“Do you know what they call that place?” he asked. “The delousing joint.”
He explained that it was a mission for unfortunates, and that Plennie should rest assured that he was free of bugs and lice. He recommended Hotel Pension Hofer instead. His friend owned it and would probably even offer a free room. The friend turned out to be so welcoming that Plennie stayed two nights.
* * *
When he set out again, he followed the River Elbe southeast, against its flow, through the glorious snowfall, wearing his warm secondhand clothing and all-weather jacket. He narrowly avoided being robbed once more by “gypsies,” as he called them, outside Niedersedlitz. Like in Oklahoma, the handsy groping was interrupted when an automobile came to a stop nearby, and the men and women slunk back into their inert caravan. Simple men made easy marks.
Walking through the snow grew exceedingly difficult, and his pace slowed as he entered the rural Bohemian Highlands. He came to a fork in the road and chose at random the path he soon learned did not run into the nearest town. The snowflakes, thick as nickels, caught the sun and looked like moths lit by a streetlamp. Deep in a borderland German forest, he came to another unmarked split in the road and wasn’t sure which path to take. The snow had stopped and the sun fell in patches through the trees, dancing and glistening magically upon the drifts. He had never beheld a more beautiful sight, and he was saddened to think he might never again. He stood for a long time, watching, listening, his breath visible, the full moon rising over the woods. He had walked at least twelve miles in the wrong direction. He was happy to be lost.
He pulled a coin from his pocket and flipped it into the cold air with his thumbnail.
“Heads,” he said into the stillness.
He faithfully started down the empty white road to his right, going backward as though the traffic were heavy and people were watching. The snow crunched under his brogans.
When he crested a hilltop he noticed distant lights glimmering in his mirrors. He walked another four miles, praying for a sign of life. He soon realized he’d stumbled across a lumber camp. At the largest lit house, a bearded man answered the door and shook his head when Plennie began to talk. Plennie whipped out his clipping from Tempo and pushed it into the lumberjack’s hands. The man left him standing in the cold and returned with another man, who introduced himself in broken English as I. H. Honeger and invited Plennie inside.
Plennie shook off the cold as he told the men of his wrong turn and tried to explain how he had accidentally arrived at their camp. They seemed dubious, so two other men, much younger, walked into the night and returned ten minutes later, having followed Plennie’s tracks some distance, to confirm his story. They had not believed it possible to walk all that way.
The foreman’s name was Lutzengauser and his wife was a fine cook. Lutzengauser pulled out a gallon jug of red wine and poured a round, then another, toasting the backward American until the bottle was empty. They talked well past midnight, and when Honeger stood to leave, Plennie passed out on the floor, his belly full of wine, the fireplace crackling, and a handful of lumberjacks hovering overhead, laughing.
In the morning they walked Plennie to the Czech border. Honeger slipped a folded bill into Plennie’s pocket. “To use as you journey along,” he whispered. He then produced a pencil and asked to see Plennie’s journal, where he wrote:
There came a man out of nowhere
His boots were wet, his bag was heavy
He looks at the world with a different view
That’s how we should look
That may be the clue
24.
A Year on Foot
He had barely made it through the gate of the fortified village at the foot of the ancient Bohemian castle when he noticed that the peasants seemed to want to kill him.
The signs were all there. They were angry and shouting. They were spitting in the dirt. And they were scuffling, holding one another back violently, the whole time staring through hard eyes at the backward stranger. Something was amiss. Plennie didn’t know what, but he readied his fists just in case. The entrance to the village, 340 miles southeast of Hamburg, was flanked by stone walls, and inside the walls were rooms, and the deeper he progressed into the village the more peasants poured out of the rooms and advanced toward him.
Just before they reached Plennie, a uniformed constable appeared and ordered them to stop the commotion. He escorted Plennie into the little square, then into another stone room that housed a tavern of some sort. The bartender recognized that Plennie was speaking English, motioned for him to wait, then ducked out the back door. He returned accompanied by a man named Schultz, who spoke English and began translating for the constable. The constable informed Plennie that the peasants hated Germans, and they’d seen Plennie’s sign and assumed he was German. They were all set to rough him up when the constable heard the commotion.
