Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Fourteen

When they crossed into Montana on July 2, they crossed the Continental Divide as well. A metal sign at the roadside informed them of this fact, and Dingo told Jordan and two of the jack-Mormon kids how he and a buddy had stood back to back at the Continental Divide in Colorado once, the two of them peeing, one into the Pacific, the other into the Atlantic. The two brothers ran off to try it, while Jordan told Dingo that the urine would never reach the ocean, that it would soak into the ground and dry up.

“Well, it’s the idea of it,” Dingo said.

Jody had been walking with Mame and Bev. Now he moved ahead and caught up with Guthrie. “Hey, hoss,” he said. “Halfway there.”

“Halfway where?”

“Halfway to wherever we’re going. Remember when we first met up and I had the idea you were going to Chicago? Halfway to the end of the line, wherever that turns out to be.”

“How do you figure that?”

“The Continental Divide. That was the Continental Divide, case you didn’t notice.”

“I know.”

“I never been across it before. Every time I put a foot down I’m further east than I ever been in my whole life.”

“Well, you’re a long ways short of halfway across the country,”

Guthrie told him. “The Continental Divide just halves the country in terms of the watershed. It’s way over in the west. If you wanted to draw a line down the middle of the country, it would run pretty close to the border of Minneapolis and the Dakotas. If you wanted a natural line, well, the Mississippi comes reasonably close. Where we are now, we’ve covered maybe a fifth of the distance across the country.”

“That’s all?”

“Just about.”

Jody considered this. “That’s in miles,” he said at length. “Aside from that, I figure we’re halfway. The hell, hoss, from here on it’s all downhill.”

From Dillon, in the southwest corner of the state, Guthrie plotted their route north on 41, skirting Butte on the east. Then north on 287 to Townsend and all the way across the state on 12. All the way to Miles City, anyway, and from there he would decide whether to hold to 12 and continue due east or follow the Pumpkin River south toward Broadus and pick up US 212 into South Dakota. Both routes stood out equally when he looked at his new map of Montana, but there was no need to hurry his decision. Miles City was a full four hundred miles away.

He wasn’t sure when they’d get there. Originally he’d set out to cover twenty miles a day, occasionally pushing a little ways further. In Idaho, over much more difficult terrain than they’d covered previously, they had still managed to log twenty miles each day. Now, with the last few ranges of the Rockies before them, soon to give way to the Great Plains, it seemed likely that they could increase their mileage without spending more hours on the march.

It stood to reason, but he was beginning to realize that reason wasn’t operating too effectively on this trek of theirs. Maybe whatever was guiding them had firm ideas about how much ground they should cover. He’d find out soon enough.

The group was growing. That should have slowed things down, it seemed to him, but it didn’t work that way. There were forty-two of them the last time he’d counted, and folks were joining up faster than he could learn their names, let alone get much sense of who they were. At night, camped alongside the road, there would always be six or eight people stretched out and breathing, with someone sitting beside each of them and helping them stay with the breath, bringing them out of it if they went unconscious, talking them through it if they ran into fear or pain or an inability to breathe.

And, while this was going on, more often than not there was someone having hysterics in a corner, or off to one side screaming, or forgiving themselves and their parents and God and their obstetricians, or discovering some hitherto unknown talent within themselves, or in a circle around Jody, learning how to heal pain with their hands.

“I put a foot wrong and my ankle went out on me,” Jody had explained, “and I could walk on it but it hurt me some, and when Martha did that the day before I put energy on it for her, so I thought to do the same thing for myself.”

“Physician, heal thyself,” Guthrie had said.

“Yeah, well, the thing is you can’t. It doesn’t work that way. I didn’t think it would, but I tried, and of course it didn’t. And I thought somebody else ought to be able to do it for me, because the thought came to me that if I could do this, anybody could do it. I had a feeling Martha could learn, and I taught her, and she fixed my ankle. And that purely amazed me. I was used to the idea of taking away somebody else’s pain, but when somebody took away my pain it felt like a total miracle. A small one, anyway.”

“Sara says there aren’t any little miracles.”

“One size fits all, huh? Could be. Anyway, I got to thinking, and the next thing that came to me was if anybody could do it, shit, everybody could do it. So I taught Sue Anne and Thom, and word got around and people started coming up to me and asking me to teach ’em. And you know how that made me feel?”

“Pretty good, I’ll bet.”

“Hell it did. Made me feel like homemade shit. Because if everybody could pull off this little magic trick, what was so damn special about Joseph David Ledbetter?”

“Oh, right. I see how that could happen. What did you do?”

“What do we all do when we start going nuts? I went to Sara.”

“What did she say?”

“She said to get that I could be perfect without being special, and I could be wonderful without being special, and I could even be special without being special.”

“Sounds like Sara.”

