Idiot Wind

by Peter Kaldheim

  It was nearly eleven when I finally hit the highway, hoping to catch a quick ride and make up for lost time, but all I caught for the next hour were suspicious glances from a steady parade of looky-loos who sized me up in passing and then left me standing in the cold. ‘Kerouac forgot to mention this part,’ I muttered to myself. Then again, maybe he hadn’t gotten stranded quite as often. America had been less paranoid when Kerouac was on the road in the late forties. Thanks to psychos like Charlie Manson and Ted Bundy, people thought twice about picking up a stranger anymore. Understandable caution, I supposed, but it was sad to see how much harder hitchhiking had gotten, even since the sixties, when I used to thumb home from college to visit Marie nearly every month. Hell, in my hippie days I looked scruffier than I did now, and I could still thumb from Hanover to Brooklyn in less time than it would have taken me on a Greyhound bus. Apparently, those days were long gone. Hitchhiking to the West Coast was going to take more patience than pluck, I could see that now. Still, what could I do about it, except put on my best ‘I’m-not-a-serial-killer’ face and wait for my luck to change?

  Then I suddenly realised there was something I could do. So far I’d been hitchhiking legally by sticking to the entrance ramp, rather than risk getting hassled by highway cops for thumbing on the interstate. But playing it safe was getting me nowhere, so I jogged down the ramp to the highway shoulder. Within minutes a shiny Renault sedan pulled over to pick me up. Should have made this move an hour ago, dummy, I chided myself as I ran to the car. But I was all smiles when I climbed in and shook hands with the deeply tanned crewcut kid behind the wheel.

  ‘Thanks for stopping,’ I said. ‘I was starting to think I was invisible.’

  The kid asked where I was headed, and when I told him San Francisco he said, ‘Well, I can take you far as Selma, if that’ll help.’

  ‘Selma, Alabama?’ I asked him. It was the only Selma I could think of.

  He laughed, ‘That’s what my shipmates always think, too. But I’m from Selma, North Car’lina. About a hundred forty miles down the road. Keep you out of the cold for a few hours, anyway.’

  A hundred and forty miles! String together a few more rides like that and I’d be in Florida in no time.

  ‘You in the navy?’ I asked. He was dressed in street clothes, but he looked a little too shipshape for a merchant seaman.

  ‘Yes, sir. Goin’ on three years now.’

  ‘Where you stationed? Norfolk?’ I asked, thinking of my father. My dad had spent most of his two-year enlistment in the navy giving crewcuts in the base barber shop at Norfolk, Virginia, before leaving the service in 1948 to play his part in the postwar baby boom.

  He and my mother were no shirkers: I was born a year later, and by 1955 I had three younger brothers – all of us doomed to go through our school years shorn like sheep by my dad’s heavy hand on the clippers. Which might have been okay if we’d been home-schooled at an Aryan Brotherhood compound, but in the public schools on Long Island it just made us bait for skinhead jokes. Is it any wonder I’d developed a thing for hats?

  ‘No fuck?’ he scoffed. ‘What a hole. No, I’ve been stationed at Andros Island for the last year and a half. Sweetest base in the Atlantic.’

  ‘Andros Island? Must be a sunny place. That’s quite a tan you’ve got going on.’

  ‘Not many places sunnier than the Bahamas,’ he grinned.

  ‘That explains it,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know we had a base in the Bahamas. What do you do down there?’

  ‘I’m a sonar tech at AUTEC,’ he said. ‘That’s navy shorthand for Atlantic Undersea Testing and Evaluation Center. AUTEC’s where submarine captains get certified on underwater weapons systems. We do beta-testing of next-gen sonar equipment there, too. Some of the gear we’re testing now would blow your mind. A fish takes a shit two miles below the surface, we can not only detect it, we can tell you what the sucker had for breakfast.’

  I laughed. ‘You’re pulling my leg, right?’

  ‘Okay, I’m exaggerating a little,’ he admitted. ‘But the day is coming, believe me.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ I said. And I did. Though it was hard to imagine a scenario in which our national security would hinge on accurate analysis of fish shit. But I must admit, by the time we reached Selma I knew more about sonar systems than I’d ever learned watching late-night reruns of Run Silent, Run Deep.

