Travels with Lizbeth

by Lars Eighner

  In July, of course, Arizona was far worse than it had been in other seasons, and on the trip to the development for water we consumed almost as much water as we got. I did not know what to do. Clearly we could not stand in the sun where we might be seen, for the sun was too intense. We sat in the shade of the crossover for many hours.

  A Cadillac DeVille stopped a few yards past us. I could not believe this was a ride, for the driver could not have seen us. An enormous black woman, as stout as I, got out of the passenger side and relieved herself. I averted my eyes and planned not to look back until I heard the car drive away. But when she was done with her business and back in the car, she rolled down the window and called to me.

  She questioned me closely. I offered her my IDs. She asked if I had a weapon and I told her there was a folding knife in my pack, which she might keep with her if she wished. She said that would not be necessary, but as I could see, my bags would have to go in the trunk anyway. And so I could see, for half the backseat was taken up with a box of provisions. Now I suppose any serial killer might have passed her examination as well as I did, but at last she said for us to get in.

  The driver was an enormously muscular young black man and I never did know if he was her son, her servant, or her companion. At all events he did as she said, and if he ever disagreed with her judgments or opinions he never revealed it. He got out and helped me pack my bags into the trunk, and we were off.

  The woman said she had been visiting friends in Los Angeles and was returning to her home in Georgia. She proposed to let me out on I-10 at whatever place seemed to me best to make connections to Austin. The ride proceeded without incident, but as we were all of an imposing physical presence, and an unlikely combination to boot, we seemed to inspire anxiety among the locals wherever we stopped.

  At dawn the following morning, Lizbeth and I were let out at Kerrville, Texas. Two days later we had got only so far as Fredricksburg. It was summer and the fire ants were at large. I tried to call Billy in Austin, but he had moved and his number had been changed. I never heard of him again. Eventually I reached a friend who was willing to pick us up in Fredricksburg.

  * * *

  LIZBETH AND I went first to the stand of bamboo where we had slept before we left Austin. It was still there. Just as I had been told at Ramblin’ Red’s, the project to remove the brush and the homeless the brush concealed had not reached the bamboo. I surveyed it as I had not before.

  I discovered Tim had camped in it, for I had told him while he was in jail of the places I had found to sleep. Evidently when he had been released from jail he had worked at a fast-food restaurant until he got the money for his bus ticket to L.A. His uniforms were among the things he had left in the camp. He had packed up everything in plastic garbage bags, but the growing bamboo had pierced the bags and everything had been ruined by mildew, including his expensive motorcycle leathers.

  As he had taunted me that he would force me to return to Austin, he had said he would give me the bicycle he had stashed there. He planned to be a star in Hollywood and would never want the bicycle again. I found a bicycle in the bamboo and I supposed it was the one he meant.

  There were several well-marked trails and old camps in the bamboo. I left the old camps intact and contributed Tim’s gear to one of them, for I meant for them to be decoys. I carved a nine-by-four-foot room out of the wall of bamboo and was pleased to discover that the entrance was invisible from even a few feet away.

  By all rights I should have felt perfectly hopeless. The trip to Hollywood was a better chance than I could expect to have ever again. But as a boy I had read The Swiss Family Robinson over and over—I loved the idea of it so. Putting the camp together in the bamboo was just such an enterprise. I found shower curtains and learned to layer them to keep the rain off our heads. I rigged several of them on bamboo poles so they could be lowered down the bamboo walls; I was planning against the winter winds, although it was July. I camouflaged the shower curtains overhead to prevent their being seen by aircraft.

  I installed cushions and a foam mattress on them. I put in makeshift bookshelves. I found some large fresh dry cells and wired them to a radio so I did not have to change the batteries every hour as I listened to the news. When I satisfied myself that light in my camp would not call attention to us at night, I discovered how to make lamps that would burn on cooking oil, a commodity that was always available in abundance in the Dumpsters.

