I was remembering this as I looked down between the houses, where I could see flashing water and a few masts and pilings. Maybe, I thought, I should go down and get a look at the tides on which, a few hundred miles farther south, I’d be working. But that, I suppose, is why I was so surprised when, up the dockside street, I saw Bob ambling on the far sidewalk.
He saw me, grinned, and called out, “Well, howdy, stranger!”
I just laughed. “Fancy meetin’ you here,” I said. I shook my head. “This is certainly the last place I expected to see you!” As I said it, though, there seemed a certain inevitability to it. “How come you’re here?”
He shrugged. “This is where the ride let me off. Ain’t seen the place in a while. It’s kind of interesting to look at it all again.”
“How long you been here?”
“’Bout three, four hours.”
I figured there was no point in saying anything.
We got some lunch at the small-town-Texas drugstore. Bob flirted with some high school girls in the booth behind us and managed to get job offers from one of the girls’ passing brothers and from another’s cousin who was also in the store. Listening to Bob’s banter — in which the last months were as absent as they had been from my talk with the family off to see their son in the army — I realized that Bob was far more comfortable negotiating this landscape than the complexities of New York — which meant he was more comfortable here than I could ever be. I’d known for some time that if you put me down on the streets of any large city, I would be able to survive. But I hadn’t realized there was a whole technique, equal in its intricacy and wholly unknown to me, by which somebody like Bob, dropped in a town like this, could survive equally well.
Afterwards we went back to the waterfront and sat on a couple of dock pilings, watching the boats. “So you got yourself into a motel last night. How’d you work that?”
“Oh, man — ” Bob began. “When you left me yesterday on the road, I got picked up by this guy with some brand-new foreign sports car not two minutes after you rode off in that jalopy. Most guys at least say hello, how you doin’, where you goin’—before they start feelin’ you up? But this guy was right on me, soon as I got in! He told me he’d buy me a good dinner, a motel room where we could sleep — that’s where I called Marilyn from. He wouldn’t even let me call collect.”
“Sounds good. What else happened?”
“I told him about you.”
“Me?”
“And your big black dick.”
“Bob,” I said, “why don’t we call it medium-sized and kind of coffee-colored?”
“You’re coffee-colored,” Bob said. A breeze shattered the water at our feet and lifted his hair. “But your dick’s darker than the rest of you.” He shrugged. “I been too close to it, man. You can’t tell me no different.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, you know, most guys — you tell ’em you got a partner, and they think you’re settin’ ’em up for something. But not this guy. He was all excited as he could be. He said havin’ two guys at once was what he was really into — you’d just taken off not five minutes ago, so we drove all up and down that highway, three, four times, lookin’ for you. For at least two hours.”
I sighed. “The first couple of rides I got were both thirty-, forty-mile jobs.”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “But if you’d just gotten a five or six miler — ” which I knew now was four out of five of the rides you caught — “you’d a’ had one good steak dinner, the nicest shower, a good night’s sleep, and a blow job — ” he shook his head — “that wouldn’t quit!” He grinned at me.
“He sucked like he wanted you to come back, huh?”
That made Bob howl. “What were you, hidin’ in the back seat of that yellow Dodge I got me a ride in two days ago?”
I looked up. “You think it’s going to rain again?”
“Naw …” He squinted into the sky. “That looks like it’s over with. For a while, at least. Come on.” Foamy lace lazied below our shoes. “Let’s go call Marilyn.”
We did.
Collect.
The clouds were white and high in a lazuli afternoon. Crowded into the phone booth at the head of the dock, now Bob, now I, now Bob again poured out cascades of details from the past days, laughing long-distance while Marilyn told us what the woman who was her boss at the magazine had said the previous morning and asked us for the fifth time how we kept managing to run into each other, as surprised by the phenomenon as I. For those ten minutes on the phone, it was as if, with the sun burning the back of my neck and the water sloshing down below the dock planks and Bob’s usual smell, showers notwithstanding, become something astonishingly rank with three days on the road (but I guess it was his clothes; my own were doubtless worse), all of us felt as if — despite all barriers — we were, in all ways, together again.
When I hung up, Bob backed from the booth. I stepped out, hefting up my guitar case.
“Well,” he said. “I guess we got to get back on the road.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess we do.”
“Come on. I’ll walk you up to the highway.”
When we got there, Bob went back up on the bank and sat. “Go on,” he told me. “Oil up that thumb and start it purrin’.” I didn’t even wonder why he was having me go first. I strolled a few yards down the road and put out my fist.
A car would pass. Bob would call some obscene comment about how I wasn’t working my finger hard enough. And I’d glance back at him, shaking my head.
In twenty minutes I got a ride.
56
56. Sometime after that, in New York, at the round oak table in the kitchen, while the phone sat on the windowsill, Marilyn wrote:
56.1 Later that evening, I stood before a small white building with tall grass on either side. Stenciled in green letters on the wall by the screen door were the words COLORED ENTRANCE, with an arrow pointing off to a side door. It was the first segregated eating establishment I’d ever found myself about to enter.
I was very hungry.
My last ride had innocently pointed it out as a place both good and cheap.
And I didn’t see anyplace else near it.
I stood there about two and a half minutes, deciding what to do. In this sun-soaked land, my complexion was ambiguous enough that I couldn’t see the point of going in the colored entrance unless I wanted to make some kind of statement. Only — did I want to make a statement, right at this moment?