The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  In Port of Spain, Joe traveled directly to the brand-new U.S. Embassy. There were two letters from his mother, but not the expected bank draft. He talked his way into the office of an embassy mucky-muck named Humphrey to see if the United States of America could spot a weary traveler fifty bucks. No Funds Humphrey loaned me $2 out of his own pocket, Joe wrote home in the letter he mailed later. He used this money to send a telegram to Urbana: Need funds. Please wire immediately. Love. Joe. Stop. That night he slept in a Salvation Army mission, and the following morning he went to the embassy to check the mail, and discovered a letter with $150, and a wire for $150 more.

  Dear Mom and Dad and Steve: Ah, but didn’t the eagle shit! Excuse me momma, I’m being over-exuberant. Got the moneyed letter this a.m. and you people will never know how glad I was. For the past two nights, I walked the streets staring into restaurants and the pastry shops. I am now fed and bloated.

  In Trinidad, Joe heard stories about the diamonds to be found in the jungle rivers of South America. In British Guiana, a fortune awaited. He figured he’d find a few precious stones and pay back his mom all the money she’d lent him.

  Joe’s next letter home arrived two weeks later with four five-cent postage stamps from Georgetown. Hallelujah, he began. I done come through the rye!

  * * *

  THE VAST, UNCONQUERED JUNGLE of an entire continent crept into Georgetown and swallowed a bit of it every day, forcing the locals to fight back at the intruding treescape with machetes, bulldozers and electric saws. Cloud animals migrated in from the rain forest and tinkled streams of water on the town, turning its streets into muddy lakes. The locals were Amerindian, West Indian, African and Chinese. Living in seemingly peaceful cohabitation, Joe thought, until he read the local newspapers, which described a low-level war being fought between the races and their political parties. Just a week earlier, terrorists (interesting word) had set off a bomb that destroyed the new library at the U.S. Consulate. He sought out a Brit named McNichol, who ran an operation that dredged up gold and diamonds from the gravelly bottom of the Mazaruni River, and soon Joe joined him on a flight out into the bush on a Cessna, puttering above the last roads, footpaths and huts of Georgetown, and then over a leafy ocean filled with voracious egrets and parrots and rivers of toothy fish. They landed an hour later on a grassy strip cut into a peninsula of land where two rivers met.

  The settlement of Imbaimadai consisted of a dozen shacks raised up over the ground on stilts, and it greeted Joe with the pink light of a late afternoon in Eden, and with the oval faces of children running across the runway to greet them, their features in half shadow. People the color of clay, blackest bangs and brownest eyes. The original inhabitants of this place: the Arakuna and the Akawaio. Joe joined a crew that operated a machine that sucked up gravel from the bottom of a river, working with local men of mixed African and Amerindian ancestry who wrestled with hoses as thick as anacondas, spending their day covered with mud, wearing shirts half-eaten by river bile. “You clean the land, you chop in the bush,” they explained to him. “You get mineral in the box, you wash it down.” He drank cassava juice and heard of sacred trees in the jungle, and folktales featuring tapirs and a tribe called the Sky People.

  At the end of most days, Joe held a sprinkle of gold specks in his palm, or a diamond not much bigger than a grain of sand, and he joined his fellow crew members in making camp with hammocks and tarpaulins strung between trees. He ate “bakes” for breakfast, which he described in a letter home as a cross between dumplings, bread and pancakes. A classic bum meal. Now I’m a jungle drifter, that rarest of vagabond species. They traveled upriver and reached a waterfall of roiling white mist four stories tall, and Joe made dives into the pool at the waterfall’s base, and at night he listened to the raindrops on the tarpaulin above him and wrote home. When he returned to Imbaimadai he gave the letter to the store owner for the next Royal Mail pickup.

