Travels with Lizbeth Read online

  Lizbeth and I took up a station on the city street that was the interstate as it passed through Phoenix. A number of prostitutes objected that this was their regular corner and our presence was bad for their business.

  Highways, medians, and margins throughout Arizona are lavishly planted, thereby to convince the unwary traveler that the land is fit for human habitation. Along the Flagstaff Highway I found a spreading magnolia where there was some evidence of a previous camper. My only qualm was that the sprinkler system might be turned on in the night. But I laid out my new bedroll, reclined with Lizbeth at my feet, and the next thing I knew it was dawn.

  * * *

  WE RETURNED TO the corner and of course in daylight none of the working girls were in evidence. Promptly Jesus told a roofer in a pickup to give us a ride, a couple of oranges, and another five dollars. In return I had only to accept a fulsome little tract. The driver let us off at the Avondale ramp. Here were the signs of lengthy and fruitless habitation by other hitchhikers, and the graffiti on the lamppost were not reassuring:

  “130,000 miles and still going strong—11–26–86—the Golden Thumb—6 years on the road.”

  “Trick Norton—12–17–87.”

  “1–29–88—Phoenix to L.A.—the Kalamazoo Kid—Fuck this ramp.” This latter sentiment was repeated in many slight variations.

  I wrote: “Lizbeth the dog and Lars … Austin TX to L.A. February 1988. Tucson sucks.”

  Thereafter whenever things on the road were not totally wretched, I often thought of the Golden Thumb, six years on the road. A person could, it seemed to me, hitchhike forever, and had I been twenty years younger I would have been tempted to see just how long I could make such an adventure last.

  Lizbeth and I walked down the cross street, found a truck stop where I replenished my mailing supplies, and stopped at a McDonald’s. We returned to the ramp to split a Big Mac.

  I did not expect to get out of Avondale soon, but in the afternoon a red-haired woman in a trashy car stopped and gave us a ride to the Burnt Well rest stop.

  Burnt Well had shaded picnic tables and plenty of water. Indians laid out tacky turquoise and silver jewelry for sale in the shade of the pavilion that housed the restrooms. They had a fair number of customers, even for the obviously ersatz coral pieces.

  Refreshed, Lizbeth and I walked far out on the reentry ramp where we could be seen both by cars on the highway and by those leaving the rest stop. A couple of women from the rest stop offered me a handful of change. They said they would give me a ride but for Lizbeth. I told them I would not part with her, and that was that.

  Once again we were picked up by a vehicle I had not noticed until it stopped. I always tried to make as much eye contact with the drivers of approaching vehicles as possible, but I do not believe I stared down a single ride. Eventually I was picked up so often by cars I had not seen that I almost became superstitious on the subject. I did not see this ride because I had turned my head away from the blowing rain for a moment.

  The driver’s name was Dallas Matsen. His car was a beat-up Pontiac. Its drab paint had been mostly blasted away by the sand, and its windshield bore a spider’s-web fracture. Rain leaked in at the top of the windshield and through my door, which was sprung. Many partial packs of cigarettes slid back and forth on the dashboard as Dallas drove.

  Dallas was what I expected of Arizona and Southern California. He had long, stringy, dirty-blond hair, sun-bleached in streaks, blue eyes, and a very dark tan, and he was so slender that he gave the impression of being taller. He said he was going from Phoenix to Fontana and then on to L.A. He claimed to have a good idea where La Puente was and said he would drop me off there.

  I thought our troubles were over.

  Dallas’s story seemed at first in no way alarming or far-fetched. He said he had fallen out with his girlfriend in Phoenix, which accounted for the crack in the windshield. Now he had a few days off and money in his pocket. He was going to Fontana to visit his son, who was with his ex-wife, and then on to L.A. to party.

