Chapter 7

Two uneventful weeks later, two men wearing dark business suits and gray fedoras arrived in camp in a black Ford phaeton. They left with the commandant, and he was never heard from again. There were all kinds of rumors about this event, but no one knew for certain who the two men were, or what they had wanted with him. He was handcuffed with both hands behind his back, according to one witness, but another man claimed that he was merely handcuffed to the wrist of one of the men who came for him. Some said that the commandant was wanted for murder, which was easy enough to believe, and others said that he was an escaped convict, but no one knew for sure. With little else to do except talk, there was a good deal of speculation. It had happened and he was gone, but at least there was something new to talk about for a few days. The executive officer, Mr. Sealy, was now in charge of the camp, but we heard that he would soon be replaced by a new commandant, and that there was no chance that Mr. Sealy, who was only five-two, would get the job. On an errand to the supply room to pick up some towels for the barbers, I entered the office and took a look at the two framed dishonorable discharges that were still on the wall behind the commandant's desk. The dishonorable discharge from the Marines, I noticed, was either printed on yellow paper, or had faded to yellow, but I couldn't tell for sure. I talked to Pablito about it, and he said that the Marines had printed their dishonorable discharges on yellow parchment, but the practice was now discontinued. At any rate, the ex- commandant had been proud of his discharges, so I knew he wouldn't have willingly left them behind.

Three days later, Mr. Adams arrived. He came down to Douglas on the Sunset Limited from Tucson to be our new commandant. I was sweeping the floor in the barbershop when he entered the hangar, accompanied by a camp guard. He had just taken over, and was making his initial inspection of the camp. He spotted me almost at once, and pointed to me. Raising his voice, he said to the guard: "Kick that bastard's ass all the way to the gate!"

With the C.P. right behind me I started running, so he only managed to kick me once, a glancing blow on the outer part of my left leg, before I reached the gate. The gate was open, with another C.P. stationed there. As I whipped by him in a cloud of dust, he just laughed, and made no effort to detain me. I pounded down the road toward town, but when I saw that I wasn't being chased I quit running, and walked the rest of the way without looking back.

I was on my own again, which I didn't mind particularly, but seeing Mr. Adams again had filled me with remorse. If I had known that he was coming as the new commandant I would have left before he arrived. I had failed and disappointed him, and he had a right to be angry. He had probably heard from my grandmother, either directly or from the Red Cross, when I had failed to arrive in Los Angeles. So he knew that I had reneged, or, if he hadn't heard from Mattie, just seeing me in the camp was proof enough that I hadn't gone home.

I had my money on me, happily, but not my sweater. My sweater, the old pair of bib overalls, and the little cloth bag of toilet articles that had been issued to everyone by the Red Cross, and six sacks of Bull Durham were back in my tent. But the clothes I was wearing were new, I had my necktie, and I also had my money. I was still much better off than the day I had signed into the Douglas camp. My big regret was leaving Pablito: I had been pressuring him to teach me how to cut hair, and he had said that he would. This was something I had wanted to learn. With a comb and a pair of scissors, a barber-even a drunk like Pablito-can go anywhere in the world and always make a living, or at least pick up some money to eat on. Here was another lost opportunity.

A local freight left Douglas each night for Rodeo, New Mexico, and there was the regular Pacific Fruit Express that by-passed Rodeo and went directly to El Paso via Lordsburg, New Mexico. The trains were about three hours apart, and I could catch either one of them. But they wouldn't leave until late that night. I had a long day to kill.

I crossed the border into Agua Prieta, and went to Pablito's favorite cantina and ordered a dozen tacos. The cantina was cool and dark, and the padded chair with its back to the adobe wall was comfortable. Tacos, all tightly rolled, sold for a dime a dozen. They were rolled like large cigars, and they were very hot. I rejected a beer, but nodded when the waiter suggested a mescalito. Pablito always drank mescal, and he told me that it was ten times better than tequila.

