Travels with Lizbeth Page 10

  By then it was the heat of the day and we moved through town slowly. We found a picnic table in the shade of a tree and sat down for a while. A respectable-looking old gentleman with very loud suspenders came and sat at the table too. He admired Lizbeth and inquired of me tactfully with no apparent motive other than to pass the time. I regret not learning from him anything of Benson except that he thought it was a nice little town.

  When Lizbeth and I reached what I think was the principal cross street, I saw a Dairy Queen, still of the style I remembered from childhood. Lizbeth and I crossed the road. I tied her outside and went in. I got a cone as well as a dish. Lizbeth and I sat outside and she lapped at her dish while I licked my cone.

  Adult dogs, of course, cannot digest ice cream, but I had heard the stuff at Dairy Queen is not a dairy product. At any rate, Lizbeth suffered no ill effects except thirst. Wonder of wonders, there was a free fountain at the Dairy Queen, too.

  Evidently Benson was a rather old town by Arizona standards. Many of the buildings and storefronts on the road might easily have been a hundred years old. I did not see a hint of phony restoration. It looked like the Old West and it looked real.

  Several of the old storefronts were for let and clearly had living quarters above. And since I saw them I have recurred to the fantasy of having one of them for a studio. Where the main street came to an end was a sign indicating that the entrance to the interstate was through an underpass. This was not made to accommodate pedestrians. So I stood on a grassy spot in the shade of a tree and stuck out my thumb.

  Quite a number of high school kids were cruising around, but none of them yelled at me. Adults smiled and nodded. A sheriff’s car came by, but the driver ignored me.

  Another old man came along. I discovered he had parked his car nearby and got out to speak with me. He asked if there was some emergency. I said none immediately. I told him I had been to Los Angeles to look for work, had found none, and was returning to Austin although I had no particular prospects there.

  He said he would return at sundown and if I was still there he would find some accommodation for me. I wish I could recall his exact words, for he graciously made it sound as if putting me up would be no trouble at all, while conveying nonetheless the idea that I ought not to interrupt my journey any further if the opportunity of continuing presented itself.

  I was not in Benson at sundown.

  I was very sorry to leave the town. Perhaps if I had stayed longer Benson would have shown another face, but I doubt it. If Benson was not genuine, it was at least very convincing.

  As the shadows began to grow long I was picked up by a Latin man in a pickup. He spoke no English. Before we were quite out of town he stopped to fuel the truck and bought me a Coke. He seemed not to grasp that no matter how loudly and rapidly he spoke Spanish to me I would not understand. I caught one word, I thought: “Paradisio,” which I took to mean paradise—but I could not apprehend the significance of that. He became almost frantic, verging on tears in his utterances. I smiled sweetly and nodded.

  I fancied he took me for some kind of mendicant holy man. Perhaps he hoped I might be induced to pray for him that he might attain paradise. This seemed a little less ludicrous at the time, for he could not have tried more passionately to communicate with me if his soul had depended on it.

  Finally we went off down the highway, Lizbeth and I in the back. In the last bit of twilight he put us out. This was a place at least as desolate as the Joshua Tree crossover. He turned off the highway and was gone. He had let us out under a big green interstate sign. I had been facing the rear and had not read the sign as we approached. I backed away from it to read it. It indicated the exit to Paradise. Paradise, Arizona.

  This is what he had been trying to tell me. He was only going to Paradise. No doubt he had become agitated because he knew he would be leaving me in the middle of nowhere. He took me not for a mendicant holy man, but for a lunatic or a fool.

  Again our situation did not look good, so I laid out our bedroll. The moon rose. The moon must have been past full, else Sunday would not have been Easter, but the illusion that makes the moon seem larger when it is near the horizon is especially pronounced in the desert. All we needed to be the perfect Western cliché was the silhouette of a coyote against the rising moon.

  That silhouette I never saw, but presently a coyote began to howl. The coyote’s howl reached something primeval in Lizbeth. She insisted on getting under the covers with me, although it was really too warm. She whimpered and shuddered. But the sand was soft and I was soon asleep.

  * * *

  LATE THE FOLLOWING afternoon we got another ride after our water was quite exhausted. We had spent the day in the full sun, for there was not even a crossover.

  He came along in an El Camino, which is a poor compromise between a small pickup and a car. In the bed of the decayed El Camino was a very large motorcycle, lashed upright on the diagonal, as it would not have fit lengthwise. All manner of gear had to be moved to accommodate my two bags. This left no place for Lizbeth except in the cab, and the driver wanted reassuring that she was a licker, not a biter. By then Lizbeth had absorbed, however dimly, that rides were a very good thing and she would lunge tongue-first to express her gratitude to our drivers.

  Our driver’s name was Dale, and he was a Texas native. I do not believe I learned much of his history, but if I did it did not impress me so much as his destination. He was going to his family’s home in Bastrop, a little town to the east of Austin. I had expected to have trouble getting to Austin once I left the interstate, but Dale would be going into Austin, and this seemed the best I could have hoped for. Dale was quite saturated with biker culture. I had met such guys before—black T-shirts, flying-skull rings, back issues of Easy Rider magazine kept like other people keep National Geographic. I always suspected that real bikers did not put quite so much time and money into maintaining a biker image. Indeed, of the guys who seemed to be trying too hard to be bikers, Dale was the first I had met who actually owned a bike, although he admitted he had not been able to make his run since he bought it. Part of the reason for the trip was that he hoped his father and brothers in Bastrop could make the bike run.

