The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  Joe thought he would wait for his mother to wash the breakfast dishes, but he was eager to get going. While she was still in her apron, drying off the last plate, he stood at the entry to the kitchen with his suitcase and said, “Well, I’m off.” His father was already in the living room, reading the morning paper. Steve was fiddling with something in the garage.

  “Say hi to Dr. Lewis,” Milt said.

  His mother turned from the sink and looked at him. What did I do to cause this? The son who wants to drift away. From home, from responsibility, from study. From me. She dried her hands on her apron and said, “Have a good trip, son.”

  Joe lifted up a hardened leather suitcase with a brass lock and walked out the front door, passing under the maple trees along Mumford Drive.1

  His final destination was to the southeast, but he took his first steps away from home to the northwest and the nearest highway. Inside the house, his mother went to the living room window and watched him advance to the end of the block. She saw an undisciplined young man who also looked happy as he took a few final appreciative glances at the neighborhood and its lawns and garages. Happy counted for something.

  * * *

  U.S. HIGHWAY 150 ran down to Kentucky, and it seemed a good place to get going, and Joe stood with his thumb out on the stretch that ran through Urbana, on University Avenue. He waited five minutes before a driver stopped. “I’m going to Indianapolis, that help you?” said the man, who was about thirty and heavily cologned, sweating in summer seersucker, with a silver ring on the pinkie finger of his right hand. “Sure, why not?” The driver guided his Chevrolet Impala off U.S. 150, onto a long curve, the on-ramp for Interstate 74, a brand-new superhighway that ran wide and unfettered across central Illinois, four lanes of freshly poured concrete vaulting and dipping over otherwise troublesome crossroads. Off to see the Rastafarians, what a way to start. The edges of this byway were sculpted into gentle, unnatural slopes. “When they finish it, we’ll be able to drive to Indianapolis in two hours,” the driver said. “Never have to stop.” The driver floored the accelerator and pushed the Impala past seventy miles per hour, and the road signs announced they were speeding through Muncie, but they never actually saw the town; instead, they passed through an abstraction called Muncie. The Impala hit eighty and at this speed the familiar farmland and the prairie began to shrink. What an unromantic and sterile way to see the world. In less than an hour they were in Danville, and the interstate ended with a series of barriers and traffic cones, and a herd of yellow metal grading machines and bulldozers were parked at the spot where the new, concrete interstate was preparing to obliterate another cornfield.

  “I should get off here, ’cause I’m headed south.”

  Joe stood with two feet on the roadside again, until a big semi clanked and air-braked to a stop. The trucker at the wheel said but three or four words to Joe as they rumbled southward. He had smoky teeth and skin, and the tragic yellow eyes of an imprisoned tiger, and he took Joe into Terre Haute, Indiana, and dropped him off in the town center, where Joe found a diner and ordered a cup of midday coffee.

  “Is there a good place around here to hitch a ride and head south?” Joe asked the waitress.

  “Ain’t no better place than right outside the door, right here,” the waitress said. “You’re at the corner of Seventh and Wabash. It’s the ‘Crossroads of America.’”

  Joe looked outside the diner’s window and saw an unremarkable intersection with squat brick office buildings. “Wabash Avenue is the old National Highway,” the waitress explained. “It’ll take you to San Francisco. Or New York. And Seventh Avenue is U.S. Highway 41. Runs from Canada to Miami.” Joe stepped outside with his suitcase, into the middle-of-the-day light of a midsize city halfway between the northern and southern borders of a Midwestern state in the middle of North America, and the middleness of the place was overwhelming. I need to get out of the middle, to the south, to the edge of the continent, where ocean waves are waiting for me. The buildings were middle-size and the people too. A midsize sedan stopped before him and he looked inside and saw a middle-aged man and Joe said thanks and took a seat, and this new driver proceeded at the speed limit southward, toward Kentucky, and as night fell the headlights illuminated the hypnotic pulse of white highway lines, until Joe finally said to the man, “You can drop me off at this motel coming up here,” because he could see a sign of curlicue neon letters announcing VACANCY.

