FIVE

To Austin

We had three or four rides in quick succession. One of these got me no farther down the road.

A young man in a nice little car picked us up around sunset. We were hardly on the highway when he asked me whether I ever had sex with men. He drove us to a large, new home in—I would guess—the Riverside area. He said his lover was at work and that they had an open relationship. I would suppose this was so, for they obviously slept together in one bedroom while the other bedroom was reserved for sexual guests, with a plastic mattress protector under the sheets and various sexual appliances in and on the bedside table. For all of these provisions, I could not find a condom. I would have used one, if I had found it.

Aside from a couple of unsatisfactory daytime assignations with a young man who lived across the street from Roy and Rufus—and the rather pitiful five-dollar trick I had turned on the highway as we traveled west—I was sexually starved. I could not even remember the last time I was in a real bed with someone. Considering those circumstances I thought I did rather well, but I gathered it went rather too quickly for my host.

Afterward I discovered a stack of magazines in the living room. My stories were in almost all the magazines. I hope my host did have an open relationship with his lover, because I could not resist signing the stories. Although his home was considerably east of the ramp at which he had picked us up, the young man insisted on returning me to that ramp. I suppose he wanted to prevent my returning to the house, for he had told me that he was going to work and that his lover would not return for several more hours.

I was much encouraged, although it was long after dark and Lizbeth and I were still in the midst of the Southern California version of civilization.

At the same ramp we were picked up by some college boys in a small nearly new pickup. They were on their way to Palm Springs for spring break. Lizbeth and I were accommodated in the bed of the pickup, where I was given the task of fishing in an ice chest for beer. The boys suggested I continue to Palm Springs with them, but I got out where the road to Palm Springs left I-10.

The hour was then very late, but I decided to try hitchhiking awhile longer, for I supposed some drivers would make a point of crossing the worst of the desert at night. Before long a very small sports car stopped. Packing Lizbeth and the gear into the space behind the seat proved challenging. I do not believe the driver was drunk, but he clearly was not all there, either. The speedometer only went to 100 or a 120, but when we hit the highway the needle moved as far as it could to the right and stayed there.

The driver’s story was that he was engaged in an over-the-highway race. Sometimes he described this as a one-on-one wager. At other times this was an underground competition with a large purse and dozens of competitors. Besides the evidence that this was a lie, in that he never told it twice the same, the driver wasted several minutes in stopping to pick us up and our mass would be a considerable factor if the race was the near thing our driver said it was.

I have said I am not a good rider. And I am not. But on the dark straightaways through the desert, even with the strong crosswinds and the blowing dust, the speed did not bother me. What did bother me was that our driver allowed himself to be boxed in when we approached semitrailers traveling abreast. He could not, of course, make any better time than the trucks until one of them gave way. Several times we ran for many miles with the hood of the sports car actually under the overhang of the rear of a semitrailer. No driving skill a human being may possess would have done any good if the truck ahead had braked for any reason. Very simply, it was highway Russian roulette.

I was terrified.

Dallas Matsen had scared me because his judgment of what he could make his vehicle do differed from my own estimate of his abilities. But it was a matter of judgment. With the driver of the sports car, it was only a matter of chance whether we lived or died.

Perhaps I flinched too visibly. Perhaps he meant from the very first to strand me. He put us out at the Joshua Tree crossover. Although this was by far the most isolated and desolate place Lizbeth and I had yet landed, I thought we were lucky to be alive. I noticed the driver took the crossover and returned to the west rather than continuing his imaginary race to Blythe.

From the earthwork at the southern end of the crossover I could see a very great distance in all directions. I saw no artificial lights at all. Clearly our travels had come to an end for the night. I thought we would have great difficulty in the morning. But I had profited from our experience in Tucson. I would worry about tomorrow tomorrow. I picked a spot and we went to sleep.

*   *   *

I WAS ALARMED by how quickly Lizbeth and I went through the six liters of water I was carrying.

As might be expected of an Easter forenoon, there was little traffic of any kind. I was concerned as I poured the last of our water into Lizbeth’s dish. Her dish was a plastic bowl. I had punched a hole in its lip so that it could be tethered to the rest of our gear and would follow us if we had to run after a ride.

