The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (7 page)

“Have you had your lunch yet?” he says.

“No.”

“Neither have I. I know a nice little restaurant on the road that leads out of town. I’ll buy you lunch, then you’ll be on your way.”

The sudden offer raises my suspicions. Besides, I’m not even hungry. But a penniless traveler never knows when he’ll next eat, so I reluctantly agree.

We both order the special of the day, chicken fried steak.

Something about the man pushes my uh-oh button. He won’t look me in the eye. He doesn’t ask me any personal questions, not even where I’m from. And for a guy who lives in Hawaii, he looks awfully pale.

He says he stopped picking up hitchhikers after one killed a friend several years ago. He recently resumed giving rides because he likes to help people. He says the president of a local college is a close friend. It’s as if he’s trying to convince me of something, put me at ease.

The man says he’s been moving some boxes out of storage, but it’s been difficult because he recently suffered whiplash in a car wreck. He mentions the beautiful home in Boise he’s house-sitting. I sense this is all leading up to a request for help, with an offer of a night’s shelter in return. I rehearse my polite refusal in my mind.

“Do you want some pie?” the man says.

“Oh, no thanks. I’m stuffed.”

“Well, I’ll drive you out to the stoplight. It’ll be easier for you to get a ride out there.”

I recall the guy in California who drove me down the dead-end road. I may be paranoid, but there’s no way I’m getting back into this man’s car.

“That’s okay. You’ve done enough.”

“It’s no trouble.”

“No, really, thanks. I’ll just walk out that way.”

“It’s no trouble at all.”

“I’d like to walk, really. I need to work off my lunch.”

“Well, all right,” he says.

I retrieve my pack from the man’s car and thank him for the meal. It’s broad daylight and we’re in a crowded parking lot, but I’m afraid of him. I can’t get away fast enough.

When I was a kid growing up in California, there was a string of murders attributed to a man called the Zodiac Killer. After each death, he claimed responsibility in a card or letter that bore astrological symbols. He once mailed a card to the news media from a post office near my home at Lake Tahoe. I worried about the Zodiac Killer a lot. He was never caught. Years later, one expert claimed that the notorious murderer was a real estate agent living in northern California. But today, part of me is convinced that the Zodiac Killer is a retired attorney from Boise, Idaho.

Walking down the street, I keep turning around, expecting to find him following me. I imagine him turning up further along the Road to Cape Fear. Will he be my last ride?

I chastise myself. I’m to blame for this fright. I got too greedy.

It was stupid to accept lunch from a stranger who triggered my mistrust. I must be more careful. For the rest of the trip, I vow to listen to my instincts before my stomach.

CHAPTER 10

A junior high school on the edge of Boise is letting out when I drop my pack in the dirt. I draw a sign for a place called Murphy, a dot on the map in southwestern Idaho. I don’t know what’s there, but it’s away from the city. Kids cruising in cars read my destination and bust loose laughing. I guess Murphy is where all the geeks live.

An old Jeep Wagoneer stops to pick me up. The driver, Sue, must weigh close to 250 pounds. Her 55-year-old mother Edie rides shotgun. Sue’s little girl Katie, an adorable child with blond hair and blue eyes, stands on the floorboard, as my pack and I now take up the whole backseat. Sue’s other daughter, Laura, 11, is sprawled across her grandmother’s lap. She wears a protective helmet. Her body is as limp as linguine.

“Murphy!” Edie says in a voice like gravel. “Boy, you sure are a brave soul. There’s nothing but desert out there.”

I tell her I’m avoiding the freeways and traveling through small towns.

“There isn’t even a town there. Murphy!” Then, in the next breath: “Well, you want to have supper with us?”

The offer comes faster than the one made by the man earlier today. Yet Edie’s weathered face and simple ways convey a raw honesty. I’m not even hungry, but I’m suddenly smitten with this crusty woman. I quickly accept.

Sue turns into a tract housing development set among dull brown hills without trees. From Edie’s appearance—she’s dressed in baggy sweats and a dirty T-shirt—I expect her place to be a dump. But when we pull into the driveway, I see that hers is the tidiest house on the street. The modest home with white aluminum siding is bordered by a neatly trimmed lawn. Concord grapes hang from a lattice arbor out back. Edie has just been to the farmers’ market, where she sold $10 worth of grapes, which I gather for her is no small sum. When I use the bathroom, I notice the tub is spotless. Decorative baskets adorn the kitchen wall. A collection of antique spoons hangs from a cabinet in the living room.

