Travels with Lizbeth Read online

  The last of the grass and the trees petered out a little past Junction, Texas, and then for many miles there was nothing except what is called cedar in Austin but elsewhere is known as juniper scrub. This is a long and desolate stretch, but what is more, the few wretched settlements that exist are several miles from the highway and no cafés, gas stations, or even tourist traps are visible from the road. I was set to work brewing coffee. The driver was well into his second day on the road, without stopping and had no intention of resting until he reached Tucson. Again I was offered a part of a roach from the ashtray, but once it was clear I had no interest in marijuana, I was given the job of rolling joints for the driver from a stash in a Bull Durham bag. We did not talk much. The driver was determined to coax something out of the radio. For the most part we got static and whenever he did pick up something he overpowered his speakers so the result to me was little different from static.

  I was suitably impressed by the mountains as we got to them. I had seldom seen mountains and never such as these, young and rising from a treeless landscape.

  It was another hot day and we were climbing. The temperature gauge in the old pickup read hot, but the driver insisted it was stuck. We pulled into Las Cruces to get gas and the radiator blew.

  The cap is supposed to blow first, just as a safety valve on a boiler blows before the boiler reaches the bursting point. But this cap had not. Yet as the steam dissipated and things cooled off, it appeared the radiator had only split a seam. A welder was found who would draw a bead down the seam for seven dollars.

  This exhausted our folding cash and I was set to the task of sorting through the driver’s change pot. There was enough for a couple of packs of cigarettes and, perhaps, gasoline to get to Tucson. I had about three quarters besides of my own, which I did not mention. We would press on.

  As we pulled out of the service station in Las Cruces, Lizbeth finally managed to hang herself, but inadequately. She was attempting to get from the back of the pickup to the cab window. I made a bed for her in the hub of the spare tire and then lashed her to it again with as little slack as I thought possible. Night was falling and I knew it would be cold. I hoped she would nest in the tire. Of course she did not. I was set back to square one in worrying about her. I became accustomed to the shadow of her head in the lights of the vehicles that overtook us, only to be alarmed again by the absence of the shadow when she finally fell asleep.

  The sun set as we passed Vail, Arizona. We were climbing again. The driver explained that Tucson was in a box canyon and if we reached the top of this climb we could coast into town. This was far from an idle observation, for fuel was precariously low. Eventually the truck did make it to the top and it was all downhill from there.

  The driver let us off about 9:00 P.M. at a truck stop south of town. I have since learned that this was a famous truck stop and elegantly appointed as these things go, but I had no chance of learning that firsthand. Immediately Lizbeth sat on a prickly pear and thus struck the keynote of our tenure in Tucson.

  The shoulder of the frontage road was under construction for as far ahead as I could see. That would pose a problem in getting away from the truck stop.

  I know now what I should have done. I should have found a dark spot and gone to sleep. Our situation did not appear to me to be good, but it was far from desperate and unlikely to deteriorate overnight. “Things will look brighter in the morning” was the sort of adage I always sneered at. Now I was to learn it was valuable advice and in Tucson it was a dear lesson. A long ride is such a piece of luck that one is tempted to try to press on before fortune shows its other face. I suppose that was why I hoped to get farther that night. But instead, Lizbeth and I were fallen upon by thieves.

  A young Latin man distracted me with some discussion that I never understood. I was holding Lizbeth and we were not more than twenty feet from our gear. When I turned to the gear, it was gone, and when I turned again, so was the young man.

  His confederates must have had a car, for there was no other way they could have made such a pile of gear disappear in so short a time. Naturally, I had laid my heavy coat on the bundle.

  I find it hard to believe that anyone would have thought I had anything of much value. My clothes, besides being worn, would not fit many other people, and this should have been obvious to look at me. The little radio was of no appreciable value. Besides my papers, most of the bulk of what was taken was the remainder of Lizbeth’s food and the bedding, which was warm enough, but could not have been sold. Other than a few dollars in postage, nothing could have been readily converted to cash. I was left with what I was wearing, a football practice jersey and my most ragged pair of jeans, and Lizbeth.

