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

“What happens to people when they start walking with us, Guthrie?”

“They quit smoking, they hyperventilate, their tattoos fade, their arthritis dissolves, their acne clears up, their warts disappear, and now it looks as though they grow themselves new teeth. Suppose we pick up a guy with an arm missing. Will he grow a new one?”

“Why not? Crabs and lobsters do it all the time. What else happens to people, Guthrie? What happens on the inside?”

“We change.”

“Yes.”

“We don’t turn into clones. If anything, people become more completely themselves.”

“That’s right.”

“We walk out of our old lives. We let go, we open up. We forgive and forget, and one of the things we forget is who we thought we were.”

“And we remember who we really are.”

“Yes.”

“And love our neighbors as ourselves, and act out some of the other radical notions that fellow was talking about on the mountain.”

“Uh-huh. But—”

“What, Guthrie?”

“Well, does it amount to anything? It’s wonderful for us, I’m not asking for a better way to spend my summer, but I didn’t know I was doing this to save the planet. Are we reaching enough people? Shouldn’t we, well, find a way to get the word around faster?”

She smiled. “You think we need media attention? We could get one of the networks to send a film crew to follow us around. You could hold press conferences and announce all the latest miracles.”

“Jesus, don’t even say that.”

“You and I could go on Donahue and Oprah Winfrey and spread the word. We could answer provocative questions from the audience. Or maybe it would be better to buy some TV time. Should we start raising money?”

“Stop it, Sara.”

“We could get one of the shoe companies to sponsor us. ‘When you’re walking to Glory, only Reeboks will do.’ Or should we offer it to Nike first? After all, this whole thing started in Oregon, so maybe we ought to do business with a local firm.”

“I get the point, Sara. I really do.”

“Wanting to make it happen faster is just ego, Guthrie. It’s thinking, ‘Oh boy, God’s in deep shit without my help.’ It’s thinking we have to get people to do what we want them to do for their own good. But we haven’t been trying to make anybody do anything, and the only people who join us are people who want to, and that’s why it all feels right. We’re not going to make this happen by marching on Washington and telling the government what to do. But if we go on walking wherever your intuition happens to lead us, and if people join us because they’re led to join us, somebody in Washington’s going to get up from his desk one of these days and decide he feels like going for a walk.”

“And who runs the store when everybody goes for a walk?”

“It doesn’t matter. Who’s tending bar in Roseburg? It really doesn’t matter. You know that line, ‘It’s a lousy job but somebody has to do it’? If it’s really a lousy job, then nobody has to do it.”

A Holiday Inn in Pueblo, Colorado. Mark signed in, went to his room. He showered, then put on a pair of bathing trunks.

They were loose in the seat, and the last time he’d worn them they had been tight. There was no question about it — he was losing weight. George Kingland had pointed it out to him before he’d noticed it himself, and the process had gone on uninterrupted since. He’d lost almost two inches in the waistline, he was wearing his belt two notches tighter, and he had slimmed down proportionately all over. When he shaved that morning he’d noticed definition around the jaw that he hadn’t had in years. His jowls were disappearing and he was losing that smug plump look.

He rather liked the change. He hadn’t minded carrying the extra weight, and now he found that he enjoyed losing it. He especially liked the fact that he never deprived himself at the table; indeed, he’d begun losing weight without any intent, and continued to eat whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it.

Still, he was eating less. Until he’d decided to devote the summer to the pursuit of young women, he had lived with Marilee and the children and eaten breakfast and dinner at home. When he’d gone away overnight, on a two- or three-day trip to some other city, he had eaten in much the same fashion.

Now there were no points on his compass, no true rhythms to his days. Since his final departure from Wichita Falls, his sleeping habits had been erratic. He might go to sleep or get up at almost any time. Many of the chain restaurants stayed open twenty-four hours and offered their entire menu around the clock, so that you could get up in the late afternoon and go out for breakfast, then have a dinner salad at seven-thirty in the morning. Sometimes he would forget to eat; other times he would consider it and decide he wasn’t hungry.

It seemed to be agreeing with him. He felt fine, and his energy level was high. He didn’t look drawn or wasted, as people sometimes did after rapid weight loss. At first he had been a little concerned, because weight loss without dieting could be symptomatic of various illnesses, but then he’d realized that he was dieting, but that it was unintentional. He was snacking a lot less, and he suspected that had something to do with it. He didn’t seem to crave cookies and candy bars as he once had, and if he did have a snack it generally wound up serving as a replacement for a meal.

The Easy Weight-Loss Diet, he thought. When hunger strikes, just go out and kill someone lovely.

He went down to the pool, swam a couple of laps, stretched out on a chaise and let the sun dry him off. It was fairly late in the afternoon but the sun still had plenty of power left in it. He took a moment to look around the pool, noticing who was there, deciding which of the women he found attractive. There was a slender brunette who was sitting with her husband; she was a little thinner than he liked, but she would do. And there was a chubby teenager who kept climbing up the ladder, tugging the top of her one-piece suit up over the tops of her breasts, then mounting the diving board and plunging into the water, only to repeat the entire process moments later. She looked to be a blonde — it was hard to tell, her bathing cap covered everything but the nape of her neck — and she was cute, with a nice little puppy-fat body and shapely young legs. But she was too young, sixteen at the most.

Still, both of them would do for fantasy material, and that was as much as he wanted right now. He had killed a hitchhiker the previous morning, leaving her body in a culvert where it might never be found, and he might not hunt at all today, or tomorrow either, for that matter.

Something had crested in Wichita Falls. Missy Flanders had been quite literally irresistible, and he never could have rested until he had taken her. Since then he had been able to resume killing for the pleasure of it. When he was lucky enough to find a woman who really moved him he just had to have her, but not out of the absolute need that had operated in Wichita Falls. Now, if he found some little darling irresistible, it meant that he chose not to resist her. With Missy there had been no choice involved.

Now he closed his eyes and remembered the hitchhiker from yesterday morning. He remembered her eyes, and the way she had nibbled her lower lip when she asked him how far he was going. He thought about what he had done, and for just the shadow of a moment he wondered who might be waiting for her to come home, but those sort of thoughts were rare, and they never occupied him long.

He thought his thoughts, and he opened his eyes from time to time to glance at the teenager (pulling the top of her suit up again; why didn’t she give it up, those tits were not going to stay completely covered, not by that suit) and the married woman.