Just Deserts (14 page)

Our pace was a little slower that day. I was pretty sure Larson was doing that for my benefit—and my detriment. After all, a longer trip meant less money, but realistically, I knew I wouldn't be able to keep going if we didn't slow down.

Despite the slower pace, I was taking more steps. I'd deliberately shortened my stride to take the pressure off the places that had blisters. That wasn't so
easy, because it felt like every spot on both feet was blistered, but the toes and a couple of spots on the pads were the worst. Now if only I could find a way to walk on the tops of my feet, I'd be all set.

Up ahead, Kajsa moved off the path—again—heading for another washroom break. She looked back and gave me an embarrassed smile and a little wave. Not that I was deliberately counting (it was hard to overlook), but this was detour number four, and it wasn't even noon. I was beginning to think she really
did
need to see a specialist.

What I
was
counting was footsteps. I was up to almost eleven thousand. With my normal stride that would have meant eleven kilometres, but I was definitely covering less distance with each step.

Ironically, counting my steps made me forget about the walking. As I'd felt before, there was something about it that was calming, almost like a meditation. In some ways it stopped me from thinking at all. I'd never realized just how many things in my life I didn't want to think about.

I looked up. Connor had stopped to wait, but Andy had kept on going. That surprised me. They always stopped as a group, although I had the sense it wasn't something Andy
wanted
to do. He was like a racehorse—no, a
mechanical
racehorse—and all he wanted was to keep going. It was nothing he'd said so much as his usual expression, a barely noticeable tapping of his
foot, a longing look forward, a subtle glance at his watch. It was as though he was counting the seconds. But this time he wasn't counting, he was walking.

I'd stayed close to them all day. Kajsa's washroom breaks had helped make up for my feet. I felt each step, particularly each step with my right foot. Despite my counting, my arithmetic meditation, those were the blisters that hurt the most.

I quickly caught up to Connor.

“How come the Terminator is still walking?” I asked.

“The Terminator?”

“You know, from the movie.
I'll be back
,” I said, giving him my best Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. “Doesn't Andy remind you of Arnold?”

Connor laughed. “Maybe a little. Neither one of them wastes many words.”

“And both of them might kill you. So why did he keep walking, does he have a date in the future?”

Connor laughed again, and lifted up an arm to offer me a high-five—I guess a congratulation for keeping up with them. For a second I almost didn't respond, but that would have been just plain mean. He'd done nothing to me to warrant meanness. In fact it would have been like kicking a puppy. We exchanged the high-five.

“Way to keep up, buddy!” he said.

As I did every time, I kept walking.

“Keep moving and we'll catch up,” Connor called out encouragingly.

This guy was relentlessly friendly. Given another time and place, I think we could have been friends, or at least pretended to be friends.

Andy was well ahead. I couldn't be certain but it seemed he'd opened up a bigger gap between us, that he was walking faster, as if, shed of the weight of his partners, he was able to go quicker. I started digging deeper, walking a little faster myself. For whatever reason, I now felt as though I was in an unofficial race with the Terminator. Better for it to be unofficial. If he knew we were in a race, there was no way he'd let me win.

With each step I felt a little pulse of pain. Okay, maybe pain wasn't the right word, but severe discomfort for sure. None of those burst blisters had become calluses yet, and I could feel where more were forming. Changing my stride to try to avoid putting pressure on the existing sore spots was only creating more sore spots.

Despite my increase in speed, the gap between us continued to grow. Did Andy know we were in a race … or was he just racing everybody? Was he trying to pull ahead and stay in front of the whole “team”? Only one way to find out.

“Andy!” I called out.

He didn't turn around. Either he didn't hear me or
he was ignoring me. But I wasn't somebody who was used to being ignored and I certainly didn't appreciate it.

“Andy!”
I yelled, definitely loud enough for him to hear.

He spun around but kept moving, walking backwards!

“Wait up!” I shouted. I started jogging, very slowly. My legs were sluggish and didn't want to move any quicker, and my toes cried out in pain.

He kept walking—backwards. What a bizarre statement. He was waiting up for me, but he
wasn't
waiting for me.

I could see he had his usual serious, stern expression. It was as if there were only so many smiles allowed each day and Connor and Kajsa were using up the whole quota.

As soon as I caught up to him, he spun around and started walking forward again. I had to scramble to match his stride. I could tell within a dozen steps that this wasn't the pace we'd been moving before. He
was
moving faster.

“You're not waiting anymore,” I said.

“My knees. If I stop moving, my knees lock up when I start again.”

“Maybe the secret is not to start again,” I said, and laughed. He didn't laugh. Didn't the Terminator have a sense of humour?

“So you have bad knees,” I said.

“Affirmative.”

Moving at this speed, I understood the need for one-word answers. It was hard to have the breath for both talking and walking. The best way to slow him down was to get him talking, or at least thinking.

“Bad knees, that's a drag. I guess we all have our own personal odometers.”

He gave me a questioning look.

“You know how a car has an odometer that shows how far it's been driving? You figure a car can go maybe two or three hundred thousand kilometres before it's driven into the ground. People are the same way. We only have so many steps in us before we get worn out.”

“Not the best analogy. Each person is an individual.”

“Just like each type of car is different. You expect to get more kilometres out of a Mercedes than you do a Ford.”

“Not necessarily. It depends on how each car is maintained and serviced.”

“Definitely, but also how they're driven. A car that's driven hard will break down faster. Just like a person who drives himself too hard can break down his body parts,” I suggested.

“That can be mitigated by proper diet and exercise and staying in shape.”

