by John Updike
After the tiny town of Galilee, gathered, no bigger than Firetown, around the Seven-Mile Tavern and the cinder-block structure of Potteiger’s Store, the road like a cat flattening its ears went into a straightaway where my father always speeded. Passing the model barn and outbuildings of the Clover Leaf Dairy, where conveyor belts removed the cows’ dung, the road then knifed between two high gashed embankments of eroding red earth. Here a hitchhiker waited beside a little pile of stones. As we rose toward him I noticed, his silhouette being printed sharply on the slope of clay, that his shoes were too big, and protruded oddly behind his heels.
My father slammed on the brakes so suddenly it seemed he recognized the man. The hitchhiker ran after our car, his shoes flapping. He wore a faded brown suit whose pattern of vertical chalkstripes seemed incongruously smart. He clutched to his chest as if for warmth a paper bundle tightly tied with butcher’s cord.
My father leaned across me, rolled open my window, and shouted, “We’re not going all the way into Alton, just to the bottom of Coughdrop Hill!”
The hitchhiker drooped at our door. His pink eyelids blinked. A dirty green scarf was tied around his neck, keeping his upturned coat lapels pressed against his throat. He was older than his lean figure glimpsed at a distance suggested. Some force of misery or weather had scrubbed his white face down to the veins; broken bits of purple had hatched on his cheeks like infant snakes. Something dainty in his swollen lips made me wonder if he were a fairy. I had once been approached by a shuffling derelict while waiting for my father in front of the Alton Public Library and his few mumbled words before I fled had scored me. I felt, as long as my love of girls remained unconsummated, open on that side-a three-walled room any burglar could enter. An unreasoning hate of the hitchhiker suffused me. The window my father had opened to him admitted cold air that made my ears ache.
As usual, my father’s apologetic courtesy had snagged the very progress it sought to smooth. The hitchhiker was be wildered. We waited for his brains to thaw enough to absorb what my father had said. “We’re not going all the way into Alton,” my father called again, and in impatience leaned so far over that his huge head was in front of my face. As he squinted, a net of brown wrinkles leaped up behind his eye.
The hitchhiker leaned in toward my father and I felt absurdly pinched between their fumbling old faces. And all the while the musical choo-choo was clicking forward on the radio; I yearned to board it.
“How far?” the hitchhiker asked. His lips hardly moved.
His hair was lank and sparse on top and so long uncut it bunched in feathery tufts above his ears.
“Four miles, get in,” my father said, suddenly decisive. He pushed at my door and said to me, “Move over, Peter. Let the gentleman up front by the heater.”
“I’ll get in back,” the hitchhiker said, and my hate of him ebbed a little. He did have some vestige of decent manners. But in getting into the back seat, he did not lift his fingers from the sill of my window until with the other arm, awkwardly pinching the bundle against his side, he had worked open the back door. As if we were, my selfless father and my innocent self, a treacherous black animal he was capturing. Once safe in the cavity behind us, he sighed and said, in one of those small ichorous voices that seems always to be retracting in mid-sentence, “What a fucking day. Freeze your sucking balls off.”
My father let out the clutch and did a shocking thing: turning his head to talk to the stranger, he turned off my radio. The musical choo-choo with all its freight of dreaming dropped over a cliff. The copious purity of my future shrank to the meager confusion of my present. “Just as long as it doesn’t snow,” my father said. “That’s all the hell I care about. Every morning I pray: ‘Dear Lord, no snow.’ “
Unseen behind me the hitchhiker was snuffling and liquidly enlarging like some primeval monster coming to life again out of a glacier. “How about you, boy?” he said, and through the hairs on my neck I could feel him hunch forward. “You don’t mind the snow, do ya?”
“The poor kid,” my father said, “he never gets a chance to go sledding any more. We took him out of the town where he loved to be and stuck him in the sticks.”
“I bet he likes the snow real good,” the hitchhiker said. “I bet he likes it fine.” Snow seemed to mean something else to him; he certainly was a fairy. I was more angered than frightened; my father was with me.
He, too, seemed disturbed by our guest’s obsession. “How about it, Peter?” he asked me. “Does it still mean a lot to you?”
