Idiot Wind

by Peter Kaldheim

  Thumbing from Algiers to Avondale took us all morning. We managed to catch a few short-hop rides, but for the most part we covered the fifteen miles on foot and we were both exhausted by the time we reached the train yard. When I’d left the Oz that morning, my new work boots were still damp from Wednesday’s rainstorm and as they dried out on our hike from Algiers they got tighter by the mile, cramping my toes and chafing both my heels raw. Arne’s beat-up loafers hadn’t treated his feet any better and we were a sorry sight as we hobbled through the poor black shantytown that bordered the railroad tracks.

  At the last shack before the tracks a white-haired black man was sitting on the front steps. To my surprise he gave us a friendly wave and invited us to fill our water bottles at the hand-pump in his yard. ‘Gonna hop you a train, fellas?’ he asked. We admitted we were, and he said he’d figured as much because the only white people who ever ventured into that part of town on foot were rail tramps. The old boy said he’d hopped a lot of trains himself in his younger days. He warned us to keep a sharp eye out for the white Suburban the local yard bulls drove while patrolling the tracks. ‘I seen too many tramps hauled away in that Suburban already, so watch yourselves, boys. The bulls round here are all hard-ass crackers and they won’t cut you any slack.’

  Arne asked him where he’d recommend we lay low while we waited for a train and he pointed us toward an old cemetery across the road from the tracks. He said the best place to stay out of sight was under the weeping willow trees that bordered the edge of the graveyard, so we thanked him for the advice and headed straight to the cemetery to begin our vigil. And for the next two hours there we sat, hidden from sight beneath an umbrella of willow branches, waiting impatiently for a westbound train to come through the yard.

  While we waited, the white Suburban cruised past our hidey-hole three or four times, but thanks to the old man’s tip the bulls never spotted us, and luckily when a locomotive came slowly rumbling into the yard from the east the Suburban was nowhere in sight. We grabbed our packs and made a lame-footed dash across the tracks to the far side of the yard before the locomotive passed, and when Arne spotted an open boxcar coming down the line he ran alongside the train, threw his pack through the open doorway and grabbed a handrail to swing himself aboard. I was running right behind him and, as soon as I threw my pack aboard, Arne grabbed my wrist and yanked me up into the car.

  What a rush! I caught my breath and realised how close I had come to losing my footing on the trackbed gravel and stumbling beneath the killer wheels. Who knew that hopping a freight train on the fly would be even hairier than riding the Cyclone at Coney Island? Still, I had pulled it off on my first try and I was so elated I’d have whooped for joy if I hadn’t been worried about attracting unwanted attention. Until we cleared the yard the railroad bulls were still a threat, so I held my tongue and saved my celebration for further down the line – little suspecting that we’d boarded a train to nowhere.

  Minutes later, to our dismay, the train squealed to a halt halfway through the switching yard and then started backing up onto a siding. Arne leaned out of the boxcar for a quick peek and immediately started swearing under his breath.

  ‘We’re screwed,’ he reported. ‘The fucking brakeman’s uncoupling the whole line of cars. We better clear out before he spots us.’ Which was deflating news, but only a foretaste of the way the rest of our day would unfold.

  We snuck back to our hidey-hole without being seen, and shortly after we settled in for another wait the sky grew darker and a steady drizzle began to fall. And it kept on raining throughout the long afternoon while we sat around smoking the last of Arne’s cigarettes and waiting in vain for another westbound train. By four o’clock, Arne’s patience had reached its limits. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘I’m heading back to town. You with me? If we hustle, we might make it in time for supper at the Oz.’

  ‘Suits me,’ I said. ‘I’d sooner spend the night at the Oz than in a boneyard.’

  We’d stayed dry beneath the willow tree all afternoon, but by the time we hiked back to the highway our clothes were completely waterlogged. I’m sure our sopping appearance didn’t help our odds of catching a ride, and as we trudged along the shoulder of the Westbank Expressway cursing every driver that splashed past without stopping it began to seem likely our next meal at the Oz would be breakfast, not supper. Two short rides were all we could catch. The rest of the way we hoofed it, through the puddles and the darkness and the steadily increasing protests from our blistered feet. It took us nearly three hours to reach the Morial Bridge. Arne’s feet were so sore by then he couldn’t walk without leaning heavily on me for support. I’m surprised I could shoulder the extra weight. My feet were as torn up as Arne’s, and I had to stop every quarter-mile or so and prop him against a light pole while I caught a breather.