  When the first morning light filtered through the curtain of his room, he got up and walked back toward the highway. He saw a man in a white shirt and black tie loading up a car in the parking lot.

  “Early riser,” the man said to Joe. “Me too. The Lord’s work begins with the light, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Couldn’t agree with you more,” Joe said. “Genesis.”

  “A man who reads the Bible! Now that’s a good start to my day. Where you headed, son?”

  “Florida. Miami.”

  “I can get you as far as Clarksville if you need a ride.”

  His new driver was a man of about forty, a pastor who led a flock of Baptists in a church on the outskirts of Clarksville, Tennessee. Joe told him he was headed for Jamaica.

  “Is that a Christian country?”

  “Well, it’s part of the United Kingdom.”

  “Always try and surround yourself with good Christian people, Joe.”

  They drove south toward white clouds clustered like a vast bouquet of bleached flowers on the horizon, and the pastor took shortcuts onto skinny farm roads that curved and wound their way along gullies and into shallow valleys framed by hills topped with mushroomy oaks. The pastor said he considered the “unviolated land” of Kentucky and Tennessee to be a fairly accurate representation of what paradise itself must look like. “Cleansed of sin, we’d be in heaven itself, Joe. Right here in Kentucky.”

  “It’s beautiful country,” Joe said. “But to be honest, I’m not religious. And I’m not sure there is a heaven.”

  “I knew there was a reason why I had to pick you up,” the pastor said, and of course he launched into his finding-Jesus story. It began with the U.S. Army in Europe, where the pastor-to-be had helped liberate the concentration camp in Dachau, and had fired his gun only once in combat. For the most part, his World War II had been a campaign of licentiousness. He’d fornicated his way across France, Germany and Austria, “because I was a good-looking young man, spit-and-polish, never a hair out of place, even on the march, and horny as hell.” He attracted European women the way other men in his unit attracted body lice. As a result of all that screwing, he’d picked up a disease, but even that didn’t stop him, until finally he’d ended up with a Bavarian farm girl whose father shot him in the shoulder with a 12-gauge shotgun.

  “Son, do you really want to be picking shotgun pellets out of your shoulder for the rest of your life? I mean, that’s a metaphor.”

  “I understand.”

  The minister made his Jesus arguments and filled the passing miles with a rambling talk about his past “sex addiction,” the northern lights (which he’d seen from the deck of a troopship), Holstein cattle and the caloric properties of German beer; and about Mary Magdalene and the relative effectiveness of various gonorrhea treatments. All these things served to illustrate that the path to eternal grace was just sitting there for the asking if Joe wanted it.

  “I see it,” Joe said, with a faux sincerity that nearly produced an actual welling of tears. “I see the Lord’s plan for me.”

  When Joe got out of the car the minister gave him a manly squeeze of the shoulders and also a Bible. A King James filled with a fireworks of red-font letters said to be the words spoken by the Lord himself. Joe held the volume with him while he stood on the pebbly driveway of a gas station in Clarksville, his thumb extended again. A station wagon pulled up and a woman with untamed raven bangs rolled open her window and asked, “Where you headed, stranger?” The back of her station wagon was filled with six kids.

  �
��Whatcha standing on the side of the road for, mister?” one of the kids asked as Joe opened the door and stepped inside.

  “Where are you headed with that suitcase?” asked another.

  “Are you selling Bibles?”

  “Are you running away from home?”

  When he reached Nashville, Joe bought a postcard that showed the limestone columns of the Tennessee capitol building and wrote home. Down in the boondocks of Tennessee. Traveling slow, but have met some real interesting people. Told a Holy Roller preacher he converted me. Told a carload of kids my mother wanted me to be a minister so I ran away from home. They asked if I carried a gun or knife and I said, “No. I’ll throw my Bible at any troublemakers.”