  * * *

  VIRGINIA OPENED THE LETTER and read it, and she wondered who her son was becoming, out there in the wilds of South America. A writer? A treasure hunter, a hobo? In Urbana, it was a time of changes. She sat down at the kitchen table before three lined sheets, to write a letter that Joe read ten days later, when he came out of the bush and picked up his mail at the Imbaimadai airstrip. She did not mention her impending divorce but, instead, the happier story of Steve’s sudden marriage. Joe’s brother and his new bride, Maggie, were moving into their own Urbana home. I’m damn happy for the both of you, Joe wrote back. Maybe the little ones will call me Uncle Diamond and pull at my 4 carat beard? He asked for a picture of their family castle. Some of us are doomed to live under tarps and sleep in smoky hammocks all the rest of our days. And to his mother: Beautiful description of the wedding, Momma. Thomas Wolfe couldn’t have done any better. Two days later her birthday arrived while he was on a tributary of the Mazaruni, hunting with McNichol; they shot a bush deer, a tiny animal with delicate forelegs and the big, meaty haunches of a donkey. The British treasure hunter dragged it back to their canoe, and on the way Joe noticed an orchid growing inside the root system of a Mora tree, a jungle colossus as tall as an Urbana office building. The flower was ivory with thin lavender lines at the base of its petals.

  Late Happy Birthday to you, Momma! Joe wrote the next day. I had an orchid for you, but before the canoe reached Imbaimadai, one goddamn 40 lbs. bush deer chewed through plastic to bolt one flower! Short of vivisection, I could do nothing. I’m tempted to whack off a small deer tail to send in the flower’s place. Bush deers—bah! Mothers—hurrah!

  Mothers. Mother Earth. Mother lode. McNichol said he expected to find a mother lode soon. When that happened McNichol said he’d extract what he could before the masses of prospectors got wind of it and descended on the site. He’d then invest his capital in equipment to sell to those prospectors, who would dig and dig, with the desperate and focused purpose of burrowing animals, hundreds of them carving a canyon into the flat savanna with their shovels, their palms and their fingernails. “I’ll get rich off the hole itself, from all that digging and digging.” Joe looked into McNichol’s eyes, which were the green of the jungle and the river, and saw how this fantastic vision brought him joy. This Brit would destroy the jungle and every living thing in it and dig a wet hole down into hell doing so. What kind of novel would that make? Not a happy one.

  Thank God I’ve cleaned most of the scum of my greed out of my system, Joe wrote home a few days later from Georgetown. He was at the airport in the capital of British Guiana, checking in for the first leg of the long flight home, when he heard that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. The next day, in Chicago, he saw mourning people sleepwalking through a bright fall morning of stunned quiet, holding newspapers showing the departed president alive and grinning in the Texas sun. On the train to Champaign-Urbana he was transported into the warm box of color that was an Illinois autumn. The cornfields had dried into yellow papier-mâché stalks that caught the rays of angled sun, and the tops of the trees were the red of dried blood and the prairie grasses bronzed, and Joe felt every plant possessed a tragic incandescence, as if a celestial alchemist had tipped his wand over the landscape and conjured a final glowing tribute to the fallen president.

  In Urbana each Old Glory was at half-mast, and in the days that followed Joe stood beneath them and studied their flapping nylon stripes; he noticed the skins of the flagpoles were often flaking and rusted. He felt the urge to climb each pole with a paintbrush in hand, and he wondered if he could make a bit of money and pay for his future travels that way.

  9

  Decatur, Illinois. Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri

  VIRGINIA OPENED THE DOOR of her Mumford Drive home and in its frame she saw a cask-aged version of her son. Veneered skin and a sparse spray of reddish-blond hairs over his cheeks, swelling at his chin to a russet foam. For a moment, she found this sudden outbreak of ruggedness charming. My son, “road bum.” Look at his face and see the journey. Home safe. Then Joe and the
beard showed up at the Champaign County Bank and Trust to cash a check he’d earned painting flagpoles. His facial hair prompted a silent, startled look from the tellers and from Virginia’s bank manager. They were living in the Golden Age of Aftershave and the only men who wore beards were merchant seamen, mountain hermits and the grizzled authors who wrote about them. She asked him to shave it off.

