On our last night in the house, Rolf took me out for a pleasant dinner and as his sad brown eyes filled with tears, he told me how much he’d adored my mother and how he hoped we’d always keep in touch. I reassured him as best I could, which wasn’t very well as I was anxious to be free of burdens and commitments; I wished to divest myself of every obligation. He patted my hand and said, “Angelina, Angelina, Angelina,” and he wiped his eyes, then pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket and leaned it against the rose vase. His soulful eyes encouraged me to look inside. It was a check for a substantial amount of money. From the sale of the house, he said.
I didn’t want the burden of it, but I took it.
Sometime during the middle of that night, I awoke with the sound of my bedroom door opening. I wasn’t afraid, because already the night was my friend—it was the daytime that held the horrors of society. I lay very still and wrapped the familiar cloak of the darkness about my shoulders and watched the bedroom door open very slowly. I knew it was Rolf; he’d been downstairs drinking. I assumed he would be drunk, and that meant he was in my room for one of two things: to rape me or to cry. I was old enough to understand either one of those.
He came to my bedside, and though I could smell the liquor on his breath, I don’t believe he was drunk. I could barely see his glistening eyes in the dimness of the room as I looked up at him towering over me. He stood there for a long time before he spoke.
“You’re awake,” he said.
“Yes.”
He fell to his knees next to my bed. “Angelina—Angelina—will you . . .” He choked a bit. “Will you pray with me?”
While it was not what I had been expecting, I wasn’t taken totally by surprise. His grief was far more enormous than I would ever have imagined.
“Of course, Rolf,” I said.
He knelt next to my bed, wearing his striped pajamas, and he steepled his hands just as children do when they pray, and he began. He prayed for Mother and me and himself and for the forgiveness of all our sins. Then he started on the world, praying for peace and an end to disease, and I began to fidget with the more maudlin of his recitations. So I inched over in my twin bed and held the covers up and he choked out a premature “amen” and got in. He turned his back to me and his sobbing shook the bed.
I placed my hand gently on his side, my cool cheek against his warm back. Even in the farthest nether regions of my experience, I could imagine nothing that would cause me to behave as Rolf was now behaving, and that made me feel quite odd. I knew nothing of this grief, this devastation, these feelings he owned.
I pondered this for a while as exhaustion tempered his sobbing. Surrounded by an aura of peacefulness and finality, soon we were both asleep.
In the morning I brushed my teeth and my hair, packed my nightie, and said good-bye to Rolf. He hugged me fiercely, squishing the breath out of me as he whispered in my ear, asking me if I was absolutely sure that I had to go away. I nodded against his chest and he released me, the tension of the question still trembling on the edge of his ample lower lip. I laced up my walking boots, shrugged into my backpack, and stepped out the door. I needed to visit the bank to deposit Rolf’s check and draw out my personal savings, and that would be the last of my responsibilities.
I would never become enmeshed again.
ROLF BREZINSKI: “Angelina Watson, you say? Angelina. After all these years. Yes, I knew her. Of course. Married her mother. Beautiful woman, Alice was. Never found one better. How she got saddled with a child like Angelina must have been one of God’s little jokes.
“Angelina. Like steel, she was. So hard she glinted. And it all showed in her eyes. Her eyes were—I don’t know. Mesmerizing, almost. Like no other eyes I’ve ever seen. You know how sometimes you can look into someone’s eyes and see love and softness? Alice had eyes like that. Well, when you looked into Angelina’s eyes, you knew right off that someone was in there, lurking about. No God-fearin’ mortal’s got any right to eyes like that.
“When Alice died, Angelina hung around until the house sold. Alice willed half of the house to her, of course. Then Angelina sold all her mother’s things—even her grandmother’s jewelry—and packed up and took off. She was just a young’un, but I was glad to be rid of her. And I haven’t heard of her since. Until now, that is.
“Angelina. God damn. Back like a bad penny.
