The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America

by McIntyre, Mike

  “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 t
housand-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.

  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.r />
  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.