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

“Is spend the rest of your life healing yourself and the planet. You’re right, Mark. You’re getting off much too easy. It would be ever so much harder for you to have to spend three minutes in an electric chair. And it would do so much more for you and the world.” She touched his hand. “Go to sleep now,” she said. “Things will make more sense in the morning.”

In the morning they walked east on 14, into the rising sun. At Arlington the road turned south, joining with US 81. After two miles 14 ran east again, toward the small city of Brookings, but Guthrie chose to stay with 81 south to Madison. The wind which had been behind them for days was at their right now, blowing with the same unremitting vigor.

Several new walkers joined them that day, including the group’s second babe in arms, an angelic little girl named Jane. She was just weeks older than Bud and Ellie’s Richard, and people kept teasing Richard about his new girlfriend. Richard giggled as if he knew precisely what they were talking about.

Jane’s single mother was a delicately beautiful woman named Amanita; she had worked as a teacher of deaf children until days before Jane’s birth, and when she spoke her fingers often echoed her words, flashing unconsciously in sign language. When anyone commented on her name, she would explain that it was the Latin name of a genus of poisonous mushrooms. She said, “What can I tell you? I’m a child of the sixties and my parents were crazy. They did so much acid I’m lucky I’ve only got one head. I’ve got a brother named Bozo and a sister named Cloud Nine, so I figure I got off easy.”

Just before they turned south on 81, a convoy of three army troop carriers passed them. Members of the group waved at them, but no one waved back. The third vehicle slowed, however, for no apparent reason, and before it resumed speed a pair of young soldiers vaulted the tailgate and dropped to the road below. The carrier drove off after its fellows, and no one appeared to notice the two deserters.

Their names were Jeff and Ken. One was from Lansing, Michigan, the other from southern Indiana. They were dressed in fatigues and sported quarter-inch crewcuts, and they had just recently finished basic training and were en route to a base in eastern Wyoming. They had enlisted and they liked the Army.

Then why had they joined the walk?

“Gosh, I don’t know,” Ken said. “I just saw you all walking, and something said go, and I went. I looked over my shoulder and here’s Jeff standing next to me and dusting himself off. What’s funny is the other night I had a dream I was marching with a whole regiment of troops, and everybody quit marching in step, they were just sort of walking along, and falling out of ranks, doing all the things you don’t do when you’re marching. What they were doing was they were turning into civilians. And that’s what they did, see. They weren’t all guys my age. In fact they weren’t all guys. They were men and women all ages, and they weren’t carrying rifles anymore, and they were, well, like this.”

Jeff said matter-of-factly that he’d had essentially the same dream. “We’re AWOL now,” he said. “Are we going to get in trouble for this?” No, he was assured. They were not going to get in trouble.

Ken had only one regret. “My teeth are in bad shape,” he said, “and I was going to get all this dental work done for free, and army dentists are supposed to be pretty good.”

He was baffled when everybody started laughing at him. Then Jody clapped him on the shoulder. “Little brother,” he said, “you got here in the nick of time.”

Throughout the day, Guthrie found himself avoiding Mark Adlon.

This wasn’t all that hard to do, and he wasn’t obvious about it; at first, in fact, his efforts to steer clear of the serial killer weren’t even obvious to Guthrie himself. With over two hundred of them, the line of march typically stretched for more than a quarter of a mile, and you could walk all day without getting a close look at some of your fellows.

On several occasions, though, Guthrie was aware of Mark’s presence nearby, and purposely drew away from him.

He wondered why. He had run a gamut of emotions the night before, shocked and sickened by the horrible story Mark told but struck nevertheless by whatever gave him the strength to tell it. He knew what it cost the man to go through the whole long list of killings, seeing them differently now. And when Mark lay down and breathed his way back into the terror of his birth, Guthrie had been right there with him, knowing exactly what Mark was going through and, to a great degree, going through it with him.

When Sara had asked the group whether Mark should stay or go, Guthrie had not raised his voice with the others. But if he had he would have said what they said, urging Mark to stay. It was clear to him that Mark was supposed to be with them. So far no one had found his way to the group by accident, and no one had walked along with them without adding to the group’s strength and enriching his own life in the process.

Certainly Mark needed the group. He had done awful things, with an awful effect upon his spirit, and it would take everything the group had to offer for him to recover. At the same time, Guthrie was willing to believe that the group needed Mark. He had already had a powerful impact upon them, and his was the sort of dramatic healing — like Mame’s, like Al’s, like Bud’s new incisor — that touched off new miracles of healing in others.

Still, something bothered Guthrie.

What it came down to, he realized, was that it rankled that Mark was getting off scot-free. It was one thing for Ida Marcum to forgive a Hitler who’d killed himself in the bunker back in 1945. It was another matter to forgive a living mass murderer and welcome him with open arms. “We forgive you! Now all you have to do is forgive yourself!” Well, nifty. That was fine when the offense was spitting on the sidewalk or cheating on your taxes or aborting a child or slapping a woman around. But this son of a bitch had killed a hundred and one women and loved every minute of it. He killed them, he got off on killing them, and they were dead, and now it was Mark, you are our brother, and they were doing everything but pelting him with flowers and kissing his ring.

As the afternoon wore on he couldn’t avoid recognizing three things. He was standing in judgment of Mark. He wanted to see him punished. And, finally, he was afraid of him, afraid that he was a very real threat to the women in the group.

He considered discussing this with Sara but didn’t, not wanting to hear what she might tell him. But this was no help; his own mind obligingly supplied the words she might have said.

“When you judge anyone you judge yourself. When you seek to punish anyone you are seeking to punish yourself. What you fear in others you fear in yourself.”

That evening, as soon as they had made camp just north of Madison, he sought out Georgia and asked her if she would supervise his breathing. Off to one side, he lay on his back and looked up at the gathering clouds. He closed his eyes and began the rhythmic connected breathing.

He went far away. He met a boy who never quite believed that his mother approved of him, no matter what he did. He met a man who longed to feel powerful and in control, and whose heart sang at the thought of having his hands around a woman’s throat. He met facets of himself whose existence he hadn’t expected, saw the scraps of fear and anger and hatred tucked away in sealed drawers of the self. Confronted, at last, the killer he might have been, the self within the self that thrilled at the thought of murder.

Georgia must have sensed the play of emotions within him, however much she knew exactly what he was going through. From time to time she would supply a thought. “It’s safe to feel your anger,” she told him several times. “It’s safe for you to see exactly who you are,” was another sentence she uttered just when he most needed to hear it.