“Must be bad trouble. Bad trouble, I can tell. I knew it then. That last night—I spent almost all night downstairs, thinking about her, about her ways, thinking about her loose with all that money, and I knew there would be trouble. I’d just come to decide that if I was a real man, I’d do something about her. So I went up to her room, ready to . . . ready to kill her, I guess it’s time I confessed to it—I was just going to push a pillow on her face and keep it there . . . But when I got up there, all I could see was Alice’s soft brown eyes, and how she loved that strange child . . .
“I could never really do something like that. I could never sin like that. Never. A couple a brandies give me false courage, I guess.
“Are you here to tell me I was wrong, that I should have gone through with it?”
3
I left Rolf in Wilton, Pennsylvania, and began my tour of life. A matron in a cream-colored sedan stopped for me, and when I got into the front seat, she asked my destination. I thought for a moment and realized I had no answer. After a hesitation, I asked where she was going, and she said she was off to Columbus, Ohio, to visit her sister, and I was welcome to travel the distance with her. She seemed nice and smelled clean, so I agreed.
We rode together for five hours. At first I was loath to talk of myself, but as she shared of herself and her family, of their difficulties and their joys, I came to understand some of her feelings. She had been widowed the year before, and she felt an anger about the desertion that we discussed in depth. I was no stranger to desertion by death.
We parted in the early afternoon on the outskirts of Columbus. She suggested I might enjoy traveling in the South, so she left me at the freeway interchange, where I could get a ride going down through Tennessee.
I’m sure more than two hours passed before my next ride stopped for me, and in that time I thought much about families, desertion, death, and this journey of mine. I had been on the road for less than a day and my joyous exuberance had already turned to introspection. This adventure was a learning experience, and I would pay close attention. I wanted to see the whole range of life during this time, from normalcy to lunacy, from safety to trouble, and everything in between. And I did.
Trouble remained elusive, in fact, for an entire year—until that terrible new-moon night when a demon named Earl Foster, fueled by the wildfire of alcohol, tried to damage me. In retrospect, I’m sure I could have avoided the entire situation, had I taken time to think for a moment before acting. But I didn’t, so perhaps the whole experience was inevitable. That was after a year of ceaseless roaming, however, ceaseless, priceless learning.
For over a year, I lived as a transient. While I tried to do nothing illegal, I exercised some very naive judgment. I learned about bulls in farm pastures and the perils of climbing fruit trees. Naive indeed. Young and impetuous.
I traveled without direction, without hurry. I graciously accepted rides with whomever offered them, and our lives merged for the miles we spent together. I felt no remorse in asking to be let out, nor did I feel like an imposition if our companionship was valuable and I rode with them to their final destination.
I noticed my sense of atmosphere sharpening. I could smell a situation the moment I opened the vehicle door. Humans have a musk of anger, a sweet tang of lust, a rolling bland contentment, and a hot spiking fear. I learned to balance atmospheres, to fine-tune my own vibratory emissions to counteract or augment an air, or to maintain a neutrality that allowed the emotions of the moment to roam free. The practice provided
an interesting pastime; the talent eventually proved invaluable.
My traveling companions were laborers, executives, drug addicts, runaway housewives, drunks, salesmen, businessmen, families, grandparents, and rock singers. I met butlers and metermaids and razor-scarred criminals. I came to know cheating husbands and ordinary women who beat their children. I encountered bastardizations of the language, dialects from all over the country, accents from all over the world. I heard terrible jokes, revulsive propositions, and enigmatic compliments. I was told impossible stories and I came to believe them.
We traveled along freeways and highways and one-lane mountain roads. We traveled with air conditioning and with dust, in sedans and Jeeps and pickup trucks and limousines. We traveled in buses and old Checker cabs and motor homes and once in a boat being pulled by a truck. I rode long distances in tractor trailers with leather-worn wildcatters and to the corner drugstore in an antique car with a precious grandmother. The variety was infinitely surprising. And renewing.
