The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  “Let me get a picture of you two,” Milt said.

  She stood next to Joe, and Milt snapped their picture. Joe in leisure wear on a hot August day; khaki pants, a shirt with broad crimson stripes. Virginia in a summer dress, carrying a purse. Milt had given him cash and Virginia had washed his clothes one last time, and she had hovered nearby as he packed in his room, a few books on the bed that he would take too, wrapped up in brown paper and twine. I carried you under the hard shell of my belly and pushed you from my too-small womb, big-shouldered baby, slippery and sloppy out into the world. Spoons of applesauce in Arkansas, spelling lessons and games of checkers with nickels and pennies on the checkered tablecloth. She had watched the Urbana barber plop him up into a booster seat in his big black leather chair and tame the blond bangs reaching for his brow. Now he shaved and folded his oxfords and his socks into neat rectangles in his Samsonite suitcase.

  My boy. Last little boy. Tall and manly voiced, but still my boy.

  On the platform, twenty minutes before it was scheduled to arrive, Joe looked in the distance for the train. Or maybe he was scanning the nearby Champaign streets for that Karen girl.

  “I’m not passing through Atlanta, no,” Joe said to this father. “New Orleans, yes. Mobile too.”

  Buttery frosting on your face. First wooden toys. Your kindergarten tears. The lonely look in your wounded teenage eyes that October night. Nothing I could do.

  “Karen said she might come,” Joe said. A few moments later Karen walked up the steps onto the platform, bounding toward him, trailing two of her friends. “Hello, Mr. Sanderson. Mrs. Sanderson.” And then she turned and gave Joe a kiss on the cheek.

  “I’m going to miss him a lot.”

  Vicki and Linda, Karen’s friends, gave Joe kisses on the cheeks too, and he rolled his eyes like a movie comedian, and then three more girls arrived on the platform, in summer shorts, including Betty Jo, and they all surrounded Joe and gave him kisses on the cheek, and fussed over him, and complimented him on his shirt, and said it was going to be hot and humid in Florida. Karen stood at the edge of the circle and tried to stay in the funny and charming moment, even though this felt momentous, the goodbye of all goodbyes.

  My Joe. My boyfriend. My goofy thinker. He is unaware. Boy in the stretchy body. Charismatic. Charmer. Say little, say it funny, say it gently, Joe, and the girls orbit you in their dresses. Charming when he speaks, but mean in his silence. Because the words he never spoke are ending everything between us. A boy like him, a man, allows his silences to do his dirty work for him.

  “Whatta you think you’ll major in, Joe?” one of the girls asked.

  “Don’t know. Don’t have to decide yet.”

  Forever Joe? Not forever. Will you remember our kisses? Our Camus? Our Frost? Our Thoreau? Cabin man, rugged man. Neat now but messy later, when Mom isn’t looking. Mom hovers and looks and measures you and measures me. I’m just his girlfriend, Mrs. Sanderson, and not even that as soon as the train pulls away. But you will always be his mother.

  A whistle sounded and they felt the train’s vibrations before it came around the corner. The Illinois Central. Punctual, of course. A minute early, in fact.

  “There it is.”

  “It’s time.”

  His mother placed a hand on his shoulder. Will the mossy heat make you ill? Ill eventually. Ill without me nearby. He’ll manage. Will learn to manage.

  “See you, Mom. See you, Dad.”

  “Bye, Joe.”

  “Bye!”

  “See you at Christmas.”

  His mother spoke her last words softly into his still-young ear: “Write home, son.”

  The girls gave a chorus of cheery bye-byes as he climbed the steel steps. He turned from the top and took them all in with one rushed scan of their faces, and it didn’t feel like a movie, as he’d imagined it would. Karen with moist, meaningful eyes. His father too. His mother standing back behind the girls, as if to allow Joe a last moment of boyhood. Suddenly as stolid as a silo. She doesn’t see that I am looking for her. Looking at her.

  Soon after Joe was at his seat, moving southward. He did not imagine he would feel this way. As if he’d lost part of himself back there in the city cut into the corn.

  On the platform, his mother watched the last steel car disappear around a bend.

  He will always need me.