“No,” I said.
The hitchhiker snorted moistly. My father called back to him, “Where’ve you come from, mister?”
“North.”
“You heading into Alton.”
“Guess so.”
“You know Alton?”
“I been there before.”
“What’s your profession?”
“Annnh-I cook.”
“You cook! That’s a wonderful accomplishment, and I know you’re not lying to me. What’s your plan? To stay in Alton?”
“Ihnnn. Just to get a job enough to get me south.”
“You know, mister,” my father said, “you’re doing what I’ve always wanted to do. Bum around from place to place. Live like the birds. When the cold weather hits, just flap your wings and go south.”
The hitchhiker giggled, puzzled.
My father went on, “I’ve always wanted to live in Florida, and I never got within smelling distance of it. The furthest south I ever got in my whole life was the great state of Maryland.”
“Nothin’ much in Maryland.”
“I remember in grammar school back in Passaic,” my father said, “how they were always telling us about the white stoops of Baltimore. Every morning, they said, the housewives would get out there with the bucket and scrub-brush and wash these white marble stoops until they shone. Ever see that?”
“I been in Baltimore but I never seen that.”
“That’s what I thought. They lied to us. Why the hell would anybody spend their life washing a white marble stoop that as soon as you scrub it up some moron with dirty shoes comes along and puts his footprint on it? It never seemed credible to me.”
“I never seen it,” the hitchhiker said, as if regretting that he had caused such a radical disillusion. My father brought to conversations a cavernous capacity for caring that dismayed strangers. They found themselves involved, willy-nilly, in a futile but urgent search for the truth. This morning my father’s search seemed especially urgent, as if time were running out. He virtually shouted his next question. “How’d you get caught up here? If I was in your shoes, mister, I’d be in Florida so fast you wouldn’t see my dust.”
“I was living with a guy up in Albany,” the hitchhiker said reluctantly.
My heart shriveled to hear my fears confirmed; but my father seemed oblivious of the horrible territory we had entered. “A friend?” he asked.
“Yeah. Kinda.”
“What happened? He pull the old double-cross?”
In his delight the hitchhiker lurched forward behind me. “That’s right, buddy,” he told my father. “That’s just what that fucking sucker did. Sorry, boy.”
“That’s O.K.,” my father said. “This poor kid hears more horrible stuff in a day than I have in a lifetime. He gets that from his mother; she sees everything and can’t do a thing about it. Thank God I’m half-blind and three-quarters deaf. Heaven protects the ignorant.”
I dimly appreciated that my father had conjured up Heaven and my mother as a protection for me, as a dam against the flood of vile confidences with which our guest was brimming; but I vividly resented that he should even speak of me to this man, that he should dip the shadow of my personality into this reservoir of slime. That my existence at one extremity should be tangent to Vermeer and at the other to the hitchhiker seemed an unendurable strain.
But relief was approaching. We came to the crest of Cough-drop Hill, the second, and steeper, of the two hills on the
way to Alton. At the bottom, the road to Olinger went off to the left and we would have to let the hitchhiker out.
We began the descent. We passed a trailer truck laboring toward the crest so slowly its peeling paint seemed to have weathered in transit. Well back from the road, Rudy Essick’s great brown mansion sluggishly climbed through the down-slipping trees.
