‘Well, I better get back to taking inventory. Sit here as long as you like. If you want more coffee, Ellie will take care of you,’ the manager said, nodding at the waitress who’d just stepped behind the counter. As soon as the manager was gone, Ellie approached me with another invitation – Lumberton was turning out to be full of surprises.
‘The young fella in the corner booth wants me to ask if you’d like to join him,’ she said with a smile.
I swivelled on my stool to see who she meant and saw a preppy-looking kid with shaggy blond hair giving me a beckoning wave.
‘Don’t worry, I know him,’ Ellie said, when I turned back to the counter looking skeptical. ‘His name’s Sean. He might talk your ear off, but he’s harmless.’
‘What the hell, why not?’ I said. The rain was still bucketing down. I wasn’t going anywhere soon. Who knows? I thought. Maybe I can talk the kid into dropping me somewhere outside the Lumberton city limits.
And so began my bizarre encounter with Sean – heir to a Lumberton real estate empire, fresh from a month-long stay in a mental ward and currently off his meds. Of course, I knew none of that when I first sat down across from him. True, he had the haggard, over-caffeinated look of a college freshman cramming for finals, but otherwise there seemed nothing peculiar about him. That is, until he opened his mouth.
‘Thanks for joining me,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘I was watching you at the counter and I thought, “There’s an interesting-looking feller. I’ll bet he’s got some stories to tell.” My name’s Sean, what’s yours?’
‘Pete,’ I told him.
‘I like your toe-boggin, Pete,’ he said. ‘Good hat for hitchhiking, I’ll bet.’
‘Keeps my ears warm, yeah,’ I replied.
‘You a Christian, Pete?’ he asked, apropos of what I couldn’t tell, but I hoped I wasn’t in for a Bible session with a true believer.
‘Lapsed Catholic, but yeah, I guess you could call me a Christian.’
‘I knew it! I’m a ninja warrior for Christ. I can always spot another Christian. One of my ninja skills,’ he beamed, his eyes afire with a light I was beginning to suspect had nothing to do with religious fervour or caffeine consumption.
‘Impressive,’ I nodded. How else could I respond to such an off-the-wall claim? I couldn’t imagine what he’d come out with next, but he surprised me again by veering back into more predictable territory.
‘Where you hitching to, Pete?’ he asked, lighting up a smoke with a heavy gold Zippo before pushing the pack across the table to me.
‘Out to the West Coast, San Francisco,’ I said, helping myself to one of his Parliaments.
‘Whoa, that’s a long way to go. How long you think it’ll take you?’
I laughed. ‘At the rate I’m going, might take forever. I left New York two days ago and I’m still only halfway to Florida.’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to just take a Greyhound out there? I’ll bet the bus could get you to San Francisco in a couple of days.’
‘Probably could,’ I agreed, ‘if I had the money for a ticket. But I’m flat broke. Lost my wallet back in Selma. Didn’t even know it was gone till I got here to Lumberton.’
‘Damn, you’re havin’ some hard luck, aren’t you? How ’bout I just buy you a bus ticket to San Francisco, one Christian to another?’
Yes, Lumberton was full of surprises.
‘No, that’s a generous offer, Sean, and I appreciate it, really, but a ticket to San Francisco’s bound to cost close to a hundred bucks. I can’t let you lay out that much money.’
‘Don’t worry about the money. My daddy left me plenty when he passed. Just hang out with me tonight and I’ll take some cash out of my trust fund when the bank opens in the mornin’. The Greyhound station’s right down the block from my bank. Get you a ticket and you’ll be in San Francisco by the weekend. What do you say?’
It was a tempting proposition, I had to admit. But I was still incredulous. ‘You’d do that for a total stranger? You sure?’ I asked.
‘You’re not a stranger,’ he smiled. ‘You’re a brother in Christ. So it’s settled. I’m putting you on a bus first thing in the morning. Hey, while I think of it, there’s something I’ve got to show you. Let me run out to my car a second.’
And with that he sprang up from the booth and rushed out the door. Ellie noticed his exit and came over with a fresh pot of coffee and a conspiratorial smile. ‘You doing okay over here?’ she asked. ‘Sean makin’ your ears bleed yet?’
