The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  2

  Champaign, Illinois

  FALL ARRIVED, AND DEEPENED, and the ash trees on Washington Street outside Joe’s bedroom window became skeletons that resembled pleading arms reaching to the sky. On the calm ocean of soil beyond the city limits, the crops were in. The local farmers, cleaned up in new plaid and old denim, their fingernails freshly scraped, drove into Urbana to visit the Champaign County Bank and Trust, where Virginia Sanderson worked. They brought their leather ledger books and made big deposits. Abundant applications of ammonium nitrate and the ordinary rains of summer had brought Illinois another bumper crop.

  When winter arrived the outsiders transplanted to this college and farm town grew bitter and angry with the icy roads and the frosty, cutting wind; and the natives were stoic and silent as they scraped and shoveled away snow. The land was fallow. Like a man or a woman following the act of procreation, it was in a state of quiet repose.

  Joe asked his father to take him hunting.

  “With any firearm in your hands, you really can’t allow your attention to wander, Joe. Understand?” They drove an hour outside town, past carpets of collapsed cornstalks turning gray in the rain, and past a stretch of woods where fallen, rain-moistened leaves were blackening into mulch. They reached a pastel prairie with jasmine-colored switchgrass, and the violet seed heads of big bluestem grass, and they stopped, squatted and waited. A single wild pheasant settled into the grass about twenty yards away. “Remember: shoot where it’s going to be,” Milt said, and he brought his cold hands together in a loud clap. The pheasant startled and took flight, and Joe took a half step forward and fired, and the pellets struck the bird about six feet off the ground. Feathers exploded into black confetti and the bird fell into the grass with a thud.

  Thirteen months later, when Christmas came around again, Milt bought Joe a .22 Remington rifle. Joe lifted it from its box and took in the solventy scent of the rifle’s lubricants, the milled ball of its bolt and the walnut grain of its stock. Milt thought it was as good a time as any to tell his son the family gunman stories again. Great-Grandpa Frank was very handy with a rifle. Ran away from home when he was twelve—left Maine and made it all the way to South Dakota. Lived with the Sioux for a while, and made friends with Wild Bill Hickok. Got a job on the railroad and went on strike with the socialists; he took Milt on his first hunt.

  For target practice with his new rifle, Joe took long rides on his bicycle and hikes outside the Urbana-Champaign city limits. To the Mahomet woods and beyond. Rimfire cartridges, brass bodies and silver heads, remembering his father’s lessons. “A rifle is different from a shotgun. You point a shotgun, but you aim a rifle. Breathe three times and squeeze the trigger as slowly as you can. The rifle is going to recoil. You can’t allow your fear of the recoil to make you jerk the gun.” After he bought a telescopic sight Joe could hit a squirrel from seventy-five yards.1

  The corpses of the squirrels oozed muscle tissue from the wounds his bullets inflicted on them. He saw an ad in Boys’ Life and wrote to the National Rifle Association and joined as a junior member, and took a self-administered shooting test and passed it, and got a wallet-size card in the mail identifying him as a “marksman.” He struck a crow from one hundred and fifty yards, and afterward he came home and told his father, “This rifle is my most prized possession.” On television many years later, the actor Chuck Connors fired off a rifle too, a Winchester, in a new show called The Rifleman. Lucas McCain, as the benevolent hero was called, was an expert shot, and he used his rifle skills to right wrongs on the Western frontier. The show aired on Tuesday nights and Joe would watch many of its episodes.

  * * *

  UNLIKE GENERATIONS OF Midwestern fathers before him, Milt Sanderson had little reason to believe that his son would ever need to use his home-taught shooting skills in battle. The United States was at peace, more or less, except for the thousands of troops stationed in Germany to scare off the Russians, and the thousands more in Korea to scare off the Chinese, and the fleets of Stratofortresses waiting in airbases in the Great Plains, ready to deliver nuclear warheads over the Arctic Circle. The war in Guatemala had lasted only a few days: the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated a coup to overthrow the country’s leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz, with undercover American pilots flying P-51 Mustangs to bomb Guatemala City. The drama unfolded on the front page of the Champaign-Urbana Courier, which Milt read every day. “Anti-Red Exiles Mass on Guatemala Border,” read one headline, next to an incongruous photograph of a local woman in a pioneer dress, celebrating the centennial of Loda, Illinois, population 550. “Casualties Heavy, Guatemala Capital Prepares for Raid,” read another headline; on the same day the newspaper reported the city of Champaign would be installing new, fluorescent streetlights. Then President Arbenz fled Guatemala and the war was over, and as the weather warmed and summer approached the Courier reported on a heat wave and on a University of Illinois study on the ill effects of air-conditioning.