  My mistake, besides not getting us out of harm’s way after dark, was in not lashing Lizbeth to the gear the minute I set it down. While Lizbeth is harmless, most people would require some time to discover the fact and in the meanwhile she would make noise.

  Tired and disheartened, I sat by a telephone pole, and in spite of the cold I must have dozed sitting up.

  When I awoke I discovered a further disaster. Lizbeth had curled up at the base of the telephone pole, and cold as it was, she had heated the tar on the pole until it flowed all over her back. Clearly no one would want this mess in his vehicle. When the sun rose I saw it was even worse than it had first appeared.

  My own stamps and envelopes had gone with our gear. But just before I left Austin, Billy gave me a whole book of stamps with a face value of $4.40, which I had put in my wallet. By chance the wallet was in my jeans and not in the pocket of the coat that had been stolen.

  Billy had told me his phone credit card number and I used it to call a bookstore that was listed in the copied pages of a gay travelers’ guide that Billy had given me with the stamps. I supposed the bookstore was a gay one, and in my experience these little stores, which are not to be confused with adult bookstores, take a proprietary interest in their authors. The clerk I spoke to, however, seemed less than gracious and only grudgingly agreed to give me cash for the stamps. My object was to buy some rubbing alcohol to clean the tar off Lizbeth’s back.

  The immediate problem was to get to the bookstore.

  South Tucson consists of huts and shacks and sand dunes, with here and there the occasional obvious federal housing project. It is unremittingly barren and ugly. There are few improvements of any kind. Street signs are restricted to the housing projects where they identify various stravs. Using the dictionaries of several languages, I have been unable to discover what a strav is, and have concluded that it is a compromise between street and avenue.

  South Tucson simply has no sidewalks. I thought at first this was merely in keeping with the general wretchedness of the place, but eventually it seemed to me that the public policy in Tucson is to impede pedestrians as much as possible. In particular, I could find no way to walk to the main part of town in the north except in the traffic lanes of narrow highway ramps.

  I could not believe this at first, and Lizbeth and I spent several hours wandering on the south bank of the dry gash that divides Tucson as I looked for a walkway. More than anywhere we have been, adults like teenagers shouted threats as well as insults at us in Tucson, and did so whether I was trying to hitchhike or was merely walking. More than one man found it necessary to brandish a firearm at us although we were afoot and presented no conceivable threat to those cruising past us at upward of fifty miles per hour. This atmosphere did not make the walk across the high ramp in the traffic lane any less exciting.

  The usual medium in Tucson for vulgar displays of wealth appeared to be the conspicuous and wasteful consumption of water. As we walked north things got greener and more affluent. The ritziest neighborhoods were positively swamplike. Lizbeth could drink from the runoff of the sprinkler systems that ran throughout the heat of the day. Still, there were no continuous sidewalks.

  Perhaps the bookstore was no more than seven miles north of the gorge, but it was late in the afternoon when Lizbeth
and I got there. The bookstore was not of the sort I expected. It was not after all a little gay bookstore, but was a very large general-interest bookstore with a gay-interest section.

  The clerk took the book of stamps and said he would have to check with the owner, although I mentioned having phoned earlier. I suppose they counted the stamps each and every one, for it was some time before he returned to give me $4.40. I noticed that a couple of magazines that contained my stories were on display behind the counter, over the clerk’s head.

  I took the money to a nearby drugstore to get some rubbing alcohol.

  If I had then had a better grasp of the geography I might have saved us considerable trouble and heartbreak. The bookstore was not so very far to the east of the interstate. But as we had crossed the gorge, the interstate appeared to veer off sharply to the west. I thought the nearest point of the highway was in the south, and to the south we returned.

  We were quite in darkness by the time we crossed the gorge again. Lizbeth could no longer walk.

