The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America

by McIntyre, Mike

  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.

  By late afternoon I’m in Vernon, in the southeast corner of Indiana.

  The sign on Route 7 for the Muskatatuck State Park has a symbol for a campground. I turn down a road covered by a canopy of branches. It climbs the other side of a ravine and skirts an open grassy plateau the size of a polo field. From the look of the facilities, I know it’s too nice to be free. A worker with a rake in his hand confirms this. I tell him I don’t have any money and ask about other campgrounds in my budget.

  “Oh, you can stay here free,” he says, “only because you’re a backpacker.”

  When I poke my head out of my tent in the morning and look at my neighbor’s campsite, I see a deer hanging from its neck by a rope. The rope is thrown over a tree limb and secured t
o the ball hitch of an old blue Chevy pickup. A man about my age is skinning the deer with a knife. Blood covers his hands and forearms. He puffs on a cigar as he cuts.

  “You get that this morning already?” I say on my way over.

  “No, last night. It’s gonna be warm today. I gotta get her in ice.”

  Tom is married and the father of three. He’s a foreman at a steel fabrication plant up in Gary. I ask him if he’s originally from Indiana.

  “Yep. If you ain’t a Hoosier, you’re a loosier.” He flashes a big smile and puffs his cigar.

  Tom killed the deer with a bow and arrow. He works quickly, slicing long strips from the animal’s back, and packs the meat in a plastic garbage bag.

  “It’s wanting to stick to the bone, but it’s still cool,” he says. “Here, touch.”

  I put a tip of my finger to the purple meat. It’s cold and gluey.

  “How far away were you when you let the arrow fly?” I say.

  “About fifteen yards. It went through both lungs and the heart. She didn’t suffer a bit. This is one of Jesus’ prettiest creatures, and I’m just glad He allowed me to have one.”

  The deer’s brown eyes are now cloudy, its tongue stiff and jutting to the side. Tom reaches into the cavity and cuts out the tenderloin.

  “Yeah, people spend lots of money for drugs to get the same feeling I get from bow hunting,” he says. “It’s exhilarating.”

  Tom carefully packs the animal’s hide. He saws off the hooves and wraps them in newspaper; a Mexican man he knows will use them for bullwhip handles. He slices out the windpipe, which he’ll later turn into a deer caller. Nothing will go to waste.

  I’ve never hunted, let alone fired a gun or shot an arrow, but I admire Tom’s sense of conservation. He’s a breed apart from the “hunters” I once interviewed for a story on exotic game ranches in Texas. Down there, people shot tame animals from the back of a pickup that distributed a trail of corn feed. When one hunter missed badly and blew a hole in a Sika deer’s belly, he didn’t bother to track down the wounded animal and put it out of its misery. It was getting dark and he had paid to kill two more.

  When Tom learns I’m penniless, he offers me some deer meat. “You might get hungry,” he says.

  I politely decline. There’s no room in my pack, I say.

  He flicks the dead ash from his cigar and relights it.

  “What do you miss most?” he says. “Besides your girlfriend, I mean.”

  I hesitate.

  “Cable TV?” Tom says.

  Still nothing comes to mind. “You know, I’m so busy meeting people and trying to get down the road without money that I haven’t had time to miss anything,” I say.

  I don’t miss TV. I don’t miss movies. I don’t miss beer. I don’t miss any of the things I usually use to numb my mind and pass the time. This has been the only extended period of my adult life that I haven’t been bored. If I could only make it last.

  I shake Tom’s bloodstained hand. He makes a final offer to share his deer meat. I say no thanks and return to my campsite to break down my tent.

  “Hey, what’s the name of your book?” Tom yells over.

  I tell him.

  “It’s hard to believe we’re all strangers,” he says, “when we’re really all brothers.”

  CHAPTER 32

  The citizens of Vernon, Indiana, are readying for their fall festival when I walk through town. Vendors erect booths for an arts and crafts show. Boys rake leaves on the courthouse lawn under a gray sky. One kid reclines on a park bench, his rake idle in his hands. The supervisor tells him to hop to.

  “You see, I told you, boy!” a lecherous voice cackles from a cell window in the nearby jail. “Get back to work! Hah!”

  At the edge of town, a Toyota stops for me. I grab my pack and start to run, but the car speeds off.

  A few minutes later it returns. A young, chubby couple sits in front. A boy rides in back. There’s also a dog, a caged parakeet, and a pile of blankets and clothes. I don’t know where I’ll fit my pack or myself.

  The man apologizes for passing me. There was no room to pull over. He rearranges his cargo. The boy, Kyle, aged six, sits on his mother’s lap.

  The man served five years in the Navy before he was kicked out for a bad back. He now attends pharmacy school up in Indianapolis. He and his wife are originally from Madison, Indiana, on the Ohio River. They’re going there now to visit their parents.

  “I’ve got a big brother,” the boy says.

  “Kyle, you big fibber,” his mom says.