  * * *

  SOMETIMES JOE WENT OUT on expeditions with both his rifle and a butterfly net. In farm fields, in orchards, by streams. He caught a buckeye, with its six black onyx eyes on its wings to scare off predators; and an eastern comma, and a question mark, Polygonia interrogationis. He marched twenty miles with the Boy Scouts on the Lincoln Trail, and earned merit badges for botany, astronomy, shooting and citizenship. Soon he was a Star Scout. All these skills would serve him well later in life, when he became a professional road bum. At the Crystal Lake pool in the summer, he became a powerful swimmer, and he climbed out of the water feeling the muscle added to his arms by hundreds of strokes: his pectorals remained thin and boyish, but were home to a few pioneering strands of chest hair. A strange mammal was being born inside him. Tumescence. In the morning and in his sleep. Mysteries of male biology.

  His father read to him from the pages of The Atlantic Monthly. Unbeknownst to father and son, these articles were often about places Joe would visit in the next decade: Real control [in Afghanistan] is vested in a royal oligarchy … It has no railways; its four thousand miles of rough, all-weather roads are used mostly by donkeys and camels; [The Indonesian] islands—draped around the equator like a girdle of emerald … —are quite mountainous, with many volcanoes. When Joe grew older, and too restless to sit and listen to his father read, Milt gave him a leather-bound journal as a fourteenth-birthday present.

  They moved a mile away to Mumford Drive and a newer subdivision where the streets were wider and curved gracefully past big front lawns. A local television station heard about Joe’s butterfly and reptile collection, and in one of the first local broadcasts in Urbana of WILL-TV, channel 12, young “Joey Sanderson” appeared with his framed and pinned Lepidoptera specimens, and assorted birds and reptiles. On that night, Joe was famous. In Urbana. The Courier wrote a story about him being on TV. He liked being famous.2

  * * *

  ON HIS FIRST DAY OF HIGH SCHOOL Joe stood with the milling student body before Urbana High, in the small park across the street, and waited by the statue Lincoln the Lawyer. A pair of incoming freshman boys stood below the great Illinoisan, admiring the streaks of rust in his bronze suit. The school was integrated, and the few Negro students were gathered in clusters, awaiting the morning bell; like their white counterparts, they were dressed in wool sweaters, and the girls in long skirts that reached down to their calves. Everyone so formal and fresh. Aerosol hair spray and hair pomades, menthol shaving cream and lavender perfume. The measured vanities of the Midwest. Years later, when he’d seen more of the world than any other member of his Urbana High graduating class, Joe would remember the eagerness and earnestness of this moment—the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. The bell rang and the student body surged toward the small rectangular orifice carved into the brick-and-concrete building, and in this sudden collective movement, Joe felt the strides of the girls especially, the sway of their hips and the bounce of the cone of their skirts. Oh man, oh man, oh man. He was ast
onished by their variety. They were plump and they were statuesque; pimply and clear-faced; blue-eyed and hazel-eyed. They wore somber autumn oranges and blacks, and extrovert pinks and purples, and their hair was done up in dos that were full of parlor-styled and bathroom-ironed curls, so that many seemed to have storm systems of swirling locks floating about their heads.

  Joe filled up the pages of his journal with his high school observations, and he left all the natural specimens in his room to gather winter, spring and summer dust. “This journal is now my most precious possession,” he told his father. When his brother, Steve, brought home his first car, a royal blue 1951 MG-TD, cars became Joe’s new obsession. He approached his father with a grim and serious face. “Dad, I don’t want to collect any more butterflies and reptiles,” he said. “I’m not interested in those things anymore.”

