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

“You got a nice little family,” Jody told Gene. “I didn’t think Mormons could still have more’n one wife.”

“You can’t,” Gene said, “but there’s a lot that do. What are they going to do, run around locking people up? Of course you can’t be in good standing with the church, but that only matters if you give a shit about it. Which I don’t.”

“Yeah. How is it having two wives, anyway?”

“Well, I’d say it’s good,” Gene said judiciously. “They sort of keep each other company. They’re in the kitchen together, they care for the children together, they do their chores together. It works real good that way.”

“They don’t get jealous?”

“Naw.”

“You have some kind of schedule?”

“Schedule? Oh, you mean for who to sleep with? No, we just all three sleep together.”

“Oh.”

“It works real fine that way.”

“I guess,” Jody said, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Just one more question, hoss. Who do I see if I want to join this church of yours?”

Kate and Jamie were picking raspberries at roadside just east of Lowman. Kate was Boston Irish, and she had gone through a period in her late teens when she had Gaelicized her name to Caitlin. Jamie was a black woman from the South Side of Chicago. Both were nearing thirty, both had short hair, and both were dressed alike in baggy fatigues from Banana Republic and unpatterned flannel shirts from Norm Thompson and duck hunter boots from L. L. Bean.

They lived together at a lesbian commune half a mile up a dirt road, and the group waited while they went back there to fill a pair of backpacks and say their good-byes. They returned with a couple of spare backpacks and some extra canteens, a hamper of food, and two half-gallon jugs of homemade elderflower wine. They also brought Neila, a big-eyed thin-limbed waif of a woman with a skittish manner and a haunted look about her.

“She doesn’t say much,” Kate told Martha and Sara, “but you should have seen her when she turned up back in November. I don’t think she spoke a word the first week she was with us. Somebody must have done a number on her. I thought she probably should have stayed with the other women, but she wanted to come. Something told her to come to the Hen House when she needed us, and the same thing must be telling her to leave.”

Sara grasped Neila’s hands and saw child abuse that started in the cradle, a tough little brute of a father with a predilection for sexual torture, a slow-witted mother, herself terrified of her husband, who acquiesced in and abetted her daughter’s exploitation. She saw more than she wanted to see, and had to fight the impulse to close her inner eyes and draw away. Instead she made herself center her energies in her heart, letting herself feel Neila’s pain and revulsion and beaming back love in return.

“It’s right for her to be with us,” was all she said.

A mile or so on down the road, Sue Anne found herself walking alongside Neila. Neither of them spoke. After they had walked together for a few minutes, Sue Anne opened the clasp of the gold chain and hung it around Neila’s neck. The blue crystal lay between Neila’s breasts. Neila stiffened at first, but then she took the crystal in her hand and looked at it, and her features relaxed into what was almost a smile.

Later on, Sue Anne caught up with Lissa. She said, “That crystal you gave me? The one you got from Grace?”

“What about it?”

“I gave it to Neila.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know why I did that. I liked wearing it, you know? But something just told me to give it to her.”

“Well, something just told me to give it to you.”

“I thought maybe I should keep it because you gave it to me.”

“Grace gave it to me, and I had the same kind of thought, but it seemed the right thing to pass it on.”

Walking with Jordan, Thom said, “You must be glad to see Jamie.”

“Why? We supposed to be old friends or something?”

“Well, she’s black. Now you’re not the only black person in the group.”

“She doesn’t like me.”

“What are you talking about? She hasn’t even met you yet.”

“We already know she hates guys,” Jordan said. “She’s probably got no use for Indians, either.”

Jerry Arbison was the man who had abandoned his Ford Taurus as a prelude to discarding his car keys, tie, jacket, his vest and his wristwatch. The last was a Rolex, he confided, but not the expensive Rolex.

He had been born in Ohio in a Cleveland suburb and had majored in English at Western Reserve. After graduation he went west to get a master’s in film studies at UCLA. He wrote two unsuccessful screenplays before landing a job at the William Morris Agency. After a few years there he opened his own office as an agent, representing film and television writers. He closed the agency after a year and a half and became a stockbroker with Smith Campbell Hamilton, where his client list consisted largely of screenwriters and their friends.

He had gone back to Cleveland for his grandmother’s funeral. He’d flown east for the funeral, but he hadn’t wanted to fly back so he’d bought the car in Cleveland. He planned to drive straight back, but first he drove down to Dayton to visit an old college buddy. He stayed three days, and from the buddy’s house he called an old girlfriend, divorced now and living in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. He stayed at her apartment and they spent three days drinking chilled Beaujolais and fucking like weasels, and on the third night he asked her to marry him.

“Let’s not move too fast, Jerry,” she said. “You’ve never been married. I have. I’m still getting over the divorce. Let’s live together, you can move right in here or I’ll come out to L.A., whichever you’d rather. I don’t really care where I live. And then, you know, we’ll take it from there.”

The next morning she went to work. As soon as her car was out of the driveway he threw all his things in his suitcase, jumped in the Ford, and got the hell out of there.

Jesus, talk about your narrow escapes.

He drove across the country, but he kept getting off the Interstate and just driving around. When he got back to L.A. he’d step back into his life, but he didn’t seem willing to do that. In Grand Junction, Colorado, he took a room at a Ramada Inn and couldn’t leave the room. The first day he went downstairs to the coffee shop for his meals, but then he stopped being able to do that, and he would call up Domino’s Pizza two or three times a day and have a pizza and a couple of Cokes delivered. There was a Coke machine on his floor, next to the elevator, but he didn’t even want to go that far.

After four days of Coke and pizza he got in his car and split. He didn’t even stop at the desk to check out. They had run a slip with his credit card, they could take care of it, and he didn’t want to talk to anybody. He hadn’t eaten since noon the previous day because he hadn’t wanted to talk to the girl at Domino’s Pizza , not even over the phone.

At Salt Lake City something made him head north. At Baker, Oregon, something made him get off 1-84 and take roads without even consulting a map or paying heed to the highway markers. He had known something was coming moments before he saw them walking at the side of the road. He had felt something waiting for him, feared it, and yet was drawn to rush forward to meet it. He had thought it might be a car wreck, an accident waiting for him to happen into it, and so he had failed to recognize them as he sped past them, but something must have registered, because he had almost wrecked the car, braking savagely to a stop, swinging around, and racing back after them.

Now he was quiet most of the time, his silence pierced periodically by manic episodes and furious rambling monologues. Several members of the group had had experiences similar to Martha’s, with a siege of physical or mental agitation leading them spontaneously into hyperventilation, at which point someone would get them to lie down and breathe in a fluid rhythm, with no pause between one breath and the next. The breathing seemed to produce a cleansing energy in the body. Already Jerry had gone into hyperventilation three times. The first time he panicked and couldn’t breathe, but Martha talked him through it. The other times were easier, and in each instance he maintained the breathing rhythm for about an hour, rested for an hour afterward, and emerged from the experience refreshed and lighter, cleaner, clearer.