by Matt Weiland
Who is he?” I asked Michael over brisket and white bread at Black’s BBQ in Lockhart, 72 miles later.
“I don’t know. He’s just this guy who wrote me and said he wanted to build a house. I don’t know!”
I do know now. Don told us he “used to live in the Paradise Valley in Montana with my literary friends Richard Ford and Thomas McGuane.” Coincidence provided a coda to our day when I met the writer Richard Ford at a wedding, and I asked him about this.
Ford squinted and said, “Don Harris … Don Harris …” Then he raised his hands and shouted, “Don Harris is a fugitive from justice! He fled the country to Mexico. I was giving a reading in South Carolina when someone said there was a friend of mine who wanted me to go outside and see him. I said, ‘Tell him to come in here,’ but they said he wouldn’t. I asked his name and they told me ‘Esteban De Jesús’ and I went outside and it was Don. If he’s back in the U.S. now and using his own name he must have resolved his legal troubles. But I’ll tell you this, he can’t be practicing law—he was disbarred. And don’t let your friend build a house for Don Harris!”
In Crockett, Texas (named for Davy Crockett, who supposedly camped there on the way to the Alamo), the next morning, we were so far behind Michael’s schedule there was no way we could make the coast without blowing the engine. Our sad room in a seedy motel, still 200 miles deep in Texas, was of the sort Steinbeck, feeling sorry for himself, described as “dirty yellow, the curtains like the underskirts of a slattern.”
“Splendor in the Pines” was the Crockett town motto. The reality was gasoline and junk food in the pines. I walked Charlie across a leach field from the L of our hotel, over to a pawnshop (it shared a single prefab building with a feed store), where cheap, sun-bleached acoustic guitars hung in the window.
“Michael,” I said when I got back. “There’s a pawnshop next door. Let’s buy a guitar so we can work out a routine for Nashville.”
He replied, distractedly, “OK, yeah. Cool, man.”
We ate a breakfast of packaged pound cakes and Sunny Delight, then made for Louisiana, swaying along an empty road that threaded through trees, interrupted by house after house that proved America is poor. I let Michael drive. Entering Shreveport, he ran just-turned-red after just-turned-red, to avoid stopping/stalling, me shouting “Hang onto your ass, Charlie!” as we wrenched around a corner and onto a road north toward Arkansas. Surrounded by Louisiana farmland, we pulled over. This was Charlie’s chance to know his native soil. He sniffed around. Michael’s cell phone rang. The Pentagon finalists had just been announced that morning in Washington. A reporter from the Albany Times Union, the paper Michael had delivered as a boy, wanted to interview him. He talked earnestly as I drove. Then, in Arkansas, we stopped at a gas station, selling unbranded gas, to fill up and to get snacks. A thin, beautifully sulky woman in a housedress, right out of a WPA photograph, was sweeping some concrete around the pumps. Her twin sister was at the register, talking lazily with a sexy blonde in a tube top. They were around our age—early thirties. I asked, trying to flirt, “Can you recommend a healthy snack?” There was a long pause till the counter-working twin replied, in an accent of such deep Arkansan exoticness, a subtle inflection making it clear how unfascinating she found me, “How ‘bout some peanut butter and crackers?”
As we pulled out of the station Michael said, “They were like sirens.”
Half an hour later, when we’d finished our crackers, I realized, “Damn, we forgot to buy a guitar for Nashville!”
“We’ll just a-capella it and get booed off stage—with a lot of thigh slappin’ and hooting!” Michael declared.
This was what I’d imagined. Why I’d wanted him to come along. We made up a Yankee ballad about southern food and southern accents—how we couldn’t resist either one. Title: “I Got the South in My Mouth!” It was a beautiful day for a drive. Sunny. Breeze full of birds. Singing, our voices were bad and scratchy. We both were starting to get colds. As the day progressed we filled the Apache with loaded Kleenex and cough drop wrappers—a major divergence from Steinbeck, who had a camper van on the back of his truck, and filled it with “bourbon, scotch, gin, vermouth, vodka, a medium good brandy, aged applejack, and a case of beer”—then lamented that “if there had been room … I would have packed the WPA Guides to the States, all forty-eight volumes of them.” Steinbeck could have spent a lot less time getting lost, then depressed, then drunk.
