Russian Spring (39 page)

From Washington, Bobby caught a flight to Orlando. When he got there, he found that the Kennedy Space Center had been placed off limits to civilians and was surrounded by endless tacky suburbs servicing military and space personnel that sprawled all the way to the frontier of the Magic Kingdom.

This seemed somehow appropriate, for Disney World had decayed into a hideous parody of the ruins of an out-of-date future, where the amusement rides were clogged with drunken and swaggering military personnel, and the Epcot Center displayed the last century’s scientific wonders, and creaky audioanimatronic robots sparked and
jerked spastically. Mickey Mouse, Roger Rabbit, and Donald Duck waddled down Main Street in military uniforms, terrorizing Frenchie the Frog, Limey Dick, the Frito Bandito, and Ivan the bright Red Bear.

Miami was the most prosperous American city Bobby had seen, terrifying where New York and Washington had been merely depressing, filled as it was with soldiers, sailors, airmen, mercenaries, arms merchants, speculators, whores, drug dealers, political refugees—the major staging base for the U.S.’s military and paramilitary operations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The drinking age seemed to be about twelve, and so Bobby was able to spend a night there bar-hopping, sipping truly dreadful tropical concoctions and listening to the local bar-talk with growing horror.

It was no secret here that a large naval task force would soon be on its way to blockade the Gulf Coast of Mexico. The bars were full of sailors from the ships taking their final liberty, paratroopers who expected to be dropped on Vera Cruz and Mexico City any day now, Marines and soldiers on
R&R
from Venezuela and Argentina full of gleeful war stories, all of them drunk out of their minds on booze and adrenaline, and eager to go out and kill some more spicks for God, country, and kicks.

What the denizens of the Miami bars were fantasizing about was a President with the balls to
really
enforce the Monroe Doctrine as God had intended, to kick the fucking faggot Europeans out of Bermuda, Curaçao, Cayenne, Martinique, and the rest of their Western Hemisphere territories and throw them all open for a big land grab like what was shortly going to come down in Baja, what a cakewalk
that
would be, real profitable too, and surely there must be some way to apply the Doctrine to Canada, the Canucks still were part of the British Commonwealth after all, now weren’t they . . . ?

One night of this was more than enough, and so the next afternoon, once his hangover and upset stomach had subsided to the point where he could face another move, Bobby escaped the feral lunacy of Miami, shaking and sweating, on the first flight he could get, which turned out to be to Chicago.

Chicago was another New York, with a little less dirt and a lot more wind, and then on to New Orleans, which was decay dripping with verdigris in sweatbox heat, and another wide-open military pigpen, and from there to Denver, which at least was farther north and farther west.

Which was about the best that could be said for it. To a born-and-bred Parisian, Denver was hardly a city at all, more an endless collection of dull bedroom arrondissements with no street life.

Between Denver and Los Angeles, there was nothing, or, as the old
American saying had it, “miles and miles of miles and miles.” He could hop a plane to
LA
and fly over it, or . . .

Or he could hang out his thumb and try to find that other America that his heart told him must still be out there somewhere. The Rockies and the Great Desert. The Sierras and the Mojave. A thousand miles and more of empty spaces as cities were counted on the map, but the land of legend from another perspective, cowboys, and Indians, and cattle drives, and wandering hippie tribes, outlaws, and ghost towns, and timeless mystic landscapes.

So Bobby lettered the word “West” on a piece of cardboard, screwed up his courage, shouldered his backpack, walked to the nearest freeway entrance, stuck out his thumb, and waited.

He had waited in the hot smoggy sun for nearly an hour, while electric city cruisers, big long-distance fuel-cell haulers, and petrol-guzzling monsters buzzed by, quite ignoring him, before this old pickup truck, with its load of toilet bowls and plumbing fixtures, finally pulled up.

Bobby dashed to the passenger-side door and opened it. The driver was a burly gray-haired man in his sixties wearing a battered straw cowboy hat, mirror shades, and a set of filthy blue coveralls.

“How far west ya goin’, bucko?” he said in what Bobby imagined was a perfect cowboy drawl.

“
LA
.”

“Figures for a Dodger fan,” the driver said, with a little laugh. “Bring your butt aboard, you like, get ya as far as Vail, anyway.”