  * * *

  MANY TRAIN HOURS LATER, Joe watched the sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico from his moving window. He began to write a first letter home. After he’d moved into a campus dorm, and looked out the window at the sturdy, mossy willows on the University of Florida campus, he finished it. It was sad as heck leaving all you people but luckily I’ve been almost too busy to be lonely here. He pledged into a fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha. The guys are really a swell bunch, very widely varied in interest and background. Millionaires to poor folk—drinkers and goof-offs to serious students—pansies to real tough guys. They were all white, of course, and among a few an obnoxious and assertive Southern feeling (as Joe described it in his letter) expressed itself even before their first sip of vodka. “All those uppity Negroes in Nashville,” one of them said. “They wouldn’t dare in Gainesville.”

  The next time Joe wrote home he said his classes were harder than he’d expected. His mother wrote back with the news that Roger Ebert’s father, Walter, was seriously ill. Roger had given up on the Ivy League and stayed in Champaign-Urbana to study at the University of Illinois because his father had lung cancer. At mail call, his fraternity brothers made fun of him: “Sanderson! Joe! Another letter from moootheeer!” He wrote back that all was well, even though he’d been forced to drop one of his courses because it was too hard. I really can feel how much I am missing the fall—cider and doughnuts, moonlight and crisp night air, cabin, football games out of town, and of course crab apples in the orchards.

  At the frat house, he played bongos for his drinking brothers, wore his green swimming trunks while doing his homework and learned to bartend. His grades dipped below a B average. In the presidential campaign that November he supported the somber Nixon over the handsome and pampered Kennedy, and he wore a Nixon-Lodge button on Election Day. His mother wrote to tell of the death of Walter Ebert. I hope Roger and Annabel get along all right, he wrote back, and I know you people are doing everything you can for them. He went home to snowy Urbana for Christmas and saw Karen, and their meeting was friendly, awkward and passionless. She talked about a boy she had dated, and measured Joe’s reaction: half-hurt, distant, distracted.

  Back in Florida, in January, all the talk at the university was of Fidel Castro going communist in Cuba, and the uprising the anti-Castro Cubans in Florida were planning. One of the Lambda Chi Alpha brothers announced, “My friend José called and asked if I can lend him a rifle!” There was talk of secret meetings of anti-Castro Cubans on campus, of underclassmen headed to the Tampa training camps of the counterrevolution. Everything in preparation for a revolution, and believe me I feel right on the doorstep, Joe wrote home. He raised money for a student college fund for exiled Cubans. But he was getting a C in English.

  In the second week of the winter semester he skipped classes to take a bus down to Key West, so that he could see the imminent Cuban counterrevolution unfolding with his own eyes. Everything here is one big romantic adventure, he wrote to his mother and father. Cubans all over town, a jumping-off point for refugees and freedom fighters. Utter tension everywhere to rebel against Castro. You might have read about the three boatloads of Cuban refugee fighters landing here in Key West a few days ago. The boats are in the harbor now and the fighters have been sent to Miami. Two fishing trawlers, an aging yacht. Joe spent three days in Key West, listening to the angry Spanish being spoken on the streets, sneaking into a bar, trying to decipher the many meanings and uses of the oath ¡Coño! On the beach, he stared at the azure, flat waters of the Straits of Florida, Cuba just ninety miles away. The horizon was filled with puffy mountain ranges of cumulonimbus clouds, and a
t night their round peaks were illuminated by electric pulses of blue light, and he imagined a rebel army on the water, headed toward the thunder and a war. I can only be glad that my stay here will let me live, somewhat, this whole situation, and not just see it, he wrote home.1

  Joe headed north on the bus, back to school, traveling over the string of keys, on an asphalt-ribbon of road that floated over the blue leopard spots of a shallow sea.

  * * *

  HE DECIDED THE University of Florida didn’t suit him and he began to make plans to transfer to a college closer to home: Hanover, in southern Indiana. The weather is a ghastly 70–80 out, he wrote home. Complete hell for studying. He traveled outside Gainesville in search of new adventures for his journal and his letters, and he saw the evangelical preacher Billy Graham speak at a football stadium in Jacksonville. Chiseled-faced, suntanned and dressed in tailored wool, the reverend possessed the gift of perfect enunciation, his voice filling the bowl of the arena with one precisely uttered syllable, Bible parable and verse after the other. Joe joined a paleontology professor on an expedition, and picked at the fossils of skinks, snakes and shrews protruding from the mossy limestone of a huge, old and eroded sinkhole.

