The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  * * *

  JOE WAS BACK IN KATHMANDU, sitting alone and doing some late-morning patching of his jeans with a needle and thread at his hostel, when he looked through the open doorway and saw a young woman with a burlap bag walking past on the street outside. She peeked in to Joe’s hostel and he waved at her, and she waved back, and disappeared. Joe dropped his sewing and walked out and found her applying something with tape to a pole down the block. A small strip of paper. He approached her and she smiled at him while he read.

  When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains.

  And then a second.

  The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed.

  “Poetry?”

  “Yes, I clipped a bunch from magazines back home,” the woman said. “And I’m leaving them scattered around like this. All over Asia, I guess.”

  Rebecca Olmsted was as tall as Joe, with thick, curly hair she pulled back and tied up over her head in a blond ice cream swirl. She showed him the clipped lines of poems she carried in her bag, along with a pair of scissors and several rolls of Scotch tape. “I could use some tape,” Joe said. One of his two pairs of eyeglasses had broken in India, and so they returned together to his hostel to fix them. She was a graduate student on hiatus from the history department at the University of Wisconsin, and she had set off from Madison with her boyfriend. They made it to Australia and Thailand, but said dude had ditched her in East Pakistan. “He left me! On the road! Alone! Asshole!” But she kept going, and only now, in the presence of friendly Joe (“You’re such a good listener, thank you”), did she realize how tired she was. “You can bum with me if you want,” Joe said, and that night they fell asleep holding hands. Two mutually exhausted Midwesterners, like a farm couple, spent after the harvest. Sleep. After crossing oceans and continents—her to the west, me to the east—we meet on the opposite side of the world. Rebecca became his new bumming purpose: getting her home, protecting her.

  They agreed to travel westward together, toward Europe, which was Rebecca’s original destination. They bused back into India, to the valley of Kashmir, and to Srinagar, where they slept in a houseboat hotel on a lake: The Golden Hopes, a bungalow palace of bright, aromatic wood tied to the shore amid reeds and lily pads. At night, Joe slept platonically next to Rebecca and awoke around midnight to the sound of water lapping against the boat and Rebecca crying in her sleep. They headed for the resorts of the Western Himalayas, and a mountain trek. Rode horseback six miles and walked the rest, he wrote in his next letter home. Picked up skis from Indian snow soldiers. Incredibly beautiful countryside—roof-high snow, tunnels to the doors, blue sky and hot sun. They went through the last of Joe’s Delhi money, and began spending Rebecca’s cash, with Joe promising to pay her back. In his next letter home Joe asked Steve to send him more money to the U.S. Embassy in Damascus—an advance, since he’d spent the last of his flagpole savings.

  The long road to Damascus began by crossing between the two armies at the India-Pakistan border, walking past barbed-wire fences and sandbags and machine-gun posts. Then they hitchhiked quickly through Pakistan, through Islamabad and Peshawar toward Afghanistan. “With a girl, you never have to wait more than one truck to get a ride,” Joe observed.

  “I’d never hitchhike alone,” Rebecca said. “Not even here. Even though, I have to say, this place seems pretty safe. The Pashtuns are pretty cool people. Peaceful, I guess.” They were passing through a corner of the globe ruled by feudal lords, and from inside the cab of a truck carrying propane tanks they saw Pashtun boys wearing embroidered cylinders on their heads and long robes, and girls in brightly colored scarves with raven bangs showing. The landscape turned scrubby and rocky, and they took a bus that climbed into the Khyber Pass, and Rebecca gave Joe a brief history of the place, yelling loudly to be heard over the engine. “The Aryans in 1600 BC! Alexander the Great in 300 BC! The British Army in 1842!” The bus climbed as the driver shifted gears, again and again, around one hairpin turn and another, and Joe looked out the windshield and saw two hawks high above the pass, mimicking the turning road in their graceful downward glides.