The village was part of Aussig but across the river from the industrial city. It sprouted up at the foot of Castle Střekov, a fourteenth-century stone fortress perched atop a blackstone cliff, rising high above the River Elbe. Richard Wagner was a guest once, wandering around at night wrapped in a bedsheet. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe stayed here as well and savored the views of the Bohemian hills. Now came a Texan in soiled clothes wearing a German sign.
Schultz, the English-speaker, was a Czech, and he invited Plennie to be his guest for the night. He’d been deported from London with his British wife and three sons after the war and wound up back home, struggling like everyone else in Czechoslovakia. His wife had lost all her teeth, and they didn’t have money for a false set. She prepared a meal in the kitchen while the two men talked. When she finally brought food to the table, Plennie looked it over: cornmeal dumplings cooked with a ham bone. The woman picked the meat off the bone and put it on Plennie’s plate.
“Are the stores still open?” Plennie asked.
They were. Schultz asked what he wanted to buy.
“I want to do some shopping,” Plennie said. The bill that Mr. Honeger had slipped in his pocket at the border was a hundred marks, more than twenty US dollars. He’d never had more fun buying groceries. When he returned, he splayed the bounty on the table: bacon, ham, beef, bread, butter, eggs—the woman’s eyes grew wide—coffee, potatoes, onions, and a jar of pickles.
“I want to show my appreciation for your wonderful hospitality,” he said.
Mrs. Schultz began to sob. She wrapped her arms around Plennie’s neck. Mr. Schultz began to cry as well, and then their sons, and then Plennie cried a little too, of course.
* * *
Eastern Europe was a glorious and terrifying romp. As the Great Depression grew worse and nationalist attitudes strained relationships between the neighbors that shared this small slice of the globe, the sun continued to rise over the Balkans. On March 13, Paul von Hindenburg beat Adolf Hitler in the German general election, but by a slim enough margin that a runoff was scheduled for the following month. Police began raiding Nazi headquarters across the country, searching for evidence of a Nazi plot to plunge the country into civil war. Hitler launched a flying tour of Germany by airplane, which would take him to dozens of campaign stops where he addressed more than 150,000 people in a matter of days. Back in the States, as Plennie plodded south through Czechoslovakia, someone kidnapped the Lindberghs’ baby from his bed at their home in Hopewell, New Jersey, and left a ransom note on the windowsill. Four people were killed and dozens wounded when unemployed protesters clashed with police outside a Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan. President Hoover signed a law giving workers the right to organize and pick representatives to negotiate contracts.
Plennie made friends with a wealthy man in Prague and inherited a swell new suit. In Vienna, the city that inspired Mozart and Beethoven, he walked the stone streets of Old Town, admiring the churches, then walked seven miles through an enormous cemetery outside the city, thinking about how fleeting life is. The Vienna newspaper carried a story that day about the “spe
cial world traveler.”
In order to gain interest, which his kind barely gets anymore, he walks around the world backwards. Although people have no eyes in the back, Wingo had himself fashioned glasses, which function like the mirror of a motorcar and allow him to look backward.
His trip is being financed by a rubber sole company. He has traveled through the various cities of the Union, such as St. Louis, Chicago, Washington, and New York, where he got an autograph from Mayor Jimmy Walker. From there he went to Boston and by ship to Hamburg. From Hamburg to Berlin, Dresden and Vienna. He carries with him a book of clippings from American newspapers which report his travels.
From Vienna, he wants to go to Budapest, Bucharest, and Constantinople, straight eastward to Japan. Had he gone in reverse order to America, it would have been a simpler trip for him.