  In spite of the obvious trails, it was very rare that anyone else entered the bamboo at all. I could see no reason I might not bathe in the bamboo, and I set out vessels to catch rainwater for this purpose. I always had some little project. I had come to believe that Lizbeth and I would die homeless. And that seemed to me too bad. But then, why shouldn’t I try to make us as comfortable as I could, wherever I could? I had put us to considerable discomfort several times in my attempts to struggle against homelessness. For a time I would just accept it and make the best of it.

  Of course this was a policy easier to effect while we were out of public view in the bamboo, than it would have been if we were still sleeping in the open in Adams Park.

  The first month in the bamboo was an adventure and a vacation. Curious as it sounds, I needed a vacation. I had worked very hard in Hollywood, and one of the principal problems of self-employment is that after eight hours or ten or twelve, no boss comes by to say that you might as well knock off for the day. We went around in the coolness of the morning to the Dumpsters and returned to the bamboo to eat—although because of the rats, raccoons, and possums I was careful never to bring food into our sleeping quarters. I puttered around camp, installing whatever improvement I had thought of, and in the heat of the day we lay in comfort and I read. I wrote long letters and began to make a few sketches, which have become the present book. I could read at night by the light of my improvised lamp. And if I read too late and overslept the next morning, I had nothing to fear.

  This was as good as homeless life gets, and that could not last.

  * * *

  ON THE SIXTEENTH of August, precisely a month after we had returned, I was a little surprised to hear someone moving through the bamboo, but I was not alarmed because people had been in the bamboo before. I became increasingly concerned as I realized this was no one passing through, but whoever it was was making a systematic search. He was carefully exploring each of the culs-de-sac and the false trails I had built. We would be discovered, there was no doubt.

  The last screen to the entrance of our sleeping area parted.

  “Well, there you are!”

  It was Tim.

  When I went to check my mail at The Grackle that afternoon there was a letter from Jack Walden warning me that after I had left Hollywood Tim had turned his spite against one roomer after another until the roomers en masse had confronted Carl and given him an ultimatum, the result of which was that Tim had been cast bodily into the street. I should be on the alert, Jack wrote, for Tim had made some remarks that suggested he was heading back to Austin.

  But as Tim told it, he had just become bored with Hollywood. Tim told me he intended to make my life so miserable that I would abandon the bamboo and he would have the nice camp I built. In making me miserable, he succeeded.

  He had no intention of working as hard as would be required to hack another place out of the bamboo. Instead he camped a little farther up the hillside where the bamboo was sparse. As he had learned from me to check the Dumpsters, he soon found a dozen shower curtains and a roll of duct tape. With these he erected a wall tent, which might have been a lighthouse for its general visibility. I consoled myself that while his tent might increase the chances of our detection by the civil authorities, against anyone else it would be an effective decoy.

  Tim had a morbid fear of the creatures that moved through the bamboo at night. But though I advised him otherwise, he kept loads of poorly packed food in his tent, with the result that one possum, which was especially smelly even for a possum, called on Tim nea
rly every night. Besides keeping my camp clean, I did have Lizbeth to discourage the idle curiosity of critters. Tim considered Lizbeth the source of my courage, and as I kept her on a very long lead in camp—one that would reach Tim’s tent—he was always trying to entice her with tidbits to stay with him through the night. She went, of course, for the tidbits, but the only nights she stayed I suspect Tim detained her. He would call back to me, “Now, see how you like it when the possums come.” The possums never came, but I did watch the rats scurry across the shower curtain overhead, if not with pleasure, then without concern.

  Before long, creatures began to visit Tim that did not exist in the bamboo or anywhere else. He sat up for hours at a time, shrieking.

  He went through my camp whenever I was away, and once he had grasped the principle of my two little oil lamps, he built a half-dozen lamps on a much larger scale. These he burned throughout the night. I wondered why the fire department did not come, for from any distance at all, his lamps created the impression that the bamboo was afire. The lamps did not keep the creatures away, and the shrieking went on night after night.

