The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (24 page)

By late afternoon I’m in Vernon, in the southeast corner of Indiana.

The sign on Route 7 for the Muskatatuck State Park has a symbol for a campground. I turn down a road covered by a canopy of branches. It climbs the other side of a ravine and skirts an open grassy plateau the size of a polo field. From the look of the facilities, I know it’s too nice to be free. A worker with a rake in his hand confirms this. I tell him I don’t have any money and ask about other campgrounds in my budget.

“Oh, you can stay here free,” he says, “only because you’re a backpacker.”

When I poke my head out of my tent in the morning and look at my neighbor’s campsite, I see a deer hanging from its neck by a rope. The rope is thrown over a tree limb and secured to the ball hitch of an old blue Chevy pickup. A man about my age is skinning the deer with a knife. Blood covers his hands and forearms. He puffs on a cigar as he cuts.

“You get that this morning already?” I say on my way over.

“No, last night. It’s gonna be warm today. I gotta get her in ice.”

Tom is married and the father of three. He’s a foreman at a steel fabrication plant up in Gary. I ask him if he’s originally from Indiana.

“Yep. If you ain’t a Hoosier, you’re a loosier.” He flashes a big smile and puffs his cigar.

Tom killed the deer with a bow and arrow. He works quickly, slicing long strips from the animal’s back, and packs the meat in a plastic garbage bag.

“It’s wanting to stick to the bone, but it’s still cool,” he says. “Here, touch.”

I put a tip of my finger to the purple meat. It’s cold and gluey.

“How far away were you when you let the arrow fly?” I say.

“About fifteen yards. It went through both lungs and the heart. She didn’t suffer a bit. This is one of Jesus’ prettiest creatures, and I’m just glad He allowed me to have one.”

The deer’s brown eyes are now cloudy, its tongue stiff and jutting to the side. Tom reaches into the cavity and cuts out the tenderloin.

“Yeah, people spend lots of money for drugs to get the same feeling I get from bow hunting,” he says. “It’s exhilarating.”

Tom carefully packs the animal’s hide. He saws off the hooves and wraps them in newspaper; a Mexican man he knows will use them for bullwhip handles. He slices out the windpipe, which he’ll later turn into a deer caller. Nothing will go to waste.

I’ve never hunted, let alone fired a gun or shot an arrow, but I admire Tom’s sense of conservation. He’s a breed apart from the “hunters” I once interviewed for a story on exotic game ranches in Texas. Down there, people shot tame animals from the back of a pickup that distributed a trail of corn feed. When one hunter missed badly and blew a hole in a Sika deer’s belly, he didn’t bother to track down the wounded animal and put it out of its misery. It was getting dark and he had paid to kill two more.

When Tom learns I’m penniless, he offers me some deer meat. “You might get hungry,” he says.

I politely decline. There’s no room in my pack, I say.

He flicks the dead ash from his cigar and relights it.

“What do you miss most?” he says. “Besides your girlfriend, I mean.”

I hesitate.

“Cable TV?” Tom says.

Still nothing comes to mind. “You know, I’m so busy meeting people and trying to get down the road without money that I haven’t had time to miss anything,” I say.

I don’t miss TV. I don’t miss movies. I don’t miss beer. I don’t miss any of the things I usually use to numb my mind and pass the time. This has been the only extended period of my adult life that I haven’t been bored. If I could only make it last.

I shake Tom’s bloodstained hand. He makes a final offer to share his deer meat. I say no thanks and return to my campsite to break down my tent.

“Hey, what’s the name of your book?” Tom yells over.

I tell him.

“It’s hard to believe we’re all strangers,” he says, “when we’re really all brothers.”

CHAPTER 32

The citizens of Vernon, Indiana, are readying for their fall festival when I walk through town. Vendors erect booths for an arts and crafts show. Boys rake leaves on the courthouse lawn under a gray sky. One kid reclines on a park bench, his rake idle in his hands. The supervisor tells him to hop to.

“You see, I told you, boy!” a lecherous voice cackles from a cell window in the nearby jail. “Get back to work! Hah!”

At the edge of town, a Toyota stops for me. I grab my pack and start to run, but the car speeds off.

A few minutes later it returns. A young, chubby couple sits in front. A boy rides in back. There’s also a dog, a caged parakeet, and a pile of blankets and clothes. I don’t know where I’ll fit my pack or myself.

The man apologizes for passing me. There was no room to pull over. He rearranges his cargo. The boy, Kyle, aged six, sits on his mother’s lap.

The man served five years in the Navy before he was kicked out for a bad back. He now attends pharmacy school up in Indianapolis. He and his wife are originally from Madison, Indiana, on the Ohio River. They’re going there now to visit their parents.