  We were far enough west now that convenience stores no longer had faucets and hoses on the outside. I went into a convenience store and bought a gallon of water. I returned to Lizbeth and carried her a few feet from the road, behind a sand dune.

  I would never have thought a stout middle-aged man could outwalk a healthy young dog. I have since learned I cannot expect much more than five miles a day out of Lizbeth on a consistent basis, and then only when conditions are favorable. In Tucson conditions are not favorable. Without sidewalks or grass, she had walked on cinders, sand, and rocks. The trip to the bookstore had worn the pads off her paws.

  TWO

  Tucson to La Puente: The Desert Rat

  It gets cold in the desert at night.

  I scouted around for something to cover us and found a piece of packing material that appeared to be shredded plastic pressed into a sheet. Lizbeth yipped and moaned every moment I was out of her sight. I stumbled about as if very intoxicated. I found Lizbeth again only for her crying. I was too cold to sleep. I sat up with Lizbeth on my lap, under my jersey, and the sheet of plastic wrapped around us. I shuddered until dawn. Then I found a piece of cardboard to lie on and fell asleep.

  We were there four days and I cannot account for that time. It is hard to say what was the worst of it. The nights warmed a little. When I went to find an unlocked and unattended water tap, Lizbeth would whine and howl; I was afraid she would be taken away when I got back. My lips crusted over. My face and exposed forearms burned.

  We were spotted from time to time by mobile thugs who drove by over and over shouting insults.

  One of the evenings, I forget which, something good finally happened. A young couple stopped on the road and set something out of their car. When they were back in it, they called to me and drove away. They left a paper plate of cold cuts, evidently left over from a buffet, for some of the slices were fanned out.

  We had eaten nothing since the night of the chicken à la king. I meant to give most of the cold cuts to Lizbeth, but I had my eye on a piece of cheese for myself. As soon as the plate was within her range, Lizbeth scarfed down all the food in a swoop. I held her in my lap, said, “Good dog, good dog,” and cried.

  Day and night strange planes flew in and out of the Air Force base. I reflected on what our last ride had told me; Tucson—or so he said—was one of the few cities in America that was off-limits to Soviet citizens. I supposed for that reason the Soviets had a number of missiles aimed at Tucson. I took that as a reassuring thought. Arizona is a desolate wasteland, but it might be considerably improved by detonating a few H-bombs in and around Tucson.

  I recalled an anthropology professor I had studied under once, who in proposing a list of cultural universals cited the duty to aid the wayfarer as a common aspect of desert cultures. He had never, I supposed, been to Tucson.

  One morning I went behind a bush and Lizbeth came after me. I had not needed to tie her while she recovered. She tackled me from behind at the knees, almost causing a minor accident.

  We rolled around in the sand, playing her favorite puppy-hood game, Piranha Fish, which consists of her chewing on my hands and wrists and wrestling me about while I shout, “Oh, the razor-sharp piranha teeth strip the flesh from my fingers! Oh, the pain!” and so on. Then we played Brain-Sucking Spider from Outer Space, in which the creepy brain-sucking spider-hand lands on the dog’s head and, of course, starves to death in short order.

  Lizbeth was well.

  In the meantime I had got most of the tar off her back. What tar remained was fairly inconspicuous because that part of her coat was black. Now I was the weak link.

  I had fasted before for much longer periods, but always with vitamins and, at least, caffeine to keep my spirits up. The sunburn and the chill of the nights were beginning to tell on me. I became dizzy when I stood and exhausted by twenty minutes of walking.

  I had found water in a distant park and when I went to fetch water I managed to rinse off my upper body in the men’s room. I was surprised to discover over time how much bathing helps, even if one has to put on dirty clothes afterward. But I did not have a razor or even a comb.

  I did not see how we would ever get out of Tucson.

  I was deeply depressed.

  My plan was to follow the frontage road through town, trying to hitchhike, but moving slowly through town in any event. Unfortunately, there was no frontage road in the direction we were going for quite long stretches.

