The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America (23 page)

At one point, Arnie pulled off the freeway and called about teaching jobs in Australia. Months later, when Katherine agreed in court to let him have custody, he let her know that he and Todd were living in Kansas.

Arnie never remarried, raising Todd on his own.

“Just me, him and the world,” he says.

Arnie got a high school coaching job in Kansas. He did nothing but win. He moved up to bigger schools and always had his teams in the top 10.

When Todd entered high school, Arnie was finally his son’s official coach. In Todd’s senior year, father and son combined to win it all. In the state final, Todd scored 34 points, grabbed 12 rebounds, had five assists and four steals.

“We were up by one with about a minute and a half to play,” Arnie says, recalling the game as if it were last night. “That’s a long time to hold the ball. Todd came over to me on the sideline and shook my shoulders and said, ‘It’s over!’ And he went out and scored the last four points of the game. He could never dunk a ball. But in the last seconds of that championship game, he went baseline and just jammed that sucker through.”

Arnie pauses.

“Hell, it’s storybook,” he says.

Father and son weren’t finished. They went to Southeast Kansas State University in a package deal. Todd was the freshman sensation and Arnie was the new coach. They had four good years. Todd set a national free throw record for small college players and was named an All-American.

Arnie left his own mark. In a game against a Canadian college, he pulled his team off the court when the hosts refused to play the American national anthem. The controversy caught the attention of Bob Knight, Indiana University’s legendary, chair-throwing basketball coach. “That guy’s crazier than I am,” Knight reportedly said. From then on, Arnie’s team had a standing invitation to scrimmage with Knight’s squad whenever they were in Indiana. And Arnie was often seen sitting behind Knight at IU games.

When Todd graduated, he moved to Indiana to start his career as a high school basketball coach. Arnie stayed with the college in Kansas a few more seasons, then lost heart. His number-one recruit was gone—his favorite team disbanded.

Arnie needed three more years in the Indiana school system to qualify for a pension, so he returned home and signed a contract with a high school in South Bend. He did the best with what he had, taking a team ranked 428th to the top 50. But high school had changed in the years he was away. Arnie was now a dinosaur. His disciplinarian methods didn’t fly with the young, liberal principal, and he was often reprimanded.

Kids had no respect for Arnie. They called him “Crip” because his arthritic knee caused him to limp. The proud Marine had to take their abuse. His retirement was bittersweet.

It’s dark when we get back to the campground. Arnie builds a fire outside his cabin and we pull up a couple chairs. A hoot owl joins the conversation from a nearby tree.

After he quit coaching, Arnie moved to Bloomfield, where he knew the mayor. The land near the lake was owned by the city. Arnie figured it would make a good campground and he struck a deal.

The only problem was that the wooded area was a hangout for a gang of drug dealers. When Arnie cleared the ground for campsites, he found syringes in the grass. Gang members tore through the park at night in pickups to try to scare Arnie off. When he built a gate at the entrance, they drove around from the other side of the lake. Arnie felled a tree across the dirt road, but they took a chain saw to it and came marauding through.

The next night, Arnie was ready for them.

He blocked the road with another tree. The gang again sawed through it and drove in. But this time, Arnie had dug a pit on his side of the tree with a backhoe and covered the hole with branches.

It took three tow trucks to pull the pickup out.

As the gang members stomped around the lip of the pit cursing Arnie, he watched from the dark woods. He suddenly switched on a floodlight pointed at himself. The hooligans saw one scary Marine. He wore a helmet and camouflage face paint, and stood at attention with a smuggled AK-47 on his shoulder.

Arnie clicked off the light and eerily faded into the black night. The gang never came back.

“Hell, it’s storybook,” he says.

When Arnie moved to Bloomfield, he befriended a 15-year-old girl, the daughter of a welfare mother who kept company with various dodgy men. Arnie thought he could save the girl, Keri, from a life like her mother’s. He told her that if she avoided the wrong crowd at school, he’d provide for her. He bought her clothes and shoes and other gifts. Then one day he saw her standing on a corner, snuggling up with a boy Arnie knew to be a drug dealer. Arnie cut Keri off. His last advice to her was to get on the pill.