  For Mother’s Day, he sent a letter home addressed to Mrs. Mom Sanderson, and signed it much love with the Playboy rabbit logo alongside it. When he left for home in June, he knew he wouldn’t be coming back to Florida, and after a long train ride he entered Urbana to find the pale yellow shadow of a subversive bunny still visible on the tin shell of the water tower in the center of town. In Urbana he had done the boldest things he could do, and yet he was still an unremarkably average Joe here, and unfamous. A few days later he got sad and stupid drunk with Jim Adams, and ended up firing a rifle randomly into the night woods outside Urbana, crying as he fired at critters that weren’t there.

  * * *

  JOE ENTERED SOUTHERN INDIANA, and drove past yellowing cornfields and white wood-frame houses that were square, squat and unassuming. On his first try at finding Hanover College he drove straight through the town (population 1,065) and ended up in more corn on the other side. He joined a new fraternity and surveyed the local landscape for places to explore, beginning with the next town down the road. Started off the year by drinking a beer or two at a Madison tavern, he wrote home. The whole atmosphere the first night, homosexual piano player and all, brings back the wanderlust, so I’ll probably head for Kentucky this weekend. One of his new fraternity brothers bet him he couldn’t swim across the nearby Ohio River, so one warm day Joe donned his Florida swimming trunks and swam into the gentle brown-black ripples and easily made it to Kentucky terra firma on the other side. The river held his attention much in those first days. I sleep from 7:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., hit the books till 7:00 a.m., have breakfast and drive to the river for a shot of bourbon to wake me up and have a little talk with the Dawn, he wrote home. During this 30–45 minute period, I do the only creative writing I have allowed myself, and it’s the minimum that can keep me on an even keel.

  His grades were not terrific, in part because he spent hours working on his novel, The Broken Fawn, a series of dreamy, stream-of-consciousness stories about a young man growing up in the Midwest. Rain stalks him, animals are his witness. The soil exists to hold him upright, the clouds to shelter him from the sun. When he wasn’t writing, Joe followed narrow roads into the wavy topography of the countryside; unlike central Illinois, the farmland here rose and fell like a blanket God had shaken and allowed to remain suspended in the air. His English professor told him about a local writer who was trying to live like Thoreau, but on the Ohio River, and Joe quickly read his book, Shantyboat, which described his journeys up and down the waterway. His name was Harlan Hubbard and Joe found him inside his floating ice-box abode, a mile downstream from Hanover. Mr. Hubbard was the first author Joe had ever met. He was a shy and spry man of about sixty who told stories about river currents called “chutes,” and about the muscadine and elderberry he’d found on the riverbanks. “How do you write a book?” Mr. Hubbard said, repeating Joe’s question. “All I know is I go someplace, see things and scribble down what I see.”2

  * * *

  JOE SANDERSON the student remained an incurable procrastinator, driving through Indiana in search of adventure and scribbling down in his journal the odd phrase he heard, the strange sights and anecdotes. The funny things farmers told him. “My dog won’t chase no rabbits ’cause I guess he “just knows them too well.” He subjected his liver to the elixirs on offer in the bars of northern Kentucky, and sometimes a thin beam of sunlight squeezed into those dark spaces through their leather-covered doors, a crack opening in the crust of a brick and wood-paneled Hades, allowing bats and lushes to enter. He drank Old Taylor and read From Here to Eternity. When he absolutely could not postpone studying any longer, he drove to the truck stop on the edge of Hanover and drank coffee and ate fried eggs, and daydreamed stories about the bristly truckers sitting at the counter.