I could form no suitable plan. My survey of the night before had revealed no evidence of habitation in any direction. Were we to walk, I knew we should stick to the road, but walking in the daytime seemed more likely to make things worse. In any event, we got a ride before I could think much further, and considering that California had lost an hour in the night to daylight savings time, perhaps this ride came much sooner than anyone could expect.

It was a beat-up panel truck of just the sort I expected to stop for us. The driver was a slender man, balding although he was several years younger than I. He had with him his son who was knee-biting high and perhaps five years of age. The child alternated between torturing Lizbeth and being terrified of her. Lizbeth had no previous experience with children, but she was a paragon, yipping once or twice for rescue and moaning in exasperation, but never snapping or growling.

The story was that it was the father’s turn at custody. I envisioned a scene of wild rejoicing at the mother’s household.

Fortunately we sometimes had respite as the child was able for short periods of time to amuse himself by maiming chocolate bunnies and mutilating toy chicks from his Easter basket. I became convinced that these behaviors did not represent the child’s deep emotional scarring at being the product of a broken home, nor were they the artifacts of abuse, but rather enacted the child’s self-realization that he was a spoiled, undersocialized, little monster.

The driver offered me soft drinks from the ice chest and I refreshed myself with Sprite while Lizbeth got water from the melting ice. The driver never said how far he was going. The panel truck contained the tools of several trades. From his spare remarks, I gathered the driver was an itinerant contractor.

At the first stop I filled my water bottles. After several oblique inquiries I still had not discovered how long this ride might last. Lizbeth then refused to get in the back with the child, and although it became quite warm there, she rode the rest of the way curled up under my legs. That very much frustrated the child, who was reduced to trying to poke at her with sticks and soda straws whenever the father and I were distracted.

We stopped at a number of flea markets. The flea markets were usually some distance from the highway and I never recognized any sign indicating their presence. The driver just knew where they were. Several of them seemed to have sprung up from the desert sand. But others were better organized, with portable toilets and electrical rigging of a temporary and dangerous appearance.

Much of the merchandise was trash, the sort of things one throws away before having a garage sale. Weapons, mostly knives, and rocks were the staple stock of the more prosperous-looking vendors. Dickering was de rigueur. I was astonished at the prices the rock specimens brought and even more so at the theoretical prices on their tags. Being rather deliberately out of touch with New Age mysticism, I did not appreciate the new demand for natural crystals.

The desert flea markets were clearly institutions of an alien culture, one I wished I had investigated more closely. The trade in Nazi memorabilia was especially brisk. My driver told me that automatic weapons, mortars, and a considerable variety of ordnance were usually available at these gatherings upon discreet inquiry, and of course no records were kept. Moreover, the vendors and the customers were entirely white. Not many blacks reside in this part of the country, but the utter absence of brown-skinned aboriginal people struck me as remarkable. Indeed, there was not a great variety of European stocks, for almost everyone seemed to be Scots-Irish. These sinister indications aside, I had a deep sense of cultural difference, as if I were not quite absorbing what was going on around me.

The child, however, was not likewise inhibited. As we approached a flea market, while it remained to me a tiny blur on the horizon, he would begin shouting, “Buy me! Buy me!” Most vendors had two-bit boxes filled with mangy stuffed animals and tooth-marked rubber and plastic things. The child could not get enough of these. Books, the mainstay of Austin garage sales, were rare in the Arizona flea markets. Occasionally there was a small box of two-dozen volumes of mass-market paperbacks—dog-eared, much-read tomes by Danielle Steele and Louis L’Amour. No doubt Arizona readers cannot bear to part with more substantial fare.

We circumvented Phoenix on roads that were little more than dry ruts. These took us through open range, and only then did I realize what open range was. There were no fences. Livestock wandered about freely, quite oblivious to traffic.

As we got on the interstate again and put the last of Phoenix behind us, I began to have a horrible suspicion. My worst fears were realized, for when we reached Tucson, Lizbeth and I were put out somewhere not far from the Miracle Mile. Before so very long we were picked up by three Chicano boys, locals who were cruising around on a Sunday afternoon. We rode around for about an hour. At times we got quite far from the highway.

My rollbag was new and the camouflage backpack I had persuaded Rufus to give me was in good shape. All my clothes were new, and I was still relatively neat and clean. I wondered whether I appeared a bit too affluent. Slowly I was reassured that the boys meant no harm, but they did propose, quite without premeditation, I think, to strand me far from the highway.