Keri went to Arnie for help a few months later. She was pregnant. Arnie now gives her money for diapers and baby formula. He always demands a receipt. Tomorrow he’s taking her shopping in Indianapolis.

Arnie gets up and throws another log on the fire.

I ask him why he never remarried.

“I know the girl I shoulda married,” he says. “She was from Hollywood.”

Arnie met her on a weekend pass when he was in boot camp on the West Coast. “I took her to the prom. We stayed in touch when I was in the Marines and after I got back from China. She wanted to get married, but I wasn’t ready. She wrote to my mom for years.”

Four decades later, Arnie decided he had to find her. “She once told me she had an uncle who worked at Soldier Field. I wrote the Chicago Parks Department twice. They wrote back and said they had no such name on their retirement rolls. I placed ads in the
Los Angeles Times
. When my mom died, I searched for the letters, but she had thrown them out. I’ve been looking for her for the last ten years.”

Like his father, Todd is a bachelor.

Todd dated the same girl for eight years—through high school and college. “Then she broke it off a month before the wedding,” Arnie says, shaking his head. “She was a cousin of that mystery writer up there in Maine. Stephen…”

“King?” I say.

“Yeah. It was gonna be the biggest wedding ever.”

The campfire rages.

All this talk of lost love gets Arnie started again on Katherine. “People always told me I didn’t deserve her. Well, they were probably right. But no one did.”

Arnie stares into the flame.

“I’ve never gotten over it, not really,” he says. “I don’t sit around and mope. But when I’m feeling ill, or I go to bed with a pain in my side, I get this nightmare. I’m young again, and everything’s good. Then it turns bad. I relive that awful feeling. And I wake up, usually at two or three in the morning. And, boy, when that happens, that’s all the sleep for that night.”

In the end, Katherine was the coach’s greatest trophy. But it was a trophy he never really won. He only got to hold it for a while.

Arnie rubs his eyes, and the tears on his cheeks glisten in the glow of the flame.

As frustrating as his final years of coaching were, he’s got to get back in the game. “I can’t let go,” he says.

He plans to send résumés to 500 high schools. He knows most of them will reject him on age alone. Maybe he’ll change his birth date from 1929 to 1939, he says. Anybody can get one digit wrong, right? He wants a school near the ocean. Maybe that would entice Todd, a scuba diving fanatic. The team would be reunited.

“I’m gonna take a class in political correctness and learn sensitivity,” Arnie says. “I think I can update myself, be able to take the kids’ shit. Maybe I’ll even see a psychiatrist. Maybe he can tell me some shit. I’m gonna lose forty pounds. Hell, it’ll work. Someone wants a winner.”

The flames die out. Arnie struggles to his feet. He invites me inside.

When I step through the cabin door, my eyes go wide. The room is furnished almost entirely with memories.

“This is the sanctuary,” Arnie says.

It’s a shrine to Todd and glory past. The walls are laden with basketball memorabilia—plaques and photos and framed newspaper clippings. Shelves are lined with trophies, draped with nets cut down from rims in victory. The basketball Todd scored his one thousandth point with sits on the television, next to the one he used to sink his fifty-fifth consecutive free throw. The VCR is loaded with a tape of the Kansas state high school basketball championship.

My gaze falls to a framed black-and-white photo on the end table. Todd is pictured surrounded by college teammates, accepting a trophy. A pretty cheerleader kneeling at his feet looks up at him adoringly.

Arnie sees me staring at the picture. He picks it up.

“That’s the gal Todd went with for eight years. She’s the one who broke his heart. And mine. Tore the shit out of me. The only reason I keep it is Todd’s in it.”

He returns the frame to the table.

“Yep, he made all his daddy’s dreams come true. I always wanted to be a Marine, and I wanted to have my son win me a state championship. Thirty-four points, twelve rebounds, five assists and four steals. Mr. Basketball.

“Hell, it’s storybook.”

CHAPTER 31

Many folks I meet in Indiana have no concept of geography. When I tell them I’m crossing America, they often say, “You’re gonna see a lot of country.” Or, “You’ve got an awful long way to go.” It’s as if they believe Indiana still sits on the western edge of the United States. I guess they haven’t heard of the Louisiana Purchase.

