The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  James and Cyril returned to their woodcutting work. “It’s going to be cold tonight.” Joe offered to help, and took an ax, and began to expertly chop, turning a log sideways and splitting it. He saw the woman who had brought him water, now carrying another bucket, and he offered to help her too, and she said he was a sweet boy. A child stared at him, and Joe showed him his pocketknife, which contained a small magnifying glass and together they studied a line of passing ants. The men in the camp watched Joe do these things. They were expecting to be raided by the police again at any time; the police might not be as vicious if they saw this white man here. The woman returned. “Come inside, eat,” she said, and she laid out a mat for him on the dirt floor. After Joe ate he looked at the mat and felt very tired. “Me just lie down for a sec,” Joe said, and he fell asleep at six in the evening, with his head resting upon his folded hands.1

  The woman put a blanket over Joe and she studied him, as one studies a flower or a ladybug one encounters in a garden. Stubble growth of man-child beard, cheek hairs sparse and downy. A citizen of the most powerful country on Earth, the United States of America. He has never carried a crop over his shoulder, or suffered a day without a meal. The woman stepped outside and gestured to the woodcutters to come inside and look at the stranger sleeping. They saw the Joe his mother saw when she peeked into his room on Sunday mornings. Pursed lips fluttering, a child suckling at the buttermilk in the air. James felt that the Creator was showing him a truth: human vulnerability was universal, and brotherhood the natural way of the world. Cyril noticed the young man’s leather suitcase, and the wallet peeking out from his pocket. Cash. Comfort. If we were the criminals the British think we are, he wouldn’t have a thing left. Sleep, white man, sleep safely here.

  The camp dwellers left Joe to his light snoring, and in the darkness of a dream he traveled to a winding strip of asphalt amid meadows and rolling hills. The black road began to move beneath his feet, and then he rose over the road and began to turn and tumble inside a sunlit cloud of dust. While still dreaming he blinked hard, trying to wake himself up, and the Jamaican room around him came into focus for an instant, and it felt more like a dream than his dream, and then he slipped back into sleep and found himself sitting at his kitchen table in Urbana. His mother stood before him, expressionless. She placed a plate on the table for him with two pieces of freshly buttered toast, and his desire to bite into the toast caused him to wake up.

  His eyes opened to the unilluminated room of the shack. Nighttime. A smoky purgatory. Straw mat under his cheek, scratchy. He remembered the woman and the meal, and the camp outside. He was bumming. In Jamaica. With the Rastafarians. A candle burned in the shack, and a moth flew past the flame and singed its wings. Joe got up and stepped outside, and found Cyril and James gathered by a fire. He sat down with them and started to light a cigarette.

  “No tobacco in the camp, Mr. Joe Bum.”

  “That’s fuckery.”

  “Fuckery?”

  “Oppression.”

  They invited him instead to try the wisdom weed. Cultivated in the nearby hills, they said. It grew between mango and breadfruit trees, seeds secretly tucked into the earth and nurtured to life by Rastafarian hands. They placed a pinch of what looked like a dried flower bud in the bowl of a pipe made from a gourd. Water floated inside the contraption. “Chalice pipe,” James said, and he held a flame for Joe. “Hold it in your lungs, Joe Bum. Don’t puff it out quickly, like you do with that evil tobacco.” Joe’s lungs burned with unfamiliar inner heat. Against the law. Here, home, everywhere illegal. Really far from the Urbana city limits now. He held the smoke in for about five seconds. His exhale was followed by a violent cough.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Cyril said. By the fourth puff Joe decided he liked the tension in his chest muscles from the act of inhaling, but he felt no different, and an hour passed uneventfully, with James telling the story of his hair, which was a twenty-year epic involving his grandmother’s scissors and assorted barbers in a place called Rose Town, and then finally his enlightenment by the movement, and the growth of his beard and his locks. “The creation is alive in our hair,” he said. “We want our hair to be living amongst us. Because we have locks, you know who we are.”

  Joe looked at James and saw the flickering yellow flame of the fire ferociously alive in the swirling brown lava of his irises, and in the creamy liquid of the sclera. He could feel the core of the log in the fire expanding, and when it crackled each pop was like a note made by an ancient musical instrument, and Joe began to hear more distant and delicate sounds coming from all around him. A creek ran somewhere nearby, bell-tinkling and whispering a song of rest and seduction. Didn’t hear that before. On the other side of the camp, someone played a guitar. He could hear the springy resonance in the strings and the hollow body, each note a plea of wire and wood.

