The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America

by McIntyre, Mike

  Teri arrives to retrieve April. She’s a heavyset woman in shorts, with permed dishwater hair and thick glasses. Her voice doesn’t fit her body; it’s soft and high. She looks at once sad and serene.

  We pile into Teri’s car, a rusted gas-guzzler, and Mitch kisses her goodbye through the window.

  We drive toward Wayland. April sifts through sacks of groceries in the backseat. She asks me to open a bottle of juice.

  Teri is a factory seamstress. She works 10 hours a day, six days a week.

  “Lately, I’ve been doing everything but cut the fabric,” she says.

  Splattered raccoons in the road mark our progress like mileposts.

  “I really envy you, being able to just up and take off,” Teri says.

  She was born and raised in Missouri. She’s never left the state. I was in Iowa this morning. I’ll be in Illinois tomorrow. It’s strange how people can spend their whole lives in one spot. Then again, they must think I’m odd, always roaming.

  “I’m not just saying this, but you won’t find a friendlier state than Missouri,” Teri says.

  She’s so sweet and sincere, I don’t remind her there are 49 other states she’s yet to visit.

  Teri has two daughters. Missy is 19 and Julie is 17. Teri is 39. She’s already been a grandmother for two years.

  “Missy was my wild one,” Teri says. “I was always watching her. Then Julie goes and gets pregnant. I always said to her, ‘Just be honest with me. Do you want to go on the pill now?’ And she said, ‘Oh, Mom, we’re not ready for that yet.’ Then she goes and gets pregnant. Not much you can do at that point.”

  Julie, her boyfriend Kenny and their two-year-old son Dwight live with Teri and Mitch. Missy, who works at a convenience store, lives there, too. Missy is married to a man who’s serving time for dealing drugs. She married him after he was sent to prison. The ceremony was at the courthouse. They were granted one night together, and then Missy’s husband was thrown back in the slammer. Teri thinks Missy married the guy to piss her off. It worked.

  Teri divorced the girls’ father a long time ago. There were some happy years in the beginning, but he took to drinking. Long weekends carried over into the workweek. He was always disappearing, returning home only long enough to change his clothes. He prowled around. Teri counted 15 women. He brought one of them into the restaurant where she worked. Teri hung in as long as she could. Then the battering started, and she got out.

  She lives in a neighborhood of trailers, all with big backyards that converge into one. I pitch my tent under an oak tree that supports a swing.

  April runs out the back door of the trailer with a foam ball. She demands that I throw it as high as I can. I do. She orders me to heave it again. The drill continues until my arm feels like it’s going to fall off.

  At last, Teri rescues me. “Do you like wildlife?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s a lake nearby. Want to go see it?”

  “Sure.”

  As we’re backing out, Julie and Kenny pull up in an old Bronco with headlamps on the roof. Teri asks if little Dwight wants to come with us, and he climbs in.

  Deer Ridge Lake is a long finger of water shrouded by oak, maple and hickory trees. Two men float in an aluminum boat, their fishing lines disappearing into the dark pool. The scene looks like a calendar photo hanging on the wall of a hardware store.

  “When I was a kid, we used to come over here and play for hours,” Teri says. “In the fall, we’d get sacks and slide down the hills over the leaves, just like a sled.”

  She smiles at the memory.

  “My kids today have TVs, stereos and video games, but they always say they’re bored,” she says.

  On the way back to Wayland, we see Julie and Kenny coming from the other direction. Teri stops to hand back Dwight.

  “Just drop him at Marty’s,” Kenny says.

  Marty is Teri’s brother. He lives on a farm back toward the lake. Teri turns around and follows Julie and Kenny up a dirt driveway. A young boy throws a lasso around a sawhorse with a pair of plastic steer horns attached to the front.

  “Don’t be surprised if my brother doesn’t talk to me,” Teri says as we get out of the car.

  We walk to the side of the house. Teri’s sister-in-law Alice meets us at the sliding glass door and invites us in. A TV flickers in another room. I can’t see the person watching, only a pair of cowboy boots propped on an ottoman.

  “No, we better get going,” Teri says.

