In the Country of the Blind

by Edward Hoagland

  Chuck had a tarp for the Great Smokies, where he wanted to camp for a night. Still had his temporary plates. He was amused that Press’s wife had kicked him out for going blind, mentioned having met a man too rich for his wife to leave, so she simply would use a vibrator at night while lying in bed right beside him. Life was a mess, he said.

  They purred along south, and not being able to see the congestion on the New Jersey Turnpike eliminated for Press the old irritations of travel.

  Magic carpeting. The sky’s shade of robin’s-egg blue, then chartreuse darkened bluntly to black, with Chuck stopping only for bathroom calls, gas, and pizza and coffee.

  “I’m in my element,” he murmured. Somewhere in the Carolinas he propped up that tent fly for sleeping purposes. They lit a campfire and spread the gaggle of blankets, plus whatever unspoken trove of materials Chuck might be transporting and probably a gun to guard it with. He got a bit high but not obstreperously, chatted with himself without revealing secretive fodder for Press’s musings. So far, as on the trip to Portland, he had no reason to regret throwing in his lot with Chuck.

  Chuck left to use the phone booth several times and reflected rhetorically on whether he wanted to return to Ten Mile Farm next summer, speaking to Press in big-brother fashion, as if their age difference and sophistication were reversed.

  Other campers made nesting sounds and irrational comments, or at cross-purposes, misheard each other, then apologized. Chuck’s calls from the booth at the ranger’s office were more complicated than he’d expected. Arguing with the other end—and employing the name Garth once again—he was apparently postponing a delivery, and needed more change from Press to feed the phone. He laughed and said, “They couldn’t figure out where I am! Better than a hotel, that’s for sure. No settled address is best.”

  He left to replenish their food, though Press, fingering ant hills on the ground, had no sure way of knowing that the car would return, just the tarp overhead. Like people’s voices, he could recognize car engines, not by make or model but simply whose they were, and duly did hear Chuck’s pull in next to him, with Cracker Jack popcorn, plus catfish gumbo, for a treat. “Good catfish, like Memphis. We may head to the Mississippi anyhoo. No ands, buts, or ors. I bet neither you or I ever thought we’d be doing this.”

  So, he wouldn’t be rubbing sunscreen on the backs of a bunch of carnie strippers wintering by a pool. A fantasy, that. But Press’s mind slipped into another. How about if Chuck soon dropped him off at the Amtrak station in Atlanta or some such place and he bought a roomette to Los Angeles. The porters would lead him to the dining car for every meal, the maître d’ then seat him at a different table where he could strike up new conversations with obliging strangers, and in between mount to the bubble car where he’d really find acquaintanceships, as people helpfully described the landscape streaming by. Might even score a wife, in fact. Lonely widows and divorcees often took to a long rail ride, even in this airport age, and empathy was commonplace. An Amtrak read was not an airplane read and you’d board with different expectations. There’s time for stories, for sympathy and friendship. Somebody might bring him home with her.

  On the road after a sleep, he realized he didn’t actually know which state they were in. Tennessee? The sun’s position indicated they were traveling west. At lunch he was deposited in a restaurant with a margarita while Chuck placed more phone calls. Their matey relationship maintained its even keel, however, because Press was drifting willy-nilly in his wake. No money arguments, nor as to food or route. The scents in these restaurants, or outdoors, and eavesdropping on a hundred conversations unnoticed as just “the blind man”—there were rewards. He played it as it lay, enjoying the randomness of someone else’s stop and go. Think of it as an amusement park, he told himself, where he was riding all the rides, and listening to yet another next-stool yak-yak at the candied-apple counter, the tapestry of America, while Chuck attended to business. The waitress wished him well and put her hand on his hand on his wallet in front of the other customers to take out the proper amount, tip included, then patted him as a signal to pocket it again.

  “Where’d you get that funny name?” Chuck asked in the car.

  “You mean Prescott?”

  “Sure.”

  He pondered whether he wanted to be left off, as they pointed toward a declining sun and therefore the Mississippi. That Ozark commune Chuck had come from—did it still figure in his calculations? “What’s the pot like they grow in Arkansas?”

  “Well, they have their own trip there,” Chuck said.

  “So what’s a trip like?”

  “They never fed you any acid? Mescaline opens the heart. Acid’s a rocket ride. Hash is like accelerated pot, even more euphoric. Coke’s a great high. But do you know what we do with snitches? We tie them up and stick them in the bathtub and then turn on the water.”

  Press was taken aback. “So are you dropping me off in Little Rock?”

  “Oh, I’m not going to Arkansas. I’m not certain where, but you can bail whenever you want. I have my principles.” After a pause he added that Louisiana, for instance, was crawling with oil rig jobs for a pipe fitter. “I might go back to that. And they have rest homes there, if you like the climate.”

  “Nice idea.” Was he afloat in the wrong place?

  “The women are sweeter, Cajuns, Creoles.”

  “I like a drawl, so relaxed. ‘Come back and see us. Don’t be a stranger.’”

  “The Bible Belt. They know about Noah’s Ark. Two by two. Eating apples.” Chuck laughed. “Some nook will fit you. Pay by the month and a damsel will come, make sure you’re fed, and change your bed.”

  “You make it sound plausible.”

  “But isn’t that what you already had, really?”

  Having traded suppositions, they fell silent for some miles, except for burping from the driver’s side. From his scent and a slight slurring, Press suspected he’d been drinking more than on their Portland drive. Uneasily he wondered not just whether Chuck was in the process of delivering drugs somewhere, but if perhaps he weren’t also detouring right and left like this in order to snatch from the dealers whatever he had. A wildly dangerous proposition. Suddenly be a rich man.