Edie invites me to run a load of wash. The laundry room is a sight more welcome than the kitchen table, as my jeans and shirt can probably stand on the side of the road and hitchhike by themselves.

As Edie fixes dinner, Laura watches her from the kitchen table. She bounces in her chair, a sock dangling from her mouth.

Edie moves fast in the kitchen, a habit from her early years as a restaurant worker. She peels and mashes potatoes, and boils a pot of water for corn on the cob. Chicken roasts in the oven. I offer to help, but she says sit tight.

Sue parks her ample behind in an easy chair in the front room. She plunges her hand into a bag of potato chips and swigs from a two-liter bottle of 7-Up. Her three-year-old son Kyle slaps her knee. A ponytail protrudes from his otherwise short-cropped hair.

“I’m gonna go see Daddy,” he whines.

“No, you’re not gonna be seein’ Daddy.”

Sue is married to a man down in Texas. A few days ago, she gathered up Kyle and Katie and left him. For good, she says.

“I’d like to beat my husband’s face in, make it all bloody, and leave him to die in the street,” she says, grinning wickedly.

Sue never married Laura’s father, a neighborhood boy who got her pregnant when she was 15. One day, when Laura was a baby, Sue fell asleep in another room while listening to loud music. She didn’t hear her daughter entering the earliest stage of sudden infant death syndrome. When she awoke and saw she wasn’t breathing, she phoned her mother, who worked as an orderly at a hospital. Edie rushed home and performed CPR on Laura. She saved her life, but she had already suffered brain damage.

Through the years, Sue proved a careless mother, leaving Laura with anybody. Edie hired a lawyer and sued for custody of her granddaughter. She went to school and got a license to care for the severely handicapped. The state now pays Edie to care for Laura at home, a cheaper and better alternative to putting her in an institution.

Edie sets a plate heaped with food in front of me, and I thank her.

“We don’t have much, but we don’t mind sharing what we have,” she says. “I know what it’s like to be hungry. There’ve been times when I’ve been down to my last ten cents, but people have always helped me.”

She asks if I want regular bread or homemade bread.

“I bet your bread is lots better,” I say.

“I think so. We grew up making our own bread. We thought store-bought bread was like candy. When we had store-bought bread, we thought we’d died and went to heaven.”

I saw off a slice from the dense loaf. To economize, Edie substitutes Karo corn syrup for sugar and boiled potato water for milk. It’s delicious.

Edie cuts kernels from an ear of corn and mashes them in a bowl. She spoon-feeds the mush to Laura, who hums as she chews. Sue fixes herself a plate and goes back into the living room to watch
Oprah
on TV.

“She used to be beautiful,” Edie says. “I don’t know what happened to her.”

Sue has more problems than an expanding waistline and a bad marriage. She’s currently on parole for dealing cocaine. Edie kept Kyle and Katie while Sue served five months in jail.

I hear a door open down the hall. Edie’s 30-year-old son Jay appears in the kitchen doorway. He wears a black cowboy hat, snakeskin cowboy boots and a belt buckle as big as a saucer. He struts through the kitchen like he’s just come in off the range. Without even a howdy-do, he pours himself a cup of coffee and retreats to his bedroom.

Jay has an ex-wife and two kids. She got tired of supporting him and kicked him out. He moved back home, where he mooches cigarettes and gas money off Edie. He busted up her Wagoneer four-wheeling in the desert. He’s supposed to be looking for a job to earn the $1,600 it cost Edie to fix the Jeep, but he spends most days in his room smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.

“He thinks the world owes him a living,” Edie says.

Jay and Sue each draw $400 per month from their father’s disability pension. Sue tells me with glee that the sum jumps to $900 as soon as her dad dies of lung cancer.

Edie was married to the kids’ father, a hardware salesman, for five years. They were living in Arkansas when he ran out on them. Edie spent her last $20 on a motel room and a baby-sitter, and that night she found a job in a local pizza parlor.

“I’ve always been able to work, and I’ve always been able to feed my kids,” she says.

There was no alimony or child support. Edie managed by holding down two jobs. She avoided the welfare rolls and never took a penny of public assistance. She also never remarried, nor got involved with another man. She remains self-sufficient to this day.