  April runs up a hill to the chicken house. Teri, Alice and I follow, passing a corral where two horses and a mule munch grain from a trough. We pass through a gate and duck into the dark chicken house. When we come back out, a man is approaching from the house. He wears jeans and a white T-shirt, and the cowboy boots I saw resting on the ottoman. He isn’t smiling.

  Alice walks down and intercepts him. He flails his arms, but I can’t hear what he says. He stalks up the hill. He grips the top of the fence post and glares at Teri.

  “What are you doin’ out here?”

  “Marty, we just came to drop off Dwight,” Teri says softly.

  “Well, you just give him to Kenny and Julie and git!”

  He takes one step back from the gate, making room for us to pass. He shudders with rage.

  “Bye, Alice,” Teri says, hanging her head. “Come on, April, let’s go.”

  When I walk by Marty, I give him a nod. It goes unreturned. He stares a hole straight through me to his sister.

  “Sorry, Mike,” Teri says when we reach the car.

  I don’t know what to say.

  Teri heads back toward the lake and drives aimlessly along the dirt roads. It’s the opening day of bow hunting season, and men step from the dark woods dressed in camouflage and stride empty-handed to their pickups. Teri points out the places where houses she knew in her youth once stood, their foundations now overgrown with brush. The forest gives itself up to the night. Teri keeps driving in a daze, long after there’s anything left to see.

  I want to know the reason for Marty’s wrath, but I don’t ask.

  We drive back to town in silence.

  Nobody’s home when we return. Mitch’s shift ends at midnight. Missy is working overtime to pay for the $600 in collect calls her husband rang up in prison. Julie is who knows where.

  “My kids are never here,” Teri says. “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes, I am.” I smile.

  “I’ll fix supper then.”

  “Do you need any help?”

  “No, thank you. You just sit down and watch TV.”

  Teri bakes potatoes and stirs up some Hamburger Helper.

  The kitchen table has only three chairs, one of which bumps against the refrigerator door. Teri eats quietly, her mind elsewhere. The only noise in the trailer comes from the TV, Robin Williams riffing wildly in Good Morning, Vietnam.

  I ask Teri how she met Mitch.

  She says her old boyfriend, Dan, collected books and knew Mitch from the thrift store. Teri lived with Dan for four years. He was once married. Before his divorce, he climbed a ladder to get his kids’ kite down from a telephone pole. Dan brushed a live wire and was electrocuted. He fell 20 feet, landing in a sitting position.

  “The doctors said the only thing that saved him was the fall,” Teri says. “It jolted him back to life.”

  As a soldier, Dan survived three tours in Vietnam. Now he was paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair. When he moved in with Teri, he outfitted her previous trailer with ramps.

  “He hated sympathy,” she says. “He was so good in that wheelchair.”

  He died of smoke inhalation in a fire in their old trailer. They figure he was trapped in the trailer and he couldn’t get out.

  “The only thing that kept me going was my kids,” Teri says. “People told me I’d get over it. You learn to deal with it, but you never get over it. I think about it every day.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “That’s terrible. I’ve never had to face an
ything like that before.”

  Teri looks up at me. Her brown eyes go wet.

  “I hope you never do,” she says quietly. “I hope you never do.”

  She nudges the food on her plate and sets down her fork.

  “I loved Howard, the kids’ father,” she says. “And I love Mitch. But I believe you have one real love in life, and Dan was it. “

  Teri stays with Mitch out of fear as much as love.

  “He told me that if anything ever happened between us, he would do everything in his power to take April from me,” she says. “I’m one of those people who if you take my kids from me, you might as well put a gun to my head, ’cause I’d be through.”

  Teri is being so candid, I decide to ask her about Marty. “So that was your brother, huh?”

  She sighs. A couple years ago, her father and Mitch got into an argument—over what, nobody remembers. Just two stubborn and opinionated men, neither willing to back down.

  “If you weren’t holding that baby,” Teri’s dad told Mitch, “I’d deck you.” Mitch handed April to Teri, and Teri’s dad came at Mitch, and they got into it.