  The Morial Bridge was off-limits to pedestrians, so when we reached it we had no choice but to wait for a ride, no matter how long it took. Twenty minutes later, as we stood forlornly keeping vigil beside the approach ramp, a middle-aged redneck wearing a Marine Corps ball cap came weaving unsteadily toward us, obviously drunk, and offered us two tokens for the cross-river bus if we’d swear out loud that we hated ‘niggers’.

  Racist dickhead! I thought, but when Arne crossed his fingers behind his back and played along with the guy, I did the same.

  ‘Now I know how Judas felt,’ I said to Arne, after the redneck walked off into the night.

  ‘Hey, I didn’t like dealing with that scumbag either, but sometimes you’ve got to go along to get along,’ Arne said. ‘We’ve already missed curfew at the Oz. The Brothers lock the doors at seven. But we’ve still got a shot at the Gospel Mission, if we can get there before ten.’

  We caught the next downtown bus to Basin Street and made it to the Gospel Mission with an hour to spare. Once again, my hitchhiking ticket from Florida came in handy as ID and the clerk booked me in for the night. But he cautioned me that I wouldn’t be admitted again without a health department card that certified I’d been tested for TB, and he advised me to get tested in the morning.

  Arne wasn’t as lucky. His name was already in the Gospel Mission’s ledger from a previous stay and he’d never bothered to get a TB card in the interim, so the clerk refused to book him a bed. I asked him what he was going to do. He said he’d just have to head back to the Oz. ‘If I pound on the doors long enough, maybe one of the Brothers will take pity on me.’

  And that’s exactly what happened, as Arne happily informed me the next morning when I turned up at the Oz for breakfast. The Brothers had not only taken him in after curfew, they’d bandaged his mangled feet, issued him a pair of crutches and even promised to buy him a bus ticket home to Denver as soon as his feet were healed. Meanwhile, he was getting the royal treatment – the Brothers were letting him loll around the dormitory all day instead of putting him out into the streets with the rest of the overnighters. I envied him that more than the bus ticket. I was still so beat from our trip to Avondale I’d have gladly spent the day in bed. Instead, I had to settle for the grass in Lafayette Square.

  After lunch, I went to see the nurse at the Oz’s health clinic. She clucked sympathetically as she disinfected and bandaged my bloody heels, then gave me a fresh pair of socks and advised me to stay off my feet for a couple of days. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said with a smile, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I was down to the last night of my vouchered stay at the Oz. Tomorrow morning, come rain or shine, I’d be back out on the highway – hobbling west toward whatever the road had in store for me next.

  CHAPTER 6

  When I limped out of the Oz on Saturday morning, cold rain was drizzling from a Gulf Coast sky as darkly clouded as my mood – and I felt every bit as miserable as the weather. The Ibuprofen tabs I’d downed with my breakfast hadn’t yet kicked in, and my blistered feet were so sore all I could manage were baby steps as I hobbled through the empty streets of the Warehouse District, heading for the interstate.
The nearest on-ramp was behind the Superdome, only a mile down Poydras Street from the Ozanam Inn, but at my painfully slow pace it took me nearly an hour to cover the distance. I was wincing the entire way. Of course, the irony of my situation did not escape me. After all, hadn’t I fled New York to avoid being crippled by Bobby Bats? And yet here I was, crippled just the same. I couldn’t help wondering if there’d ever come a day when I’d get far enough down the road to escape my own stupidity.

  The stretch of I-10 behind the Superdome was elevated highway, with a narrow on-ramp that made it a tough spot to thumb a ride. I wagged my thumb in vain for hours, and as I watched car after car pass me by I remembered the old story about Diogenes begging alms from a marble statue. When a curious passer-by questioned his odd behaviour, Diogenes explained that he was ‘practising’. ‘Practising what?’ the stranger asked. To which Diogenes replied, ‘Being ignored.’

