After the sun was down and I was driving along the dark highway, getting worried, I seen a sign that said TOURIST CABINS 75 CENTS A NIGHT. It didn’t look like I was going to find a place to camp and I couldn’t keep driving all night. I was so stiff my neck hurt when I turned my head. I drove into the yard where the sign pointed.
The office was in a regular house, and after I paid my seventy-five cents the woman in charge give me a key and pointed to a row of little houses in the pine woods. “You’re in number six,” she said.
“Where can I get something to eat?” I said.
“There’s a hot plate in the room,” she said and closed the door.
A string of lights run along the road beside the row of cabins. I was so stiff from driving I couldn’t hardly walk. And I was so tired nothing seemed real. Even though I was there looking for number six, I didn’t feel like myself at all.
I found my door and opened it and turned on the light. You never seen such a bare little room. The place wasn’t much bigger than the bed, and all the furniture was a dresser with a flaky mirror and a hot plate on a little shelf. The bed looked thin and lumpy. The toilet and shower was in another building, and I hurried out into the night to use the toilet. There was people going in and out of the building and I spoke to them, but they didn’t seem interested in being friendly.
“Do you know what the weather is like north of here?” I said to a man washing his hands at one of the sinks.
“Haven’t the slightest idea,” he said without even looking at me. I was glad to hurry back to the room and close the door.
I got some raisins and crackers out of my packsack and eat them, setting on the shaky bed and looking in the mirror. In the light from the one bulb my face looked gray, a kind of yellow gray, and I looked older than I was. I’d been awful hungry, but as I started to eat my appetite went away. I just wanted to lay down and rest. I was tireder than if I’d walked my trapline or pulled fodder all day. I was tired just from setting still and worrying about the road ahead. My back was sore like it had been beat with a stick.
Maybe it was the excitement of being away from home for the first time, or maybe it was because I was so tired from driving, but I didn’t fall asleep like I expected to. I was so weary I thought I’d just drop off. But as I laid there I kept feeling I was still driving. I could feel the bump and rattle of the Model T. I kept thinking I was steering on winding roads and watching out for trucks in curves. It seemed like everything was magnified and stretched out of shape and then shrunk by turns.
Lord, I prayed in the dark, if you don’t want me to go to Canada I won’t go. If you want me to go back home and help Mama and Fay, just show me a sign. I’ll do whatever you want, if you’ll just show me what it is. I laid in the dark hoping for some kind of sign. I must have floated off to sleep still thinking about a sign, for the next thing I knowed there was daylight and it was already eight o’clock.
I went to the bathhouse and shaved and washed my face, and I didn’t even try to be friendly to the other people. Then I went back to the cabin and gathered my things and got on the road.
There was a guesthouse down the highway about a mile with a sign in front that said BREAKFAST 25 CENTS. I stopped there and had eggs and grits and coffee, and biscuits with jelly on them. Once I got the coffee and grits in me I started to feel better. As the coffee warmed me up, and the grits and eggs and jelly started filling me up, the world got firm again and the morning fell into place. I seen I was doing something I had to do. You are going toward something better, in a long zigzagging way, I thought.
By ten o’clock I crossed the great bridge into Cincinnati. I knowed it was a bridge built by the same man that made the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the biggest manmade thing I’d ever seen. But I didn’t have time to look much because the traffic was so thick and fast and crazy. And traffic was so loud and close I didn’t have time to look at the city when I got to the other side. I just drove right on down the wide street, trying to miss the cars that weaved in and out in front of me. There was horns honking and lights flashing at intersections. I just stayed on Highway 25 and stopped at lights with all the other cars, then rushed forward when the lights changed. I didn’t even have time to glance at buildings and parks, I was so busy trying not to hit other cars and looking for road signs. I seen a great church to my left but didn’t have time to look at it.
Through my open window I could smell the city. It was a stink of oil and car exhaust and rotten things, like rotten cabbage and sour meat. But it was a stink of burned things too, scorched hair and chemicals on fire. The roar scared me. The noise of horns and slamming brakes sounded like the world was falling apart, or falling on top of me. A policeman blowed his whistle and pointed at me, or beyond me. I seen a man whose face was nothing but scabs laying on the sidewalk. I gripped the wheel and told myself that I’d come back to the Queen City and look at Cincinnati another time. I drove on past light after light and corner after corner. I felt a little sick at my stomach as I drove up into the hills past fancy estates. And then I was beyond the city.
I was so relieved to get through Cincinnati without having a wreck, I felt like hollering out. Once I reached the farm country beyond, I pounded the wheel and laughed, knowing I was in the North for the first time, that I had at least made it across the Ohio River. I was the first member of the family that had been in the North since my grandpa was took a prisoner to Elmira, New York, in the Confederate War.
The farm country of Ohio was so pretty it smarted my eyes to look at it. The corn was gathered and the fields was already plowed for the winter. Fields run back to hedgerows of oaks and ash trees. Barns was neat and painted red. I seen teams of great Percherons doing the fall plowing. The soil looked like black silk turned a thread at a time. At home we never plowed till early spring. But I’d heard it was better to open up the soil before winter and let it breathe in the cold months.