Coughdrop Hill took its name from its owner, whose coughdrops (“sick? Suck an essick!”) were congealed by the million in an Alton factory that flavored whole blocks of the city with the smell of menthol. They sold, in their little tangerine-colored boxes, throughout the East: the one time in my life I had been to Manhattan, I had been astonished to find, right in the throat of Paradise, on a counter in Grand Central Station, a homely ruddy row of them. In disbelief I bought a box. Sure enough, on the back, beneath an imposing miniature portrait of the factory, the fine print stated made in alton, pa. And the box, opened, released the chill, ectopiasmic smell of Brubaker Street. The two cities of my life, the imaginary and the actual, were superimposed; I had never dreamed that Alton could touch New York. I put a coughdrop into my mouth to complete this delicious confusion and concentric penetration; my teeth sweetened and at the level of my eyes, a hollow mile beneath the ceiling that on an aqua sky displayed the constellations with sallow electric stars, my father’s yellow-knuckled hands wrung together nervously through my delay. I ceased to be impatient with him and became as anxious as he to catch the train home. Up to this moment my father had failed me. Throughout our trip, an overnight visit to his sister, he had been frightened and frustrated. The city was bigger than the kind he understood. The money in his pocket dwindled without our buying anything. Though we walked and walked, we never reached any of the museums I had read of. The one called the Frick contained the Vermeer of the man in the big hat and the laughing woman whose lazily upturned palm un consciously accepts the light, and the one called the Metropolitan contained the girl in the starched headdress bent reverently above the brass jug whose vertical blue gleam was the Holy Ghost of my adolescence. That these paintings, which I had worshipped in reproduction, had a simple physi cal existence seemed a profound mystery to me: to come within touching distance of their surfaces, to see with my eyes the truth of their color, the tracery of the cracks whereby time had inserted itself like a mystery within a mystery, would have been for me to enter a Real Presence so ultimate I would not be surprised to die in the encounter. My father’s blundering blocked it. We never entered the museums; I never saw the paintings. Instead I saw the inside of my father’s sister’s hotel room. Though suspended twenty stories above the street, it smelled strangely like the lining of my mother’s fur-collared winter coat of thick green-plaid cloth. Aunt Alma sipped a yellow drink and dribbled the smoke of Kools from the corners of her very thin red lips. She had white, white skin and her eyes were absolutely transparent with intelligence. Her eyes kept crinkling sadly as she looked at my father; she was three years older than he. They talked all evening of pranks and crises in a vanished Passaic parsonage whose very mention made me sick and giddy, as if I were suspended over a canyon of time. Down on the street, twenty stories below, the taxi lights looped in and out, and that was abstractly interesting. During the day, Aunt Alma, here as an out-of-town children’s-clothes buyer, left us to ourselves. The strangers my father stopped on the street resisted entanglement in his earnest, circular questioning. Their rudeness and his ignorance humiliated me, and my irritation had been building toward a tantrum that the coughdrop dissolved. I forgave him. In a temple of pale brown marble I forgave him and wanted to thank him for conceiving me to be born in a county that could insert its candy into the throat of Paradise. We took the subway to Pennsylvania Station and caught a train and sat side by side as easy as twins all the way home, and even now, two years later, whenever in our daily journey we went up or down Coughdrop Hill, there was for me an undercurrent of New York and the constellations that seemed to let us soar, free together of the local earth.
Instead of braking, my father by some mistake plunged past the Olinger turnoff. I cried, “Hey!”
“It’s O.K., Peter,” he said to me softly. “It’s too cold.” His face was impassive under the cretinous cap of knitted blue. He did not want the hitchhiker to be embarrassed by the fact that we were going out of our way to take him into Alton.
I was so indignant I dared turn and glare. The hitch hiker’s face, unfrozen, was terrible-a puddle; it mistook my motive and moved toward me with a smear of a smile and an emanation of muddy emotion. I flinched and rigidly cringed; the details of the dashboard leaped up aglitter. I shut my eyes to prevent any further inwash of that unwelcome unthinkable ichor I had roused. Most horrible in it had been something shy and grateful and girlish.
My father reared back his great head and called, “What have you learned?”
His voice strained under a high pain that bewildered the other. The back seat was silent. My father waited. “I don’t follow you,” the hitchhiker said.
My father amplified. “What’s your verdict? You’re a man I admire. You’ve had the guts to do what I always wanted to do: move around, see the cities. Do you think I’ve missed out?”
“You ain’t missed a thing.” The words curled back on themselves like offended feelers.
“Have you done anything you like to remember? I was awake all last night trying to remember something pleasant and I couldn’t do it. Misery and horror; that’s my memories.”
This hurt my feelings; he had had me.
The hitchhiker’s voice scribbled; maybe it was a laugh.
“Last month I killed a goddam dog,” he said. “How’s that?