  Tim found a scrub suit in the Dumpsters, and of course he did not have difficulty finding student apparel that fit him. He began to go to the hospital at which his companion had died, where evidently he had learned something of the routine. He sometimes appeared as a visitor and other times he dressed as an orderly—or so he told me. He pilfered patients’ belongings, made off with dinner trays, grabbed the purses left unattended for a moment by distraught visitors. Whether he thought of this on his own or had run across my unfinished novel as he went through my desk at Carl’s, I do not know. I do know we had never discussed institutional parasitism. I do not even know that he went to the hospital, as he said he did, but only that he was stealing somewhere. He consistently had more cash than he could have retrieved from Dumpsters and I doubted he was hustling.

  As in Hollywood he would sometimes want to make up and would offer me sexual services. I had perhaps grown no wiser, but I no longer needed much fortitude to refuse Tim because while I was living in the bamboo I could make myself reasonably presentable and when I went to Sleazy Sue’s, in spite of having Lizbeth with me, I was having an unparalleled streak of luck in receiving invitations to spend the night with one of the other patrons. As in Hollywood, Tim tried to find a place to masturbate so that he could accuse me of staring at him. For the thickness of the bamboo around my camp, he could not find such a place. After I ran him out of my sleeping area a few times, Tim began to go around naked much of the time. Whether this was to entice me or to tease me or had nothing to do with me, I do not know, but as I went about my business I would sometimes find Tim in the middle of a trail, squatting on his heels, masturbating.

  From these episodes, and what had come before, I began to think that Tim really could not distinguish feelings of sexual arousal from feelings of rage and that he was bound, once he aroused himself sufficiently, to lose his facade of sanity. As he made it easy for me to observe his physical state, I began to think I could guess Tim’s state of mind by observing the state of his penis. I did not take this theory too seriously, for in psychological matters researchers too often find whatever best confirms their hypotheses. But I did think, though Tim could maintain his composure well enough to get around in public, that he could not perform satisfactorily as a hustler.

  Tim claimed to be having an affair with a police officer, and perhaps he had once realized his fantasy of having sex with one. But I very much doubted that any real policeman, having made it safely to the end of his shift, would think it very recreational to maintain an affair with Tim.

  In September he went to the hospital less often, or so he said. He began breaking into cars, and he reported he did not even have to break into many, because freshmen from the sticks had not yet learned to lock theirs.

  When he found a pair of white overalls, he began to leave camp some days in them. He said he masqueraded as a maintenance man at the very large apartment complexes. He had a large ring of keys that he carried on these expeditions. The keys would not fit any of the locks, of course, but people who saw them would assume he was authorized to be wherever he was.

  He would pound loudly at the door of an apartment. If there was no answer he would try the door. Often it would be unlocked or could be forced without drawing undue attention. If someone came to the door, Tim would say he had come about the sink. A few times there were problems with the sink, and once or twice the occupants of the apartment left while Tim was supposed to be inspecting the problem. They saw the keys, but they did not notice that he had no tools. He could always escape by saying he was going to the hardware store to get parts.

  Again whether he got money by this scheme as he described it or by some other, several times he came by fifty or eighty or a hundred dollars that I think he could not have got legitimately.

  He also confided in me that he had a holy mission. He would not quite admit to being the Second Coming of Christ, but if not that, he was anointed by God for something nearly as cataclysmic. After many hours of intensive study as a Seventh-Day Adventist he had gained the power of infallibly interpreting scripture, and as he studied the Book of Revelation he came to realize that many passages alluded to him personally and to his mission.