  “Okay, Joe,” Milt said. “So what are you interested in now?”

  “Cars and girls.”

  Two months later they gathered up Joe’s naturalist collections. Milt gave the jarred reptiles and assorted snakeskins to a colleague in the biology department, and told Joe he would donate his butterflies and other insects to the Illinois Natural History Survey. “They’re going to be really happy to get these, Joe, because you’ve got all the right data with each one.” They drove to the Survey’s offices and met the collections manager, who led them into a room with a table. He began opening Joe’s glassine envelopes. “Very nice,” the collections manager said. “Impressive. Ah, the question mark. Let me show you how we’ll store them,” and he guided Joe and Milt into a room filled with rows of cedar cabinets with thin drawers. He opened one and revealed a battalion of dead roaches, with wings the texture of marbled chocolate, all lined up in rows, their antennae deployed skyward, awaiting insect radio signals. A Hercules beetle from Peru that had a horn that was four inches long, armed for a jousting tournament. Joe Sanderson’s butterflies joined this insect menagerie, with J. D. Sanderson listed in the catalog as the scientist-collector.3

  3

  Piatt County, Illinois

  AT URBANA HIGH, Joe became the master of the solid B grade, though he was not above settling for the occasional C. When he got an A, a minus always seemed to trail after it. He could talk to you all day about Voltaire, and the bending of space-time, or how cool and easy Spanish verbs were next to English, but when it came time to take a test, he didn’t see the point in studying. He felt a deep sense of moral superiority to everyone who earned an A, or who even cared about earning an A. Screw these nosebleeds following the script, regurgitating and reciting. My mind is pure. He began to think of himself as an outcast and outsider. One day at lunch, he decided on a whim to cross the cafeteria’s informal racial divide, an imaginary pane of glass that walled off a half-dozen tables in the cafeteria.

  “Hi, mind if I join you? Name’s Joe.” He sat on a bench next to two young black men, and extended his hand for a fraternal, introductory handshake.

  “Yeah, I know,” one of the young men said. “I’m in your English class. Ernest.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.”

  “This is Cory. Cory, Joe. I told you about this guy, Cory. He’s the one who was talking about sex to Mrs. Henderson. Romeo and Juliet. ‘Lie with her!’ You’re a cutup, man. That was too much.”

  The now multiracial trio laughed and they ate their ham sandwiches and pushed around their potatoes, and Joe talked about how it might rain, and other topics of friendly conversation. Ernest and Cory nodded, and the conversation died. In the quiet, from behind their sweaters and collared shirts, Ernest and Cory gave Joe the glances of young men sizing up a stranger, trying to determine his intentions. Earlier that day, Ernest and Cory had walked to school together, kicking rocks on unpaved streets, past homes converted from chicken coops and coal sheds. Champaign-Urbana was de facto a segregated town, separate and unequal, but also freer and friendlier than other places a black family might settle. Or, as Ernest’s dad put it: “When I got to Urbana, son, a white man invited me into his house, and he offered me a sandwich. A really fine one too, with lettuce, tomatoes, and mayonnaise.” And Cory’s dad: “Next to Tennessee, this is a liberal place, son. You can walk down the street wearing one purple shoe and one green shoe and no one will say anything.” But Ernest and Cory longed to move to Chicago, to be surrounded by streetcars and blues and bold women. What was there here in Urbana? A school day that was defined by the stiff politeness of the white students and teachers around them, and also a steeliness and a distance that was unmistakable.

  Today this white boy had come to sit next to them. His unexpected presence had the odd effect of keeping their black friends away from them for the rest of lunchtime, making the deadening whiteness of Urbana High School all the more obvious.

