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

And Aggie recognized them. They were her parents, and they were fighting and fucking at the same time. And their lovemaking, if you could call it that, reached its climax, and the spirit that was Aggie moved to assume her corporeal form within the fertilized egg they had just created.

They were her parents. This was her conception she was witnessing or remembering, and it was frightening, and she didn’t want to be there, she didn’t want to take this form, to be in this body, to be the child of these crazy people. But she had done it, she had entered into the egg, and she would be born to them.

She went through it all again now, and her dramatics set up sympathetic vibrations in several of the people around her, prompting them to lie down and breathe their way into altered states of their own. When her own process had run its course, she sat up and looked around. All these wonderful people, she thought. Her family.

“I’m glad I’m here,” she said to the eleven-year-old girl who was studying her with interest. “I’m glad I decided to show up. To, uh, put in an appearance. Like.”

“Do you have a headache?”

Did she? She tuned in, and discovered that she did. “Yes,” she said. “I certainly do. How ever did you know?”

“I’ll fix it for you,” the child said, and closed her eyes and planted her feet and held her hands at her sides. Then the child put a hand on either side of Aggie’s head, and imagination was a wonderful thing, she thought, because it was almost as if she felt rays coming out of the little girl’s hands.

“There,” the child announced. “It’s better now.”

And indeed it was.

Route 12 headed east along the north bank of the Musselshell, through endless prairie that served mostly as range for sheep and cattle. If the ground was flatter now, the sky seemed determined to compensate. The skies were high in this part of the country, and the clouds were forever shifting and re-forming, a painting in a constant state of revision.

Just beyond the town of Twodot, the sheriff of Wheatland County showed up to find out who they were and what they were doing in his domain. He was about thirty-five, built like a cowhand, and you could see he was wary of something weird going on in his county. He wanted to know who was in charge and was dismayed to learn that no one was. Were they members of some camping organization? Did they have permits to camp on private land? They weren’t and they didn’t, they told him, but no one had objected to their presence, and they cleaned up after themselves.

How did they sleep? Just fall down on the ground in their clothes? What did they do when the nights were cold? How did they keep from fainting in the heat of the sun? Their responses were deliberately vague; a sheriff in the middle of Montana seemed an unlikely candidate for a lecture on energy shields and psychic sun-screens.

Were they some kind of a cult? A sect? And where were they from? He was disconcerted to learn that they weren’t exactly from any place, that the migration (or whatever it was) had started in Oregon, but that people had been joining all along the route. On the other hand, he was somehow reassured to learn that several of the walkers were native Montanans, and that one man and woman owned business property in Great Falls.

“I guess this is all right,” he said. “There’s no problem with unhygienic conditions at your camp because you don’t have a camp, you just lie down when you’re tired. You’re trespassing when you go on private land without a permit, but if no one makes a complaint and you don’t do any damage, I don’t suppose it’s any concern of the county’s. If you had any dogs that were running people’s sheep that’d be one thing, but you don’t have any dogs, do you?” They didn’t. “Walking across the country,” he said. “Well, at least you picked the right season for it. You wouldn’t like this country too much in the winter, not to walk through.”

He drove back the way he’d come. As they hoisted their packs and set out again, Dingo told Ellie he was glad to see the sheriff drive off. “I get nervous around cops,” he confided. “I got a few wants out on me. No real major shit, but I jumped bail once on an assault charge in Bakersfield, and if anybody ever ran my prints I might have to go back and maybe even do a few months.”

“He’ll be back,” Ellie said. On her back, Richard smiled and cooed. Dingo gave the baby a finger to hold onto and asked her what she meant.

“Look at all the time he spent with us, Dingo. While he was asking his ridiculous questions, tentacles of sneaky group energy were wrapping themselves around his astral body with a grip of steel. He was too busy playing Clint Eastwood to realize what was going on, but what do you bet he’ll be back with a knapsack and a canteen?”

“You’re kidding.”

“You want to bet? If he comes back, you carry Richard.”

“You want me to carry Richard? I don’t mind carrying Richard.”

“No, I don’t mind either. I’d feel naked without you, wouldn’t I, Richard? But that sheriff’ll be back. You’ll see.”

“Not everybody who talks with us joins in.”

“They do if they’re supposed to.”

“How do you know that dude was supposed to?”

“Because he never would have come after us otherwise. Dingo, how long have we been walking? And how many cops have stopped us to ask us what the hell we were doing?”

“In the time I’ve been part of the group? None. I never thought about it, but that’s true. You hardly ever see a cop, and when they do roll by they don’t even slow down. You know, I never thought about it, but that’s not natural. Any righteous cop would want to know what we were up to.”

“Exactly. Because they don’t see us, Dingo. Oh, they see us, but it doesn’t really register.”

“There’s Chinese dudes who can make themselves invisible,” Dingo said. “It’s a part of one of the martial arts. If they don’t want you to see them, you don’t see ’em. You can be looking right at ’em and it don’t matter, you don’t see them. Your eye takes it in but your mind erases it before it can get to the brain.”

“He’ll be back, Dingo.”

“Well, if he’s supposed to be with us, I guess it’ll be all right.” He drew a deep breath, let it out between pursed lips. “If I can be best buddies with a cowboy,” he said, “I suppose I can hang out with some sheepfucker sheriff. You get him going, he’s probably got a few good stories to tell.”

The sheriff brought his wife, his two sons, and his widowed father-in-law. Sara managed to get a reading on him and saw a man trapped in judgment, assessing everybody and making them right or wrong. She saw the child he had been, always judged, judging now in return. How brave he was, she marveled, to have met the group, decided they were aimless and crazy, and followed his inner guidance and joined them in spite of his judgment.

He might have a hard time, she sensed, getting far enough past his own judgments to allow the healing to happen to him. But she was confident it would happen sooner or later. He wouldn’t have come except in search of something, and he would get what he’d come for. She knew that much.

Al came out of spite. He wheeled himself all the way from his place out in the country to the little town of Cushman, where he sat in a patch of shade alongside the feed store to wait for them. “I understand you’re walking,” he told the first ones to reach him. “You got something against wheels?”

“Not on a chair,” Jerry Arbison said.

“I’d walk if I could,” Al said. “I’d walk the asses off of the lot of you. But my damn legs don’t work. You got anything against cripples joining up?”