‘He’s a talker all right,’ I replied. ‘Not sure we’re both tuned to the same wavelength, but I’m doing my best to keep up.’
She laughed. ‘I’m not sure anybody’s tuned to that boy’s wavelength. He took it hard when his daddy passed a few years back. Been a bit off ever since. But I’m sure he appreciates your company.’
Moments later, Sean came rushing back into the restaurant with one hand tucked out of sight inside the front of his black satin windbreaker. It gave him a wackily Napoleonic air as he crossed the room and slumped back into the booth.
‘You believe in the Virgin Mary, right? Check this out,’ he beamed, pulling his hand out of his jacket to reveal a sad little dirt-smudged plaster figurine that looked more like an unearthed dog bone than a statue of the Blessed Mother. ‘I was digging worms by the river last year and there she was, tangled in a bunch of roots, just waiting for me to come along and set her free. Looks really ancient, right? Might be Roman or something. What do you think?’ he asked, passing me his prize.
To me, it just looked like one of those cheap religious knick-knacks sold in the Botanica shops up in Spanish Harlem, but I kept that impression to myself and gave the piece the reverent examination Sean seemed to be urging. Sure enough, when I upended the statue and rubbed away a bit of dirt from the marking stamped on the base, the words Hecho en Mexico came to light. This, too, I kept to myself. He seemed so pleased with his find I couldn’t bring myself to burst his bubble.
‘I’m no expert, but it looks pretty old to me, Sean,’ I said. Old as the Industrial Revolution, anyway. Humouring him would become my full-time job in the hours ahead, but I couldn’t complain. I figured I had to earn my bus ticket somehow. Around midnight, Sean declared he was tired of sitting around, so he hustled me out to his jet-black Camaro and we set off on a nightlong prowl through the sleepy streets of Lumberton. Sean kept up a running riff on the passing scenery, and the low rumble of his muscle-car engine provided the bass line.
When we passed a stately courthouse on Main Street, Sean said it had just been used as a backdrop in a new movie called Blue Velvet that David Lynch had shot there a few months earlier. ‘Seemed like a pretty weird movie. I think that Lynch guy’s a little strange in the head,’ he said.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black, I thought to myself, but the kid was probably right. I’d seen Lynch’s first film Eraserhead back in the early eighties and the mutant baby scenes had left me wondering what madhouse Lynch had gone AWOL from when he shot them.
Nearly everywhere we went in Lumberton, Sean pointed out some building his father’s company owned. It was an impressive portfolio, and it certainly made me feel less guilty about accepting his charity. Eventually, he headed out into the surrounding countryside and we killed a few hours crunching along gravel roads through tobacco fields and pine forest, watching the night critters scatter. Whenever an opossum or raccoon ran through the headlight beams, Sean would chuckle and say, ‘Everything runs from the Ghostrider.’
‘What’s this Ghostrider business about?’ I finally asked, against my better judgement.
‘That’s what the Lumbee Indians around here call me. They’re descended from the Croatans, the original Lost Tribe of Roanoke. I’m always out driving these roads after dark, and when they see the black Camaro with the white face in the window they say, “The Ghostrider’s on the prowl again.”’
The moon was getting low in the sky, and Sean’s nonstop monologue was lulling me to sleep
, but I woke right up when I heard him suddenly exclaim, ‘Oh, crap, we’re almost out of gas.’ I hadn’t seen a gas pump since we’d left the truck stop and I feared we were in for a long hike back from the boonies. But Sean said not to worry, he knew just where to go. A few miles down the road he pulled into the driveway of a run-down tarpaper shack, scattering the yard chickens as he pulled up beside a flat-tyred old Dodge pick-up. ‘My Uncle Arlen’s place,’ he announced. ‘He’ll let me grub some gas.’
Uncle Arlen appeared at the door moments later and stepped out in his bathrobe to see what was up. Sean asked if he could get some gas, and the uncle told him to go grab a five-gallon can from the shed. As soon as Sean stepped away, Uncle Arlen approached me and asked how he was doing. He said Sean’s mother was worried about him because he’d been off his meds for days and hadn’t been sleeping. ‘He’s manic-depressive, the doctors say. He just got home last week after a month’s stay in hospital to get his meds regulated, and now he won’t take them. Do me a favour, son. See if you can get him to go see his mother. She really needs to talk to him. If I say anything, he’ll just bark at me for meddling.’
