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.

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 sniffed 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.

But no. The threaded hole in the alternator was clean as could be; I could see through it. Evidently besides the hole itself being threaded, there had also been a nut on the far side. I asked who had replaced the fan belt the last time. Clearly Dallas had not done it himself.

“A friend,” he said.

I suspected then that the bolt had not sheared off, but had never been replaced when the friend changed the belt. That in itself was odd, because the bolt should never have been removed, needing only to be loosened to adjust the tension in the belt. Yet I could not think of another explanation.

I sorted through Dallas’s hardware. Of course I could not find a bolt to match the threads of the hole of the alternator. But I found one that was narrower and long enough. Dallas had discovered that a corrugated-metal building across the road was in fact a machine shop—I would never have inquired, for I would never have expected such luck. He took the bolt that fit through the alternator to the machine shop and returned with several nuts that fit it. Several square nuts. This was jury-rigging, but there was nothing else to be done.

“It will work now,” I told Dallas, “but I can’t say for how long.”

I let Dallas replace the radiator. He seemed well-drilled in the procedure and I would have had to figure it out as I went along. Then Dallas waved his cables until someone stopped to give us a jump. We took to the interstate to build up a full charge in the battery. As we cruised the freeway we passed the West Covina exits several times, but I did not know that any one of them would have taken me to La Puente in short order.

We returned to Fontana with the battery fully charged. There was no more difficulty restarting the engine.

Dallas had no more to say about kidnapping children, his own or anyone else’s. He was trying to score—crack or speed, I never learned which. He simply could not remember where his connection lived. It had been many years. I doubted that after such a time the connection would be where Dallas remembered even if he could remember.

At last Dallas thought he recognized something, either the house or the car. We stopped at a house we had passed many times before and Dallas went in. He was in the house a long time. It was not the place he was looking for, but he got an idea there of what to do instead. He began to try to set up a deal for the cigarettes. We rode around until it was dead dark. We went then to a number of sleazy places, including, I gather, a bordello. At one place he traded some cigarettes for a pint of whiskey, although there was cold duck aplenty on the floorboard behind the driver’s seat. We went to various pay phones. At some of them Dallas placed calls and at others he waited for calls.

At last we went to the very dark parking lot of a very sleazy-looking beer joint somewhere in Fontana, not far from where we replaced the fan belt. People with guns and big flashlights came.

Flashlights shined at me and Lizbeth in the car. Dallas discussed something in animated whispers with a man and a woman in the parking lot. He got more and more excited. They leveled their guns at him.

Another man approached the car with a flashlight and a rifle or shotgun—I could not tell which because the light was in my eyes.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Lizbeth yipped. “Just a hitchhiker,” I said.

“What’s your connection with this guy?”

“He picked me up outside Phoenix.”

“Where did he leave the cigarettes?”

“In the backseat,” I said. The cigarettes had been returned to the backseat from the trunk as soon as I got up and about that morning.

The man shined his flashlight into the backseat. There was more than a case of cigarettes stacked up.

“These are the cigarettes?”

“That’s them.”

“And you rode from Phoenix in this car with this guy?”

“Yes. That’s all I know about this.”

The man chuckled. He backed away from the car until he was in whispering range of the others. He whispered. The woman shrieked a sort of laugh.

Dallas began talking quickly and earnestly. I could not quite make out what he was saying. The people with flashlights and guns backed away. Dallas kept after them, jabbering away. One of the men ordered Dallas to stay put. Dallas kept talking and did not entirely stay put. But the others backed away quickly, and when they were out of the parking lot and down the road in the shadows, the flashlights went out all at once.

Where the flashlights had gone out a big engine fired up and a big truck without lights came down the road. The truck passed the parking lot on the fly and disappeared down the dark back road. It came out bit by bit. Dallas was quite intoxicated. He had set up a deal to trade cigarettes for whatever it was he wanted. But the people got the idea that Dallas had a truckload of cigarettes. Dallas tried to convince them to deal for the cigarettes he did have, but they were not interested in such a small quantity. I suspected the people did not have anything to trade, but would have ripped us off and possibly killed us if there had been a truckload of cigarettes.

