The man laughed. “Wasn’t supposed to, neither. We had to take him back. He got in trouble for it, too.” He chuckled. “I tell you, he don’t like that army!”
“But that’s why,” the woman went on, more or less ignoring him, “I always stop for young men on the road. I figure somebody maybe’ll stop for my boy. He’s a good boy, too. That’s why we’re goin’ to see him. He says he misses us somethin’ terrible over there. Broke my heart for him to get in trouble like that, just from missin’ his momma and daddy and comin’ to pay a visit. He’s a really good boy. Like you — well, guess this is breakfast.” And she eased us to a stop before some country breakfast place.
Then, later:
Was it morning?
Was it evening?
Some man who wanted me to talk to keep him awake had let me off just beyond Baton Rouge. It was right at the intersection of the detour my first ride had sent me off on and the last leg of the road Bob and I had originally traced out. The cars weren’t too thick, so I’d started walking along under the trees at the edge of the highway. When I’d gone about fifty yards, I saw a guy standing a little ways ahead — some local, I figured, walking along the road. But now he put his thumb out, turned to follow a passing car with his eyes. The low sunlight gleamed in his bronze hair. He wore a denim jacket.
I frowned.
I stopped.
Then I called, sure that there would be no answer: “Hey, Bob …?”
He turned and looked back.
I grinned. “Bob!”
His own frown opened into a smile. “Well, now fancy meetin’ you out here, a thousand miles away from anywhere. Howdy, there, stranger!”
“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.
“Same thing you’re doin’. Tryin’ to get a goddamn ride.” He laughed. “Well, I see you ain’t lost your guitar. You got a chance to play it yet?”
“Naw,” I said. “Not really. Joanne was right. I shouldn’t have taken it.”
Bob chuckled. “But you can’t tell you nothin’.”
“Hey,” I said, “can you imagine it, the two of us, meeting up like this, just by chance!”
Bob shrugged. “We’re goin’ the same place, in the same direction — at about the same speed. Sometimes it happens three or four times.”
“Well,” I said. “It sure surprised me.”
“I been wondering why I haven’t caught up with you once or twice already.”
I filled Bob in on my adventures with the first truck driver, the rain, the dog. Bob filled me in on his — most spectacularly, he’d gotten picked up by a college girl on vacation in a red Citroen, who took him to a motel near Virginia Beach where, apparently, “I ate pussy, man, like it was goin’ out of style!” Somewhere in the midst of it, he looked at me seriously. “You ain’t been callin’ Marilyn, have you.” There was an accusatory tone.
“Huh?” I said. “No. Have you?”
“Just about every chance I get. That’s how I know you ain’t. But I told her she shouldn’t worry.” He shook his head a little. “You should call her, though, if you get a chance.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I will. How’s Joanne?”
Bob shrugged. “I didn’t call her, I told you. I called Marilyn.”
“Oh,” I said. There wasn’t a phone in their apartment, only in ours. And Marilyn would have had to run down the hall to get her.
“I guess she’s okay,” Bob shrugged. “But she don’t expect to hear from me till after I get there, anyway.” He took a breath. “Well, about three hundred cars done gone by since we been standing here jawin’. We better get our thumbs back out if we wanna get anywhere.” He put his hands on my shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see you again, sometime soon.”
I laughed. “Okay — hey, I’m going ahead this time.” I lifted up the guitar case and started up the road, with my thumb out.
I got the first ride, too — in an anonymous jalopy with no glass in the windows, its tan upholstery hanging in strips off the inside of the doors, the ceiling, the seats. Back on the road, I saw Bob laugh and give me the finger as I slid over into the seat.
Complainingly, the car started.
The driver was an immense, friendly, and sort of slow black guy. About twenty-six years old, he’d just broken up with his girlfriend and had decided he’d had it with St. Gable, which was just out of Baton Rouge. He was six-feet-eight, with forearms the size and color of charred legs of lamb. He wore size forty-four paint-splashed workman’s greens — and, incongruously, a white-and-navy striped polo shirt, torn where the oak stump of his neck emerged from the collar. At one point, with meticulous deliberation, he detailed all of his clothing sizes for me, from his sneakers (size 14) to his collar (size 18½”): not that I’d asked. But I guess other people did. Since the breakup last night, he’d taken off for somewhere else, anywhere else, he wasn’t sure. “Wha’ ’bout you?”
“Well, me,” I told him, “I’m going down to Aransas Pass. I’m going to work on the shrimp boats there.”
“Yeah?” He looked at me, considering. “Now that don’ soun’ like a bad idea. I may just go along with you and do some of that myself.”
“Well, yeah,” I said, “that’s an idea …” though picturing myself entering the unknown Gulf coast town with this otherwise affable mammoth was not the most comfortable image I could muster.
Thirty miles on, though, his car began to stall, giving out, finally, with a carburetive groan. We rolled to a stop. I left him — it was raining again — walking around the hulk, kicking at one tire after the other. “Wha’ you think wrong wi’ it?”
“Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about cars.”
“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout ’em either.”
Twenty yards up the highway I got another ride.
Still a later one was in an old car with a pudgy kid in black-framed glasses and a threadbare T-shirt who liked comics and astronomy and vampire movies and who explained that tonight was the dark of the moon and that just before midnight we’d be passing under it. Initially I’d decided not to tell him anything about my connection with science fiction. But after fifteen minutes, I finally mentioned that I’d written some SF novels, that Ace had published them, what my name was — then sat back, basking in his astonished enthusiasm, which poured out in his excited southwestern accent. He was sure he’d seen one of my books, sure he’d even read it. (From his fragmentary description, though, I was sure he hadn’t.) I felt the strange combination of discomfort and pleasure such attention brings. And ten minutes on he had to let me off, anyway.
Later that night, in a raging downpour, with lightning flicking luminous whips into the fields around me, I slogged beside the highway along the shoulder, mud to the knees. Traffic had stalled in some monster jam. And, yes, it’s impossible to hitchhike in a traffic jam at night in the rain. I was holding the guitar case in both my arms in front of me. The reason I wasn’t on the side of the pavement was because there was only about eight inches of asphalt between the cars and where the road dropped off into the slough through which I waded.
The thing was maybe fifteen feet ahead, before — even with the headlights — I realized what it was:
On a concrete pedestal, like Childe Roland’s dark tower reconstructed of glass in this lightning and rain-lashed field, a phone booth rose by the road. I had to climb up into it. I couldn’t get the guitar case all the way in and close the door at the same time — but it was enough to make the automatic light come on inside. Probably because of the rain, nobody in the traffic jam three feet to my left had gotten out to use it. I fingered a dime from my sopping jeans, thumbed it into the slot, and called the operator, while the rain and the neon light that haloed the square aluminum ceiling and the stalled headlights on the highway made a kind of beaded curtain on four sides. “I want to make a collect call …”