“I’ve got a big brother,” the boy says.

“Kyle, you big fibber,” his mom says.

“Do you have a kid?” Kyle asks me.

“No, not yet. Someday.”

“In two weeks?”

“No, I don’t think that soon.”

“In about four weeks?”

“No, a little longer than that.”

“Five weeks?”

The mom rescues me. “
Maybe
, Kyle,” she says.

The dad turns down a country road outside Madison. They need to drop the dog and bird at his mother-in-law’s before continuing on to his parents’ house in town.

As soon as we’re out of the car, Kyle grabs my arm.

“I show you Gwamma’s garden,” he says. “We gotta go akwahs da bwidge.”

He clutches a stuffed bear in one hand and my hand in the other as he leads me over a footbridge. We wade through a bank of tall grass that opens onto a garden of gourds. The gourds are immense, some the size of laundry baskets. Kyle tramples through the garden, kicking up vines. The patch is out of sight of the house. I tell Kyle maybe he ought to leave his grandma’s gourds alone. It’s a timid request; I don’t want to make the boy cry. At the same time, I don’t want to get blamed for killing a blue-ribbon gourd.

Kyle’s dad calls us. It’s time to go to town. I only hope we get away before the damage is discovered.

“So, you’re going to see your folks for the weekend?” I say to the man as his wife says goodbye to her mother.

“Yeah, well, I got word my grandmother died at six this morning.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay. You had no way of knowing.”

When I think of all the woes on this man’s mind, I’m surprised he made the time to take on one more problem. Not to mention, he had to turn back and pick it up.

“Was it unexpected?” I say.

“She had lung cancer, but she went fast. I saw her two weeks ago, and she was good old Grandma. My dad called me this week and said she wasn’t feeling well. We were gonna drive down last night, but classes ran late. I figured I’d see her this morning, but I didn’t make it.”

He raises his eyes heavenward.

I’m lucky. Both my grandmothers are still alive. They’re in their 80s, but remain sharp. Even so, you never know. I decide to write them from the next post office I see.

The family drops me in the new part of Madison, on a busy boulevard up the hill from the historic center of town. The road has no shoulder. What’s worse, it’s being repaved, so there’s even less room to walk.

I pass a golf course and fondly remember my round in Liberty with Jim. Three men stand on the tee, taking practice swings. I lapse into a daydream: The golfers call to me. They need a fourth. I climb the fence, drop my pack, and pick up a club. There’s a big bet. My partner says, don’t worry, he’ll cover me. I play magnificently. We win, and the losers buy me a hotel room and dinner.

I’m knocked from my fantasy by a rock that hits me in the face. It must’ve shot up from under the tire of a passing car. It hits me above my right eye. A half inch lower, I would’ve stumbled into Cape Fear a cyclops. I touch my forehead. No blood. But there’s a knot the size of a golf ball.

Madison’s Main Street is one of only three Main Streets in the United States on the National Preservation Registry. The wide avenue is lined with Greek Revival, Italianate, and Federal-style buildings. The red brick facades and clean sidewalks gleam in the sun.

The bridge across the Ohio River ends at the base of a wooded bluff. There’s no sign of life on the other side. Kentucky looks foreboding—the edge of the mysterious South. Stereotypes race through my head. I have visions of hillbillies chasing me through the forest. I recall a disturbing scene from the movie
Deliverance
. I ponder backtracking and detouring through Ohio.

I scold myself for being so ignorant. I know better. I’ve traveled all over the world and have found good people wherever I’ve been. On this trip, I’ve been treated with kindness in every state for the last 3,500 miles. I’m ashamed that even for an instant I believe Kentucky will offer up anything less.

A “Pedestrians Prohibited” sign guards the north side of the bridge. I write “KY” on a sheet of paper. I don’t bother affixing it to my cardboard because my roll of tape is running thin.

“We’ll take you to Kentucky,” a smiling woman says through a car window.

She drives, and her daughter rides in the front seat. I sit in back. The daughter is 21. Her mother is three months pregnant.

“I can size someone up pretty quick,” the mother says.

“All her boyfriends are in prison,” the daughter hoots.

“Melissa!” the mother scolds.

Melissa watches me in the visor mirror. “Yew hitchhiking all the way across the country?”

“Yep.”

“Yew got balls,” she snickers.

“Melissa, watch your mouth!” her mom says.

The bridge arches over the wide green river, and my head spins from the height. When we reach the other side, Melissa asks her mother to stop at a gas station.

“Yew like Coke?” Melissa says.

“Sure,” I say.