  Between Nashville and Atlanta he met five different drivers, including one man with a neatly trimmed gray mustache who looked into Joe’s eyes, and at his mannish musculature with the strange longing of unrequited love. And a burly salesman from Chicago who said he carried a gun. “People tell me, ‘Aren’t you afraid of picking up hitchhikers,’” said the man, who smelled of perspiration and pastrami sandwiches. “And I say, ‘No, not a whit.’ And you want to know why not a whit?”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I’m packing. Smith and Wesson are my bodyguards. Right in the glove compartment right there. Take a look.”

  Joe opened the glove compartment and saw a black revolver that was scratched and ancient. Like an artifact from a Chicago crime museum.

  Three hundred miles later, the Chicago man dropped Joe off at the long pier in Jacksonville, and Joe walked with his suitcase onto the nearby white sands and felt the road still moving underneath him. I sure have covered a lot of ground. He sat on the sand and watched the sky and the sea begin to darken, and saw heavenly bodies begin to rise up out of the water; a constellation shaped like a dolphin and a fiery Saturn. Across this ocean, the Rastafarians awaited him. Maybe this is the end to the first chapter of my book. From Champaign County to the Atlantic Ocean. I did it. I’m here. He remembered the faces of the children in the station wagon, their innocence and their hunger for wondrous things. One day, boys and girls, you can be like me, and bum across America. He celebrated by lighting a cigarette whose tip crackled orange and warm against the night sky.

  Out at Miami Airport! he wrote two days later, in his next letter home. I can’t believe all that hitchhiking’s over with. Altogether it took 24 rides. The variety of people was unbelievable. To mention a few—the Holy Roller preacher, the gunman, 2 homosexuals, a Cuban boy and a 65-year-old “lady killer” and very eccentric man who said Christianity didn’t amount to the square root of a damn! This last guy was the greatest. He picked me up at Jacksonville Beach and I chauffeured his ’62 Chevy for the next 250 miles. We hit it off great. Talked about theology, sex, politics, philosophy, business, the past, the present, every darn thing you could think of. He bought me a Howard Johnson’s lunch and rescheduled his whole route to get me here.

  * * *

  IN MIAMI, Joe took the cheapest flight to Jamaica he could find, which turned out to be on an old DC-3; the plane puttered into the air with a luxurious shimmy of vibrations that the passengers felt primarily in their pelvises. When Joe went to the bathroom, somewhere over the Straits of Florida, he lifted the toilet seat and saw the Caribbean speeding by below. He watched his yellow water obliterated into mist, drifting down toward the marlins and the waves below. He returned to his seat, and to his book, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

  Sitting one row ahead of Joe, a woman turned to rest her head against her seat, and she caught the movement of Joe’s eyes as he read. The back-and-forth of his pupils, their jump from one line to the next, the inverse action of the novelist’s typewriter. He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. The woman passenger had a daughter of eleven and she saw a child in Joe’s alert cerulean eyes, and in the waves of bemusement and puzzlement that moved across his sun-reddened face as he read.

  8

  Maroon Town, Jamaica. Kingstown, Saint Vincent. Imbaimadai, British Guiana

  UP, UP ON THE CURLING BACK ROADS of Saint Elizabeth Parish. Island vistas, the hill upon which I am standing, more hills in the distance, destination somewhere in the green folds of the landscapes. I’m probably the only hitchhiking white man on the entire island. His novel was up here, someplace, if he could ever find these people. You’re looking for the Rastas? Why? Everybody know the Rastas. Directions in patois, Jamaican English. “Follow me now,” which means listen to me. “Whe ya gah to do is…” The friendly instructions of the locals, but do they really know where it is, or are they just being polite? “Little bit down front way.” The arms of a man gesturing, the index finger of a girl pointing. “You go back so.” Joe was making circles in the country roads and footpaths. “See the man dare. Ask im.”