By this point in the long night none of Uncle Arlen’s revelations came as a surprise. I had pretty much reached the same diagnosis hours ago. Though I doubted it would do any good, I promised the uncle I’d put a word in Sean’s ear.
We were two miles down the road when I got up the nerve to broach the subject, but Sean beat me to the punch.
‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Let’s go see what Mama’s got for breakfast.’ We pulled up to the kerb in front of a split-level ranch house on a quiet street at the edge of town. ‘I don’t know if Mama will be up yet,’ Sean said. ‘I better take you round back and let you wait in my treehouse.’
The treehouse was a sprawling affair perched in the branches of a massive oak tree, and you could see his father’s professional hand in its sturdy construction.
‘Inspect the troops for a few minutes. I’ll be right back,’ Sean said, and left me in the treehouse to browse the shelves that held his collection of vintage lead toy soldiers.
After Sean’s manic babbling, the soldiers’ mute company was a tonic. But my peaceful interlude didn’t last long. Within minutes, I heard Sean and his mama going at it inside the house, shouting loud enough to wake the neighbourhood. They kept it up a good five minutes before subsiding into silence. Wondering what the hell was going on, I waited in the treehouse another twenty minutes before Sean finally reappeared, now freshly washed and resplendent in a brass-buttoned blue blazer and a commodore’s yachting cap. What, are we off to a regatta now? I wondered. Curiouser and curiouser.
‘Sorry it took so long,’ he apologised. ‘Mama gets ornery sometimes. She wouldn’t let me out of the house till I took my medicine and got washed up. Good thing I left you out here,’ he grinned. ‘I grabbed some raisins and salt peanuts you can eat in the car. Come on, I’ve got to make a stop before we go get your bus ticket.’
Sean drove us to the downtown dojo where he took martial arts lessons, and I realised why he’d claimed to be a ‘ninja warrior for Christ’. He insisted I come inside to meet his master, a man named Vic Moore. The master’s apartment was on the second floor, and while Sean went upstairs to fetch him I browsed the framed clippings on the dojo walls and learned that Vic Moore was the first black man to win a US national karate championship. His celebrity photo gallery included shots of Moore with Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris and Huey Newton. This guy’s the real deal, I thought to myself, wondering why a man of his talents had set up shop in a backwater like Lumberton.
Sean came downstairs smiling and said Master Vic would join us in a moment. While we waited, he snatched a samurai sword from the weapons wall and started swinging the damned thing around with such manic energy it made me nervous. Obviously, his meds hadn’t kicked in yet. I wondered what Master Vic would make of the scene when he came down to find a madman in yachting gear wildly slashing the dojo’s air with a samurai sword. But as soon the big man appeared on the stairs – dressed in a conservative suit and tie – Sean calmed down immediately and meekly hung the sword back on the wall without a word from the master.
‘Sensei,’ he bowed, ‘I’d like to introduce my friend Pete. He’s on his way to San Francisco, but I wanted him to meet you before he leaves town.’ And there I was, shaking hands with the only American ever quick enough to block one of Bruce Lee’s speed punches. Chalk up another surprise for Lumberton.
The Greyhound ticket office was a few blocks from the dojo, and when we walked over there to check the schedule there was a westbound bus slated to leave Lumberton at two in the afternoon. Staying awake till then was going to be a struggle, but I figured I’d have plenty of opportunity to catch up on my sleep once I got on the bus. All we had to do now was hit Sean’s bank and I’d be good to go. However, Lumberton had one last surprise in store for me, and the hangdog look on Sean’s face when he emerged from the bank told me it wasn’t going to be a good one.
It turned out Sean’s mother had frozen his trust account while he’d been in the mental ward and the bank wouldn’t let him touch his money until his psychiatrist declared him competent to handle his own finances again. If I’d been a tenth-degree black belt like Master Vic, I think I’d have the pulverised the first cinderblock I could find. What a letdown! Sean, of course, proposed a harebrained scheme to remedy the situation – he wanted me to go with him to his doctor’s office, pose as a psychiatrist from New York and declare that I’d given Sean a clean bill of mental health!