My energy expenditure was far less than when I lived at home with Alice and Rolf. At home, I was always pacing off nervous energy, but while traveling, I was relaxed, peaceful, at ease. I had nothing to do but stand and wave my thumb at passersby. I’m a small person, under five-foot-three, and I’ve always been thin, so I got along fine on one solid meal a day, and I always kept an apple or an orange in my pack, just in case.
The importance of eating, I discovered, is the sociability of the act, not necessarily the nourishment. We ate at roadside stands, truck stops, cafeterias, and friendly kitchens with pastry-baking wives bustling about. We broke bread together on hilltops and over campfires and standing in parking lots. We even spent time together eating soup-kitchen broth and breadcrusts in cities large enough to have missions for the needy.
In those cities, we were swallowed by trucks and skyscrapers and exhaust. In little burgs, we admired the freshly painted facades and pastel shingles classically designed to entice the visitor. We visited museums and saw statues. We saw clouds reflected in mirrored buildings, and we locked the car doors against the slums and the Saturday night peep-show crowds.
I was not impressed with civilization. All around, I decided, man’s best shot at creation was as pitifully inadequate as the words I have to describe it.
But we also saw square miles of cornfields, and forests with canopies so thick we felt we were indoors. In Minnesota we camped by lakes and bathed in streams. We swam in the ocean off an Alabama beach and we stepped over the Mississippi River where it begins. We saw flatlands for miles and miles, and then slow-rolling hills and finally mountains. We saw birds and rabbits and deer and moose. There were squirrels and chipmunks, elk and bear and wild pigs. Nature spoke the loudest and the clearest, and I knew in my soul that it was the strongest. Man against the elements was a fallacy. Man looked his finest when dancing with Nature; he appeared a fool when preparing for battle.
The places I made my bed were as diverse as the sights I saw. I slept in trees, in culverts, and under the stars. I slept in motels, hotels, abandoned barns, and homes with fresh linens. I stretched out, spreadeagled, on the top of a knoll in the middle of acres and acres of meadowland, and counted eighty-eight shooting stars. I slept in a train yard and in a cemetery and under a freeway.
I always slept alone.
During my nightly meditation, I contemplated the events of the day, and though tired, I renewed my enthusiasm for the adventure of the day ahead.
With every morning came my precise toilet. I washed my body thoroughly and changed to fresh clothes. Then I washed the previous day’s clothes. Every day I was glad I’d always kept my blonde hair short. It was never a burden. I learned to bathe in service-station sinks; I could wash my hair and my underthings, soap up and rinse down very quickly. If I was moving, I’d pin my wet clothes to the top of my pack, where they dried in the sun before being folded away again. Otherwise, I just laid them over a tree branch, or a fence, or the rearview mirror of a parked car. Only then was I fit to make new friends. It was surprisingly easy to find accommodations for this, even in the wilderness of the big city.
For over a year I encountered the daily challenge. It was America that I saw; it was Nature that I heard; was survival that I learned. After a while it no longer challenged. I was ready for something new. And something new was delivered.
It was late September, and I was in Missouri for the second time when I encountered Earl Foster. I had returned to a place that had provided comfort in the past. This was, in fact, the first time I’d actively sought out a destination, rather than just going where life led me. I arrived midafternoon, found a perfectly suitable Ozark campground, and tied my hammock up between two sturdy trees, next to a picnic table.
I took off my boots and climbed into the hammock, stretched out as best I could, and pulled up my lightweight Salvation Army blanket.
The shadows stretched long, and I was suddenly very tired. Discouraged. I hadn’t seen my face in anything but a rearview mirror for three days. I had only a dollar and fourteen cents left and I hadn’t had anything to eat since an apple that morning.
Winter was approaching. All the animals of the woods were beginning to grow their winter coats, hoard their food, and prepare for hibernation. I felt the call, but knew not what to do. I began to wonder about my choice in life. Or my lack of choice.
