The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America

by McIntyre, Mike

  CHAPTER 24

  I planned to reach Missouri today, but I’m too rattled to press any farther. An Amish man rides by in a horse and buggy. I take it as a sign: Slow down.

  I park myself on a bench on the courthouse lawn. Small town America, a parade, Old Glory fluttering in the breeze. All that’s missing is some apple pie, but the raisin bars Eric packed for me do nicely.

  A couple in their forties sit down one bench over. The man glances at my pack.

  “How far you going?” he says.

  “The East Coast.”

  “Just thumbing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Boy, I’d be afraid,” the woman says. “I don’t hitchhike, and I don’t stop for hitchhikers.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a little shaky now,” I say. “I’ve had thirty-nine rides so far. Two of them were bad, one being the guy who just let me off.”

  “What was wrong with him?” the woman says.

  “He was nuts. He just went berserk.”

  The man says he had some bum rides in his day. When he was in the Army, one driver took off with his duffel bag while he was in the restroom. Another time, a driver robbed him at gunpoint. That was in the sixties, when hitchhiking was safer. Despite my fears, nothing terrible has happened to me on this trip, nothing even remotely bad. I have no right to complain. The country has been more than kind.

  The woman stays behind to chat when her partner leaves for a closer look at the parade. Sally is quite attractive, with a trim figure, red hair and a bright smile that shows her gums.

  “Are you from around here originally?” I say.

  “No, we’re from Wisconsin.”

  “Was that your husband?”

  “No,” she blushes, “he’s my brother.”

  “So how did you end up in Centerville?”

  “Norman blew out a brain aneurysm twelve years ago. I brought him over here and took care of him. Then when he got better, he moved into a place of his own. Then I got some brain damage myself, and he takes care of me. We both kind of lean on each other.”

  She smiles.

  I ask what’s wrong with her.

  “Six years ago, I was robbed and beaten and strangled out at the market where I worked.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I’ve lost a lot of my memory. I can’t remember my kids’ childhood.”

  “Well, you sure seem normal,” I say. “You look great.”

  “Thank you.” She smiles bashfully. “But if you’d seen me two years ago, you wouldn’t have said that.”

  After she recovered from her physical injuries, Sally became a prisoner of her house. When she finally ventured out, she would get lost in public buildings. Even in tiny Centerville, she still looks for landmarks whenever she parks her car. She doesn’t remember good friends from before her attack.

  “A woman came up to me in the store the other day and gave me a hug,” she says. “I went, ‘Oh, get away.’ She knew me from before. She said she knew what was going on, she understood. I’ve only recently started coming out. I usually don’t talk to people. The only reason I’m talking to you is that Norman started visiting with you first.”

  I would’ve thought Sally was Centerville’s most outgoing citizen. It’s startling how appearances can mask the depths of inner trauma.

  “So did they catch the person who hurt you?” I ask.

  “Yeah, it was a husband and wife.”

  “Were they from here?”

  “Missouri. They cased the market three times during the night before they held it up. I was working graveyard alone. I knew what they were up to. I told the police, but the cop that was on that night wasn’t the regular one, and he wouldn’t listen to me. The man strangled me, and the woman was clapping and yelling, ‘Kill her! Kill her!’ Then I woke up moaning, and he bashed my head into the concrete floor. That’s what damaged my brain. There was blood everywhere, all up the walls, ’cause he cut an artery. I think they thought I was dead. I crawled into the back room and locked the door.”

  Sally remained there for five hours, bleeding, before she was found.

  The Missouri couple was released from prison after serving six years of a 25-year sentence. A condition of their parole is that they stay out of Iowa.

  Sally was recently driving to Ottumwa when she spotted a car with Missouri plates in the rearview mirror. She pulled into the slow lane, but the car wouldn’t pass her. On her way back to Centerville, she saw the same car. She doesn’t know if it was her attackers, but she’s always looking over her shoulder.

  Sally stands up from the bench. She says she’s got to get going. She’s enjoyed the visit, she says.

