The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (20 page)

“So, what’s your purpose?” he says. “What’s your goal?”

“If you really want to know, I’ll tell you.”

I figure that will scare him off, but he sits down and leans forward, ready to listen. He’s about my age, with black horn-rimmed glasses. He’s the custodian at the local school. His name is Brian.

“I know where you can stay tonight,” he says after I’ve finished my story.

“Where?”

“At our church,” Brian says, smiling. He and the boys are heading there now. His wife is already there, attending a meeting. “They have snacks afterwards. You want to come?”

“Sure,” I say. “I could use a little spiritual nourishment.”

Bible study is in session when we enter the Liberty Christian Church. About 30 people sit in the middle pews, huddled around the preacher. He hands out photocopies of a timeline that shows how Christianity has been corrupted by various denominations since the time of Jesus. He says the word of the Lord was rescued only in the last century, when fundamentalist churches such as this one returned to a literal interpretation of the “New Testament.”

“I don’t mean to put down other religions,” the preacher says.

I have to bite my cheeks to keep from laughing. It’s always the same:
Ours is the only carnival selling tickets to the ride to heaven
.

The preacher excuses himself to prepare for a baptism. He appoints a member to lead the congregation in a few hymns. The man wears blue jeans, a T-shirt and red suspenders. He loses his place in the hymnal and we sing “Rock of Ages” twice.

A red velvet curtain opens behind the altar, revealing the preacher and a woman named Sue. They stand in a hidden pool of water, a painting of a forest over their shoulders. Sue is dressed in a white smock. The preacher says a few words and dunks Sue in the water as she holds her nose. The curtain draws to a close, and, like that, another soul is saved. It seems so easy.

I’m not sure what to say to Sue in the receiving line. My stock line to brides at weddings—”You looked so beautiful up there”—doesn’t seem appropriate. I shake her hand and say, “Congratulations.”

Cookies, cake, popcorn and Kool-Aid await downstairs. Brian has already spread the word about my trip. The congregation swarms me. It seems that everybody saw me walking down the road today. They press close, asking questions, offering me more snacks. I feel bad about stealing Sue’s thunder, and me a heathen at that.

The preacher sits down next to me. He’s young and energetic, fresh out of Bible school. He offers to let me sleep in his office.

“I’d let you stay at my house, but my wife runs a child care service out of our home, and the authorities might—”

“Not approve of a stranger in the house,” I finish for him.

“Right.”

When the reception breaks up, the preacher shows me to his office, pointing out the men’s room on the way. He pulls a box of religious cassette tapes from the shelf and sets them on his desk next to the tape player.

“In case you get bored,” he says.

His wife goes next door to their house to fix me a steak sandwich. The parishioners file out. I ask the preacher if he wants me to lock up. He says no, the church door is always open. Now, that is faith.

After the preacher and his wife go home, a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair and friendly eyes comes through the church door. He’s one of the people I met at snack time, but we didn’t visit much.

“Would you like to sleep in a bed tonight?” he says.

I follow Jim outside, where his wife Linda waits in their new Cadillac. I get the idea that they left and returned to extend the invitation after grappling with their collective conscience.

Jim is a contractor and Linda is a school librarian. They live in one of the nicest homes in the area. The sprawling, two-story brick house is set back among the woods outside of town.

Their eldest son, Jim Junior, is away at college. Jim says I can have his room.

“I get to go upstairs first,” Linda says, worried I might find a mess.

I start a load of wash. Jim and Linda’s other son, Andy, returns from his job at the YMCA in a nearby town. We all sit around the table talking about my journey.

“Boy, I could never do that,” Andy says.

“Your mother would never let you do it,” Linda says.

“Yeah, I was afraid to tell my mom,” I say. “I told her I was traveling across America, but I skipped the penniless part.”

Mercifully, the conversation steers clear of religion. If my hosts think I’m going to hell, they keep it to themselves.

Jim grew up in Texas, the youngest of 12 children. He might be the most mellow, even-tempered man I’ve ever met. Linda was raised here in Liberty. She and Jim met in Washington, D.C. Jim was in the Navy, and Linda was a secretary for the FBI, recruited out of high school.