For over twelve months I had been traveling, experiencing, growing in knowledge, but to what end? As I lay there in that swayback hammock, I felt as if I’d been observing, not participating. I couldn’t think of a single thing I had contributed, other than a little atmosphere, to the lives of all the people who had touched me. I felt that my life had been put on hold, that a real life was a normal life—with family and responsibilities—and until I had that, I had no life. I had nothing. Nothing but the thread of a haunting echo that led me onward.
I was treading dangerous ground here. I could be free from responsibility forever, on the move forever, addicted to lack—and for the first time, it frightened me.
I pulled the blanket closer around my neck.
Yes, Angelina, I thought. It’s time to settle in somewhere.
A memory of Rolf’s face passed before my mind’s eye, and the back of my throat burned for a moment, but that was not the direction my path lay. Time had passed. I had changed. Surely he had a new life by now.
A breeze came up and I set the hammock rocking just a little, while I looked up into the trees with their autumn color.
Find a place and settle down. Find a place and settle down. Even the phrase sounded comfortable, warm, delicious. It sounded safe and secure, and I thought of looking out through crystal-clear windows at snow-covered trees from a comfortable chair in front of the fire. I would find a place and settle down. Money would come my way, I was not concerned about that—I always had the account in Wilton if I needed it. I’d get an apartment and a job and a boyfriend. Soon, before my travels turned sour and became a blot on the history of my life. My time on the road needed to be a good memory, a pleasant memory. A memory of happiness and education, of laughter and comfortable aloneness.
My tension dissolved with my decision, and I was resting on the edge of an early sleep when that dusty old blue Pontiac rattled down the road and chugged to an exhausted halt right at the picnic table beside me. There were two men in the car. They lumbered out slowly, each carrying a beer.
This was my first glimpse of Earl Foster. And a chill from Hell blew through me.
J. C. “JUICE” WICKERS: “Earl an’ me pulled into the park to drink beer just like always, and right where we always goes is this camper, sleepin’ in a hammock. A kid. We figured we’d give him a beer and talk for a while you know, just shoot the shit. So we pulled in and got out and the kid leaps out of that hammock and starts pulling on his boots and would you believe, it’s not a kid, it’s a girl! Now you tell me
what a goddamned girl’s doing camped out all by herself down by the lake, huh? What kind of a girl would do that?
“Well, I’ll tell ya. A hippie girl, that’s who. One of them stinking smelling runaway whores, that’s who. Ain’t got no family, ain’t got no sense, just trash, you know? Filthy trash.
“But I see this look in Earl’s eyes, you know? Tells me it’s been too long since he’s had a woman, tells me he’s already had too much beer, tells me we’re too far away from anybody. And hell, I figured she was just askin’ for it anyway, bein’ out there all by herself.
“But I’ll tell ya. I’ll tell ya. That look in Earl Foster’s eyes was nothin’, goddamned nothin’ compared to the look in that girl’s eyes.
“That girl was no girl, if you get my drift.”
4
It had occurred to me earlier in my travels that I was indeed a single woman traveling alone; and as such, I ought not be caught by surprise or at a disadvantage. The shadows were long and it would be dark very soon, and cold. The men who had just arrived probably cared little for my privacy; certainly they would never leave after driving all the way out here just because they were an intrusion on my solitude.
I thought for a moment that I could snuggle down in my blanket and pretend that I was a man; my boots and my pack would not give my gender away, but then I would be quite defenseless and even more at their mercy. I decided to meet them as prepared as possible.
I threw the blanket to the ground and swung out of the hammock, pulling on my boots as quickly as I could, keeping one eye on the two gray-haired men. Earl hefted a six-pack of brown bottled beer onto the picnic table and watched me. I heard one of them speak to the other, but all I caught was an exclamation of surprise and the word “girl.” I brushed wrinkles out of my clothes and walked toward them as they settled on either side of the table.
Black Ambrosia Page 2