“There’s some real good people here,” the mother says. “They’ll give you a ride.”
There’s a new feel to the land. I’m still in the United States, but it’s a different country. The abrupt change reminds me of crossing from California into Mexico. The blacktop is potholed. There isn’t a new car on the road. People wear tired looks and tired clothes. What little they have is paid for with sweat, and it’s obvious there aren’t enough jobs to sweat over. Northern Kentucky is as depressed as a recent widow.
I sit on the tall curb of the Country Store Super Market—an oxymoron if I ever heard one. An old, stooped man shuffles out the door to his pickup. He casts a cloudy eye in my direction.
“You want me to take you down the road a couple miles?” he hollers.
I stand and meet him at his truck. John is frail, with a cough like a baby rattle. He holds himself up against his truck with a bony hand. In his other hand, he pinches a burning cigarette. His fingernails are stained orange from nicotine.
“You a tobacco farmer?” I say.
“Three hundred years my family’s been doin’ it.” He gasps for air. “You cain’t lose money if you do it right.”
I ask John if there’s a spot in Bedford a traveler can pitch a tent. He rubs his whiskered chin and mentions a park on the other side of the gas station.
“They may investigate, but no one’ll bother you.”
He gives the pack on my back a sideways glance.
“There aren’t many real hobos left,” he says. He recalls a man who passed through here in the seventies. “I called him the plastic hobo. He carried everything in a plastic bag, and he used the bag for a shelter.”
After John leaves, I cross the road to look for the park behind the gas station. There may have once been a park here, but not in my lifetime. I’m sure that to a man of John’s years, it was here only yesterday.
I walk back across the road to reclaim my seat at the Country Store Super Market.
John returns in his pickup. He flicks cigarette ash out the window.
“I thought of a place where you can camp,” he says. “The back side of my farm is on 421. There’s a wooded area there with a creek. Put your pack in back and I’ll show you.”
He drives down the road at a leisurely 15 miles an hour.
We pass a string of places I’m hard put to call homes. They’re twisted trailers and sagging shacks. Laundry waves in the breeze like flags of surrender. The shabby yards are littered with pieces of dead automobiles and machinery. A giant old-fashioned cash register sits in a rutted dirt driveway, its drawer open and empty.
We clear the squalor and drive several more miles.
“Is there a creek there?” John asks, squinting into the woods. “My eyes aren’t too good anymore.”
“Yeah, I think so.”
He parks and tells me to check it out. I slide down a ravine to a stream that trickles over slabs of shale. There isn’t a flat spot in sight. I climb back out. I’ll ride back to Bedford with John.
“How’s it look?” he says.
“Well, it’s pretty, but it’s all rocky.”
He says the ground is flatter across the creek. It’s his neighbor’s land, but he won’t mind.
Storm clouds are gathering. I’ve already conquered my fear of sleeping in the forest in the rain. There’s nothing new to prove here. Besides, this is my first time in Kentucky; I don’t want to hide like a hermit. But John is so eager to accommodate me, I worry I’ll appear ungrateful and hurt his feelings. So I tell him I’ll be fine here and thank him for the ride.
He reaches into a paper bag on the truck seat and hands me four tomatoes from his farm. After he disappears around the bend, I start the long walk back into town.
CHAPTER 33
I return to the curb at the Country Store Super Market and eat one of the tomatoes. It’s vine-scarred, but juicy and sweet.
Rusted clunkers roll by, knocking and belching. It sounds like all of Trimble County needs a tune-up.
A barrel-chested man with a salt-and-pepper beard sits down beside me.
“Lemme show you somethin’.”
He pulls a knife from a leather sheath, but it doesn’t look like any knife I’ve ever seen.
“I carved that out of black granite,” he says.
I run my fingers along the cold smooth blade and whistle in admiration.
“How long did it take you to make it?”
“Aw, I worked on it an hour or two a night for a couple months.”
Rex was born and raised in Bedford. He’s a welder, divorced, and the father of eight grown kids. He lives above the store. The sidewalk is his front porch. He gives a friendly wave to all who pass.