  I ask if she knows anyplace I can camp.

  “You can camp in my backyard,” she says without a moment’s hesitation.

  Her offer takes me by surprise. I don’t know how anyone who’s endured what she has could let a stranger set foot on her property.

  Sally gives me her address. She says she’ll be there all afternoon.

  I spend the rest of the day in the town square, writing in my journal and jotting a postcard to Anne.

  At five o’clock, I walk down a wide, tree-lined street toward Sally’s house. The air is humid, and my jeans stick to my legs. I recall Sally’s memory problem and wonder if she will have already forgotten me. I imagine her flipping out, hysterically yelling at me to go away.

  I spot Sally washing down the side of her house with a garden hose. I take a few tentative steps up the walkway. She turns and flashes her big smile.

  “Hey,” she says.

  She’s a picture of calm and serenity.

  Her house stands across the railroad tracks from a cement factory. It’s made of cedar overlap siding, painted white. A porch swing hangs in front. The crawling roots of a massive maple tree buckle the sidewalk near the street.

  The house was built in 1846 by the original homesteader. It caught fire twice and fell into disrepair. Sally bought it a couple years ago for $12,000. A contractor told her it would cost another $24,000 to fix. Sally, who once worked as an electrician, did the job herself. It was her therapy. The makeover cost only $1,400. A realtor offered Sally $40,000 for the place, but she refused. She had restored the house, and the house had restored her. They belonged together.

  “Want to bring your stuff in?” Sally says.

  The question shocks me more than her original offer to let me camp in her yard. I wonder if she has a death wish.

  The phone rings as soon as we’re through the screen door. Sally answers it, motioning me to put my pack in a bedroom just off the living room. The house is tidy and small, the two bedrooms connected by the single bathroom. Tin foil covers the bedroom windows. In Sally’s room, framed posters of Elvis Presley hang on the walls. The pictures are black and white, showing the young, thin Elvis, not the old, fat Elvis. I remember reading somewhere that Elvis put tin foil in his windows, too.

  As Sally talks on the phone, she hands me a ginger ale from the refrigerator and gestures for me to sit on the couch. She sits in the reclining chair, her feet tucked under her legs.

  “He’s from California,” she says into the phone. “No, you don’t know him…I don’t know…Becky, I don’t know…”

  She smiles into the phone and says she has to go.

  “That was Becky. She lives across the street. She knows how cautious I am. She says she’s going to come over later and check you out.”

  Pictures of Sally’s daughter and two sons hang on the living room wall. They’re adults now, but all the photos show them as kids. I wonder if it’s Sally’s attempt to jog her memory of their childhood.

  Sally was 15 when she had Lisa, who’s now 32. Sally’s boyfriend Steve was a soldier stationed in Korea when he learned Sally was pregnant. He returned to Beloit, Wisconsin, and married her. Their first son, Ted, now 28, lives near Centerville. The youngest, Scott, 25, was diagnosed with cancer six years ago, around the time of Sally’s attack. He lost his jawbone and lower lip to the disea
se. He later had brain surgery for the scar tissue sustained during radiation treatments. Scott lives in Wisconsin, but he’s soon moving in with Sally.

  Sally’s cat Aretha hobbles into the living room on three legs. Her mother chewed off her back left leg at birth. The owners were set to put the kitten to sleep when Sally stepped in and rescued it. Sally’s disability check, her sole income, is less than $500 per month. Even so, she recently managed to pay a veterinarian to surgically remove a hair ball from the cat’s intestine.

  Sally sits down next to me on the couch and flips through a family album. The photos are yellow and faded. In one, she poses with Steve in front of a black convertible. It’s their wedding day, and the future looks as bright as Sally’s smile.

  The marriage lasted 20 years. They were actually married twice. Sally divorced Steve both times for cheating on her.

  She later married Doug, a county road crew supervisor. He was a tyrant. He beat Sally, told her when to eat and sleep, and kept her from her kids. After her attack, he refused to let her seek long-term medical treatment. She wasted to 70 pounds.