  After a while, his acoustic powers faded, and about that same time Cyril retrieved the pipe again, and circled it around their group, which had grown to six men. The camp dwellers asked Joe about this new American president with the wavy hair, Kennedy. “Irish,” Joe said. “He wants to go to the moon.” They looked up at the white scythe blade of the waxing moon.

  * * *

  JOE SPENT FOUR MORE DAYS with the Rastafarians, chopping wood and hauling water, and helping Cyril erect a small shack to house another family. He met a Jamaican communist and told him he wanted to write a novel about the Rastafarians, but was surprised and confused when the communist objected: “No, you can’t do that. We’ll write our own books, thank you.” The communist was a bit of a kook. He said the American CIA was active on the island, and Joe thought that was the craziest thing he’d ever heard. That night a new family arrived at the camp, and there were many greetings, and later the playing of barrel-shaped akete drums, and some of the men danced in a slow motion, rhythmic swaying. A kind of moving prayer. Joe stood up and clapped, and an older man studied him. “It’s nice to see you interested in knowing truth and right,” the man said when the music stopped. His locks and beard had wandering gray strands. “Give thanks that you are here. You have a heart of joy. It’s the goodness of your heart that brings you to this place.”

  The next day, Joe left, with the members of the camp giving him a series of handshakes and pats on the back. The Rastas had asked him if he could help out with the food, and he had discovered he was out of money—they were kind enough to give him a few coins so he could mail a letter home.

  Two weeks later, the Jamaican police raided the camp. They knocked down every structure, and cleared out every man, woman and child, and pulled every marijuana plant they could find out of the ground.

  * * *

  HAVE BEEN AT A RASTAFARI camp the last few days and was it ever an experience, Joe wrote home from Montego Bay. A night of drums … and believe me, not for tourists. Under the influence of ganja, the drummers went on for literally hours without letting up. They had a special chant, usually along the lines of: “The white man surprise me forefather, and still he suppress me now.” And then he got to the main, urgent point of his missive: I’m in a kind of a pinch right now. I’m completely out of money, and in debt for a few pounds. He’d gotten credit from a local innkeeper. Need money like hell, so as not to be tied down here in Montego. A pound a night with a big breakfast is darn good but I shouldn’t be spending even that, and besides the wanderlust is digging in deep. One of my new Rastafarian friends lent me the 6d for the stamp. So I need $$. The cashier’s check you sent last time was fine. Joe thought of his mother reading his note, his plea for emergency money, and he felt like he was ten years old—and definitely not like the author of a book. I love mango juice running down my chin, but I can still smell the cherry crunch and ham, he wrote. Sure miss you folks.

  * * *

  VIRGINIA READ THE LETTER TO MILT, who merely looked up from the cherry crunch she had prepared for dessert. “I sent him the money, of course,” she said. She was seething, but said nothing more. Their disagreement o
ver Joe filled the wordless space between them. Milt would not intervene and use his influence over Joe to get him back in college. A few days later, Virginia contacted a lawyer she knew from her work at the bank, and when Milt came home she told him, “I’m going to file for divorce.” Milt nodded and said he would move out to the cabin they owned in the Mahomet woods, and after he had packed up his things, she made him a cup of coffee and they sat together in their Mumford Drive living room for the last time. Twenty-six years of marriage. In their thoughts they both returned to Lawrence, Kansas. University summer school, 1933. Tall Milt, studying bugs after defying his father. Petite and pretty Virginia, with the wavy hairstyle of a starlet in the moving pictures. Green gingham dress for school, $2.98 from a Chicago catalog. Walking together one icy morning on her family’s farm, they saw three haloed suns on the horizon. “You see, Milt. Sometimes we have three suns instead of just one. That’s why our wheat grows so tall.” Parhelions. Sun dogs. Milt told her he had played with bugs as a kid. He’d captured a green June beetle, Cotinis nitida, on an Oklahoma farm, and tied a string to one of its legs, and watched it deploy its diaphanous wings and fly, and in this way the insect became a slave-kite and a toy. The heart of the attraction: our desire to be more. One day you’re a boy, the next you’re a man, married. Wedding night. How life begins. The bump in her gingham dress when they went to tell her mother and father.

