Douglas told her he was going. She said to be sure and have a good time, and send her a postcard now and then. “Why don’t you just meet the people?” he suggested. “You know Gary’s all right.”
“I always used to think he was one of your more normal friends.”
“So give it a try. Meet the people, maybe walk out with them this afternoon. If you don’t feel good about it you can always turn around and come back.”
“Great, I can walk all the way back alone.”
“You can hitch. Besides, if you don’t like it the chances are I won’t like it either, and we can hitch back together. Just join in for a few miles, Bev.”
“This has a familiar ring,” she said. “It’s like a couple of years ago when you swore you were only going to put the tip in.”
“If you don’t like it—”
“That’s the trouble, Douglas. I wind up liking it.”
Douglas was a sort of half-assed survivalist, and Gary had a hard time talking him out of bringing along a ton of camping gear. He was sure they’d be more comfortable with a tent and sleeping bags, and he wanted to bring a mess kit and a compass and water purification tablets and a hatchet and fishhooks and line and God knew what else. “These people are into traveling real light,” Gary told him. “If it weighs a lot or if it won’t fit in a small pack, leave it behind.”
“But you can’t sleep uncovered in the mountains,” Douglas insisted. “You’ll freeze.”
“They’ve been doing it all along.”
“Well, I’m certainly taking the first aid kit. It doesn’t make sense to go anywhere without gauze and tape and antiseptic and aspirin.”
“Don’t really need aspirin,” Gary said, grinning. “We got an old boy from Klamath Falls who puts his hands around your head and cures your headache.”
“How is he with menstrual cramps?” Bev wanted to know. Gary said it hadn’t come up, but he was sure Jody would be willing to try. “Well, why not?” she said. “It won’t be the craziest thing I did all day. But he better watch where he puts his hands.”
They left Burns in a compact group. As they put a little distance between themselves and the city, they tended to spread out along the highway in twos and threes. Here and there someone walked alone, but usually not for long.
Guthrie asked Sara if she’d had a chance to get a reading on Jordan.
“I just picked up a lot of self-hatred,” she said. “Nobody wants him and he doesn’t belong anywhere.”
“Yeah, I got that much and I’m not even blind. I was a little concerned about him just joining up with us. As far as I can tell he didn’t say a word to anyone back in Burns. He just walked on out of town. So I asked him if his people wouldn’t come after us to get him back. You read about these cults spiriting children away from their parents; I sure don’t want to turn into something like that.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he didn’t think the people of Burns were going to get up a posse to bring back a half-nigger Indian. He said his mother was in the state hospital and his father was doing time for manslaughter, and the aunt he lived with would do a victory dance if she ever noticed he was gone. I’m glad he’s with us, the poor little son of a bitch. I don’t think he could have had too good a life in Burns.”
“Or too long a one, either.”
“He’ll be good company for your boy, too.”
“He’ll be good company for all of us.”
“Uh-huh.” They walked a little ways in silence, and then he said, “People have so goddam much to walk away from. Every time I find myself wondering what we’re walking toward, I tell myself that’s beside the point. Sara, I read a newspaper back in Burns and there wasn’t a single good thing in it. The baseball scores were the closest thing to good news, and even there somebody had to lose for everybody who won. I don’t usually get bothered by the fact that major league baseball is a zero-sum universe, but that puts it ahead of the rest of the world, where one person can lose without somebody else winning.”
“I suppose I’ll miss being able to read a paper,” she said. “But so far I haven’t.”
“There was a man in Washington State who killed his wife and kids with a shotgun and then hanged himself with his belt. All that went through my mind reading the story was wondering why he’d used the shotgun on the rest of them and then used a different method on himself. I asked Jody.”
“I’ll bet he had an answer.”
“He had several suggestions. Maybe the guy ran out of shells. Maybe he was sickened by the mess a shotgun makes. Maybe the gun barrel was longer than his arm, and it didn’t occur to him that he could work the trigger with his toe.”
“Maybe he knew you could get an erection by hanging yourself.”
“You can?”
“So I understand. There are accidental suicides all the time, people trying to half hang themselves for sexual pleasure who go a little farther than they intended.”
“This really happens?”
“Oh, the literature’s full of it. It happens quite frequently.”
He shook his head. “I suppose all knowledge is valuable,” he said, “but I’d have a hard time saying how my life is richer for knowing that.”
Three hours out of Burns, a Ford Taurus passed them at high speed, heading west. A few minutes later the same car returned in the eastbound lane, braking hard and fishtailing to a stop, then pulling onto the shoulder across the road from the main body of walkers.
The driver got out of the car, slammed the door, and stalked across the road. He was a man in his mid-thirties, average in height and build. He was wearing a three-piece navy pinstripe suit, a yellow tie with black pin dots, and a pair of black scotch-grain wingtip shoes. He had taken his car keys with him, and he strode along with them clutched in one hand.
A couple of people tried speaking to him. He didn’t reply, or give any clear indication that he had heard them. There was a wild look in his eyes; they seemed to be focused off in the middle distance somewhere. He walked at a good pace, his arms swinging madly at his sides, his back ramrod-straight.
After he had gone perhaps half a mile he became aware of the car keys. He looked at them as if unable to guess what they were or where they’d come from. Then he reared back and hurled them into the field to his left.
Another half mile down the road he shrugged out of his suit jacket, compressed it into a ball, and flung it into the field. His vest was the next to go, after another quarter mile. Then his necktie. Then his wristwatch.
Not too surprisingly, he had attracted a great deal of attention. No one was quite prepared to interfere, but everybody was waiting to see what he would litter the landscape with next.
But instead he walked for the next half hour without discarding anything. Gradually his arm movements became less exaggerated and his face lost its look of manic concentration. He had been staring straight ahead; now he occasionally looked to the left or right. Twice he yawned.
Then he said, “My name’s Jerry. Christ, I’m hungry, I don’t mind telling you. Anybody know where you can get a sandwich around here?”
“You win,” Bev told Douglas. “The hell with it, I don’t care, I’ll be a lemming too. You win.”
Ten
Hitchhikers were so easy. It seemed to Mark that they were virtually asking to be killed, and he wondered if there wasn’t something fundamentally suicidal about a girl who stood alone by the side of the road, actively seeking rides from passing strangers.
He’d been driving on 1-70, heading toward St. Louis, and at Columbia he’d left the Interstate and drove north on 63. The main campus of the University of Missouri was in Columbia, and there were always students on roads in the area, thumb out, looking for a ride.