  Joe was whiskerless as he began to write his first Jamaica novel, The Shroud Has No Pockets. He typed sixty pages on his Underwood, but never finished it.1

  * * *

  JOE STARTED ANOTHER NOVEL, The Prince of Castaways, a story set in the Jamaican fishing village of Savanna-la-Mar. He enrolled at the University of Illinois, mostly so that he could stay out of the army, but he spent too much time writing in his father’s old cabin to keep his grades up. Each morning, in the hours just before dawn, he typed to the earnest tweeting of sparrows and mockingbirds, a Kool poised on his lips his only companion. A match, the spark, a two-second flame, ashes sprinkled on his writing table. Three months later he approached an ending. By Joseph Sanderson. By Joe Sanderson. My words, mine, now and for eternity between the bound cloth covers. After three months he had a stack of pages, and smoked one last Kool to celebrate. He went to the public library and in a directory of publishers found the address for Grove Press.2

  * * *

  THE MAINTENANCE SUPERVISOR at the elementary school in Champaign listened to Joe’s offer to bring the flagpole up to patriotic standards, then told him how to do it: “You gotta climb the thing. You do it steeplejack style. I got the ropes.” Joe pulled himself up like a caterpillar, hands and knees squeezing the steel. A can of paint dangled from a rope tied to his waist. He wrapped another rope around the pole and slid upward, climbing two stories above the elementary school campus, looking over the schoolhouse into the yard where boys and girls stopped playing and turned their heads up to stare at him. Hey, that man. What’s he doing? Is he an acrobat? Spider-Man? Is he gonna fly or spin or jump?

  Spray-paint gold on the ball at the top. Splash of white on the pole, brush your way down.3

  * * *

  HE DROVE AROUND Champaign-Urbana and found three other flagpoles to paint. And then out of town, into other Illinois cities. In Decatur a newspaper photographer spotted him up in the air and made Joe the subject of a photo-essay. Famous again. With his earnings he bought a rickety old Ford truck and drove it to more painting work in Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri, sleeping in the back alongside his ropes, brushes and paint. After the last of these sky-climbing missions he came home to Mumford Drive and discovered the Selective Service was after him. The United States was at peace, but the draft from the last war was still in place, and the military was demanding he do his duty. He signed up for the Army National Guard, hoping to complete his military service before he hit the road again. Two weeks later he was on a bus headed for Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and basic training.

  * * *

  THEY SHAVED OFF HIS HAIR, dropping a pool of blond strands around the chair, where they democratically comingled with the sheared Cs of black Afros and the rusty-red raccoon quills of Irish pompadours. He lined up for inspection in his freshly issued fatigues, along with a cross section of middle America: the muscled and the flabby, the crooked-toothed masses and the orthodontiaed minority. An eyeglasses-wearing Texan on his left, and a Dakotan with a stony Mount Rushmore brow on his right. Like a dog newly assigned to an owner obsessed with obedience, Private Sanderson was told to sit here, stand there, lie down, rise up, eat, shower. Shave, Private Sanderson. We’ll frighten the enemy with our baby-faced, razor-nicked soldiers, our beardless formations.

  The physical challenge of basic training was easy. Crawl, climb, march. Run through curtains of Missouri mosquitoes, out into the Ozarks, where they bivouacked and Joe laughed as his fellow recruits whined about sleeping on air mattresses. I slept on benches and floors in Jamaica. Later, he stood on guard duty with his M14 at the entrance to a base, waiting and dying in the dark, hours ticking away, uselessly. Finally, the shooting range. Disassemble your weapon, check the sights, steady position, control your breathing. Dear Mom and Dad. The son of New Paul Jones applied his gutter academics to shoot highest in the company today on rifle range. Later, he qualified as an Expert. In his specialist training as a medic he performed passionate resuscitation on a pliant rubber dummy, bandaged and splinted unwounded fellow soldiers, took pulses and blood pressures and practiced tourniquets.4

  He was assigned to the base hospital and most days did nothing but read novels.

  Went AWOL for two hours and they wouldn’t do a damn thing! I cursed and moaned and demanded my rights to a rebel’s prestige and they nearly threw me out of the Orderly Room. What’s America coming to? Soon he was “short” and finally a civilian again on the bus back home to Illinois, planning his next trip. Southward, in the general direction of the equator and the Orinoco, to spread a bit of Joe Sanderson love and peace into new territories. A year after Joe left the army, President Johnson sent the first troops to Vietnam. And Joe’s mother met the second great love of her life: a geologist named Calhoun Smith, a friend of Milt’s who worked at the U of I. They were married, quietly, at the county courthouse. Neither of her sons was invited.

