The Road to Grace (The Walk) (5 page)

She went back to the kitchen, returning a minute later with my juice and coffee. She set the drinks down and sat down across the table from me, presumably to watch me eat.

I took a couple of bites, expecting her to say something, but she didn’t. She just sat there watching me,
which, frankly, was a little uncomfortable. Finally I asked, “How’s business?”

She sighed. “A little slow but it’s picking up. It’s not tourist season yet. During Sturgis we just rent the whole place out. You know what Sturgis is?”

I nodded. “I had employees who went every year. The stories they would tell …”

“Oh yes, there are stories. Last year there was a woman on a Harley who called herself ‘Lady Godiva.’ I don’t need to tell you what she was wearing. Or not wearing.”

The town of Sturgis, South Dakota, is the epicenter of the world’s largest annual gathering of Harley-Davidson motorcycle riders. Every August, thousands of bikers, from business magnates to Hells Angels, descend on the town. There’s nothing else like it in the world.

“How far are we from Sturgis?” I asked.

“A little over fifty miles.”

“I’d like to see that sometime.”

“There’s not much to see this time of year,” she said. “’Course it’s not as wild as it used to be. It’s like Christmas—it got commercialized.”

Just then I heard a doorknob turn and the back door opened. I looked over as Dawna’s other guest entered the room. It was Pamela.

“Hi, Alan,” she said softly.

I stared at her in disbelief. “I thought you’d given up.”

“No.”

I looked at her for a moment then stood. “Fine. Follow me to Key West if you want. But you should get some better shoes.” I turned to Dawna, whose eyes were nervously darting back and forth between us. “I need my bill.”

“I’ll get it,” she said, standing quickly. She walked over
to her cubbyholed maple desk. “It will be eighty-nine dollars for the night.” She held up a handwritten invoice. “Ninety-two fifty-six with tax.”

Pamela stared at me. “Alan … Just five minutes. Please.”

“I told you no.”

I handed Dawna my credit card, then, as it was processing, went back to my room and got my backpack. When I returned to the dining room, Pamela was still there. I retrieved my credit card, signed the bill, then walked past Pamela to the front door.

“Please, just hear me out,” she said.

“I told you yesterday, we have nothing to talk about. Nothing’s changed since then.” I walked out the door, slamming it shut behind me.

As I reached the other end of the parking lot, Pamela stepped outside. “You owe me,” she shouted.

I spun around. “What?”

“You owe me.”

A flash of rage engulfed me. “I owe
you
?”

She walked halfway across the parking lot to me. “Yes. You do.”

“For what? For abandoning a little girl? For ruining my wife’s life?”

She looked me in the eyes. “Her life wasn’t ruined. She had you.” She stepped closer, and her voice was calmer. “If I hadn’t been a bad mother, would McKale have been yours the way she was? Would she have needed you like she did? Would she have even married you?”

Her questions took me aback. After a moment I said, “Go home, Pamela. Go back to wherever you’ve been hiding all these years. You had your chance.”

Her eyes welled up with tears.

I turned back to the road. I walked fifty yards or so
before I glanced back. I couldn’t believe it. She was still following me. Though, this time, with a slight limp. It didn’t take me long to leave her far behind.

The strangest thing I saw that morning—other than Pamela—was a sign for
Red Ass Rhubarb Wine
. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to flee my pursuer I might have stopped for a taste. I could have used some wine. Pamela’s questions bothered me.

Just outside Hill City I came to a place called Mistletoe Ranch, which wasn’t really a ranch, but a Christmas emporium. A sign in front of the building proclaimed it
The Ultimate Christmas Store
.

McKale was a die-hard fan of Christmas and, as she had in so many of her passions, converted me as well. Even in spring I couldn’t resist the allure of the season. Since I hadn’t seen Pamela for more than an hour I went inside.

The place was indeed full of Christmas. Tinny, banjo Christmas music played from overhead speakers, and the room smelled of pine and buttercream scented candles. The walls were shelved and piled high with hundreds of unique holiday decorations, knickknacks, and collectibles, from Betty Boop Christmas ornaments to Elvis stockings to miniature porcelain Christmas villages.

There were a few things I wanted but since purchasing anything I’d have to carry would have been absurd (although I did consider purchasing a Marilyn Monroe ornament to hang from the back of my pack) I left empty-handed. My stop wasn’t a waste of time, though. The visit had distracted me from the emotions stirred up by my encounter with Pamela. Whatever the season, a healthy dose of Christmas lifts the spirits.

As I opened the door to leave I looked both ways to see if Pamela was there. She was. I don’t know how she knew I
had gone into the store—she was nowhere in sight when I’d gone in—but she was there, standing across the road waiting for me.

I started off again, walking even faster than usual. Within fifteen minutes Pamela was out of sight, though by now I no longer assumed that she’d given up her quest.

A few miles past Hill City, the highway split. I continued on 16 east until it ran north again. Around noon I reached the historic Rockerville Café, where I stopped to eat a hamburger and failed to learn what made the place historic. Actually, I didn’t care what made the place historic. After traveling through Idaho, where everything was historic, the label had lost its luster.