We had pie for dinner (having skipped lunch), after which, Michael’s cell ringing with the occasional journalist, I silently drove, and drove, and drove, and drove, the strain on the engine and the torque of our incompatible needs seeming sure to cause some sort of an explosion, till, suddenly, we rounded a corner in a blank part of the map, out of cell range, off all grids that I knew, near the Mississippi border, where a strip of river and two gas stations, plus some fireworks stalls, nothing you could call a town, had nonetheless caused two groups of young men to come into proximity—one shirtless and black and drinking beer, the other shirtless and white and selling Confederate flag patches and 9/11 keepsakes. We filled the tank at a station frequented exclusively by black customers, and looked across a dirt road at a station frequented exclusively by white people. The heavy sound of insects was all around, while harsh stares came from the white gas station at the two Yankees and their wild dog of Africa. Then the whites started to shout at the blacks. When the word, “Fuck!” rang out, we fled. No more back roads that night. We made for the interstate.
Coming out of the midnight darkness of St. Francis County, Arkansas, we took I—40 (which runs all the way from California to North Carolina) across the Mississippi River—while endless trucks did the same thing. Twenty miles from the bridge we broke into a column that stretched back as far as we could see. (Turning around, Michael said, “They just keep going forever.“) East of this juncture is the one single lane section of I-40 coast to coast. Usually it’s single lane for only a mile. But that night construction had the highway down to half capacity for more like twenty. The lane was tight, and the looseness of the Apache’s steering was magnified by the sensation of driving in a trench—I slowed down to 40, 35, 30, to keep from crashing into guardrails or road workers. Soon we were holding back a flood of trucks. Space opened up in front of us. By mid span on the Hernando de Soto, the bridge that carries I-40 into Memphis, we had nothing but open pavement ahead, while in our wake so many drivers had hit their brakes that the sky was red. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw a screaming trucker. At the same moment he blew his air horn, and contorted his face in rage. A wrathful BWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLF! sound filled my ears and seemed like it was coming straight out of his mouth.
We exited the highway in Lakeland, Tennessee, and Michael said, “That was terrifying. I thought we were going to die.” It was a too close encounter with American velocity—the terror of stopping all these trucks from hurtling along at 80, loaded with consumer goods, all the things we need to make life easy.
After checking in to a big Super 8, overlooking the highway, I walked Charlie along something called Huff Puff Road, dropped him in the room then went to check the truck’s engine, which looked like it was sweating oil. When I returned Michael was watching TV, Charlie was drinking out of the toilet, and an ad for Snoop Dogg’s Girls Gone Wild came on. Snoop screwed up his face and framed his gold jewelry-covered chest with his arms; teenagers on streets and beaches flashed their breasts at him. It was mesmerizing. When the ad was over a feeling of loneliness crushed us to sleep.
At Michael’s insistence we spent the whole next day on the interstate, needle at 45, sometimes creeping up to 50, steady rain falling. A pool formed in the dents on the hood. In five hours we got to Nashville, ate, and kept going, not even mentioning our plans for an open mike. Hoping to relieve the spring-induced pain in my thigh, I let Michael drive till he almost crashed, and I took over again. Pain or terror—those were my choices. Steinbeck described the interstate as a “wide gash” where the minimum speed
“was greater than any I had previously driven,” and, “You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side mirror for the car or truck about to pass. … When we get these thruways across the whole country … it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”
By nightfall in Knoxville I was done. We exited into a deserted downtown. “This is it,” I said. “I can’t take any more of this. You want to get there on time, just rent a car.”
“Shit, man. No,” Michael said. We hadn’t talked for hours. “We have to do this together.”
“What? Sit silently in terror? This thing won’t go any faster.” Michael was silent. Unable to think of anything else to say, I came out with, “And that’s such an architect’s belt buckle.”
Then I got out of the truck with Charlie and walked off.
When I got back Michael said, “OK. I’ll get a car. But I don’t want the trip to end like this. Let’s find a back road and drive as far as we can tonight. I’ll get a rental tomorrow.”
What followed was the best drive of the trip. Michael took the wheel, and I looked out the window: a hundred miles along an empty road that followed a low ridge line, like a levee through the woods, nothing but trees with slashes of cloud-filtered moonlight coming through their leaves, and shreds of silver river visible beyond their bare trunks.
