Walking

An almost lost love, a carjacking, and a wander through the nothing.

Walking

By

Andrew T. Gordinier

The cold made my fingers too stiff and clumsy to smoke; there was little I could do about it though. The only way I really had to warm them was to put them under my arms the way my father had taught me when I was a child on my first hunting trip. That meant opening my coat though and lowering my body temperature that much more normally not a big deal in my mind but I had no idea how long I would be walking. Besides Samantha had suggested on more than one occasion that I should quit smoking. Now seemed like a good time to try, if for no other reason than I didn’t want to freeze. To say nothing of the fact that I didn't have a lighter.

I looked at the stars through the cold clear desert air and marveled at the number and majesty of them. If I had I not been forced to walk along this road that seemed to be just south of nowhere, would I not have paused to look at them and missed something? I had not intended to drive this route, but the map showed it was a fast way to bypass a bad snowstorm a few hours north. I had not intended to stop til I needed gas, but there had been that old man in a suit standing next to his apparently disabled car. I had not intended to leave my keys in the ignition and the door open when I got out of my car, but I had been on the road for the better part of twelve hours and had gotten careless. I am sure the old man had not intended to miss me when he pulled a pistol and shot at me, but the same cold that made my fingers stiff must have dulled his already slowing muscles. I suppose I could be thankful for that and the small gully near the road, the one that neither of us could see among the low and dark scrub that covered the area. I suppose that I was thankful to an extent, but the gully had been a harsh place to trip and fall an it was lined with sharp stones that left bruises. Still it was better than being dead or so I kept telling myself. By the time I had stumbled to my feet and developed the courage to look, the old man had taken my car, and I could see the taillights fading to the south. I had been headed south to begin with, so no reason to change now that I was on foot. Even I had just been randomly carjacked by some old man.

I had stopped to search the old man's car before I started walking. It had been a disappointing and almost totally unprofitable idea. The floor of the backseat was a collection of fast food bags that held the rank and greasy remains of meals that could never improve with age. The front seat was devoid of everything except empty packs of cigarettes. Whoever the jerk was, he smoked menthols. The glove compartment only had an owner's manual for the car. The registration was under the seat and showed that a rental company in Indiana owned the car. I had even been denied the old man's name. The keys were in the ignition, but the battery was dead and the gas tank proved empty when I opened it. The trunk didn’t even have a spare tire just a stained map of New York and one road flare. The flare looked older than old man had. I doubted it would light and vowed to test it only if I desperately had to. With that I had pulled my light coat close around me and dusted myself off before I started walking.

The stars hung high and bright in the night sky, still not commenting after watching me walk for four hours. I doubted things would change before they left me in another hour or so when the sun came up and at least that would warm me some. It would do nothing for the exhaustion that was slowly gnawing at me and urging me not so gently, to find a place to nap til day break. I thought about building a fire and using the road flare to light it, but all I had to feed it was the tough and dry weeds that seemed to be laying siege to the road. I thought that they would burn too quickly though and not give enough warmth. I had no experience to back this up, but it was what kept me walking. At least it did for those first four hours.

As I walked on waiting for the dawn, I thought of Samantha. I thought of how she had looked the last time I saw her standing in the airport. Her dark eyes pinning me to that moment as she fought back tears. We had mutually decided that we had do what was best for our lives and futures, and unfortunately that had turned out to mean she went to California and I stayed in Illinois. In the big picture why is really unimportant, I could erase the words and replace them with a million different ones, and it would still say we were separated.

I had insisted that it happens to people every day, that people make choices to be true to what they want from life and in doing so give up one thing to achieve another. Besides, we had only been dating for about six weeks, a very intense six weeks. Some had said too intense. How could we, in good conscience, ask each other to forsake a life goal for something so untested and too new to predict? She had agreed with me, and we had talked about it in detail, but when we stood in the airport saying our goodbyes it all fell apart inside me. I had learned later, from her letter, that the same had happened to her. As she stood clutching her backpack as if it could at any moment attempt to flee like an unruly child, her heart had broken. There was hardly a word said between us the entire day, but suddenly I had more to say to her than ever before And it all ended with asking her if we might be wrong. I kept it to myself like some fool that I thought I was not but that I proved myself to be. We kissed goodbye it was a kiss that lingered long enough to make those watching uncomfortable To hell with them though. It was an embrace that felt like everything good in life, and I was giving it up. When we finally did step away from each other, she looked down and brushed a strand of hair from her face and tucked it with the rest of her dark curls that were forever falling in her face. In an effort to steal one more moment, I asked if she wanted me to walk her to security. She said that it was better to just get this over with now, and not to drag it out no matter how much we wanted to. I agreed because I could do nothing else. That was the last time I saw her it two months ago.