He reached Budapest in five days and was surprised and delighted to learn that the American consul, Fletcher Warren, was from Wolfe City, Texas. A reporter for the leading daily newspaper interviewed him for a story in which he used the Hungarian word for “peculiar.” Near Sebeş, Romania, he accidentally knocked his cane from a bridge railing into the water below. He had carried the cane 2,952 miles so far and nearly lost his mind at the thought of continuing without it, so he scrambled down to the base of the bridge, stripped, and jumped into the murky water. He plunged to the bottom three, four, five times, gasping for air at the surface, until, on the sixth dive, he found it, and he celebrated in his own mind the personal triumph.
In Sebeş, he checked into a hotel and noticed the date for the first time in a long while. April 15, 1932. He’d been on the road a solid year. The fact gave him only minor pause, and little satisfaction.
Two hundred miles later, in Bucharest, he walked ten blocks and solicited four different hotels in hopes of finding someone who spoke English. This effort he performed in his usual reverse manner, so by the time he accomplished his goal, a healthy crowd of Romanians had begun to follow him, which delighted the English-speaking desk clerk at the next hotel. He checked in with the American consulate and retrieved a stack of mail that had been forwarded from Hamburg to Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and finally Bucharest. He tore into a few letters from siblings in West Texas and several from his loyal mother, who expressed concern and, as always, love. He was also interested to see one from John Hall, his only friend on the Seattle Spirit, dated March 15.
Dear Mr. Wingo,
It has been a good while since I last saw you. I don’t know if you will get this letter or not. But if you do I certainly would like to hear from you.
I know that you will like to hear what I am going to tell you about what happened aboard the Seattle Spirit after you went ashore the night we sailed out of Hamburg. If you remember, and I am sure you do, the steward was due to get back from Italy at nine o’clock that night. Well, he came in right on schedule. All the ship’s crewmen had everything ready for sailing and we were all in the bunkhouse just chewing the fat, waiting for twelve o’clock to cut loose to sail out to sea. Arthur Cook, the second mate, I know you remember him? He was just waiting and talking in the bunkhouse, too. When the steward came aboard he wanted to see Arthur to ask about you.
He had an armful of magazines when he came into the bunkhouse and was all tuckered out and dirty from the long car ride from Italy. The first thing he asked of Arthur was, “How did Wingo do with the cleaning?” Arthur said, “I think he did a very good job.” The steward said, “Is he gone?” Arthur told him yes, that you left ship at five that afternoon. Steward said, well, good riddance, and he was tired and he was going to take a bath and hit the hay. He went into the cabins. We just kept chewing the fat and some of the boys were playing pinochle. In about twenty minutes we heard the awfulest noise, screaming, hollering, and cursing, and we all run to see what happened.
When we got to the cabin hallway he was running up and down the hall without a stitch of clothes on and acting like a maniac. We were all afraid of him and he could see that we were, so he said, “Please don’t be afraid of me. I need help.” Arthur said, “What in the world is wrong, steward?” He said, “Hell, I don’t know, but I am stinging and burning up. Do something!” Arthur said, “What happened, what have you done?” Steward said, “Nothing. I took a bath and went to bed. I think there is something in my bed.” So Arthur checked and found the lye. Arthur said, “I think it must be lye or something,” and it turned out to be lye. In the meantime, the steward went back to the bathroom and tried to wash off and that just made things worse. After we decided it was lye the second cook ran to the storeroom and fetched two gallons of vinegar and poured it in the bathtub and it took almost all of us to put the steward in it, but we gave him a good vinegar bath and he got some relief.
Then he asked if anyone knew where you were staying in Hamburg? And the two fellows that had talked to you at the restaurant had already told everybody about seeing you and that you were stopping in the hotel that most of us boys stop at when we are in Hamburg.
He dressed as soon as he could and left the ship for shore without saying anything at all. I was uneasy about you because I was sure he would find you and beat you to death. So before the ferry took off to shore with the steward, I told Arthur that he would kill you if he found you. So me and Arthur decided to go along to keep him from killing you. But I don’t believe we could’ve prevented it if he had found you. You know how much of a man he is.