  ‘Enjoy the rest of your leave,’ I said, hopping out at the exit.

  ‘Two more days and I’m out of here,’ he grinned. ‘I can’t wait to get back where it’s warm.’

  That makes two of us, I thought, hoping my next ride would finally take me south of the snow line.

  If I could catch a next ride, that is. Three frustrating hours later I was still stuck in the Selma doldrums, with darkness coming on and the temperature dropping fast. Now I was getting nervous. I had barely enough money to buy supper when I hiked across the service road to warm up at a KFC, so there’d be no bailing out to a motel room tonight. If I didn’t catch a ride out soon, I was going to be in trouble.

  Fortunately, as soon as I got back to the highway, a furniture delivery truck pulled over for me. ‘You’re a lifesaver, man,’ I said, climbing into the cab beside a sandy-haired young guy with a mullet haircut and a Van Halen T-shirt under his quilted thermal vest. Nineteen, maybe twenty, I guessed.

  ‘Don’t know about that,’ he said, ‘but I can take you as far as Fayetteville.’

  ‘How far is that?’ I asked, hoping for a big number.

  ‘Fifty miles south,’ he said. ‘Where you headed?’

  ‘San Francisco, eventually,’ I told him. ‘But right now I’d settle for anywhere that isn’t freezing. If I can make Florida by daybreak, I’ll be a happy camper.’

  ‘Well, there’s a truck stop in Fayetteville where I can drop you. Lot of long-haul drivers fuel up there. Might catch you a good ride south if you ask around in the parking lot.’

  ‘I like the sound of that,’ I said, as he gunned the big Mercedes diesel and got rolling. ‘You hauling furniture to Fayetteville?’

  ‘Nope, I’m dead-heading back to the warehouse. Dropped my last load up in Virginia a couple hours ago. In fucking Petersburg,’ he sneered.

  ‘Funny,’ I said. ‘I just spent the night there. Not your favourite town, I take it?’

  ‘I got into a fender-bender there last month. Some dried-up old bitch ran a red light and clipped my back end. She gets a hot flash, and I’m the one facing jail time. Just my luck.’

  ‘Jail time for what?’ I asked. ‘If she blew the red light, how’s that your fault?’

  ‘Problem is, I’m on probation in North Carolina. Leaving the state without permission is a violation. I never bothered telling my PO I was making deliveries out of state. Soon as the Petersburg cops ran my licence, I knew I was screwed.’

  ‘That sucks,’ I said.

  ‘Big time,’ he agreed. ‘I’ve got a probation hearing scheduled tomorrow morning. If they decide to violate me, I’ll be locked up by lunchtime.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Guess you won’t be getting much sleep tonight.’

  ‘Tonight? Shit, I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. Whatever happens tomorrow, I’ll be glad to just get it over with.’

  I felt sorry for the kid. I knew what he was facing. Eight months after Kate’s death I got popped for selling blow to a confidential informant – a seductively dressed coke whore the narco squad sent into the Raccoon one night to fish for drugs with a pocketful of marked ‘buy’ money. I was the sucker who took the bait. It cost me six months on Rikers Island, during which I learned all I’d ever needed to know about the hardships of life behind bars, so the kid’s story was falling on sympathetic ears and I couldn’t help rooting for him. Despite all his worries, he’d been goodhearted enough to give a stranger a lift and that counted for something in my book. As we approached Fayetteville, he even went the extra yard by putting out a call on his CB radio, asking any truckers in t
he area to holler back if they could take on a southbound passenger. Nothing panned out, but I was grateful he’d even tried.

