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

“It means I’m a coward!”

She laughed at him. “You think only cowards are fearful? You think a brave man’s not afraid? Why, you can’t be brave without fear.

There’d be nothing for you to be brave about. Brave ain’t fearless. Brave is being afraid, and owning your fear, and going ahead anyhow. And you’re brave, mister, and you’re going through this.”

“Why do I have to?”

“Because it’s what you have to do to get your legs back,” she said. “And we don’t allow no cripples in this family.”

He could move his legs.

The pain had vanished at last. It had been unbearable but he had borne it and now it was gone. There was a pins-and-needles tingling in his legs, as if they had gone to sleep — as indeed they had, and for years. But he had sensation and movement throughout them, and that was clearly impossible, but it was true.

“The nerves were severed,” he told Mame. “There was no sensation there, and no muscular control. It was like a marionette with the strings cut, no more capable of movement than that. What I’m trying to say is I wasn’t imagining it. It was organic damage, the doctors could see that it was there. They just couldn’t fix it.”

“So you had to fix it yourself.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it without saying anything, and she could see his belief system struggling to incorporate this new phenomenon. It was impossible, it had happened, impossible things did not happen, and therefore… therefore what?

“How do you feel, mister?”

“Confused. Foolish. You mean physically? All right, I guess.”

“Good. Because it’s time you started learning to walk.”

“Learning to walk?”

“Well, you’re a big boy, I shouldn’t think you’d have to learn how to crawl first. Now that you’ve got two perfectly good legs, why would you want to spend any more time in that wheelchair?”

“But the muscles have atrophied,” he said. “My legs have wasted away, I haven’t exercised them since the injury.”

“All the more reason to get started. Take my hand, I’ll help you up.”

“But I’d just fall down again! I’ll need to rebuild myself carefully and deliberately. There’s probably a physical therapist in Billings I can work with, and a good nutritionist can put me on the right diet for rebuilding muscle tissue. I don’t want to risk damaging my legs all over again. Slow and steady wins the race.”

“Not this race,” Mame said. “You haven’t got the time to waste on slow and steady. Mister, are you going to sit there and tell me it’s impossible for you to walk on the legs you just got handed back to you? You think that’s any more impossible than what you just went through? You just swallowed the camel. Are you really going to strain at the gnat?”

He got up from the chair, hanging onto it and to her for balance, swaying precipitously on unsteady feet. He took a step. He almost fell, but he didn’t, and he took another step.

As they walked together, she told him about her arthritis. She said, “See these hands? They looked like witch’s hands. They were all knobs and knots. And they are perfect now, the body absorbed the spurs and dissolved the calcium and restored everything. You think your body can’t build muscle? You know you could build it in the gymnasium over the months, build it out of sweat and protein. You think it has to take such a long time? I walked out of my arthritis in an afternoon. Why should it take you longer than that to walk back into your muscles?”

“You have to build muscles out of something. You can’t make them out of thin air.”

“What do you build them out of? Protein? That’s all muscles are is protein, and all protein is is nitrogen. Nitrogen! Four-fifths of the air you breathe is nitrogen, so what do you mean you can’t build them out of thin air? You can breathe all the nutrition you need, if your mind can just tell your body how to do it.”

“But—”

“Just walk,” she told him. “If you wait until it makes sense to you you’ll be in that wheelchair all your life.”

He walked, and there was pain in his legs, but it was the soreness that came with the use of muscles, not the searing pain he’d had earlier. More walking made the soreness recede. He never had the strength to walk a full mile, but he kept having enough strength to walk ten yards and ten yards more, and as the yards passed so did the miles. He started out expecting to grow weaker with each step, and instead he grew stronger, until finally he rounded the last corner in his mind by knowing that each step would strengthen him.

“The pain was so great you didn’t dare feel it,” Mame told him, “and so you didn’t feel it. You blocked it.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “I don’t remember any pain when Miguel stepped on the mine. I remember the impact, I remember how it picked me up and threw me, I remember metal fragments going right into me. But I don’t remember the pain.”

“Because you never felt it. Not then and not afterward.”

“Not until today. But—”

“But what?”

“It was real damage.”

“I know that, Al.”

“It wasn’t just in my mind. It was organic, it was real.”

“Of course it was. You gave yourself real healing today. Don’t you think you could have given yourself real damage back then?”

He said nothing for a time. Then, more in wonder than in bitterness, he said, “What a coward I was. What a fool.”

“Nonsense.”

“I was! Look what I did to myself. I made myself a chairbound cripple for all those years.”

“There’s another way to look at it.”

“Tell me.”

“Look how wise you were, Al. All that pain and fear, and some part of your wonderful mind saw that it was more than you could handle. And so you blocked it off and stored it up, and you kept it cordoned off where it couldn’t do any harm. Then you joined up with us, because you knew we could give you a safe space to deal with it. And look at you. You’re walking.”

“I am, aren’t I?” He looked down at his legs, watched in wonder as he put one foot in front of the other. “All those years,” he said.

“Forget them. You had to go through it to get to it. Don’t regret what put you where you are now.”

“I’ll have to remember that.” He shook his head. “How could you ever stand to walk with me, Mame?”

“Oh, I made fun of you a lot,” she said. “That helped, and I didn’t feel too bad about it because you never knew. But mostly I stood it because I saw past all of that stuff. I saw beyond the surface, Al. It’s not too hard to put up with a person once you can see who they really are.”

That night Jody sat down next to Guthrie. “Well, now we’re about to abandon a wheelchair,” he said. “It was bad enough leaving an aluminum walker by the side of the road, but this’ll get us a littering summons for sure.”

“They’re talking about bringing it along tomorrow, in case Al’s legs give out.”

“His legs aren’t about to give out. We’re like broken bones, hoss. Once we mend we’re strongest in the broken places. You take Mame, she can walk anybody into the ground. Another day or two and old Al’s gonna be leggin’ it out to Green Bay, askin’ the Packers can he try out for kicking field goals. Speaking of Green Bay, where we headed?”

Guthrie dug out the map, unfolded it. “I was thinking about that myself,” he said. “I was thinking originally we’d go clear to Miles City and then either stay on 12 going east into North Dakota or come down 59 and pick up 212 down into a little bit of Wyoming and then into South Dakota. See where we just slice off the northeast corner of Wyoming?”