The Road to Grace

  “Did she mention Kailamai?”

  “Who?”

  “I guess not.”

  “She asked about you. She wanted to know if I’d heard from you and how you’re doing.”

  “Tell her I’m still walking.”

  He laughed. “I’ll do that. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she sounds a little smitten.”

  “With who?”

  “Who do you think?”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond so I changed the subject. “Something weird is happening. McKale’s mother …”

  “Pamela,” my father said. I was surprised he knew her name. But of course he did. He and Sam had been neighbors for more than a decade.

  “Right. Pamela,” I said. “She’s following me.”

  “Following you? In her car?”

  “On foot.”

  “She’s walking with you?”

  “Not with me. She’s following me.”

  There was a long pause. “What does she want?”

  “I’m not sure. She says she wants to talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “No idea.”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I’m trying to avoid her.”

  “I saw her at McKale’s funeral,” he said.

  “I know. So did I.”

  “Maybe you should just find out what she wants.”

  “Maybe she should just go home,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything. After a moment I said, “Remember that time you threw me that birthday party and we went to the zip line?”

  “Yes. And that German girl got her hair stuck in the pulley.”

  “She was Hungarian.”

  “That’s right. What about it?”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For throwing me the party.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “You’re welcome.”

  “I’ll talk to you next week,” I said.

  “Okay. Be safe.”

  “Bye.”

  I hung up the phone, stowed it in my pack, and kept walking.

  Homemade Pie. Wall Drug

  Fast Food. Wall Drug

  Homemade Ice Cream. Wall Drug

  Wall Drug as seen on CMT

  5 cents Hot Coffee. Wall Drug

  Western Wear. Wall Drug

  Something to Crow About. Wall Drug

  Homemade Donuts. Wall Drug

  Free Coffee and Donuts for Honeymooners

  That night I slept behind one of the Wall Drug signs—an advertisement for five-cent coffee. The road was flat and smooth, which made walking easy, but there were no services. Ted Hustead’s father-in-law was right, this place was as “Godforsaken” as you’ll find on the planet. Fortunately I was prepared. I had asked about this stretch at the grocery store back in Rapid City and was told that there was nothing until Wall. I had packed several liters of water, which, in spite of the weight, I drank sparingly.

  This led me to wonder: where was Pamela getting water?

  C H A P T E R

  Six

  My stalker has forced my hand.

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  I didn’t sleep well that night. The ground felt harder than usual, if that was possible. My water was warm and free ice water at Wall Drug was sounding pretty good. Dorothy Hustead was a smart lady.

  At breakfast I noticed that a field mouse had gotten into my pack and chewed off the corner of a peanut butter Clif Bar. I broke off the spoiled corner, then ate the rest of the bar, along with some bread and my last can of fruit cocktail. I packed up my sleeping bag then started off, my back aching a little. I was ready for a real bed.

  After two miles the landscape opened to a valley—a welcome relief from the tedium of endless plains. The signs were still there.

  New Dinosaur. Wall Drug

  Camping Supplies. Wall Drug

  Great Hot Coffee 5 Cents. Wall Drug

  After such a psychological assault, could anyone possibly not stop at Wall Drug? This was clearly an instance where, like the California Raisins or Pepto-Bismol, the advertising became greater than the product.

  After five miles I passed the town of Wasta. Strange name. I have no idea what it means.

  Wasta wasn’t much of a town, really, but it was the first I’d seen since Rapid City. The highway crossed the Cheyenne River, which was the first body of water I’d seen in a while. A half hour past the river, I came to a rest area, where I stopped to use the bathroom. I took some extra toilet paper because I was running low. I filled up my water bottles with fresh water.

  As I strapped the bottles to my waistband, the thought returned to me, what was Pamela doing for water? What if she really meant what she’d said about dying? I hoped, for her sake, that she’d gotten smart and caught a ride back to Custer, or wherever she’d left her car. She had to have. She couldn’t have made it this far without finding water somewhere.

  After my stop at the rest area, the frequency of the Wall Drug assault increased, assuring me that I was getting close. At my current pace, I would reach Wall by late afternoon.

  Black Hills Gold. Wall Drug

  Exit 109. Wall Drug

  Experience Wall Drug

  Coffee 5 cents. Wall Drug

  Conoco and Wall Drug

  The Wild West. Wall Drug

  Tour Bus Stop. Wall Drug

  Free Coffee and Donuts for Veterans. Wall Drug

  Famous Western Art Gallery—A Wall Drug Must See

  I was still keeping track of the signs in my journal. Out of curiosity, I counted the entries when I stopped for lunch. Fifty-two. And that was just what I’d passed going east. I was sure there were just as many on the other side of Wall. That was more than a hundred signs. Considering where the signs were placed, on the outskirts of farms, I figured that the Wall Drug folk weren’t paying usual advertising rates, as an outdoor campaign of that magnitude would cost a fortune. It was probably handled as a neighbor deal, a weekly pie or two, or free ice cream for the farmer’s kids. Southern South Dakota still seemed to be that kind of place.

