The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America

by McIntyre, Mike

  I’m relieved when Mark and Colleen pick me up to go watch a video at their house. Barbara stays home in case her friend Paul drops by. He’s a university student from Belgium who studies bugs. Some nights when he’s finished in the lab, he sleeps at Barbara’s on the mattress with the Dick Tracy pillowcase. Barbara says Paul is jealous of me because of my trip. I have freedom, while he must meet family expectations and become a cookie-cutter-perfect Belgian scientist. He would love to trade places with me. I know the feeling. Some days I’d rather be a Belgian scientist. Barbara has flipped for Paul, who is half her age and due to return to Belgium in two days.

  “You better pick a new obsession, Barb,” Colleen says before we leave.

  When I get back to Barbara’s, Paul is sitting on her bed, petting Maya. He strikes me as a shy little boy with a blond goatee. Before long, he announces he must leave. Barbara walks him outside. I get into bed. They are standing in the driveway a long time, doing what awkward lovers do in the dark.

  In the morning, Barbara comes out of Alicia’s room and asks where Paul is. After I dozed off, he apparently came back in and slept in Barbara’s bed. Alicia spent the night at a friend’s, so Barbara slept in her room.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  Barbara slumps on the couch, fidgeting with a pillow on her lap.

  “He told me he doesn’t want to say goodbye,” she says, frowning. “This is his way of saying goodbye. He wants me to hate him.”

  I reassure Barbara that Paul will say goodbye before he flies home. As soon as the words leave my mouth, he whisks through the front door carrying a grocery bag full of milk, juice and pancake mix. He sets the bag on the counter and leaves again without breaking stride.

  Barbara looks at the meaning of the interlude from every negative angle.

  “I don’t think you should analyze things so much,” I say.

  She says men have abandoned her all her life. When she was a little girl, her father would lock her outside. Her first husband left her. Several times, her second husband packed his bags and set them by the door for her to see before he finally left for real. Now Paul.

  I tell her she should recognize the pattern so she won’t repeat it.

  “I’ve had forty years of trauma and abuse,” she says. “It’s all I know.”

  Barbara has a million plans for a career in music, but I doubt she will ever play the guitar as well as she plays the victim. She’s paralyzed, unable to act on any of her dreams, anxiously awaiting her next dose of despair. I fear that when I leave tomorrow, she will see me as yet another man abandoning her.

  She pulls a handful of orange berries off a bush in the yard to toss into the pancake batter. When I point out that they’re probably not edible, she cuts up an apple. After my second breakfast of apple pancakes, I wash the dishes.

  “Maybe I ought to kidnap you,” Barbara says, “like in Misery, and have you write my story.”

  “That would be a federal offense. Besides, it’s already been done.”

  “Only in the movies.”

  Paul returns yet again. This time he stays while Barbara cooks him some pancakes.

  Alicia rolls in around noon and flops on her mother’s bed.

  “I’m gonna have a heart attack,” Alicia says dramatically.

  She pops up and gets a carton of chocolate ice cream from the freezer. She scoops with a teaspoon into a coffee cup. She keeps missing and picks the ice cream off the counter with her hands and puts it in the cup. She collapses on the couch.

  Paul mumbles something and leaves, closing the door behind him. Barbara sits in a round rattan chair held together with duct tape and stares at the door.

  Alicia says what I’m thinking.

  “He’s got a stick up his butt. He’s stupid. He’s the biggest kiss-up. He’s a pussy.”

  “Ali!” Barbara says. Then she turns calm. “Ali, Colleen thinks you’ve had sex, but I told her that if you had, you’d tell me.”

  “Mom, I kissed a boy last night.”

  “You kissed a boy?” Barbara squeals. “Who? Who?”

  “Ryan.”

  “Ryan?”

  “Then I got laid!” Alicia blurts.

  “Ali!”

  “I got laid. Laid—I love that word,” Alicia says, spooning ice cream into her mouth.

  “Ali, don’t talk like that. That kind of talk is not becoming.”

  “Coming,” Alicia moans, writhing on the couch. “You said coming.”

