Richard never once cried in his mother’s absence but lay in Georgia’s arms beaming up at her like a tiny Buddha. Whenever his eyes met with hers she wanted to weep. She couldn’t even see his eyes clearly in the gathering darkness, but she could feel it when he was looking at her; some current passed from his eyes to hers, and she felt old things welling up in her chest. She didn’t cry, but each time it happened something hard softened, something that was tight became a little looser.
She had been holding the child for ten minutes when Les sat down next to her. Neither of them spoke. After perhaps ten minutes more Ellie appeared to reclaim her baby, and he went to her with a little whoop of delight.
“He loves you,” Les told Georgia, “but he wants his mama.”
“Just so his mama wants him. They were gone a long time; I was starting to wonder if I was gonna get to keep him. Where do you suppose they went?”
“A young couple on a moonlit night? Use your imagination, honey.”
“You think so? I hope they were careful or they’ll wind up with Irish twins. You know what that is? That’s babies less than a year apart.”
“Is it supposed to be bad luck?”
She looked at him. “If you’ve got a second baby before the first one’s a year old,” she said, “you’ve already had bad luck.”
“Oh. Of course you and I wouldn’t have to worry about that. I mean, if we were to go off the way Bud and Ellie did—”
“Are you serious? You mean just go lie down in the grass?”
“You lived in cities all your life, didn’t you, Georgie girl? About time you learned some country ways.”
She got to her feet. “If you can even think about it,” she said, “after all that driving, and jacking up the car and changing a tire, and then all that walking—”
“Did I do all that today? That’s the trouble with getting old, your memory goes and you start to forget things.”
“If you can still be in the mood,” she said, “I guess I can at least call and see if you’re bluffing.”
He put an arm around her and led her off toward where Bud and Ellie had wandered earlier. The moon was three-quarters full, the night still and silent. He said, “Bluffing. You think this here is a poker game? Well, you just shove all your chips in the pot, little lady, and I’ll show you what I’ve got in my hand.”
It was well before noon the next morning when they reached Burns. They made plans to meet in front of the post office at one-thirty; that would give them plenty of time to buy what they needed and eat a meal before they reassembled and headed out of town.
They went their separate ways. Gary picked up a pair of soft shoes to spell his boots. Bud and Ellie replenished their supply of Pampers. John wrote a postcard to his parents. Les went to the garage to see if the car was ready. Guthrie picked up a Portland paper and read stories about a world conference on population control, a massacre of Indians by government troops in Brazil, a confrontation of warships in the eastern Mediterranean, and a man in Yakima who had killed his wife and four children with a shotgun before hanging himself with his belt.
When they regrouped at one-thirty, the Burdines showed up with backpacks and canteens, and Les had managed to equip himself with a stout bamboo walking stick. The car was ready, and he’d made arrangements to have it delivered to his home in Pendleton. Everyone was relieved that Les and Georgia were staying with the group, and some of them were gracious enough to pretend to be surprised.
There were five new people who joined the group in front of the post office:
Lissa was a waitress at the restaurant where Martha and Jody had had lunch. She was twenty-four, and she told them that she had had a fantasy for the past three years that a rich handsome man would come into her restaurant and take her away with him. “But the closest I ever get is a cowboy with a mattress in the back of his pickup,” she said, “and as far as he wants to take me is half a mile up a dirt road. Only person’s going to get me out of here is me.”
Sue Anne was working at Wembley’s when Lissa came in to buy a backpack and a canteen. She was a few years older than Lissa and about twelve pounds heavier than she wanted to be, a divorced woman with a son nine and a daughter almost eight. “I don’t believe this,” she said. “All of a sudden everybody wants a backpack. And canteens! I sold three already today and I can’t remember the last time I sold one. There are these people in town—”
Lissa said she knew, that she was going with them.
“You’re not,” Sue Anne said. “Just like that? You mean it? You tell Grace she’s gonna be short a waitress?”
Lissa nodded.
“She holler at you?”
“Started to. Then she said she wished she could go with me, and she would if she didn’t have her ma to look after.” She hooked a finger under a thin gold chain around her neck, raised it to show a pale blue crystal. “She gave me this,” she said.
“Grace gave you that? It’s pretty. What is it?”
“I think she said aquamarine.”
“It’s real pretty.” She reached out, drew in her breath sharply when her fingers touched the cool surface of the crystal. A look passed over her face, and she said, “This here’s the last backpack but one, so you can have it, but there’s only the one canteen and I’m keeping it for myself. You know where I bet they might have canteens? Western Auto. I’ll walk over there with you if you want to go see.”
“You’re coming too? What about your kids?”
“Well, what about them? They’re visiting their daddy and that bitch in Spokane. I talked to them on the phone Sunday and all I heard was how they got a heated pool, they got a golden retriever, they got a rear-projection TV with a dish antenna. They like it so damn much, they can just stay there for a while.”
Jordan was Thom’s age, thirteen, but not as tall. He was the son of a black father and a Flathead Indian mother. The two boys had got to talking in front of a shelf of science fiction paperbacks at Goody’s Trading Post, where they discovered that they liked a lot of the same authors. They got Cokes from a machine and stood around drinking them, and Thom told Jordan he was from Indiana, and that he’d never even seen an Indian until he crossed the Mississippi River.
“You got black people back where you are?” Jordan wanted to know.
“Oh, sure. The school I used to go to, I think about a third of the kids were black.”
“No shit? Because it’s the other way around here. We got Indians up the ass, but it’s being half nigger that makes me exotic.”
Jordan never said anything about joining the walk. He didn’t pack any clothes or bring along anything other than what he was wearing. But he stuck close to Thom, joined Thom and Sara and John for lunch, and, when they all met in front of the post office, he was there with them, acting as if it were a foregone conclusion that he was a member of the party.
Douglas was a friend of Gary’s, a transplanted Californian who worked at Western Auto and had a shop at his house where he produced handmade hunting knives as a sideline. The knives sold readily at knife and gun shows for upwards of two hundred dollars, but each one represented a minimum of fifty hours work and a substantial investment in high-grade steel and fancy woods or ivories for the grips, so there was little profit in the trade.
Douglas was ready to go as soon as he learned what Gary was up to. The woman he lived with, also a former San Diegan, thought it was the craziest thing she’d ever heard of. When she learned that the group included a blind woman and a nursing infant, she declared that she’d heard everything.
“The only thing is you’re all headed in the wrong direction,” she said. “Aren’t lemmings supposed to throw themselves into the sea?”