A black Trans Am pulls up and the driver leans across his girlfriend to talk to Rex. I can’t hear what they say over the roar of the engine.
“Be good!” Rex shouts at the end of the conversation.
“I work for his dad,” he tells me. “He’s crazy.”
“The dad or the boy?”
“The boy. He’s had three totals already and he’s not yet eighteen.”
Rex nods at an orange 1965 Ford pickup parked at the curb. With its makeshift top, the truck looks more like a van.
“There’s my vehicle down there,” he says. “A friend of mine used to own that. He died ice-skating on a pond. They never found him.”
At the funeral, the man’s wife recalled that Rex liked the truck. She asked him if he wanted to buy it. He did. She wanted $3,500, a price too steep for Rex. She let the truck sit in the barn. A year after her husband’s accident, the woman died of a brain aneurysm. At her funeral, the woman’s mother asked Rex if he was still interested in the truck. He was. She let it go for $150. Rex dropped a new battery in it and it came back to life.
The firehouse siren pierces the air. A fire truck screams past, red lights flashing. It’s followed by a state trooper’s sedan, a woman at the wheel.
“She gives tickets for even two miles over the speed limit,” Rex says.
An auxiliary fire truck and an ambulance bring up the rear. Rex can’t tell if there’s a fire or a wreck.
A man drives up from the direction of the emergency.
“There’s a guy standing in his yard waving a gun,” he says.
He notices a light on at the mortuary down the street. “Who’s in the bone house?” he says.
Rex answers with a shrug.
A young man missing a front tooth walks up and sits down on the other side of Rex.
“I’ve learned the secret to meeting women,” the young man says. “Elbow ’em in the jaw and take ’em home.” He laughs. “It works. That’s how I got laid last night.” He tells Rex he was shooting pool at a bar. A waitress came by with a tray of drinks. When he moved out of her way, he swung around and caught another woman in the mouth. It was lust at first smack.
“Well, I gotta go,” the young man says, and he does.
Another man in a pickup pulls up. He tells Rex he’s driving across the river into Indiana and asks if he wants to come. Rex climbs in and they leave me alone on the curb.
I write in my journal by the light from the store. I nod hello to everyone who comes and goes.
A woman steps out from her car.
“Hey, mister, I saw you over in Madison,” she says in mock accusation.
“Me?”
“Yeah. You came in and asked to use the bathroom at the gas station.”
“Oh yeah. You told me there was a bathroom at the visitors center. It was a real nice one.”
For some reason, my scintillating conversation fails to engage the woman, and it looks like I’m destined for a night in the rain.
Rex’s friend drops him off at the store an hour later.
“Ya still holding that curb down?” Rex says.
He sits down next to me. Bedford is silent. There are no more cars, no more curbside gossip. Just two strangers sitting in the dark.
I glance at Rex’s orange truck. That would
keep me dry.
“So that’s really a truck, huh?”
“Yeah, it’s just got a top on it. It’s got paneled walls, insulation, everything.”
“Hey, you think I can sleep in your truck tonight?”
“If you can find some room. I got pretty much everything in there—boots, tools, fishing rods.”
Rex gets to his feet to use the payphone outside the market. After he hangs up, he walks by me without a word and climbs the stairs to his apartment.
Rex’s excuse about the clutter in his truck reminds me of Randy in Garberville, California. When I asked if I could crash in his greenhouse, he said it was way out in the woods. Some people just can’t say no.
The night air is damp and chilly. My breath fogs in front of my face. I wish I hadn’t forgotten my sweater in the back of J.D. and Kristin’s pickup in Montana. I wonder how Kristin’s abortion went. I wonder who’s wearing my sweater.
When the first raindrops hit my head, I hoist my pack and hunt for shelter from the storm.
I reach Bedford’s community center—a corrugated metal warehouse. A white stretch limo is parked in front. I hear people inside shriek and holler. It can only mean one thing: A celebrity preacher has come to town to fleece the faithful. I step inside and find a sham of another sort—a professional wrestling match. Two hulking men in tights bounce off the ropes, taking turns slamming each other into the canvas mat.