While Melissa drops coins in the soda machine, her mother leans over the seat. “My daughter’s got a mouth on her, but she’s kind.”

Melissa hands me a 20-ounce bottle of Coke. The soda machine charges 35 cents. I’ve either traveled back in time or Kentucky is the state that inflation forgot.

Mother and daughter have no plans. They’re just out driving.

They drop me at a gas station in Bedford, 13 miles south of the river, on Route 421.

“There’s some real good people here,” the mother says. “They’ll give you a ride.”

There’s a new feel to the land. I’m still in the United States, but it’s a different country. The abrupt change reminds me of crossing from California into Mexico. The blacktop is potholed. There isn’t a new car on the road. People wear tired looks and tired clothes. What little they have is paid for with sweat, and it’s obvious there aren’t enough jobs to sweat over. Northern Kentucky is as depressed as a recent widow.

I sit on the tall curb of the Country Store Super Market—an oxymoron if I ever heard one. An old, stooped man shuffles out the door to his pickup. He casts a cloudy eye in my direction.

“You want me to take you down the road a couple miles?” he hollers.

I stand and meet him at his truck. John is frail, with a cough like a baby rattle. He holds himself up against his truck with a bony hand. In his other hand, he pinches a burning cigarette. His fingernails are stained orange from nicotine.

“You a tobacco farmer?” I say.

“Three hundred years my family’s been doin’ it.” He gasps for air. “You cain’t lose money if you do it right.”

I ask John if there’s a spot in Bedford a traveler can pitch a tent. He rubs his whiskered chin and mentions a park on the other side of the gas station.

“They may investigate, but no one’ll bother you.”

He gives the pack on my back a sideways glance.

“There aren’t many
real
hobos left,” he says. He recalls a man who passed through here in the seventies. “I called him the plastic hobo. He carried everything in a plastic bag, and he used the bag for a shelter.”

After John leaves, I cross the road to look for the park behind the gas station. There may have once been a park here, but not in my lifetime. I’m sure that to a man of John’s years, it was here only yesterday.

I walk back across the road to reclaim my seat at the Country Store Super Market.

John returns in his pickup. He flicks cigarette ash out the window.

“I thought of a place where you can camp,” he says. “The back side of my farm is on 421. There’s a wooded area there with a creek. Put your pack in back and I’ll show you.”

He drives down the road at a leisurely 15 miles an hour.

We pass a string of places I’m hard put to call homes. They’re twisted trailers and sagging shacks. Laundry waves in the breeze like flags of surrender. The shabby yards are littered with pieces of dead automobiles and machinery. A giant old-fashioned cash register sits in a rutted dirt driveway, its drawer open and empty.

We clear the squalor and drive several more miles.

“Is there a creek there?” John asks, squinting into the woods. “My eyes aren’t too good anymore.”

“Yeah, I think so.”

He parks and tells me to check it out. I slide down a ravine to a stream that trickles over slabs of shale. There isn’t a flat spot in sight. I climb back out. I’ll ride back to Bedford with John.

“How’s it look?” he says.

“Well, it’s pretty, but it’s all rocky.”

He says the ground is flatter across the creek. It’s his neighbor’s land, but he won’t mind.

Storm clouds are gathering. I’ve already conquered my fear of sleeping in the forest in the rain. There’s nothing new to prove here. Besides, this is my first time in Kentucky; I don’t want to hide like a hermit. But John is so eager to accommodate me, I worry I’ll appear ungrateful and hurt his feelings. So I tell him I’ll be fine here and thank him for the ride.

He reaches into a paper bag on the truck seat and hands me four tomatoes from his farm. After he disappears around the bend, I start the long walk back into town.

CHAPTER 33

I return to the curb at the Country Store Super Market and eat one of the tomatoes. It’s vine-scarred, but juicy and sweet.

Rusted clunkers roll by, knocking and belching. It sounds like all of Trimble County needs a tune-up.

A barrel-chested man with a salt-and-pepper beard sits down beside me.

“Lemme show you somethin’.”

He pulls a knife from a leather sheath, but it doesn’t look like any knife I’ve ever seen.

“I carved that out of black granite,” he says.

I run my fingers along the cold smooth blade and whistle in admiration.

“How long did it take you to make it?”

“Aw, I worked on it an hour or two a night for a couple months.”

Rex was born and raised in Bedford. He’s a welder, divorced, and the father of eight grown kids. He lives above the store. The sidewalk is his front porch. He gives a friendly wave to all who pass.

A black Trans Am pulls up and the driver leans across his girlfriend to talk to Rex. I can’t hear what they say over the roar of the engine.

“Be good!” Rex shouts at the end of the conversation.