  WELCOME TO AFGHANISTAN read the sign at the little border post at the top of the pass. The customs agents served them green tea. In the market in Kabul Joe bought two old flintlock pistols for five dollars each. Kabul was clean and spare, a city freshly swept each day by thousands of brooms made from wide fans of straw. In the dark of a Kabul hotel room, under a spinning fan, Joe felt the beauty of this bumming journey and their youth, and he looked over at Rebecca meaningfully, and she crossed over from her bed to his. The next morning they hitchhiked onward into the Afghan countryside, through valleys of delicate green grasses, and past shallow streams and ranges of dry mountains, and the altitude and the pelvic-memory of making love to Rebecca lulled Joe into a long, midday sleep. When he awoke, he saw their driver had stopped before a collection of mud-walled compounds; a veiled woman exited and reentered an opening in one of these walls, and Joe realized an entire community lived inside; he sensed that if he followed her, he’d be married off to a girl inside, and find an epic and ancient Afghan story to write, but he would never be let out to share it. At sundown they reached the final stretch of road near the Persian border, past the town of Herˉat, and their driver pulled his Ford over to the side of the road suddenly; they stepped out and heard distant gunfire. Rebecca crouched instinctively, and the driver motioned for them to get back inside, and they turned around and drove back to Herˉat. In town there was much speaking in Pashto and Tajik, and the distant gunshots grew in frequency and became a fusillade. Some sort of battle. Who was fighting? No one could explain, until Joe finally found an English speaker at the local police station who said, “It’s the tribes.” No further explanation was forthcoming. The firing stopped and the police officer at the desk gave a loud yawn, and that night Joe and Rebecca slept on the floor of the police station, until the same officer woke them up at dawn with a big grin and said, “Yes, yes. Go, go. You go. Okay, okay.” He shuffled them out of the station like a farmer chasing chickens out of their pen. As it happened, their next ride was with a truck carrying chickens; it dropped them off at the town of Islam Kala, where Joe stopped at the local post office, purchased an “aerogramme” and penned a letter home. Slight skirmish in the last village. Ended up sleeping in the cop shop. Still not sure what crap was involved, but interesting nonetheless.

  They moved quickly through Iran, and arrived at the modern metropolis of Teheran. Inside the maze of the city’s Grand Bazaar, a young man in a tie accosted them. “You! American? How are you? Greetings and welcomings to Persia!” He was a filmmaker, he said, the Persian assistant director in an Israeli production filming in Teheran. “This is the Hollywood of the Middle East.” After a brief back-and-forth in which they discussed Joe and Rebecca’s travels, the director offered them a part in the next movie he was working on.

  “Who do we play?”

  “An American couple visiting Persia.”

  In his next letter home Joe described his momentary flirtation with Middle Eastern stardom. They were finishing an Israeli flick and prepared to start on the next one. After showing us around the local sets, the cutting room, laying a dinner on us, they made their offer. Said all of our expenses would be paid before the shooting started. Sounded nice, we told ourselves. But we declined. You didn’t need a movie star anyway, huh? More from Damascus.

  Postmarked from Teheran, the letter arrived in Urbana some ten days later. Virginia marked it twenty-eight. The next letter, number twenty-nine, was dated May 11, and described his arrival with his new female friend (another one?) into Jordan. Rebecca and I showed up at the American Embassy dirty and tired, up most of the night (two hours’ sleep at a Jordanian cop shop) having hitchhiked from the Persian border. She wearing blue jeans and denim jacket and leather sandals and a red hankie over hair (looking like an itinerant apple picker), me likewise passing for some brand of bindlestiff. Before that, they had passed
quickly through Baghdad and the Iraqi town of Ramadi, where Rebecca had decided to give away most of what she was carrying, because her bumming would soon be over. And in this lighter state they reached Syria, and then Jordan and prepared to cross into Israel.4

