The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (8 page)

“Get to bed!” she says. “I’m gonna kick your ass.”

“Got your alarm set?” I call after her.

“I don’t need an alarm. These guys are my alarm.”

I think Sue a fool for taking a chance on such an important call. Then I decide I’m more concerned about it than she is.

Jay emerges from his room, this time wearing a $150 cowboy shirt designed by the country-western singer Garth Brooks. He opens the front door to let in a bubbly blond woman named Stacey, who has apparently just tapped on his window. Stacey is married, but I gather she spends more time with Jay than with her husband. I watch TV while they play slap-and-tickle at the kitchen table.

Ricky, a young man from the neighborhood, enters through the back door. The trio smokes and jokes, nobody uttering an intelligent remark. I keep hearing them say, “Eleven.” Something happens at 11 pm, I don’t know what. But it’s only 10. I wish they’d just leave, so I can go to sleep. Finally at the appointed hour, they head out.

I’m too long for the couch, so I unroll the sleeping bag on the floor and flip out the lights. A half hour later, Jay and his friends are back. I feign sleep. They lollygag in the kitchen, louder than before. I hear them count their money out on the table. They have $2.90 among them. They take turns calling the local Denny’s, trying to learn who’s working. I guess one of their friends gives them food. They leave again, and at last I’m able to sleep.

In the middle of the night, I’m awakened by the creak of the front door. It’s Jay and Stacey. They giggle as they tiptoe into Jay’s room and shut the door. I hear another door open down the hall, then footsteps.

“Jay, this is the last time!” Edie growls. “I’m tired of this. You wanna fool around, you do it on your own time!”

“Back off and fuck off!” Jay yells from the other side of the door.

I wince in the dark.

When I come out of the shower in the morning, Edie has breakfast on the table. Fried eggs, potatoes, sausage patties and toast—my fourth meal in the last 24 hours. She feeds Laura, and dresses her for school. I do the dishes over much protest from Edie and help Kyle put on his shoes.

It’s well past eight when Sue shuffles groggily from her room to resume her position next to the chips and soda. Maybe she’ll get that apartment next year.

Edie fixes me a bag full of grapes from her backyard, prunes and a loaf of her homemade bread. When I leave, Sue is trying to get through to the housing office, complaining that it hurts her fingers to push the buttons. Jay is still asleep in his room with Stacey.

“He and I are gonna have a talk,” Edie tells me in the driveway. “He goes and picks up these floozies in the bar and brings ’em back home. He thinks this is his private playground. I don’t do that in my house, and I don’t want him doing that in my house.”

I guess it’s a story as old as Cain, but I’ve never been able to figure how good people can produce rotten kids. I ache for Edie. She deserves better than Jay and Sue. They can’t see in a lifetime what I know in a day: Their mother is a saint. I think of Laura and how lucky she is to have Edie. And I think of myself, and how fortunate I’ve been to know her, if only for a short while.

“I wanna give you a good luck piece,” she says. “My friend gave me two of ’em, and I wanna share one with you.”

She holds out a Canadian dollar, polished to a shine. When she presses the coin into my palm and closes my hand around it with her rough fingers, I feel an emotion that can only be described as love.

“Carry this with you and you’ll never be broke,” she says.

For the first time since I met her, Edie’s creased and kind face hints at a smile.

CHAPTER 11

I walk down the road, my fingers turning the coin in my pocket. The money is foreign, so I’m still penniless, but I suddenly feel wealthy. I realize that this is no longer my trip alone. If I fail to reach Cape Fear, I’ll let down a growing number of people who find hope in this journey.

Two young men with dirt bikes in the bed of their pickup drive me to Murphy, the seat of Owyhee County. The region was named for the Hawaiian natives brought over in the early 1800s to trap beaver. Many Hawaiians were sent into the Snake River Valley, never to return, presumably killed by Indians. Owyhee is Idaho’s largest county—the combined size of Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island—yet has only one person per square mile. When my ride drops me in Murphy, it looks like the census takers may have padded that figure.

None of the town’s alleged 50 citizens are in view. The only sound in this dust-blown land is the drone of hot air colliding with more hot air, and the flap of an orange windsock perched above a lonesome airstrip.