“Diet is just giving the engine better fuel, and exercise and staying in shape might just cause the person to break down more quickly,” I said.

“That's ridiculous,” he snapped.

His response was a bit more emotional than I'd expected. That meant I was zeroing in on something. Had I found the Terminator's weak spot?

“Think about it. Training for a marathon builds up your lung capacity and makes it possible for you to complete the run.”

“That's what training is about,” he said.

“Yet each step of training takes its toll. Knees and hips are only good for so long, then they have to be replaced … but you'd know about that, wanting to be a doctor and all. Don't old people often need to have hip or knee replacements?”

“Often.”

“And I read something about how long-distance runners need joint replacements earlier because of the mileage they rack up and all the pounding they do,” I said.

Okay, I hadn't really read that, but it certainly
sounded
plausible. A believable lie was much better than a truth that sounded far-fetched.

“You must have done lots and lots of training for this, and for the other things you've done. I bet
you
put a lot of pounding on your knees,” I added.

He didn't answer. I wasn't expecting an answer. It
didn't matter what he said, I just wanted him to listen. I gave it a moment to sink in—which gave me a chance to catch my breath a bit.

“That article detailed a number of endurance athletes who'd had to have their knees replaced by their early forties.” I paused. “But I'm sure you'll be fine. You probably won't need to have joint replace-ment for a long time … maybe never.”

I couldn't be positive, but I thought his footfalls were getting a little lighter, his stride a little shorter.

“Of course, the article said that the majority of endurance athletes
never
need to have anything replaced.”

“That's reassuring,” he said.

“Yeah, most of them just end up with arthritis. But I'm sure by the time that would affect you, they'll have developed some medication or treatment to control it, so I wouldn't worry.”

This time I definitely detected both a change in pace and a slight flicker of reaction in his expression.
Hasta la vista,
baby. I guess I'd sort of terminated the Terminator.

I had him thinking. Now I needed to get him talking. The question was how, but that was kind of a no-brainer. The things people most like to talk about are themselves and their accomplishments, and this guy had some accomplishments to brag about.

“Did you do a lot of training prior to this trip?”

He nodded his head.

Great, a wordless response. Maybe he was thinking so hard about his impending knee surgery that he didn't want to talk.

I tried again. “You ran the Boston Marathon. That must have been exciting.”

“Very.”

A one-word, two-syllable answer. Not much better. What else had he done? … Then I remembered.

“I can't believe you rode a bike across the country,” I said.

“From sea to sea … but riding a bike isn't hard on the knees.”

“I'm sure it isn't,” I said. Thinking
and
talking—this was moving in the right direction. “Can you tell me about it?”

“Do you really want to hear?”

“Of course I do. I'm sure it was really interesting!”

It was probably about as interesting as walking across the desert, which wasn't interesting at all, but it sounded like something
he
found interesting.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“Just tell me about it.”

He shrugged. “It was last summer. We went west to east, Pacific to Atlantic, so that the prevailing winds would be behind us,” he began. “The back wheel of the bike was in the Pacific to begin and then
the front wheel was dipped into the Atlantic when we ended.”

“How many miles is it in between?”

“Four thousand three hundred and twenty-seven miles is how far we travelled.”

I wasn't surprised by him giving the exact distance. I would have been surprised if he hadn't.

“And how long were you on the road?”

“The whole trip took forty-eight days.”

Again, very precise—very Andy. “So just under seven weeks.”

“We had originally scheduled it to take forty-nine days, so we came in ahead of our ETA,” he said proudly.

“You keep saying ‘we.' Was it like this trip, with a guide and other people?” I asked.

“No team, no guide. Just me and my dad.”

“You spent seven weeks with your father?” That really did surprise me.

“Just the two of us on our bikes.”

“That must have been … been …”

“Amazing,” he said.

That wasn't the word I was struggling to find. I was thinking
painful, annoying, awful
—which is what it would have been like to spend that much time with
my
father. Had we ever spent even seven
days
together? Really, I was trying hard to remember a time when we might have spent seven
hours
alone together.

“We rode side by side and slept in the same tent. Just me and my dad. It was sort of a present for both us before I went off to college.”

“And are the two of you still talking?” I joked.

He chuckled. “Of course we are. We've always been close, and that made us even closer. Aren't you close to your father?”

“Pretty close,” I lied. On a cosmic scale, if a few thousand miles were close, then we were close. Emotionally we were even farther apart than that.

“It's just … he's pretty busy. There's no way he could
ever
take seven weeks away from work. He's really busy,” I said defensively.

“Same with my dad.”

“I doubt it's the same,” I scoffed. “My father is the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the entire
world
!”

“I guess you're right. The company my father owns only has a few hundred employees. They build locomotives.”

“Like, trains?”

“Yeah, trains. He's pretty busy too, but for seven weeks he left the business alone. Not a phone call, not an e-mail and not a text message about business during our whole trip. He said it was my time, and the company would just have to get by without him.”

I couldn't remember a single meal with my father that hadn't been interrupted by something to do with
business, and it had only gotten worse over the last few years. I wasn't sure he could live without his BlackBerry, and I was pretty sure the company couldn't live without him.

“How did things keep going without your dad there?” I asked.

“He has good people working under him. He just trusted them to make the right decisions.”

I couldn't think of one person my father trusted like that. Certainly there was nobody he trusted enough to allow them to run the business. And yet he was prepared to send me around the world to be raised and educated by people he hadn't even met. I guess that said something about which was more important to him.

“Before I left, my father was talking to me about doing it again,” Andy said.