“Sara’d say that’s just your mind.”
“Right, don’t pay any attention to your thoughts, they’re just coming out of your mind.”
“You can trust it, Guthrie. It’s real.”
“I suppose.”
“You all right? You look a little ragged around the edges.”
“Just a headache. One of the women probably has an aspirin.”
“A headache? Stand up a minute.”
“What for?”
“Stand up,” Jody said, and got to his feet himself. He steadied himself, took several deep breaths, gave his hands a shake and held them down at his sides. Guthrie asked him what the hell he was doing.
“Letting my hands tingle,” he said. “Don’t talk, just let me do this.” He kept his hands at his sides for another twenty seconds, then placed them on either side of Guthrie’s head. He held them in that position for half a minute, let them drop, and heaved a sigh.
“There,” he said.
“What was that all about?”
“First tell me how’s your headache.”
“It’s gone. How’d you do that?”
“Beats the hell out of me, hoss. You saw what I did. I just let the power flow down into my hands, and then I sent it into the part that hurts.”
“When did you learn how to do that?”
“I don’t know. An hour ago? Martha had a cramp in her shoulder and I was massaging it and not getting anywhere, and suddenly it came to me to try getting energy in my hands and putting the energy on her. So I did, and it worked.” He shrugged. “Guess it works on headaches, too.”
“It’s amazing,” Guthrie said. “The headache’s really gone. Uh, thanks.”
“All part of the service. Just pay the nurse on the way out.” He laughed. “Don’t get too carried away, hoss. It’s not like curing cancer or casting out devils, and I didn’t heal nothing that an aspirin wouldn’t have got rid of. But I’ll tell you, it sure is a nice feeling to be able to take away a person’s pain.”
Nine
There were twelve of them by the time they reached Burns.
Gary was a hand at the Kay-Bar-Seven Ranch. Two of the other hands had seen the group pass on the road and cut across the range in their 4-by-4 to check the party out; later that day they sat around laughing about the fools who were trying to walk across the country, and Gary rode out the next morning, found them and fell into step. He was tall and thin, narrow in the hips, his brown hair cropped short and his cheeks pitted with old acne scars. He smoked Marlboros — he could have modeled for their advertising — and he looked wary when Jody told him how Guthrie had spontaneously given up the habit crossing the Cascades.
“You have to quit smoking to stay in this group?”
Sara assured him otherwise. “You may quit,” she said, “and you may not. Nobody gets anything from this walk that he didn’t come here to get.”
“Well, that’s good,” he said. He sounded at once relieved and a little disappointed.
“The thing is,” Jody added, “the only way you’ll know what you came for is when you see what you get.”
Les and Georgia were waiting for them. Their car, a Cadillac Seville, was parked at the side of the road headed toward Burns. The left rear tire was flat.
Les was standing in the road leaning against the car. He was a big man, about six-three and weighing close to two hundred fifty pounds. He was in his mid-fifties and he was wearing white Levi’s, a western shirt with pearl buttons and a lot of silver braid, a string tie with a turquoise slide, and a pearl-gray ten-gallon hat.
Some of the walkers, the ones in front, called out to him. He scowled across the road at them.
John Powers said, “We’ll get that tire changed for you, sir.”
“I already jacked her up and changed her,” he said. “That’s the goddamned spare on there. The goddamned spare is flat, it came from the, goddamned dealer’s that way, and if I ever get this goddamned car back to Pendleton he is goddamned likely to hear about it.”
He was from Pendleton, where he had extensive holdings in timber and ranchland. He had gone down to Reno to celebrate a successful business transaction. He stayed at Harrah’s, saw some shows, ate some good food, drank a lot of first-rate Tennessee whiskey, smoked some cigars that were supposed to have been smuggled in from Cuba, but he frankly didn’t believe it, did reasonably well at the crap table and substantially less well at blackjack, and, somewhere along the way, met up with Georgia, whom he was now bringing back to Pendleton as the fourth Mrs. Lester Pratt Burdine.
He had driven to Reno on US 395, which runs through Pendleton to Reno and all the way south to San Bernardino. He was returning to Pendleton the same way, with his new bride on the front seat beside him. There is a twenty-seven-mile stretch from Burns west to Riley where 395 and 20 run together, and it was there that the Seville’s left rear tire had gone flat, and the spare had revealed itself to be in the same state. It had, however, not done so until he had changed tires and lowered the car from the jack.
“And ever since then,” he said, “I’ve been standing here waiting to see a goddamned state trooper so he can send someone out with a new tire. Drive five miles over the speed limit and you’ll see more goddamned troopers than you can shake a stick at, but get a flat smack in the middle of a goddamned federal highway, make that two goddamned federal highways, and you could about die waiting for one to turn up.”
He’d thought of walking to a service station but he didn’t know which way to walk. He couldn’t remember passing a station since Riley, and that was a good eight or ten miles back. There was a bitty town called Hines a couple miles before you got to Burns, but that was still at least fifteen miles away, and he couldn’t remember for sure if there was a station closer than that.
They told him they were walking on toward Burns anyhow, and they would see that he got help. There might well be a garage in the next few miles; failing that, there would surely be some place with a phone. They could call the Triple-A and make sure that someone came to his assistance.
“I’d walk along with you,” he said, “except I don’t want to leave Georgia here. And I don’t know that I can walk that far myself.”
“Couldn’t you flag a car?”
“Now that is the whole goddamned thing,” he said. “There was no end of cars while I was changing that tire. There were even people who stopped without being asked, wanted to know if I needed help. Well, it doesn’t take more’n one man to change a tire, so I said thanks all the same and sent them on their way. And from the moment I got the jack down and saw the spare was flatter than Floyd’s feet, I never saw another single goddamned car. Not in either direction, not a single car.”
He wound up walking toward Burns with them, and Georgia came along rather than stay in the car. She was a honey blonde of thirty who managed to look older by trying to look younger. She had a baby-doll face, but carried so much tension in her facial muscles that she looked as though she was made of pink velvet on a steel frame. She wore a cowgirl outfit, smart and expensive, but had the wit to get a pair of flat shoes from her luggage to replace the high-heeled Tony Lama boots.
There was a roadside telephone a mile and a half down the road. Les made his call, and they took a break from their walk and waited with him and Georgia until the truck arrived from the garage in Burns. Les and Georgia shook hands all around and got into the truck to ride back to the Cadillac. The others watched the truck until it was out of sight, then got underway again.
John said he hadn’t thought they’d go back to the car. “I figured they’d stick with us,” he said.
“And just leave that Caddy there?”