The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (22 page)

Three-quarters of the people who give me rides say they never pick up hitchhikers. An equal number tell me I’m “clean-cut.” I knew appearances would count for a lot on this trip. But every time I shave and shower and put on a fresh shirt, I never think about the one aspect of my appearance I can’t change: the color of my skin.

If a “clean-cut” black man set out from San Francisco on a penniless journey and followed my exact route, how far would he get? I’d like to think he’d be standing here with me, in Terre Haute, Indiana, but I fear that may not be the case.

I walk south out of town, past another Kmart and Wal-Mart, and set my pack down near a stoplight. Traffic is bumper to bumper, so I know I’ll be standing here a while. For some reason, the time it takes to get a ride is inversely proportional to the number of passing cars.

A van pulling an aluminum fishing boat drives by. I don’t bother making eye contact with the driver. Tourists never stop. But the van pulls to the shoulder, and a man steps out of the passenger door and waves me over.

He makes room for my pack behind the front seats.

“Don’t squash my tortilla chips,” the driver says as I load my pack in the van.

The driver’s name is Frank. He’s a large man with a jowly face and a stomach like a medicine ball. He’s semiretired from his hose and brass fittings business. The passenger, Phil, is a retired farmer. He’s short and trim and wears a Purdue Boilermakers baseball cap. Both men live in Kokomo, north of Indianapolis. Phil has 14 years on Frank, but it looks the other way around.

“You go to school here?” Frank says.

“No, I’m from California.”

“Shoot, I saw your sign say ‘Sullivan.’ I thought you might be able to tell us something about the fishing down there.”

Frank and Phil chuckle about how the one hitchhiker they decide to pick up turns out to be a know-nothing out-of-towner.

Frank says he needs a smoke. He asks Phil to find a coffee and cigarette stop on the map. It’s Phil’s van and he doesn’t allow smoking.

Frank pulls into a Hardee’s on the outskirts of Sullivan.

“Come on, we’ll buy you a cup of coffee,” Phil says.

“Yeah, come on in with us,” Frank says.

Coffee with cream and sugar sounds good, even though I have an empty stomach and I’ll get the shakes.

Inside the Hardee’s, my eyes lock in on a copy of the
Indianapolis Star
newspaper on a vacant table. I snatch it up quickly. Every section is here, even the sports page. It’s the find of the trip.

Frank buys three large coffees and we take a table by the window.

“I once hitchhiked to Newark, New Jersey,” Phil says. He pronounces it “New Work.” “That was in forty-two, way before you were born.”

“It was so long ago, Phil had to stop along the way and make peace with the Indians,” Frank says, his belly jiggling at the joke.

Frank snuffs the butt of his cigarette in the ashtray. Phil stands up to leave.

“One more cigarette,” Frank says.

“Frank is trying to quit smoking,” Phil says, rolling his eyes.

Phil quit cold turkey ages ago.

“I had a nightmare,” Phil says. “A good buddy of mine was laying on a slab of cement in the morgue. He had a cigarette in his mouth, and the smoke was drifting up over his head. He was dead as that tobacco. He died a few months later of a heart attack.”

“I used to smoke two packs a day of Camel unfiltereds,” Frank says. “Now I’m down to six a day of these filtereds. I have two in the morning, two around now, and two before I go to bed.”

“He quit for three weeks,” Phil says. “I told him there’s no need to start up again.”

“I had a heart attack September eleventh,” Frank says. “That one scared me. I’m trying to take better care of myself.”

He takes a long drag on the cigarette. The heart attack three weeks ago was his fourth.

“Have you had surgery?” I say.

“Yeah, I’ve had ’bout everything done to me,” Frank says.

He smokes the cigarette until there’s nothing left, then sucks on the filter like it’s a marijuana roach.

“Frank, good thing them cigarettes have filters, or you’d be burning your fingers right now,” Phil says.

Frank smiles with embarrassment. He knows he’s hooked. He changes the subject.

“What do you do?”

“Before this trip, I was working as a journalist,” I say.

“You gonna write a book about this trip?” Frank says.

“I hope to.”

“Well, write your name down and the name of the book so I can get it when it comes out.”

