“They do all right by you,” the man said. “You want to stop by for a minute? I just made some coffee, if you could do with a cup.”
The motel office had a pair of wooden armchairs with vinyl cushions flanking a console television. A drama about a Los Angeles law firm was playing, the sound pitched almost inaudibly low. Guthrie took his coffee black; the owner, whose name was McLemore, stirred in a powdered creamer and two sugars. His wife was in Grants Pass, he said, spending a few days visiting her mother.
“She has Alzheimer’s,” he said. “By God, that’s an awful way to end up. Here’s a woman who never did any harm her whole life and she finished up like that. You read about that man, I think he was down in Florida, his wife had Alzheimer’s and he shot her?”
“Didn’t he go to jail?”
“Isn’t that terrible? You got the scum of the earth walking around free and that man has to go to jail. I’ll tell you, if my wife got like that, I’d put her down. What kind of man wouldn’t do for his wife what he’d do for a dog? And I’ll tell you something else, I don’t believe people around here would convict you. I don’t know what kind of people live in Florida, but we’re not like that here.”
The coffee wasn’t bad. It could have been stronger, but it wasn’t bad.
“Now you’re doing some hiking,” McLemore said. “I’ll tell you, it’s not every day someone comes in here on foot. Where’d you walk from?”
“Roseburg.”
“Roseburg! Why, that’s got to be seventy-five miles.”
“Just about.”
“How long you been walking?”
“Today was the fourth day.”
“Four days. So you’re making pretty close to twenty miles a day. Where you headed? Crater Lake, I guess?”
“I don’t think so.”
“No? You ought to see it if you never have, as close as you are to it now.”
“I was there a couple of years ago. I think I’ll pass this time around.”
“And just head on back to Roseburg? Least you’ll be going downhill on the way back.”
“No, I think I’ll keep going for a while.”
“Headed where?”
“East, I think.”
“East!”
“I think so.”
“How far you gonna go? You thinking to cross the whole country?”
“I might.”
“Your shoes holding up?”
“So far.”
“How ’bout your feet?”
“They’re all right.”
“By God,” McLemore said. “Twenty miles a day, well, yes, you just about could find places to stay, couldn’t you? Where’d you put up last night in Toketee? His cabins aren’t worth a damn, and the motel’s not a whole lot better.”
“Well,” he said, “actually, last night I camped out. I got a few miles past Toketee and just walked off the road into the woods and spent the night there.”
“You probably weren’t a lot worse off than in one of those cabins, from what I hear about ’em.” McLemore frowned in thought. “None of my business, but I could have sworn you weren’t carrying but a little knapsack when you checked in.”
“That’s right.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you could fit a sleeping bag in there.”
“I don’t have one. I slept in my clothes.”
“In your clothes. You mean what you’re wearing now?”
“Well, a different shirt and my other jeans. And I put on an extra pair of socks.”
“And that little windbreaker, I guess.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s all?” McLemore stared at him. “Weren’t you cold?”
“A little, but it wasn’t bad. I had a fire.”
“A fire.”
“A campfire, I let it burn down when I went to sleep. I suppose it was against the law, but—”
“Forget the law. You slept out in the open last night in your clothes. No tent, no sleeping bag, no blanket. Mister, are you telling me a story?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe you parked down the road. Maybe you drove here from Roseburg.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Don’t ask me. Maybe you’re one of those psychological liars, or maybe you don’t want anybody seeing your car. Or maybe you just want to see if you can make a fool out of a person.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know what the temperature got down to last night, mister? The low forties, and it wouldn’t have been any warmer closer to Toketee. You sleep without cover on a night like that and you’d wake up chilled to the bone, providing you woke up at all. A man’d freeze to death, likely as not, sleeping out like you said you did.”
Guthrie looked at him.
“You expect me to believe you, mister?”
He stood up. “You can believe whatever you want,” he said. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to me. Thanks for the coffee.” He walked to the door, opened it. “It didn’t seem all that cold,” he said.
South of Diamond Lake the road forked, with 138 swinging to the right and heading east along the northern border of Crater Lake National Park. There was a little more traffic on this part of the road, and it would be heavier in July and August, when the tourists came.
The Fair Harbor Inn gave you complimentary coffee and doughnuts in the morning, but he hadn’t wanted to deal with McLemore at that hour, so he’d stopped for breakfast on his way out of town. He stopped again at an Amoco station for a Coke around eleven and realized he hadn’t had a cigarette since the one he’d taken a puff of after dinner the previous night.
He thought about that, and about having slept out on a cold night without having much felt the cold. Maybe the two phenomena went together, maybe nicotine withdrawal generated heat.
Did he want a cigarette now?
No, he decided. He didn’t. He seemed to have lost the habit, as if he had walked out from under it just as he’d walked out from under all the encumbrances of his life. His apartment, his job, his car, his friends, his books, his records, his furniture, most of his clothes, he’d walked away from them all, sloughing them off like a snake shedding its skin.
The image, he decided, was an apt one. He was walking away from all the parts of himself that he had outgrown. Somehow, evidently, he had outgrown the need for tobacco, because God knew he’d never had the intention of quitting. He hadn’t quit. Quitting had simply happened to him.
And the night in the woods?
Maybe McLemore had been wrong about the temperature. Maybe it had indeed been warmer closer to Toketee Falls. Maybe the trees, besides breaking the wind, had served to hold in the heat from the campfire.
One of these nights he’d have to try it again, and see what happened.
But not that night. Diamond Lake Junction wasn’t much more than a crossroads, but there were a couple of motels positioned to catch tourists en route to Crater Lake. He stayed in one that got WTBS on cable, and he watched the Braves shut out the Dodgers in L.A. During commercials he kept looking at the map, and in the morning he looked at it again. He could go north on US 97 toward Bend, or he could go south to Klamath Falls. He looked at the map, and he tried to calculate the best route to, well, to wherever he was going.
His mind kept juggling possibilities. Klamath Falls was closer, but from Bend he could proceed more directly east. Then too, the first dot on the map south of Diamond Lake Junction was forty miles away, while if he headed north there were towns spaced at fairly frequent intervals. On the other hand, he’d probably find places to stay whether or not there were dots on the map, and he could always sleep in the woods again and find out if he froze to death this time. On the other hand—
North.
Not a voice in his head this time, but something close to it. Counsel from some source within or without him. Go north, it gave him to understand. Don’t work things out, don’t try to think your way through it. Just listen, and you’ll always know where to go.