The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (18 page)

“That’s no excuse.”

Becky turns to me. “Are you a serial killer?”

“Nope.”

“Becky!” Sally says.

Becky asks if we want to go to a bar on the outside of town.

Sally is a teetotaler. She comes from a family of alcoholics. She helped her brother Norman get sober and still attends AA meetings with him. She doesn’t like bars.

Becky begs Sally to go. She reminds her she needs to get out more.

Sally asks if I want to go. If she does, I say. Sally says okay, and Becky says she’ll meet us there.

I wash the dishes while Sally gets ready. She emerges from her room dressed in jeans and a denim shirt. She wears the white frosted lipstick that was popular back in the sixties. At 47, she still looks young and innocent and happy, baring no trace of the dark shadows cast over her life.

When we get to the bar, Becky is throwing darts at an electronic dartboard. A Country and Western band plays, but nobody listens. Sally orders a Diet Pepsi and tells me to have anything I want. I ask the bartender for a Bubble Up.

The three of us play several games of darts. Sally has an unorthodox delivery. She squints her left eye, lunges forward and thrusts her right leg back. When she lets the dart fly, her eyes open wide. It’s an adorable sight, and I would be content to sit on a bar stool and watch Sally throw darts all night.

A thin man with black hair and a scowl stares from the end of the bar. Sally sees him and leans closer to me.

“He’s been trying to get me to go out with him for a year,” she says. “He’s a beater, though. That’s how he lost his last wife. I want him to think I’m with you.”

It’s after midnight when we drive home. I watch TV while Sally talks on the phone with Becky. When she hangs up, there’s an awkward moment, as if Becky had been here in the room and then left us alone. The house is still. Sally and I talk late into the night. I nod off momentarily several times, yet I’m curious what will happen next.

Finally, Sally says, “How hard is it to put your tent up?”

I sit up, a little relieved.

“Not hard at all. There are just two poles.”

“I feel bad, not letting you sleep in the house, but I just wouldn’t feel comfortable. I told Becky, ‘He’s such a nice guy, I don’t know why I don’t let him sleep in Scott’s room.’ But I just wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

“Hey, you don’t have to explain anything,” I say, getting to my feet. “After all you’ve been through, I’m amazed you’d even let me in the house.”

“In the morning, I’ll cook you breakfast and you can have a shower,” she says.

“That’d be great.”

I pitch my tent under the maple tree, holding my flashlight between my teeth. It’s warm and windy, and my sleep is heavy with dreams.

Noise from the cement factory wakes me early in the morning. I pack everything up and sit on the porch steps. I hear music inside, but I don’t want to take a chance on startling Sally.

She sees me through the screen door and says, “Well, come on in.”

I shave and shower. Sally fixes me eggs, potatoes, bacon and toast. I again eat alone.

“Becky gave me shit last night,” Sally says. “She wanted me to try to get you in bed. I keep telling her no, I don’t do that. See, that’s Becky. I try to change her and she tries to change me and we both stay the same.”

No one has ever bashed my head in, but there’s a part of me that’s damaged. That’s the part that wants to go to Sally right now and hold her, then carry her into her room and lay her down on her bed, and afterward gaze up at the foil-covered windows and the pictures of Elvis.

I don’t tell her any of this. Instead, I ask her how far it is to the Missouri state line, and she tells me 13 miles.

“Are there good people down there?”

“A few,” she says skeptically.

“Did you feel that way before your attack?”

“Yeah. Whenever there’s trouble, it always seems to come up from Missouri.”

There’s an air conditioner in the living room window that Sally wants to store for the winter. I help her carry it out to a shed off the garage. We set it on a pile of scrap wood and cover it with a piece of black plastic. The shed is dark, except for a few shafts of sunlight poking through cracks in the roof. I feel like we’re kids, standing in our secret hiding place. My stomach stirs, but I again resist the urge to reach for Sally.

When we go back inside, I linger in the living room. It’s been hard to say goodbye to people on this trip, but not like today. If I don’t leave now, I’m liable to stay here forever.

“So, how many strangers have you had in your house?” I say on my way out the door.

“You’re the first one since I got hurt,” Sally says.

A tingle shoots down my spine.

“Why me?”

“I don’t know. I just trusted you.”