  “Got to get to class,” Ernest said. Cory held out his hand and added, “Nice to meet you, Joe.” Thus ended the first, boldest and final attempt Joe Sanderson ever made to encourage the mixing of the races at Urbana High School.1

  * * *

  WHEN YOU’RE A BOY, you fight your way into the world, and Steve and Joe grew up fighting, and since Steve was bigger and brawnier, Steve always won. “Ankle biter! Stop bothering me. Go catch butterflies or something!” More than once, he pushed his brother’s face into the ground. “Runt! Insect! The dirt is where you belong. Slither like a snake, why don’t you.” Little brother, little oddball. Sick half the time. Fever dreams and cold compresses on my forehead. The mucus crystals falling from my nose. When he was six or seven, Joe had a serious ear infection, and a doctor treated it with radium, inserting two luminescent capsules filled with chartreuse radioactive dust up through his nostrils. He caught a glimpse of his board-flat chest in the mirror, and felt the need to bulk up, so he joined the wrestling team. At the first practice the middle-aged coach wore sweatpants and took crouched sidesteps across the training mat, like a vaudevillian actor doing slapstick on a rickety stage. Joe began to ghost-wrestle at home and in the school hallways. “What are you doing, Sanderson? What a kook!” He lost himself in extended fantasies of his newfound indefatigability, of his spidery lateral shiftiness; he practiced the occasional evasive sideways movement in his classrooms, and at home before dinner when he stood before Steve in the kitchen.

  “Get that MG working again?” Joe asked, taunting his brother, because Steve’s car hadn’t been running for several days.

  Steve said nothing, but then he raised his arm, as he had done many times before, to grab his little brother around the neck. Joe ducked and made himself short, causing his brother to lose his balance and stumble forward. Wrestling lessons. Two quick steps to his left, and Joe grabbed his falling brother from behind and used his forward momentum to lift Steve up and flip him over and turn him upside down against the kitchen floor.

  Joe’s kitchen-wrestling victory made the brothers equals again, and not long afterward Steve helped Joe buy a car from a neighbor for three hundred dollars: a 1950 Chevy two-door coupe with whitewall tires and a body that was smooth and bulbous, like sculpted steely-blue clay. Steve gave Joe a few driving lessons out in the farm country where there was a perpendicular crossroad every mile, each going due east and due west, due north and due south on the invisible latitudes and longitudes of the corn-covered plain. “Take the wheel, sir. It’s your car,” Steve said. The Chevy moved with a massive gasoline-fueled glide across the asphalt, quiet for a moment, and then clanky and old, as if there were six fidgety goblins dressed in tin under the front hood, pounding at the Midwestern-made pistons with rubber hammers, making it go.

  * * *

  TO HIS CLASSMATES, Joe was becoming a lovable paradox. He was a smart kid who liked to read and talk about ideas, but who didn’t seem to care about his grades; he was a funny guy who had lots of friends, but who often looked lonely. When he turned sixteen and drove his own car legally for the first time, he invited a girl named Betty Jo to go to the movies in his Chevrolet. On the second date he took her to the Widescreen Drive-In Theater, which occupied
a stretch of asphalt on the edge of Urbana that abutted the ubiquitous fields of corn. She had a face whose color and shape suggested her ancestors braided their hair into blond crowns and gazed at fiercely frigid Baltic seascapes. As the lighthearted film No Time for Sergeants played out inconsequentially in black-and-white on the big screen, Joe turned and faced her on the front seat of his Chevy. She pulled him closer across the wing-shaped vinyl skin of the seat, and they joined their lips, slowly, and Joe tasted the beeswax of her lipstick.

  My first kiss. Silly kiss. Sloppy kiss. But I am kissed.

  After two more dates, his verdict on Betty Jo was that she was looking for someone to be a mister to her missus, and was in a hurry to do so because in the coming months everyone in the class of 1960 would be a senior and eighteen years old. He didn’t call her again. He dated other girls and the word about him got around to the female half of the Urbana High student body, through anecdotes and observations shared in the cafeteria and in the stands at football games and at the Tiger’s Den, an off-campus dance hall. Joe wasn’t one of the serious ones. Yes, he was fun, kind, polite and respectful, but he wasn’t going to get googly-eyed over you and make you feel you were his Guinevere. He wasn’t going to get a girl pregnant anytime soon, and he wasn’t going to get married, or even buy a girl a promise ring.2