What happened next I used in a novel seven years later (save that I omitted the guitar case — which, by now, I wished I’d never brought). At a rundown house, twenty feet from the road, I went up on the porch and lay down on the warped boards by the wall — one arm around the case neck — to doze off under the water’s hiss and whisper on the shingles above.
When the air was turning gray-blue behind the overcast through the porch rail, I pushed myself up, got my feet under me (I’d left my glasses in my shirt pocket because it was still raining), took up my case and walked down the steps into the drizzle, out the yard to the highway.
There still weren’t any cars.
At all.
I squinted up, got a face full of droplets, and figured this was silly. I’d go back to my porch and try to sleep some more. I turned and walked back up the quiet, grassy street. But as I approached the dripping gray clapboard, with the dark windows and the overturned tricycle in the yard, I heard a growling and, the next thing, this big white and brown dog pushed out from under the porch beside the steps. And started barking.
Apparently he’d been sleeping there when I’d been dozing topside. But he was awake now.
I backed up.
He stepped forward. And barked some more. A lot.
I took two more steps backward — I wasn’t afraid of the dog so much as I was worried by the noise he was making.
Then he charged me.
I turned, slipped, got my balance again, and ran — guitar case swinging wide — for the road. Behind me the dog kept barking. Without halting his racket, maybe he stopped running a few seconds. But when I was on the highway, I gasped a breath, turned to look back — and, only about thirty feet behind me, he was running at me again.
I barrelled forward —
— and this dozen-year-old blue Chevy I hadn’t even seen went past me to pull to the side. Its door swung open — I didn’t even have my hand out. But I practically dove into the car. Somebody pulled me in — now by my arm, now by my belt. I could hardly see what was going on. The door got slammed behind me — but we were already moving. When I sat up, bruising my knee on the case, to look out the window, the dog, still barking, ran for a while, stopped, barked again — and dropped back into the tan, morning souse.
“Thank you — ” I blurted, looking around. “Thank you, I — ” I coughed. “Thank you. …”
I was in the front seat. There was a whole lot of very blond, very gray-eyed children in the back, ranging from about two to about fifteen. The woman in the print housedress wedged behind the steering wheel was immense. The stringy-necked guy beside her who had gotten me in had a set of huge, callused hands on him. He was grinning at me, and bald, with iron-gray tufts over his ears.
“His lungs ain’t good at all,” the woman was shortly explaining about her lanky husband. “You all right, after that? That’s good. ’Cause I seen that dog runnin’ after you and it like to stopped my heart.” As she turned the wheel, dirigibles of flesh emerging from her creased and flowered armholes swung from her upper arms. “Well, like I say, he’s real sick. But he wouldn’t stay behind, no matter what I said. He wanted to come and help out with the children — but he’s like that. He’s such a good man — it breaks my heart to see him this way. What was that nasty ol’ dog runnin’ after you for, like that, anyway?”
I explained as best I could.
Her husband just grinned; he only had about half of his teeth.
“I know he’d offer you a cigarette,” the woman said, indicating her husband again, “but the doctor won’t let him smoke no more. That’s cause his lungs is so bad.” She, it seemed, was driving to see their oldest boy, eighteen, who was at an army base a state away.
“Where’re you goin’?” the husband asked me, at last.
“Aransas Pass — in Texas. …”
“What you goin’ there for?” He didn’t sound sick, and his gap-toothed smile was just as friendly as it could be.
The woman said, “Now don’t go pryin’ into the boy’s business. You gotta excuse him — he’s a good man, but his lungs are real bad. And he’s gotta go pryin’ into everybody’s business that don’t concern him. You don’t have to tell him nothin’ you don’t want to — all I know is, I don’t hold with no dog chasing nobody down no road in the rain, when you probably ain’t done nothing but walk by and say, ‘hello.’ Y’all take that guitar thing and put it in the back — and don’t go touchin’ it now. It’s his; it ain’t yours. What did you say you were goin’ down for?”
“To Texas,” I repeated. “To Aransas Pass — to work on the shrimp boats. For the spring.”
“Now, that’s nice,” she said. “He’s going down there to work at a job. On the boats. That’s nice work, I bet, when it gets real hot. He did outdoor work, too, till he got sick. Now see there, I told you he was a nice boy, when I seen him runnin’.”
“You make good money there?” the man asked.
“Now you don’t have to tell him anything about your money. He just wants to know everybody’s business. That’s all — he’s like an old woman, sometimes. Always wants to know everything about everybody that don’t concern him.” She laughed. The dirigibles wobbled. “What’s your name?”
But while she asked, I was marveling at how, under this onslaught of warmth and domesticity, I had suddenly become the most ordinary of young men, hitchhiking south to work at a summer job, with all else — Bob and Marilyn and insistent truckers and timid salesmen — closed suddenly and totally out.
“What’s your name?” the man asked.
“You don’t have to tell him, you don’t want,” the woman said. “That’s your business, not his. You don’t have to pay no attention to any of his foolishness, once he starts asking questions. We just thought you looked like you needed a hand — don’t you touch that boy’s guitar case back there. Just hold it in your lap.”
I coughed again. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m sorry …” And realized, as I searched around for it, that for the next moments, I actually couldn’t remember what I was supposed to say, as if the fact of my identity had somehow managed to slip off the tables of consciousness and roll into some corner, to become — at least for a moment — invisible with the exhaustion, the confusion, the displacement. It only lasted seconds, though. “Chip,” I said. And coughed again. “That’s what everybody calls me. Chip. My real name’s Samuel, though. But you can call me Chip.”
“Well, hello, Chip,” the husband said.
Then the wife introduced me to all the children, and herself, and her husband — a gaggle of Lincolns and Ezras and Annies and Hues and Lurlenes — among which my own name seemed, once again, to get misplaced, as if, in spite of my smiles and my gratitude, my whole identity were somehow shut outside their pleasant, over talkative friendliness and simple Samaritan goodness, along with all I knew I could not possibly speak of here.
Did I doze?
When I woke, the windshield was rain speckled. We were just passing some sign that at first I thought was a state border. But it wasn’t — and we couldn’t have been going that long anyway. Once more, silently, I went scrambling around inside my head for my name: and, blessedly, found, “Chip …!”
“Huh?” the man asked, hoarsely, turning to me.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just coughed.”
“We gonna stop and get breakfast up ahead,” the woman said. “You’re welcome to join us.”
“We’ll buy you a good meal,” the man said. “You don’t get to eat too well, out on the road, most of the time — I know that. My oldest boy — the one we goin’ to visit — told me.”
“My boy hitchhikes too,” the woman said. “He hitchhiked all the way home from that army base to come see us, once.”