We ended up in Kingsport, improbably large for a fume-choked industrial city nobody’s ever heard of. We checked into an Econo Lodge. Michael went to the room and I took Charlie on a walk. Stumbling along, my dog also looking sick of it all, I was suddenly so weary I thought I might fall asleep standing up. I half noticed something catching the streetlight in some wet grass, and let go of Charlie’s leash so he could go investigate. Suddenly he was lying on his back and rolling on it. He dug in. Legs straight up in the air, head kicked back, Charlie twisted side-to-side, a look of ecstasy on his smiling face, his eyes pure white. I’d never seen him so fulfilled. I laughed. Here was his inner Smut. When he got up I saw what looked like a huge pork chop with a flap of white chamois on top and a rack of thick rib bones: a dead animal that had gone flat and sunk into the earth. Then the smell hit me—hard. Death: You’ve been pondering me. Well, hellooooo!
When Michael and I said good-bye, early the next day, I wished him luck with his memorial. He wished me luck with the rest of the trip, affectionately referred to Charlie as “Charles,” and said, “Good call on the belt buckle. I’m gonna get rid of it.”
Charlie and I carried on in what smelled like a coffin. Forty minutes later, on a brief stretch of unavoidable interstate, Michael passed us in a tiny silver car and we honked and waved. Then Charlie and I disappeared into the rainy closeness of Virginia and West Virginia, following Route 460, where the two states traded places every few miles. For lunch, on the main street of an old mining town, I went to a pizza place, where there were four tables. I ordered a salad, and the dark-skinned proprietor brought me fresh feta, olives, lettuce, peppers, bread—the homemade meal I’d been wanting the whole trip. After devouring it I asked him where he was from, and he told me Egypt.
I drove seventeen hours without a rest, crossing the Mason Dixon line at 1:00 a.m., at the same time as an Amish buggy with reflective bands Velcroed around its horses’ ankles; a quick sleep in Harrisburg, PA, where, beside the banks of the Susquehanna River, hoping to remove the spring that had been boring into my pelvis, I disemboweled the bench seat with a pocket knife; past the Hershey chocolate factory, over toward the Jersey border; across the deep-carved bed of the Delaware River on a gleaming steel bridge, barely wide enough for the truck; another highway gash, and finally we saw the New York skyline. My dog said “Wroarowlwolf!”
Michael didn’t win the contest to design the 9/11 memorial in Washington. He told me, “They’re actually really smart at the Pentagon, and they could obviously see through my criticism of the massive war machine.” He’s now teaching at Harvard, and has a dog of his own.
Charlie died of cancer in 2004, just a few months after the birth of Daphne’s and my son. When he saw the baby he gave him one of his gentle taps; wet nose on top of bald head.
I still have the truck. It cheers up everyone who sees it in New York (especially firemen; especially when my wife’s at the wheel). I’ve recently been thinking of driving it back to Texas with my family, a reverse trip that, with our two small children, would definitely mock ease even more than velocity.
THE 50 STATES
ALABAMA
CAPITAL Montgomery
ENTERED UNION 1819 (22nd)
ORIGIN OF NAME Possibly from a Choctaw Indian word meaning “thicket-clearers” or “vegetation-gatherers”
NICKNAME Yellowhammer State
MOTTO Audemus jura nostra defendere (“We dare defend our rights”)
RESIDENTS Alabamian or Alabaman
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 7
STATE BIRD yellowhammer
STATE FLOWER camellia
STATE TREE Southern longleaf pine
STATE SONG “Alabama”
LAND AREA 50,744 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Chilton Co., 12 mi. SW of Clanton
POPULATION 4,557,808
WHITE 71.1%
BLACK 26.0%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.5%
ASIAN 0.7%
HISPANIC/LATINO 1.7%
UNDER 18 26.3%
65 AND OVER 13.0%
MEDIAN AGE 35.8
ALABAMA
George Packer
In the summer of 1980, when I was nineteen, I worked as a $600-a-month intern at a government-funded poverty law center in Alabama, renting a matchbox house with two black law students at the crumbling edge of downtown Mobile. It was a record hot summer, at a record high in urban seediness: Mobile, the poor man’s New Orleans, was hollowed out by economic stagnation and the white exodus that followed desegregation. Carter was in the White House, the azaleas in Bienville Square were dead, and the sixteen blocks between the house and office offered the comfort of no trees, only the glare of the sun and an assortment of drunks, casual laborers, and petty criminals. My yellow short-sleeved Oxford shirt, too heavy in the humidity, instantly marked me as a carpetbagger, and one morning a razor-thin limping man pursued me block after block, yelling, “Hey! Asshole! ” Anomie set in the day I arrived—everything shut down for Memorial Day weekend—and pursued me all the way to my departure in August. At times it grew so intense that the only relief came in cups of mocha-flavored instant International Coffee, from a red-and-white tin, which I bought at a shop downtown and savored as the taste of civilization itself.