I’ve been in their house only an hour, but I’m totally at ease. A month ago, this would have been an impossibility. Now I feel at home anywhere in the country.

I doubt that my hosts’ sense of comfort ever completely matches mine. No matter their ability to judge character, their gut instincts, their faith in humanity, surely there must always come a moment—perhaps in bed, after they’ve turned out the lights—when an inner voice asks them,
Can we really trust this stranger with our lives?

I say good night. On my way upstairs, I turn back to the family.

“You were leery about letting me stay here, weren’t you?” I say.

“Yeah, we thought about it a while out in the car,” Jim admits.

“Well, I sure appreciate your hospitality—and your trust.”

“Yeah, I’m glad we invited you home,” Jim says.

In the morning, Linda and Andy rush off to school, and Jim sits with me at the kitchen table.

I’m midway through my bowl of cereal when he says, “You want to go golfing, Mike?”

I love to golf, but the image of teeing it up during a penniless journey hits me as comical.

“I didn’t bring my clubs,” I say.

“No problem, I’ve got an extra set in the garage.”

Jim first runs some tools to one of his construction crews at a job site. He leaves me at home, alone. The beautiful house contains the family’s worldly goods—all of them now entrusted to me. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, the benefit of the doubt is still alive and well in America.

When Jim returns, we drive his Cadillac out to Arrowhead Heights, the local golf course. The morning is slightly overcast and crisp—my kind of golf weather. Jim buys us coffee to go. The coffee warms my hands as we zip over the rolling fairways in a cart. We’re the only people on the course. We say little to each other, but few words are necessary on a golf course. It’s all understood.

I’ve never been a very good golfer, but golf is the one activity in which I can completely lose myself. On a golf course, the only thing on my mind is the next shot. I forget everything else. I forget life’s uncertainties. I forget any troubles or worries. And for a few glorious hours here in western Illinois, I even forget that I just may be a crazy man on a crazy quest.

Before I left California, I was having trouble controlling my driver, so I started using my three iron off the tee. Today, I also leave the driver in the bag—until the back nine, when my caution strikes me as ludicrous.

“I mean, after all the risks I’m taking on the road, I guess I can afford to take one on the golf course,” I tell Jim.

“Yeah, it’s safer if you miss out here,” he says.

I reach for the biggest club in the bag and let her rip. As I see the ball sail out over the fairway, straight and true, I know that, if nothing else, the Road to Cape Fear has cured me of my fear of the driver.

Back at Jim’s, we fix ourselves sandwiches from cold cuts and eat them with pickles and potato chips. Afterward, we cut ourselves pieces of chocolate cake and wash it down with iced tea. It’s the perfect end to a perfect morning.

“Let me ask you something,” I say to Jim. “Do you ever get mad?”

“No, I try not to.”

“I guess you could say you’re a contented man.”

“You could say that,” says Jim, his brown eyes beaming wisdom and peace. “I’ve been lucky. If you find the right woman, it’s real good.”

I think about Anne. I’ve thought about her a lot on this trip. Usually, it’s after I’ve met a happy couple married a long time. If Anne and I had followed through with our wedding plans, we would’ve been married a year by now. That’s a year I’ll never have back. If I really want what Jim and Linda have, what am I waiting for? So many times out on the highway, I’ve imagined again asking Anne to marry me. Perhaps this is how the journey is destined to end. On the Road to Cape Fear, maybe I’ll lose my fear of commitment.

I help Jim clear the table. I fold my clean clothes and put them in my pack.

Jim asks if there’s anything I need, anything at all.

“Could you spare a Magic Marker?”

CHAPTER 27

I take nothing for granted. No matter how good it gets—my own room, a hot shower, plenty to eat, a round of golf with a fine fellow—I’ve got to start from scratch each day. There are no guarantees of kindness on this journey.

I’ve now traveled penniless for 3,000 miles. The trip is working. Still, I can’t allow myself to think I can coast the rest of the way. Perhaps it’s all been sheer luck, like making your number 15 consecutive times in a game of dice. If I am on a roll, I only hope I reach the end before crapping out.

I use the felt pen Jim gave me to snag a ride to Meredosia, a blue-collar town on the eastern bank of the Illinois River.