I drove on through the town of Lima. The country beyond was flat as a stove top, and the plowed soil was dark as snuff. There wasn’t a hill or even a river in sight. I seen stacks of pipes along the sides of fields. I guessed they used them for drainage.
About two or three miles north of town I noticed a big red sedan following me. It come up close behind and I seen it was a Duesenberg. The big car pulled around and passed. I thought if I had a car like that I’d be in Canada already.
But when I drove on about a mile I seen the shiny red car stopped beside the highway. It was pulled over on the shoulder and the hood was raised. As I got closer a man in a brown suit run out into the highway and waved his hands at me. I pushed in both the clutch and brake and slowed down, but even as I stopped I wished I hadn’t. I wished I’d just kept going. The Duesenberg had several people in it, and the man that flagged me down wore the most expensive-looking suit I’d seen in a long time. He run over to my car and leaned in the window.
“Hey, sport, would you give me a lift to the next filling station?” he said. The way he said sport made a nerve somewhere in my belly feel sick. But now that I was stopped I couldn’t just drive away.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Fan belt’s broke. Got to get a new one,” he said.
There was no excuse for not helping somebody in trouble on the highway that I could think of. I heard a woman laugh inside the sedan.
“Sure, get in,” I said. But the man had already opened the door and was climbing in. I throwed my mackinaw coat into the backseat.
“You’re a peach, sport,” the man said. He smelled like some kind of aftershave. He had a jaw like an anvil and a neat mustache, but there was something twisted about his face, like one eye was lower than the other, or a cheek had been crushed and the nose turned wrong.
As I drove away from the red Duesy, the woman inside laughed again. It was hard to imagine what was so funny about a fan belt breaking.
“Well, sport, where you heading?” my passenger said. He lit a cigar and offered me one.
“Thanks, but I d
on’t smoke,” I said.
“Good for you,” he said.
“Northern Michigan, Canada maybe,” I said.
“Going up there to get some Canadian hooch?” he said and cuffed me on the shoulder.
“No, I’m going to trap fur,” I said.
I wondered if the man had a gun under his chocolate brown suit. My shotgun was in the backseat under all my gear.
“Trap what?” the man said.
“Mink and muskrats, maybe beaver and otter,” I said.
“You’ll freeze your ass, sport,” the man said. He knocked the ash off his cigar out the window and let the wind make the tip glow for a few seconds.
“Hey, you got a girl back in Carolina?” the man said.
“Not anymore.”
“Ah, you must have got somebody, big handsome hunk like you,” the man said.
“I used to think I had a girl,” I said.
“You been getting any lately?” he said. “That why you going to Canada? Those Eskimos will give you their wives if you come visit.”
“No, I just want to catch fur,” I said. The man made me feel I was in a stupor and couldn’t hardly talk.
“Fur’s just another name for pussy, sport,” the man said.
“The fur’s better up there because of the cold winters,” I said.
“The fur’s better, ha, ha, ha,” the man said.
Looking in the mirror I seen the big red car. It appeared behind us and was gaining quick.
“Hey, ain’t that your car?” I said.
The man didn’t even look back. “Might be,” he said and puffed on the cigar. “What do you care, sonny?”
“I thought you said the fan belt …”
“Them is smart guys; they must have fixed it already,” the man said.
I gripped the wheel, wondering what was going to happen next. The Duesenberg come up behind and followed for a few seconds, then whipped around, and in a few more seconds was far ahead.
“Ain’t they going to wait for you?” I said.
“Don’t you worry about me, sport. Just keep on driving,” the man said.
My palms was sticky on the wheel, and my foot trembled on the clutch when I had to change gears. I drove on for several minutes and seen the big car stopped at a crossroads ahead.
“Well, professor, just let me out right up there,” the man said.
“Where the car is?” I said.
“No, on the other side of the moon,” the man said.
I pushed down on the brake, and before the Model T had come to a stop the man jumped out and slammed the door. “Take care you don’t catch no social disease from that Canadian fur,” he hollered back at me. “And stay away from Canadian booze, you hear?”
I jammed in the clutch and shifted down to first and drove on fast as I could. I got ahead maybe half a mile when I seen the big sedan pull into the road again. It swept up behind me and passed in a gush of wind. Nobody inside give any sign that they seen me. Soon the Duesy was out of sight ahead and I felt the wetness on my forehead and under my arms, and my feet trembled on the pedals. It was several minutes before I noticed again the fine farm country I was driving through.
I stopped for lunch at a drugstore in Findlay. It was the first time I’d set foot on the ground of the North. But the pavement didn’t look any different from that in Asheville. The people acted busier but was no better looking or better dressed. The buildings, the cars, the clothes, did look new and expensive. I set there eating hotdogs and telling myself how lucky I was to be alive. I asked myself what I would have done if the man in the brown suit had pulled a gun. The news of gangsters in the North, especially around Chicago, was in the papers every day. There was even supposed to be gangsters following their enemies into the mountains of North Carolina.