  Doug once pushed her from a moving car. Another time, he threatened her with a gun. Sally was afraid to leave him because if she did, he told her, he’d kill her children. But Sally’s two eldest kids came to her aid. Ted kicked in the door of Doug’s truck to get him to come out and fight. Doug wouldn’t. Lisa later snatched a gun from Doug’s hand, and he backed down. Like all wife beaters, Doug was a coward.

  “When I saw that he wasn’t going to hurt my kids, that’s when I ran,” Sally says.

  She moved to Wisconsin to live with Scott and stayed away six months. When she came back, she took up with a man from Kansas City. He was nice enough, but he moved to California. They kept a long distance relationship going for a while. Then the man lost all ambition and became a beach bum. Sally broke it off. She’d like to marry again. She’s not picky, she says. She just wants a man who won’t drink and hit her. She hasn’t been on a date in a year.

  Sally asks if I’m hungry. You bet, I say. She sits me at the kitchen table while she whips up minute steaks, baked potatoes and corn. She says she’s not hungry and gives me both steaks.

  Becky arrives from across the street. She’s 45. Her jeans are so tight it looks like she jumped into them from a second-story window. She just broke up with her 83-year-old boyfriend. She now dates another senior citizen. She’s mad at him because he hasn’t called in a few days.

  “Becky, he went to a family funeral,” Sally says.

  “That’s no excuse.”

  Becky turns to me. “Are you a serial killer?”

  “Nope.”

  “Becky!” Sally says.

  Becky asks if we want to go to a bar on the outside of town.

  Sally is a teetotaler. She comes from a family of alcoholics. She helped her brother Norman get sober and still attends AA meetings with him. She doesn’t like bars.

  Becky begs Sally to go. She reminds her she needs to get out more.

  Sally asks if I want to go. If she does, I say. Sally says okay, and Becky says she’ll meet us there.

  I wash the dishes while Sally gets ready. She emerges from her room dressed in jeans and a denim shirt. She wears the white frosted lipstick that was popular back in the sixties. At 47, she still looks young and innocent and happy, baring no trace of the dark shadows cast over her life.

  When we get to the bar, Becky is throwing darts at an electronic dartboard. A Country and Western band plays, but nobody listens. Sally orders a Diet Pepsi and tells me to have anything I want. I ask the bartender for a Bubble Up.

  The three of us play several games of darts. Sally has an unorthodox delivery. She squints her left eye, lunges forward and thrusts her right leg back. When she lets the dart fly, her eyes open wide. It’s an adorable sight, and I would be content to sit on a bar stool and watch Sally throw darts all night.

  A thin man with black hair and a scowl stares from the end of the bar. Sally sees him and leans closer to me.

  “He’s been trying to get me to go out with him for a year,” she says. “He’s a beater, though. That’s how he lost his last wife. I want him to think I’m with you.”

  It’s after midnight when we drive home. I watch TV while Sally talks on the phone with Becky. When she hangs up, there’s an awkward moment, as if Becky had been here in the room and then left us alone. The house is still. Sally and I talk late into the night. I nod off momentarily several times, yet I’m curious what will happen next.

  Finally, Sally says, “How hard is it to put your tent up?”

  I sit up, a little relieved.

  “Not hard at all. There are just two poles.”

  “I feel bad, not letting you sleep in the house, but I just wouldn’t feel comfortable. I told Becky, ‘He’s such a nice guy, I don’t know why I don’t let him sleep in Scott’s room.’ But I just wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

  “Hey, you don’t have to explain anything,” I say, getting to my feet. “After all you’ve been through, I’m amazed you’d even let me in the house.”

  “In the morning, I’ll cook you breakfast and you can have a shower,” she says.

  “That’d be great.”

  I pitch my tent under the maple tree, holding my flashlight between my teeth. It’s warm and windy, and my sleep is heavy with dreams.

  Noise from the cement factory wakes me early in the morning. I pack everything up and sit on the porch steps. I hear music inside, but I don’t want to take a chance on startling Sally.