“And she also said to keep on teaching people whether I got all that or not, because all of us were letting go of crap we’d had stored away since birth, and a lot of people were getting headaches during the process of cleaning out all that crud. In other words, we needed a good supply of psychic anesthetists for all the emotional surgery that was going on.”

“Just because you think you’re a chicken doesn’t mean you are a chicken, and it’s safe to know that you’re not really a chicken, and you can love yourself even if you are a chicken, or even if you think you are. But in the meantime we can use the eggs.”

“Something like that. Thing is, I learned something by teaching people. Sue Anne told me she got a little headache herself every time she healed somebody, and I realized that you have to protect yourself against picking up other people’s pain. I was doing that myself, not realizing it because it always stayed at a low level. And somebody said that massage therapists have that problem; some of them get sick all the time because they’re releasing shit for other people and getting caught in the backwash.”

“So what do you do?”

“A shower’s good. Cleans your aura. That’s a little tricky to arrange around here, so I came up with this.” He demonstrated. “You put your hand at the inside of your elbow and just sweep it down the arm and see yourself brushing the negative energy off and discharging it through your fingertips. And then you do the same with the other arm.”

“And it works?”

“Seems to. Hey, what do I know, Guthrie? I’m just a guy who was driving up to Bend and strayed a little ways off the track.”

As the group grew, as it covered distance and increased in number, it seemed to be growing as well in its magnetic power. More and more as they crossed Montana they tended to find people waiting at a crossroads, people who had traveled dozens of miles to cut their route. Sometimes these new recruits were already equipped with a backpack and canteen or water jug, as if the same force that drew them let them know what they ought to bring. Others brought only themselves and the clothes they were wearing. Some of the new people were in a sort of fog, falling in with the group without knowing what was going on or why they were becoming a part of it. Others had had inner visions of one sort or another, or had heard voices, and when the group came into view on the western horizon they were either gratified that their vision was being validated or (and this was especially true of those with some sort of drug history) half convinced that the walkers were just another part of an ongoing hallucination.

Two couples got caught in the group’s magnetic field while they were in the middle of a scheduled week at Yellowstone, photographing bears and geysers before returning to Silicon Valley. One said it was time to go up into Montana, and the other three dutifully joined him in their camper, and away they went, heading north on 89. They parked and waited eight miles south of White Sulphur Springs, and when the group reached them they joined in, leaving the camper at the side of the road.

One of the women wasn’t sure she wanted to be with the group. Her friends jollied her out of it. “Aggie, you never want to be anywhere, and then once you’re there it’s fine. You probably didn’t want to be in the world in the first place.”

That night Aggie was one of several people who went into hyper-ventilation. Kate and Jamie monitored her breathing, and in the course of it she had a vivid memory of herself as a disembodied spirit, hovering on another plane of existence while two people had a loud drunken argument below her. The argument turned violent, and then the two made a sort of peace and began making love, but the love they made was fueled by their anger.

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?”

Nobody did.

“Well, what do I have to do? There some kind of fee I’m supposed to pay?”

“There’s no charge for people in wheelchairs,” Jerry said.

“What’s the regular charge? I don’t want any special treatment. I’ll pay the same as everybody else.”

“There’s no charge for anybody,” Gary said.

“Well, why didn’t he say that in the first place? Why say there’s no charge for wheelchairs?”

“I was just being a prick,” Jerry said disarmingly. “Look, we’ve been doing about twenty-five miles a day, sometimes a little more than that if we’re making good time and everybody feels like moving. I have no idea if that’s a lot or a little for a man in a wheelchair. Intuitive being that I am, I somehow sense that you’d rather propel yourself with your arms than have anyone assist you. That’s great, but if it turns out to be hard on your arms, just say the word and somebody’ll help out.”

“I don’t need anybody’s help,” Al said. “My arms can do anything your legs can do.”

“That’s great,” Jerry murmured to Gary. “Let’s strike up some music and Mr. Warmth here can show us some of the old soft glove.”

He wound up with Mame for a companion. He groused and bitched about one thing after another, and she simply strode along beside him and responded to his words as if they were delivered in perfectly polite fashion.

“You walk like you win medals for it,” he snapped at one point. “You don’t have the slightest goddam idea what it’s like to be crippled, do you?”

“I sure don’t,” Mame said. “How did you happen to lose your legs?”

“Are you blind or just stupid? I haven’t lost my legs. What do you think I’ve got in my pants, rolled newspaper? I’ve got my legs. I just can’t do anything with them.”

“How did it happen?”

“Vietnam,” he said. “Maybe you heard of it.”

“Oh, yes.”

“‘Oh, yes.’ As far as how it happened, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“All right.”

“We were on patrol, I was right behind the point man, he stepped on a mine, he caught most of it, I got a little. Enough, as it turned out. He went home in a body bag. I went home in a wheelchair. You want to know the worst part?”

“What?”