I write “The Kindness of Strangers” on the back of the Hardee’s receipt, but I don’t put down the penniless part.

I ride with Frank and Phil a few more miles until we come to the turnoff for Route 54.

“Good luck with the fishing,” I say.

“Have you got money for food?” Frank says.

“The point of my book is to go across the country with no money.”

Frank reaches for his wallet and draws out a ten.

“No, thank you. I can’t accept any money.”

He holds the bill out to me. “Take it.”

“I appreciate it, but I can’t. I’ve got to get across America without a single penny.”

“No wonder you’re skinny,” Frank says. “If I’da known that, I woulda bought you something to eat back there at Hardee’s.”

“I’ve got food in my pack. Thanks for the ride and the coffee, though.”

After they drive off, I wonder if I should’ve taken the ten from Frank and given it away. It would’ve meant 10 fewer dollars for cigarettes. It could’ve been
my
act of kindness to a stranger. But I think Frank has enough money to smoke himself into an early grave. I doubt he’ll even be around long enough to buy this book.

I have vices, but smoking isn’t one of them. When I was seven, I asked my great-grandmother for a puff from her cigarette. I was fascinated by the way she held the burning stick. To my astonishment, she started a new one and handed it to me. I asked her how many puffs I could have. As many as I wanted, she said, it was my cigarette. I took one drag and about coughed up a lung. It was the nicest thing my great-grandmother ever did for me.

I walk east along Indiana 54, a narrow two-laner that threads a thick forest of hickory, spruce and oak. The air smells clean, and it feels good to be back in the country.

My foot almost comes down on a pack of cigarettes sitting on the side of the road. It’s a full pack, newly opened. A driver must have gone to light up, then decided,
That’s it, no more
, and tossed the bad habit out the window. I pause in the woods and wish the brave soul good luck.

I stop at a jog in the road flanked by a gas station. Before I’ve finished writing down the name of the next town, a man pumping gas offers me a ride. A woman sits in the front seat. I climb in back. The door is smashed in, and I slam it several times to get it to close.

“My husband used to hitchhike,” the woman says. “He was a professional hitchhiker. We both worked for carnivals. He’s been all over the world. Well, he’s been to the Virgin Islands.”

The man stops the pump at three dollars and slides behind the wheel. He has a pocked, unshaven face framed by a greasy shag hairdo. His scary looks are tempered by his friendly manner.

“I told him you were a professional hitchhiker,” the woman says.

“Well, I guess I was,” he says, turning back to me as he drives. “I had this Army ammo box, see? And I put a motorcycle battery in it. Then I connected a CB radio to it. I’d talk to truckers and get rides. I’d make money at it, too. Polishing the tanks, unloading the trucks. I’d do that four months a year and work for the carnival eight months.”

We drive 30 miles to Bloomfield. The man drops his wife at a nursing home, where she works as a nurse’s assistant. They met four years ago at a carnival in the South.

The man ran away from home at 14 to join the circus.

“I worked with elephants for a year,” he says. “Well, I shoveled elephant shit.”

He switched to carnivals—where he operated rides and ran games—because they paid better. When he tired of the road, he and his wife returned to her hometown in Indiana.

“I figure after sixteen years, it’s time to settle down,” he says.

Settling down at the moment means unemployment. Jobs in this part of Indiana are as scarce as bearded ladies.

The man drives me to a private campground outside of Bloomfield.

“If this don’t look good, you can ride back with me to the house. We don’t got much there, but you can have a ham sandwich.”

I thank the man for the offer but tell him I’ll be fine. Once again I’m amazed at how often it’s the ones with little to eat who are quick to share their food.

CHAPTER 30

Hoosier Park hugs the shore of a clear lake formed from an abandoned coal pit. The campground is empty but for a couple of RVs, their owners nowhere in sight. A giant maple tree creaks in the wind like an old man’s bones. Leaves fall from the sky like brown snowflakes.

I knock on the door of a simple cabin. The fellow who answers is a bowling ball of a man, round and heavy. A pair of glasses rests on his pug nose. A strand of hair sweeps across an otherwise bald head topped by a baseball cap that bears the image of an Indiana road map. A fat cigar juts from his mouth.

“All right if I camp here?” I say.