  She sees me through the screen door and says, “Well, come on in.”

  I shave and shower. Sally fixes me eggs, potatoes, bacon and toast. I again eat alone.

  “Becky gave me shit last night,” Sally says. “She wanted me to try to get you in bed. I keep telling her no, I don’t do that. See, that’s Becky. I try to change her and she tries to change me and we both stay the same.”

  No one has ever bashed my head in, but there’s a part of me that’s damaged. That’s the part that wants to go to Sally right now and hold her, then carry her into her room and lay her down on her bed, and afterward gaze up at the foil-covered windows and the pictures of Elvis.

  I don’t tell her any of this. Instead, I ask her how far it is to the Missouri state line, and she tells me 13 miles.

  “Are there good people down there?”

  “A few,” she says skeptically.

  “Did you feel that way before your attack?”

  “Yeah. Whenever there’s trouble, it always seems to come up from Missouri.”

  There’s an air conditioner in the living room window that Sally wants to store for the winter. I help her carry it out to a shed off the garage. We set it on a pile of scrap wood and cover it with a piece of black plastic. The shed is dark, except for a few shafts of sunlight poking through cracks in the roof. I feel like we’re kids, standing in our secret hiding place. My stomach stirs, but I again resist the urge to reach for Sally.

  When we go back inside, I linger in the living room. It’s been hard to say goodbye to people on this trip, but not like today. If I don’t leave now, I’m liable to stay here forever.

  “So, how many strangers have you had in your house?” I say on my way out the door.

  “You’re the first one since I got hurt,” Sally says.

  A tingle shoots down my spine.

  “Why me?”

  “I don’t know. I just trusted you.”

  Halfway down the block, I can still hear Sally’s stereo. When the radio changes songs, I stop in my tracks to listen to Billy Joel’s “The Stranger.” Then I walk on toward Cape Fear.

  CHAPTER 25

  Kahoka sits in the extreme northeast corner of Missouri, 20 miles west of the Mississippi River. The local gas station doesn’t have a bathroom. I overhear the attendant giving passersby directions to the public restroom in the courthouse, and I tag along. When you’re traveling without a penny, you never pass up free facilities.

 
The men’s room in the basement of the courthouse is next door to the sheriff’s office. I poke my head in and find the dispatcher, Mitch, slouched in an old overstuffed couch. He’s 44, with gray hair and no uniform. His three-year-old daughter April, chatty and blond, rolls around on the floor.

  “Someplace I can camp around here?”

  “Which way you headed?” Mitch says.

  “East.”

  “Well, the closer to the river you get, the more likely you are to find trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Trouble is all. People are packed in like rats over there and they just go off. Pack rats, we call ’em.”

  Mitch mentions a campground several miles west, back where I’ve already been. I don’t know if it charges. Besides, I’ve always had a hard time turning around.

  “I tell you what,” Mitch says. “My girlfriend gets off work in about twenty minutes. She lives nine miles east in Wayland. If she says it’s okay, you can pitch your tent in her backyard. Just be sure to take my oldest stepdaughter with you.”

  I wait on another sofa that looks like it was refused by the Salvation Army. It’s pushed up against a wall papered with FBI “Wanted” posters. One guy is wanted for a string of murders. He doesn’t look the type. He looks a little like me.

  I pull out my road atlas, and April climbs onto my lap. “Where’s Mexico?” she says. She flips through the pages. “Here’s Mexico.”

  “Hey, she’s right,” I say to Mitch.

  “We’re not raising no dummy.”

  Mitch was married three times but never had any kids. He and his girlfriend Teri live together but have no plans to marry. April was an accident. Mitch is fiercely protective of his only child. He won’t let her stay with a baby-sitter. April spends four days a week with Mitch in the sheriff’s office. The rest of the time, Mitch has her with him at his thrift store.

  “I’m blunt,” Mitch says. “Let me ask you two questions. One, do you have finances?”

  “What’s your second question?”

  We both laugh.

  “Are you having fun?”

  “Yeah, I sure am.”