‘You’re a smart guy, you could pull it off. Come on, let’s try it,’ Sean pressed.
‘That’s just plain crazy.’ There, I’d said it. I felt bad for the kid, but after ten hours of biting my tongue, a dose of candour seemed in order. ‘You’re a generous guy, and I appreciate you trying to help me out, but I think it’s time you just take me to the interstate and let me be on my way.’
Even though Sean hadn’t come through with a bus ticket, my night with the Ghostrider must have brought me some luck. As soon as he dropped me off I caught the first of three short rides that took me across the border into South Carolina. Then I hit the jackpot at a highway rest stop near Dillon, where a guy named Carl – a ponytailed hippie from Vermont – offered me a lift all the way to Florida.
Carl’s rust-eaten Volvo looked ready for the scrap yard, but somehow the old beater held together as he balled the jack like Dean Moriarty and we rattled south through Georgia. By sundown, we were rolling up on the outskirts of Jacksonville, and when Carl turned west onto Interstate 10, I felt like I was finally making real progress. Twenty-five hundred miles straight down the road and I’d be watching the sun set over the Pacific.
It was dark when Carl dropped me off in the Panhandle town of Baldwin, but the night air was mild and for the first time in three days being on the road didn’t feel like a trial by ice. By now, thanks to the Ghostrider, I’d gone thirty-six hours without sleep, and all I wanted was a good night’s rest. Ducking into a palm grove beside the highway, I bedded down on the soft layer of dried fronds beneath the trees. What more could you ask for? I thought. At last things were looking up – though I’m sure my dad would have begged to differ.
When I was ten, I built a teepee in our backyard in East Northport, and all these years later it still rankled me that my father had refused to let me camp out overnight in it, no matter how much I pleaded. The way he saw it, if it was his duty to keep a roof over my head, then it was my duty to sleep under it. At the time, I thought he was just being a spoilsport. But as I lay roughing it beneath the stars that night in Baldwin I realised his final words on the matter had been prophetic. If you want to sleep outside, he’d told me, go be a bum.
CHAPTER 4
As I lay hunkered down in the dark of the palm grove, I heard rustling all around me. Mice or voles, I assumed, foraging in the dried fronds. I told myself they were no threat, but they creeped me out anyway – and called to mind another memory
of my father that I hadn’t thought about in years. I was three or four at the time, I’d guess, and we were living in a railroad apartment above a mice-ridden grocery store on Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge. No doubt the mice were the source of the scary night-time noises that sometimes made me scream for my parents to come chase away the monsters under my bed, but after a few weeks of being wakened by my cries for help, my father decided it was time to break me of the habit. The way he did it taught me once and for all that there are scarier things to worry about in this world than monsters under your bed.
On that memorable night, I’d already cried monster twice, and my father had warned me that if I woke him and my mother once more I’d be sorry. But as soon as the lights were out again my fear got the better of me, and when I started howling for help the third time my father stormed into my bedroom, snatched me out of bed and hauled me into the kitchen.
‘What are we doing, Daddy?’ I asked, as he sat me down in the middle of the kitchen table.
‘We’re making a sandwich,’ he said, and set a carving board and a loaf of bread beside me. Then he opened a drawer and pulled out the long carving knife and meat fork that he used for slicing the bloody roast beef my mom always cooked for Sunday dinner.
‘What kind of sandwich?’ I asked, already forgetting the monster as I watched my father hone the knife with a butcher’s steel. Stroke, stroke, stroke.
‘A Peter sandwich,’ he replied. Which is not a phrase you want to hear from a six-foot-four Norwegian giant standing over you with a carving knife, trust me.
Still, I wasn’t really convinced my father meant it. He had to be playing make-believe, right? But when he opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of Heinz catsup, I thought, He’s really going to eat me! My father’s stint in the navy had left him in the habit of dousing everything he ate with catsup, which used to drive my mother crazy. She took it as an insult to her cooking. My father paid her no mind. He was set in his ways, and we never sat down to a meal without a bottle of Heinz on the table, so when he set the catsup bottle beside me I started wailing.
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