After that we talked on the phone often, so often that my bluetooth hardly had a chance to charge. It was hard because neither of us was letting go, neither of us wanted to, but we had made our choices.

Then it happened. She made another choice that one of us eventually had to. She stopped calling and stopped answering my calls. At first I just told myself that it was nothing to worry about, and that she was just busy. I could not deny her letter though, I was thankful it wasn’t email. It arrived on a Saturday buried among the bills and junk mail. When I found it I tried to keep myself from getting excited, I knew what must be written on those pages, I knew the last line was most likely “goodbye”. Still I had hoped and still I had ached for any contact with her, even if it was dead ink on lifeless paper. I put the letter on my desk and forced myself to calm down before I opened it.

The letter itself was three pages covered with her delicate, curved handwriting. She confessed her emotions of doubt and fear at the airport in the first paragraph and then talked about how much our time together had meant to her. Then, in the last half page, she explained that neither of us would move on as long as we kept in touch, and that we were only hurting each other by not letting go. She said that she wanted nothing more than to have me with her but she could not ask me to give up what I had always wanted and knew I could never ask her to give up her dream. So it was best that we not call each other anymore. She singed it: “Goodbye my love, Samantha”. With the towering “S” and “th” in her signature reaching up to lines above it as if to hold the word love in out stretched arms.

I left the letter on my desk and I left the radio on to lull the ghosts to sleep. I got into my car and drove out of the city and into the country, not thinking about anything, not knowing where I was going, not caring. It was hard to believe that the same stars that watched then would hold vigil over me in the desert; no I guess it actually isn’t that hard to believe. I changed my mind that night. It may take me two weeks to tie things up in Chicago, but I didn’t care. That is how I found myself on the road hunting an uncertain future on the other side of a desert.

The same stars that have watched all my nights faded slowly before the rising sun, I had read poems and heard songs about sunrises in the desert, but they did not prepare my weary mind for the impact of it. I can only say that at some point I must go back and watch it again when I am not walking through nowhere wondering what fate has met my car. It was gone now along with almost all my clothes and what few possessions I had not put into storage before leaving Chicago. I realized then that the old man had not only taken my means to get to Samantha, he had taken my cell phone and that final letter from her. For the first time since I had started walking, my feet stopped.

It was one thing to shoot at me - a fact that I think I was still in shock over. It was another thing to steal my car and most of my things. It was a totally different matter to steal from me my last chance for and only connection to the woman that I loved. I looked around at the vast and utter nothingness that seemed to have swallowed my life whole without my realizing it. There seemed to be only the faintest and coldest wind stirring, reaching for me from some distant place that mocked me by its very nature. I looked at my watch, not because time matters when you’re nowhere, but because it gave my mind a structure that I had known my whole life. Hours, minutes, and seconds that could be counted, planned for, and recorded a history to be filled and lived not lost among the dry weeds of some wasted and cold land. I suppose some men would have raised their fists to the sky and howled in defiance. I did not. I turned south and started walking again - slowly filling the history of those moments with a slow determined progress through nowhere.

I would find my car, I would recover my cell phone, and I would deal with the old man. Then I would be on my way to Samantha. All I had to do was walk til I could make it happen. In my mind it was a simple, elegant plan, despite the apparent gaps. Even in my state of exhaustion, I could see that there was one major flaw; I had no real idea where I was going. I vaguely recalled that the map indicated a small town on this road, but I had no idea where that was in relation to where I had stopped.

I thought about these things and realized that I had allowed myself to fall into a perfect position for all of this to go totally wrong. I had called my parents to tell them I was leaving Chicago the day before I left. No one was home, so I had left a message on the answering machine. I told them I was leaving and would call them when I got to California, But I left no details beyond that. I had few friends in Chicago, and they only knew I had quit my job to chase after some girl - not where she was or how I was going to chase. Samantha had no idea I was on my way. In short, I was walking through nowhere and no one knew where I was. I knew a good number of horror movies that started that way, and thinking about it, I realized that I was probably near the part where the unlucky victim meets the killer for the first, and last, time.

