He hadn’t shaved since leaving Roseburg, which seemed to indicate that he was growing his beard back. Now, after the better part of a week, there was enough there to trim up a little. He didn’t like the way it felt on his neck, and he didn’t like the way the whiskers grew almost to his eyes.
He lathered his neck and shaved it, and he shaved around his cheekbones, and then he said the hell with it and shaved the rest of it, too.
He seemed to have given up deciding things, he realized. It looked as though the only way for him to find out what he was going to do was to wait and see what he did.
Earlier he’d had remarkably good weather. It had rained some since he left Roseburg, but never while he was out in it. It rained evenings while he was inside, and the other day he’d waited out a brief downpour in a service station, but he’d managed the trick of getting across the Cascades without once getting caught in the rain. Rain was still a possibility on this side of the mountains — he was a long ways yet from the state’s eastern desert — but it was less likely, and it wasn’t something he had to worry about this particular day.
Because the weather was perfect, with the sun bright and warm in a startlingly blue sky, and only a few puffs of cloud high overhead. He walked along, keeping a fairly brisk pace with no effort, the pack riding easily on his shoulders.
Two hours out of Diamond Lake Junction, and perhaps that many miles past a clutch of houses and stores called Beaver Marsh, he heard a horn sound on the other side of the road. He turned to see a dark blue Datsun pickup, the window rolled down on the driver’s side and a man’s face looking at him. The man was motioning for him to come over.
There was no traffic in either direction. He crossed the road, and the fellow said, “Hey, hop in. Toss your gear in the back and come on around.”
“Thanks,” he said, “but I’m walking.”
“Well, I can see that, hoss. If you was driving, I wouldn’t have stopped for you.”
“I appreciate it,” he said. “But I don’t really want a ride.”
“Something wrong with my truck?”
“Not that I can see. I’m just out for a walk, that’s all.” The fellow scratched his head. He looked to be in his late twenties, with a lot of strawberry blond hair and an inch-wide strip of beard the same color running down along the edge of the jawline. His upper lip was shaved clean, as were his cheeks and neck. He was thick in the chest and big in the arms, and he had a tattoo on his left forearm showing a spider in its web. He was wearing an Olympia Beer gimme cap and a red T-shirt with nothing written on it.
He said, “Just out for a walk.”
“That’s right.”
“I always figure why walk when you can ride, but you can suit yourself, I guess. Where you headed?”
“East.”
The fellow grinned, showing crooked teeth. “Well, shit,” he said. “Where you’re goin’s north.”
“I know. I’m going north as far as Bend, and then—”
“You’re walking to Bend?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re kidding. That must be eighty fucking miles!”
“More like seventy, I think.”
“Seventy miles. You’re planning on walking seventy miles?”
“Not all today.”
“Not all today. Well, shit, I just hope not. Where’d you come from?”
“Diamond Lake Junction.”
“Just down the road? You live there?”
“No, I stayed there last night. I live in Roseburg.”
“You mean to say you walked all the way from Roseburg? You know what you did, hoss? You walked across a fucking mountain range.” He snorted. “I never heard of anybody doing that before. And I sure as shit never heard of anybody walking to Bend.”
“Well—”
“How far you planning to go today?”
“That depends. Maybe all the way to Crescent, maybe just to where the cutoff to Eugene is.”
“That’s 58, runs to Eugene. Hop in and I’ll run you to Crescent. Not that there’s anything in Crescent. Hell, I’ll run you clear to Bend, save you three or four days if you want. That’s where I’m headed.”
“Thanks, but—”
The fellow squinted, focusing pale blue eyes at Guthrie. “You got a real thing about walking,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“I guess I do.”
“Say it was raining. You’d take a ride then, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I don’t think so, but I can’t really say for sure.”
“Might depend how hard it was coming down.”
“It might.”
“Well, hell, I won’t keep you. You got a lot of ground to cover. I got to go to Bend, take care of my business, then turn the truck around and go back home to Klamath. Maybe I’ll see you again on the way back.”
“Give a honk if you do.”
“Well, I’ll do that.”
“And thanks for the offer. It was decent of you.” He waited while some cars passed, then crossed to the other side of the road. The fellow in the truck pulled off the shoulder onto the road, honked twice, and headed off to the north.
Five
Walking to Bend, Jody Ledbetter thought. Walked across from Roseburg, and now he was walking to Bend. You met all kinds and sooner or later you heard every damn thing, but whoever heard of anybody walking from Roseburg to Bend?
And he’d said he was going east. Going to Bend first, and then going east.
East where? East to the Idaho line, say? Or east to Chicago?
Nice enough sort of a dude. Course there was a minute there when he’d thought the guy was turning him down because either Jody or the truck wasn’t good enough for him, but fortunately that little misunderstanding hadn’t blown up into anything. No, he was an okay-seeming guy, and you didn’t get the feeling he was crazy. A lot of the people you ran into these days tended to be on the weird side, and it wouldn’t make any difference if they told you they were walking to Chicago or flying to Paris. But this dude looked okay and sounded okay. The only thing crazy about him was what he was doing.
And how crazy was that? The dude was going to Bend, and then from Bend he was going someplace else. Jody, on the other hand, was also going to Bend, and from there he was going right back where he started from.
And it wasn’t as though there was anything that sensational to get back to in Klamath Falls. Lumber was bad and farming was worse, which didn’t leave a whole lot, so he wasn’t exactly living in the middle of the land of opportunity. What he was living in the middle of was a trailer, and a hell of a messy one at that, messier ever since Carlene had gone back to her mother, but not all that neat before she left, as far as that went. Seventy miles was a long way to walk just to get to Bend, but two hundred and seventy miles was a long way to drive, and that’s what the round trip amounted to, and when he was done he’d be back in Klamath Falls.
Well, shit.
There was a Circle K up ahead and he braked and downshifted and pulled in. He had plenty of gas but he was dry even if the truck wasn’t. He went back to the cooler and started to pull a couple of cans of Coors loose from the plastic webbing, then changed his mind and grabbed the whole six-pack.
The kid at the counter said, “I think we got Olympia.”
“Say what?”
“Olympia. I think we got some in the cooler. You’re wearing an Olympia cap.”
“Well, shit,” Jody said. “I got a John Deere cap home. If I was wearing that would you try an’ sell me a tractor?”