Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Twenty-One

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.

When he was finished he rolled onto his side and opened his eyes. “Thanks,” he said.

“You were really out there, Guthrie.”

“Well, I’m back now.”

He walked over to where Mark was sitting. He looked within himself for the fear, the judgment, the desire to punish. All were present, but not nearly as strong as before.

I forgive you, he said silently, for making me look in the mirror.

“Mark is amazing,” Lissa told a couple of people. “He gives the best massage I ever had in my life.”

“You let him massage you?”

“I asked him to. You know, I walked with him yesterday, before we knew anything about him. And I didn’t pick up any killer vibes or anything, so I sort of got to know him before I got to know him, if you follow me. And this morning I was talking to Kimberley and I asked her if she’d picked up anything that I didn’t, because she was the one he almost killed. I mean, he went to that farmhouse with her and he was all set to kill her, except he didn’t.”

“He couldn’t,” Dingo said. “It’s like when you’re an absolute master at Tai Chi, you never have to defend yourself. Say somebody wants to attack you. You don’t do anything, you may not even notice them, but as they’re getting ready to attack you, they forget. The idea of killing you slips their mind.”

“Maybe that’s what happened, I don’t know. Anyway, she said she never picked up any hostility, but that he gave her the best neck rub ever, that his fingers knew just how to get the kinks out.” She shrugged. “So I figured what the hell. He thought I was joking, and then he said he didn’t know anything about massage, that he’d never given a massage, that he’d hardly ever even had one. But then I guess he figured what the hell, and he started on my neck and shoulders and worked on my whole upper back, and it was amazing. I didn’t even feel tight to begin with, but his fingers went where the tension was and knew just what to do. He may not know anything about massage, but his hands know, and they’re wonderful. You know the feeling I had afterward? I felt as though he took bad stuff out of my body.”

“Bad stuff?”

“Yeah. I don’t know how else to put it.”

“He probably did exactly that,” Martha Detweiller said. “He had all that killer energy. When it turns around, it gets transformed into an incredible amount of healing energy. It sounds to me as though he’s gifted.”

“Well, it certainly felt that way.”

“I’d better talk to him,” Martha said, rising. “If he’s taking negativity out of people, he’s got to learn to discharge it or it’ll build up in him. There’s the way Jody taught everybody of wiping your hands when you’re done getting rid of pain, and there are some other things I can teach him. If he’ll visualize white light around himself before and after he works on somebody, that’ll help. Or he can discharge the bad stuff by willing it to flow out of his hands and into the ground, or into moving water.”

“Poor Mark,” Lissa said after she’d left. “To think that all along he had this great gift for rubbing necks, and he wasted all those years wringing them.”

In the morning, Guthrie woke up knowing he had had further healing in his sleep. He had forgiven Mark some more, and he had begun forgiving himself. He was looking for Mark, not sure what it was that he wanted to tell him, when Jody drew him aside.

“Wanted to talk to you for a minute,” he said. “About our route.”

“We’re still not going to Washington.”

“God, do you remember that, hoss? No, I know that, now that Sara let us see how all we have to do is save the world. No, it’s something else. You know where you’re fixing to head from here?”

“Well, I know where we’re going today,” he said. He got out the map, unfolded it to the right section. “We’re right here, a couple of miles north of Madison. We’ll take 34 east from there, and then it becomes Route 30 in Minnesota, and we’ll take it right into Pipestone. There’s a national monument north of there; it’s supposed to be beautiful, where the Indians used to get the red stone for their peace pipes. I don’t know if we’ll get close enough to look at it, but we’ll pass through there.”

“And then?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Jody. I haven’t been looking too far ahead. Once we cross into Minnesota I’ll pick up a state map and see what feels right.”

“I’ve already got one,” Jody said. “Picked it up yesterday.”

“Oh?”

“I got one for the whole country, too, and one for the region.”

“I see,” he said. He took a breath, let it out. “Actually,” he said, “I never formally applied for the job of pathfinder. I just went out for a walk and people kept joining in. If I’m not doing it right, I suppose—”

“Oh, come on, hoss. That’s not what this is about.”

“It’s not?”

