When Dave and Katharine returned, she was looking a little rattled but very relieved, and Dave was smiling like a man who’d love nothing more than to sit down with me over a beer and have a good long chat about the meaning of what he’d just been through. I believe he wanted to wink at me, but he didn’t do it.
“Everything’s all right,” Katharine said. “Barry understands.”
“Barry’s a saint,” I said.
She gave me a sharp look, then hurried on: “Dave says he’ll drive us to the Holiday Inn.”
“It’s maybe a mile out,” Dave explained, gesturing in a direction, “by the interstate exit. It’s about the only place to stay in the general neighborhood.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Katharine told me.
We walked back out to the sunlight, and over toward the disreputable looking automobiles. “I’ll look for a new starter first thing in the morning,” he said, “and call you at the hotel.”
29
“Talk to you some time tomorrow, Tom,” Dave said, as we and our luggage got out of his car. “Take it easy, Ace.”
“Oh, I will,” Katharine said, smiling at him, and he rattled away in his beat-up old Pontiac.
I said, “Do you want to be called Ace from now on?”
“Not by you,” she said. “I like Dave to call me Ace because he really means it, but if you did you’d just be patronizing me.”
How little people know one another. She couldn’t have been more wrong just then, but if I tried to tell her the real attitude I’d have if I called her Ace I would get myself into very deep water indeed. So I just shrugged and said, “Katharine’s a grand old name,” and picked up my suitcase and one of hers, and she picked up her other suitcase, and we went into the Holiday Inn.
The young couple on duty at the desk in his-and-hers yellow blazers were having an affair; they were practically having it in our presence. They kept contriving to pass one another in the fairly narrow space behind the counter, rubbing against one another on the way by, giggling a little behind their hands, flashing one another conspiratorial, warning, forgiving looks. But they were efficient, I’ll say that much for them; probably because the sooner they finished with us the sooner they’d be alone again. Also, their interest in one another was so total that it left them no awareness with which to become intrigued or baffled by our own fairly unusual relationship. We got our keys and our directions with no trouble, and found this time we’d been given adjoining but not connecting rooms.
And here it was again; the same room. I was getting so I could find my way around this room blindfolded, I felt I knew it by now better than my own apartment back in New York. In a way it was becoming a sort of reassuring presence, this same room no matter where I went, but if I were going to be living in it very much longer I’d have to speak to the management about those non-Utrillos.
At the moment, however, my main problem was not highway art but time. It wasn’t even three o’clock in the afternoon, and what on earth was I to do with myself? The day was sunny and the motel had a pool, but the air was too chilly for swimming. Without wheels, I couldn’t go tour the sights of the neighborhood even presuming the neighborhood came equipped with sights. The hours between now and whenever tomorrow the cab would be fixed — oh, let it be tomorrow! — stretched ahead of me like a desert without oases. And all I had with which to defend myself was daytime TV and the four generations of the Gritbone family.
Political differences over the Spanish American War were pitting Gritbone brother against Gritbone brother when the phone rang. I looked at my watch, saw that the last twenty hours had used up barely fifteen minutes of real-world time, and knew this couldn’t possibly be Dave with a reprieve. So it had to be Katharine.
It was. “I’m going crazy,” she said.
I was in a grumpy enough mood to be ungracious: “Peace and quiet,” I said. “It’s very conducive to decision-making.”
“Now, don’t be mean.”
I was immediately contrite: “Sorry, I guess I must be going crazy, too. Want to teach me chess?”
“Not a bit,” she said. “I hate games with people who play worse than I do.”
“Don’t you like to win?”
“Of course, but only against real competition. Let’s go for a walk.”
“A what?”
“A walk,” she repeated. “It’s what we do with our feet when we go to dinner.”
“I know what walk means. What I meant was, walk where?”
“Away from the motel. North maybe, or possibly south.”
“Aha,” I said. “I see what you mean.”
“Glories of nature,” she said.
“Take one’s constitutional,” I suggested. “Go for a hike.”
“Stretch the legs. Get a lungful of fresh air.”
“I’ll knock on your door in one minute.”
“I’ll jog until you get here,” she said.
30
When people think of Colorado they think of mountains; Denver, Boulder, Aspen, Vail, skiing, all that stuff. But that’s all in the western half of the state, while we were still in eastern Colorado, which is every bit as flat as next-door Kansas. The mountains were visible far away to the west, blue-gray promises bunching on the horizon, but where we stood it was possible to see nothing much of interest in any direction at all for miles and miles and miles. No wonder they make science fiction movies in places like this; you’re really aware that you’re on a planet. And this is the landscape through which — no, over which — Katharine and I took our walk, heading arbitrarily north on the smallest available road, away from the Interstate.
It’s a truism that we don’t walk as much as we should, but behind the truism is the fact that we don’t walk at all. By ‘we’ I mean Americans, but I probably mean Europeans and Canadians and South Americans and Japanese as well. Going from the garage to the house, or from the television set to the refrigerator, or even from the parking lot to the supermarket, isn’t walking. In order to walk, you have to go somewhere you’d usually go by car — like two blocks for a newspaper.
Not that I took to this new experience right away. At first, my cantankerousness and boredom kept me from taking any interest or pleasure in what was happening, until suddenly I realized my body, all on its own, was enjoying itself. Our movement had achieved an easy strolling rhythm, our arms and legs were involved without strain, the dirt shoulder on which we strode was flat and even, there were no hills to contend with, traffic next to our left elbows was light, and it turned out that walking wasn’t merely a method to get where you could do something else; walking was fun in itself. “This was a stroke of genius,” I said.
Katharine beamed, then looked back and said, “See how far we’ve come already.”
Not very far, actually, but that was all right; we had no appointments to keep. The Holiday Inn was a squat nodule in the near distance, among other low projections from the surface like groves of trees, clusters of barns, the town containing our cab, and some sort of factory westward with those water-cooling tanks that look like salt-and-pepper shakers.
Our road was old concrete, patched frequently with ragged scars of blacktop, traveled infrequently by mostly dusty cars and pick-up trucks. People looked at us in curiosity — nobody walks anymore — and one well-meaning fellow in a pick-up truck and cowboy hat stopped to ask if he could “help.” We thanked him, assured him we could manage on our own, and he gave us a friendly smile, a big wave, and his wishes for good luck.