“I mean, what’s the rush? I mean, why do we have to rush to pack up and go somewhere when you don’t even know where we’re going? If you really want to know, I think you’re acting crazy. That’s what I think.”
“I know it is, Thommy.”
“Mom, I didn’t mean it.”
“Sure you did. It’s okay.”
“No, I—”
“You meant every word of it, sweetie, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
He rushed to her and his embrace was fierce. He said, “I don’t want us to go anywhere. I don’t want you to be blind. I don’t want any of this. It’s not fair.”
“I know.”
“I mean it. It’s not fair. It sucks.”
“I know.”
“I hate this. What’s so funny?”
“Oh, I was just thinking. The other day, when I tried to imagine telling you that I was going blind? I had this image of you jumping up and down and shouting, ‘Oh, goodie, we’ll be getting a dog!’”
“You’re terrible.”
“I know.”
“The good news is we’re getting a dog. The bad news is it’s a seeing-eye dog.”
“Some joke, huh?”
“You’re really terrible.”
“I know,” she said, stroking the blond hair, kneading the nape of the neck. “I’ll tell you what. Fix your terrible mother a cup of tea—”
“With or without cookie crumbs?”
“Without. And I’ll try to explain why everything’s so crazy and why it all has to happen so fast.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know where to start. Okay. These pictures I’ve been seeing, these visions.”
“People walking on a highway.”
“That’s one of the themes, yes. It’s not just a batch of visually interesting images.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is that it’s all part of something very big and very important. There’s a reason why I’m losing my eyesight and getting this other sight in its place. I’m being given an important part to play in something very big that’s happening.”
“What is it?”
She closed her eyes. “Things are happening very rapidly,” she said. “Everything is getting ready to change. I don’t understand it, but maybe I don’t have to understand it. I don’t understand electricity but when I turn the switch the light goes on.”
“Unless the bulb’s out.”
“All of a sudden,” she said, “things that used to be important don’t matter anymore. My work doesn’t matter. Your finals don’t matter; your whole education doesn’t matter. The car doesn’t matter. Whether or not I go blind doesn’t matter. Do you hear what I’m saying, Thommy? None of that stuff matters.”
“What does?”
“Going forward. Letting go of everything that’s not necessary. Thommy, I close my eyes and I see things, but I don’t see all of it. I know we have to leave here within the next couple of days. I want to make arrangements about this house and money and everything before then, but if I can’t handle any of it we’ll just walk away from it, because the important thing is to go. We’ll know more when we have to know more. You know what it’s like? It’s like driving at night. You can only see as far as the headlights reach, but you can go all the way across the country that way.”
“Not if we sell the car. Not if you can’t see to drive.”
“Oh, shit,” she said. “I’m not doing a good job of explaining this.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “I sort of get it.”
Explaining to Thom, she spoke with powerful assurance. Alone, she was less supremely confident. There were doubts, there were fears. But there was always enough certainty to overcome them.
She felt guided.
She sat down with a vice president at her bank and arranged to pay the mortgage payments and taxes out of a line of credit secured by a second mortgage. Angert Motors sent a man out to look at her car, and she wound up getting twelve hundred dollars for her equity in it. Hal Rysbeck cut through a maze of red tape at the school and got her a check for most of what she had coming; the rest would go to her bank and be credited to her account. And a very nice woman at Klopfer & Klopfer Realty listed her house for rent and agreed to have a moving firm pack and store her personal articles.
It all went so smoothly that she took it for confirmation that she was acting appropriately. The universe was endorsing her action by cooperating at every turn. But if there had been any snags she would simply have let go of whatever was stuck. She was willing to leave the car in the driveway for someone to repossess, willing to let the mortgage go unpaid until the bank foreclosed or the city sold the house for back taxes. None of that really mattered because something else, something new, something still incomprehensible, mattered so very much more.
She had had her last appointment with the ophthalmologist on Monday. That Thursday, she and Thom took a taxi to the Greyhound Terminal downtown, where a very helpful black man worked out their route for them and sold them their tickets. They would go from Fort Wayne to Chicago, where they would change to an express bus that went through Davenport and Omaha and Cheyenne en route to Salt Lake City. There they would change to another bus that slanted northwest through Idaho, stopping at Boise en route to Portland.
“Now that’s Portland, Oregon,” the man said, grinning. “You absolutely sure you want Portland, Oregon, and not Portland, Maine?”
“As sure as I am of anything,” she said.
Four
Oregon 138 extends east from Roseburg, terminating when it runs into US 97 at Diamond Lake Junction. The distance between the two points is about eighty miles as the crow flies, but the road meanders, following rivers and creeks and finding its way through the Cascade Range, and that adds another fifteen miles.
Guthrie Wagner covered fourteen miles the first day. Some years back, when he’d been running, he’d reached the point where he was doing seven-minute miles in short races. His regular training pace was slower, between nine and ten minutes a mile, which translated into a little better than six miles an hour. He wasn’t sure what a comfortable walking pace would turn out to be, and he found out it was somewhere between three and four miles an hour. Even with a pack on his back, and without having done anything to condition himself, he seemed able to sustain that pace without effort for hours at a time.
He didn’t know this the first day because he couldn’t tell how fast he was going or how much ground he was covering. It was around four by the time he got out on the two-lane blacktop, and it was getting dark by the time he found a place to stay, a little mom-and-pop motel in Glide. But his map told him he’d covered fourteen miles, and it was ten minutes of nine when he thought to look at his watch, so he felt he could figure on managing a three-mile-an-hour pace without difficulty. Of course the going would get tougher when he started to get into the mountains, but he’d be in better shape by then.
Twenty miles a day, say. Three hours in the morning, three hours in the afternoon.
He showered off the road dust, then ran a hot tub and soaked some of the soreness out of his feet and legs. He ached a little, but in a satisfying way. He dried off and sat in a chair with his feet up, studying his map. There was a television set in the room but he didn’t think to turn it on.
Six miles to Idleyld Park, eighteen to Steamboat, sixteen to Toketee Falls. Then nineteen to Diamond Lake and twenty-two to Diamond Lake Junction. At that point he’d have to decide whether to go north or south on 97, but for the next four days or so all he had to do was keep on walking west.
It might not always be convenient to stop in the towns, and they wouldn’t all necessarily have motels, as far as that went. They were small towns, pinpoint dots on the map, little more than wide places in a narrow road.