“Yeah, but it’ll cost you.”

“How much?”

“Two dollars for campers is all.”

“How about I do some clean-up work for you?”

“That low, huh?” he says.

“Yeah, I’m traveling across the country without a penny.”

“How you do that?”

“Pretty well, actually.”

“Yeah, why not? We don’t have any campers now anyway.”

The campground lacks a shower and a sink. I ask the man if he has a container I can use to shave. He comes out a few minutes later with a pan.

Arnie, 65, is a retired basketball coach—fitting, as basketball is the leading religion of Indiana.

He has two passions in life—his son Todd and basketball—which converged into one obsession when Todd led the high school basketball team Arnie coached to a state championship.

Todd is now grown and off on his own, and this is Arnie’s first year away from the game. He bought the campground to see him through his twilight years, but he misses coaching. When the school buses started up this fall, he nearly cried.

Arnie grew up poor in southern Indiana. His dad died in a coal mining accident. Arnie ran off and joined the Marines when he was 16. He went to mainland China after World War II to help train Chiang Kai-shek’s troops, who were fighting Mao’s communist forces. Mao’s army was assisted by the Soviet Union, and Arnie says he fought against Russians—a claim not yet acknowledged by history books.

One night when the trains he was guarding came under communist attack, Arnie was separated from his company. He roamed through China with the nationalists for eight months, engaging the enemy numerous times. He was captured when he wandered into a communist-held village, and later escaped during U.S. artillery fire. He then walked for several weeks around the Great Wall to evade the communists.

“They talk of Mao’s great thousand-mile march, “ Arnie scoffs. “Hell, I walked eleven hundred miles.”

When the communists finally closed in, Arnie had only four hours to reach the sea. He jumped in a Jeep and maneuvered his way through the hordes of fleeing nationalists. He reached the docks just in time to board the last U.S. ship to pull out.

“You say you’re out looking for interesting people, well, you came to the right place. There ain’t a hundred people in the world been through what I have.”

He chomps down on his cigar. “Hell, it’s storybook.”

I pitch my tent and sit at a picnic table. An hour later, Arnie walks out the door toward his Jeep pickup.

“I’m going into town for a sandwich,” he calls over. “I know I’ll have to buy, but you’re welcome to come along.”

We drive into Bloomfield to a diner called the Huddle. Arnie heads straight for an eight-seat table in the middle of the restaurant and plops down.

“Might as well have room,” he says.

He orders chopped steak, string beans and the salad bar. He swears he’s got to lose the 40 pounds he’s put on since he quit coaching. I order the all-you-can-eat buffet.

After China, Arnie returned to Indiana and went to college, earning his teaching credential. He later served with the Marines in Korea and Vietnam, where he was an underwater demolition specialist.

When Arnie graduated college, he became an industrial arts teacher and the basketball coach for an Indianapolis high school. His teams were consistent winners, always ranked near the top in the basketball-crazy state.

He married a fellow teacher named Katherine. She was a stunning woman—bright and beautiful. It was forever a mystery how the homely jarhead managed to snare the most fetching female from Greene County, Indiana.

It took Katherine 10 years to get pregnant. Arnie got malaria during the war and suffered from a low sperm count. When Todd finally did come along, Arnie set a basketball on the baby’s chest the day he was born. His future was never in doubt. He became the coach’s lifelong student.

“I worried that Todd was an unpopular kid,” Arnie says. “What I found out was, none of his friends wanted to come over to the house ’cause I was always drilling him.”

As Arnie chased his goal of a state championship, Katherine joined several liberal causes. She worked for Indians, blacks, Latinos, and any other groups she saw as disenfranchised.

“She wanted to turn our house into an international village,” Arnie says. “She never had anything bad to say about anyone. She was caring. She cared so much about everyone else, she left her own family.”

The night Katherine told Arnie she wanted a divorce, he demanded custody of Todd. He’d do anything to keep him. “I won’t lose you both,” he said. Katherine resisted. Arnie didn’t wait for a court to decide. He skipped Indiana with an Oldsmobile, $120 and Todd. He left the house and everything in it to Katherine.

He wouldn’t tell her where he was taking their son. He promised her that if she alerted the police, she’d never see Todd again.