“Idiots telling me how lucky I was. I can’t feel anything in my legs, can’t move them. Can’t wiggle my toes. Can’t remember what it was like to wiggle my toes.”

“It must be difficult.”

“No, it’s a bed of roses. I’m continent, in case you were worried about that. I have full control over my bowels and bladder. And I can generally lift myself on and off a toilet if there’s space to maneuver the chair. Otherwise I need someone’s help.”

“How badly do you have to go before you’ll ask for it?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” she said sweetly.

“I don’t ask for help if I don’t have to,” he said. “I don’t believe in it.”

“You know,” she told him, “I know you don’t want to be told how lucky you are, but there’s one respect in which you’re very fortunate.”

“What’s that?”

“A lot of men in your position suffer terribly from self-pity. You’re sure lucky that’s not a problem for you.”

For three days he griped and snapped and snarled and whined and rolled his wheelchair across Montana. A couple of the men would help him on and off the chair when he was ready to go to sleep, or when he wanted to attend to a bodily function. But it was always Mame who walked alongside him and listened to his bitching, and she was generally alone with him, because no one else much wanted his company.

“I know he’ll be terrific when he gets off this cripple shit,” Lissa said, summing up the majority opinion, “but until then I really don’t want to know the man.”

“You don’t have to put up with him every day,” Mame was told. “Get somebody to spell you. You listen to that garbage all day long and it does funny things to your head.”

“Oh, it’s good for me,” Mame said. “Every time he opens his mouth I hear things I never let myself think when I had the arthritis. Let alone say them. I don’t mind listening to him. You know, he never does know when a body’s teasing him. It just sails right past him.”

“That’s great,” Jerry said. “The best thing you can say about the son of a bitch is he has no sense of humor.”

On the fourth day, just after they’d crossed into Rosebud County, immediately putting Guthrie in mind of Citizen Kane, Al felt something in his feet. He stopped propelling the wheelchair forward. “My toes!” he said.

“What about them?”

“I can feel them. Can’t be, the nerves are all gone. Must be like an amputee feeling ghost pain in a missing limb. Damn!”

“What’s wrong?”

“That hurts! My God, I’m in pain. I’m getting shooting pains all through my legs. Christ, I’m on fire. The base of my spine feels like it’s being stabbed with a flaming sword. God, I can’t take it!”

“You have to,” Mame said evenly.

He fought the pain in silence, then gave up the battle and screamed. “I can’t do it,” he cried. “I can’t go through this, it’s too much. God, I can’t stand any more!”

“Yes you can,” she told him.

They had been quite a few yards away from the nearest of the others — no one was too anxious to be too close to Al — but now they were drawing a crowd. Jody pushed through the circle, willing power into his hands, but before he could extend them to cover Al’s legs, Mame thrust herself into his path.

“No,” she said firmly. “Don’t you dare take away his pain.”

“But he’s hurting, Mame.”

“I know, and thank God for it. It’s all the pain he never had a chance to feel. He’s got to feel it now. He came here to feel this pain, Jody. Don’t ruin his chance.”

Jody considered, then nodded shortly. “I guess Mame knows what’s happening,” he told the others. “Let’s give them some room.”

The others drew away, and Mame rested her hands on the back rail of Al’s wheelchair and rolled him slowly forward. He was crying out in agony, rocking a little on the base of his spine to fight the pain. “Just let yourself feel it,” she crooned to him. “It can’t kill you. All the pain in the world can’t kill you. It’s been in your body all this time, you poor man. You’re feeling it now because it’s on the way out.”

“Oh, Christ, it hurts,” he said. “Nothing ever hurt so bad.”

“It hurt even worse holding it in. But you just didn’t know it, that’s all.”

“There are these waves of pain, like waves in the ocean, like sheet lightning. Oh, God, I can’t stand it.”

“Yes you can.”

“I can’t.”

“You are standing it.”

“Oh, Jesus, I’m afraid.”

“Of course you are.”

“I’m so scared! I don’t want to die. I’ll be torn apart, I’ll disappear. God, dear God, I’m afraid.”

“It’s all right to be afraid.”

“No it’s not. It’s soft.”

“You can be soft.”

“I can’t! I have to hold it together, don’t you see that? If I let go for a moment I’ll fall apart.”

“And what would happen if you fell apart?”

“I’d… I’d be nothing.”

“You think you’re Humpty Dumpty? You think we couldn’t put you back together again? You think you couldn’t put yourself back together again?”

“I just want it to stop,” he moaned.

“No! You can’t make it stop. I won’t let you. Why do you think I put up with your whining and your nasty mouth and a pool of self-pity deep enough to drown a stork? Because you are going to go through this, mister. You’re going to suffer your pain and shiver through your fear, and worst of all you’re going to look in the mirror and see a fearful man looking back at you. What’s so bad about getting scared?”

“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.”