The driver’s name was Carl. He thought it was real hilarious when Bobby asked him if he was a cowboy. “Figures the last of the hitchhikers make me for fuckass cowboy! Though them’d call me outlaw, thinkin’ at it!”

“Outlaw?”

“Shithouse bandito, bucko, make it! Haw! Haw! Haw!”

“Huh?”

“Hey, Bob, I’m a
plumber
, make it, and when they get the bill, they’re gonna shit in their pants anyway, haw, haw, haw, serve ’em right for buyin’ them Jappo johns in the first place!”

Carl did a lot of talking on the way from Denver to Boulder, and Bobby kept his mouth shut for the most part, for most of it was about how the ol’ US of A had been corned by the Jappos and the Peens for far too long now, and it had been about time
we
got down to doin’ the screwin’, and he should know ’cause he had done his time in fuckin’ Nicaragua and Panama, was only luck they had made him a shithouse commando in the Army and taught him a trade still worth a fuck of a buck after all these years, or the spicks woulda iced him in the jungle, and if not, he’d probably be screwin’ bolts in a factory
fer nigger wages ’stead of screwin’ the homesteaders, make it, that was the scoop they said about plumbers, really
was
a license to steal, haw, haw, haw . . .

It was a tense ride until they drove through Boulder and began climbing up into the mountains, and Bobby had started to hate this ignorant, hate-spewing, chauvinistic gringo.

But now that they were climbing up into the verdant green mountain fastness, a change had come over Carl the plumber. He ceased his jingoistic jabber, popped an actual
Beethoven
chip into the truck’s player, and sat there, leaning back in his seat, holding the roof with one hand out the open window, steering with the other, taking an occasional deep breath of resinous pine-tinged air, with a dreamy smile on his face.

“Nothin’ like this in Akron, bucko,” he’d mutter from time to time. “Fuckin’ God’s country, yes . . . Love this drive . . . ’Magine what it was like when there was nothin’ here but mountain men and grizzlies, hey . . .”

Higher and higher they climbed, into vaster and vaster mountains, where there was nothing to be seen but green trees and brown loam and outcroppings of gray granite, and it seemed to Bobby that the America of the past ten days was slipping away, in space and time, and some elusive understanding seemed to tease at the edge of his consciousness, and strangely enough, he began to feel a kinship with this plumber, this old veteran of the Central American wars, this former shithouse commando, for all of that seemed long ago and far away as they retraced the epic journeys of the long-ago pioneers through a landscape that the hand of man had scarcely touched since Columbus first set foot on the American shore.

The landscape changed as they drove higher, the trees thinned out and became scraggly, and then they were above the treeline, and there was nothing but rich brown earth and dark slate-colored rock.

“The fuckin’ Continental Divide,” Carl said softly. “From here on in, the streams all flow west. It’s the roof of the world, make it, the backbone of this great fuckin’ continent. Made this drive a thousand times, still can’t help thinkin’ about it. Fuckin’ pioneers crossed all this in covered wagons behind horses and mules, make it, bucko! Shit, they musta had balls the size of watermelons! Makes ya proud, don’t it, Bob? Know what I mean?”

Bobby nodded, for in that moment he did understand, and something he had feared lost was all at once found, and he understood what he had been feeling. There was just him, and Carl, and the timeless grandeur of this immense landscape, as it had always been, as it would always be, and none of what lay in the cities and the lowlands could ever touch it.

“Yeah, Carl,” he said contentedly. “Makes you proud to be an American.”

Carl drove through Vail, a onetime resort town that had been overdeveloped into a miserable little industrial city that seemed obscenely out of place in this glorious mountain setting, then dropped Bobby off on the highway where a narrow feeder road wound back into the canyons, right in the middle of glorious nowhere.

Bobby stood there on the road all by himself in the high mountains, and not minding it at all, for the better part of an hour before he got picked up by a big empty flatbed hauler driven by a squat, ugly woman with crew-cut blond hair and wearing an ancient brown leather jacket, whom he at first took for a man.

“Esmerelda’s the handle, believe it, not exactly butch, now is it, used ta call myself Erika back when I cruised the bars in Philly in neo-Aryan gear, brass swastikas and all, ya shoulda seen me, woulda creamed ya cojones, but when I came up here to blow all that, I took back the name ma mommy gimme, seemed only right, know what I mean . . . ?”