I ask the ticket seller if I can use the restroom and he says okay. When I come out, a pack of youths yells at me.
“Faggot!”
“Turd burglar!”
I have no idea what I’ve done to prompt their fury. But then I see that they’re hurling the epithets at a target behind me. I’ve stepped in front of a wrestler retreating from the ring.
“Faggot!”
“Turd burglar!”
He wears a hooded black robe. The bad guy, I presume. He stalks me through the angry crowd like the Grim Reaper.
Outside I find a covered picnic table next to a church. At least I’ll stay dry for the night.
I spot Rex walking down the street. My eyes follow him to the other end of town, where he enters a convenience store. He exits and strides back through town. I’m pretty sure I’m hidden by the shadows. Just in case, I turn away to save us both the embarrassment of eye contact.
A moment later I hear footsteps. I look up.
“Hey,” Rex says.
“Hey.”
We make small talk in the dark. There’s an awkward silence.
Finally Rex says, “Where you sleepin’ tonight?”
“I figured I might lie down right here,” I say, patting the table.
“Well, you’re welcome to come upstairs and sleep, if you don’t mind sleepin’ on the couch.”
A man is talking on the payphone when we reach the market.
“Hey, Rex,” he says.
It’s got to be a tough situation for Rex. Lots of folks saw us sitting together on the curb. It’s a small town. There’s bound to be talk. I admire Rex’s kind gesture.
The front door of his apartment lacks a knob. Rex fishes a key from his pocket and unlocks a padlock.
Inside he ties a string from the door handle to a nail on the jamb. A double-barreled shotgun rests against the wall.
“It ain’t fancy,” he says. “Plop down where you like.”
A threadbare rose-colored sofa and matching chair face each other in the cramped living room. I sink into the chair, which has popped a couple of buttons.
Rex disappears behind a wall into the kitchen. I hear the microwave run. He walks back out and hands me a cup of tea. When I hear the microwave start up again, I figure it’s for Rex’s tea. But he returns and hands me a mini sausage pizza. When he comes out of the kitchen for the last time, he carries tea and pizza for himself.
Rex flips on a portable TV sitting on a table in the corner of the room. A documentary on aviation plays on TNT. Neither of us pays any attention. We quietly munch on our pizzas, our feet nearly touching in the space between the furniture.
The walls are crowded with sketches and paintings of Native Americans. Among them hang framed collections of arrowheads. Rex’s grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee. Her hair grew to the floor, plus another two feet. She raised Rex from the age of three, when his mother passed away. Rex’s father was always off chasing work. Rex’s grandmother died when he was 13, and he was on his own.
“I notice you was writin’ down there,” he says.
“Yeah, I’m keeping track of where I’ve been.”
“I had a heart attack here ’bout four years ago that set me down for a good while. I wrote a story then.”
He rummages through a pile of papers on the floor beneath an end table.
“I ain’t got a good education,” he says, handing me the object of his search. “You probably can’t even read it.”
I unfold the two sheets of white ruled paper. “The Boy,” as the story is titled, is written with smudged pencil in a child’s scrawl. The grammar and spelling are awful, yet it’s a touching tale about a poor lad of 10 in New York City. As snow falls on him, he stares enviously through a department store window at a display of shoes. A rich woman in a chauffeur-driven limousine pulls up to the curb and asks the boy what he’s doing. He tells her he’s asking God for a new pair of shoes. The woman takes the boy into the store and buys him a new pair of shoes. The story ends when the boy asks the woman, “Are you God’s wife?”
When Rex’s grandmother died, he dropped out of the eighth grade to find work. “I know that’s why I haven’t been able to get better payin’ jobs.” As a father, he made sure all eight of his kids graduated from high school.
Rex removes a gold chain from around his neck. A gold arrowhead dangles from the end. He twirls the necklace around his finger and then unwinds it, over and over.
He says he has no regrets.
