For two days, Skyler had wandered the streets, eating out of garbage cans outside restaurants and begging for loose change, which he had never seen before and had to learn to use. His beard grew to a stubble, his stomach ached constantly, and his skin became pasty and he got as thin as a saint. One morning, when he awoke in a park, he saw that the sky was filled with dark, billowing clouds and the wind was whipping up; he knew a storm was coming. The streets emptied out, and just as the rain started to hammer down, a police car came along and picked him up and took him to the homeless shelter in the church basement.
It turned out it was not just a storm, but a hurricane, and it was a terrifying experience. While the wind howled and the rain pounded outside, the men fought inside. There was a lot of drinking and stealing, which scared him. Once, a man who had been talking to himself wounded another man with a knife and was expelled; he left, shouting vile words. At night, the man on the cot next to him, who grunted that his name was "Smokey," taught him to roll his clothes up in a bundle and sleep on them so that they wouldn't be stolen. Skyler began to wonder if Baptiste hadn't been right — maybe the mainland was one great big cesspool.
The religious people who ran the place gave him an extra shirt and a pair of pants and insisted that he attend services. He was amazed to see a statue of the crucifixion on the altar; he kept quiet, his eyes wide with amazement at the reverence with which they read from the Bible. He liked the singing, though.
His bunkmates taught him how to earn a few bucks by bagging groceries, weeding gardens and washing windows, and collecting bottles to refund at the Winn-Dixie market. He saved a pathetic fistful of coins, and lived on the shelter's cereal and sandwiches, and on bread and french fries that he snuck from the cans behind Karla's Fish & Crab.
For the next couple of days, he and Smokey joined a small gang of Mexicans and Salvadorans that picked peaches. The first morning, everyone made fun of him, because he was too terrified to mount the open back of the truck that was to carry them.
"Boy, where you from?" shouted the owner, pushing up the wide brim of his straw hat. "I seen backwoods boys before, but I never seen one like you."
Just as he was about to drive off and leave him, Smokey whispered something to two other men, and they jumped down and hoisted Skyler onto the truck bed, where he rode sitting down, bouncing among the crates and burlap bags. The orchard was miles away. Smokey taught him how to carry a long white ladder on his shoulder, and a young Mexican girl with a stunted thumb taught him to pick the peaches by stretching up with one hand and pinching them off. They were given cards with numbers on them, and when they picked a bushel basket full, they carried it to the foremen, who inspected the peaches and poked a hole in a grimy card with a handheld punch. Skyler was embarrassed that even the small children filled more baskets than he. It was exhausting work that hurt his back; peach fuzz stuck in his skin, so that when he rubbed his arms across his forehead to wipe off the sweat, it felt like hundreds of microscopic splinters.
They were not paid the first day, and so had to return to the orchard the next morning. That day, finally, the foreman looked at their cards and doled out dollar bills grudgingly; they were small denominations but fresh bills that still smelled of ink, and no one objected. Smokey took Skyler's pay as well as his own, but then they got separated and he disappeared for two days. When he returned, stinking of gin, he handed over only twelve dollars.
The next morning, Skyler changed his clothes and walked four blocks to Hill Street, passing the Southern Salvage Company, an army and navy store, and Currie's Body Shop, until he came to a lot where there were two large, rusted storage tanks fitted with a tall white flagpole, from which drooped an American flag. Next to it was a blue and orange sign that said: HARDEE'S — VALDOSTA'S PLACE TO EAT — and underneath, in smaller letters: All you can get, gravy Sunday. But they were only serving breakfast. And when he came back later, the waitress insisted upon seeing his money before he could be seated, and he had to spread out everything, including the coins, on the counter. They sat him alone near the kitchen door. He ate ravenously, and after he returned to the shelter he felt sick.
Smokey had been around, and he liked to tell stories starring himself that suggested he knew the ways of the world.
"You know," he confided one evening as Skyler lay on his cot, staring at the acoustical tiles above, "this town will give you money just to leave it. That's a fact. You go down to the police station and they'll take you right over to the bus station and buy you a bus ticket to anywhere you want to go. Only thing is, you have to stay gone."
Skyler took to escape by daydreams. In the evenings, his stomach half full from the baloney and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches served by the shelter, he would retire to his cot and cover his eyes with one bent arm and spend hours in drifting memories of the island. He did not even know its name or how far away it was, and he did not want to tell Smokey or anyone else about it.
Mostly, he thought of his early years there, when life had seemed simple, straightforward and joyful. He thought a lot about Raisin, but he was not ready to think about Julia — that was still too painful.
One evening, Skyler's daydreams were summarily interrupted. Big Al, the supervisor of the shelter, a man who stripped to his waist and so showed a mountainous belly and thick shoulders covered in a carpet of hair, walked over and kicked a leg of Skyler's cot.
"Follow me," he commanded.
Skyler did as he was told, and trailed behind the big man into his closet of an office. Unbeckoned, he sat across from the desk, which was cluttered with phone books, rags and papers, an ink stand and a teddy bear. The wall was festooned with mechanics' calendars of women bending over to show their bosoms and thrusting out their pelvises.
"I just don't get it," said Al, shaking his head as if genuinely confused. Skyler was the one who was confused. And Al's tone of voice did not augur well.
"You guys coming down here, taking advantage of Southern hospitality."
Skyler looked him in the eyes, but all he could read there was anger.
"I suppose you think it's cool. Big-time writer, grow a beard, come down here, pretend to be what you're not."
Al sat back in his chair, slightly more reflective, ready to strike a pedagogic note.
"I tell you, I don't mind a man being poor, no crime in that at all. But I can't stand a man pretending to be what he's not. Especially if that something is lower than he is. 'Cause that makes him just as low as he's trying to be. You get what I'm saying?"
All Skyler could do was shake his head in dumb incomprehension.
Al sat forward, hunching his elbows on the desk. The air conditioning set the hair on his shoulders moving in waves.
"Let me ask you — you collecting stuff for a new book? You getting lots of — what do you call it? — material?"
Skyler knew it was incumbent upon him to say something.
"I don't know what you're saying. I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Oh, you don't, doncha?"
With that, Al picked up a newspaper and threw it. It struck Skyler in the chest and fell onto his lap. He picked it up and looked at the page that it was opened to. He still didn't understand.
"Look at the picture," commanded Al. Skyler did. It was a photograph of a man, and it looked a lot like him.