I didn’t stay long. I hoped I had lost Pamela where the highway split, but in case I hadn’t, I didn’t want to give her the chance to catch up. I was relieved she wasn’t standing there as I left the café.

A couple miles from the café a Forest Service sign informed me that I was leaving the Black Hills National Forest, though you wouldn’t know it by looking; as far as I could see, the road continued to be lined with forest, as well as tourist attractions, hoping to catch the crumbs from Mount Rushmore’s table.

I passed another Christmas shop (apparently Christmas is a moneymaker in South Dakota) and Bear Country USA—a 250-acre drive-through wildlife park, boasting the world’s largest collection of privately owned black bears. I could see some of the bears from the highway and I thought back to the grizzly I had encountered in the wild three weeks earlier in Yellowstone. These captive bears didn’t look nearly as lively or dangerous. In fact, they looked sedated and about as frisky as my father an hour after Thanksgiving dinner.

There were more tourist attractions in this stretch than perhaps anywhere else in America. I passed a reptile zoo, a wax museum, a corn maze, and a mountain zip line, the latter of which reminded me of my eleventh birthday.

That was a birthday to remember. Actually, it was impossible to forget. My dad, in a rare moment of introspection, decided that in the absence of a mother, a dutiful father should probably throw his only son a birthday party at least once in his life. This was something that he’d never done before, so, not surprisingly, he was clueless. I once saw my dad dismantle a five-horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine from our lawn mower, strip it down to its block, then reassemble it perfectly. But he couldn’t put a birthday party together to save his life.

He started by inviting random children from the neighborhood, many of whom I didn’t know, including two sisters whose family had just migrated to the U.S. from Hungary. The girls didn’t speak English, or at least not that any of us had heard, and they huddled together the whole time speaking in frightened whispers to each other.

My father borrowed a minivan and took all seven of us to a Pizza Hut (which wasn’t a bad call), then to a zip line he’d found a coupon for, located about forty-five minutes from our home.

The Hungarian girls only became relevant to the party when the younger of the girls (none of us ever learned either of their names) somehow got her long blond hair caught in the pulley, stopping her mid-ride and leaving her dangling hundreds of feet above the ground, screaming hysterically.

The rescue mission was well worth the price of admission. We, and a few dozen others from waiting groups, gaped as one of the zip line workers donned thick gloves
and shimmied down the line until he was close enough to cut the girl’s hair with a pair of wire cutters, sending her rolling down the line. We clapped and hooted when she was free, unanimously judging the rescue operation a great success. All of us, that is, but the sisters, who apparently thought otherwise, evidenced by their red and tear-stained faces. The older girl kept examining her sister’s chopped hair and crying.

When we got back to our neighborhood, my dad dropped the sisters off in their driveway and sped away before they got to their door. I asked if he should tell their parents what had happened, but my dad just mumbled something like, “They don’t speak English that well,” and “They’re from a communist-bloc country, they’re used to things like that.” I pondered that statement for years, and every time I heard something about a communist country, I imagined unhappy girls with erratically lopped off tufts of hair.

By twilight I was close to Rapid City and had I been in a car I would have driven on to the city center, but I had already walked twenty miles and there was an ominously steep hill looming ahead of me, so I ended my day outside the city limits at the Happy Holiday Motel. I expected at any moment to see Pamela step out of a car behind me but she never did. I was foolishly optimistic that she had finally given up and gone home. I was wrong.

I woke the next morning wondering what Pamela wanted to say. If she had come to apologize, she was too late for that. The person she needed to apologize to was already gone.

After breakfast, I stretched my legs and back, then donned my pack and started walking.

I don’t like days that start with large hills; the same was figuratively true when I ran an advertising agency. In less than two hours, Rapid City loomed ahead of me.

Rapid City reminded me a lot of Spokane. Since it was the first city of any real size I’d walked through since Cody, Wyoming, I decided to bypass the truck route and walk through town. No doubt inspired by Mount Rushmore’s presidential fervor, there was a bronze statue on every street corner depicting a U.S. president engaged in some activity demonstrative of their term in office.

I didn’t recognize many of them. Actually, most of them. This wasn’t surprising. I mean, could anyone alive today pick James K. Polk from a police lineup or recognize Rutherford B. Hayes if they bumped into him in an elevator? Or what about William Henry Harrison, our shortest-lived president, who died just thirty-two days into office? I wondered what his statue looked like—a man in bed?

At the end of the strip, I turned left on East Boulevard to I-90. Walking in the city is always slower, and adding to my delay was some major road construction that forced me to dodge road maintenance workers and machinery for the next few miles. Not halfway through the city I was longing for the wilds again.

The only restaurant I encountered, other than the usual fast-food chains, was a Vietnamese restaurant, which sounded interesting. Once inside, though, I ended
up ordering things that weren’t Vietnamese—sesame chicken and Thai curry shrimp. They both were good. I ate quickly, eager to get back on my way and out of the city.

I stopped at a grocery store to stock up on rations: canned fruit, beef jerky, Clif Bars, bread, Pop-Tarts, a jar of artichoke hearts, and water. A half hour past the grocery store I reached Interstate 90 and headed east.