  Mitch used his connections in the sheriff’s department to get Teri’s father arrested. Mitch later asked that the charges be dropped, but it was too late. Teri’s dad was convicted, fined and placed on probation. He told Teri to never set foot in his house again. He eventually made up with Teri, but Marty still carries a grudge. He thinks Teri should leave Mitch, out of family loyalty. But with Mitch holding April over Teri’s head, that’s impossible.

  Julie, Kenny and Dwight roll in around 10 pm. Julie and Kenny scoop Hamburger Helper into their bowls and sit down at the table. Dwight plays in the living room, snot running from his nose.

  “Dwight eat yet?” Teri says.

  “No,” Julie says.

  “You’re sitting there feeding your face and he hasn’t eaten yet? You get up and feed him something!”

  It’s the only time I hear Teri raise her soft voice.

  I take the local newspaper out to my tent and read it using my flashlight.

  When I wake in the morning, Mitch has already returned home and left again for work.

  Teri looks out the back window and sees me packing.

  “Do you like sausage gravy?” she says through a hole in the screen.

  “I love sausage gravy.”

  “Well, I’ll get breakfast started then.”

  On my way in, I stop to visit with Kenny, who’s washing his Bronco. The best way to get a man talking is to compliment his wheels, so I do.

  “I know it’ll rain, now that I’ve washed the car,” he says.

  Kenny has a shag haircut and rotting front teeth. He works as a laborer, digging holes for telephone poles. He still keeps a room at his parents’ house, down the road in Luray, but he spends most of his time here in Wayland.

  “There are fewer blacks over here,” he says.

  I don’t know if Kenny assumes I’m a racist like him, or if he just doesn’t care. Either way, I’ve heard enough, and I go inside.

  I sit at the kitchen table, sipping coffee while Teri cooks breakfast. She tells me Missy got home after midnight and got a call from a guy she met on a 900-number party line. She fell asleep during the call. Kenny discovered the receiver off the hook this morning.

  “This one boy from Texas calls Missy a lot,” Teri says. “I heard him talking to her one time. I couldn’t believe the things he was saying. He kept calling her. She wasn’t home one time and I answered the phone. ‘I been trying to call Missy,’ he said. I said, ‘I know you have, and I don’t like what you say to her.’ He said, ‘Do you know what Missy does for me?’ I said, ‘No, what?’ He said, ‘She masturbates over the phone.’

  “I just hung up,” Teri says, flushing red with embarrassment.

  At last, I meet Missy. She walks out of her room, separated from the kitchen by a torn accordion-shaped partition. She wears a St. Louis Cardinals baseball jersey.

  Teri tells her how Kenny found the phone off the hook. Missy mumbles something about the Texas trash talker having enough money to pay his long distance bills.

  Teri’s biscuits and gravy are the best food I’ve tasted since San Francisco, but they sit in my stomach like hockey pucks. I may stay full clear to Cape Fear. She offers to make me some sandwiches, but I tell her I’m good.

  The sky is dark gray. All through my time in the Midwest, they’ve been forecasting rain, but I’ve managed to stay a day ahead of the storms. I haven’t been drenched since Oregon, and I see no point in getting soaked in Missouri. I say my thanks and grab my pack.

  Thirty yards up the road, I turn to take one last look at Teri’s trailer. I’m surprised to see her standing at a window, staring at me. Our eyes lock. Even at this distance, I can see tears welling, the way they did last night when she told me about Dan.

  It dawns on me that so many of the kind strangers I’ve met are women who have suffered great heartache and tragedy. They are fierce survivors. They have taught me lessons in perseverance and compassion that will stick with me long after this journey is over. But what have I given them in return?

  Jerry, the man back in Idaho who bought me a motel room, said that people who help me have their own motivations. As I turn away from Teri’s wet gaze, I can only hope he’s right.

  CHAPTER 26

  My Magic Marker is fading. I’ve put a lot of miles on it. I use the last of its ink to write “Quincy” on a sheet of paper and tape it to my dog-eared piece of cardboard.