Edie invites me to stay over. “You don’t wanna be out on that road at night,” she says.

I tell her I’m happy to pitch my tent in her backyard.

“Or you can stay in here,” she says. “We won’t bother you.”

“Thanks, I really appreciate it.”

“Well, you look clean-cut,” she says. “You don’t look like one of those killers.”

Edie wipes Laura’s face with a washrag. She pours some orange liquid in a tube and gently squirts it down her throat. Even with the medicine, Laura suffers two to three grand mal seizures a day, thus the need for her helmet. She can’t talk, but Edie says they communicate fine. She’s her tireless advocate. When doctors told her Laura couldn’t walk because her brain fails to connect with her muscles, Edie refused to listen. She carried her granddaughter to specialist after specialist until she found one that saw Laura lacked certain bones in her feet. She will soon undergo an operation that should allow her to walk. Edie also fought to mainstream Laura into the local school system. She now attends classes with normal 11-year-olds.

“Okay, Grandma’s gonna give you a bath now, Laura,” Edie says.

I offer to do the dishes, but Edie insists I make myself at home in the front room. She bathes Laura and puts her in brown pajamas with feet. They sit on the sofa next to me. Edie polishes a silver spoon she bought at a garage sale and watches a documentary about ancient Siam on the Discovery Channel. I almost tell her I’ve been to Thailand, but I don’t want to sound boastful. It suddenly occurs to me how odd it is to be staying in the house of a total stranger. But a moment later I think maybe this is the way it’s supposed to be. Maybe what’s really unnatural is the great lengths we take to avoid one another.

After the show, I fold my clothes from the dryer. Edie added fabric softener to the wash, so my shirt smells fresh and clean. She moves Laura to her favorite chair at the kitchen table. She makes a pot of coffee and has a smoke. It’s the first time I’ve seen her relax since we met four hours ago.

“I admire what you’re doing,” she says. “I wish I would’ve done that when I was your age. I coulda gone to that big concert back East.”

“Woodstock?” I say.

“Yeah. And I didn’t go. I coulda been part of something that was almost historic. There were four carloads of kids that went from here. I coulda got a baby-sitter and went, but I didn’t. I could kick myself now. When you get to be my age, you’ll be able to look back and say, ‘I did this.’” She sips her coffee and says wistfully, “Boy, you’re taking me back now.”

I ask Edie what her dream is. She says that because she’s three-quarters Crow Indian, she was able to obtain a 120-acre parcel on a mountainous reservation in Montana. One day she’d like to sell her house and move there with Laura.

“I wanna build a log cabin, and I wanna get a horse for her. That’s my plan.” She looks adoringly at her granddaughter. “I love her. She’s special. The doctors said she wouldn’t live past five, but here she is. As long as God gives me the strength, I’m gonna take care of her. I really believe God made her this way so I could have her.”

For such a decent and caring woman, I’m surprised to learn that Edie had a terrible childhood. Her mother was an alcoholic, murdered at age 65 by the last in a long line of drifters she picked up in bars.

“She was always drunk, bringing home strange men,” Edie says. “As old as I am, I can still see these scary old men standing over me when I was little. We roamed around the country that way. She’d lock me in a motel room for two or three days ’til she got off her drunk. Sometimes, the police knocked the door down and took me to orphanages. One time we were in Mexicali. She was with this guy and they had a fight. The police came and took us all to jail. They put us in this cell with other people. There was water up to my ankles. The toilet was stopped up and overflowing. There was a mattress on the floor, and when I laid down it was sopping wet. I’ll never forget that, boy. When I had kids, I made a promise to myself that they’d never see that kind of life, and they never have.”

Edie sets out a sleeping bag for me. She says good night and takes Laura back to her bedroom.

Sue lounges in the easy chair. She wears a nightgown that could be mistaken for a tent. She fiddles with the cap on a bottle of sleeping pills. She says she was out until three in the morning. I see the giant hickey on her neck and imagine the rest. She has to get up early tomorrow to make a call. One day a year, the city of Boise takes applications for subsidized housing. Appointments are granted over the phone between 7:30 and 8:00. Now that she’s leaving her husband, an affordable apartment is critical to Sue and her kids. She pops a couple of pills, washing them down with 7-Up. She lumbers toward the guest room, ushering Katie and Kyle along with her. Kyle takes his time.