  By noontime, I was so sick of being ignored I decided to switch over to the eastbound ramp, just to see if I could change my luck. I wasn’t thrilled about doubling back in the wrong direction, but I figured the truck stop in Slidell was bound to be a better place to catch a ride than the luckless spot I’d been stuck in all morning. It certainly couldn’t be any worse. My change in tactics paid off minutes later when my losing streak was ended by a mud-splashed Ford pick-up with Louisiana plates.

  As soon as I climbed into the cab and got a look at the beefy guy behind the wheel I thought I’d been time-warped back to the fifties. The double-chinned driver looked so much like the old kiddie TV host Andy Devine I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if the first words out of his mouth had been, ‘Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!’ I took this as a good omen. Andy’s Gang had been one of my favourite Saturday morning shows when I was in grade school. To me, the best part of the show was when Devine would pronounce that five-word command and suddenly, in a puff of smoke, Froggy the Gremlin would appear, croaking his familiar catchphrase: ‘Hi yah, kids! Hi yah! Hi yah!’ Whereupon, as always, Froggy would immediately start cracking wise and causing trouble. Naturally, being six or seven at the time, I found Froggy’s knack for instigating mischief appealing. What kid that age wouldn’t? But, even more than his mischievous nature, it was Froggy’s power to teleport himself from place to place that impressed me most. Imagine it, plunking your magic twanger and popping up anywhere you felt like going! How cool would that be? A lot cooler than trying to hitchhike across the country without a penny in your pockets, that much I knew for certain. Sans magic twanger, the best I could hope for was a long-distance ride that would keep me off my feet for the rest of the day. When we got to the Slidell exit and I saw the westbound entrance ramp already crowded with a half-dozen hitchhikers waiting for rides, I began to doubt whether Andy Devine’s doppelganger was really the lucky charm I’d imagined.

  Rather than join the queue on the ramp as the seventh man in line, I decided to station myself near the fuel island in the truck stop parking lot, where I’d have a shot at intercepting a westbound driver at the pumps before he got back on the interstate. It seemed like the easiest way to jump the line at the ramp. All I needed now was to make up a sign.

  Scrounging a scrap of cardboard from the dumpster behind the coffee shop was the easy part. Coming up with a way to letter it took more ingenuity. Too bad I hadn’t asked Kalvin to hand over his stolen Magic Marker before he left for Winsboro. But I’d missed my chance, and now I was forced to improvise. Channelling my inner kindergartener, I decided to go with finger painting. I squatted beside one of the truck stop’s ornamental boxwoods, dipped my forefinger in the wet dirt beneath it and began printing out the words ‘WEST COAST’ on the cardboard in strokes of dark mud. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. Isn’t that what it says in the Rubáiyát? I hoped to hell Omar Khayy‡m was right about that. After five days in New Orleans, I was overdue to get a move on.

  Luckily the morning’s rain clouds had blown over, or my mud-lettered sign wouldn’t have held up for long. But even though the weather stayed dry and the sign remained legible, hours passed before it did me any good. It was late afternoon when my sign finally caught the eye of a bearded guy in a shiny silver Audi, who pulled up beside me and asked if I felt like joining him in the restaurant for a cup of coffee so he could ‘run an idea’ by me.

  What’s this guy up to? I wondered, a little leery. Still, I figured it was worth a cup of coffee to hear him out, so I said sure, and he told me to wait by the entrance while he parked his car. When he got back, he shook my hand with a powerful grip and we swapped names before stepping inside the coffee shop. Gino Cardello looked to be about my age, but he stood two inches taller than me and had the build of a middle linebacker. His bulging forearms reminded me of Popeye the Sailor, and his close-cropped beard was as black as Bluto’s. However, there was nothing comical about the confident way he carried himself, or the probing gaze with which he sized me up when we settled into a booth at the back of the restaurant.

  ‘So, where you from, Pete?’ he asked, after the waitress had poured our coffee. When I told him New York, he asked what part, and as soon as I said Brooklyn he grinned and told me he’d been stationed at Fort Hamilton for a while when he was in the service.

  ‘I think the neighbourhood was called Bay Ridge,’ he said. ‘Anywhere close to where you come from?’

  Once again, the road had taken me by surprise. A Bay Ridge connection? In Slidell, Louisiana? What were the odds?