“Hell, no.”

“It does sound like it.”

“Well, it’s not. Here’s the U.S. map. Now I know you like to make it up as you go along, but if you had to pick a destination, where would you say you were fixing to take us?”

Guthrie considered. “I’ve thought about it,” he admitted.

“Figured you must have.”

“I don’t let myself dwell on it, but I’ve thought about it. Charlotte and Charleston kept coming to mind.”

“Charlotte’s where, North Carolina? Here it is. And here’s Charleston. Wait a minute, here’s Charleston. There’re two of them.”

“One in West Virginia and one in South Carolina. I know. That confuses the issue, doesn’t it? You know what sounds a little like both of those cities, and that I think might be a good place to go?” He pointed. “Charlottesville. Thomas Jefferson lived there, his home’s open to the public. Monticello. Might be nice taking a look at it.”

“You want to look at it, all you gotta do is take a nickel and turn it over. But I guess you’re talking about a closer look.”

“Well, it might be fun.”

“And anyway, it’ll do for a place to be walking towards.”

“That’s what it really amounts to,” Guthrie said. “It’s the walking there that seems to be important, not the arriving.”

“You bet,” Jody said. “So let’s say you’re going to go in that general direction, which’d be pretty much the same whether you’re going to Charlottesville or Charlotte or either of the Charlestons.”

“Right.”

“So what does that look like on the map? Here we are, here’s Minnesota, and you’d probably want to go on east some through Minnesota, maybe into Wisconsin, maybe coming on down into Iowa. Either way you’d most likely go through Illinois, then Indiana—”

“Or right down into Kentucky. We might be ready for some hill country by then.”

“And then east and maybe south. Uh-huh. Now, let’s look at Minnesota, all right?”

“Whatever you say.”

“Where’s Pipestone? Here’s Pipestone. Now there’s a couple of roads out of Pipestone. If you want to go east you could stay right on 30, or you could come over here and pick up 62. Or you could go north on 75, or south on 75, or there’s Route 23 here slanting off to the northeast. Or you could take 23 south, as far as that goes, and it runs into Iowa 182.”

“What are you getting at, Jody?”

“Shit, boss, I really hate this. I wish I could see a way around this, but I think Pipestone’s a perfect place for us to go separate ways.”

“Why’s that, Jody?”

“Well, you know, I was thinking I might head on down to Pass Christian.”

“Where’s that?”

“Mississippi, right on the Gulf. Lemme find it. There it is, right in there between Biloxi and New Orleans. Right there on the Gulf of Mexico.”

“What’s the big attraction in Pass Christian?”

“Well, I got an aunt down there. I was thinking I might go say hello to her.”

“When’s the last time you saw this aunt?”

He scratched his head. “I’m not too clear on that,” he said. “There’s a pretty good possibility I never did see her, but she might have been visiting us when I was born. She’s a great-aunt, actually. My grandma’s younger sister.”

“So she’s probably along in years.”

“Either that or she’s dead, which is a possibility. I’d have to say we’re not too close to that side of the family.”

“But you thought you might want to go down and check on her.”

“Sure, why not? If she’s alive I could pass the time of day with her, and if she’s not I could go put flowers on her grave, something respectful like that.”

“Either way, you’d be heading south at Pipestone.”

“That’s the idea. Cut down through Missouri and Arkansas and Mississippi. Might be nice, seeing that part of the country.”

“Why do you want to leave the group, Jody?”

“I won’t exactly be doing that, hoss. I’ll be taking part of the group with me.”

“Oh?”

“Guthrie, we’re gettin’ too damn big! Remember when there wasn’t but four of us, and you didn’t like the idea of the group getting any bigger than that? Now we’re getting new people faster’n I can count ’em, and that’s a good thing, but the logistics of it are gettin’ tricky. You can’t send two hundred people into a restaurant. You can’t even shop for ’em at a food store without emptying the shelves.

“And, at the same time that we’re growing too fast, we’re growing too slow. We’re not getting to enough people. If we were two groups we’d be passing through two parts of the country at once and we’d be growing twice as fast.”