I laughed at myself out loud. The lack of sleep was starting to take its toll on me. I am not normally a morbid person, but the events of the night, and even perhaps the past few months, were starting to wear away at me. I forced myself to think of the happy moments Samantha and I had together,I forced myself to keep walking through the early morning light.

The memories did not move in a smooth cinematic fashion They skipped and wandered details leading from one to the next. A summer afternoon we had spent at the water park reminded me of the evening we had spent trying to fix dinner and only succeeding at destroying the kitchen. The memory of the burnt food pulled me to a time when we had sat and watched a family cooking on their grill in the park. We watched the children play and laugh; then Samantha had looked at me and smiled because there was no need for words at that moment. A contrast to one of the few fights we had gotten into yelling at each other over some miss-communication about when and where we were supposed to meet. I had been terrified at the time that we were going to break up over it. We didn’t, and that quickly lead me to a memory of an intimate moments we had spent together. The way the sun had slipped through light clouds that summer day, the tone of the children’s laughter as they chased each other, or even the gentle warmth of Samantha’s body. Those words though could never hold the truth of how these things were. They could never impart the true impact and meaning these things had to me. The words would only frustrate me, some things can only be lived and those things escape all but the briefest words.

Through all these thoughts and memories my feet moved. One in front of the other in a steady pace that eventually became associated with breathing. Keep moving and keep living. A single step is nothing, it covers no distance on it’s own. The next step only carries the motion of the first one forward, and the third is as much effort as the first. All that effort and you only travel a few feet forward and gain only a little. I was once told that a single drop of rain could accomplish nothing alone, but when that single drop is followed by drop after drop, quickly they are innumerable. Those drops of rain can fill oceans or wash away homes, they can do anything. Eventually all those steps added up and by about eleven in the morning I could see a small collection of buildings huddled around the road. They were not much more than dark figures on the horizon, but it was enough to fill me with hope and quicken my tired pace. It seemed like moments later I was standing next to the first set of buildings and wondering how to go about filling in the first gap in my plan. I was afraid then. Not for the first time in the course of all this, but this was the most crippling fear I had encountered. What if I had just plain run out of luck? What if I had used it all up in those few seconds that the old man was shooting at me?

I had kept walking in the desert, and there was no reason to not move forward now. No reason to let a fear stop me from advancing towards my goal. I would either succeed or fail on my own merits, with or without luck, and the only way to find out was to walk forward,and see what this small town had to offer. So I did.

I walked past the first buildings on the edge of town to find a small run down motel. It looked as if it had been built in the era that spawned all such motels. This was era long before mine when Americans still traveled the back roads to see the country they lived in. These were relics of a time when the speed of the big pavement was not yet the new god, when the journey was still as important as the destination and people saw every speck of a town they passed.

Beyond this motel there were houses and small shops on both sides of the road each seeming to be fighting a battle against the brown and black of the desert with their white sides and brightly colored doors. The colors seemed shocking to me after a night in shades of gray and a day where the only color was the cold deep blue of the sky’s awning. There were cars parked in some of the driveways. None of them were mine though. Each parked car only served to sharpen the pain in my legs and feet, to sharpen my desire to find the old man.

After these simple houses and a small library came the heart of the town: a crossroads that seemed to support everything in town by its mere presence. There was no stoplight only stop signs that showed proof what wind and sand could do to metal. To my right I could see the sign for a gas station peeking up above the low roofs of houses the last marker before crossing back to nowhere. To my left I saw more houses that quickly gave way to open road and the brown black of the open landscape. Up ahead I saw the same, but the edge of town was marked there by a diner that seemed to be from the same era as the motel was. While I had been aware of my thirst for some time the smell of bacon sharpened my hunger. I walked towards the diner fully expecting it to be a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep and food. I was pleased to find the door handle solid and the alluring smell of coffee I found within.

I had not been fool enough to leave my wallet in my car so I at least had enough money to eat. If I was careful, I could live off the money I had for a few days, or at least til I could find a way to access my bank accounts. The walking however had generated an appetite in me that argued against being, careful and I ordered three full plates of food and drank more juice than I care to admit. The coffee smelled so good, but I knew better than to dehydrate myself further.