  Some nights in the bamboo he had evil thoughts. He pored over his Bible for a week or two, telling me he was getting nearer and nearer to determining the source of these thoughts. At last he announced that he knew, with biblical certainty, that I was Satan’s agent and that I was planting the evil thoughts in his head. He said it was a matter of fact that his holy mission could not reach fruition while I lived. That I had gone to Hollywood just before he did and had returned to the bamboo just before he did proved that Satan was giving me advance notice of Tim’s movements.

  I believed Tim had followed me to California, and that he had followed me back. If I abandoned my camp to him, I did not think he would be satisfied with it, any more than he had been satisfied to be left in his situation in Hollywood. I thought he would follow me wherever I went.

  I could not appeal to the law.

  I said nothing, but I decided that as soon as I could think of a way of disposing the body I would have to kill Tim. In the meantime I began to scatter my orts around his tent to encourage his nighttime visitors. This last proved to be useless, for Tim had by now been given the power to understand and be understood by animals. He and Mr. Possum began to have long and inane conversations that lasted late into the night.

  Tim’s body weighed about 150 pounds. I knew I could not carry it far if I left it in one piece. The soil in the bamboo was not deep, and there was no hope of burying him in the limestone rock beneath it. Perhaps I could dismember him and carry him a piece at a time to the Dumpsters. I knew when the Dumpsters were emptied and I could slip the parts into them just before the trucks came. We were coming to the rainy season. If we had a flash flood, I might stave in his skull with a rock and send his body into the creek. His body would be discovered, but no one would question the matter. Every time it floods, a few fools are washed away. I was the only person in the world who cared whether Tim lived or died and I was all in favor of the latter.

  On Saturday, October 7, several different groups of fraternity boys came to the bamboo and hacked a considerable amount of the stand away. I thought perhaps they meant to remove the bamboo altogether. But it was only that they were having various parties with South Seas themes and they wanted the bamboo for decoration. They took bamboo from what I thought of as the back of the stand and they hacked it away until they reached Tim’s tent.

  Tim was at home. The boys apologized profusely. They were near enough to my camp that I could hear them clearly, but my camp was still well concealed. I was convinced that they had no intention of dispossessing any homeless person. Tim remained of at least two minds on the subject of the boys’ intentions, but as I made my Dumpster rounds I did verify that they made use of the bamboo according
to their story.

  The cops came the night of October 16. I had removed my shoes and retired. But Tim’s lamps were ablaze as usual. Lizbeth growled, but I managed to keep her from barking. After they rousted Tim, the cops were very surprised when he informed them that there was still a man and a dog in the bamboo. Indeed, they had shone their flashlights into the entrance of my camp, but they still had not seen it. Once Tim told them of my camp, they still could not find it until he showed them the way.

  I was given time to shorten Lizbeth’s lead, but not time to get my shoes. They made me walk up the hill, barefoot on the freshly cut bamboo stumps. At the back fence of one of the houses at the summit I was questioned. But every question put to me, Tim answered before I could respond. He was of course very eager to please the male officer. At last we were released and given an hour to get out of the bamboo. My feet were all bloody when I got back to Lizbeth.

  The proprietor of Ramblin’ Red’s, who had some of the nearby property, got the rest of the story. The cut the fraternity boys had made in the bamboo exposed Tim’s tent to the view of one of the grander houses at the top of the hill. As chance would have it, a woman who lived in this house had an active imagination, and as a prominent physician’s wife she had the influence to have her view of reality heard and treated as solemn fact by the authorities.

  Tim’s tent, which was no more than seven feet by four feet, became to the doctor’s wife a half-dozen six-man tents. And Tim, who was the only one of us she could have seen, became a well-armed paramilitary organization. Whether he was supposed to be a fascist or a communist, I do not know, but when the police turned us up we were escorted to the fence of her house so that she might see for herself who we were. By then, however, she could not be satisfied with fact. She insisted the army was still in the bamboo. A week after we were evicted from the bamboo, she had not shut up, and so the city had to send in the bulldozers. All the bamboo was destroyed, and as anyone who has ever tried to remove bamboo will know, this was no mean task.