  The truck stop where the Van Halen kid dropped me turned out to be a bust. There were a few big rigs parked out back, but the counterman in the diner told me their drivers had already bedded down for the night – which left me in a black mood as I started the five-mile hike back to the interstate. But my morale improved considerably when I noticed that none of the ramshackle houses along the access road had snow in their yards. South of the snow line at last! Two miles down the road, the houses gave way to pine forest bordered by chain-link fencing, with signs every hundred yards that said: Fort Bragg – Government Property – No Trespassing. It was spooky country to be hiking through in the dark, so I was relieved when I finally heard a car approaching. But when I spun around and stuck my thumb out, I immediately wished I hadn’t.

  The dark-coloured Crown Vic had unmarked cop car written all over it. Seeing it roll up on me real slow, like a cop would, I started to sweat and braced myself for my first encounter with a Southern sheriff. Fortunately, instead of a cop, it was just an elderly Baptist preacher who’d decided to play the Good Samaritan on his way home from prayer service. Big exhale.

  ‘Where you from, son?’ he asked me when I climbed in.

  ‘New York,’ I said.

  ‘New York, eh? Well, you’re in the so-called Bible Belt now,’ he smiled – a bit impishly for a preacher, it seemed to me.

  ‘Yeah, but I thought it was supposed to be warmer down here in God’s country.’

  ‘You’ll feel warmer when I drop you off in Lumberton. It’s only thirty-five miles south, but for some reason it’s always three or four degrees warmer than Fayetteville. Don’t ask me why.’

  I didn’t really care why, so long as he was right. When he pulled onto the interstate, I glanced across the highway and noticed a pack of unmarked cop cars staked out on the shoulder of the northbound lanes.

  ‘Quite the speed trap the cops have got set up over there,’ I remarked.

  ‘That’s not a speed trap,’ the preacher said. ‘It’s a drag line for dope smugglers. They catch plenty coming through here on their way up from Florida. Too bad they can’t catch them all. It’s a shame to see so many young people these days throwing their lives away just to get high.’

  It was hard to argue with that. Not when I was sitting there beside him as Exhibit A.

  ‘Mind you, I understand the temptation,’ the preacher added. ‘I tried smoking jimson weed when I was young. We called it “loco weed” back then. Makes you see crazy things. I guess some folks think that’s fun, but it scared me silly. You ever fool around with drugs, son?’

  ‘Some, when I was younger, but not any more,’ I hedged. If I had confessed to all the drugs I’d experimented with in college, he’d have been appalled. The psychedelic sixties – was there ever a more enticing trap for a gullible teenager with boundless curiosity and minimal impulse control? Back then, I fancied myself the second coming of Allen Ginsberg, and I was all too willing to test my idol’s theory that ‘the poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses’. LSD, mescaline, magic mushrooms, hashish – I tried them all, and never once suffered a ‘bad trip’. But rather than unlocking Aldous Huxley’s much-ballyhooed ‘doors of perception’, my experiments with psychedelics only proved I had a brain that enjoyed being chemically deranged. Which should have been a revelation that ‘scared me silly’ – like the preacher and his jimson weed – but instead it only made me smugly confident there was no drug I couldn’t handle.

  Getting high in my free time hadn’t kept me from holding down three part-time jobs on campus and a place on the Dean’s List, so what harm had drugs done me? None, as far as I could tell – at least, not at the time. But the false notion that I was somehow bulletproof would come back to bite me later, when I finally got around to trying cocaine and belatedly discovered that there were, indeed, drugs I couldn’t handle. What happened after that would have given the preacher enough material for a dozen cautionary sermons. Luckily for him, I’d sworn off confessing to men of the cloth years ago – I’d had all I could take of that during my cassock-wearing days as a Redemptorist seminarian. I hadn’t set foot in a confessional since dropping out of St Mary’s Seminary midway through high school. So far, that was still the only habit I’d ever successfully kicked, and I felt no urge to start backsliding now.

  On the subject of backsliding, it suddenly occurred to me how little I’d been affected by going cold turkey for the past few days. I didn’t know if that was because I’d been half-frozen much of the time, or because the moment-to-moment distractions out on the road kept me too preoccupied to dwell on my withdrawal symptoms, but whatever the reasons I was grateful – I was getting off easier than any junkie had a right to expect.