  * * *

  THE MANDELBAUM GATE leading into Israel was not a gate, but rather a roadway many hundreds of yards long, running through the no-man’s-land between the armistice lines fixed a generation earlier after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. A Jordanian soldier with a machine gun hanging over his shoulder checked their papers, studying Joe’s clean-shaven passport portrait as if it would speak back to him and comment on the unshaven twin about to leave the Kingdom of Jordan. The soldier returned the passport to Joe and stretched out his arm westward. Go forth, young Americans, into the Territory Whose Name I Cannot Speak. Joe and Rebecca entered a cobblestone road, and Joe felt the heel on his left shoe going loose. I’m not going to make it home with these. They passed empty lots of white, rocky soil, and the remains of a villa bombed in the last war, and streets where weeds were colonizing the pavement. They were in the purgatory between two states defending different ideas of man’s relationship to God. Inside a metaphor filled with rubble and litter. A rusting ruin of a bicycle. Soldiers in blue berets appeared on the roadway, and a blue United Nations flag, and finally the cement cones of tank traps. Then, an Israeli flag.

  After inspecting Joe’s documents, an Israeli soldier riffled through Joe’s rucksack and discovered the flintlock pistols Joe had purchased in Afghanistan and confiscated them. The ancient firearms suggested Joe was headed to a duel somewhere, and the soldier presented them to a sergeant with gray hair, perfect American English and the even temperament of a school principal. “Sir, this is very, very serious. Why are you bringing weapons into our country?”

  “I was traveling among the Arabs,” Joe said. “With an American woman.” The sergeant asked him where he was from, and Joe said, “Urbana, Illinois.” The sergeant gave a knowing nod. “You look like Paul Newman,” the sergeant said. “But not like the Paul Newman in The Hustler. More like that flick where he plays Billy the Kid.” In the letter he wrote that night, Joe described the incredibly high prices in Israel, the friendliness of the locals they met (nothing but, “Shalom, shalom”), and the rumblings of war. “Six Syrian planes shot down two weeks earlier in the north.” He and Rebecca visited a memorial to the Holocaust, and a beach where Rebecca found a utility pole to tape the last lines of poetry she was carrying. The light was full of salt … and the air was heavy with crying for where the wave had come from. They belatedly celebrated Joe’s twenty-fifth birthday with a glass of wine and took a ship to Cyprus, and from there a plane to Athens, and finally a last jaunt to Istanbul, where his next letter home began: Don’t panic, but I’m in the hospital for the next few days. Whatever could be wrong with a person’s head—I’ve got it. Believe throwing it away is the best solution. But he was well enough, at least, to comment on the march toward war in the Middle East. Glad I had a chance to get through all the countries involved before things got really hashed up.

  * * *

  HIS LETTER FROM ISTANBUL was his thirty-first and last letter home on this trip, dated May 27; when Virginia received it in Urbana, she wrote the number in a circle on the envelope. By then, on June 6, the Israelis had destroyed the entire Egyptian Air Force. There was fighting in Jerusalem, and Israeli paratroopers had crossed the no-man’s-land and entered the Old City, and the Jordanian army had abandoned its posts on the Mandelbaum Gate, never to return. Joe told people afterward that he and Rebecca were the last Americans to pass through the Mandelbaum Gate before it was dismantled. He thought there was a good chance that was actually true.

  * * *

  IN ISTANBUL, Rebecca slept in the hospital alongside Joe until the doctors said he was well enough to leave. They parted ways, Rebecca going home to Chicago via plane, from Istanbul via Dublin and New York. At the airport, they said their goodbyes. Rebecca gave him a final kiss on the cheek. Joe’s last words were, “I’ll pay you back, I promise,” which left her hurt and angry, though Joe only realized this once he’d walked away. Three days later, in London, Joe blew it again, with Mafalda. He had not written to her since he was in Egypt five months earlier. When the door to her flat opened, his ocean lover froze and her eyes opened wide. She embraced him the way a child squeezes a teddy bear. “My God, you’re so thin. Have you been sick?”