  I had lost my maps with the rest of my gear. I gathered Fontana was in Southern California, but whether it was ten miles or a hundred from La Puente I did not know. At least we had plenty of cigarettes. Dallas told me to help myself from the open packs. He opened a fresh pack about every third cigarette and had several unbroken cartons in the backseat. He must have known the road well, for soon he pulled off the highway and stopped at a convenience store that had not been visible from the highway. Dallas flashed a roll of bills. My job was to keep a foot on the accelerator. If the engine were to die, there was some doubt Dallas could restart it. Dallas went into the store and came out with a couple of bottles of cold duck and a couple of cartons more of cigarettes.

  He popped the plastic corks of the bottles with his teeth and handed me one of the foaming bottles. In normal times I would have been dead drunk if I had finished off one bottle of cold duck, and would have been all the more so then, as I was scarcely accustomed to solid food again and was still somewhat dehydrated from our days in the sun while Lizbeth recovered. I took every opportunity to pour a little out of the bottle when I was unobserved, and I only sipped at the wine while trying to give the impression I was guzzling it. After only a few sips I was quite lightheaded.

  Dallas told me he was thirty-four. Since he carried his cash in a roll, he left his wallet lying on the car seat, and I later verified his age and the name he had given me. He looked at least ten years younger. He had a certain je ne sais quoi that reminded me of Rufus. They were of the same physical type, and I soon learned that like Rufus, Dallas was a compulsive liar and a bad one.

  We stopped again, this time for gasoline. I had to keep the engine running while Dallas filled the tank. This did not seem very safe, but then nothing about Matsen’s car seemed very safe; his gas cap was merely a red shop rag. The roll of bills came out again and Dallas went in to pay for the gas. Again he came out with two bottles and two cartons of cigarettes. And so our journey went. After a while I noticed his bankroll was all ones. Dallas was obviously an alcoholic. If I had drunk as much as he did we would not have accumulated a surplus of cold duck, for he drank one of every pair of bottles he acquired. He continued to bring two bottles out of the store every time we stopped, though it must have been clear I would never catch up to his drinking. But it was the cigarettes I wondered about. The cartons in the backseat already amounted to a case or more. He was not buying them to smoke. Then I realized: He was not buying them at all.

  I felt that by keeping my foot on the gas to ensure Dallas’s getaway, I was compromising my policy of not stealing. Moreover, I was afraid of being arrested. Technically I became an accessory as soon as I realized what Dallas was doing. I did not think I would be convicted of any such thing, but I was afraid that if I was detained, even if I was eventually discharged, Lizbeth would be impounded and I would be unable to raise the pound fee to reclaim her. She was a handsome animal when she had her winter coat, but she was no longer a cute puppy. I feared that once she was impounded she would not be adopted and would be put to death. Sticking with Matsen was not wise and I knew it.

  But we were moving toward Southern California and it seemed Lizbeth and I would reach our goal in just a few hours. I was too tired and too roadsick to insist that Dallas put us out in the desert. I believed Lizbeth and I had been near death in Tucson and to go afoot on the sand again voluntarily might tempt Fate.

  A little after dark we were in the mountains and the car was climbing to the top of a rise. “I want to show this to you,” Dallas said.

  We cleared the rise and in every direction were the shimmering lights of the thickly populated valley below us: rose sodium lights, blue mercury vapor, neon and yellow incandescent; all before us glittering in the darkness. Tears rolled down my cheeks. It was beautiful and, so I hoped, somewhere down there Lizbeth and I might get off the road.

  The novelty had worn off traveling so far as Lizbeth was concerned. She no longer sat up and snif
fed the air, but whenever we found a ride she sought the warmest and most comfortable spot available and promptly fell asleep. When it was time to walk her she went about her business with uncharacteristic haste and then made a beeline for the vehicle, as if she had at some level grasped what a ride was and was afraid of losing one.

  Dallas’s car was a hazard. The engine died repeatedly, despite all precautions, giving up the ghost a couple of times on the open highway with no apparent provocation. Restarting the engine required liberal applications of some very volatile aerosol chemical that Dallas kept for that purpose, and as often as not the carburetor caught fire when he applied it.