The meal went down surprisingly fast and left me feeling contented, confident and in better control of my world. I had not yet addressed the idea of what step would be next. I was more concerned about leaving a good tip for my waitress without over tipping. She reminded me of my grandmother and had met my every request for more juice, syrup, and butter with speed and a smile. I decided to hell with over tipping and dropped ten dollars on the table. She had earned it. Perhaps that is what changed my luck. I’m not sure.

I turned to pay my bill and leave. As I did so, the door opened and in walked the local sheriff. If it’s possible for a man of the West’s wild youth to blend in with the current times, it was this man. He looked as if he could walk into a modern detective show or an old black and white western with equal ease. Before he sat down there was a cup of coffee waiting on the counter for him and the grandmother waitress was telling an order to the cook. Apparently the man was very well known here.

I settled my substantial debt with the owner, sat down next to the officer, and introduced myself. I told him I was sorry for interrupting his lunch but that I had a serious problem. He told me to explain as he stirred his coffee. I launched into the story of the previous night, one that I had thought was more interesting as I lived it and now seemed too simple to tell. When I was finished he asked what make and color my car was. I told him. He asked for the numbers of my license plate. I told him. He stood up and grabbed his hat declaring he had just seen that 'red devil' of a car headed out of town going south not ten minutes ago. Before I could respond he was dragging me out the door and yelling to the grandmother waitress he’d be back later for lunch.

Outside he pushed me in the general direction of the passenger door to his cruiser as he jogged around to the other side. As I was putting on my seat belt the engine roared to life and almost instantly. After that the tires were screeching. He launched the car into a tight turn that brought south and raced forward. The sheriff then asked me for my driver’s license, I handed it over without thought. He expertly read the information into his radio as he drove. He also told “Sophia” to have “Whit” stop my car because it was headed his way with warning that the driver was armed. The sheriff, whose name I later learned was Gary, drove casually with one hand despite the fact that the speedometer was reaching for the hundred mark. I smiled to myself as I realized anew just how much driving for a few moments beat the hell out of walking all night.

As we raced across the landscape I listened to the radio chatter and found myself getting lost in the racing ribbon of pavement we rode. Sophia eventually let the sheriff know that my record was clean and that the car was registered to my name. I also listened intently as Whit declared he was pulling the guy over. Apparently the old man had taken a wrong turn and gotten lost behind us. Gary slowed down just enough to do a u-turn, and then slammed the accelerator to the floor. What road had the old man gotten lost on? I hadn’t seen any, but Gary seemed to know where we were going.

Calling the turn the old man had taken a road was generous. It was not much more than a glorified set of parallel paths that led off into the desert, I found myself getting angry with the old man for abusing my car by driving over gravel that dreamed of being boulders. I was still neglecting the fact that he had tried to kill me on sight.

The road actually improved after a few moments and seemed to run over ground that was more gravel than sand. It was not long after that I spotted the familiar lines of my car and the boxy shape of a pickup truck blocking its way. The truck had police lights on the roof and looked like it was modified specifically to deal with a situation like this one. As Gary pulled his own car up behind mine, I found myself thinking how all these vehicles must look parked out here in the nowhere. An image of lost cosmonauts on a desperate mission to save one of their own from deadly misfortune in the nowhere came to my mind's eye.

Gary told me to wait in the car while he talked to Whit. His sense of caution and familiarity with giving orders reminded me of a battle weary sergeant looking out for his soldiers. Gary walked away and talked to another officer that must have been Whit, he was leaning against the side of his truck smoking. As I watched the two of them talk I wondered where the old man was, I had more than a few choice words to say to him. Eventually both Whit and Gary came back to talk to me. He had been very colorful about the comment though, he had just gotten a ticket for doing 80 in a 65.

Gary introduced me to Whit, the handshake we exchanged was brief and informal. He asked me a few questions about the night before and what I had found in the old man's car. There were other questions about where on the road I thought the car might be found and other matters of that nature. I am not sure if I interrupted the questioning or not, but I wanted to know, so I asked where the old man was.

Whit filled in some lines in his notebook and put it away before answering. He explained that the old man was handcuffed to the front bumper of his truck. I looked at the truck and nodded, my car neatly blocked any view of where the old man was. As I sat there wondering what I actually would say to him Gary asked me if I wanted to press charges, I nodded and said that I most certainly did. Whit nodded and said we had better get everything and everyone back to town then and start getting things taken care of.

