The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (21 page)

A cute young blond in a Mustang whizzes by, eyeing my sign for Assumption. Not a chance, I figure. But she pulls a U-turn.

“
Where
in Assumption?” she says.

She’s even prettier standing still. She gives me a big smile. My gaze falls to her smooth legs, which extend from a skimpy pair of cutoffs. I lapse into the male hitchhiker’s fantasy.

“Anywhere,” I say.

Natalie is 19. She studies psychology at a junior college in Decatur, about 15 miles north. Today she cut school and called in sick to her day-care job. She’s hiding from her mother until dinner. She says her stepfather “owns part of Assumption.” She smokes like a fiend and drives like a demon, almost ramming into the back of a slow combine.

“What’s that playing?” I say over the stereo.

“Smashing Pumpkins. Ever hear of them?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Do you know Green Day?”

“I’ve heard of them, but I don’t know their music.”

“I love Green Day,” Natalie says, pulling the CD from under her bare leg. “I
love
Green Day.”

Natalie is on her third college in two years.

“I missed two months of school last year. I was hospitalized.”

“Oh no, what was the matter?”

“I was on the psychiatric ward. They were giving me electroshock therapy. Ever hear of that?” She turns to me and smiles.

“Yeah, but I didn’t know they still used it,” I say.

“Oh, they still use it, all right. It makes you have a seizure.”

I think of all the people I’ve met on this trip who have seizures: Edie’s granddaughter, Laura; Barbara and her brother-in-law Mark; Sally in Iowa; now Natalie. It’s either a strange coincidence or there are a lot more people than I thought with faulty wiring.

“Did they have a name for your condition?” I say.

“Depression is what it was. I tried to kill myself three times.”

A few miles ago, I was lusting after this girl. Now I’m wrought with sadness for her.

I’ve never tried to commit suicide. But there was a time when I never wanted to wake up again. I was in college. Suddenly and inexplicably, life was terrifying and overwhelming. I locked myself in my dorm room and didn’t go to class for a month. I felt completely alone. I lost all sense of control. A giant wave of despair had me pinned to the bottom and wouldn’t let me up. I got better only with counseling. When the episode passed, I swore I would never feel that way again, and I never have.

I tell Natalie all of this in the hope that something in my story might help her.

We reach Assumption, Natalie bouncing her knee to Green Day.

“You can almost see my house. There’s my mom, as a matter of fact, painting.”

I look beyond somebody’s backyard to see a woman painting a house in the next block. It’s a nice-looking house, a nice-looking mom. I wonder what went so horribly wrong.

Natalie drops me at a gas station at the edge of town.

“Don’t kill yourself, all right?” I say.

“Okay.” She smiles.

The couple that stops for me next has come to Assumption to buy their daughter a dress for the high school homecoming dance. They’re on their way home to Pana, nine miles south. I put my pack in the trunk, careful not to wrinkle the formal gown enclosed in the clear plastic garment bag.

I ask the people what they do.

“I’m on disability,” the woman says. “An injury I got back in 1969 has returned. I was a driver for the state, and I’ve been driving and having seizures and not even knowing it.”

When I ask the next driver who picks me up where he’s going, he says Shelbyville—but I swear it sounds like Seizureville.

CHAPTER 28

There are some towns where I instantly know I won’t be invited home with anybody. Shelbyville, Illinois, is one of them. It’s a pretty place, set near a lake in the center of the state. But it exudes an air of self-sufficiency, a quality I suspect it also admires in its drifters.

I sit on a bench in a little brick square and open a can of beans with my Swiss Army knife. As I eat the cold beans, I recall who supplied them—Pastor Larry—and that gives me an idea.

It’s dark when I start knocking on church doors. The Catholic priest is the first to answer. I ask Father Joe if I can borrow a pew.

“I can’t let you for several reasons,” he says. “But we’ll work something out.”

Father Joe invites me into the rectory. He recently moved here, and his office floor is covered with unpacked boxes. He’s about 80, with a halo of white hair. He was ordained in San Diego, where I once lived for five years.

“I’m on a sort of spiritual journey,” I say, and tell him about my trip.

“That’s quite an adventure, Mike, but it’s getting too cold for you to be sleeping outside.”