  The rattan chair breaks and Barbara crashes to the floor. The chair lands on her head. Together they look like an upturned cup and saucer.

  Alicia bounces up from the couch and flies out the door.

  “I’ve lost my childhood,” she yells to the world.

  I can’t stay in the basement alone with Barbara. I grab my journal and leave.

  When I come back, the apartment is nearly dark. Barbara stands in the kitchen, a vacant look on her face.

  “How you doing?” I say.

  “Not good. I was in a coma for four hours.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going through abandonment syndrome. When Paul closed that door in my face, it triggered it. I had flashbacks and went into a coma.”

  I get a sick feeling, like someone who nearly reaches the end of a long dark tunnel only to see an oncoming train. It’s too late. I’ve stayed one day too long.

  Barbara stirs the pieces of a burned pancake in the skillet with a knife. She says she’s making pancakes for my trip. She tells me she’s dizzy. She starts to cry.

  I tell her I’ll finish the pancake, and I help her to the couch.

  “I’m going into shock,” she says.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Don’t call the hospital! I can’t go back to the hospital again!”

  She holds her head in her hands and weeps uncontrollably.

  I’m frightened—for her and for me. Alicia isn’t home. I haven’t seen Colleen since last night. There isn’t a phone in the apartment. I could run upstairs, but I’m afraid to leave Barbara alone.

  “Have you taken your medication?”

  “Yeah,” she wails.

  She shudders and bawls about how her two husbands abandoned her, how her father locked her outside, how Paul shut the door in her face.

  She asks for a box of crayons and a pad of paper from the kitchen drawer. She attacks the paper with a crayon, slashing as if she held a knife. A picture of a sleeping woman emerges. She’s purple. Barbara fills the rest of the paper with sharp geometric figures, colored red and orange and yellow. When she’s finished, she cuts up the picture into heart-shaped pieces and tears them all in two.

  “Help me think of other reasons for Paul’s behavior,” she says.

  When I don’t answer, she says, “I was gonna get on a bike and then pull in front of a car.”

  “You don’t want to do that.”

  “It would be less painful,” she cries, heading off on another jag. “Part of it would be for the pain. I need to be hit right in the face.”

  “Do you want me to call Colleen?”

  “No! She’ll try to commit me. I can’t go to the hospital again! I’ll lose Ali!”

  “You’re not going to go to the hospital,” I try to soothe her. “You don’t want to. Just relax. Don’t think about everything at once.”

  Barbara wails and weeps as she draws, hacking away at the pad.

  I’m afraid to go and I’m afraid to stay. Five hours pass. Just when I think she’s calming down, she loses it again.

  I wash the dishes. I scrub the knife Barbara used to flip pancakes. It has a melted handle, a triangular blade and a serrated edge. Barbara catches me looking at the knife and reads my mind.

  “Don’t worry, Michael, I won’t snap and take it out on you. I could never hurt you.”

  That may be true, I think, but perhaps someone else inside her could.

  “God sent you here to save me, Michael. You’re a godsend.”

  She
rocks back and forth, holding herself.

  “I don’t usually treat my guests this way,” she sniffles. “You are seeing me have a total nervous breakdown.”

  She catches her breath, then bawls, “See what you pay for pancakes?”

  CHAPTER 13

  When I climb the stairs from Barbara’s basement apartment the next day, I feel like I’m emerging from a torture session in a dungeon. I welcome the freedom, but I’m more nervous than ever about what lies ahead. All the goodwill saved from the early part of the trip was spent in Bozeman. There’s nothing left in reserve. I’ve lost my edge. I’m fat and weak and vulnerable. The pack on my back feels strange. The sign in my hand feels strange. It’s like I’m starting over.

  I’m good for only 12 miles, which puts me in Livingston, Montana, a town that could serve as a set for a Hollywood western.

  The bartender at the Hotel Murray lets me watch Monday Night Football, even though I can’t buy a drink. I help myself to a free slice of happy-hour pizza. I’m grateful when the game goes into overtime, delaying the search for a place to sleep.

  I bed down on the lawn behind the train museum. But when my eyes adjust to the dark, I see I’m not as hidden as I thought.

