Root (41 page)

I checked my watch. My train was due to leave
in one minute. I hoped my watch wasn’t running slow. I ran around a
barrier, but it was the wrong platform—a train headed to
Manchester. I had to double back.

There were two guys down the far end, looking
in all the windows of the train. They spotted me and started
running my way. I sprinted past a Cornish pasty stand to the proper
platform.

The conductors on the Inverness train were
already signaling the engineer that all were aboard. I found my car
and risked a peek back into the station before stepping onto the
train.

The two guys turned the corner. I ducked
inside the train just as the doors shut. We began to pull out. I
made my way back and took a seat by the window, my senses at eleven
on a scale of one to ten. I stared blankly out the window as we
picked up speed.

And then there they were, sprinting alongside
the train. One of them spotted me and pointed. I glanced away,
looked back and they were waving to me, laughing and taunting. I
gave them the finger and slumped down into my seat.

***

It took a good hour to get my heart to wind
down. I was too close to my goal to have a pair of cut-rate bounty
hunters take me down.

I wondered if they might call ahead and have
someone waiting for me in Inverness. It would be dark when I
arrived. I ran schemes through my head to evade any unwanted
welcoming parties. Maybe I could leave the train before it reached
the platform and disappear into the night.

I took inventory of my dwindled reserve of
cash. I had just under three hundred bucks left—enough for a few
meals and a night or two in a fleabag hotel. After that I would be
down to pocket change. Karla had better be in Inverness. This was
my last train ride.

Once we were out of London, I tried to get my
head into the moment and not dwelling so much on challenges waiting
at my destination. I counted sheep to pass the time—literally.
There were pretty pastures and paddocks everywhere. Butterfly
bushes grew like weeds in every vacant lot and right of
way.

York was the last station stop I remembered
seeing before my eyelids clamped shut. I had the usual nightmare,
except instead of the mall, I was running naked through a culvert.
I awoke in a cold sweat in the middle of a bustling train
station.

Some man in tweed was shaking me by the
shoulder, his brogue so thick it was unintelligible. Did he just
call me ‘bro?’

Not fully awake, I grabbed my day pack and
stumbled out of the train. Could this be Inverness already? Had I
slept through all of Scotland?

And then I remembered too late those guys in
London, and my daring escape plan. But the tracks here were all
enclosed, there was nowhere to run. I slipped behind a support
column to gather my wits.

I took a peek and indeed, far down the other
end at the head of the train, a young guy in a pleather jacket
stood alone on the concourse watching the passengers gather their
luggage.

He looked like yet another one of those
ubiquitous young loners. Was he some dutiful grandson meeting his
grandmother or a bounty hunter with a contract from Cleveland? How
could one tell?

I waited behind the column, sneaking a glance
every once in a while, until he had gone away and the train had
pulled back out of the station. I hurried down the platform, hood
pulled over my head, hung a quick right up a long flight of stairs
that dumped me out into the most astonishing cityscape. The place
looked ancient, quarried straight out of the sandstone
bedrock.

A taxi pulled up to the curb and dropped off a
lady with a cello. I rapped on his window just as he flicked off
his top light. The window came down.

“
Sorry lad, that was my last fare.
I’m going off shift.”

“
Quick question for you … do you
know where can I find Ardconnel Terrace?”

“
Ardconnel? Never heard of
it.”

“
I have this address. Number six
Ardconnel Terrace.”

“
I tell you, I know this town well.
And there’s no such place in Edinburgh.”

“
Edinburgh?”

“
Where do you think you were? This
is Waverley Station, Old Town Edinburgh.”

“
Oh my God. I bought a ticket for
Inverness!”

“
Look again, lad.” He pointed to a
road sign, chuckling. “What happened? Get snockered on the
train?”

“
I … fell asleep.” I started back
towards the stairs, but then I remembered that train was gone, not
to mention that guy might still be down there. The full horror of
what I had done began to sink its teeth. I could have been in
Inverness tonight.

“
No worries, lad. The trains run
pretty regular … although … that might have been the last one bound
for Inverness today. Just hop one in the morning. I’d make the best
of it. Enjoy Edinburgh. It’s a great town … especially for a young
man like yourself.”

What did he think I was going to do? Party? I
was in no mood to enjoy anything. The idea of interrupting my
journey so close to its destination galled me. I was anxious to
keep moving. Morning was a long time from now.

“
Tomorrow … do you think I can
re-use the same ticket? I mean, it was an honest
mistake.”

“
I doubt that. Train tickets are
only valid on the day of travel. There’s nothing to be done but
purchase a new one. But it’s probably only ten quid for the cheap
seats.”

“
How far … is Inverness?”

“
Too far to walk, if that’s what
you’re asking.”

“
What about hitchhiking? Do folks
still do that here?”

“
Well, sure, in the countryside. But
what’s the hurry, lad? Why not have yourself a good night’s
rest?”

“
I don’t have a whole of cash on
me.”

Something shifted in the cabbie’s expression,
as the local gravity had just been amped up a notch.

“
Hop in, lad. I’m coming off shift,
but I can take you as far as Falkirk. That’s a fairly major
crossroads. Make friends in the pub and you’re bound to find
someone going on to Inverness … or who’ll put you up for the
night.”

***

The cabbie drove back to his dispatch lot to
pick up his personal vehicle. On the way over, I got to appreciate
how startling Edinburgh could be. We would be riding down a street,
a gash would open up in the land and there would be this other
cityscape a hundred feet beneath us. The sheer verticality and
layering of the place stunned me.