Halfway down the block, I can still hear Sally’s stereo. When the radio changes songs, I stop in my tracks to listen to Billy Joel’s “The Stranger.” Then I walk on toward Cape Fear.

CHAPTER 25

Kahoka sits in the extreme northeast corner of Missouri, 20 miles west of the Mississippi River. The local gas station doesn’t have a bathroom. I overhear the attendant giving passersby directions to the public restroom in the courthouse, and I tag along. When you’re traveling without a penny, you never pass up free facilities.

The men’s room in the basement of the courthouse is next door to the sheriff’s office. I poke my head in and find the dispatcher, Mitch, slouched in an old overstuffed couch. He’s 44, with gray hair and no uniform. His three-year-old daughter April, chatty and blond, rolls around on the floor.

“Someplace I can camp around here?”

“Which way you headed?” Mitch says.

“East.”

“Well, the closer to the river you get, the more likely you are to find trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Trouble is all. People are packed in like rats over there and they just go off. Pack rats, we call ’em.”

Mitch mentions a campground several miles west, back where I’ve already been. I don’t know if it charges. Besides, I’ve always had a hard time turning around.

“I tell you what,” Mitch says. “My girlfriend gets off work in about twenty minutes. She lives nine miles east in Wayland. If she says it’s okay, you can pitch your tent in her backyard. Just be sure to take my oldest stepdaughter with you.”

I wait on another sofa that looks like it was refused by the Salvation Army. It’s pushed up against a wall papered with FBI “Wanted” posters. One guy is wanted for a string of murders. He doesn’t look the type. He looks a little like me.

I pull out my road atlas, and April climbs onto my lap. “Where’s Mexico?” she says. She flips through the pages. “Here’s Mexico.”

“Hey, she’s right,” I say to Mitch.

“We’re not raising no dummy.”

Mitch was married three times but never had any kids. He and his girlfriend Teri live together but have no plans to marry. April was an accident. Mitch is fiercely protective of his only child. He won’t let her stay with a baby-sitter. April spends four days a week with Mitch in the sheriff’s office. The rest of the time, Mitch has her with him at his thrift store.

“I’m blunt,” Mitch says. “Let me ask you two questions. One, do you have finances?”

“What’s your second question?”

We both laugh.

“Are you having fun?”

“Yeah, I sure am.”

Teri arrives to retrieve April. She’s a heavyset woman in shorts, with permed dishwater hair and thick glasses. Her voice doesn’t fit her body; it’s soft and high. She looks at once sad and serene.

We pile into Teri’s car, a rusted gas-guzzler, and Mitch kisses her goodbye through the window.

We drive toward Wayland. April sifts through sacks of groceries in the backseat. She asks me to open a bottle of juice.

Teri is a factory seamstress. She works 10 hours a day, six days a week.

“Lately, I’ve been doing everything but cut the fabric,” she says.

Splattered raccoons in the road mark our progress like mileposts.

“I really envy you, being able to just up and take off,” Teri says.

She was born and raised in Missouri. She’s never left the state. I was in Iowa this morning. I’ll be in Illinois tomorrow. It’s strange how people can spend their whole lives in one spot. Then again, they must think I’m odd, always roaming.

“I’m not just saying this, but you won’t find a friendlier state than Missouri,” Teri says.

She’s so sweet and sincere, I don’t remind her there are 49 other states she’s yet to visit.

Teri has two daughters. Missy is 19 and Julie is 17. Teri is 39. She’s already been a grandmother for two years.

“Missy was my wild one,” Teri says. “I was always watching her. Then Julie goes and gets pregnant. I always said to her, ‘Just be honest with me. Do you want to go on the pill now?’ And she said, ‘Oh, Mom, we’re not ready for that yet.’ Then she goes and gets pregnant. Not much you can do at that point.”

Julie, her boyfriend Kenny and their two-year-old son Dwight live with Teri and Mitch. Missy, who works at a convenience store, lives there, too. Missy is married to a man who’s serving time for dealing drugs. She married him after he was sent to prison. The ceremony was at the courthouse. They were granted one night together, and then Missy’s husband was thrown back in the slammer. Teri thinks Missy married the guy to piss her off. It worked.

Teri divorced the girls’ father a long time ago. There were some happy years in the beginning, but he took to drinking. Long weekends carried over into the workweek. He was always disappearing, returning home only long enough to change his clothes. He prowled around. Teri counted 15 women. He brought one of them into the restaurant where she worked. Teri hung in as long as she could. Then the battering started, and she got out.