  After a furtive stroll, I unroll my bag on a patch of grass behind the city library. It’s bordered by a public parking lot and an apartment building whose tenants keep odd hours. The locomotives in the switching yard shake the ground all night. I’m not sure if I sleep or not. When I notice the time and temperature sign at the bank, it reads 6:38 and 46°. My eyes sting. The Absaroka Mountains looming above town are the color of a bruise.

  J.D. and Kristin stop for me at the I-90 eastbound on-ramp.

  J.D., 26, is a ringer for the late rock legend Jim Morrison, with long, curly brown hair, dark shades and a pretty-boy pout. Kristin, 20, is a walking wet dream, with bleached blond hair, short cutoffs and centerfold breasts. Her T-shirt says “Jaegermeister,” and I can read every letter.

  They’ve been driving all night from Oregon. They’re both originally from Bismarck, North Dakota. J.D.’s mother is driving from Bismarck to meet them tomorrow in Billings, Montana. She has the couple’s seven-month-old daughter, Summer, who she’s been watching while J.D. and Kristin worked in Oregon. J.D. says he’s a welder. Kristin doesn’t say what she does.

  We barrel down the freeway, heavy metal blaring on the stereo.

  J.D. pulls into a truck stop 30 miles west of Billings. While Kristin uses the restroom, J.D. opens an ice chest in the back of the pickup.

  “Want a beer?” he says.

  It’s nine in the morning. I’ve got an empty stomach. I’m riding through America with a pair of perfect strangers.

  “Sure, why not?” I say.

  As I gulp from the can, I see the sky reflected in J.D.’s sunglasses, and by the time I reach the bottom, I’ve got a feeling that anything can happen, and that’s just fine.

  Back on the road, J.D. reaches into a second ice chest below the seat.

  “Want another?” he says. “They’re like potato chips, you can’t have just one.”

  “If you’re gonna be a bear, might as well be a grizzly,” I say, cracking open the beer.

  J.D. opens another for himself and one for Kristin, who sits between us, the knees of her sleek legs pushed high from the mounded floorboard.

  “What are you doing out here?” J.D. says.

  “A month ago I went in and told my boss I’d had enough.”

  “You woke up with one nerve and he was on it,” J.D. says, grinning.

  “Something like that,” I say, and I tell them the rest.

  When Kristin hears I’m from San Francisco, she says she was recently in the Bay Area. Some town that starts with the letter M, she says. We spend a few miles trying to figure out the name of the place. I give up and ask her what she was doing there.

  “Visiting a friend,” she says.

  “Tell him what you were really doing,” J.D. says.

  “You tell him. You’re the one who put me on the plane.”

  “We were running a scam on some old guy,” J.D. says. “Some rich dude who wants to marry her.”

  “I met him in Vegas,” Kristin says.

  “That’s what she does,” J.D. says. “Hustles and dances.”

  “I was an escort,” Kristin corrects him. “This guy picked me up in a limo, and two hours later I had fourteen hundred dollars. I didn’t even have to fuck him. The first time. Now he wants to marry me. He even wants to adopt my daughter. He had this financial statement printed out on a computer, showed me how I’d be taken care of. But I said, no way. I like my freedom.”

  “We’re scamming him for thousands,” J.D. says.

  “It’s not a scam,” Kristin says. “It’s money. I only sleep with guys that have money. If you’re gonna do this, you might as well go for the high end. Why fuck someone for twenty bucks?”

  Kristin ran away from home when she was 13. She lied about her age and worked as a stripper in a Portland bar. Two years later, she stole a car and returned to Bismark, where she met J.D. They’ve been traveling for five years, Kristin turning tricks in every state in the West. Somewhere along the line, I’m guessing she got breast implants. But there are some things I can’t ask a woman, even if she is a whore.

  “How’s all this sit with you, J.D.?” I say.

  “It was hard when we first got together, but it’s okay now that I’ve matured. With her, I’m never broke.”

  Kristin drags on a cigarette. J.D. fishes out three more beers. I spot the Billings skyline in the distance as J.D. tells me he’s really not a welder.