He calls a local hotel and says he’s sending me over. As he fills out a voucher, he tells me about a priest who often picked up hitchhikers.

“We always told him he was going to pay for it, and he did. They found him dead.”

My situation also reminds Father Joe of another priest. This one took his vow of poverty to the extreme, refusing to even touch money.

“When he rode the city bus, he’d get other people to pay his fare,” he says, chuckling at the image.

He jots something on a church envelope and hands it to me. It’s good for six dollars in groceries at the local supermarket.

“You still won’t have to handle money, but you’ll be able to replenish your pack.”

I appreciate Father Joe’s help, but I wish he’d called one of his parishioners rather than the hotel. I guess my hunch about Shelbyville was right.

The Lidster Hotel is the local flophouse. I’m led to a dank basement room, with a chipped tile floor, an industrial gray metal desk and a stained bedspread.

A portable humidifier drones violently in the hallway. When I go out to investigate, I find an old man standing in front of an opened refrigerator that’s streaked with spilled liquids and food. The Lidster has been his home for 16 years. He lives on his Social Security payment of $299 per month. Mention of my road trip prompts him to name every relative who ever died, and how each met his demise. Several were “knocked over the head.” The list goes on for five minutes.

He bids me good night with, “Watch you don’t get knocked over the head.”

In the morning I exchange the church envelope at the market for a box of crackers, a package of sliced turkey, an apple and some grapes.

I return to the bench where I ate the beans and start a letter. A heavyset man in overalls and a baseball cap walks up and demands to know my “purpose.” I tell him straight.

“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” he says.

Father Joe didn’t say a word about religion when he set me up with a place to stay and something to eat. I guess this fellow is here to settle the account. As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Lee is 63, a former Marine. He farmed most of his life and later ran a hardware store in town. He says he’s read the “Old Testament” twice and the “New Testament” 31 times.

I listen politely as he recites several spiritual poems he wrote. Every one ends with the word “repent.” After he finishes a poem, he says, “What do you think of that one?” or, “How’s that for a hillbilly?”

He runs out of poems and wanders off.

Lee returns a minute later. “I’m back.”

I look up from my letter.

“You told me you don’t have a penny. How ’bout I buy you dinner?”

It’s 11:30 in the morning. Besides, I’ve got a pack full of food. I tell Lee thanks all the same.

He says God told him to buy me dinner. “God said, ‘You fed his spirit, now feed his stomach.’”

“Well, I don’t want to get you in trouble with God,” I say.

I follow Lee around the corner to a storefront cafe. He says, “Hey buddy,” to everyone who greets him. The special is fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, coleslaw, cottage cheese, and brown bread and butter.

Lee won’t let up on the God talk. If God is so powerful and loving, I ask him, then why do bad things happen to good Christians?

Jesus suffered, is his answer.

He tells me his wife lost her left breast to cancer last year. He tears up during the story and his lip trembles.

“I held her in my arms and told her it don’t matter what she look like. I’ll always love her.”

Tears stream down Lee’s rosy cheeks. He removes his glasses and wipes his eyes with his hands.

Out on the sidewalk after lunch, Lee cocks his head and says, “Your face looks familiar. I’ve seen you before. Are you a preacher?”

“No, not yet.”

He gives me a closer look. “You’re not run of the mill,” he says. Then he says it again.

He pulls his wallet from his overalls and offers me money. I tell him I can’t accept it. He gives me his number and tells me to call collect if I get in a jam.

“I want to take someone to heaven with me,” Lee says. “What good is a carpenter if he never builds a house? What good is a fisherman if he never catches a fish? What good is a Christian if he never converts one soul? You’re too good for hell. You know what the Bible says about strangers?”

“No, what?”

“They’re angels in disguise.”

Eastern Illinois is littered with towns that look tiny on the map, but jump up and swallow you when you reach them. The city of Mattoon spits me out onto Route 16, a four-laner thick with rush-hour traffic. I walk 12 miles to Charleston, home of Eastern Illinois University. I keep walking until I’ve passed the last gas station and fast food joint.

An auto mechanic named Jim stops for me. His hands are as greasy as his face is kind. He’s going home to Kansas—Kansas, Illinois.