He went straight to the hotel and asked where your room was. The hotel man said you had gone back to the ship that you came over on and was going to America. That you had been gone for over an hour. The steward said he knew better than that. He made the man show him every room in that hotel but couldn’t find you.
Boy, I don’t know where you went, but it was a good thing you wasn’t there. He went to every hotel on the shore street asking about you, up until almost sailing time, and me and Arthur right with him. I thought he was going to jump ship and stay in Hamburg to find you, but the Captain talked him out of it.
He wouldn’t talk to any of us on board about it, just mumbled to himself.
We sailed at twelve and he was aboard, so I was somewhat relieved. But if I were you, Mr. Wingo, I would steer clear of him because I believe if it is twenty or even thirty years from now he would kill you if he ran into you. I remember how you and me talked about not being able to give things up with him for the way he treated you. But I would never have thought of doing it the way you did. But believe me, you sure did a good job evening things up with him.
All the boys talked and laughed their heads off about how the steward acted. But not before him, because he was so burned up about it. But they all said they thought the steward had it coming to him. You should have seen the place, his room where he had stacks of books and magazines on a chair by his bed. When he left the bed in such a hurry, he knocked them over. His books and clothes and shoes were scattered everywhere. I guess that is about all I can tell you about the steward, but I just thought you would like to know how well you did even things up.
From your friend,
John Hall
* * *
Why do you walk backwards? asked one of the cluster of Romanians gathered around Plennie in Giurgiu, on the bleak Bulgarian border, examining him as one would a sideshow oddity.
“How many of you would be here now, watching me, if I were walking forward?” asked Plennie Wingo, who was ready to back down the gangplank onto a ferry to cross the Danube. “How many of you would remember that I had ever walked in your town if I walked through it in the usual way?”
And what do you do for money? one of the men asked.
Plennie told them about the postcards, how he had sold out, and how he was now relying on the goodwill of his friends in Europe. The man took off his hat, plunked a few coins inside, then began passing it around. The offering filled Plennie’s pocket.
He got a haircut in Ruse, Bulgaria, passed the iron gates and the wild plum thickets, then spent a few complimentary nig
hts in a hospital on a hill, on the advice of a kindhearted Methodist minister who felt Plennie could stand to relax a bit and put on some weight, lest he fall ill and die.
Not far from the hospital was an undiscovered archaeological site where four settlements were stacked one on top of the last. The oldest, at the bottom, dated back eleven thousand years. Excavated in reverse—descending, backward through time—the settlements would reveal a gradual primitivization. The higher strata contained currency, bookkeeping tablets, jewelry, and religious artifacts. The lower strata contained practical tools like eating utensils, pottery, knives, scrapers, and awls. Farther down still, the remains of the bottommost settlement held crude tools meant to kill: stones, boomerangs, spears, and arrows. The consistent element across thousands of years was the treatment of the dead. They were laid to rest outside town, sprinkled with red ocher, which was believed to symbolize blood and life and passage into the afterlife. And they were crouched, knees tucked, lying on their left sides with their heads toward the northeast, symbolizing a return to the womb of Mother Earth.
Plennie left Ruse as April turned to May, with a letter of endorsement from the minister and from one of his doctors, who wrote that “this will remain as a memory to our hospital, because this fearless human was here in person.” A man had come, and would be remembered, and what more could he ask?
He slept the night in a mansion in the Balkans with four dogs and the widow of Captain William H. Northington, a seaman from Cardiff who’d been dead fifteen years. He nearly vomited when, in a restaurant in Kozar Belene, he was offered “horse flesh.” He thought for a long while about that combination of words, and how “horse roast,” or “horse chops,” or “horse steak” sounded so much better.
He backed through Yablanitsa, where the thick carpet of stars lit the inky purple sky like they did over West Texas. Then came Botevgrad, then Sofia, the capital city, where dubious police officers escorted Plennie backward to jail and the American consulate sprung him five hours later.
The Man Who Walked Backward Page 20