—I'll just take a glass of water.
—No water, she says looking a half foot above my head.
—Coke with no ice.
I drink it in three gulps and hand her the cup. She points wordlessly to a garbage pail on my left.
—Water, I ask.
She fills the cup with ice water.
—We can't make a dollar on water.
—Thanks.
I begin to walk away when I hear a “hey you.” The cop of course. I sit in his chilled car while he pokes around in my billfold. I explain the theft in San Francisco thus little identification. The radio rasps. Nice cool place to sit. He calls in my name and then we wait for fifteen minutes or so until I am cleared from nameless deeds.
—I'm going to give you a ride.
—That's nice of you.
—Don't get smart.
When we drive away I nod at the pop-stand girl and she waves, smiling.
—Where we going? I ask.
He doesn't answer. He drives with his left hand and keeps his right on his holster. A quick-draw champ no doubt. Matt Dillon and Robert Mitchum in a hundred-thirty-pound sack of kidney beans. If one were interested in martyrdom it would be nice to quietly draw a Beretta out of your pocket and fan him six times in the bread basket where the badge wouldn't deflect the lead. But then he is probably a Methodist and church usher and an Eagle, Moose and Lion with a wife and little eaglets at home who love his steely bravado. At the edge of town he tells me to get out and start walking because hitchhiking is against the law. I stand there while he turns the car around in a swirl of gravel and dust and peels a few yards of rubber on the way back into town. Oh for a bazooka. Or to pull the pin of a grenade as I got out of the car and just as he shifted into second to see and hear the car shatter in an orange explosion. I started walking and with only forty cents after my Coke, at least a hundred degrees of heat and my mouth already dry as the pavement. About two thousand miles from home.
So dumb of me to take 50 on the split instead of 40-95 up through Winnemucca and Elko, the main route. A ride into Fallon for buying some teenagers beer and I wasn't twenty-one myself but evidently looked it. Two cases and a buck for the effort. I walked around Fallon then out the other side standing a few brief minutes until I got a lift to the entrance of a secret air base where two guards stood in the heat with white helmets glinting. I walked down the road a few hundred yards farther and began to wait. The desert around me seemed so immense, hostile, nature at total war with herself and the road such a thin strip of civility through so many measureless miles of sand and umber rock. I've been told there's life out there and the desert owns all these mysteries but they aren't my own and I must have green. I stood there twelve hours with only three or four cars passing, until my bottom lip cracked and I became dizzy from the lack of food and water and though evening had come the air had not cooled. Breathing in a furnace. Holes out there that go down to the center of the earth. I crossed the road and began to walk back toward Fallon and I could not quite feel my teeth or tongue or my hands swinging at my sides. After a few miles I heard a car coming but doubted my senses—earlier in the day the few cars seemed to ride on a cushion of air, a wave of heat. But they stopped. A man and his wife and when I got in they looked at me and she said, Jesus Christ. He gave me a lukewarm can of beer which I drank in a few swallows and then another. No more you need water, his wife said, look at your face. I looked in the rearview mirror and my lips were black and had cracked in three places and the whites of my eyes were shot with blood. Toasted. They let me out and I went into a cafe that was half casino. I drank water until I was swollen after ordering a cup of coffee. The place was nearly empty and a man came over to me while the waitress changed the grounds in the coffee maker. He asked if I had gotten stuck out there and I said yes. Then he said the northern route is best and I answered that I had by now figured that out. I asked him about the telegraph office and when it opened and then went over and made a collect call to Michigan to an old friend. Couldn't call my dad as he usually had less money than I did. I told him I was stuck in Fallon, Nevada, and then to juice it up a bit I told him the police at gun point said I had to be out of here close after dawn and that I only had thirty cents. He giggled and asked if there were any whorehouses in the town and I said yes but not for a man with two bits. He said he would wire two hundred dollars right away and I said make it a hundred fifty. I went back to the counter and had some more water and started talking to the waitress and the owner. She put a hamburger before me and I said I had no money. He waved his arm and said he had heard my call and the bus didn't leave until ten next morning and I could pay him back after I cashed my wire. Three Paiutes entered and bought some wine to go. They were nearly in rags but one had an unblocked Stetson. When the owner got back from selling them the wine he told me a story of how he got out of the army after World War Two and was hitchhiking back home when outside of Topeka he lipped off at two cops and they beat him until he had to have his jaws wired back together in a VA hospital. All this after he had taken part in the Normandy invasion and swept across France and was one of the first to enter Paris. He said he always did want to get back to Paris because he drank himself silly and fucked the thankful French girls until he lost ten pounds. Then he said he always planned to take his antelope rifle, a .270 Weatherby back to Topeka and get both cops in the cross hairs of his four-power Bushnell scope. They would be head shots. But he never got around to it. I left the casino after he told me I could sleep in the park and if the police came to tell them “Bob” had sent me over. Some fine people left, a bond of voyagers no matter how far in the past it was. Funny how many people with tattoos and muscles give you rides. Not afraid of anything. I remembered how with a few friends we had terrified some college students at a bar. It was summer and I was chewing tobacco to try to kick cigarettes and the students were slumming and rather deftly beat us at the pool table. My friend stooped behind the most arrogant one and I pushed him over and spit tobacco in his face then my friend planted a boot in his ribs. We were ashamed after they fled. Bad losers and we were part-time students too only hated it. When we had a few more drinks my friend said he wouldn't have put the boot to him but was trying to kick off his fraternity pin.
I watched the locals leave the second movie—one girl in particular with long blond hair and incredibly tight Levi's. Take me home. The marquee lights went off and a pickup roared down the main street narrowly missing some movie-goers. I walked a few blocks over to the park. Nice with a cool breeze and clumps of cottonwood trees. I hear crickets and cars accelerating from town which is an orange haze. It is moonless. There is a street lamp at the entrance of the park and beer cans all over the ground. I lie back on the picnic table but then am startled from the beginning of sleep by some roaming dogs. Out with the knife. The largest of them, part collie and part shepherd I think, approaches the table snarling. I say, Come boy, in a soft voice and he starts wiggling and wagging his tail. Now four of them are around the table all jumping to be petted. Then a car swerves into the park and the dogs run off. Country music again from the radio and two couples drinking and I'm in their headlights now. A man calls out, Hey kid, what you doing? Sleeping. They laugh and tell me to get out because they're going to have a little party. I get up and walk out of the park as far from their car as possible. No trouble please—so tired that if someone hit me I would put the knife in to the handle. I walk a dozen or so blocks until I reach a school and walk across the green lawn to the bushes that surround it. I crawl into the shrubbery and make myself comfortable watching the same four dogs trot down the middle of the street. My friends. School daze. The girl in those Levi's now or beneath lilacs in a greener country. Take bus the hell out of here and sleep all the way to diesel roar on the back wide seat. Think I can smell chalk dust and cleaning fluid from the building. All schools smell the same, don't they? Hope that there're no rattlesnakes in town like the one I saw crushed on the road covered with flies. Fat with large head. I cut
off the stinking rattles and put them in my pocket. Rotten cucumber smell. Won't rattle them now or its brothers and sisters might hear and come in from the desert for a visit. Strange to wake up with a blanket of rattlesnakes. Or a large ball of hibernating rattlesnakes for a pillow as they get in a ball to hibernate in prairie dog holes. Scare people in town when I carried them in for breakfast. Little sleep for four days and my adrenaline glands as large as a baby's head. Girl with Levi's will find me but we'll discover the trousers won't come off and I'll have her between the breasts like the Berkeley librarian in the morning and I could watch each involuntary mindless thrust. I want some fried eggs or a steak. I turned over and faced the street and slept with my blind eye open to the lamp on the corner.
I ate a tin of Argentine beef and kicked some dirt over the coals of the fire. Smokey the Bear is always watching. Canteen full and only a package of raisins and peanuts in my pouch with the fish line. I made another inept attempt at a compass reading—perhaps I would miss the juncture of my circle and be lost all night seven hundred feet from my tent. I was lost at twelve in an impenetrable swamp, my clothes covered with ooze, and then I heard a car on a log road only a few invisible feet away. And how could I be truly lost when there was only a tent to find and it was summer and there was food in the woods and I could make a lean-to out of cedar or birch poles. Being lost somehow presupposes a distant location that you are trying to find, a warm center where a door will open, a screen door at that with a piece of cotton on it to keep off the flies, and into a yellow kitchen where a woman is cooking at the stove. When she turns around you'll be able to tell if it's your mother, wife or mistress. Or some dark lady you haven't met yet who will lead you to another, more evil life. When I set out toward the hills barely visible in the west I had the feeling that I wouldn't make it back to the tent that evening. I was momentarily angry at the wolves—I knew they were out there and they were aware of my presence but had learned through generations not to reveal themselves to anyone who walks upright. I felt peaceful again when I thought of the Arctic wolf that had weighed a hundred ninety pounds, exactly my own weight. How pleasant to have him as a companion walking with you, his back higher than your waist and his head and teeth rubbing and caressing your shoulder. They can be vaguely domesticated but only on their own terms and should be left where they belong. Of course they only knew it weighed that much after they shot it. Heat rising to the head now, a thin red line of anger encircling my vision of the woods ahead of me. I could do less with my life than go to Alaska and shoot down the airplanes from which they shoot the wolves. I think here I have found a worthy cause, a holy war I can adapt myself to—I suppose it would be less significant than taking part in the other horrors but it's something I might do well.