  A man stops for me. He has gray hair and gray pants and two toothpicks in his mouth. He’s headed for church in Quincy, Illinois, across the Mississippi River. He owned a drugstore there, but the Wal-Marts and Kmarts moved in and forced him out. He now runs a drugstore in Memphis, Missouri. Half his customers are on welfare, he says. No one has a job, but they’ve got slews of kids.

  “It’s their meal ticket,” he grumbles. “I’ve got a solution to it. It may sound extreme to you, but the answer is orphanages. They’d reduce the welfare rolls and give these kids a better chance than with their deadbeat parents.”

  I see the top of a steel bridge in the distance and my stomach flutters with excitement. I told myself before I left that if I made it to the Mississippi, I’d make it the whole way.

  “All this was under water,” the man says, recalling the terrible flood last year.

  “How about that Phillips 66 station?”

  “That’s new. The old one washed away.”

  This part of northeastern Missouri was above water until some nut broke the levee. Officials said it would have held. Instead, thousands of acres of crops, along with buildings and homes, were destroyed.

  “If the farmers could get hold of him, they’d hang him from the highest tree,” the druggist says.

  We cross the Big Muddy, the grated bridge humming beneath the tires. I feel like a racehorse turning for home.

  Quincy, site of one of the famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, occupies the limestone bluff above the river. It’s an old town of brick storefronts and stately houses. The druggist parks at the Episcopal Church at the eastern edge of the city. He recommends I take Highway 104, the scenic route.

  The “scenic route” is lined with the chain stores that chased the druggist across the river. If somebody knocked me out and dropped me here, there would be nothing to let me know I was in Quincy, Illinois, when I came to. I could be in California or New York or Texas. Every city in the country is starting to look the same. America has been malled.

  This section of Route 104 has four lanes—two too many. I’ll walk until it slims down to a friendlier width.

  The strip malls give way to fields of corn. Some ears stand taller than my own. But the highway still resembles an interstate, so I keep walking.

  At noon, I rest at the entrance of a motor speedway. I shed my long-sleeved shirt and drink half the water from my bottle. I eat the banana Eric gave me and the last of the raisin bars.r />
  Food has almost become a nonissue on this trip. If I don’t meet another kind stranger, I could ration my provisions and still limp into Cape Fear with something in my belly. As of today, my food bank includes two cans of tuna from Mel and Judie, four nutrition cookies from Pete and Doris, a brick of sweaty cheddar cheese from the Montana Rescue Mission, a can of beans and two tins of lunch loaf from Pastor Larry, the eight remaining energy bars from my friend Bruce, and somewhere at the bottom of my pack, down near my winter gloves, the big bag of trail mix Linda bought me way back in Redway, California. The stash is reassuring, a hedge against a downturn in the kindness market. The drawback is that my pack now weighs 70 pounds. I feel like I’ve got a pantry strapped to my back.

  I walk against the traffic. A few motorists wave, but most folks glare at me, as if menaced by the sight of a man walking down the highway. My left arm goes numb. I poke my thumbs under my backpack’s shoulder straps to relieve the pressure. I buckle the hip belt to shift the weight. I undo it 100 yards later. I alternately tighten and loosen the shoulder straps. I fasten and unfasten the chest strap. I reach behind and support the bottom of the pack. Nothing works for long.

  A plane swoops down over the cornfields. A crop duster, I figure. But when I reach the crest, I see runway lights and an airstrip. A sign says “Quincy Municipal Airport.” After two hours of walking, it’s mighty discouraging to learn I’m still in greater Quincy. I drink the last of my water.

  I keep passing campaign signs for some fellow named Allan Witte. He’s running for treasurer. I know there’s a thing or two I could teach him about saving money.

  After 10 miles, the highway thins to two lanes. But now there’s no shoulder to stand on, no place for a car to stop. With highway dollars, it’s always feast or famine. I decide to walk straight on through to Liberty, another 10 miles.

  The road cuts through a forest, tree limbs meeting above the blacktop and forming a tunnel. Traffic is light, so I follow the centerline. When the occasional car happens by, I hop up onto the bank, watching for snakes in the grass.

  I round a bend and a bull-necked dog rushes me from a gravel driveway across the road. I freeze in my tracks.