  A couple of miles later, I saw train tracks on the south side of the road. I wondered where they had been for the last fifty miles.

  An hour after lunch I came upon a decent-sized pond with inviting blue water. I climbed down the sloped shoulder of the highway to the edge of the pond. When there were no cars in sight, I stripped down and jumped in. I hadn’t bathed for two days, not since the Happy Holiday Motel, and I was as sticky as a roll of flypaper. The water felt magnificent. I washed my hair and body with a small bottle of shampoo I had left over from the Holly House Bed and Breakfast.

  I bathed for about twenty minutes, dried myself off, dressed, and climbed back to the highway. I had been walking for two hours when I heard the familiar sound of a car stopping behind me. Pamela. At least she doesn’t have any trouble getting people to pick her up, I thought. Of course, if I saw a stranger—a mature woman—hitchhiking along this road, my conscience wouldn’t let me pass her by. But to me she was no stranger. I knew what she had done.

  As I watched her climb out of the car, I could tell that something was wrong. The driver of the car was saying something to her; his words, though indistinguishable, sounded pleading. Pamela offered a curt “thank you” and shut the car door, staggering a little as she stepped back. Even from a distance I could see that she wasn’t okay. She was leaning to one side and her steps were awkward.

  I had once read about people crawling to Mecca to atone for their sins. I wondered if, on some level, Pamela saw this journey as her penance. Maybe she really was willing to walk herself to death. I didn’t want to think about it. I continued on past two more signs.

  Wall Drug, USA. Just Ahead

  Homemade Lunch Specials. Wall Drug

  A few minutes later I looked back. Pamela was farther behind than I thought she would be. Actually, it looked like she hadn’t taken more than a few steps since she’d left the car. I continued walkin
g but turned back less than a minute later. Pamela was facedown on the ground.

  I dropped my pack on the side of the road and started jogging back to her.

  As I neared her I grew more anxious. She wasn’t moving. When I was maybe a hundred feet away I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted, “Pamela!”

  Nothing. I shouted again, “Pamela!”

  She slowly raised her head so that her chin touched the asphalt. She looked at me with a confused expression. When I reached her, I crouched down next to her. “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes darted quickly back and forth. Her face was scraped on one side, and her skin was bright red. Her lips were cracked. Her mouth was moving but she was having trouble speaking. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “When was the last time you had something to drink?” I asked, taking a water bottle from my waist belt.

  “Long time,” she said, her words slurred.

  I held the bottle up to her lips. She opened her mouth and I squirted the water inside. She gulped heavily, though much of it ran down the side of her mouth and face. She stopped drinking only a few times and drained the bottle in less than a minute. When the bottle was empty she lay forward again, her face in her arms.

  She lay there for another fifteen minutes before she rolled to her side. “Thank you.”

  “Would you like some more water?”

  She nodded. “Yes.” Her speech already sounded better.

  I brought out my other bottle, which was only half full. She held it herself this time and quickly drained it. When she’d finished the water I handed her a Clif Bar from my pants pocket. “Here, have this,” I said, peeling back the wrapper. “You need some carbs.”

  She ate the bar quickly.

  “That was stupid following me,” I said. “You’re not prepared for this. You could have died out here.”

  She slowly looked up at me. “Would it have mattered?”

  I looked at her for a long time then said, “There’s a hotel in Wall. Let’s get you there. Can you walk?”

  “Will you talk to me if I do?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then go,” she said. “Just leave me.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  In spite of her weakness, she shouted, “Leave me!” She lay her face back down on the asphalt. “Just leave me.”

  I looked around. There was no one in sight. I breathed out slowly. “Okay. I’ll talk to you.”

  She looked up at me doubtfully.

  “Come on,” I said. “I mean it. Come with me to Wall and we’ll talk.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, then slowly struggled up to her knees. I took her arm and helped her to her feet. The front of her blouse was dirty and her arms were red and pocked from the rocks she had fallen on.

  She took a step, leaning heavily against me. Then another. It took us more than twenty minutes to get back to my pack and nearly forty-five minutes to walk the mile to the Wall off-ramp. Only a few cars passed us, and even though I put my thumb out, none of them stopped. We passed three more signs on the way.

  Wall Drug Exit

  Wall Drug Keep Left. Free Mainstreet Parking

  Wall Drug Straight Ahead, 4 blocks

  Pamela was staggering and breathing heavily at the top of the highway off-ramp. “May I rest a moment?”

  “Of course,” I said. I led her to the curved, aluminum surface of the guardrail where she sat.

  I stepped back to the edge of the road and stuck out my thumb when I saw an approaching vehicle, which immediately slowed—a phenomenon not uncommon in small towns. The gray-haired man driving an old truck pulled off the road slightly past us. I walked up to the truck’s window as it rolled down. The man reached over and turned off his radio that had been blaring country music then looked out at me. “Need a lift?”