  Although they were on an interstate traveling at speed, the car teetered and shimmied. Press braced himself against the plastic dashboard or gripped the handle hanging above his passenger’s-side door. Had he heard a paper bag crinkle as when somebody tipples slyly from a bottle? “Northwest, southwest? What do you do with a hundred thousand bucks?” Chuck chuckled. He said his father had been a rolling stone too, but a mean drunk, not agreeable. Liked to show up unexpectedly. “What could she do?” he ruminated. “Have him deported?” A friend of his mom’s had got hitched to an immigrant who wasn’t legal, and just called the Immigration Service when he turned ugly. Back to Latvia he went. As for child support, when Press broached the subject, Chuck’s father’s view had been that if a woman had a kid she ought to be able to support it.

  “Like the hippies?” Press ventured, knowing that Chuck had one or two of his own stashed somewhere. Was it California, he hinted?

  “Maybe kinda.”

  The dapple of sunlight with tree shadows flickered through the windshield. The car slithered but not at great speed. Their stops also seemed erratic or slipshod, shifting direction in relation to the sun. Had they left the interstate? Chuck’s mind must be in turmoil, Press worried.

  What happened that waning afternoon was that Chuck, rounding a mountain curve too fast, to his surprise lost control of the wheel or perhaps the car’s dynamics, and hit a guardrail, then a tree. It was like the gargantuan thud in a balloon in a comic strip. Press was stunned, not cognizant of what had transpired for half a minute, except he felt in sequence his left knee, forehead, chest, and so forth. He discovered the seat belt had not broken and he was not perceptibly hurt, although aching. Half upside down, he wished he could see where they were or what had been done to the car, but couldn’t.
They were constricted by an accordioned car frame, wedged on its side, but Chuck cursed like a man in reasonably fair shape.

  “Totaled! How are you?” He checked Press’s head and leg with one hand. “Lucky, huh? We were both lucky.” He could climb out through the windshield, he said, but told Press to relax and rest, picking broken glass off him. “They’ll extract you, easy.”

  It sounded like Chuck was scrounging items from the back, and he retrieved the gun from the glove compartment. “Thank god the damned trunk popped open.” A satchel or something bumped against the door frame. “Very lucky,” he repeated, reminding himself that they hadn’t been hurt, and collecting those temporary license plates, laughing mirthlessly because that too was good luck—a less traceable car.

  “I think you’re best staying where you are. Cops will be along and get you out. If you try it yourself, you’ll get into trouble and fall. I’d appreciate it if mum’s the word regarding me. Vermont, looking for a new life. A ride with a stranger. They’ll put you on a plane for home. You’ve got nothing to answer for. We had a good time, don’t you think, so don’t feed ’em leads. You couldn’t see what or wherefore anyhow.”

  Shortly he was gone, thrashing through the brush up to the highway. “I’ll call for help!” he yelled back. Soon, a car seemed to stop and pick Chuck up.

  Thumbing for Arcadia? Press resolved to honor their palship by not mentioning Arkansas or communes or whatever. And he couldn’t divulge the plate numbers or Chuck’s last name because he didn’t know either, and being blind, wouldn’t know where they’d stayed. Songbirds in the trees close to the car began trilling normally again, as he groped carefully around for where the dashboard had buckled, how the steering wheel had missed impacting his chest and stomach, the crumpled door next to his ribs that wouldn’t open when he tried it.

  He was confident he would be rescued, and indeed after a while he was. A car stopped. People trundled down the slope. Without a need for the Jaws of Life his door was pried open, and an ambulance transported him for a checkup. Vermont’s and Connecticut’s police confirmed his identity, address, and blindish state. The vehicle, when hauled up to be scrapped, yielded no evidence of miscreant behavior beyond Chuck’s telltale paper bag. Press told the detectives who questioned him that he had been on a joyride with an acquaintance named Chuck Something who was aiming for an oil rig job in the Gulf but had taken off after seeing that Press was okay.

  “No fixed address, this drifter?”

  “He said he had no wife. And no one he sent money to. Grew up in California. And he was trying the East.”

  “Kind of stupid to entrust your life to that kind of guy, don’t you think? And he doesn’t even want to collect his insurance?”

  “Well, cheap insurance doesn’t cover you, just the others. As far as ‘stupid’ is concerned, try being blind. And the old cliché is to walk in the moccasins of any man you’re calling stupid.”

  The police in the room didn’t respond.

  “I’m blind as you can see. What else am I going to do?”

  They kept him around for a couple of days before shipping him home to Melba.

  About the Author

  Edward Hoagland (born December 21, 1932, in New York, New York) is an author best known for his nature and travel writing. His nonfiction has been widely praised by writers such as John Updike, who called him “the best essayist of my generation,” and Joyce Carol Oates: “Our Chopin of the genre.”

  Hoagland joined the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1951 and sold a novel about this experience, Cat Man, before graduating from Harvard in 1954. After serving two years in the army, he published The Circle Home, a novel about the boxing world of New York. Soon after, he took the first of his nine trips to Alaska and British Columbia. During the 1970s he made the first two of his five trips to Africa. After receiving two Guggenheim Fellowships, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  Mr. Hoagland has taught at The New School, Rutgers, Sarah Lawrence, CUNY, the University of Iowa, U.C. Davis, Columbia University, Beloit College, Brown, and Bennington, beginning in 1963 and retiring in 2005.

  He divides his time between Martha’s Vineyard and the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont.