The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (17 page)

“I was in one of these situations once,” I tell Kim. “It happens. I don’t think less of you. But I’ll tell you, these things rarely work out. And if they do, they’re not worth the price you pay.”

The last stop of the night is the Country Corner. Eric circles the parking lot looking for a car that belongs to a married woman he’s seeing.

Inside, a cowboy sings karaoke on stage as 30 people do the line dance. The 25-cent drafts flow, and pyramids of plastic cups rise from the tables. The music is loud, the air thick with smoke. It’s a crude crowd of drunks, hayseeds, yahoos and floozies.

Eric joins a group of foul-mouthed men and sleazy women. They spend hours playing a drinking game, taking turns trying to flip a quarter into a cup. There isn’t an ounce of intelligence on display at the table, and though Eric is a Phi Beta Kappa, he does his level best to fit in.

On the way home, Eric slows down and looks through the window of a coffee shop. He drops in to visit one of the waitresses whenever he gets the itch. She’s also married, he says, but her husband ignores her.

“She’ll take you in back and fuck you. She’s lonely.”

I’ll pass, I tell him.

I wake the next morning at Eric’s, feeling like I’ve been poisoned. I hadn’t had anything to drink since that long day back in Montana with J.D. and Kristin.

Irene and Joe are already gone, and Eric is running late.

When I come out of the shower, I see that Eric has made a sack lunch for me and set it on the bed. There’s a hoagie sandwich, three raisin bars, two bananas, an apple and a bag of potato chips. There’s also a note, but I don’t read it.

Eric drives me to the south edge of town. After he takes off, I pull out his note.

“Mike, I will continue to pray for your safety as your journey eastward continues,” it reads. “It was a pleasure for us to have you visit our fair city. Best wishes, and keep yourself safe and dry. Eric.”

I think of the many identities Eric has presented over the last 18 hours: The punk, the brain, the gentleman, the scoundrel. The pressure to suppress your instincts and play the good ol’ boy must be immense in these parts. I hope Eric will keep his own inner counsel and walk his own true path.

I’ve never understood what people mean when they say they have to find themselves. We know who we are. The hard part is being that person. It’s always so much easier to be someone else.

CHAPTER 23

A farmer on his way to apply for a loan at the bank drops me in Ottumwa, Iowa, hometown of Tom Arnold, Roseanne’s ex-husband. After Arnold, it must be a long drop down Ottumwa’s celebrity ladder, because the local paper is eager to interview me. I pose for the photographer on the bank of the Des Moines River. A sign notes that last year’s Great Flood crested at 22 feet, almost over the bridge. I hold the sign I started with in San Francisco, the one that says “America.”

I walk a few miles south, past the John Deere plant, to get to where the highway narrows to two lanes. The bridges have no shoulders, so I hustle across them, my pack pounding me into the asphalt, to avoid onrushing semis. When I return to the golden heartland, I write a sign for the next town, Centerville.

A blue Toyota pickup slams on its breaks and skids to a stop. I toss my pack in back.

“Push it all the way up,” the driver says through the cab’s sliding window. He gives me a friendly smile.

I climb in front. The floorboard is heaped with dirty clothes and soda cans, leaving little room for my feet. When I manage to get the door closed, we’re already up to speed.

“I hope you don’t mind riding with a crazy man,” the guy says.

He lets loose a booming laugh. I figure it’s a little joke, a conversation starter, but he keeps laughing maniacally. He won’t stop. He laughs and laughs as he looks at me. The smile I first thought friendly now appears demonic. His teeth are yellow and caked with plaque. I must look spooked, as the man flips off the laugh like a light and says, “Nah, just kidding.” He grins. I take my first breath of the ride.

He’s a bear of a man, a University of Iowa T-shirt stretched over his enormous belly. Dark sunglasses hide his eyes. The tip of the first finger on his right hand is missing. That explains why he stopped. He wasn’t able to give me the full Iowa index finger wave.

I ask where he’s going.

“Home.”

“What do you do out here?”

“I might go to Fairfield next week,” he says.

He follows that nonsensical answer with the fact that he was an alcoholic and drug addict.

“Former?” I say.

“Oh yeah, I wouldn’t touch a drop now for all the tea in China.”

“How long you been clean?”

“Twelve years.”

“That’s great,” I say, trying to sound upbeat.

“What I did then is the reason I’m not working today.”

“How does something you did twelve years ago have an effect on your ability to work today?”

“I’m a manic-depressive,” the man says, flashing me a disturbing grin.

Oh no, here I go again
, I think, remembering Barbara.

“Oh yeah?” I say, acting casual. “I stayed with a woman in Montana who is a manic-depressive. Bipolar, it’s called, right?”

“Bipolar, yeah.”

“Ted Turner is bipolar.”

“I get terrible mood swings. I’m gonna pull in here and get a soda. That all right with you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, it better be. I’m the driver. Hah, hah, hah!”

He parks in front of a convenience store on the edge of a cornfield.

“I won’t be too long. Unless I get to talking. I talk a lot.”

I step out of the truck to stretch my cramped legs. My gut tells me to grab my pack and hitch another ride. Instead, I follow the man into the store to see if anybody recognizes him. I don’t learn anything new from the way the cashier rings up the driver’s soda. What the heck, it’s not that far to Centerville.

Back on the road, the man opens a 20-ounce bottle of Coke. He swigs big gulps and spills some on his chest. He sets the bottle between his legs.

“I had a job that paid four sixty-five an hour,” he says. “A farmer hired me. He just wanted someone that wouldn’t make him mad. I made him mad the first day and he fired me. So I’ll go to Fairfield next week and make six dollars. Or I’ll go to Mt. Pleasant and make six forty-five. Or I’ll go to Drakesville! Or Albia! Or Chariton!”

His face reddens. A vein on his temple bulges. He grips the wheel like he’s trying to strangle it.

“Cuz what the farmers don’t understand is they’re gonna be—”

He lets go of the wheel and balls his hands into fists. He raises his beefy forearms and pounds them down across the steering wheel, a blow punctuating every word.

“—Out! Of! Work! And! I’ll! Have! A! Job!!!”

The rage subsides like a spent wave, and the man grows eerily calm. Stunned, I stare out the windshield, hoping to see a road sign. How far to Centerville? If it’s a mile, it’s too far.

“I pick up hitchhikers,” the man says. “I don’t care. I picked one guy up one time, said he was from Fairfield. It was Fairfield,
New Jersey
. Ha, ha, ha! He said, ‘I’m from Jah-zee,’ just like an aristocrat. Ha, ha, ha! There’s a lot of Fairfields in the country.”

“Yeah, we’ve got one in California,” I offer meekly.

“I know!” he shouts. “There’s a Fairfield, Connecticut; Fairfield, Florida; Fairfield, Idaho; Fairfield, Illinois. There’s thirty-seven of ’em. I counted ’em up one day, cuz I had nothing else to do.”

He exhales. “Hey, sorry for talking so loud back there. I talk too loud, that’s my problem.”

“Well, people can hear you better,” I say, hoping to sound sympathetic.

“Tell them that! Ha, ha, ha!”

He raises the Coke bottle from between his legs and takes another sloppy swig.

“The stuff they have me on now puts me to sleep, right to sleep. That’s why I gotta pull over all the time and get one of these.”

He gulps from the bottle again.

“Know what the doctor told me?” he says.

“No, what?”

“He said he can’t believe I’m even able to function.”

I think of something to ask, but I’m afraid anything I say might set him off. So I nod and say, “Hmm,” to whatever comes out of his mouth.

I look straight ahead. I’m calm on the outside, but on the inside, I cower like a whipped dog awaiting his master’s next tirade.

“I picked one guy up and he shot me,” the man says. “I said, ‘What did you do that for?’”

He reaches across me into the glove box.
Oh, shit, this is it
, I think.

I slip a finger in the door handle. I look out the window and see the blacktop whizzing underneath. I’ve often wondered what it’s like to jump from a speeding car. Now I’ll find out. I remember the article about me that will appear in tomorrow’s paper. They can follow that with my obituary.

The man pulls something from the glove box, but it’s not a gun.

He pops the cassette into the tape deck. Jesus music blasts from the speakers.

“The thing with me is, I don’t care! Ha, ha, ha!”

I see a sign. Centerville, three miles.
Just hold on
.

A car pulls onto the highway ahead of us. We come up on it fast. I flinch and point. The man waits until the last second before he hits the breaks. Tires squeal.

“I won’t stop! You don’t like the way I drive, too bad! I don’t believe in laws. My daughter ran away two weeks ago. I asked a highway patrolman to help me find her. He wouldn’t. You know what I told him?”

He raises his damaged finger and jabs it at me. I’m now the cop on the receiving end of his wrath.

“If I speed on the road, you don’t know me. If you stop me, I’ll take that gun away from you and kill you.”

The man looks ready to reach over and squeeze the life out of me.

“Are you a pastor?” he says.

“A pastor?”

“Yeah, you’re a pastor.”

“No.”

“But you could be one, right?”

I choose my words carefully.

“Well, in the broadest sense of the word,” I say, “yes, I suppose I could be a pastor.”

“Are you a Christian?”

I’ll admit to being Judas Iscariot at this point. “Yep,” I say.

“I’m a Christian who cusses. A lot of people say that means I’m not a Christian.”

“It’s what’s in your heart that counts,” I say, hoping this doesn’t piss the guy off.

“I just do my thing. I go where God tells me.”

We race down the highway, Jesus music and fear banging on my eardrums.

“You’re not in the good part of Iowa here,” the man says. “You want to be over in Van Buren County. Lebanon, Keosauqua, Douds, Pittsburg.”

I fear an imminent detour. I slip my finger through the door handle again.

All of a sudden we crest a rise and enter the town of Centerville. I glimpse Lady Justice atop the old stone courthouse. I breathe easy.

“Where you want off?”

“Middle of town would be great.”

He swings around the town square. People sitting in lawn chairs line the sidewalks.

“This is good,” I say.

“Nah, there’s a homecoming parade today. I can’t park here. I don’t want to get in trouble. I’ve already been in trouble this week.”

The parade hasn’t started. There’s room to pull over and let me out.

“Anywhere here is fine,” I say.

“Nah, I’m gonna take you down a side street.”

We stop at a red light. I wonder if I can hop out and reach my pack before the light changes. But it turns green, and we’re now driving down a road—away from all the people.

There’s no place to park. All the spaces are taken. There’s no one in sight. Everybody’s in the town square, waiting for the parade. We’re now heading out of town. How long before I act?

Suddenly the man pulls to the curb and cuts the engine. I jump out like the truck’s on fire and grab my pack.

“Hey, thanks a lot,” I say.

The man slumps in the seat, grinning his demented grin.

“Well,” I say, but leave it at that.

“Yeah,” the man says. “It’ll be all right.”

I don’t know if he’s talking about him or me.

CHAPTER 24

I planned to reach Missouri today, but I’m too rattled to press any farther. An Amish man rides by in a horse and buggy. I take it as a sign: Slow down.

I park myself on a bench on the courthouse lawn. Small town America, a parade, Old Glory fluttering in the breeze. All that’s missing is some apple pie, but the raisin bars Eric packed for me do nicely.

A couple in their forties sit down one bench over. The man glances at my pack.

“How far you going?” he says.

“The East Coast.”

“Just thumbing?”

“Yeah.”

“Boy, I’d be afraid,” the woman says. “I don’t hitchhike, and I don’t stop for hitchhikers.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a little shaky now,” I say. “I’ve had thirty-nine rides so far. Two of them were bad, one being the guy who just let me off.”

“What was wrong with him?” the woman says.

“He was nuts. He just went berserk.”

The man says he had some bum rides in his day. When he was in the Army, one driver took off with his duffel bag while he was in the restroom. Another time, a driver robbed him at gunpoint. That was in the sixties, when hitchhiking was safer. Despite my fears, nothing terrible has happened to me on this trip, nothing even remotely bad. I have no right to complain. The country has been more than kind.

The woman stays behind to chat when her partner leaves for a closer look at the parade. Sally is quite attractive, with a trim figure, red hair and a bright smile that shows her gums.

“Are you from around here originally?” I say.

“No, we’re from Wisconsin.”

“Was that your husband?”

“No,” she blushes, “he’s my brother.”

“So how did you end up in Centerville?”

“Norman blew out a brain aneurysm twelve years ago. I brought him over here and took care of him. Then when he got better, he moved into a place of his own. Then I got some brain damage myself, and he takes care of me. We both kind of lean on each other.”

She smiles.

I ask what’s wrong with her.

“Six years ago, I was robbed and beaten and strangled out at the market where I worked.”

“Oh, no.”

“I’ve lost a lot of my memory. I can’t remember my kids’ childhood.”

“Well, you sure seem normal,” I say. “You look great.”

“Thank you.” She smiles bashfully. “But if you’d seen me two years ago, you wouldn’t have said that.”

After she recovered from her physical injuries, Sally became a prisoner of her house. When she finally ventured out, she would get lost in public buildings. Even in tiny Centerville, she still looks for landmarks whenever she parks her car. She doesn’t remember good friends from before her attack.

“A woman came up to me in the store the other day and gave me a hug,” she says. “I went, ‘Oh, get away.’ She knew me from before. She said she knew what was going on, she understood. I’ve only recently started coming out. I usually don’t talk to people. The only reason I’m talking to you is that Norman started visiting with you first.”

I would’ve thought Sally was Centerville’s most outgoing citizen. It’s startling how appearances can mask the depths of inner trauma.

“So did they catch the person who hurt you?” I ask.

“Yeah, it was a husband and wife.”

“Were they from here?”

“Missouri. They cased the market three times during the night before they held it up. I was working graveyard alone. I knew what they were up to. I told the police, but the cop that was on that night wasn’t the regular one, and he wouldn’t listen to me. The man strangled me, and the woman was clapping and yelling, ‘Kill her! Kill her!’ Then I woke up moaning, and he bashed my head into the concrete floor. That’s what damaged my brain. There was blood everywhere, all up the walls, ’cause he cut an artery. I think they thought I was dead. I crawled into the back room and locked the door.”

Sally remained there for five hours, bleeding, before she was found.

The Missouri couple was released from prison after serving six years of a 25-year sentence. A condition of their parole is that they stay out of Iowa.

Sally was recently driving to Ottumwa when she spotted a car with Missouri plates in the rearview mirror. She pulled into the slow lane, but the car wouldn’t pass her. On her way back to Centerville, she saw the same car. She doesn’t know if it was her attackers, but she’s always looking over her shoulder.

Sally stands up from the bench. She says she’s got to get going. She’s enjoyed the visit, she says.

I ask if she knows anyplace I can camp.

“You can camp in my backyard,” she says without a moment’s hesitation.

Her offer takes me by surprise. I don’t know how anyone who’s endured what she has could let a stranger set foot on her property.

Sally gives me her address. She says she’ll be there all afternoon.

I spend the rest of the day in the town square, writing in my journal and jotting a postcard to Anne.

At five o’clock, I walk down a wide, tree-lined street toward Sally’s house. The air is humid, and my jeans stick to my legs. I recall Sally’s memory problem and wonder if she will have already forgotten me. I imagine her flipping out, hysterically yelling at me to go away.

I spot Sally washing down the side of her house with a garden hose. I take a few tentative steps up the walkway. She turns and flashes her big smile.

“Hey,” she says.

She’s a picture of calm and serenity.

Her house stands across the railroad tracks from a cement factory. It’s made of cedar overlap siding, painted white. A porch swing hangs in front. The crawling roots of a massive maple tree buckle the sidewalk near the street.

The house was built in 1846 by the original homesteader. It caught fire twice and fell into disrepair. Sally bought it a couple years ago for $12,000. A contractor told her it would cost another $24,000 to fix. Sally, who once worked as an electrician, did the job herself. It was her therapy. The makeover cost only $1,400. A realtor offered Sally $40,000 for the place, but she refused. She had restored the house, and the house had restored her. They belonged together.