She laughed when Bobby goggled uneasily at her. “Hey, relax, boy, I ain’t about to eat
you
, not my thing, I’m what they call a diesel dyke, though never drove nothin’ but these fuel-cell haulers, now this time, it’s a load of logs I’m pickin’ up—’bout a hundred down the road for Salt Lake, so I can take ya as far as the turnoff. . . .”

Bobby got another hitch almost immediately after Esmerelda dropped him off, this time on a slow, full log hauler driven by a black man named Duke who claimed to have had a cuppa with the New York Yankees way back when, went two for fifteen in the majors, you could look it up, but just couldn’t handle the split finger. Duke took him all the way down into the corner of Utah, where the mountains got lower and rockier, and things started to dry out, and he could feel the warm breath of the approaching desert, and taught him more about baseball than Bobby had dreamed possible.

The sun was going down by the time Duke dropped him off at a little rustic camp beside roaring river rapids, just a tiny general store, a fuel station, and a few cars and tents down by the riverside.

“Now you listen up, Bob,” he told him. “You don’t try to go no further tonight, and tomorrow you don’t take no ride that don’t get you all the way to Vegas, ’cause you
do not
want your ass caught out there by the road in the desert! And when you get to Dodger Stadium, spring for a seat in the lower deck right behind the plate and see if you can pick up the old split finger any better’n I could; you’ll see why I’m out here truckin’ it, betcha!”

Bobby went into the store and bought himself packets of some plastic-looking yellow cheese and rubbery pink charcuterie, an apple, a small loaf of whole wheat bread, and a can of beer, which was about all he could figure out to put together for dinner out of the meager stock. The man behind the cash register had long red hair, a bushy unkempt beard of the same color, a big belly bulging out his T-shirt over a wide belt, and all in all fitted perfectly Bobby’s image of what an old mountain man should look like.

“Uh . . . you wouldn’t have a room to rent for the night, would you?” he asked.

The storekeeper looked at him peculiarly. “This look like a motel, Angeleno?” he said. “Too good to sleep out by the river?”

“Uh . . . I don’t have a tent or a sleeping bag.”

“Huh?” The storekeeper seemed quite amazed by that. “Watcha doin’ way out here without campin’ gear?” he demanded righteously.

“Hitching my way to California.”

“Jeez!” the storekeeper exclaimed, his surprise tinged with a certain awe, or so it seemed. He studied Bobby speculatively. “Ain’t got no room, but I got an old bag I could lend you. ’Course this ain’t free-lunch city.”

“How much?”

“Got something else in mind, city boy. You afraid of a little honest grunt-work like the rest of ’em?”

“I can handle it, I guess. . . .”

The storekeeper took him around the back of the building and opened a door flanked by three big empty garbage cans. Inside was a musty storeroom piled with cardboard boxes of canned goods. Empty cartons, old tin cans, and general litter were scattered all over the dusty wooden floor.

“Shouldn’t take you more’n an hour t’clean this mess up, and then you can have the sleeping bag for the night, or crash in here. ’Course if you ain’t never slept out under the stars in
this
country, and from the looks of you you haven’t, y’d be an asshole ta miss it!”

It actually took more like two hours for Bobby to get the job done, but he really didn’t mind, it was the first time he had done physical labor for
anything
, let alone a simple place to sleep, and somehow it made him feel . . . connected to something he could not quite define, a part, somehow, of the mighty landscape, of this western country and its timeless slow-moving stream of life.

And of course, he opted for the sleeping bag and took it down to the riverbank, where he ate his cold meal and drank his beer staring into the foaming rapids, luminescent and scintillant in the brilliant mountain starlight.

Then he crawled into the sleeping bag, deliciously tired after the long eventful day, and lay there gazing up at the stars through the gently waving tree crowns.

Oh yes, he had been right to leave the cities and the airports behind him to ride his thumb along the open road, for an entirely different America had emerged from this ground-level perspective.

People here still seemed to be living off lumbering, ranching, farming, and servicing each other, as they had since other sons of Europe had first made their way west across this great continent to become Americans. The American West and its people had in some deep way not changed since the days of the cowboys and Indians and would in the same deep way remain as they were long after cities grew old on Mars.