Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Six

In Chicago, the bus terminal in the Loop had coin-access cubicles in the restrooms where you could take a sponge bath, freshen up, and change your clothes. When Sara emerged from the ladies’ room Thom was waiting for her. Downstairs, she sat with their suitcases while he picked out a couple of paperback science fiction novels. He had already read fifty pages of one when it was time to board their bus for Salt Lake City.

They sat together four seats in back of the driver. She’d given Thom the window seat. Across the aisle, a very thin man with a sallow complexion was dosing himself with cough medicine. He had the whole seat to himself. Directly in front of him, a middle-aged couple sat holding hands. Thom looked out the window until the bus had left city traffic for the Stevenson Expressway. Then he returned to his book.

Sara sat with her eyes closed most of the time. She slept some, but it was difficult to tell where consciousness left off and sleep began. Her sleep was light and dream-ridden, her conscious periods hazy and dreamlike. Movies revealed themselves to her mind’s eye. Snatches of speech sounded in her mind. Sometimes it was of a piece with what she was seeing, sometimes not.

South and west of Joliet the bus left Route 55 for Interstate 80, the road it would stay with clear through to Salt Lake City — and, after she and Thom left it, all the way on to San Francisco. They crossed into Iowa at Davenport, and Thom nudged her awake as they moved onto the bridge across the Mississippi. She looked out the window. Her field of vision was too narrow to show her much, but when she sat back and closed her eyes she saw the entire river, from its headwaters at Lake Itasca to its delta at New Orleans. She could see, in one panoramic view, the whole great river through all its history — paddle-wheelers, Indians in war canoes, Huck and Jim on a raft, mills and factories spilling chemicals into the water, jet contrails overhead. People battling the rising waters, stacking sandbags to stop a flood. Railroad bridges, bridges for cars. Ox-drawn prairie schooners crossing on ferries. Eyes closed, her field of vision was so great that it could encompass all the river’s time and space without any shrinkage or loss of detail, and it was all in flux, all in motion, all evolving not before but behind her eyes—

“I wish you could see this,” he said.

“Oh, Thommy,” she said, and clutched his arm. “Oh, if you could see what I see—” He wanted to know what she meant and she told him about it, described what she saw and heard and sensed and felt and knew of the river.

He was in awe. “You see all that? How does it all fit at once?”

She took his book from him, pointed at the page he was reading. “How big a picture would you need to hold everything on this page?”

“A pretty big one,” he allowed, but he still couldn’t comprehend how she saw what she saw, and she didn’t know how to get it across to him.

“But it’s wonderful,” she said. “I never knew what a river was.”

“You didn’t?”

“Well, what’s a river, Thom?”

“Water going someplace, I guess. In a straight line, except sometimes they’re not straight, they meander. Bigger than a creek or a stream, and moving fast enough so there’s a current, and I think it has to be fresh water—”

“That’s a definition,” she said. “That’s how you look at a body of water and decide whether or not it’s a river, by whether or not it fits certain standards. But what’s the river?”

“What you just said. A body of water that fits certain what-you-said. Standards.”

“What part is the river? The water?”

“I guess.”

“But it’s only in the river for a while. It flows in from some other stream and flows out into the Gulf of Mexico. There’s always new water coming in and old water flowing out. So what’s the river? The land on either side is the bank of the river, the mud underneath is the bottom of the river, but what’s the river?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think the river’s a certain time and space,” she said, “and sooner or later every drop of water in the world gets to take its turn being a part of it. And then they go somewhere else. This drop goes to the Gulf, and this drop evaporates, and somebody drinks this drop—”

“And this little drop goes to market, and this little drop stays home—”

“A little of the worlds energy is gathered up into a river,” she said, “and the water makes sure it’s never empty.”

Iowa City and Des Moines. Rolling hills in eastern Iowa, then the plains in the west. The highway was straight as a die west of Des Moines, and almost perfectly flat. They crossed the Missouri into Nebraska and stopped at the terminal in Omaha. They had covered almost five hundred miles since leaving Chicago ten hours ago.

They had half an hour to eat before they had to reboard the bus. There was a restaurant in the bus terminal but it didn’t feel right energetically, and when she closed her eyes she saw slivers of broken glass. The people in the booths and at the counter had the air of the hunt about them, as if they were all at once predators and victims.

She took Thom’s arm and led him back into the terminal and across the lobby to the Farnam Avenue entrance. On the sidewalk, she turned without hesitation to the right and walked half a block, where they found a brightly-lit cafeteria between two stores that had closed for the weekend.

The place was clean, the prices reasonable, and the food decent. An old man with wispy white hair smiled shyly from an adjacent table, then went back to his newspaper crossword puzzle. On the sound system, an orchestra was playing “Moonlight in Vermont.”