  ‘Can’t get any closer,’ I grinned back. ‘I was born in Victory Memorial Hospital, right behind the base. Fort Hamilton’s where I took my draft physical, back in ’67. Small world, right? When were you stationed in Brooklyn?’

  ‘Must have been 1970,’ he said. ‘After I got back from Nam, I spent six months in Brooklyn, doing recruitment for the Corps, and I’ll tell you what – I thought the French Quarter had a lot of bars until I got to Bay Ridge. Man, did I have some wild times in your neighbourhood!’

  ‘You and me both,’ I smiled, flashing back to the night I’d spent in Elena’s bed on my farewell visit to Bay Ridge. Had it really been only two weeks since she’d bum-rushed me out of her apartment after our Super Bowl hook-up? So much had happened since then, it already felt like ancient history.

  ‘Anyway, here’s the deal,’ Gino said, getting down to business. ‘I’m moving out to Tacoma, Washington, to open a foreign car repair shop and I need someone to drive my other car out West with me. Otherwise I’ll have to lay out big bucks to ship it to the coast by truck.’

  ‘Can’t you just rent a trailer and tow the extra car behind your Audi?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, if I was a dumbass and didn’t care about fucking up the Audi’s transmission by towing that much weight for two thousand miles, sure I could,’ he replied, in that condescending tone mechanics everywhere employ when explaining the obvious to those of us less mechanically inclined. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I’ve got my shop equipment in a storage unit I leased in Tucson. Once I get there, I’ll have to rent a U-Haul box truck for all my gear. Then I’ll be towing the Audi behind the truck the rest of the way to Washington. So, either someone drives my Fiat and follows me out there, or I’ll have to ship it by truck. Those are my only options. Can you drive stick?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘No problem.’

  ‘Good, because the Fiat’s a Roadster turbo, with five on the floor. How’s your driving record?’

  ‘Clean,’ I said. ‘Except, here’s the thing, Gino . . . I lost my wallet last week back in North Carolina, so I don’t have my licence. But if we stick to the speed limit, I shouldn’t have to show my licence to any cops, right? What do you think? I’m game if you are.’

  Gino frowned and rubbed his beard as he considered this new wrinkle. I was afraid I had queered the deal. But to my relief, after a moment’s pause, he nodded and said, ‘Okay, what the fuck, let’s do it.’ I can’t say for sure it was the Bay Ridge connection that tipped the scales in my favour, though I’d wager it di
dn’t hurt. In any case, I could hardly believe my luck. Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy! In no time at all now, I’d be popping up on the West Coast – not in a puff of smoke, but a Fiat Roadster! I was so psyched, if it had been up to me we would have hit the road immediately. But Gino said he still had some packing left to do at his parents’ place in Slidell, where he’d been crashing temporarily while he organised his move to Tacoma, so I throttled back my enthusiasm and resigned myself to spending one more night on the wrong side of Lake Pontchartrain.

  Gino’s parents lived in a modest ranch-style house on a cul-de-sac in a sixties-era development on the outskirts of Slidell. When we got there, Gino said he was sorry, but I’d have to wait outside in the car. It was suppertime, and he said he wouldn’t feel right turning up at the dinner table with a stranger he’d just picked up in a truck stop. I could see his point and told him not to sweat it.

  ‘Sit tight. I’ll bring you out a sandwich after we’re done eating,’ he promised, and true to his word he came back out forty-five minutes later with a roast beef sandwich and a can of RC Cola. He also brought out a pillow and a blanket, so I was comfortably set for the night. I thanked him for the room service and told him to get on back inside to his folks.

  ‘Okay, then, I’ll leave you to it,’ Gino said. ‘Get some rest. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  There was plenty of room to curl up in the back seat of the Audi, and the silence that settled over the neighbourhood once the stars came out was a big improvement over the nightly racket in the dorm at the Ozanam Inn, so when I finally nodded off it was the best night’s sleep I’d enjoyed in more than a week, and I was well-rested and ready to go when Gino came out in the morning to check on me.

  Gino was carrying two mugs of black coffee with him when he arrived. ‘Here, I brought you an eye-opener,’ he said, handing me one of the steaming mugs. ‘Mom says to invite you in for breakfast, but let’s hang outside here for a while. I need a cigarette first.’ He fired up an unfiltered Camel, then passed me the pack.