IV
NEW YORK CITY
Midnight now. Only for you Lucia I'll take my wounds from the light. Here in the rain and half asleep. Then from the hill in the first milky light I could see the cars leaving. All the sailors were gone and only one toll booth on each side of the turnpike was open. There was a fine needle mist in the air—it had rained sporadically through the night with some thunder and lightning in the distance dimming the flames of the steel mills, dimming the headlights of the trucks, the arc lights above the booths, brightening the grass and the leaves of the elm under which I lay curled and wet. Late the night before there had been too many hitchhikers, mostly sailors, so I had walked two miles back along an access highway toward Pittsburgh and bought a hamburger and a pint of whiskey. Then back to the hill where I lay in the first drops of rain hoping the May night would stay warm, drinking the whiskey in sips and thinking that for a dollar extra I could have bought a brand that wouldn't burn and stop at the back of my throat before it went down. In the future all amber liquids would be silken and come in crystal decanters and be poured for me by Annabel Lee. When the whiskey was gone I slept then awoke thinking the sailors might be gone but there were still five of them so I went to sleep again to the sounds of crickets, arc lights hissing in the rain, a single whippoorwill somewhere back in the hills behind me, and the huge diesel trucks switching gears a dozen times to reach their running speed.
She had asked me to come in a letter with a single paragraph on stationery that was off-pink and smelled of nasturtiums or skunk cabbage. I suppose violets were intended. I thought about her for several days then hurled my school books off a bridge—I was studying art history and working part time as a carpenter. I had chosen art history because it involved sitting in a large darkened room and looking at slides of paintings and buildings I someday wanted to see. I had saved a thousand dollars two years before to go to France but blew it all on an involved eye operation. Took three years to save the money and the kindly surgeon got it all in three hours for an incredibly unsuccessful hatchet job. Nice that he should get three hundred and thirty-three dollars an hour for knowing all about eyeballs. He considered me pointlessly hostile—no promises had been made. I left on a Friday after I picked up my check which was small because we had been rained out for several days. I tried to borrow enough to take the bus or train but my few friends were broke and the bank asked me what I had to offer as security. On foolish evenings I had planned bank robberies with a friend and I thought when I walked out of that particular bank after being refused I would come back one day and hold it up. Remember me? You wouldn't give me a loan. Blam blam blam blam capitalist pigfucker. Maybe I would simply fire into the floor near his feet. I didn't want to hurt anyone. But so far the trip had been pleasant and the rides easy. I liked the verdant Ohio countryside, the hay dryers giving off their smell of rotting alfalfa. A green, hot smell. Even Pittsburgh looked kindly for a change, a stiff breeze blowing the filth elsewhere. But now hung-up because people always pick up soldiers and sailors first. America first or IMPEACH EARL WARREN, as the signs say outside of Kalamazoo—"Kalamazoo” is Indian for “sneeze” and “stink pot.”