  Joe and Mafalda walked through Crouch End and the springtime light. Sunday shuttered shops and the promise of warmer and longer days to come. They held hands and held each other on the living room floor of the flat where she was staying, and she told him what had happened to her, after Joe had left London all those months ago …

  Whoa, hold on a second there, partner. Stop. No sir, I will not allow this. And I demand you lift me from the footnotes so I can say so. The Author, being a Ruthless Fucking Bastard, is about to reveal something that happened between me and Mafalda. Involving a certain unforeseen biological event, and a woman doctor in Lisbon. In the name of privacy, libel law, and common decency, stop! Let’s just say she told the Author this unforeseen biological event made her feel closer to me, and then very angry with me too. This is the sort of thing that happens to men and women over and over again, all over the world. It’s my story, mine, and hers, and I’d like to keep it that way.

  * * *

  … JOE LISTENED, and cried with Mafalda, and after his tears were dry he announced he had to leave. “I thought you’d stay,” Mafalda said. “A week or two at least.”

  “I owe people money. I have to get back up on the flagpole and earn some cash.”5

  Mafalda heard herself saying, “I’ll take you to the train station,” and walked next to him and rode the Underground with him, stunned. When they were about to say goodbye, he said, “Hey, I almost forgot. I brought you back a present. From India.” He handed her a cardboard box that was the length of her palm. She took it without saying thank you, and accepted a last passionate kiss from him, and watched as Joe walked away and boarded the train. Rugged, unfeeling. A lesson for her about the mind of the American male. Her next lover would be British, but a man fated to a tragic end. She made her way back to the Underground and rode back toward her flat. When she reached Highgate Station, she stood up to get off and left the box on her seat. A woman sitting on the opposite aisle called out to her.

  “You forgot your box.”

  “I don’t want it.” She walked onto the platform and heard the Underground’s doors closing behind her.

  * * *

  AFTER TWO DAYS on rails and in the air and on rails again, Joe arrived at Champaign, Illinois. He hitched a ride from the train station home, holding out his thumb on University Avenue, figuring it would be faster than the bus. A guy driving a Coca-Cola truck picked him up.

  “Where you headed?”

  “Home. Here. Urbana, close by. Just down the street.”

  As Joe lifted up his rucksack into the cab, the trucker asked, “Long trip?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, where you been?”

  “Everywhere.”

  12

  Lafayette, Louisiana. Los Angeles. Oakland, California. Hokkaido, Japan. Seoul. Saigon, Republic of Vietnam

  POLECAT. FELINE. Scaling high places using my four limbs and paws. Nine lives. Brush, brush, brush. The principal looking up at me. He likes my work. Not as dangerous as it looks, no. One day not long ago a hippie climbed this flagpole, dragged down Old Glory, and then raised it again—upside down. Treasonous, the principal said. But the hippie did call attention to the rusting pole, its unpatriotic oxidation. Don’t worry, sir, this here polecat has come to the rescue. Joe liked the quiet. After the Sahara and the Himalayas, and the Strait of Magellan and the Khyber Pass—a summer in Illinois and Indiana, the breezes and long drives through the corn growing crazy tall. Again. In the streets of the cities and towns he visited: sunshine and a sudden craze for Japanese gadgets. His country and its ch
arming customs more in focus than ever. The 4-H fair and the Turtle Days Festival. Girls in braces and sequined leotards, twirling batons. At his mother’s house, he watched television commercials for instant oatmeal. Cooks in one minute. Calhoun opened the paper to stock tables and weather reports. In the United States of America, we have a deep faith in the things we can count, track and measure. Soil acidity, rates of return, gasoline prices. Predictable seasonal trends and objectively verifiable truths. Forty-six inches of average annual rain, the principal said. That’s why it needs painting. Brush, brush, brush.

  The Midwestern skies brought one day after another of superb painting weather and Joe bought a mattress and tossed it in the back of his truck (“Old Yeller” he called it) along with ladders, ropes and cans of paint. In an Indianapolis department store, he stopped before a display of color televisions one evening and watched snippets of the tropical drama unfolding on NBC and CBS. Troops with untucked shirts and extra ammo followed paths into the jungle. Vietnam. He imagined the caw-caw of unseen birds, and was struck by how informal the soldiers looked: like road bums, but with machine guns over their shoulders. Running their fingers through baskets of rice and flattening the knee-high grass, suddenly, with their wounded bodies. Riding canvas slings to waiting helicopters.