He went back for a second glass of milk. She sipped her tea. He said, “Mom, you knew this place’d be here, didn’t you?”

“I knew something would be here.”

“Did you like see a picture of it?”

“Not exactly. Let me try to remember.” She closed her eyes. “I sort of saw us sitting at a table.”

“You saw us?”

“I saw the idea of us,” she said. “And I walked to where that would be, and here we are.”

“This is pretty weird, Mom.”

“No kidding.”

“Were those Indians in the bus station? Over by the lockers?”

“They certainly looked like Indians.”

“Is this the West?”

“Well, I think so. We’re west of the Mississippi. We just crossed the Missouri. Of course you don’t have to be this far west to see Indians. There are Indians all over the country.”

“Indians. Can I have a horse?”

“A seeing-eye horse.”

He started to giggle and was quickly convulsed with laughter. “Oh, you’re bad,” he said. “You’re really bad.”

They were back in their same seats when the bus pulled out of Omaha. The thin man with the cough syrup had gone, and in his place sat a light-skinned black woman wearing a scarf. The middle-aged hand-holders were gone, too, and a young soldier in uniform sprawled over both the seats they had occupied.

They crossed the Platte, skirted Lincoln, crossed the Platte again at Grand Island, hugged its northern bank for a hundred miles and crossed it a third time, following the south fork and then Lodgepole Creek into southern Wyoming. They had another meal break in Cheyenne, let off passengers, took on passengers, and rolled on west through Laramie and Rock Springs.

It was dark as they rode through Wyoming. But she could see. They reached the foothills of the Rockies as they neared Laramie, and she saw the mountains and felt the magnetic power of them. She saw bighorn sheep, surefooted on the sheer slopes, the rutting males clashing head-on in ritual combat, saw mountain goats white and silent, gazing motionless over the valleys. She saw the mountains forming, willing their way upward out of the earth’s convexity, stretching like plant growth toward the sun. She saw mountain men, fur-clad hunters and trappers as solitary as bears or badgers. She saw prospectors, she saw hard-rock miners from Wales and Cornwall. She saw the buffalo dying, carcasses rotting in the sun, and she saw the land sliced by rail lines and cordoned off with fences. She saw Stone Age people who’d lived in the mountains and left not a trace of their presence, and she saw Indian wars, and she saw ranch houses with big dish TV antennas and solar-powered generators.

Thom slept at her side. He woke up once outside of Rock Springs and walked up the aisle to the lavatory, then returned smelling faintly of liquid soap and slipped back effortlessly into sleep. She dozed off herself, and when she opened her eyes he was already awake and they were coming into Salt Lake City.

They had almost four hours before their bus left for Portland. They checked their bags and had breakfast, then followed signs to Temple Square, where they joined a group for a guided tour of Mormon headquarters. You couldn’t enter the temple unless you were a paid-up tithing Mormon, but there was a great deal else to see, and just by standing in front of the temple she could sense the spiritual balance within it.

After the tour he said, “Mom, your eyes are getting worse, aren’t they?”

“How can you tell?”

“I don’t know, I just can. They are, aren’t they?”

“The tunnel’s narrowing. And there’s a little less light at the end of it.”

“But you’re not afraid?”

“Oh, a little bit, Thommy. The idea of not having my eyes to see with is scary. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m getting more vision than I’m giving up.”

“Why can’t you have both?”

“Some people probably can. But in my case I evidently have to let go of one in order to open up to the other.”

“And the way you can see now is better?”

“It’s better for me. At least it is right now.”

“That was great the way we found that place in Omaha. Can you see where we’re going to have lunch?”

“We just had breakfast.”

“Well, aren’t we going to eat before our bus leaves?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well—”

“How does Chinese sound?”

“Is that what you see when you close your eyes?”

“Nope. It just occurred to me we haven’t had any in a while.”

“You know where there’s a Chinese restaurant?”

“No, but somebody else probably does. Sometimes you let your inner vision guide you, Sport, and other times you ask a cop for directions.”

On the bus he said, “What happens when we get to Portland?”

“I think we get a room for the night. We could probably both stand a night’s sleep in a real bed. And I know we could use a bath, and we’re not likely to smell all that sweeter twelve hours from now.”

“Is that when we get into Portland?”

“He said fourteen hours. I forget where we stop. Boise, but there was someplace else.”

“I wasn’t paying attention. Mom? Besides a hotel room, what else do we do in Portland?”

“Get on another bus.”

“We’re not staying in Portland?”

“Just long enough to sleep and shower. And eat — God knows I wouldn’t dream of making you miss a meal.”

“Those spareribs were good.”

“I’m glad you approved.”

“So was the lo mein. Do you suppose the Chinese people at the restaurant were Mormons?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Aha, something you don’t know. Are there any Chinese Mormons?”

