 75 east through Sunbeam and Clayton and north past Bald Mountain and a petrified forest and into US 93, and north along the Salmon River all the way to the town of Salmon, and Idaho 28 switching southeast to Tendoy, and then a road, unnumbered on his map, first gravel and then dirt, heading east over the Bitterroots and crossing through Lemhi Pass into Montana.

That was the route Guthrie had traced out for them, and it would have been a hard trip in a car. On foot it was harder, the sort of trek where you’d expect a certain amount of attrition, with some people dropping out and deciding to head back.

Nobody dropped out. On the contrary, people kept dropping in. Not all that many, because there was not that large a population base to draw from, but enough so that the group kept growing.

Dingo was an outlaw biker. He had a full beard, a shaved head, one black front tooth, a single gold earring, and a lot of scar tissue on his face and body. He wore jeans and a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off. He had an Iron Cross around his neck and a studded leather wristband on each wrist and heavy ass-kicking boots on his feet. He looked like a middle-class nightmare.

He was one of seven bikers on five Harley-Davidsons who caught up with the group early one afternoon. Dingo would have looked menacing all by himself. With his companions, he looked like Attila on the march.

But the bikers were curious, not hostile. They asked their questions, cracked their jokes, offered various illegal substances around, then gunned their engines and took off.

A few miles away, Dingo accelerated to pull up even with two brothers who were riding double. “Hey, let Weasel ride with me some,” he said.

“What, are you two sweethearts?”

“Yeah, I want a cock to play with while I ride and I can’t reach my own.”

“If it wasn’t so fuckin’ small you could reach it.”

“Yeah, well, your mama never complained. Pull the fuck over, will you?”

Riding with Weasel, he said, “How’d you like those people we met just now?”

“The walkers? Assholes.”

“Maybe. Got to be some kind of righteous duty, though. Walking across the country.”

“Got to be crazy to do it.”

“Maybe,” he said. Then he said, “Hey, Weeze, you like my hog?”

“This here bike?”

“Yeah. You like it?”

“Shit yes.”

“You want it?”

“Huh?”

“I said do you want it?”

“The bike? Do I want it?”

“Do you?”

“Fuck, man. Would a dog lick hisself? Of course I want it.”

“It’s yours.”

“Huh?”

“It’s yours, Weasel. All you got to do is run back with me to where the walkers are, and you can keep the bike.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Walk.”

“You gotta be crazy, Dingo.”

“So?”

When they’d caught up with the group Dingo uncoupled a bag with his gear in it and slung it over his shoulder. He gave the Harley a pat and told Weasel to take over.

“Just treat her good,” he said. “You do right by her and she’ll always give you her best.”

“Like a woman,” Weasel said.

“Well, no,” Dingo said. “You got to kick the shit out of a woman now and then.”

He started walking, picked up his pace, and took a position around the middle of the group, falling into step with John Powers. “Hey, nice day, huh?” he said.

“Real nice,” John said.

“My name’s Dingo.”

“Mine’s John.”

“Oh, yeah? My name used to be John. Before it was Dingo.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. It sure is a beautiful day.”

Later, walking with Gary, he said, “Cowboys and bikers, now there’s two kind of people never did get along.”

“I know. We always hated you people.”

“Yeah, we felt the same about you. Cowboy walks into a biker bar, he’s askin’ to get stomped. No other way to look at it.”

“That’s a true statement. Only thing dumber is for a biker to walk into a cowboy bar.”

“I saw a cowboy get killed once.”

“Yeah?”

“Biker hit on a girl, cowboy and his friends didn’t like it, biker took a beating. Biker came back with his brothers, couldn’t find but one cowboy, and it was nothing but boots and chains. He wasn’t even the one who started the whole thing, I don’t know if he was even part of it.”

“If you saw it,” Gary said slowly, “you must have been one of the bikers.”

“Well, fuck, I wasn’t the girl. Man, we were fucked up. I mean, crank and reds is a destructive combination.”

“I don’t know about drugs,” Gary said. “Seems to me cowboys get mean enough on beer and whiskey. I never saw nobody killed, but I did see a biker get cut once.”

“What, stabbed?”

“Nutted. You know, castrated. His balls cut off.”

“Is that true?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“What’d he do?”

“Nothin’. He was just there, is all. There was a bunch of hands spent the whole day nuttin’ calves.”

“What for?”

“Are you shitting me? That’s how you get steers, man. You take the calves and cut their balls off. You order a steak, that’s what you’re eating.”

“You’re eating the calves’ nuts?”

“No, shit, don’t you know anything?” He laughed. “You get a bull calf, you nut him, and then he’s a steer and that’s what your beef is. If you don’t cut him he grows up to be a bull and you can’t control him on the range and the meat’s not right. I thought everybody knew that.”

“I grew up in Oakland, man. Meat came in packages wrapped in plastic. Milk came in cartons. Chicken came fried. What happened to this biker? You wouldn’t know what bunch he rode with, by any chance? Like Hell’s Angels, Rebels, Savage Skulls? One of those?”

“Hell, I don’t know. He was a biker is all, and he was there. And these guys been cutting calves all day, and big surprise they’re drinking pretty good, and somebody gets the idea of cutting the biker same as they been cutting the calves. And so they do it.”

“He lets ’em?”

“They didn’t give him much choice. There was six or eight of them, and they just held him down and did it.”

“They cut off his whole works?”

“No, just his balls. You cut the cock, a man might bleed to death.”

“Cut the balls off and he’ll just wish he did. I never heard anything like that. Didn’t his brothers come back at you?”

“Never.”

“Maybe he never said anything. Maybe he didn’t want to spread it around. Fuck. That is some story.”

“Well, cowboys got a lot of stories,” Gary said. “I guess bikers got a few, too.”

“I guess,” said Dingo.

Gene was a jack-Mormon who lived in a shack on federal land. He trapped, hunted, and made a little beer and whiskey. He had two wives, Essica and Lily, and five children between the ages of eight and eleven. The first chance he got, Thom asked one of the older boys whether there were any Chinese Mormons. The boy said he’d never met any.