  I do not consider myself mechanically inclined, but I supposed Dallas knew what he was doing. Desert rat that he was, he seemed certain to have known something about cars to have kept his bucket of bolts running. I imagined he was born with grease under his fingernails. I mastered my fear and did as he said no matter how many times the results seemed alarming.

  By and by we began to smell something like rubber burning. Dallas laid a heavy wrench on the accelerator and we got out to investigate. I do not like to fool with engines while they are running, especially when the radiator fan is uncowled, as Matsen’s was. We found a wire of some kind that had joined its ancestors. Perhaps we had smelled the insulation burning off that wire. As the engine continued to run, we decided the wire had something to do with the heater or the radio, both of which had turned up hors de combat. Dallas seemed content with the situation. We shrugged our shoulders, got back in the car, and went on. I expected to find cultural differences in Southern California, and among the first I detected was Dallas’s driving. There was, for example, the practice of passing on the right by jumping the curb and driving on the sidewalks. This was impossible in Texas, where the blocks were short and the sidewalks narrow. But in Southern California it works out well enough, provided the sidewalk is mounted and dismounted between lampposts, which are conveniently widely spaced. There is a stimulating effect on pedestrians.

  Then there is the custom—custom, I say, because I observed that Dallas’s driving habits were far from unique—of pulling up behind and gently nudging the bumper of anyone who has cut you off on the freeway. There are many others: backing up to a missed exit, impromptu crossing over at arbitrary points, U-turning on bridges, and yet others that I cannot describe because my eyes were clamped shut.

  I came to understand that Dallas had not just left Phoenix when he picked me up. He had been living in his car for some time. His occupation was driving from Phoenix to L.A. and back, with side forays on the many long boulevards between San Bernardino and L.A., where there were enough convenience stores that he could shoplift for years, perhaps even for a lifetime without having to hit the same store twice, although he did seem to have his favorites.

  At times I thought Dallas always knew where we were and where we were going. At other times I thought he had mastered only the general scheme of the boulevards and their strip centers, for they were so alike that a map of one would have served as a fair guide to any of the others.

  We sometimes stopped at rest stops—or perhaps it was the same rest stop several times—where I observed that Dallas was only one of a number of young men who lived in this way and all the others traveled in pairs. I was never in earshot when Dallas talked to the others, but I gathered they talked shop—where the pickings were especially easy, how someone had got busted, that sort of thing.

  Perhaps my imagination was running away with me, but I thought Dallas was grooming me as his sidekick. Some of his vehicular antics seemed calculated to try my nerve. Once he put me out when I gasped too audibly at one of his maneuvers. The wind was cold and hard. Dallas returned for me shortly and for a while after that he drove sanely and spoke sweetly. But after a bit he attempted even more spectacular feats, just to see, I think, whether I had learned my lesson.

  I had not a nerve left in my body, for I am usually a poor rider, likely to pump the imaginary passenger-side brake even when I am in the hands of a model driver.

  We were developing quite a surplus of cold duck. I had disposed of only two bottles while actually drinking about three wineglasses’ worth. The cigarettes accumulated even more rapidly and were beginning to crowd Lizbeth in the backseat. At last Dallas left off calling on convenience stores. We headed into the wilds of Fontana, which it turned out had been close by for some time. The plan, Dallas told me, was for me to assist him in kidnapping his infant son.

  I was certain, just about, that the plan was a lie, perhaps a part of my testing. Dallas embroidered on his story a bit, claiming to be wanted in L.A. for having hired there a couple of guys to break his ex-wife’s legs.

  We spent many hours driving back roads. Dallas was looking for something, perhaps a place he had been to only once or twice before. Again and again we returned to the highway. From the highway we followed a fixed sequence of roads so that we always reached a certain point in Fontana. From there Dallas was unsure of the way. We took various courses. Sometimes Dallas thought he almost recognized something. But finally he would realize the trail had gone cold and we would return to the highway and start over. Before long I knew the first part of the route as well as Dallas did. He remained tight-lipped.

  At long last he pulled over at no place in particular and took the decisive action of turning off the ignition. The cigarettes went into the trunk. I walked Lizbeth. Then Lizbeth and I bedded down in the backseat, and Dallas in the front.