“Want to bring your stuff in?” Sally says.

The question shocks me more than her original offer to let me camp in her yard. I wonder if she has a death wish.

The phone rings as soon as we’re through the screen door. Sally answers it, motioning me to put my pack in a bedroom just off the living room. The house is tidy and small, the two bedrooms connected by the single bathroom. Tin foil covers the bedroom windows. In Sally’s room, framed posters of Elvis Presley hang on the walls. The pictures are black and white, showing the young, thin Elvis, not the old, fat Elvis. I remember reading somewhere that Elvis put tin foil in his windows, too.

As Sally talks on the phone, she hands me a ginger ale from the refrigerator and gestures for me to sit on the couch. She sits in the reclining chair, her feet tucked under her legs.

“He’s from California,” she says into the phone. “No, you don’t know him…I don’t know…Becky, I don’t know…”

She smiles into the phone and says she has to go.

“That was Becky. She lives across the street. She knows how cautious I am. She says she’s going to come over later and check you out.”

Pictures of Sally’s daughter and two sons hang on the living room wall. They’re adults now, but all the photos show them as kids. I wonder if it’s Sally’s attempt to jog her memory of their childhood.

Sally was 15 when she had Lisa, who’s now 32. Sally’s boyfriend Steve was a soldier stationed in Korea when he learned Sally was pregnant. He returned to Beloit, Wisconsin, and married her. Their first son, Ted, now 28, lives near Centerville. The youngest, Scott, 25, was diagnosed with cancer six years ago, around the time of Sally’s attack. He lost his jawbone and lower lip to the disease. He later had brain surgery for the scar tissue sustained during radiation treatments. Scott lives in Wisconsin, but he’s soon moving in with Sally.

Sally’s cat Aretha hobbles into the living room on three legs. Her mother chewed off her back left leg at birth. The owners were set to put the kitten to sleep when Sally stepped in and rescued it. Sally’s disability check, her sole income, is less than $500 per month. Even so, she recently managed to pay a veterinarian to surgically remove a hair ball from the cat’s intestine.

Sally sits down next to me on the couch and flips through a family album. The photos are yellow and faded. In one, she poses with Steve in front of a black convertible. It’s their wedding day, and the future looks as bright as Sally’s smile.

The marriage lasted 20 years. They were actually married twice. Sally divorced Steve both times for cheating on her.

She later married Doug, a county road crew supervisor. He was a tyrant. He beat Sally, told her when to eat and sleep, and kept her from her kids. After her attack, he refused to let her seek long-term medical treatment. She wasted to 70 pounds.

Doug once pushed her from a moving car. Another time, he threatened her with a gun. Sally was afraid to leave him because if she did, he told her, he’d kill her children. But Sally’s two eldest kids came to her aid. Ted kicked in the door of Doug’s truck to get him to come out and fight. Doug wouldn’t. Lisa later snatched a gun from Doug’s hand, and he backed down. Like all wife beaters, Doug was a coward.

“When I saw that he wasn’t going to hurt my kids, that’s when I ran,” Sally says.

She moved to Wisconsin to live with Scott and stayed away six months. When she came back, she took up with a man from Kansas City. He was nice enough, but he moved to California. They kept a long distance relationship going for a while. Then the man lost all ambition and became a beach bum. Sally broke it off. She’d like to marry again. She’s not picky, she says. She just wants a man who won’t drink and hit her. She hasn’t been on a date in a year.

Sally asks if I’m hungry. You bet, I say. She sits me at the kitchen table while she whips up minute steaks, baked potatoes and corn. She says she’s not hungry and gives me both steaks.

Becky arrives from across the street. She’s 45. Her jeans are so tight it looks like she jumped into them from a second-story window. She just broke up with her 83-year-old boyfriend. She now dates another senior citizen. She’s mad at him because he hasn’t called in a few days.

“Becky, he went to a family funeral,” Sally says.