While Gary explained to me that I would have to follow them back to the station in my car Whit loaded the old man into the Gary’s cruiser. I was told specifically not to throw anything out or take anything with me when I got out at the station. They had to be sure what was mine and what was the old man's. That was fine by me. I was just happy to site in my car again,and to see that my address book and Samantha’s letter were still clipped to my visor. The drive back was uneventful and important only in the joy I felt at the familiar feel of the steering wheel and the gentle pressure of the clutch under my foot.

Once we arrived at the station, which was just a glorified box of a building tucked in behind the gas station, I had seen earlier, Gary and Whit went about locking up their prisoner and doing paperwork. They pointed me to a couch in the entryway and suggested I wait until they were ready to release my car and have me file my complaint. I complied not because of a desire to do as I was told, but because despite the apparent abuse the couch had suffered over it’s countless years in nowhere, it looked very comfortable. Its looks were not deceiving. It accepted my weight with only a mild groaning protest, and as I lay down, I could faintly smell beer and mildew from its cushions. I was beyond caring though and was soon asleep.

I wish I could say that I dreamed of Samantha, but I didn’t. It was a deep dreamless sleep brought on by physical and emotional exhaustion. It was the kind of sleep that always scares me. It’s hard to explain but the best that I can do is to say that waking from a sleep like that is like I’ve just realized that I was slowly dying and started to fight it at the last moment.

I awoke slowly to Whit shaking me in a not-so-gentle manner. When he saw that I was awake, he laughed about the comfort of the couch. He said something about it being his favorite place to sleep when he and his wife fought. I didn’t pay too much attention because he had said it while handing me a warm cup of coffee perhaps the strongest cup of coffee I had ever had. Whit and Gary let me finish another cup and have a doughnut before starting on the last of the paperwork. It sounds like there was a lot of that but not so much as you think, they were just busy doing a dozen different things all at once. They only had the two of them to work things through and take care of details so it took them a couple hours time I had spent sleeping on the couch. I was by no means recovered from my twelve-hour drive and walk through the nowhere, but I could at least start to feel like I might someday feel human again.

It was late evening by the time everything was settled and the old man was locked up, I never even bothered to ask his name. I had come to the point where I no longer cared about him or his fate. True, I had to show up in court in a month or so to play a hand in that fate, but that was just what I owed for getting my car back. I wanted nothing to do with him and only wanted to be back on the road again putting distance between this town and me. I wanted to close the distance between Samantha and me. As I left I thanked Gary and Whit for their help. They said not to worry about it as long as I showed up in court.

In the short time the old man had been driving my car he managed to make a real mess of it. A couple of empty cigarette packs on the floor of the front seat, a spilled bag of chips in the back seat, and a half empty diet cola rolling around under the driver's seat. These things unceremoniously found new homes in the nowhere after I left town, each dropped out the window as my car quickly cut through the cold desert air.

I put in a CD and skipped tracks till I heard the one I wanted a song about a hundred games of solitaire. Despite my headlights I could see the stars creeping back into the sky. I was tempted to stop, to let go of the soft leather of my steering wheel for a moment and look up at the stars. To spend a few moments with them that was not haunted with sounds of my moving feet or the roar of the wind as I disturbed its cool desert resting place. I couldn’t though I had a long way to go still and a lot of questions left to answer. Would Samantha be happy to see me? Could we make things work?

My mother had always joked that of all her children I had been the one that played things safe never took a chance. I laughed aloud. Here I was screaming through nowhere after having just about ended up dead, lost, or stranded. All the hazards I had faced just to take a chance, to chase a dream on the other side of the desert. Was it a dream though? I suppose in my mind it wasn’t and could never be. The tears we had shed were real, the laughter we had shared was real, and the warmth of her was real. I suppose to me it was no more a dream than the stars that watched me once again, no more of a chance than the rising sun in the desert. It was all just a matter of looking for the stars and waiting for the sunrise. I reached above the visor to touch the letter and my cell phone, to reassure myself that they were still there. Soon I would need no reassurances I would know one way or another. Soon I would see Samantha again. I looked for my pack of cigarettes only to find I had thrown them out with the old man's by accident. No matter, Samantha would be happy to know that I had quit.

Reviews

[AJ]

That was one huge metaphor. I liked how you tied it all together at the end, and the back story with Samantha. They way you described her signature really stood out in my mind. I loved it though. You should publish this. It is amazing(just because I overuse that word doesn't mean I don't mean it). I honestly thought he was going to die at the beginning.