“Didn’t they say so on the tour? There must be, they send missionaries everywhere. Why?”

“I just wondered. Where do we go from Portland?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But I will.”

In downtown Portland they shared a fifteen-dollar room at the Jack London Hotel on South Alder. The bathroom was down the hall. They took turns soaking in the huge footed tub, then got into their beds. He fell asleep right away. She lay awake for a while listening to the man next door, whose cough sounded serious, and possibly tubercular.

After breakfast they stopped at a Salvation Army store, where Thom noticed a used paperback of Martin Eden on a table outside. He wanted to buy it because they’d just stayed at the Jack London. “It’s good we didn’t stay at the James Joyce,” she said. “You’re a little young for Finnegans Wake.”

At the bus station she asked the clerk for two tickets to Bent. “There is such a place, isn’t there? Or it could be Ben.”

“There’s Bend.”

“Yes, Bend,” she said. “Of course, Bend. Is there bus service there?”

“Or there’s North Bend,” the woman said helpfully.

“Are they close to each other?”

“You’d think they would be, but they’re in different directions altogether. Bend is south and east of here and North Bend is on the coast next to Coos Bay, if you know where that is.”

She didn’t, but it didn’t matter. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Is there bus service to Bend?”

“There is, but we don’t go there. Trailways does, though. You know where their station is?”

She didn’t, but the woman gave her directions and it wasn’t far. Their timing was perfect; there was a bus leaving for Salem and Bend in forty-five minutes.

The ride to Salem took less than an hour on the Interstate. There half the passengers got off and a handful got on, and they headed south and east on Route 22. The road wound and climbed its way through the mountains, and the bus stopped at every little town it came to, and it took all day to get to Bend.

When they arrived her inner vision was perfect. She knew just where to go, and without hesitation she led Thom through the little bus station to the street, where a man with a visored cap was sitting on the fender of a rusted-out Ford and reading a newspaper. He asked if she needed a taxi and when she nodded he took their suitcases and put them in the trunk.

She asked if there was a motel called the Pine Haven. There was, he told her — just south of town on 97. The Pine Haven turned out to be a U-shaped one-story structure of twenty-seven units. It had modest rates, a small pool, cable TV, a 7-Eleven next door and a Wendy’s across the road. It also had a vacancy, and they took it.

“This is neat,” he said. “They even got HBO. I wonder what’s on.”

“Something wonderful, I’m sure.”

“Hope so. That pool looks pretty good. Did I bring a swimming suit?”

“Wear a pair of shorts.”

“Underwear?”

“No, regular shorts. I know I packed your blue shorts, and they’re polysomething, they’ll dry overnight.”

“Won’t it look weird?”

“Do you really care?”

He thought it over. “Not a humongous amount,” he decided, and threw himself down on a chair. “We’re here, huh? This is it?”

“We’re here and this is it.”

“We weren’t supposed to go to North Bend instead?”

“No.”

“‘This is the place.’ Isn’t that what Brigham Young said when he saw Salt Lake City?”

“His very words.”

“When was that they told us?”

“I forget. Eighteen-something.”

“No, I mean when was it we were there. Yesterday? No. Wait a minute. We were in Portland last night, yeah, yesterday morning we were in Salt Lake City. ‘This is the place.’ And he wasn’t even going blind.”

“Well, different strokes for different folks.”

“Different visions for different decisions. Hey! Did you hear that?”

“Not bad.”

“‘Different visions for different decisions.’ I like that.”

“Your cleverness is matched only by your modesty, sport.”

“Thanks,” he said. He puffed his cheeks, blew out air, slapped his palms together and then against his thighs to simulate hoofbeats. “Now what?”

“Take a swim, if you feel like it.”

“Yeah, but what I mean is now that we’re here, now what?”

“They’re very close.”

“Who are?”

“Our friends.”

“We’ve got friends coming?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Who are they?”

“Two men. One is taller, with dark hair. The shorter one has a beard.”

“And they’re coming here? Do they know us?”

“Not yet.”

“Okay.”

She looked at him. His image dimmed for a moment before her eyes, then sharpened. She said, “Thom, I got the name of the town. I missed it by a letter, but I got it. And I knew about the motel.”

“And the cafeteria in where was it, Omaha. You’re doing great, Mom.”

“You don’t think I’m crazy?”

“No, of course not.”

“Okay. I don’t think so either, but sometimes I’m not as sure as I am the rest of the time. What’s happening is there are two men coming to Bend. They’re on their way now, and they should get here soon. I don’t know exactly when. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not for another day or two.”

“How will we know when they’re here?”

“We’ll know.”

“Okay. You mean you’ll know, and you’ll tell me.”

“Right.”