  I cannot explain, exactly, why I had not parted with Dallas.

  I was not sure where I was. But that was only an excuse. I knew I was in Southern California and I knew I could not be that far from La Puente.

  As bad as things had been I cannot deny there is a romance of the road. The Golden Thumb and Dallas Matsen were part of something very appealing to me, and I suppose I will always wonder whether things would really have turned out so badly if I had given in to my desire for it.

  Dallas seemed to have some use for me in mind and after my castaway days in Tucson I was grateful to be wanted by anybody for anything. I felt a little reckless because it seemed to me my life should have ended in the desert outside Tucson and whatever happened afterward I would be ahead of the game. And I was beginning to absorb a certain California something, something of the spirit of a rat race in paradise, something that whispered “mañana, mañana” to my every nascent worry and fear. I was letting go. I was going with the flow. I was becoming Laid-Back.

  * * *

  IT WAS COLD duck for breakfast.

  Lizbeth had never known quite what to make of sheep and cattle. But as it turned out we were parked near a corral that contained a swayback bay mare. Lizbeth reacted to this as if it were a large dog and I am sure that is what she thought it was.

  We moved on rather quickly, the car cooperating for once. We returned to the same circuit we had traversed many times the night before. Then on one of the back roads, the car stopped. The starter would not crank. The battery was so flat it would not sound the horn.

  The fan belt had joined its ancestors.

  Dallas hailed down a pickup and went off to purchase a fan belt. His bankroll of ones was much diminished, although he had been paying for nothing but gas. Apparently Dallas sustained himself on cold duck. Lizbeth still had dog food, but I had exhausted my solid provisions.

  I stood by the car and watched the locals drive by. Texas has rednecks, too, but Fontana seemed to have a particularly rugged and surly lot, and well-armed to boot. I developed a strong desire not to cross any of them.

  The wind blew. Lizbeth sat out for a while, her ears streamlined back. But soon she preferred to sit in the car. The wind kept blasting unlike anything in my experience, far stronger than the winds from the Gulf of Mexico. Dallas said it was a Santa Ana, but it was not. It was the normal breeze in Fontana.

  Across the road was a vista of a majestic, snow-topped mountain that rather looked like the Paramount Studios trademark. I jotted a postcard to
Billy and flagged down a postal Jeep.

  Fairly soon a pickup stopped in front of the car and Dallas hopped out with the new fan belt. I peeked under the hood with him. I believed I saw how the belt went on. Dallas began to remove the radiator. The way I saw it, that was unnecessary.

  I still supposed Dallas was bound to have some mechanical knowledge to have kept his car running back and forth across the desert until most of the paint had been blasted away. He did have a large assortment of tools and most of them were greasy. So I stepped back and let Dallas proceed. Sure enough, he extracted the radiator rather neatly. That left more room to work, but so far as I could see it had not altered the geometry of the situation. Next Dallas removed a very large socket from his toolbox and went into the trunk of his car for a breaker bar. It took me a moment to absorb this.

  The fool meant to pull the timing chain!

  I knew from sad experience this is the last thing ever to do, even if the timing chain wants replacing.

  Somehow I diverted Dallas for a moment while I slipped the fan belt on. “Look,” I said, “won’t it work this way?” Dallas studied the fan belt at great length, running his finger around the belt’s path several times. This gave me a moment to slide under the car and to see what the situation was with the alternator.

  The bolt that allows the alternator to be moved to adjust the tension in the fan belt had sheared off, or so it seemed at first. That had released the tension in the first fan belt and it had burned itself up from the friction of slipping. So I reasoned at the time, but I was not yet sure I was correct.

  Dallas had sworn the old belt had been replaced recently. If so, a cure would require an explanation of the early failure of the belt, and the missing bolt seem to provide the explanation.

  The bolt had threaded into a hole in the body of the alternator, and if it had sheared off we should now have had the problem of removing the remainder of the bolt from the alternator. This sort of thing keeps machinists out of breadlines.