  The truck stop where the preacher dropped me in Lumberton was a lot busier than the one in Fayetteville, and I felt better about my chances as I hustled over to the fuel island to try my luck with the driver of a flatbed semi stacked high with irrigation pipe. But he shook his head and turned me down. ‘Sorry, friend, can’t help you. Wish I could, but this is a company truck. They don’t let us take on riders. Most fleet trucks have the same rules. It’s an insurance deal, they say. I was you, I’d just head back to the highway.’

  For want of a better idea, I took the trucker’s advice and hiked across the street to the highway entrance, and it wasn’t long before two cars rounded a bend in the road and approached in a sweep of headlights. Squinting against the glare, I stuck my thumb out and watched the first car flash by. No luck. But the trailing car suddenly slowed down and pulled to a stop in front me. Score! I grinned – until my eyes adjusted to the glare and I realised I was grinning at a patrol car. This time for real. Shit, shit, shit!

  ‘APPROACH THE VEHICLE SLOWLY AND KEEP YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM,’ the cop’s bullhorn blared.

  Oh boy, I thought. Here we go.

  I shuffled forward with my palms upturned, like I was feeling for rain.

  ‘Okay, stop right there,’ the cop said when I came up to his window. ‘Now, let me see some ID.’ I reached for my wallet, and that’s when things went from bad to worse – my back pocket was empty!

  While the cop looked on skeptically, I frantically patted myself down and failed to find my wallet anywhere. ‘I can’t believe this!’ I groaned. ‘I had my wallet when I bought supper up in Selma a few hours ago, officer, I swear!’

  Paranoid scenarios began racing through my brain. What if he hauls me in on vagrancy charges? And runs my prints? And finds out he’s got a convicted drug dealer on his hands? Not just a drug dealer, a New York drug dealer. What kind of Southern hospitality could I expect in the Lumberton lock-up once my rap sheet popped up on the screen? I had a bad feeling I was about to find out.

  Happily, it didn’t come to that. To my immense relief, the cop just jotted down my name and the Social Security number I recited to him, and then gave me an ultimatum. ‘If you’re not gone when I swing by here again at midnight, you’ll be spending the rest of the night in the Lumberton jail. Do we understand each other?’

  I assured him I understood perfectly, and as he pulled away I stood there shaky-kneed, thanking my stars I’d gotten off so easily. What I still couldn’t fathom, though, was how my wallet had gone missing. Had the damned thing slipped out of my pocket in the furniture truck or the preacher’s car? That didn’t seem likely. Then it dawned on me. I must have dropped it in the bathroom stall when I hit the can after supper at the Selma KFC!

  It was the only plausible explanation – and a karmically appropriate one, at that. Six hundred miles down the road, my payback for ripping off Kentucky Fried Danny had finally been delivered. All I could do was shake my head in grudging admiration. There was no denying it served me right. Still, I dreaded all the hassles I’d be facing in the days ahead, trying to make it clear across the country with no ID.

  Mea
nwhile, I had a more pressing problem. The cop had put me on the clock and I had barely an hour left to make myself scarce before he turned up again. As if that weren’t pressure enough, the wind suddenly started blowing hard from the southeast, bringing great banks of rainclouds scudding in off the Atlantic. Within minutes I was pelted by rain that was coming down so hard it left me no choice but to run for shelter.

  Loitering under the canopy outside the truck stop’s restaurant, I was glumly watching the downpour when the manager stepped outside and approached me. I braced myself for the bum’s rush, but the young guy just held his paper hat down against the wind and invited me inside for a free cup of coffee. Southern hospitality or simple Christian charity, it made no difference to me. It was a kindness I hadn’t expected, and it touched me more than I would have imagined.

  ‘Been watching you out by the road for a while now. Thought maybe you could use a warm-up,’ he said, ushering me inside to the counter.

  ‘Yeah, it got a lot chillier once the rain hit,’ I agreed.

  The restaurant clock showed eleven-fifteen, and as I sat at the counter answering the manager’s questions about my travels, the cop’s midnight deadline continued to haunt me. How the hell was I going to get out of Lumberton in time?