“And in a week or two we’d have the same problems of growth,” Guthrie said. “Because we’d have two groups of two hundred people each.”

“That’s if we only had two groups, hoss.” He pointed to the map. “There’s a lot of roads out of Pipestone. Martha and I’ll be taking some people south on 75. You’ll be staying with 30. Dingo and Gary were thinking about cutting northeast on 23 and taking that right on through St. Cloud and across northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and then on across Canada.” He shook his head. “Be damned cold in a few months, but cold doesn’t seem to hurt us a whole lot. Let’s see now. Les and Georgia and Sue Anne said they might head south a ways with me, but they’ll cut west down through Nebraska and then on into the southwestern desert. New Mexico, Arizona. Bud and Ellie want to go through Texas and into Mexico. That’ll probably mean splitting up little Richard and his new girlfriend, unless Amanita tags along with them. And I think it was Douglas and Beverly who wanted to swing wide around Chicago and then skirt the Great Lakes and wind up in New England. I don’t guess they’ll get there in time for the fall foliage. More likely they’ll make it there about the same time the snow does, but he used to be a survivalist, so his training’ll come in handy there. You all right, Guthrie?”

“I don’t know. I guess the whole group is splitting up.”

“It’s dividing into a lot of little groups. It’s not like everybody’s packing up and going home.”

“No, I understand that.” He heaved a sigh. “You want to know something? I feel threatened.”

“Yeah, I can see where you would.”

“Where was I when everybody was planning all of this?”

“There wasn’t a whole lot of planning that went on, Guthrie. The same kind of idea seemed to come on a bunch of people at the same time, mostly the ones who’ve been walking since early on. The idea was just sort of there. Maybe the day before yesterday I thought to myself, I wonder how old Aunt Mae is. Now years go by and I don’t think of the woman, and I wasn’t kidding when I said I don’t know for sure if she’s alive or dead. But the thought came and I shrugged it off and it came again, and I thought I ought to go down to wherever it is, Pass fucking Christian, and say hello to her. And meanwhile Dingo’s having these thoughts about Canada and he hasn’t even got an aunt there, and Douglas is telling Bev how the real roots of America are all in New England and he really wants to go there. It just came to everybody. You know how that happens.”

“It sounds like what we’re supposed to do.”

“Well, it seems that way to me, Guthrie. It really does. But I’ll tell you something. If you say you don’t like it, I for one’ll say the hell with it. The others can do what they want, but I’ll forget about Aunt Mae and Pass Christian and we’ll go to Charlotte or Charleston or Charlie’s Left Nut, wherever you say. I mean, shit, hoss, you’re the man got me out of Klamath Falls, so you just say the word.”

“You had a tattoo then.”

“You had a whole carton of Camels and couldn’t think what to do with them.”

He looked at the map, and now he seemed to see a web of lines radiating out of Pipestone, branching out again and again as they spread across the country. A wave of mixed emotions washed over him, and his first impulse was to shed them like a duck’s back, but he had learned better. He let himself feel what he was feeling.

“It’s funny,” he said. “I know you’re all right about this. For all the reasons you said. And just because it feels right. We’re growing too fast and too slow, both at once, and this solves both problems.”

“It sure looks like it does.”

“But my ego hates this. It fucking hates it. I always said we were just people walking together, we didn’t have a leader, but I never believed that all the way. I kept being the one who decided where we would go next, I was Fearless Leader all down the line. Now I’m going to be just one of the leaders and I’m going to be leading just one of the groups.” He shook his head. “I guess I was more attached to being a big shot than I thought.”

“Once again, welcome to the human race.”

“That’s about the size of it.” He folded the map. “It’s not just ego,” he said. “I’m going to miss everybody.”

“We’re all feeling that. If there was another way that worked—”

“There isn’t. What does Sara say?”

“That she knew this would happen but she didn’t know when.”

“And how does she feel about it?”

“The same as you. The same as everybody else.”

“Who’s she going with?”

“Now that’s funny,” Jody said. “I didn’t even ask her.”

He was afraid to find out. When they started out toward Madison he managed to be at the front of the group, and he held that post because it served two purposes — it let him tell himself he was indeed the leader, fearless or otherwise, and it kept him from having to look at all the people he was leading and wondering which ones would be leaving him in Pipestone.