She lives in a neighborhood of trailers, all with big backyards that converge into one. I pitch my tent under an oak tree that supports a swing.

April runs out the back door of the trailer with a foam ball. She demands that I throw it as high as I can. I do. She orders me to heave it again. The drill continues until my arm feels like it’s going to fall off.

At last, Teri rescues me. “Do you like wildlife?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s a lake nearby. Want to go see it?”

“Sure.”

As we’re backing out, Julie and Kenny pull up in an old Bronco with headlamps on the roof. Teri asks if little Dwight wants to come with us, and he climbs in.

Deer Ridge Lake is a long finger of water shrouded by oak, maple and hickory trees. Two men float in an aluminum boat, their fishing lines disappearing into the dark pool. The scene looks like a calendar photo hanging on the wall of a hardware store.

“When I was a kid, we used to come over here and play for hours,” Teri says. “In the fall, we’d get sacks and slide down the hills over the leaves, just like a sled.”

She smiles at the memory.

“My kids today have TVs, stereos and video games, but they always say they’re bored,” she says.

On the way back to Wayland, we see Julie and Kenny coming from the other direction. Teri stops to hand back Dwight.

“Just drop him at Marty’s,” Kenny says.

Marty is Teri’s brother. He lives on a farm back toward the lake. Teri turns around and follows Julie and Kenny up a dirt driveway. A young boy throws a lasso around a sawhorse with a pair of plastic steer horns attached to the front.

“Don’t be surprised if my brother doesn’t talk to me,” Teri says as we get out of the car.

We walk to the side of the house. Teri’s sister-in-law Alice meets us at the sliding glass door and invites us in. A TV flickers in another room. I can’t see the person watching, only a pair of cowboy boots propped on an ottoman.

“No, we better get going,” Teri says.

April runs up a hill to the chicken house. Teri, Alice and I follow, passing a corral where two horses and a mule munch grain from a trough. We pass through a gate and duck into the dark chicken house. When we come back out, a man is approaching from the house. He wears jeans and a white T-shirt, and the cowboy boots I saw resting on the ottoman. He isn’t smiling.

Alice walks down and intercepts him. He flails his arms, but I can’t hear what he says. He stalks up the hill. He grips the top of the fence post and glares at Teri.

“What are you doin’ out here?”

“Marty, we just came to drop off Dwight,” Teri says softly.

“Well, you just give him to Kenny and Julie and git!”

He takes one step back from the gate, making room for us to pass. He shudders with rage.

“Bye, Alice,” Teri says, hanging her head. “Come on, April, let’s go.”

When I walk by Marty, I give him a nod. It goes unreturned. He stares a hole straight through me to his sister.

“Sorry, Mike,” Teri says when we reach the car.

I don’t know what to say.

Teri heads back toward the lake and drives aimlessly along the dirt roads. It’s the opening day of bow hunting season, and men step from the dark woods dressed in camouflage and stride empty-handed to their pickups. Teri points out the places where houses she knew in her youth once stood, their foundations now overgrown with brush. The forest gives itself up to the night. Teri keeps driving in a daze, long after there’s anything left to see.

I want to know the reason for Marty’s wrath, but I don’t ask.

We drive back to town in silence.

Nobody’s home when we return. Mitch’s shift ends at midnight. Missy is working overtime to pay for the $600 in collect calls her husband rang up in prison. Julie is who knows where.

“My kids are never here,” Teri says. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes, I am.” I smile.

“I’ll fix supper then.”

“Do you need any help?”

“No, thank you. You just sit down and watch TV.”

Teri bakes potatoes and stirs up some Hamburger Helper.

The kitchen table has only three chairs, one of which bumps against the refrigerator door. Teri eats quietly, her mind elsewhere. The only noise in the trailer comes from the TV, Robin Williams riffing wildly in
Good Morning, Vietnam.

I ask Teri how she met Mitch.

She says her old boyfriend, Dan, collected books and knew Mitch from the thrift store. Teri lived with Dan for four years. He was once married. Before his divorce, he climbed a ladder to get his kids’ kite down from a telephone pole. Dan brushed a live wire and was electrocuted. He fell 20 feet, landing in a sitting position.