A woman in the sheriff’s office says I can camp on the lawn in front of the jail. After closing time, I get my first look at the tent Tim and Diane gave me. It’s navy blue and pitches into the shape of a dome. The inside is filled with dirt from Tim’s days at the Nevada mine, and my head and feet touch the corners when I lie down—but it’s home.

I tear off a hunk of Edie’s homemade bread and break out the bag of trail mix Linda bought me back in northern California. I lie on my back and gaze at the stars through the mesh top of the tent. When I roll over to go to sleep, a coyote in the desert bids me good night.

In the morning, I shampoo my hair and shave in the sink of the bathroom in the courthouse. When I’m home, I shave only three times a week, due to a combination of sensitive skin and general laziness. But on this trip, I try to shave daily, so as to put my best face forward to would-be benefactors. My strategy works this day. The fellow who stops for me says he never gives strangers rides, but I look different.

“I think people still respond to decency,” he says. “I think that’s what you struck in me.”

Don, a local hay grower, is driving 50 miles east to Mountain Home to get a tire fixed. That will put me at Interstate 84, but I see on my map there’s a two-laner that heads out from there across the gut of Idaho.

Don asks where I’m from, and lets me know how poorly folks from my home state are regarded in these parts. A Californian is lower than a snake’s belly. The very term “Californian” is synonymous with that local swear word “environmentalist.” There is mounting resentment against Californians who cash out and invade the intermountain states, bringing with them such twisted liberal notions as conservation and imposing them on the natives. Most recently, irrigation in the area was suspended—threatening to bankrupt many a farmer—while environmentalists fought for the rights of a new species of snail discovered in a reservoir.

“It’s gettin’ to be where a guy who wants to live off the land and raise a family can’t do it anymore,” Don says.

As if on cue, we pass a spray-painted plea on the blacktop: “Don’t Californicate Idaho!”

Don doesn’t hold my birthplace against me. He even offers me the can of soda resting on the seat.

“But what are you going to drink?” I say.

“Oh, I’ll be by a Pepsi machine before you will,” he laughs.

He stops at a truck stop in Mountain Home to let me out. Before he drives off, he says, “You know, these days people all think we’re masters of our own destiny. I couldn’t go out and do what you’re doing if I thought like that. I hope you know you couldn’t do what you’re doing unless there’s someone looking over you.”

I wish I shared Don’s blind faith. Life would be simpler. But in a way he’s right. While I worry about dying—and even conjure grisly scenarios involving my demise on the Road to Cape Fear—I simultaneously believe that on this journey I’m immune to death. Perhaps it’s no more than a mental trick that allows me to hop into cars with total strangers. Or maybe it’s proof positive that I’m not an atheist.

The next car that comes along picks me up. Casey, a recent college graduate, buys me a hot dog at a convenience store, but he isn’t much for conversation. It’s a silent 200-mile shot across the state to Idaho Falls. We blow by the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Arco, the first nuclear-powered city in the U.S. About all Casey has to say is that the Mormon Church is a cult. Like Utah, southern Idaho has a heavy Mormon population. Casey says you’re either with them or against them. So when we reach Idaho Falls, I’m surprised when he drops me in the parking lot of the Mormon temple.

Everyone in my girlfriend Anne’s immediate family is a practicing Mormon, except for Anne. As long as I’m here, I figure I’ll have my picture snapped in front of the temple and give it to Anne’s mom when I get home. A couple of women volunteers from the visitors center see me standing in front of the temple with a camera, and they come outside. They’re both wearing dresses that almost reach the sidewalk. One of them asks if I want my picture taken in front of the temple, and I say yes.

“Where are the men?” she says to the other woman. “See if one of them can take his picture.”

I wonder why a man is needed, and so must the other woman, who says, “Well, I can take his picture.”

The women invite me into the visitors center, where I lean my pack against the wall. My eyes dart to a table with some cake and punch, but it’s not that easy. I’m first handed off to one of the men. The guy looks about dead. You could put a fist in the space between the knot of his tie and his shriveled neck. He speaks in a thin-lipped monotone, yet he’s as subtle as a jackhammer.