Transitions could be abrupt, too. One minute
we’d be driving through these dense and tangled warrens of cobbled
alleys and the next we’re staring at a craggy hillside devoid of
human habitation.

So the cabbie—George was his name—brought me
home to his family and fed me some stew. They offered me a spare
bed in the attic but I declined politely.

So he dropped me off at a local pub which he
said was as good a place as any from which to arrange a ride to
Inverness. Folks down to Glasgow or Edinburgh for the day would be
heading back to the highlands after dinner.

George wasn’t kidding. I quickly made the
acquaintance of a middle-aged auto mechanic named Craig who was
heading north after his pint and could take me part of the way. The
drinking age was eighteen, believe it or not, but I made do with a
Pepsi.

So things were going well. We were bounding
along in his panel truck when, less than an hour later, we stopped
for petrol in a place called Perth.

“
There’s a pub with beds around the
corner,” said Craig. “If you want to give it a shot.”

What he said confused me. Was he kicking me
out of his truck? Had I offended him somehow?”

“
But I thought you were going
further north?”

“
Aye, but the road forks here. I’m
leavin’ the A9 and goin’ on to Braemar.”

“
Is Braemar any closer to Inverness
than Perth?”

“
Well, technically yes, but then
you’ve got the Cairn Gorms in between.”

His brogue was a little thicker than George’s
so I had no idea what he had just said. What the heck was a ‘Cairn
Gorm’?

“
Can I go on with you … to
Braemar?”

“
Sure, but you can’t easily get
to—“

“
Please? I really don’t want to
spend the night here. I want to keep on moving.”

Craig sighed. “Suit yourself.”

***

It was half past eleven when we reached
Braemar. Craig dropped me off at an inn with a restaurant that was
still open for business.

“
Now I know it’s tourist season, but
you might get lucky, seeing that it’s midweek. Jilly might have a
room vacant.”

Jilly had no rooms, but she did make me a mug
of hot cocoa. She suggested I try a bed and breakfast down the road
and offered to call ahead, but I was still in no mood to settle in
for the night. I had to keep moving. I had slept enough on that
damned train. I was too close to Inverness to stop now.

So I headed down the road and prayed that some
late-returning tourists might be heading to Inverness. Whether they
would be crazy to stop at this hour and pick up a hitcher as
bedraggled as me was another question, but I was beyond all
rationality by that point.

I moseyed around the town a bit, which seemed
to cater mostly to tourists and hikers. The information center had
a bin with free maps of the Highlands. I unfolded one against a
mischievous breeze and saw at a glance what Craig was trying to
warn me about.

Braemar looked a good distance further north
than Perth and a good deal closer to Inverness, but it had taken me
off the main road and plopped a good sized mountain range—the Cairn
Gorms—in my way.

There was a road just past Braemar, a long and
winding way called the A939—‘The Old Military Road’—that cut across
the range. But there was another route, a foot path, that slashed
directly towards Inverness, hitting the A9 at a town called
Aviemore.

This alternative route was called the Lairig
Ghru, which was an old cattle droving route, according to a blurb
on the tourist map. I looked around for a scale but couldn’t find
one.

Aviemore didn’t look so far on the map and the
mountains in the pictures didn’t look so tall. I figured, if a cow
could hike it, why couldn’t I? So I found the trailhead at the edge
of a parking lot. The night was clear, the stars sharp and the path
was broad and obvious, lit by a hefty slice of moon. I felt strong
and alert. I saw no reason why I couldn’t walk all
night.

A vision of Karla’s doorstep drew me up that
path, into the darkness and the Cairn Gorms.

Chapter 37:
Hypothermia

All those stars blew me away. I never imagined
you could see so many at one time with the naked eye. Coastal
Florida had this ever-present fuzzy orange glow that reached up
every horizon from the thousands of street lights and strip malls
and obliterated almost everything celestial except for the moon and
Venus.

But here, there was even a swath of smudged
light that could only be the Milky Way. A name that had been
abstract and cartoonish suddenly made sense. It really was
milky-looking and it looked like a path through the sky. Strange,
how the ancients were probably more in touch with the universe than
most of us in this so-called ‘space age.’

I even thought at one point that I saw a
meteor, but it seemed too bright to be real and was gone too
quickly to etch an impression on my senses.

I plunged headlong up a wide, graveled lane.
The moonlight made the pale stone and dirt glow, contrasting nicely
with the darker vegetation flanking it, almost as if my way forward
was lit by faerie footlights.

Even when the occasional patch of forest
snuffed the glow, the path was so straight and the way so obvious,
I could have almost walked it with my eyes closed.

I could easily imagine a herd of cattle being
led this way. The grade was easy, the footing firm and
well-drained. I had hiked a lot worse paths.

I had probably gone a couple miles before it
began to narrow. But I maintained a brisk and steady pace, even as
the path began to steepen.

I could hear a decent-sized creek gurgling in
a gully to my left. The sound soothed me. Since I was a kid, I had
always been drawn to water. I still loved messing around in
streams. I wish I could have seen it in daylight. From the sheer
sound of them, those cascades had to be gorgeous.

Every twenty minutes I chewed up a mile. The
path diverged from the stream for a time, but plunged into a little
valley after topping a rise and then veered right, following the
flank of another stream.

My private light show was slowly curtailed by
the hills rearing up before me and a slant of blackness creeping in
slowly like a stage curtain from the west.

In the darker areas under tree I blundered off
the trail a couple of times, but the shrubs acted like bumpers in
guiding back to the main path. If it stayed like this the rest of
the way, I had it made. I wondered if the lights of Inverness might
be visible from the top of the pass. That possibility excited me
and pulled me onward.