  I believe the only reason Dale picked us up was that I had put on a black T-shirt that morning.

  The El Camino had a slow leak in the radiator and its battery would not hold a charge. We limped from service station to service station. Dale had a case of a fluid that was supposed to be a quick fix for radiator leaks. Can after can of the stuff went into the radiator. I never could see that it helped any. Nonetheless we had some hope of reaching Las Cruces by nightfall until a tire blew out.

  At once I dreaded the task of digging through all of Dale’s junk to reach the spare tire. But Dale did not have a spare. To make matters worse, the blowout had occurred near a state prison and there were many signs advising drivers not to pick up hitchhikers. The nature of our plight was evident, but whether for the signs or for some other reason, no one would stop.

  Signs on the interstate in New Mexico say that the highway is patrolled by aircraft. And so it must be, if it is patrolled at all, for I never saw a New Mexico highway patrol car. After dark we did begin to see light aircraft, a little to the north and east of us. We supposed these were the patrol aircraft, for they seemed to follow a regular circuit. The one part of Dale’s bike that worked was the enormous headlamp. We swung it around and aimed it at the planes, alternately flashing the lamp in series of three flashes and burning the lamp steadily. Nothing came of this. We tried flashing the lamp at the prison. We could see the prison’s searchlight sweeping the desert and thought it possible they might notice our light. We flashed the light irregularly, on the theory that the guards might send someone to investigate whether we were attempting to signal a prisoner. And nothing came of this.

  At last Dale decided there was nothing to do except to ride into town on the rim, which could not help but ruin the rim, if it did no more serious damage. Aft
er midnight we pulled into a truck stop in Las Cruces.

  Dale had some hope that his family would wire him some money. He began trying to reach them by phone. By ten o’clock the next morning it became clear to me that the family, for whatever reason, was not going to put the money on the wire. But Dale kept at it. In the meantime he met a man who was abandoning his car at the truck stop. The man wore a black T-shirt with a Harley emblem, so I ought to have seen how things would go.

  Lizbeth and I remained to guard the gear while Dale and his new friend scouted around for a rim. The guy with the Harley shirt returned and extracted my last six dollars, saying it was for the rim. A rim arrived by pickup without either Dale or his new friend, but as the rim did not have holes to match the pattern of bolts on the hub, I sent it back. Eventually, the correct rim, complete with a serviceable tire, arrived.

  Dale explained to me that the other guy, by virtue of having a Harley emblem on his black T-shirt, was a bro, and so he would ride in the cab. But by careful repacking we might make room for Lizbeth and me in the back. We did find a rather tenuous purchase on a pile of things in the back and Dale took off. This was a moderately terrifying experience.

  To begin with, the bed of an El Camino is very shallow. With several layers of things under me, I was quite exposed to the wind and I had no handhold on any structural part of the vehicle. But mostly it was just very uncomfortable. The radiator’s condition had not improved over the night. At the second stop for water, where there happened to be a bar, Dale told me they had decided to rest the car for a couple of hours. He and his new friend were going into the bar, and perhaps, Dale thought, it would be all to the better if I were not there when they came out.

  Within a quarter of an hour they passed me as I stood on the highway and the guy with the Harley emblem shot me the finger.

  At dusk a very large white car with Mexican plates stopped for me. The driver and his companion were quite as fair as I, but they knew only a few words of English. I gathered they were students. They took me to El Paso.

  We passed the El Camino, broken down at the side of the road.

  In downtown El Paso, where the highway was high in the air, the driver pulled over and stopped in the emergency lane. He indicated a bell tower not so far from the highway. He said—signing as much as saying—that this was a mission and they would take care of me there.

  I had no intention of going to the mission, but Lizbeth and I slid down the concrete embankment in the general direction the driver had indicated. It was the only way I could see to get off the highway.

  At the bottom of the embankment we confronted a very tall chain-link fence that was topped with concertina wire. Beyond the fence were the backsides of frame tenements, all very dilapidated. I found breaches in the fence, one or two perhaps large enough to admit me. But I knew some parts of El Paso north of the river had been ceded to Mexico. I suspected it was Mexico on the other side of the fence. I was afraid that if we did find ourselves in Mexico I might have difficulty repatriating Lizbeth.

  We walked eastward along the fence and eventually the fence turned away sharply to the right. We were on the streets of El Paso. As we went east the highway descended below street level. We walked above it, on the street that fed all the on ramps. But at last that street came to an end. At the last on ramp I tried hitchhiking until midnight, but I had to get some sleep. The night before I had dozed only a little, sitting up in the El Camino.