  “This summer in Oregon, we were dealing drugs. Dealing ’em and using ’em. Dealing enough to use.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “Crank,” J.D. says. He grins. “Yeah, life’s always a lot more complicated than it looks. Another reason we’re coming over to Billings is she’s gotta have an abortion tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, one baby’s enough,” Kristin says. “I wanna be a good mother.”

  She pulls out her wallet and shows me pictures of Summer.

  “I’m fifteen weeks pregnant. Too late to get an abortion in Oregon. They let you have one up to nineteen weeks in Montana. It’s gonna be a two-day procedure.”

  While Kristin has her wallet out, J.D. asks her how much money they have.

  Kristin counts the bills.

  “Three hundred.”

  “And we owe my mom two-fifty for the abortion,” J.D. says. “That leaves us fifty bucks to play with.”

  He looks at me. “You’re welcome to hang with us. We’re just gonna go to a bar and make some calls.”

  “Well, you know my story. I don’t have a penny.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” J.D. says.

  “Sounds good.”

  J.D. parks in front of a dive called The Lobby. When we hit the door, sunlight washes over a roomful of professional alcoholics. I use the bathroom. When I return, a draft beer is waiting for me on the bar.

  “Who should we call?” J.D. says. “Carol?”

  “No, I don’t wanna call Carol,” Kristin says. “She’s a bitch. Besides, if we call her, we’ll have to see Alex and them.”

  “Let’s call Wanda then.”

  “Wanda outta jail yet?”

  “We’ll find out,” J.D. says, and walks to the payphone.

  The morning disappears in a blur of beer and shots of tequila.

  J.D. and Kristin try their luck at the video poker machines. The $50 gets chewed up fast.

  Kristin moves down the bar, and a man in a cowboy hat chats her up. Kristin leans over the bar, affording the cowboy a better look at what’s stuffed inside her T-shirt. The cowboy buys her a drink. Then another.

  J.D. continues to play the poker machine.

  “You got a real lucrative act going here,” I say.

  “Yeah, I never have to buy her a drink.”

  Kristin and the cowboy walk by us.

 
“I’m going to the bathroom,” she says.

  “Okay,” J.D. says without looking up from the screen.

  Kristin and the cowboy return five minutes later. There’s suddenly money for more beer and video poker. I guess Kristin doesn’t always work the high end of the hooker’s ladder.

  An old man with three teeth in his mouth sits at a table crowded with empty beer cans and a sketchbook. J.D. and Kristin sit down and pay the man $20 to draw their caricatures.

  J.D. challenges me to a game of pool. I win. Then I win three more games. Then it’s one o’clock, time to go to Wanda’s.

  We drive down a country road, my hand riding the air outside the window. I’m drunk and the sky looks like a scene from the Bible.

  J.D. pulls alongside a prefab house with a couple of junked cars out front. Kristin goes inside.

  “You’d never know these guys were millionaires,” J.D. says.

  Kristin and Wanda come out to the truck. Wanda wears hideous eyeliner and has the torn-up look of a meth addict. She’s under house arrest, serving time for a drug bust. She wears an electronic bracelet on her wrist. If she leaves her front yard, the police will know.

  “It’s gonna take two hours,” Kristin says to J.D. “And it’s sixty.”

  Wanda’s husband is holding the meth, and he’s not home.

  J.D. pulls a fifty from his wallet.

  “If you want,” Wanda says, “I’ll go in for a quarter and you guys pay forty-five.”

  J.D. and Kristin agree.

  “I better get back in, in case they call,” Wanda says, shaking her bracelet.

  We drive to another bar on a freeway frontage road. J.D. and Kristin argue on the way. I can’t tell over what because the stereo is cranked to 10. Kristin leaves us in the parking lot.

  When we catch up to Kristin in the bar, she’s nudged up against another cowboy. J.D. and I take the stools on the other side of Kristin. The cowboy shoots us a glare. J.D. gets up and walks away, chuckling. He’s still wearing his sunglasses.

  Kristin and the cowboy walk toward the bathroom.

  There are more games of pool and more beer.