In no bargaining position I simply insisted on being returned to the highway. This the boys did, not graciously, but as if they had not realized I was utterly at their mercy. For all of that, this proved to be a valuable ride. We reached the south of town and we would not have to walk on the highway ramp to cross the gorge.

Not much daylight was left, but I stationed myself near an on ramp at a busy intersection. Just at sunset a young woman in a little car pulled over. I could not believe she was stopping for us, and I continued to face the traffic. When she had pulled abreast of us, she rolled down her window. She said she was alone and could not offer us a ride, but she wanted us to have something. She handed a wad of currency out the window. I thanked her profusely and all the more sincerely because she made no explicit religious reference in her little speech.

When she was gone I pulled the money out of my pocket and counted it: fourteen dollars. I wondered if I had not judged Tucson too severely. I could not really complain of indifference, for indifference is everywhere. I had been robbed only once. Against that were the couple who left the cold cuts, the couple who rescued us to Phoenix, the boys who had done me some good, however haphazardly, and this woman who gave me fourteen dollars. Yet my opinion of Tucson remained largely negative because of the many hostile indications from passersby who, if they could not help me and would not wish me well, could have at least remained as people elsewhere: indifferent. The brandishing of firearms, the pointless threat, the gratuitous insult: in these things I am grateful never to have discovered Tucson’s peer.

The interchange was well lit, but shortly after the sun set I gathered up our gear, and Lizbeth and I walked south until I found a concealed spot. There we slept.

*   *   *

IN THE MORNING I shaved using Lizbeth’s water dish. We were very near the truck stop where we were first let out in Tucson as we traveled west—and where we had been robbed. I recharged our water bottles at the service station there that catered to passenger vehicles.

In the forenoon we had a couple of short rides of which I cannot complain. We were carried beyond the suburban traffic, exactly as I would have wanted of a ride out of any other town. That we were let out in desolate areas with no shade cannot be blamed on the drivers; there simply were no better places. I knocked the dust of Tucson off my shoes.

At last a Chicano couple in a large, new red truck stopped. They already had one rider in the bed of the truck and he was quite afraid of Lizbeth at first. He told me he had no idea how far this ride was going. He had been drunk when he was picked up. He was not even sure where he had been picked up, but this had been a very long ride and the truck had stopped for many hitchhikers who had since reached their destinations and been let off. He himself was going to El Paso and he thought it possible the driver had said they would take him so far.

Soon we came to an old man who had walked past Lizbeth and me earlier. The pickup stopped for him. He did not say a word to either of us although the other rider tried to converse with him in the sort of Spanish that omits all articles and renders every verb in the present infinitive.

We were all put out rather suddenly in what seemed to me the middle of nowhere. Our hosts had become increasingly amorous as we traveled. They were indeed going to El Paso, but they were going to take a motel room first.

After I hopped out of the truck, I stopped to adjust my gear and by the time I had done that, all evidence of the other hitchhikers was gone. The terrain was hilly. I climbed a little rise to look around. The interstate arced to the left. Secant to it was a road almost as broad that passed through a little town before it intersected the highway again. Although walking is often a waste of energy and sticking to the main road is the best policy, I decided to walk through town. We wanted water and the distance did not seem so great.

Just after the fork there was a cattle guard—whether to keep livestock in or out, I never discovered. Lizbeth had to be carried over.

We got nothing of Benson but water and good wishes—I even spent a little money there. But I found it to be a wonderful little town, quite undeserving of being surrounded by Arizona.

At first I saw nothing that seemed to me very special: a new shopping center with a large grocery store. In the shade near the entrance to the store was a soda-vending machine, and wonder of wonders, attached to it was a free drinking fountain. I had not seen such a thing since I left Texas. Very rarely a free fountain could be found in the West, but this was the only time I found a fountain near a machine that took money. I filled our bottles and Lizbeth’s dish. I bought myself a Coke with the fifty cents I had planned to spend on water. I sat down with Lizbeth in the shade. We got no dirty looks and people stopped to admire Lizbeth and to pet her.

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. After 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 missing.

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.

She pulled me in the direction of Avenue B.

I guess she thought I was crazy. Here we were back in Austin. But we were not going home.

Real rain began to fall. I led her to the bridge over Shoal Creek at Twenty-ninth Street. We got under the bridge.