  “Do you have a kid?” Kyle asks me.

  “No, not yet. Someday.”

  “In two weeks?”

  “No, I don’t think that soon.”

  “In about four weeks?”

  “No, a little longer than that.”

  “Five weeks?”

  The mom rescues me. “Maybe, Kyle,” she says.

  The dad turns down a country road outside Madison. They need to drop the dog and bird at his mother-in-law’s before continuing on to his parents’ house in town.

  As soon as we’re out of the car, Kyle grabs my arm.

  “I show you Gwamma’s garden,” he says. “We gotta go akwahs da bwidge.”

  He clutches a stuffed bear in one hand and my hand in the other as he leads me over a footbridge. We wade through a bank of tall grass that opens onto a garden of gourds. The gourds are immense, some the size of laundry baskets. Kyle tramples through the garden, kicking up vines. The patch is out of sight of the house. I tell Kyle maybe he ought to leave his grandma’s gourds alone. It’s a timid request; I don’t want to make the boy cry. At the same time, I don’t want to get blamed for killing a blue-ribbon gourd.

  Kyle’s dad calls us. It’s time to go to town. I only hope we get away before the damage is discovered.

  “So, you’re going to see your folks for the weekend?” I say to the man as his wife says goodbye to her mother.

  “Yeah, well, I got word my grandmother died at six this morning.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s okay. You had no way of knowing.”

  When I think of all the woes on this man’s mind, I’m surprised he made the time to take on one more problem. Not to mention, he had to turn back and pick it up.

  “Was it unexpected?” I say.

  “She had lung cancer, but she went fast. I saw her two weeks ago, and she was good old Grandma. My dad called me this week and said she wasn’t feeling well. We were gonna drive down last night, but classes ran late. I figured I’d see her this morning, but I didn’t make it.”

  He raises his eyes heavenward.

  I’m lucky. Both my grandmothers are still alive. They’re in their 80s, but remain sharp. Even so, you never know. I decide to write them from the next post office I see.

  The family drops me in the new part of Madison, on a busy boulevard up the hill from the historic center of town. The road has no shoulder. What’s worse, it’s being repaved, so there’s even less room to walk.

  I pass a golf course and fondly remember my round in Liberty with Jim. Three men stand on the tee, taking practice swings. I lapse into a daydream: The golfers call to me. They need a fourth. I climb the fence, drop my pack, and pick up a club. There’s a big bet. My partner says, don’t worry, he’ll cover me. I play magnificently. We win, and the losers buy me a hotel room and dinner.

  I’m knocked from my fantasy by a rock that hits me in the face. It must’ve shot up from under the tire of a passing car. It hits me above my right eye. A half inch lower, I would’ve stumbled into Cape Fear a cyclops. I touch my forehead. No blood. But there’s a knot the size of a golf ball.

  Madison’s Main Street is one of only three Main Streets in the United States on the National Preservation Registry. The wide avenue is lined with Greek Revival, Italianate, and Federal-style buildings. The red brick facades and clean sidewalks gleam in the sun.

  The bridge across the Ohio River ends at the base of
a wooded bluff. There’s no sign of life on the other side. Kentucky looks foreboding—the edge of the mysterious South. Stereotypes race through my head. I have visions of hillbillies chasing me through the forest. I recall a disturbing scene from the movie Deliverance. I ponder backtracking and detouring through Ohio.

  I scold myself for being so ignorant. I know better. I’ve traveled all over the world and have found good people wherever I’ve been. On this trip, I’ve been treated with kindness in every state for the last 3,500 miles. I’m ashamed that even for an instant I believe Kentucky will offer up anything less.

  A “Pedestrians Prohibited” sign guards the north side of the bridge. I write “KY” on a sheet of paper. I don’t bother affixing it to my cardboard because my roll of tape is running thin.

  “We’ll take you to Kentucky,” a smiling woman says through a car window.

  She drives, and her daughter rides in the front seat. I sit in back. The daughter is 21. Her mother is three months pregnant.

  “I can size someone up pretty quick,” the mother says.

  “All her boyfriends are in prison,” the daughter hoots.

  “Melissa!” the mother scolds.

  Melissa watches me in the visor mirror. “Yew hitchhiking all the way across the country?”

  “Yep.”

  “Yew got balls,” she snickers.

  “Melissa, watch your mouth!” her mom says.

  The bridge arches over the wide green river, and my head spins from the height. When we reach the other side, Melissa asks her mother to stop at a gas station.

  “Yew like Coke?” Melissa says.

  “Sure,” I say.

  While Melissa drops coins in the soda machine, her mother leans over the seat. “My daughter’s got a mouth on her, but she’s kind.”

  Melissa hands me a 20-ounce bottle of Coke. The soda machine charges 35 cents. I’ve either traveled back in time or Kentucky is the state that inflation forgot.

  Mother and daughter have no plans. They’re just out driving.

  They drop me at a gas station in Bedford, 13 miles south of the river, on Route 421.