At last the fighting boys were out of the way and I walked down the hill and vaulted the Cyclone fence, something I can't do any more along with hopscotching parking meters or chinning myself a hundred times with one arm. My how bodies calcify then rot. Within a few moments I was picked up by a chemical engineer who was very methodic in his questioning. Where was my suitcase? Stolen. Satisfied. What did I do? I worked for a demolition company tearing down old buildings. Hard work? Yes a twelve-pound sledge tends to get heavy. Good pay? Yes four dollars an hour. Then he says the unions are going too far too far too far. How much do you make? None of your business. Oh. Where were all the unions going? I wondered. Then he said if there was a radio in the car we could listen to music or a ball game but it was a company car. I said you should unionize and demand radios. Wise guy, he said. Then he began his life story as if it were obligatory—his rise through the management ranks of a Cincinnati soap factory and about his three children and how property and income taxes were a real pinch. Also a convention he had been to in San Francisco that was a real ball and I mean a real ball with beautiful high-priced prostitutes. You rich guys have all the luck, I said, getting to travel and putting ass on the tab. Golly. But we work hard and have to let off steam and by gosh when it comes down to brass tacks soap means a lot. Very handy to wash with I thought to myself. He sighed and asked if I had many girl friends. I said only one and we were saving ourselves for marriage. I didn't want to get into an aimless sex conversation. I began to doze, the chill going out of my wet clothes which were drying in the sun coming through the windshield. I thought of her in odd ways—she was birdlike thus became a bird, her head jerking and darting as she spoke. Her panties looked heavy with feathers beneath them and her breast was large and single, soft with down. Then soapy said the weather has been rainy in Cincy and sports in general and then we had a long argument on farm parity. I thought of her again and who I would see first and whether I would ask Barbara if the child was mine or skip seeing her altogether. There's a mindless promiscuity girls from Mississippi or Louisiana develop when they get to New
York. Need for warmth I suppose after a secure home and good schools and money and all they have left in the city is money and their instinctive charm and aimlessness. He lets me off in Harrisburg even though I know he's going farther. All the jackoff business types and I wish I were that sure of myself. Wanting to know if I took “dope.” Of course of course and lots of it. Well, he says, I'm a chemist and it's a scourge. Nice word scourge, I said, but I thought you made soap not dope. I'm management, he says, and work downtown, the factory is on the outskirts. I only waited in Harrisburg a half hour before I caught a ride from a young man with a package of Luckies rolled up in the sleeve of his T-shirt and an eagle tattooed on his forearm. He had the radio turned on too loud for much talk except when the hourly news came on and then he would talk. He was fresh out of the navy and said all the women in Norfolk, Virginia, were clapped up but if you went to Richmond on a weekend pass you could score with a nice country girl. I had never been to Richmond but as we talked I began to believe that I had been there and agreed with everything he said and added my own obscene embellishments. Later that evening when we had reached Staten Island I hoped that someday I might go to Richmond and meet fresh country girls who weren't like the clapped-up fat-ankled hogs in Norfolk.
At Staten Island I caught a cross-island bus and walked to the ferry from town after having a few drinks. The bartender asked if I had been to Florida what with my nice tan and I said no I had been working outdoors where the sun tends to be most of the time. He sagely agreed. I waited about an hour for the ferry in the cavernous terminal, keeping an eye on one group of Negroes who were terribly drunk but laughing, and two pasty-faced sullen young men who glared at everyone with little eyes set in pizza faces. When we boarded I immediately went up the stairs and out to the rail where I watched the dimly lit island recede, and then to the prow where I watched Manhattan slowly draw closer. Such black, black water beneath us. I've little confidence in the ability of any boat to float. How old is this ship sir that I've been on dozens of times with this and that girl? The first time with a girl I was living with and telling her I had seen a real author that day during noon hour: Aldous Huxley standing tall and gaunt and foggy-eyed on the corner of Fifty-seventh and Fifth, with a young girl holding his hand. She was very pretty, the young girl, and I followed them down Fifth until they turned down Fifty-third and went into the Museum of Modern Art to which I didn't have the price of admission. I wanted to overhear their conversation—to see if he said witty things as he did in Crome Yellow and Point Counter Point and all the other books where the young men of my age had souls that were “tenuous membranes.” I had fashioned myself on one of those young men during my last year of high school adding a large dose of Stephen Dedalus for a bouquet garni. I only saved myself from being a snot and prig by moving on to an absolute absorption with Whitman, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, and then Henry Miller who was like a continuous transfusion, food to avoid melancholy. If you're eighteen or nineteen you read for strength more than for pleasure. On a string stretched across my little room I had taped two portraits, one of Rimbaud and the other a yellowish line drawing of Dostoevsky with his high globed forehead containing it seemed all the evils and joys man had ever known, a simultaneous jubilance and doom. But then the primacy was always owned by life herself and if you're a busboy or you're hoeing or bucking hay bales the presentness of the labor overwhelms the loftiness of your reading. To an outsider from the midlands who is broke the first hot pastrami sandwich at a delicatessen is an unbelievable wonder. Why don't they make this sort of food back home? Or the lions in front of the library seemed so magnificent and the idea that I was allowed to wander around the library at will where I saw a manuscript in the handwriting of Keats. Truly a golden city I thought. And the splendor of my first marijuana in a dark corner of the Five Spot where Pepper Adams was playing with Alvin Jones taking thirty-minute drum solos growling and sweating all the way through his blue suit until it turned black. At eighteen I was ill prepared to absorb anything and walked around in a dreamlike stupefaction with the city.