“This is my wife’s car. I was supposed to fix it, but I got tired.”

“It sounds like it’s running good to me,” I say.

“There’s a few things wrong.”

Mechanics can always find something wrong, even with their own cars.

I ask Jim if there’s any camping in Kansas. He suggests the city park. I tell him the cops might have a problem with that. “You have police, right?”

“Yep, one day and two night,” he says.

“Is there a secluded place I can pitch my tent where they won’t bother me?”

“Well, if you really want to camp, you can camp in my backyard.”

Kansas is one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it towns. You can throw a rock from one city limit sign to the other.

Jim pulls into the driveway of a big white house. We walk around back to a yard that borders a pasture. A picnic table sits below a maple tree.

“I’d let you stay in the house, but it’s a mess,” Jim says.

I know it’s a weak excuse. Still, I can’t fault Jim. He’s known me for 15 minutes, which means he doesn’t know me at all.

“You sure your wife won’t mind?”

“I don’t know,” he says with a chuckle.

Jim asks if I want to take a shower, but I already had one today. He says to knock on the back door if I need to use the bathroom. On his way inside, he points to a garden hose coiled on the side of the house. “If you need water.” He gestures to a table covered with garden tomatoes. “There’s even some free tomatoes here.”

He pauses in the doorway. “It’s gonna get down to forty-seven tonight.”

“I’ll be fine. I’ve got a down bag.”

I set up camp before Jim’s wife has a chance to change his mind.

I walk into town for a look. A grain auger lugs corn to the top of a bin. The sign at the Kansas State Bank reads: “Best Wishes for a Safe Harvest.” The counter at the Crazy Corner Cafe is full of coffee sippers in baseball caps.

A left turn takes me down the main drag. Downtown Kansas stretches out for an entire block. There’s a second-hand store, the post office, an upholstery shop, a boarded-up saloon and an American Legion Hall. No town in the Midwest is too small for a veterans post.

I continue past the Methodist Church, down a residential street. Kids in Kansas don’t leave their bikes in the front yard; they leave them on the sidewalk. I stop outside a house and watch TV shadows flicker on the living room wall.

I return to my tent and crawl in. As I lie in the dark, I wonder what Jim and his wife think about the stranger camped out beneath their bedroom window. I imagine Jim’s wife at work tomorrow saying, “You’re not gonna believe what Jim did last night…”

I fall asleep listening to the comforting purr of the grain auger.

Jim and his wife have left when I wake in the morning. I stick my head under the garden hose and eat a tomato from the table.

Jim probably thought what he did for me was nothing. I bet he doesn’t know what a patch of grass, a hose and a tomato mean to me. I write him a thank-you note and pin it under a cement dog statue on the front porch.

At the post office, an old lady is waiting in the lobby when I step in to mail a letter. She stands expectantly in front of the wall of mailboxes.

A female voice calls to her from behind the boxes. “Mail’s all out, Mary.”

The old woman inserts her key into her box yet another time, as if she can’t believe the clerk. An empty mailbox stares back at her. She snaps it shut and limps away. I hold the door open for her.

“Thanks,” she huffs. Then she mumbles, “Kids don’t know how to write anymore.”

“What’s that?”

“That daughter of mine doesn’t take the time to write.”

She limps down the sidewalk, leaves swirling about her feet.

It will be winter soon.

I blow east out of town with the wind. Like Dorothy, I have a feeling I’m not in Kansas anymore.

CHAPTER 29

The man who drives me into Indiana is a construction worker in a shiny new Dodge pickup. A sling holds his right arm, so he steers and lights cigarettes with his left. He’s heading for a car wash in Terre Haute. He lives outside of town.

“There’s my house, right up there,” he says, pointing with his good arm to a cabin on a wooded hill. “Yeah, it’s nice out here. No niggers out here. Them niggers ruin everything. Run the value of your house down, everything.”

When he drops me at the car wash, I see an African-American pulling out in a Porsche. I take a few steps before realizing he’s the first black person I’ve seen since leaving California.

I have a good friend who’s black. He’s often told me that there are entire regions of the country he’d rather see from an airplane. I always thought it was hyperbole. Until now. Something’s wrong when you can travel through 10 states and encounter only white Americans along the way.