I drop by the town hall, a storefront on the main drag, and ask about camping options. There are none, comes the reply from Bonnie, the receptionist. When I tell her I’m not picky, she wonders aloud whether I can pitch my tent in the front yard of the boat club. She calls all over town, trying to secure permission.

“He’s a real clean-cut guy,” she says when she tracks down a club member.

Bonnie’s word must be gold because the man on the other end authorizes my night’s lodging. Bonnie gives me directions. She says she’ll have the police check on me during the night.

The boat club is only three blocks away, but I somehow get lost. I stop to get my bearings from two men talking in a yard. One of them starts to give me directions before the other one cuts him off.

“I’ll take you over there,” he says.

“That’s okay, it’s only a couple blocks,” I say.

“Throw your stuff in back and hop in,” he says, walking toward his pickup. “I’ll show you what it’s like.”

After I climb into the bed of the truck, I look back at the other man. He wiggles his hand, as if to say the situation I’m now in is a little shaky.

The man drives toward the river at the speed of a snail. The boat club turns out to be a lopsided cabin, shaded by an oak tree. The man eases past the building and continues through the parking lot to the concrete boat ramp. A tugboat maneuvers a string of five barges under the bridge and down the lazy river.

I walk around to the cab to thank the man for the lift. I now see that he’s drunk. His eyes are bloodshot and his speech slurred.

“What are ya da’wn? Campin’?”

“Yeah.”

“How far ya ga’wn?”

“The East Coast.”

“Ya got more money than brains.”

I look at the man. He stares back at me through angry eyes.

“Ya got more money than brains,” he says again.

Though I don’t have a penny in my pocket, he may be right.

A retired bulldozer operator stops for me in the morning. He lives in Jacksonville, 17 miles east. He drove over to Meredosia to buy some honey. He’s a native of Tennessee. I tell him I’ll probably be in Tennessee next week.

“Cops may warn you ’bout hitchhiking in Kentucky and Tennessee,” he says.

“Is it illegal?”

“No, it’s legal. They just may warn you. And if they do, take their advice. You just be careful down there. I don’t mean to scare you, but some people take rides and disappear. You just be careful who you get in a car with.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Oh, some of them boys can’t hold their liquor and put a show on. You just be careful.”

Ever since I left California, folks have been warning me about someplace else. In Montana, they said watch out for the cowboys in Wyoming. In Nebraska, they told me people aren’t as nice in Iowa. In Iowa, they said I’d find trouble in Missouri. No one ever says anything bad about his own part of the country. Evil in America is always down the road.

I walk through Jacksonville, out past the Kraft food factory, and draw a sign for Waverly, the next town east on Illinois 104. A new green Saturn passes me, and the driver turns around and comes back.

“Do you really need a ride to Waverly?” the woman says through the window.

I search my mind for another reason a guy would stand on the side of a road with a sign that says “Waverly.” I come up empty.

“I sure do,” I say.

“Well, if you’re not a rapist, a robber or a murderer, climb in.”

The woman appears to be in her forties. She works for an answering service. It’s her day off.

“You’re only the second hitchhiker I’ve ever picked up.”

“I’m honored. Why did you stop?”

“Because you’re so clean-cut. I thought you were about my son’s age. He’s twenty-three. I was going to give you a lecture. But now I see that you’re too old to lecture.”

When she drops me off, I give her my own brief lecture: “Don’t pick up hitchhikers.”

As I move east, it takes more rides to travel fewer miles. Every driver is only going to the next town, and the next town keeps getting closer.

A woman with a thick German accent drives me from Waverly to Auburn, a trip of 11 miles. The front seat of her Volvo is piled with papers, so she tells me to ride in back. She doesn’t say another word. Instead of a pauper, I feel like a millionaire being chauffeured through the countryside.

A beefy man hauling a flatbed of pesticides picks me up in Auburn.

“Nobody will stop for you out here,” he says.

So how is it I’ve come 3,000 miles?
I wonder.

The man is due to get laid off from the chemical plant next week. Then he’ll have a couple months’ work in the fields during harvest. After that, who knows? He carries me five miles to Pawnee.