After a very long time, I heard someone on the other end: “A collect call, for Marilyn from Chip … will you accept the charges?”
“Yes,” I heard her say.
“Hi, there,” I said. “How’re you doing?”
“How are you?” she demanded. “Where are you?”
“In Texas, I think. At least that’s what my last ride said. But I’m not all that sure. It’s pouring rain, and I’m waiting for the dark of the moon — in a traffic jam, somewhere right out in the middle of the countryside. It’s not the best time to hitch a ride — so I thought I’d call.”
“You’re hitchhiking at night?” she asked, surprised.
“I don’t know which is better,” I said. “That or the day. In the sunlight, all you see is one squashed-up raccoon after one squashed-up skunk — all down the road. Hey, you’ll never guess who I ran into, earlier today.”
“Bob,” she said. “I got off the phone with him about twenty minutes ago. He told me you two just met up like that. He said you were all right.”
“More or less. I guess. Where was he?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “In a motel somewhere.”
The rain blew through the partly open door to splatter against my face. “A motel,” I said. “Wouldn’t you know. What’s going on with Joanne?”
“Well,” Marilyn explained, “she’s still working the late shift as a waitress up in that all-night Bickford’s on Twenty-third Street. I’m at the magazine during the day. So we don’t really see very much of each other.” I got the impression she was just as happy that way. “What are you doing?” she asked me.
“Dripping mud and water all over this phone booth. I’ve been trying to run this kind of scam — if you call it that. A lot of people who give you rides pick you up because they think you’re a local, and know the area — so that you can give them directions somewhere. I’ve taken to memorizing about four square inches of the road map each time I leave a ride. Then, when someone stops and says they’ll give me a lift if I can tell them how to get to Grover’s Corners, I just say, ‘Well, you can go three miles up and turn off to the left, go till you get to New Goshen, then make a right on 26 for six miles or so, then keep to your left till you hit it — or you can go about thirteen miles down the road and double back right onto 26; that way you’ll probably get there faster because you avoid the bad roads with all the ruts’—that last part I just kind of make up. It’s gotten me three thirteen-, fourteen-mile rides out of my last five. And they get there, eventually — at least I hope they do. Look — ” I wiped water away off my mouth — “will you just talk to me about any old thing for about ten or fifteen minutes?”
“Okay …” Marilyn said, with the hesitancy that meant all chat had fled her.
“Tell me about literature or something. Right now I’m about as wet and muddy and miserable as — up until an hour ago — I thought it was possible to be.”
“Sure,” Marilyn said. “All right …”
So we talked.
Maybe fifteen minutes later I said, “When you get off, would you drink a nice hot cup of coffee up there and think of me real hard while you do it …?”
She laughed. “All right.”
“Okay. ’Bye.” I hung up, took a breath, and stepped back into the rain — and went down to my shins in fucking mud. I started slogging again.
Fifteen minutes later, some guy with a beard and a beer in his fist cranked down his window and shouted out: “Hey, you from around here?”
I squinted through falling water. “I live around here,” I said. “Why?”
“This goddamn traffic jam — we gotta get to Shreveport, man. Somebody told us there was a little road we had to take …?”
Shreveport, I thought, where I had been at only three-thirty the previous morning. It was maybe three hundred miles away.
In the last filling station john, an hour ago, for twenty minutes I’d pored over the netted inches of my map. Between fifty yards and a hundred-fifty yards ahead I knew was a turnoff, to the left, onto a two-mile connecting road that fed into a major highway that swooped grandly back up north into Louisiana — right into Shreveport. I hoisted up my guitar, and thought, Dear God, forgive me.
Then I called back: “Hey, no, man — you can’t get there that way. That road’s been out for six months. And in this weather? You’d never get across it. You’ve got to go down maybe forty, forty-five miles. That’s where the highway up to Shreveport comes down and crosses this one. It’s right where I’m going. You wanna give me a lift, and I’ll take you right there.”
“Okay, man,” the guy called. “Get on in the back.”
I climbed up on the road and got in the back door. The car stank. Muddy and slopping, I slid over on the seat.
“Come on,” the guy said. “Close the fuckin’ door, man. You wanna beer?”
There were three guys in the car and two cardboard cases filled with empties and another case about half finished. All three guys were raunchy, dirty, loud drunks. On the dashboard, the beige glow from the car’s clock — miraculously still working and, I guess, on time — said it was just before midnight.
I thought back to The Jewels of Aptor and Graves’s White Goddess and wondered, idly, what inverse lunar goddess I’d fallen under the protection of.
Whoever she was, I thanked her for the jam: neither the guy behind the wheel nor either of the other two were in any state to drive. We got through the next ten miles at no more than five an hour. (A couple of times we got bumped from behind; a couple of times we bumped the guy ahead. Fortunately neither decided to get out and make a stink.) The evening’s major occupation for all three was pissing in beer cans held between their thighs (“Man, don’t jerk the fuckin’ car like that. You got me pissing all over me and the fuckin’ floor!”) and heaving them out the window.
Forty-five miles down the road the highway going up to Shreveport would, indeed, after minor fibrillations, cross this one. They would be on their way with only seventy or eighty extra miles to drive. And I would be fifty miles closer to Aransas Pass.
But when, forty-five miles on, I climbed out of the car and set them on the road to Shreveport, the rain had stopped. I lugged my guitar out over the slicked highway.
Did I get to spend a few of those post-midnight hours — with some guy who wanted to ball — in a motel? Or did I, bouncing and dozing beside a dogbox with oncoming head- and highway lights playing over the truck windshield, only dream about the one Bob had managed to scare up from a passing driver? Whatever memories the writing of this account have fixed and clarified for me, that isn’t one of them.
But the next afternoon, I got let off in Freeport, Texas. It was sunny and breezy and warm. As the car pulled away, I punched at the sky, yawned, then lifted up my case to walk a little.
There was a tale connected with this Texas Gulf town that Bob had told Marilyn and me several times. Two years ago it had been the scene of a drunken binge involving half a dozen boat workers, in which Bob had smashed windows and broken into somebody’s office. A bunch of them had been arrested; and Bob, in the course of being transferred from one jail to another, had managed to get away and out on the road to hitch farther on down the Gulf. But Freeport, he’d assured us many times, was the one place in the United States he knew, for sure, his name was down on the books and he was wanted by the law — and thus the one place in the country he wanted to stay out of at all costs.