“Have you ever considered missionary studies?”

He leads me around the room, stopping in front of pictures of places inside the temple I’m not allowed to see because I’m not a member. In one picture, statues of 12 oxen support a whirlpool tank. This is where Mormon ancestors who lived before the founding of the church are belatedly baptized. Another picture shows the Sealing Room, where couples are married—not until death do they part, but for all eternity. There’s also a picture of the childhood home of Joseph Smith, founder of the religion. The story goes that God revealed the
Book of Mormon
through a stack of gold plates Smith found buried in a New York mountain. That was in 1827, but the plates were somehow lost. This is what troubles me about organized religions: The crucial evidence is always missing.

The man hands me a pencil and asks me to fill out a card. I don’t know why, but I actually put down my real name and address. Now some missionary in San Francisco won’t rest until he personally places a copy of the
Book of Mormon
in my hands.

At least now I get cake and punch.

The volunteers ask what I’m up to, and I tell them. Surely, one of them will seize the opportunity to drag a sinner home and show him the appeal of the wholesome Mormon life. But I get no offers. They already know where I live. I’m already in the factory, somewhere down the assembly line. I leave the temple, marveling at the efficiency of the salvation industry.

I hike through town along the Snake River. There’s a wooden raft anchored to the bank, and I consider playing Huck Finn for the night. But it’s out in the open, leaving me an easy target for cops and robbers. I continue along the shore until I come to a private campground.

“Are you the manager?” I say to the teenaged girl inside the office.

“No, I just work here, but I’m pretty important.”

I offer my labor in return for a campsite.

“Oh, I couldn’t decide that,” the girl says.

“I thought you said you were important,” I tease.

“The owner’s gotta decide that. She’ll be in after five.”

“What do you think she’ll say?”

“Probably no.”

I return to the office a half hour later, and a woman with a warm, friendly smile greets me. But when I run my pitch by her, the smile melts faster than a snowball in August. I see myself sleeping out on that raft yet.

“I’ve got hired men who do all my work, and they’re through for the day,” she says.

I tell her I’m passing through and I don’t even need a whole spot. A patch of grass will do.

“Well, I hate to see you be without a place to stay,” she says. “Why don’t you take one of those tent sites over there.”

As it turns out, the woman is a recent transplant from northern California. She’s from the Alexander Valley, the very place where Chief let me camp on the first night of my journey.

There’s a play area in the back of the campground. I spot a pair of swings, and I sit in one. The rubber and canvas seat cradling my behind feels familiar, yet it’s been at least 25 years since I’ve sat in a swing. When I was a little boy, the first poem I remember my mother reading to me was called “The Swing.” It was in a book of children’s literature she kept by her bed, and I often begged her to read it to me. I was enthralled with the image of flight. Of all the toys in the playground, the swing was my favorite. It was magical. And now I ask myself how I ever let a quarter century pass without sitting in a swing. If I had not embarked on this journey, would the swing have been lost to me forever? I give the ground a shove with my foot and start swinging. It all comes back. The muscles don’t forget. I pull hard on the links of chain and climb higher. I throw my head back and look down at the ground. You’re never alone on a swing. A swing swings back. Together you make music. There is the creak of the bolts, the scrape of your shoes dragging in the dirt. I pull harder, climb higher. I see the sun setting over where I’ve been, the moon coming up over where I’m going. I scoot to the edge of the seat. Soaring ever higher, I wonder: Do I still remember how to jump?

CHAPTER 12

I make West Yellowstone, Montana, by noon the next day. I was last here in 1988, covering the devastating forest fire in the national park for my newspaper. It’s odd how the profane is never far from the beautiful. With its phalanx of souvenir shops and burger stands, West Yellowstone is a blight on the land worse than the charred remains of the famous park across the state line in Wyoming.

I figure kindness may be a rare commodity in a town that needs to sell so many T-shirts. I stay only long enough to hear one joke. A local citizen asks if I know the difference between a black bear and a grizzly.

“If you climb a tree and the bear climbs after you, it’s a black bear,” the man says. “A grizzly just knocks the tree down.”