“If I die tonight, well, I’ve had a full life. I’ve had good things and I’ve had bad things.”
“What bad things?” I say.
“Oh, just bad things.”
Rex slumps on his side on the couch, as if it’s uncomfortable for him to sit upright. He slips one of his rough hands under his suspenders and holds his belly.
“I lost a girl,” he says. “She was fifteen months old. I get up one day to go to work. I picked her up from her crib to set her in bed with her mother like I always did. I noticed she wasn’t crying like she usually was. It was four in the morning, dark still. I went out to the kitchen to make some coffee. Then I heard a sound like nuthin’ I’ve heard in this life. Jo was screamin’, ‘Nancy’s dead!’”
Rex pauses.
“She had an enlarged heart. We never knew. It just burst in her sleep. Jo clutched that girl for four hours. Sat in a rocking chair, wouldn’t let no one near her. Finally, the doctor came over. He talked to her ’til he was able to get up close to her. Then he give her an injection in the arm and she went to sleep. Then we took the baby over to the coroner’s office. Jo never did get over that. I kinda think she blamed me for it.”
Rex shifts his weight on the couch. He stares at the far wall, but I don’t think he’s looking at arrowheads.
I’m lost for words. Before I say anything, he starts in again.
“The worst thing that ever happened to me, I was over in Milton. I was in the coffee shop, drinking coffee. A man come in from up near Indianapolis. He had a little girl ’bout three. Cute thing with brown hair. She was bouncing around the restaurant like a rubber ball. He come over to talk to me. Says his wife is divorcing him. Says he won’t ever get to see his little girl again. ‘No, they can’t do that,’ I tell him. ‘Yes they can,’ he says. He says, ‘Will you do me a favor?’ I tell him, ‘Well, if I can.’ He says, ‘Follow me ’cross the bridge into Indiana.’ So I get in my truck and follow him over the bridge. Then ’bout halfway ’cross, he stops his car. Before I know it, he’s got his little girl clutched in his arms, and he jumps off the bridge int
o the river.”
I feel my cheeks and ears tingle.
“They dragged them up before dark,” Rex continues. “His arms were still wrapped around the girl.” Rex hugs the air to show me. “Boy, I’ve seen that picture a thousand times. It’s been twenty years and I still have nightmares. If he’da told me he was gonna kill himself, I don’t know if I woulda stopped him from jumping off that bridge or not. But I’da saved that girl. When you lose one a your own…” he begins, then trails off. “I saw him stop and I figured he was comin’ back to tell me somethin’. I didn’t even have time to get outta my truck. Why he had to kill that girl, I don’t know. I’ve played it over in my mind a thousand times, tryin’ to see what I coulda done dif’rent. I don’t know why that had to happen.”
I had taken Rex for a simpleton. But now I see that his simple ways mask a deep soul. And because his anguish has come from out of nowhere, his revelations are all the more haunting.
I sit in the chair, numb.
“There are some things in this world that just can’t be explained,” I say, groping for words. “Some things just happen for no good reason. There’s not a thing different you could have done.”
After he goes to bed, I curl up under a blanket on the couch. Rain pelts the window, but I’m dry and safe and warm.
I wonder what the night holds for Rex, if the demons will visit his dreams.
I arrived a stranger in Rex’s humble home and I will leave that way. He doesn’t know I’m traveling without a penny. He didn’t ask what brought me over the bridge today. No need to worry about the ones who make it all the way across.
CHAPTER 34
Rex leaves for work at seven on this Sunday morning. It’s too early and too cold for traveling, so I write in my journal in the lobby of the post office.
A young, gregarious man wearing a tie comes in and offers me a ride to New Castle, 20 miles down the road. He’s the pastor of a church there.
When we reach New Castle, he says I can finish writing in his office above the rectory.
The pastor, Matthew, and his wife, Shelley, check on me an hour later. They ask about my penniless journey. I mention that several kind strangers have been Christians. I see the light go on above Matthew’s head, and I’m soon agreeing to speak to his congregation.
The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America Page 21