The house on St. Francis Street had only one air-conditioner. Carlos, the law student to arrive first, grabbed it, and never let go. Cooled only by an ineffective fan, my room began to incubate turd-sized cockroaches. Carlos, from American University in Washington, despised me on sight. This was upsetting, because I had gone South with the idea of becoming a latter-day soldier in the civil rights struggle. I saw myself, in all modesty, as an heir to Schwerner and Goodman, the two white northerners killed in 1964 outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, with their black movement colleague Chaney. The Mother’s Day melee when the Freedom Riders pulled into the Birmingham bus terminal, the fire hoses and K-9 squads in Linn Park, George Wallace standing in the doorway at the University of Alabama to prevent Vivian Malone and James Hood from becoming the first black students to attend—in my mind, all of this had happened the day before yesterday. My backpack carried Robert Coles’s study of the psychology of black children during desegregation, Children of Crisis, Anne Moody’s memoir of growing up black during the civil rights era, Coming of Age in Mississippi, and (because I accepted Black Power as a necessary stage of the movement) Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. But it was hard to sustain my own private freedom ride after I discovered that Carlos kept a personal roll of toilet paper in his bedroom, ferrying it back and forth to the john. So much for black and white together.
That first weekend, before contempt had hardened into hatred, Carlos and I went out to get a bite to eat. A black neighbor saw us round the corner and exclaimed in wonder, “You black and you white but you both walking together!” Confronted with this nightmare tableau of black abjectness, white noblesse, and assumed interracial harmony, Carlos dispatched both the neighbor and me with a strained, sneering laugh. It was little consolation that Raymond, the other housemate, from Rutgers and gay, liked me fine.
Carlos’s rejection nagged at me all summer, but my civil rights romance was too strong to be snuffed out. The law center was opening satellite offices in the rural counties north of Mobile Bay, and I spent many days doing advance work by way of Greyhound buses to Monroeville and Evergreen. These were some of the poorest places in America. In Monroe County, which, according to the 1980 census, was 43 percent black, median white family income was $17,600 and median black family income was just over $9,000. Conecuh County was even poorer. I interviewed an old woman with a picture on the wall of her shack showing the two Kennedys and King under the words “The Three Who Set Us Free.” She didn’t seem very free: There was no indoor plumbing in the shack. The revolution of the early sixties had blown through the bigger cities in Alabama and barely touched these piney backwoods. “We get along just fine with our colored folks,” the probate judge of Monroe County told me, sounding like a hundred years of predecessors.
I was looking for something—marches, drama, self-sacrifice, community, history—that now existed only in books. Less than two decades before, when Coles was working as a child psychiatrist amid the upheavals of southern desegregation, a young black civil rights worker told him that he’d joined the movement because “I’ll be lucky if I can vote, and be treated better than a dog every time I go to register my car, or try for a driving license, or go to buy something in a store.” By 1980, what was left of the movement had migrated behind the closed doors of the courts. The law center was involved in several important civil rights suits, including desegregation and voting rights cases against the Mobile school board and county commission, but these were moving slowly, obscurely, through the legal system. Class-action lawsuits were not what I had in mind that summer. I wanted the sight of headlights in my rearview mirror on a rural road. In fact, the Klan still operated in Mobile, as the country learned just a few months later, in March 1981, when two of its members randomly lynched a nineteen-year-old black youth on a city street. (Eventually they were convicted, and one was electrocuted in the first execution of a white man for the murder of a black man in Alabama since 1913. The United Klans of America was later bankrupted by a civil suit that forced the Alabama chapter to turn over its Tuscaloosa meeting hall to the victim’s mother, who used the proceeds to buy her first house.) But the main battle for equality in Alabama and the South was over. I had arrived in time for its ambiguous and incomplete aftermath: superficial civility, de facto segregation, economic inequality, with most of the stirring old words gone stale from sloganeering. As Carlos made clear, laws did not change hearts.