  * * *

  IN JAMAICA, Joe remained unaware of the domestic contretemps his bumming had produced. He lived for two or three nights more as a pale pauper, taken in by country families, waiting for money from home. Finally he approached the inn at Montego Bay, stumbling down the town streets exhausted at ten in the morning. A policeman appeared before him. I arrived in Montego only to be interrogated for 6 hours at the police station, he wrote in a letter home afterward. I found out later that someone had warned the people here that the police were watching me, but I came into town unaware. I stumbled into town sockless and dirty from head to toe, and must have looked like the wrath of God (at least I felt like it). I was taken in, searched and questioned about the Rastafaris, ganja, Communism, etc. It was all kind of amusing. They couldn’t understand why I was mixing with every element on the island and living so untypically. They said if I didn’t start living like most foreigners I would be deported. I replied that my life was mine and I would keep it that way, so they could jolly well deport me and I didn’t give a damn.2

  * * *

  AFTER THE POLICE LET HIM GO, and after finally receiving the money his mother had sent him, Joe traveled to the beach resort of Ocho Rios. He cleaned himself up and got a room in the same hotel that was home to James Jones, the author of From Here to Eternity and probably the most famous American expatriate living in Jamaica. Joe found the mustachioed writer and his protruding ears sipping cocktails poolside, in a cloud of pomade and whiskey, and spoke to him just long enough for Jones to offer the essence of his advice on book writing: “Go out and associate yourself with the hardest, most foulmouthed people you can find, Joe. Failing that, seek out the people who are having the most sex.”

  Two nights later, in Kingston, Joe lost his virginity—at precisely the same time Jamaica was becoming an independent country.3

  * * *

  JOE BEGAN TO FREQUENT various bars in a rough corner of Kingston known as Back O’Wall, and had several adventures: one night, he saw a police officer get shot, and got him into the car that took him to a hospital, and the next day he refereed between two warring parties at a car accident. And then he got a job as a bartender at a brothel in the center of the city.

  THE NEW PAUL JONES

  FOR YOUR ENJOYMENT

  WITH GIRLS AND MUSIC OF YOUR CHOICE

  CHINESE, INDIAN & COLORED

  COURTEOUS SERVICE, CHOICE LIQUEURS, REAL FUN!

  S. WONG, PROP.4

  Miss Wong paid him a few pounds per week, plus the tips he earned at the bar, and gave him a room to stay in, and made him part of the female family of the New Paul Jones, where the girls kissed him, and pinched his butt, and teased him the way older sisters might. His room was on the second floor at the end of a corridor, past the last two rooms where the “girls” worked. Joe was the friendly white American face at the bar, greeting the ingénue boys who hailed from chaste towns filled with soda fountains and good girls; and the hardened, cargo-ship sea dogs, who fingered the knives they carried in their pockets. “You’re a real American, not a limey?” “What are you doing here with these blackbirds?”5 Two U.S. Navy destroyers pulled into port, disgorging their lascivious mariners, and he served them beer and whiskey, while the girls got iced tea from an old rum bottle. He watched the working girls guide men by the hand up the wooden stairs for a bit of “sugar bowl.” When the bar emptied out at about four in the morning, Joe would go up to his room and listen as moans, whispers and the chirping of bed springs passed through the walls. The long, low larynx note of a man finding release, the cough of the woman beneath the man. He was inside the machinery of a coital factory, the floorboards squeaking from frantic missionary position thrusting. Buttock slaps and counterslaps followed by female laughter. Chuckles and gagging, murmurs and apologies.