  Finally, he fell for a girl: Linda. She was from Chicago and she was black, and like a fish out of water in Hanover. They took a long walk together through the campus and its wintry landscape of fallen leaves, and she told him about her corner of Chicago, and how different it was from the Chicago that Joe said he knew, and afterward he thought of Linda’s deep and soft voice and the writers she liked (I must read this Baldwin fellow), and how lonely and determined she seemed. They drove down to the river, and she told him about the place of the Ohio in the history of her people. “That side, slavery, this side freedom,” she said, and they watched the water move past them like a vast liquid conveyor belt. Swim, paddle, liberty. Joe reached out and placed his hand over hers, and squeezed her fingers. They took sips of whiskey and kissed and their tongues intermingled, and their hands intertwined, and they both looked down at them. Two colors, we see it in our fingers, the tribes we belong to. Is anyone watching us? On their fourth date Linda presented him with pictures of her Chicago family. A very dapper man in a thin mustache, taken many years ago, his wool suit pressed but too big for him. The same man as a boy, a fuzzy photo, surrounded by five other young men, all dressed in suits and ties, denuded Chicago trees behind him. “Bronzeville,” she said. “This is who I am, Joe.” What is she telling me? That I cannot be black, I cannot be this noble and proud? However much I try? Is that it? Linda studied Joe and saw the confusion she had expected to see. She gave him a sad smile. Such a cute boy. But it’s hard enough to keep up an A average, even without the stress of dating a white guy. She moved her hand away and raised it to touch his shoulder, in a sisterly way, as if to say thank you. Good man, good Joe. Goodbye.

  Later, in his frat house, one of the brothers made a point of saying: “You know, if you date a colored girl, you’ll have to de-pledge. That’s the rules.” The mighty rules. Fuck the racist rules. She doesn’t want to go out with me anyway.

  I’m wondering if I made the right decision about heading for college, Joe wrote home. I spend the evenings at the truck stop, studying and writing, and though I get my work done, I’m in a world removed from college life. Reading and roaming and writing as much as possible on the weekends. Unless I get squared away, I better consider the service … If it were momentary depression, I wouldn’t be concerned, but it’s been weeks, and bumming on the weekends isn’t enough of an outlet.

  He continued to read, but rarely anything related to his studies. Emerson; Tropic of Cancer; Huxley; Advise and Consent; D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; Youngblood Hawke. Books by smart men who thought and screwed and churned out reams of pages and never set out to get good grades. Who is Sanderson? The virgin sophomore. Chaser of the elusive B plus.

  The best stories came from oceans and islands. Cuba. Ithaca. Oahu.

  Joe decided to suspend his college education and get back to Jamaica. Once he got there, a truly robust novel would start to write itself. He’d sail, fly or swim to the island, and fill pages with wet ink and an orgy of adjectives.

  Even before he to
ok his final class and exam in Hanover, Joe began planning for a return trip to the Caribbean.

  7

  Terre Haute, Indiana. Clarksville, Tennessee. Miami

  TO SAVE MONEY ON BUS FARE, he was going to start his trip hitchhiking from Urbana to Miami. Then he would fly to Jamaica, or take a ship there. Virginia listened and watched Joe study highway maps at the table, and she imagined her boy out on the side of a road, his thumb extended. With his wrestler’s lean body and swimmer’s pectorals, he was more than capable of protecting himself at any crossroads where his journey might take him. She made him a macaroni and cheese dinner, and listened to him and his brother call out, jokingly, and in unison: “More cheese, Mom!” One solo journey across the continent and the waves might be enough to get it out of his system, and then he’d come back to school and serious study and work.

  On the morning Joe was to leave, the three men in the Sanderson family waited for Virginia to join them at the breakfast table, and when she slid her chair forward, the four of them looked up at one another across the angles of the square table. Here we all are. All grown-up. Four grown-ups. The full fatty aroma of the bacon on his plate invaded Joe’s nostrils, and he cut a piece of its striped skin and chewed, and the meat crackled saltily in his mouth. “Mmmm. Mmm. Mom, I’d say this is a great meal to start a trip bumming.” Virginia raised the corners of her lips, sphinxlike, and none of the three men at the table could tell what she was thinking, but all three felt she had somehow mastered the moment: Joe was giving up college, against her objections. And he would step out the door carrying his suitcase, without serious argument or protest from her.

  Dust hovered over the breakfast table and moved slowly, hypnotically through the shaft of summer morning light streaming through the kitchen window. What was the dust? Flakes of skin from his sunburned forearms, crop soil and washed linen dissolved into particulates, orbiting in air currents. His mother scrubbed, wiped and sprayed, but she could not erase the dust. He walked in dust the way fish swim in water and he was leaving on this trip to escape the dust. The dirt that covered his glasses, his nearsighted eyes peering through it at everything. Flecks from the dead wings of his butterflies and dragonflies. The dirt from the bottom of his kindergarten tennis shoes, and the cellulose escaping from the crumbled paper of his failed fiction in the wastebasket. When he walked out the door, a vortex of dust would follow him.