The preacher and his wife stop for me in Stanford, Indiana. I know he’s a preacher before I meet him because the tailgate of his truck is branded with pinstripe that reads, “The Preacher.”

“What kind of preacher are you?” I say.

“Nondenominational.”

“By the Book?”

“It’s the only way.”

The preacher wears a black cowboy hat and a string tie. He’s got a voice made for radio. Before he became a preacher, he was a used car salesman. When I think about it, it’s not that huge a career change.

He and his wife have moved back to Indiana after 20 years in California. They hated living in Fresno.

“Only twenty-eight percent of Fresno is white now,” the preacher’s wife says.

Tens of thousands of Southeast Asian refugees have immigrated to Fresno since the end of the Vietnam War. The preacher’s wife has a friend who works in Fresno’s subsidized housing office.

“She told me they don’t even know how to use the refrigerator,” she says. “They put boxes of dirt in them. It’s terrible how they treat those apartments.”

I tell her that refugees are among the most hard-working, productive citizens of our society. As for their confusion over the use of Western appliances, I point out to her that many cultures have home furnishings she would find equally baffling. I smile to myself when I imagine the preacher’s wife encountering the squat toilets common outside the West.

The preacher loves his new church. There isn’t a single black in the congregation. Next week he’ll share his vision of God with third-graders at the local public school—something he admits he could never do in California. He’s excited that the separation between church and state is a concept foreign to his part of the country.

I ask the preacher why he picked me up.

“Based on your appearance,” he says. “You hate to say that, but that’s the way it is. I’ll tell you the truth, now, if you had long hair and a beard, no way I would have stopped for you.”

“You mean long hair and a beard like Jesus?” I say.

The preacher can only smile.

We reach Nashville, Indiana, a country-western tourist trap patterned after its namesake in Tennessee. The preacher pulls into a Hardee’s and says come on in.

“I don’t want you to put in your book that the preacher wouldn’t buy you lunch.”

I can’t get away from the antiques shops of Nashville fast enough. An angelic young man with long blond hair stops for me. His mountain bike rides in the back of a Jeep Wrangler decorated with a Grateful Dead bumper sticker. I feel like I’ve been transported back to California.

Darryl is taking a semester off from college to work construction and save some money. He lives in a cabin without running water. He’s driving only a couple of miles, to a state park. I think it must be a good spot to ride his bike, but he says he’s going to the campground to take a shower.

The mention of running water pricks up my ears. I haven’t had a shower in three days—the longest stretch of the trip.

“Do the showers cost anything?” I ask.

“They’re supposed to,” Darryl says, “but I never have to pay.”

He agrees to let me come along.

We stop at the entrance to the Brown County State Park. The ranger in the booth recognizes Darryl and waves us through. The forest is a sunburst of reds, oranges, yellows and purples. It looks like a rainbow exploded and dripped on the trees.

The shower is piping hot, and I linger under it long after the dirt has melted away, then change into clean clothes.

Darryl drives five miles out of his way to drop me at a market in Gnaw Bone, where he says it will be easier to catch a ride.

Columbus is the next town east, and that’s how I feel. Like Columbus, out discovering a new world—a world without money.

A rusted beater pulls up in front of the market and a young man with shaggy hair and a greasy tank top steps out. The driver remains in the car. When the fellow comes out of the store, he gives me a long look. I watch out of the corner of my eye as the men talk. They drive away, only to stop 50 feet later behind an ice locker. I can’t see what they’re doing. A couple minutes later, they turn around and stop alongside me.

“You goin’ to Columbus?” the driver says.

“What?” I say, stalling for time to think of an excuse.

“You goin’ to Columbus?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Hey, no offense, but I only ride with single drivers. I appreciate it though.” I give his door a friendly rap.

“Oh, ’cause we’re goin’ to Columbus. I was just gonna give you a ride, is all.” He shoots me a smile absent of sincerity.

“Thanks anyway.”

“Well, I hope you get a ride.”

It’s the first ride of the trip I’ve refused. When the men drive off, I congratulate myself for saving my life.