  During the day, in his room, he used a stack of beer cases for a writing table. I am absorbed into the flaking paint of bamboo, blue eye shadow and bar counter, becoming as much a fixture as the douche bowl … My beard grows longer, turning reddish against my pallid skin … I am barely able to resist the attempts of my newfound sister-mothers to shave it off completely … When the police started prowling nearby, Joe remembered his brief detention at the station in Montego Bay and kept moving. He was living like an outlaw, “mixing with every element,” and he was excited and afraid, but felt protected, somehow. Joe was alone and free, and could go anywhere and do anything—as long as his funds held out. Everything was cheaper in the countryside, so he moved in with a fishing family in Negril, the Connells. Am watered and fed for 30 shillings a week, he wrote in his next letter home. The Connells went out on the ocean on a baby-blue wood skiff, fishing with big nets they untangled and fixed at sunset on the sandy shore, a short beach walk from their home, which was made of smooth plank wood painted yellow and red. The Connells noticed that Joe was a strong swimmer and told him he should buy a spear gun. Slithering and bare-chested, he swam twenty feet down to the bottom, two minutes holding his breath, eye-to-eye with pincer-toothed barracudas and lobsters with gunslinger claws.

  Jamaica was the world, a kind of anti-Illinois with one adventure after another waiting, and Joe didn’t want to leave it, even if the cops were after him. Next, he worked on The Rosalie, a salvage boat. To sit behind the wheel, in the deckhouse of a 110-foot ship with a clipboard of engine instructions, the wind decombing hair and beard, is the goddamnedest romantic dream a young man could live. His final gig earned him a few pounds at an archaeological dig outside Kingston, where he unearthed a glass bottle from the seventeenth century. Dad: Finding Phyllophaga grubs at the Arawak site. Mom: Send some turkey potpie. His money was going to run out again, and he figured he could ask his mother for a loan and a mailed bank check just once more, before going back home. He wrote and asked her to send a cashier’s check to Trinidad, and he bought a cheap passage on a ship to get there, via the Leeward and Windward Islands.

  The bow of the Federal Maple cut into the foamy prospect of the open ocean, where hammerhead sharks prowled carnivorously, while gulls on the hunt circled in the skies above. The first island, Saint Kitts, rose from the horizon like many mounds of green sand gently sculpted by a blissful child-giant. Montserrat he saw at night, for a few hours, and found its capital, Plymouth, a hilly little village with streets to wander, and rum to drink. He slept and woke up as the ship pulled into Antigua, an island of low rounded hills like moss-backed porpoises, one after another. His next letter arrived home with a stamp for another territory Virginia had never heard of: Saint Vincent. She admired the frugality Joe described, the good Midwestern squeezing of the dollar. Ni
ne islands, nine countries, nine cultures—approximately $5 an island. Baby flying fish bounced across the waves like skipping stones. On shore, a stone boathouse awaited him, the reptilian limbs of barnacled pier pilings. He set foot on Saint Lucia, an island with massive stone arrowheads poking into the sky, and Barbados, where he entered the Animal Flower Cave and saw its swaying anemones.

  When the Federal Maple pulled away from Kingstown, Saint Vincent, Joe watched the island trees below him bow in the wind. Farewell to another nation, another lived day. Is there a smart, beautiful woman around? Perhaps she’d like to talk to me. I’m a man of the world now. I ask the big questions about life and my times. Why do men use machetes to work the land in one country, and diesel-fed combines in another? Why do farmers carry the fruit of the farm on their heads here, and store it in steel cylinders back home? I’ll write a novel to teach the world what I have been taught by the world.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME THE Federal Maple reached Grenada, in the dark, Joe was out of cash and hungry enough to hallucinate. He heard the loud murmuring of an unseen multitude coming from the dock at Saint George’s. When the dawn light heated up the sky, the faces below him came into focus. “Migrants,” said a deckhand. “Going back to Trinidad. No more work here.” In a letter home, Joe described what he saw: Impoverished Trinidadians herded aboard like cattle in Kansas City, carrying with them string-tied cardboard boxes, battered suitcases, clean but ragged clothes, crutches and bandages and solemn, wide-eyed children. They sleep on benches, boxes, the deck, the floor, a baby on top of a mother, a girl in the lap of a stranger, a man on the garbage can. The moving mass of the world, its familial love, its poverty, the mother’s half-awake squeeze of her son, the boy asleep with his mouth open to the sky, to catch the first ocean raindrops. Joe went two days without eating, and began to feel desperate and small, until one of the crew members finally gifted him a piece of chicken. The final hours to Trinidad the ship sailed through rain, and the ocean and sky were the same color, but then a rip appeared in the shroud above him, an eye-shaped hole that filled with an eerie whitish-blue light and the sliver of a crescent moon.