  * * *

  ALONE AT HOME, showering, Joe caught a glimpse of his naked body in the bathroom mirror. Pecs. Abs. Adonis? I’m a specimen all right. Toned from basic training and from road bumming. This explains the stares I get at the pool. He put on his glasses and peered at his unshaven mug in full focus. For the first time in his life he was not put off by the sight of himself. Look out, ladies, here comes Narcissus! The women who met him found him to be handsome, full of himself, distracted, lonely, and well-read; unlike most Illinois men-boys from educated families, he seemed unfocused and undirected. He told them he was writing novels; most did not believe him. Maybe they sensed his own doubts about his abilities. Grove Press sent him his novel back in the same box he’d sent it in, but with a note on company stationery. Regrets, not for us. Worthy material. Difficult market. Thank you so much for thinking of us. His first rejection letter, and he could tell every word was malarkey. So he called the Grove offices to see if he could get any more feedback. After a few minutes on hold, they tracked down a “reader” who sounded young and well-bred. “I thought it was really impenetrable. Nice setting. But I just didn’t get what was going on with your characters. All they do is make speeches. But thanks for calling. You’re the first writer who’s ever called me. I never get to talk to anyone.”

  * * *

  UNDETERRED, JOE PLUNGED deeper into another novel, Caledonia, making use of his experiences in the diamond fields. Joe had never taken a single writing class, or opened that basic guide for American writing, William Strunk’s The Elements of Style. He wrote aggressively robust sentences, favored the passive voice, mixed up his metaphors and filled Caledonia with long descriptive passages and few other willful characters besides the one modeled on himself.5

  After ninety-four pages he did not have a discernible plot. He got bored and gave up. The experience of being on the road was more fun than writing about it. He had to get back on the road. But where to? How about everywhere? A bumming trip around the world. Down through Mexico and Central America to South America, then east across the Atlantic into Africa and Asia. Maybe a ship from Tokyo to San Francisco on the way home. He went to Chicago and obtained a visa from the Japanese consulate, and he gathered his belongings and prepared to set off from Urbana during the final days of summer.

  10

  Tampico, Mexico. British Honduras. Guatemala City. The Panama Canal. Lima, Peru. Santiago, Chile. The Strait of Magellan

  A RIDE IS ALL I ASK; good company and bumming tales are what I have to offer. Thanks, buddy. Thank you, sir. Missouri? Sure. Tulsa? That’ll do just fine. He joined the denim brotherhood of drivers and bums at gas stations and highway turnoffs. Slow road climb to the ridgeline and back down. Unsettled skies of early summer, driver�
��s eyes on the blackening horizon, scanning for lightning bolts and funnel clouds. Prairie grasses, never plowed, home to rattlers and assorted other varmints. Joe Sanderson, great-grandson of wagonmen who traveled on rutted roads through these grasses, now following the sunset, sort of. Erect corn and swaying mustardy wheat catching the wind, car radios transmitting teenage anthems. I see a line of cars and they’re all painted black. Reverb, sitars and steel guitars. His first wired money would be waiting for him at the U.S. Embassy in Panama, down in the umbilical cord of North America. After that he’d hotfoot it all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Dear Mom and Calhoun, he wrote from Mexico. Forty-four hours later, $8 and six car rides and a Mexican bus, and I’m in Tampico. Not bad, eh? I mean, for the educated bum, that is.

  Drank beer with a Detroit boy clear to Tulsa, Oklahoma; gallons of beer with 3 Lawrence, Kansas, fellows who own a tavern there; short rides with a University of Missouri student, a Vietnam vet and a Negro driving a stationery company van; then a last ride, clear to Brownsville with a 50 yr. old man and a bottle of Scotch. Claimed his second wife was top Houston businesswoman, claimed also he’d been worth $1½ million in better days, lost everything, and hated the federal income tax with a passion, far more than he hated integration of the races. Huh?