  Before Joe could see it, the Rastafarian camp announced its presence as a vibration. Then as a steady, man-made pulse. Whack-whack. Pause. Whack-whacka-whacka. Pause. Whacka-whack. Joe turned around the last bend, and up a rise, and he saw his shadow moving along the red, rutted surface of the path. His silhouette, long and lanky; the bulb of his head. The walking form of an idealistic American bum, as if on a film screen, the cover of a book. The camp came into view, shelters made of wood. Slapped together. A round pillar that once held up a porch roof in Kingston, an old light pole. Around the edge of a wall of plywood and tin, he saw the source of the music: two men chopping wood. They were facing away from each other, but they chopped, subconsciously, in the same rhythm.

  The first woodcutter stopped and turned to look at Joe; he saw a young white man of about twenty, thin, dressed in khaki pants and a sweat-stained collared shirt. Holding a suitcase. Disheveled, earnest. A lost tourist, perhaps, even though no tourists came this way. Joe had arrived among the Rastafarians two decades before the movement became a fad among the college kids of the United States and Europe. No one then dreamed of white reggae bands, or blond-haired guys growing dreadlocks.

  The second woodchopper noticed the growth of beard on Joe’s face, and intuited a raffish quality to the stranger; he surmised that Joe was a white man who wanted to become a Rasta, even though he’d never met a white man who had expressed this desire. Joe had been hitchhiking across the island for two weeks, living among the poor in and around Maroon Town, in homes without electricity, learning to use slop jars and wash pans, eating ackee, salt fish, curried goat, playing “Jesus Loves Me” on borrowed guitars, attending a Pocomania gathering, and writing home to tell Mom what he’d seen: The drums, the hysteria, the dancing! He was a mess.

  “What you want here, man? What’s your business?”

  “I’m just bumming from town to town.”

  Joe saw words painted onto the planks of one of the shelters.

  INFORMERS BEWARE.

  “I’m not an informer.”

  “No, you are not,” the first woodcutter said. “You don’t know anything about us. You have no information. No information, no informer!” The second woodcutter laughed.

  “I’m a college student from Illinois. Just traveling around. Name’s Joe.”

  The woodcutters sized him up and decided he posed no threat. He needed water, he was lost and soon they would get him on his way. The first introduced himself as James, and reached over to a nearby bucket and scooped out water with a tin ladle and handed it to Joe.

  “You share our water,” James said. “Now you can share our company, Mr. Bum.” The second woodcutter, Cyril, stretched out his arm to offer Joe a seat on a bench. Both men were several years older than Joe: James had long dreadlocks that bounced on his head like a fountain of black icicles; Cyril’s were shorter, and tucked into a cap. They sat down next to Joe, who told them he had hitchhiked across the United States and Jamaica to meet the famous Rastafarians.

  “To see us? That’s crazy. What for? You’re wearing all that road on your face and your clothes.”

  A woman stepped forward and presen
ted Joe with a bar of yellow soap and a bucket of water. The men laughed as Joe rose to his feet and scrubbed his face and hair, working the suds into his beard. “Take that shirt off,” the woman said. “Me wash it.” He poured the last of the water over his head and worked the soap into his chest hairs, which curled, causing James to chuckle and say, “That’s it, that’s righteous clean.” As clean as a white man on a billboard. Smoke Lucky Strikes. In Technicolor. In Stereo. With Added Flavor. Give us a Bayer Aspirin and take our headache away.

  Joe sat down and quickly recounted his travels across the United States and Jamaica, concluding with, “And then I walked here.”

  “Here,” James said. “With us. Why are we here? You might ask us that question. It is a good one.” James explained how his mind had been awakened on the streets of Kingston, listening to the speech-sermons of a Rasta leader who recited Psalms to people hungry to believe in paradise. An escape from Babylon. He told Joe about a king in Ethiopia, whose rise was foreordained in the Bible, and how the Jamaican police tried to break up their gatherings. Bloodied officers, bloodied Rastas. Other camps had been raided by the police, and brothers and sisters had been thrown into jail. For the crime of believing that the black men and women of Jamaica were God’s chosen people. “The Rasta men, they rise up, and we rise up with them.”