"No, this is good," Ralph said earnestly. "You should have had some of the chow we had in the army."
They were sitting around the campfire, which Larry had rekindled an hour earlier. They were all dressed in warm coats and gloves, and all were on their second cups of coffee. The temperature was about thirty-five degrees, and the sky was cloudy and bleak. Kojak was napping as close to the fire as he could get without singeing his fur.
"I'm done feeding the inner man," Glen said, getting up. "Give me your poor, your hungry. On second thought, just give me your garbage. I'll bury it."
Stu handed him his paper plate and cup. "This walkin's really something, isn't it, baldy? I bet you ain't been in this good shape since you were twenty."
"Yeah, seventy years ago," Larry said, and laughed.
"Stu, I was never in this kind of shape," Glen said grimly, picking up litter and popping it into the plastic sack he intended to bury. "I never wanted to be in this kind of shape. But I don't mind. After fifty years of confirmed agnosticism, it seems to be my fate to follow an old black woman's God into the jaws of death. If that's my fate, then that's my fate. End of story. But I'd rather walk than ride, when you get right down to it. Walking takes longer, consequently I live longer... by a few days, anyway. Excuse me, gentlemen, while I give this swill a decent burial."
They watched him walk to the edge of the camp with a small entrenching tool. This "walking tour of Colorado and points west," as Glen put it, had been the hardest on Glen himself. He was the oldest, Ralph Brentner's senior by twelve years. But somehow he had eased it considerably for the others. His irony was constant but gentle, and he seemed at peace with himself. The fact that he was able to keep going day after day made an impression on the others even if it was not exactly an inspiration. He was fifty-seven, and Stu had seen him working his finger-joints on these last three or four cold mornings, and grimacing as he did it.
"Hurt bad?" Stu had asked him yesterday, about an hour after they had moved out.
"Aspirin takes care of it. It's arthritis, you know, but it's not as bad as it's apt to be in another five or seven years, and frankly, East Texas, I'm not looking that far ahead."
"You really think he's going to take us?"
And Glen Bateman had said a peculiar thing: "I will fear no evil." And that had been the end of the discussion.
Now they heard him digging at the frozen soil and cursing it.
"Quite a fella, ain't he?" Ralph said.
Larry nodded. "Yes. I think he is."
"I always thought those college teachers was sissies, but that man sure ain't. Know what he said when I asked him why he didn't just throw that crap to one side of the road? Said we didn't need to start up that kind of shit again. Said we'd started up too many of the old brands of shit already."
Kojak got up and trotted over to see what Glen was doing. Glen's voice floated over to them: "Well, there you are, you big lazy turd. I was starting to wonder where you'd gotten off to. Want me to bury you too?"
Larry grinned and took off the mileometer clipped to his belt. He had picked it up in a Golden sports supply shop. You set it according to the length of your stride and then clipped it to your belt like a carpenter's rule. Each evening he wrote down how far they had walked that day on a dog-eared and often-folded sheet of paper.
"Can I see that cheat sheet?" Stu asked.
"Sure," Larry said, and handed it over.
At the top of the sheet Larry had printed: Boulder to Vegas: 771 miles. Below that:
Date
September 6th
September 7th
September 8th
September 9th
September 10th
September 11th
September 12th
September 13th
September 14th
September 15th
September 16th
September 17th
Miles
28.1
27.0
26.5
28.2
27.9
29.1
28.8
29.5
32.0
32.6
35.5
37.2
Total Miles
28.1
55.1
81.6
109.8
137.7
166.8
195.6
225.1
257.1
289.7
325.2
362.4
Stu took a scrap of paper from his wallet and did some subtraction. "Well, we're makin better time than when we started out, but we've still got over four hundred miles to go. Shit, we ain't halfway yet."
Larry nodded. "Better time is right. We're going downhill. And Glen's right, you know. Why do we want to hurry? Guy's just gonna wipe us out when we get over there."
"You know, I just don't believe that," Ralph said. "We may die, sure, but it isn't going to be anything simple, anything cut and dried. Mother Abagail wouldn't send us off if we was to be just murdered and nothing more come of it. She just wouldn't."