Maybe he should just stay in Pipestone. He could sneak into the place where the red stone itself was preserved from rockhounds and set aside for the ceremonial use of the Indians, and he could break off a hunk of it and spend a couple of months carving it to make a pipe bowl. Then he could fit it with a wooden stem and wrap himself up in a blanket and smoke all day. For ceremonial purposes only, of course. Just to put himself in touch with the spirits.

He stayed at the lead until they had swung east again on 34. Then he waited to one side while they went on past him, scanning the ranks for Sara. She was walking along hand in hand with her son Thom; watching them, Guthrie wondered if anyone who didn’t know would suspect that the woman was blind.

He fell into step beside her, took her free hand in his. “Guthrie,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

“Beautiful morning.”

“Yes, isn’t it?”

“I figure we’ll make it an easy day’s walking today. Pipestone’s too far to do in a day, so we’ll just walk to the Interstate or a little bit beyond it today, and go the rest of the way tomorrow.”

“That sounds good.”

“That’ll give us all two more nights together, and then the next morning in Pipestone we can set out on separate paths.”

“It’s all one path, Guthrie.”

“I guess. I had a talk with Jody.”

“He told me.”

“I’m not against it. When I think about it I even have the sense that it was there all the time waiting for me to hit on it myself. But it tears me up all the same.”

“Of course it does.”

“It’s the right thing. I remember way back at the beginning when you said you didn’t come all this way to play four-handed group therapy. Well, I didn’t walk this far just to play Follow the Leader. But with six or eight groups of us, all of them branching out whenever they start to get too large, why, we’ll fill the country.”

“We’ll be the country.”

“But I hate losing everybody in the meantime. Jody especially. I’m going to miss him.”

“So will I.”

“And everybody else, of course. Dingo and Gary and Doug and Bev and Les and Georgia and Martha and — oh, everybody. Even the ones I haven’t had a chance to get to know yet, even the ones who’ll be joining up today and tomorrow. I feel as though everyone who leaves will be taking something away from me.”

“They will, Guthrie. They’ll be taking what you’ve given them.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know it’s not. You mean you’ll be diminished by their departure, that there’ll be less of you for their leaving. But that’s not true. Nobody’s really leaving, Guthrie. We’re just extending the line of march, spreading ourselves out a little farther.”

“Maybe.”

“If the others always have you for a leader, they’ll miss finding leadership within themselves. And we need plenty of leaders.”

“I suppose so.” After a moment he said, “It’s going to be hard for anyone to be a leader without you along to tell him what he’s doing.”

“I’m not sure about that. I think we may retain some kind of access to each other’s minds, no matter how far apart we may be physically. I don’t know that distance exists on the plane where our minds are linked up. We’ve come a long way, you know.”

“All the way from Oregon.”

“Don’t be intentionally obtuse. You know that’s not what I mean. The other night, when Mark went back to his birth and went through it again, everybody was linked to him telepathically. We weren’t just picking up vibes. We were hooked up with him. That’s the kind of connection the whole human race has to make in order for things to work out. When we’re all linked up and functioning together as the cognitive brain of the planet, it will be perfectly natural for everyone to act for the good of all. And we forged a link in the chain, Guthrie. There are only two hundred of us and there are five billion people on the planet, but we’re growing, and it may not take many to start a reaction. You only need a couple of pebbles to start an avalanche, if they fall right.”

He thought about it. “So you’ll still be available? People can pick up a phone and call you on the astral plane?”

“I’m not sure how it will work. I think that if they need to know something and I know it, they’ll just get it. They’ll reach back onto that shelf in their mind, and what they need will be there.”

“Could be.”

“And they’ll know how to make certain leadership decisions because they’ll be connected to your mind.”

“Lucky for them,” he said. “But it won’t be the same as having you to talk to.”

“You’ll still have me to talk to.”

“I mean face to face.”

“So do I. I wouldn’t want to miss the Kentucky hills. They’re supposed to be beautiful in the fall.” She smiled. “Just wait until I describe them to you.”