  “Yes. Just into town.”

  “It’s only a half mile. Hop in front.”

  I walked back and helped Pamela to the truck, practically pushing her up into the cab and onto the bench seat. Then I threw my pack into the truck’s bed and climbed into the cab next to Pamela.

  “How are you all this afternoon?” the man asked.

  Pamela forced a smile. “Thank you for stopping.”

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  “We’re just going to the first hotel,” I said to the man.

  “That’d be Ann’s,” he replied. “Right next to Wall Drug.” He signaled, checked his mirror, then drove into town.

  Ann’s Motel was a small inn on Wall’s main drag, west of the Wall Drug complex. The man pulled into the motel’s parking lot and stopped his truck in front of the lobby door. I got out, then helped Pamela, holding her arm as she stepped down.

  “Thanks,” I said to the man.

  “Don’t mention it. Don’t forget your pack.”

  Pamela said, “Thank you, sir.”

  “My pleasure, ma’am,” he said kindly.

  I shut the door after Pamela and grabbed my pack from the truck’s bed. I slapped the back of the truck and the truck rattled off.

  Pamela limped over to a wood bench near the motel lobby while I went inside to check on rooms. Fortunately, the motel had vacancies and I got two rooms on the street level. There was a small, glass-door refrigerator in the lobby with beverages for sale and I bought a bottle of Gatorade. I got our keys from the clerk, then went back out to Pamela. I handed her a key and the Gatorade. “You should drink that right away. It will help.”

  “Thank you,” she said, stowing the bottle in her bag.

  “I got you a room on the main floor. One-eleven, right over there.”

  Pamela stood on her own, her bag around her shoulder. “May we talk now?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I want you to drink that and get some rest. I’ll go see what they have to eat over at the drugstore then we’ll go to dinner later. We’ll talk then.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. You gave me no choice.”

  “We always have a choice,” she said.

  In light of the circumstances of our relationship I found her comment intriguing. I helped her to her room, then went to my own.

  My room was a small rectangle, furnished with two full beds with stiff mattresses and aged floral pattern comforters. After so many days without amenities, it was as welcome to me as a suite at the Four Seasons.

  I leaned my pack against the wall and flopped onto the bed. I wondered what could be so important for Pamela to say that she had risked her life to follow me. What could she possibly have to say in her own defense? Most of all, I wondered what McKale would have made of it all.

  I remember the first time I asked McKale where her mother was. I was only nine years old and had lost my own mother less than a year earlier, so the topic of mothers was one of interest to me. Especially missing ones.

  “We kicked her out,” McKale said.

  I looked at her in amazement. “Why did you do that?”

  “Me and my dad don’t want her anymore. We even threw away all her pictures so we don’t have to look at her.”

  Her answer was the strangest thing I had ever heard. Even at that age I guessed there was more to her story, but I also knew better than to ask.

  A week later we were in McKale’s backyard climbing an avocado tree when a piece of paper fell out of her pants pocket. I jumped down and picked it up, then unfolded it. It was a creased photograph of a woman.

  “Who’s this?” I asked, holding the picture up.

  McKale looked horrified. “It’s no one.”

  “It’s someone,” I said.

  McKale climbed down from the tree. “If you must know, it’s my mom.”

  “I thought you said you threw away all her pictures,” I said, naïvely pleased to have caught McKale in a lie.

  Her eyes welled up with tears. “You are so dumb,” she said. She ran into her house leaving me alone in her backyard holding the picture of Pamela and won
dering what I’d done wrong.

  With that memory replaying in my mind, I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

  C H A P T E R

  Seven

  Once you have opened the book

  to another’s life, the cover

  never looks the same.

  Alan Christoffersen’s Diary

  I woke with a start. I hadn’t intended to fall asleep, but after three nights of sleeping on hard ground, I was out before I knew it. I looked at the clock and saw that it was almost a quarter to nine. I groaned. “Pamela.”

  I went to the bathroom and washed my face, then went outside and knocked on Pamela’s door. She answered immediately. “I wondered if you’d changed your mind.”

  “No. Sorry, I fell asleep. Are you ready?”

  She had probably been waiting for several hours, but she only nodded. “I’m ready.” She stepped out, shutting the door behind her. “Thank you.”

  Wall Drug is not the single store it started as—it’s now a long row of buildings that look like a cross between a strip mall and a movie studio’s back lot western town. Wall Drug’s restaurant was located near the middle of the complex.

  I held the door for Pamela as we walked into a large dining room separated into two eating areas by an open kitchen and a long row of cafeteria-style tray rails.

  The seating area closest to the street had an ice cream bar and pastry counter with pie, brownies, and other confections, including a platter of their famous “free for veterans” cake doughnuts.

  The wood-panel walls were hung with cowboy art: paintings of cowboys, horses, and Native Americans. They were all for sale, which was true of pretty much everything in the building.