“A blind woman and a boy.”
“Just what you needed, right? You figure they’ll slow us down much?”
“Well, I don’t see them picking up the pace and pushing the two of us past our normal limits.”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh?”
“Just a feeling I get. Like bein’ around that woman might push anybody past their normal limits.”
For that matter, Guthrie thought, it was hard to know what one’s normal limits were. He had begun to suspect, when he first realized he had unwittingly quit smoking, that some of the ordinary rules of life had been somehow suspended. He’d tried to tell himself that walking out of his life had lessened the stress he was under, and this in turn had reduced his need for tobacco. But it had never been stress that made him smoke; he’d smoked because he was addicted to nicotine, and the greatest stress imaginable had always been that of trying to go without a cigarette when he wanted one.
Then he’d had another hint when McLemore had just about called him a liar for saying he’d slept out without a tent or a sleeping bag. He not only had survived, but he’d done so without being especially conscious of the cold, as if his spirit had set up some sort of energy force field that protected him as effectively as any construction of down and canvas.
He and Jody had slept out their second night together, in a stand of mixed hardwoods and conifers north of La Pine. They’d had a small fire and cooked hot dogs that they’d bought in La Pine, and they’d slept in their clothes on either side of the dying fire, and neither of them had been bothered by the cold. The fire, which had burned down low by the time they went to sleep, could hardly have provided much warmth. The only explanation he could come up with was a force field.
“I know such things can happen,” he’d told Jody. “I know a couple of people who’ve done fire walks, where you walk twenty feet across a bed of burning coals in your bare feet.”
“And you don’t get burned?”
“Not a blister. The leader has you chanting and half hypnotized into some kind of altered state, and your mind creates an energy field that keeps the heat from reaching you.”
“It’s not just that you don’t feel it ’cause you’re hypnotized?”
“No, because your clothes don’t burn either, and how would you hypnotize a pair of pants?”
“You actually know people who did this?”
“Several of them. There’s one fellow who goes all over leading fire walks, he’s from California—”
“Where else?”
“—and I think he’s led something like thirty thousand people over the coals. But he has this whole ritual he has everybody go through, and we just had a force field settle over us without any effort on our part.”
“If that’s what it was.”
“If that’s what it was,” he agreed. “But I can’t think what else it might have been.”
“Well, maybe we’re just hot stuff, hoss. Ever think of that?”
Hot stuff indeed. Guthrie, a heavy smoker leading a sedentary life, had managed twenty miles a day across the Cascades without any ill effects, and each day’s ordeal seemed to be leaving him stronger than the day before. Jody, younger and stronger but clearly overweight and out of shape, had matched his pace without straining; at least as remarkable, he’d hiked seventy miles in the same pair of socks without raising a blister. (A stench, perhaps, but not a blister.)
Could a boy and a blind woman keep up with them?
The question, he decided, was academic. In the first place, their pace was however slow or fast they decided to go; it wasn’t as though they had a train to catch. And, whether Sara and Thom could keep up or not, the four of them were going to stay together. From the moment she’d clasped his hand he’d known that much.
In the morning they ate a light breakfast and did their shopping. By eleven o’clock they were out of Bend, heading east on US 20. The first town on the map was Millican, some twenty-six miles south and east of Bend. Guthrie thought that might be further than Sara and Thom could be expected to go their first day, especially since they were getting a late start. And they were out of the national forest now, and he wasn’t sure of the etiquette involved in pitching camp on private land. He’d heard it wasn’t too good an idea to wander far from the roadside. There was always the chance you’d stumble on somebody’s marijuana plantation. The growers, whether or not they owned the land where their harvest was maturing, were capable of a murderous response to intruders.
But they’d sleep somewhere, he was sure of that. Meanwhile it was another perfect day, the sun in view much of the time, with clouds scudding across its face just enough to keep the heat down.
Would whatever was protecting them keep them from being badly sunburned? Could a force field keep out ultraviolet rays? That was another question he couldn’t answer, and it was tough to play a game when you had no clear understanding of the rules.
Without conscious agreement, they took turns walking with Sara. She would walk on the left, her right hand in her companion’s. There was no hesitation in her step, and her partner did not have to warn her of approaching cars. She seemed to be well enough aware of her immediate environment even without seeing it.
Walking with Jody, she said, “I hope I’m not slowing you down.”
“You’re doing fine, ma’am.”
“You can call me Sara, Jody.”
“Hell, I know that, but it’s rare enough I get the impulse to act respectful. At first I thought I had to tell you about every piece of gravel on the ground in front of you, but you know just where to put your foot, don’t you?”
“Do you look down all the time when you walk, Jody?”
“No, ’course not, but I’ll drop my eyes now an’ then so I don’t step off a curb or into a ditch. It’s sort of like you get the same message without dropping your eyes.”
“I think that may be what happens.” She smiled. “This is all new to me, you know. I still had some sight until yesterday afternoon.”
They stepped onto the shoulder at the approach of a truck not unlike the Datsun he’d left at the Circle K. Jody gave a wave and the old boy at the wheel raised his index finger in acknowledgment.
“Hope my brother got the truck all right,” he said. “You haven’t got the kind of second sight to check on a blue Datsun pickup parked a few miles north of Beaver Marsh, have you? I just locked her up and walked away from her.”
“That was very brave of you, Jody.”
“You think so, ma’am? I don’t know as I’d put it in the same class with getting in the ring with a bull.”
“A bullfighter knows what to expect. You were walking into the pure unknown.”
“The road to Bend’s a far cry from the dark side of the moon. I could about drive it in my sleep. I see your point all the same, not knowing what I was getting myself into. Thing is, I knew what I was getting out of, and it didn’t take a whole lot of courage to walk away from that.”
“Perhaps not.”
“What did I have? Working for my brother, plus whatever pickup jobs came along, hauling trash to the dump for somebody or putting up somebody’s storm windows in the fall and taking ’em down in the spring. Living alone in a trailer that don’t look a whole lot like a model home. I’m married.”
“Yes.”
“She walked out on me. Went home to her mother.”
“Yes.”
“Easy to tell things to a person who can’t look you in the eye. I slapped her around some, Carlene. I don’t know as it’s what you’d call wife-beating, but I did slap her some. You knew that, didn’t you, ma’am?”
“Not exactly.”
“What’s that mean? ‘Not exactly.’ You can see things about people, can’t you, ma’am?”