By now you're probably wondering where I am. When I didn't come home that night probably you were worried. I thought about getting word to you, but I never had the words, that's the problem. When I left that night it was with good intentions—thought I'd be bringing home a big payday. But the cops raided The Deuce, and all my money was tied up in those machines, and I slipped out the back just in time or else I'd of been face down on the floor with Ludie and the rest of the boys. What can I say? I thought the police would be staking my place for sure, waiting to scoop me up. So I wandered all that night, in the rain. It was raining hard that night you remember. I wandered downtown, tried to keep under the awnings, under the canopies, trying to figure my play. By dawn the rain had stopped and I was soaked through my clothes and no closer to a plan, so I drifted down to Jefferson Street and the Greyhound Station there, bought the only ticket I could afford that'd get me at least a hundred miles away, and figured I'd call when I got to Kingsport. But the first three payphone in the bus station there were torn up and the fourth one took the last of my quarters. By then it was midday and I was getting hungry. And I went and did a bad thing. I took a wallet off this man getting into his car, and worried as I was that he might start yelling, raise an alarm or something, I hit him, and when he was down on all fours and coughing up, I kicked him good a couple more times. Then I got scared and took off, pocketing the cash, tossing the wallet. That man was no millionaire, let me tell you. Twenty-three bucks, twenty-three dollars in folding money, that's what I got for the trouble.
I ran down to the rail yards, miles upon miles track and the rows of empty boxcars. I guess the hobos must have all gone extinct 'cause there didn't seem another soul around but me, just me and some rats I swear were the size of human babies. I got spooked and took off again, walking one of the tracks until I got a town over, place called Antioch. A lot of Mexicans around. Figured nobody would come looking for me there. I tried to stay out of those neon lights, red and gold, tried avoiding those Mexicans with their dark, shining, hungry eyes. A little concrete-block motel, fronting a trailer court; the man let me a room for the night. Seventeen bucks. The sign claimed there was cable but there wasn't even a TV. No phone, either. I'm sorry. Also the toilet didn't flush. I grabbed a little sleep but woke-up with fleas all over and biting me. I lingered for awhile downstairs, around the office, but that clerk seemed to smell something in the wind and watched me through the plate glass with his hand tucked at something under the desk.
I did get score some grub at a soup kitchen that was set-up in the basement of a Catholic Church. Mother Mary watched me as I ate my hash. Got some new clothes out of the deal, too, a work shirt, pair of painter's pants, and some pretty good boots. I sat on a park bench and talked awhile with some canker-faced old timer, name of Izzy, and he bummed me a couple of smokes. I tagged around with him most of that day. He kept a shopping cart stowed nearby and he'd push it around and collect stuff, anything he thought might bring a dollar or two. I saw a lot of the town that day, though always I was looking over my shoulder for police. And finally I scored some luck and me and Izzy came across a bunch of scrap metal, some aluminum, even some copper, in back of an old bottling plant. We stacked it high on that rickety old cart and shoved off—probably looked like balancing a metal mountain on a skateboard. It was hard to maneuver but we made it there, the riverfront, Izzy knowing a guy who ran a little side business out of a warehouse down there. He paid out thirty-five bucks for the haul. Izzy tried to buy me off with a tenner, but I wasn't having any. I'd done the heavy lifting, being young and strong and not some broke down old man, and I reasoned with him and finally he listened to reason and I got another ten to make it twenty in all. Fact is he tried handing it all over, but I didn't want that, I only wanted my due proper.
I hitched my way south, back towards you. I always feel better when I'm going south. A big-rig driver picked me up, Buster, said he was hauling a load of mannequin heads down to Tarzana, Texas. He tried striking up conversation but I wasn't into it. I just stared out the window at sky and land both painted the same kind of midnight, the whole world cramped as a prison cell with the sky itself bearing down in its unbearable blackness like the ceiling of a dungeon, nothing to see but the highway where the semi's high beams dragged the ground like searchlights. We came over a rise and out in the distance of the prairie a kind of oasis, an all-night truck stop lit up like a state fair. Buster dropped me there and shoved on. The wind was up, diesel air whipped hot around the pumps, litter and bottle tops skidded over the ground. I went inside. The eyes of the drivers lifted, deep-sunk eyes in the fluorescent lights rimmed with tired red, their faces gaunt as skulls, jaws working like they were chewing over their own tongues. Man, I was hungry. I ordered some eggs at the counter, and some bacon, and some home fries, and got a cup of coffee. I felt my bank getting light, heard a cash register ringing in my brain, but I couldn't help myself, I hadn't eaten a good meal in so damn long. I got another side of bacon, had the grill-man burn the hell out of it, ordered up a wedge of lemon-meringue pie. The girl refilled my coffee, we talked a bit. Her nametag read Camille. Outside the windows lightning flashed, showing huge clouds stampeding over the shadowy shapes of hilltops. A furious rain started to fall, mixed with hail, like a billion silver dollars crashing to earth. Me and Camille and the drivers pressed up to the plate glass windows, watching the storm rip the stomach out of the sky. Every now and then someone would run in from outside and the sound when the door pulled open was like being stuffed inside the throat of a cannon. Then it was over, soon as it had come, oily rainbows swirling in the puddles in the lot's asphalt, everything out there wet and shining like snowflakes melting on black carnations. Thunder belched, already sounding faraway.
That Camille. I'm sorry, Baby. Truly I am. It's just that she was kind, we were joking around. I scraped the last of my change together, bought a tallboy, she let me drink it in the break room there. She said she had a house trailer, and I had no place to go. I needed a shower, needed a rest. I needed to recuperate. And she looked some like you, even had freckles on her back like you do.
But she was messed up. Drank too much. After three days I took off—Jesus Christ didn't rest more than three days and I figured I shouldn't either. I did what I had to do; it was deep in the night, Camille sleeping one off, I took four twenties from her stash in the panty drawer and took her car keys—she had a little foreign job, a hatchback—and switched out the plates with an El Camino parked at the trailer next door. The plan was to hightail it back to you, figuring maybe the heat had died off some by now.
But, the thing is, I'd gotten all screwed up. When I thought I'd been hitching south, turns out I'd actually been heading north. Buster had been coming from Tarzana, Texas. So now when I'd thought I was going east actually I was pointed west. It was a foggy night and I guess I got a little sleepy, nodded off for a second, and came to just as I was about to fly off the road. I skidded in some gravel and righted myself, looked up and saw the green highway reading 113A West Junction, or something like that. I swear there wasn't an exit or turnaround for the next fifty miles, and at this point I was good and lost. Morning came up gray behind me and burned away the fog and another sign read Colorado State Line. I kept going.
The highway banded into the mountains, the earth falling away to a narrow sliver of rock running beneath my wheels. Then the goddamn radiator blew. Piece-of-shit foreign cars. Finally though, I caught a break. The man at the garage there paid me three hundred bucks for the car, didn't ask about title or nothing. A half-retarded black boy slobbered up and pushed the thing around back. At last I had a stake. The man said there was a bus station in town, that I was pointed in the right direction.
I started walking. I was almost there. Why I left that path I'll never know; something possessed me. You know what I think it was? I think I always wondered about what was behind the roads, they highways, out beyond the country we glimpse in passing, on the other side of the tree-line, or inside those little houses burning with a light in one window you see atop bald hills on winter evenings. Who lives there? You hear a distant train-whistle, where is it going? Not to sound like an old ballad here, but that stuff means something to me. And I didn't know I'd ever have this chance again. So just before the edge of town I turned, stepped off the road and parted the curtain of trees on the roadside and disappeared.