“Meanwhile I’m going swimming. They won’t think I’m a jerk if they see me swimming in regular shorts?”

“They’ll think you’re a man who makes his own rules. Thommy? I should have thought to pack your bathing suit. We’ll get one for you tomorrow or the next day.”

The following day she sat out by the pool gazing down the highway. He spent part of the time swimming, part of it reading and watching television. At mealtimes she sent him over to Wendy’s and he brought back food for the two of them.

Her eyesight was almost gone. It seemed to her as though she saw demonstrably less every time she opened her eyes, and that what little sight she had left was something she was holding onto by a thread. On the one hand she had to hold onto it, and at the same time she had to let go, it would be such a relief to let go.

With her eyes closed she kept seeing them, walking up the road, one with his hands plunged into his pockets, one talking, gesturing broadly with his hands.

Oh, she saw so much.

She waited, but they didn’t come that day. The next morning she woke up knowing they’d be there soon, and she sent Thom across to Wendy’s and waited for him in a chair beside the pool. They ate breakfast there, and then he went in to watch a Clint Eastwood movie on HBO.

After lunch she had him sit out at the pool with her. “They’ll be coming very soon,” she said. “I want you to watch the road for me. They’ll be walking on this side of the highway, and they’ll be coming from the right.”

“Two men.”

“The taller one is wearing a knapsack.”

“What about the shorter one?”

“He isn’t carrying anything.”

“Well, he’s got the beard. I guess that’s enough.”

“Just watch for them, will you?”

“Is it okay if I read at the same time? I’ll look up every few minutes.”

They sat together, and then she must have dozed off, and something stirred within her just as he touched her arm and said, “Mom?”

She opened her eyes. For a moment she saw nothing, nothing at all, and she thought that the last of her eyesight had gone, but then it came back, just the narrowest beam of sight, and she looked as if down a very long tunnel and saw two men at its very end.

“Go to them,” she told him. “Tell them your mother wants to see them.”

“Just tell them that?”

“Go.”

She stood up. It was a tricky business walking; she had to look down to see her feet, then had to raise her eyes to see what was ahead of her. It was easier, really, to close her eyes and trust her feet to find their footing.

She walked down the blacktop driveway to where the three of them waited. And yes, the tall man had a pack on his back, and yes, the shorter man had a beard, but there was more red in the yellow than she had seen in her mind’s eye.

And there was such a rich aura around them, and such a good energy coming from them.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” she said. They looked at her, not sure what she meant, and she said, “I’m Sara Duskin. This is my son, his name is Thom.”

They introduced themselves. Guthrie Wagner and Jody Ledbetter.

“I’m so pleased to meet you,” she said, and held out a hand to each of them. They took her hands, and a current ran through the three of them, so strong that she almost gasped. And they could feel it, too, and she looked at each of them, looked at them in turn because her field of vision could not encompass both of them at once.

“Oh, yes, yes,” she said, holding tight with her hands and letting go deep inside herself, letting the last of her eyesight slip away forever.

And then she saw:

Saw Guthrie learning to ride a two-wheeler, biting his lip in concentration, his father steadying the frame of the bike with one hand and running along beside him, saying Yes, you’re doing it, you’ve got it now, don’t quit, yes—

Saw Jody in the womb, impatient to be born, a breech presentation trying to thrust himself ass-first into the world, and the obstetrician trying to reposition him, big hands working to shift him, and she picked up the thought of No no no, damn you, no, let me do it my way—

Saw Guthrie at Boy Scout camp, his khaki shorts down around his knees, and an older boy playing with his penis, and Guthrie wanting him to stop, but not knowing how to make him stop—

Saw Jody fighting with his older brother, and losing, and brooding over it, and coming back the next day and blind-siding his brother with an axe handle, and getting punished for it, getting the strap from their father and locked for hours in a musty attic room to think about it—

Saw Guthrie on his wedding day, standing up stiff and scared in a suit, wondering who this stranger was beside him, and then the divorce, and wondering where it had all come from, and where it had all gone—

Saw Jody in a tattoo parlor in Seattle, just out of high school, drunk, proud, excited, scared to be scared, watching the spider in its web taking form upon his arm—

Saw Guthrie at his father’s funeral, dry-eyed—

Saw Jody at his mother’s grave—

Oh, she saw their whole lives! She saw into them, she saw all the joy and all the pain and all the grief, all the rich human beauty. “Oh,” she said, her gray sightless eyes open now, her face radiant. “Oh,” she said, her heart wide open now, warmth flooding her chest, tears streaming from her eyes. “Oh, my friends,” she said, tightening her grip on their hands, transported by waves of her love for them, of their love for her, of all the love that was suddenly so abundant in the universe.

“Oh, my friends,” she said. “My friends!”