  We seemed to be surrounded by railroad yards. Everything I had heard about railroad detectives dated to the 1930s, but I did not want to learn whether these old stories were still applicable. We walked through the downtown streets until I found a drunk passed out on the steps of an old office building. Around the corner of that building I lay down without laying out the bedroll. I supposed that whoever might molest me would find the wino a more tempting target. Perhaps I slept four hours and not very soundly, but my head was a lot clearer when I got up.

  I filled my water bottles from the fountain at a service station that was not yet open for the day. The men’s room was unlocked and I tidied up a bit. We walked back to the ramp and were there until the afternoon. We got a ride to the truck stop east of town, and we were there for three nights.

  When we arrived at this ramp, two other hitchhikers were ahead of us. Before we left there were perhaps a dozen others. Here were two very large truck stops on both the east- and westbound sides of the highway. I did not investigate the one on the westbound side, but the one on the eastbound side was large enough to have an adult bookstore and arcade on the lot. The lot itself was huge and seemed always to contain several score big rigs and many more smaller trucks and passenger cars.

  At night Lizbeth and I slept in a drainage tunnel under the earthwork of the crossover. The sand there was soft and previous tenants had left many candle stubs. The drainage tunnels were extensive and indicated, I suppose, the possibility of flash flooding—a phenomenon easier to imagine in the lush, narrow canyons of California than in the arid flats of West Texas.

  Eventually I spoke to several of the other hitchhikers. Several of them claimed that the food stamp office in El Paso was issuing emergency food stamps to all comers. This was said to happen from time to time when the state had failed to issue its allotment. Funds for the stamps not issued would have to be returned to the federal government, and of course the state would rather hand the stamps out on the street than send money back to Washington. I often heard slight variations on this story, but whenever I investigated for myself I was told I did not qualify for assistance.

  One of the other hitchhikers was the old mute man who had ridden between Tucson and Benson with us. All the rest I met were alcoholics, except perhaps for a college-aged man, apparently a weight lifter, who arrived on the ramp in a tank top and nylon running shorts. He got a ride within ten minutes.

  Mogen David 20/20, called Mad Dog, was the choice beverage of the alcoholics here. When they pooled their resources to buy it at the convenience store in the truck stop, they debated whether to buy the purple or the yellow variety. Taste was not the issue. Some of the winos thought one or the other was more alcoholic.

  They were astonished to learn I did not care for Mad Dog. In the afternoons traffic backed up on the off ramp, for evidently there was a large residential area somewhere to the south of this exit. The winos would go up to the ramp and beg from the drivers of the cars stuck in the off ramp. Many of the drivers gave the winos bottled water or fruit drinks. Having no use for that sort of thing, the winos gave the nonalcoholic beverages to me with the result that I had to go to the truck stop for water only once.

  Peculiar things happened Saturday morning. One by one the winos were picked up by truckers. I think one of the trucks stopped for me, but for some reason I decided not to try to climb in the cab with Lizbeth and my gear without some more positive indication from the driver, who had merely stopped near us and sounded his horn. When all the others had been picked up, I regretted not pursuing the possibility of a ride with the trucker who had stopped. This seemed to have been my last chance and I had failed to take it.

  I thought a sign might help. I had a sign when I started out, but had lost it as we got out of the sports car at the Joshua Tree exit. I found a piece of cardboard and painted it with Wite-Out, which is the sort of thing a writer will have saved and stored in his bag even though he had no immediate use for it. Whether the sign helped or not, a Pinto soon stopped.

  The driver asked if I could drive. I replied that I could, but was not licensed. After a pause he said for me to get in. He was fiftyish, deathly pale, grown fat with age, and he was wearing only boxer shorts. I wondered at this at first, especially as the open fly of the shorts exposed his sex whenever he shifted in his seat, but eventually I concluded that the driver’s attire reflected only his practical nature. It was a very hot day.

  The car was a wreck. Loose wires hung down from behind the dashboard, and most of the knobs, handles, and interior paneling was miss
ing.

  He was a salesman. He explained that as opposed to flying it was more economical to buy junk cars, such as the one we were in, for three or four hundred dollars and to abandon them when he reached his destination. He had no tangible product. What he did was to organize packets of promotional material that would be inserted in shopping bags at college bookstores.

  He said he had planned next to go to San Antonio, but he had an old girlfriend in Austin, so if I would drive I could drive into Austin. This was very agreeable because I knew I otherwise might spend several days trying to get from the interstate to Austin.

  As we went we passed, one by one, many of the winos I recognized from the truck stop. Each of them was far from any exit. That all of them had been picked up in so short a time that morning and that so many of them turned up stranded seemed to me to be more than a matter of chance. I suspected, and I still suspect, the truckers acted in concert to remove the winos from the truck stop and to strand them. I started driving about sundown, as we were among the Davis Mountains. Lizbeth insisted on lying in the front on the floorboard, and the weight of her head on the accelerator as she dozed off made a perfect cruise control.

  Lizbeth and I got out in Austin about 3:00 A.M. A cold drizzle was falling. In Southern California I had forgotten about rain and cold.

  Lizbeth realized where we were. It was a block from her veterinarian’s office, where she had been going since she was whelped. It was three blocks from the shack on Avenue B, where she had been brought to me, where she had grown up, and where she had had her little yard to play in.