  The day of Lizbeth’s recovery we walked again in the traffic lanes to cross into Tucson. Eventually we reached an on ramp in what appeared to be the central business district. We did not get a ride that day, but many jokers stopped twenty or thirty yards past us, blew their horns, and then sped off when we ran after them. I did not sleep that night, but sat at the corner with my head against a lamppost while Lizbeth slept on my lap.

  The following morning we did get a short ride, the two of us in the back of a commercial pickup. But we were let off where the interstate ran below street level. We had no place to stand and no driver could stop for us safely. So we walked along the city streets, which of course had no sidewalks. I tried to steer us parallel to the highway, but often I could not see where it was.

  Eventually we came to the Miracle Mile. Quite a number of Western towns seem to think there is something miraculous about a string of dilapidated tourist traps and fast-food outlets that have seen better days. Signs promised that the Miracle Mile would join the interstate, so we walked along until we came to the ramp.

  The ramp from the Miracle Mile to the interstate looked too dangerous to attempt afoot. But I could see we had only to descend the artificial hill we were on and cross an exceptionally stark expanse of desert to reach what appeared to be the frontage road. Some of the sand we crossed to reach the road appeared to be the lot of a truck stop. I tried hitchhiking on the frontage road. But it was a two-way frontage road and those going our way had trouble enough getting into the lane to turn onto the highway. Stopping to pick us up was out of the question.

  It began to rain.

  This was the last thing I expected.

  The real rain lasted long enough for me to cast about for some shelter on the treeless landscape, and then it turned to a drifting mist from which there could be no shelter. A cycle of rain and then mist recurred several times.

  I spotted a Dumpster behind a restaurant that was next to the truck stop, but the Dumpster yielded nothing. Far out in the lot I had seen a wool horse blanket, evidently part of an abandoned bedroll. The wool would be warm in spite of the rain. I expected we would get no farther by nightfall, and if the blanket was not claimed then, I planned to make it mine. I sat on the abutment of a drainage culvert and Lizbeth stood, her forepaws on my knees, to lick the rain off my face.

  Here then is the occurrence of my parable: We had been fallen upon by thieves, snubbed by the respectable elements of the community, I was dazed and weary, yet we were to be rescued by one of those most likely to
disapprove of me, for just at this time appeared the Good Fundamentalist.

  “Jesus told me to stop,” he said.

  I was in no position to argue with this bit of divine inspiration. Principles are principles, but it seemed to me that a cultural guerilla must make use of the resources at hand without regard to their origin.

  He opened his trunk and gave me a bedspread of thin, quilted chintz, its fitted corners torn out. This proved surprisingly warm. And he gave me five bucks.

  I was not especially surprised that he returned in about an hour with his wife. Jesus had told them to take me to Phoenix. They had brought a sack of groceries including dog food and a number of old flannel shirts, one of which would fit over my arms although I could not use the rest of them. They insisted I eat as we went. I made a sandwich of thin-sliced beef, but slipped most of the beef in the package to Lizbeth because I knew better than to break fast with a heavy meal. They did not press me too hard with their philosophy.

  It was fully dark by the time we reached Phoenix. I had found a ten-dollar bill in the desert while Lizbeth was recovering. As anyone from hurricane country knows, genuine U.S. currency turns a sickly yellow when exposed after a flood, and that was the color of one side of the note I found. The other side was encrusted with sand.

  I hoped to use the money in Phoenix to clean up and, perhaps, get some rest, but the discolored and damaged currency was sneered at when I presented it at the gay bathhouse.

  At that time I-10 did not go through Phoenix but turned north and became the Flagstaff Highway. The through traffic on Interstate 10 was fed onto the city streets. This must have been very satisfactory for local commerce, which perhaps explains why the highway through Phoenix remained unfinished so long after the rest of the system was complete. I could not complain, for the situation seemed as promising for a hitchhiker as for the merchants.