Damn suckin’ dogs come up outa the bushes and try to grab a piece of your leg, so I get myself a hell of a big stick and I was walkin’ along this cock jumps out at me and I cracked him right between the eyes. He drops down and I thump him a couple times more good and boy there’s one suckin’ dog won’t be tryin’ to grab a piece of your leg just because you ain’t got no car to go haulin’ your ass around in. Christ right between the eyes the first crack.”
My father had listened rather dolefully. “Most dogs won’t hurt you,” he said now. “They’re just like I am, curious. I know just how they think. We have a dog at home I think the world of. My wife just worships that animal.”
“Well I fixed that one bastard good I tell ya,” the hitch hiker said, and sucked back spittle. “You like dogs, boy?” he asked me.
“Peter likes everybody,” my father said. “I’d give my eyes if I had that boy’s good nature. But I see your point, mister, when a dog comes up to you in the dark along a strange road.”
“Yeah and then nobody picks ya up any more,” the hitchhiker said. “Stand there all day your balls freezin’ off and yours was the first car in a hour stopped for me.”
“I always pick ‘em up,” my father said. “If Heaven didn’t look after fools I’d be in your shoes. You said you’re a cook?”
“Annh-I done it.”
“My hat’s off to you. You’re an artist.”
I felt within myself like a worm hatching the hitchhiker beginning to wonder if my father were sane. I cringed with the desire to apologize, to grovel before this stranger, to explain. It’s just his way, he loves strange people, he’s worried about something.
“There’s nothin’ to it except keep the griddle greased.” This response came cautiously.
“You’re lying, mister,” my father shouted. “There’s a fine art to cooking for other people. I couldn’t learn it if you gave me a million years.”
“Buddy, that’s horse poop,” the hitchhiker said, lurching into intimacy. “Just keep the burgers thin’s all the bastards run these suckin’ joints give a dick about. Give ‘em grease and spare the meat; if I had one of those bastards gimme the word I had a hundred. The great god Dollar’s the only one they’re looking out for. Christ I wouldn’t drink the nigger piss they call coffee.”
As the hitchhiker grew more and more ex
pansive I felt myself shrivel and shrink; my skin itched furiously.
“I wanted to be a druggist,” my father told him. “But when I got out of college there was no do-re-mi. My old man left us a Bible and a deskful of debts. But I don’t blame him, the poor devil tried to do what was right. Some of my kids-I’m a schoolteacher-go off to pharmaceutical school and from what they tell me I just wouldn’t have had enough brains for it. A druggist is an intelligent man.”
“What are you goin’ to be, boy?”
My desire to become a painter embarrassed my father. “That poor kid’s as confused as I am,” he told the hitch hiker. “He ought to get out of this part of the country and get down where there’s some sun. He has a terrible skin problem.”
In effect my father had torn off my clothes and displayed my prickling scabs. In the glare of my anger his profile seemed that of a blind raw rock.
“That right, boy? How so?” ‘
“My skin is blue,” I said in a congested voice.
“He’s just kidding,” my father said. “He’s a hell of a good sport about it. Best thing in the world for him would be to go down to Florida; if you were his father instead of me he’d be there.”
“I expect to be down in two three weeks,” the hitchhiker said.
“Take him along!” my father exclaimed. “If ever a kid deserved a break, it’s this kid here. My wad is shot. Time to trade in on a new old man; I’m a walking junk heap.”
He took the image from the great Alton dump, which had appeared beside the road. A few fires smoldered here and there across its tattered gay acres. Things revert, through rust and rot, to a hopeful brown, and in their heaps of ash take on fantastic silhouettes, frazzled and feathery as ferns. Like a halted host of banners colored bits of paper were pressed by a constant riverside breeze against upright weed stalks. Beyond, the Running Horse River reflected in its strip of black varnish the cobalt blue silently domed above. Elephant-colored gas tanks, mounted to rise and fall in cylindrical frames, guarded the city’s brick skyline: rose madder Alton, the secret city, lining the lap of its purple-green hills. The evergreen crest of Mt. Alton was a slash of black. My hand twitched, as if a brush were in it. Railroad tracks slipped silver along the highway; factory parking lots flashed full; and the road became a suburban street curving between car agencies, corroded diners, and composition-shingled homes.