Dallas returned to the bordello and quickly disposed of a case of cigarettes for some small amount of cash. That left four or five cartons.

As we pulled onto the interstate we passed a hitchhiker standing on the ramp far past the NO PEDESTRIANS sign. I saw the highway patrol car pull onto the ramp, and at first I thought they were going after the hitchhiker. I guess I had become used to Dallas’s driving, for I had not noticed his doing anything spectacular. He was drunk.

The highway patrol pulled us over.

I thought if Dallas really was the wanted man he had said he was, I would soon know it. I hoped this was nothing to do with the shoplifting. For some reason Dallas had stuffed the remaining cartons of cigarettes under the seat. The officers used their public address system to order Dallas out of the car. Lizbeth barked. She had never encountered police before, but she hated them—perhaps the uniforms remind her of letter carriers. Eventually one of the officers came around to check my ID.

“You boys been drinking some beer?” He shined his light into Dallas’s car, but he could not see the open bottle of cold duck Dallas had slipped under my leg.

“No, we haven’t been drinking any beer,” I said quite truthfully. I’d had a couple of swallows of cold duck for breakfast and nothing alcoholic to drink since. I never saw a sip of beer cross Dallas’s lips.

We waited a long time. Dallas raved. At last a tow truck arrived. One of the officers said I could go. I did not have much gear, but it was scattered about in the backseat. I bundled up things haphazardly and got out of the car, holding Lizbeth’s leash firmly close to the collar. Dallas realized at last that he was not going to be arrested, but his car was. He tried to unload everything out of the car onto the road. He kept unloading even as the winch began lifting the car. The police ordered him to stop. Dallas seemed to think he would never see anything in the car again.

We were on a narrow shoulder on a high ramp. I told Dallas I had a fear of heights. As he shouted after me I led Lizbeth down the ramp, across a bridge, and to a convenience store. I do have a fear of heights, but I suppress it by force of will when I must. I used it as an excuse. I wanted to get away to a phone. I used Billy’s credit card number to call Rufus’s benefactor Roy in La Puente.

Roy knew who I was, I was sure of that. But being a friend of Rufus’s was not a sterling character recommendation. I had no idea how Roy would receive me or whether he would receive me at all.

I described where I was and Roy said he knew the place and would come after us right away. This gave me the impression that Roy was close by. He was not. He knew where I was only because he has a remarkable knowledge of most of Los Angeles county.

I had hoped otherwise, but Dallas arrived at the convenience store before Roy. One of the reasons I had wanted to leave was that I thought Dallas’s attempt to get everything out of the car was hopeless and the officers were becoming impatient with the effort. But Dallas had got a great deal of it.

He considered my leaving as desertion under fire. Moreover he had missed a carton of cigarettes when he went through the car and he supposed I had taken them. I had repacked my few things in anticipation of Roy’s arrival. I invited Dallas to look through them, for I knew I had not taken the cigarettes, not even inadvertently.

I told Dallas that I had contacted my friends in La Puente and I reminded him that after all La Puente was where I was going. Dallas seemed deeply hurt at this news. I was sorry for that. I had found Dallas attractive, and he had been almost affectionate at times. But he had never said explicitly that he had any other thought than to drop me in La Puente when he had finished his business in Fontana, and if he had thought of me as anything more than his shotgun rider, he had not given me a hint. If I had got a hint, I think I would have stuck with him, in spite of his dangerous way of life.

Dallas wanted to know if he could come to La Puente, too. That, I said, was out of the question.

I tried to explain that I was to be the guest of a friend of a friend, I was already imposing to an unthinkable degree, and I certainly could not propose any additional houseguests.

Dallas believed I could if I wanted to.

At last a horn sounded and Roy waved to me from his car. He had recognized me by Lizbeth.

Lizbeth leapt for the backseat of Roy’s car and stood on it, licking Roy’s face. I got in the car with our bundle of gear. I did not look back at Dallas.