“I work for his dad,” he tells me. “He’s crazy.”

“The dad or the boy?”

“The boy. He’s had three totals already and he’s not yet eighteen.”

Rex nods at an orange 1965 Ford pickup parked at the curb. With its makeshift top, the truck looks more like a van.

“There’s my vehicle down there,” he says. “A friend of mine used to own that. He died ice-skating on a pond. They never found him.”

At the funeral, the man’s wife recalled that Rex liked the truck. She asked him if he wanted to buy it. He did. She wanted $3,500, a price too steep for Rex. She let the truck sit in the barn. A year after her husband’s accident, the woman died of a brain aneurysm. At her funeral, the woman’s mother asked Rex if he was still interested in the truck. He was. She let it go for $150. Rex dropped a new battery in it and it came back to life.

The firehouse siren pierces the air. A fire truck screams past, red lights flashing. It’s followed by a state trooper’s sedan, a woman at the wheel.

“She gives tickets for even two miles over the speed limit,” Rex says.

An auxiliary fire truck and an ambulance bring up the rear. Rex can’t tell if there’s a fire or a wreck.

A man drives up from the direction of the emergency.

“There’s a guy standing in his yard waving a gun,” he says.

He notices a light on at the mortuary down the street. “Who’s in the bone house?” he says.

Rex answers with a shrug.

A young man missing a front tooth walks up and sits down on the other side of Rex.

“I’ve learned the secret to meeting women,” the young man says. “Elbow ’em in the jaw and take ’em home.” He laughs. “It works. That’s how I got laid last night.” He tells Rex he was shooting pool at a bar. A waitress came by with a tray of drinks. When he moved out of her way, he swung around and caught another woman in the mouth. It was lust at first smack.

“Well, I gotta go,” the young man says, and he does.

Another man in a pickup pulls up. He tells Rex he’s driving across the river into Indiana and asks if he wants to come. Rex climbs in and they leave me alone on the curb.

I write in my journal by the light from the store. I nod hello to everyone who comes and goes.

A woman steps out from her car.

“Hey, mister, I saw you over in Madison,” she says in mock accusation.

“Me?”

“Yeah. You came in and asked to use the bathroom at the gas station.”

“Oh yeah. You told me there was a bathroom at the visitors center. It was a real nice one.”

For some reason, my scintillating conversation fails to engage the woman, and it looks like I’m destined for a night in the rain.

Rex’s friend drops him off at the store an hour later.

“Ya still holding that curb down?” Rex says.

He sits down next to me. Bedford is silent. There are no more cars, no more curbside gossip. Just two strangers sitting in the dark.

I glance at Rex’s orange truck. That would keep me dry.

“So that’s really a truck, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s just got a top on it. It’s got paneled walls, insulation, everything.”

“Hey, you think I can sleep in your truck tonight?”

“If you can find some room. I got pretty much everything in there—boots, tools, fishing rods.”

Rex gets to his feet to use the payphone outside the market. After he hangs up, he walks by me without a word and climbs the stairs to his apartment.

Rex’s excuse about the clutter in his truck reminds me of Randy in Garberville, California. When I asked if I could crash in his greenhouse, he said it was way out in the woods. Some people just can’t say no.

The night air is damp and chilly. My breath fogs in front of my face. I wish I hadn’t forgotten my sweater in the back of J.D. and Kristin’s pickup in Montana. I wonder how Kristin’s abortion went. I wonder who’s wearing my sweater.

When the first raindrops hit my head, I hoist my pack and hunt for shelter from the storm.

I reach Bedford’s community center—a corrugated metal warehouse. A white stretch limo is parked in front. I hear people inside shriek and holler. It can only mean one thing: A celebrity preacher has come to town to fleece the faithful. I step inside and find a sham of another sort—a professional wrestling match. Two hulking men in tights bounce off the ropes, taking turns slamming each other into the canvas mat.

I ask the ticket seller if I can use the restroom and he says okay. When I come out, a pack of youths yells at me.

“Faggot!”

“Turd burglar!”

I have no idea what I’ve done to prompt their fury. But then I see that they’re hurling the epithets at a target behind me. I’ve stepped in front of a wrestler retreating from the ring.

“Faggot!”

“Turd burglar!”

He wears a hooded black robe. The bad guy, I presume. He stalks me through the angry crowd like the Grim Reaper.

Outside I find a covered picnic table next to a church. At least I’ll stay dry for the night.

I spot Rex walking down the street. My eyes follow him to the other end of town, where he enters a convenience store. He exits and strides back through town. I’m pretty sure I’m hidden by the shadows. Just in case, I turn away to save us both the embarrassment of eye contact.