I STAYED THAT night in another tourist court in northern Ohio. But the cabin in this one was a little fancier than the one in Kentucky and it cost two dollars. After the long day on the road, I set on the bed in the little cabin and counted my money. I’d started out with seventy-one dollars. But at the rate I was spending money for gas and lodging, eats and oil and new inner tubes, I couldn’t travel for more than another few days. And then I wouldn’t have enough to get started trapping. I’d have to find a job wherever I went. And if I was going to turn around and go home I’d have to do it while I still had enough money to make it back to Green River.
I laid awake much of the night listening to traffic on the highway. It was strange to think I was in the North. But I wasn’t sure I felt really there. Maybe I was just thinking about being there.
When it was daylight I packed up my cheap suitcase and pointed the Model T north again. As flat as the land was, I could feel it sloping steadily toward water. The air was cooler, with a damp wind out of the northwest. Farms got fewer and smaller the further I drove. And every little town seemed to have a factory of its own. The sun was out, but the air had something in it, something faintly lavender or red. Soot, I guessed, from the smokestacks and trains. The traffic on the highway got heavier, with many more trucks and buses. The highway got wider, with two lanes going each way. I gripped the wheel and hoped I didn’t have a flat.
By the middle of the morning I crossed a great bridge into Toledo. You never seen such a place as I was driving through. Along the highway was three enormous mills high as little mountains, and one railroad yard after another. There was long warehouses made out of tin, with loading docks like porches. I’d seen places like that in pictures, but what you can’t get from pictures is the size of things. There was brick buildings covering a hundred acres. I passed grain elevators high as Meetinghouse Mountain. Some silos was so tall they throwed shadows across the highway.
I drove on, as far as it was from Green River to Tompkinsville, without seeing anything but mills and warehouses, elevators and gantry cranes. Where did all the people live? There was switching yards that glistened like new-plowed fields. How many people had it took to make all this? And how many did it take to keep it all going?
The city of Toledo itself, when I finally reached it, was disappointing. It was just like the other cities I’d drove through, maybe a little bigger than some. I’d planned to stop, but instead I just kept going with the traffic. I stopped at red lights with all the other cars and trucks and buses, and then rushed forward with the stream like water breaking from a dam. I felt like I couldn’t pull over if I wanted to. I told myself there was no place to park. I knowed that if I did stop I would turn back and the trip would be over. Something pulled me on to keep going with the roar of the traffic. The most important thing was not to have a flat tire out in the river of traffic, for then I would drown. I looked out for the lights at the corners and for policemen giving directions. I wanted to look just like everybody else.
Nobody had told me a city was so loud. With so many horns blaring and brakes screeching and sirens, I didn’t feel at myself. I couldn’t remember what I wanted to do. A truck pulled in front of me, and I couldn’t see where I wanted to go or needed to turn. A trolley rung its bell and just missed my fender. Even if I had wanted to stop, I couldn’t have. The air smelled like rotten eggs and burned motor oil. There was a stench of melted rubber. A woman dashed in front of the Model T chasing a child, and I just barely missed her. Two soldiers was fighting in front of a café.
After what seemed like twenty-five miles I found myself driving through factories and railroad yards again. There was long warehouses and big storage bins. There was mountains of coal and gravel with loaders reaching like goosenecks to the tops of the piles. I was near the lakefront, for on my left I could see piers and wide ships and gantries and loading cranes. It was the Great Lakes. I’d reached the Great Lakes and wanted to stop and have a look. But there was no place to pull off the highway and look. Many of the yards and docks had fences along the highway.
Traffic got faster than it had been in the city and I had to keep moving with it. The road swung back to the northwest, away from the harbor, and there was
only one more warehouse and beyond that was marshland. I could smell mud and foul water. I wanted to look at the lake, so I turned quick into the loading area beside the long building. A platform run along the side of the warehouse out into the water. There was piles of rope and spools of cable heaped on the platform.
“Hey mister,” somebody called.
I looked around to see who was hollering. A man stood at the door of the building with a clipboard in his hand. “What can I do for you?” he said.
“I just wanted to look at the docks,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘look at the docks’?”
“I just wanted to have a look,” I said.
“Then I suggest you look someplace else,” the man said.
“I just wanted to look,” I said. I couldn’t think of nothing else to say.
“Keep moving, buddy,” the man said. “Get out of here.”
I felt like he’d knocked the breath out of me. My gun was in the back under all the gear. I wished I had it out to pull on the Yankee smart-talker. I stood by the car several seconds trying to think what to say. The wind off the lake was deadly cold and made me shiver. It was right out of Canada, I thought. If I kill a Yankee I’ll never see Green River again. I won’t see the graveyard where Grandpa and Daddy is buried, or the south side of the pasture hill on a warm winter day. My knees shook a little.
“You ain’t got no right to talk to me that way,” I said.
“What way?” the man with the clipboard said. He stepped off the platform and come closer to me. He looked at the tag on the Model T. “You tell Metcalf he better send somebody smarter if he wants to spy on us,” he said.
“I just wanted to look at the lake,” I said.
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