Mescal, like tequila, is made from cactus, and the clear liquid has little white flecks in it that resemble bits of sperm. But these white particles are merely tiny bits of cactus pulp. You can also tell a bottle of mescal from a bottle of tequila because mescal, to be authentic, has a preserved earthworm (gusano) in each bottle. I took a small sip, to test it, and entered into a dubious friendship with mescal. The small sip was a warm and loving ball that entered my throat, rolled gently down to my stomach like an unexpected gift, and then diffused like searching white- hot tendrils into every part of my body. There was a faint but not unpleasant aftertaste of gasoline- one of my favorite odors- and when I bit into another taco, it now seemed so mild I had to add a teaspoon of hot salsa to bring back the flavor. But neither the delicious tacos nor the two mescalitos that followed were enough- to break the sodden gloom that overwhelmed me. My body tingled with well-being, and I was as sensitive to color and light as a chameleon, but my mental state was as dark as the black creek that gave the tiny Mexican town its name.

Depression, I found out several years later, is a state common to mescal drinkers, but most drinkers are willing to suffer it gladly because the accompanying physical feeling of well-being practically eliminates hunger and bodily pain.

By the time I finished my second mescalito I was no longer hungry, and I left the remaining tacos on the plate. With mescal, I didn't need anything else. All I could think about was what an awful person I had become. I had let Mr. Adams down, a man I admired and respected, but worse, much worse, I had done irreparable harm to Mattie, my poor grandmother, the only person in the world who had ever loved me. God knows she must have worried about me when I didn't come home on the day I had left Los Angeles. But then, when she was told by the Red Cross that I was on my way home from Tucson and I still hadn't come home, what additional suffering had I caused the poor woman? She must have suspected foul play, or a terrible accident, or even a kidnapping-who knows? And as the days passed, day after day, without a word from me, what did she think of me? How could I possibly do some- thing so thoughtless and cruel to this poor old lady? Here I was, out on the road, enjoying myself, and I hadn't even written Mattie a letter to tell her how well I was doing out on my own. These thoughts, and more dismal thoughts like them, soon had me in tears.

In a novel, a brooding place like this is called a "plateau." In every third or fourth chapter, the protagonist has to run through a mental summary of some kind to keep the wool- gathering reader informed about what has gone on already, and what will probably come to pass. This plateau is necessary so the reader won't forget some important point that he has already read, but doesn't remember too well- or remember at all.

But this book is not a novel. My remorse was real, and I detested the person I had become. I thought of all the good things my grandmother had done for me, and all of the terrible things I had done in return. By my fourth mescalito, however, at a nickel a shot, my deep, self-engendered depression had escalated to deep apathy. Then, when the plump middle-aged whore sat beside me, and brushed the tears away from my cheeks with a soft hand, and asked me if I wanted to go upstairs, I got a hard-on.

This woman also had a religious picture on the wall. But she didn't kneel in front of it, nor did she cross herself before she took me into her bed, a creaky springless bed with a mattress stuffed with cornhusks. Because of the mescal, an inhibiting factor, I was able to last for almost twenty minutes (some kind of record for a male virgin), and then I went downstairs for more mescal.

The afternoon passed in a beautiful golden reverie, with my physical well-being enhanced, not diminished, by the professional piece of ass. Because I had already reached the nadir of my depression before going upstairs, my thoughts, by, the time it got dark, were concerned with how much better I would treat my aunt when I got to Chicago, and how exciting and full my life would be when I got my job on the midway at the Chicago World's Fair.

Then, with yet another mescalito, my mind sharpened, and I began to think with a keen clarity. I realized, with a frightful insight, that I did not have an aunt in Chicago, or anywhere else. I had never been to Chicago. Nor did I have any barker's job waiting for me on the midway at the Fair. As I gradually got drunker, the fantasy of my made- up cover story had fused with my real situation in my effort to escape from my dark depression. I lurched up and away from the table, and bought an eight-ounce bottle of mescal from the bartender. He poured the mescal from his bar bottle into a used catsup bottle, and then put a cork in it. At twenty-five cents an eight-ounce bottle, it was much cheaper than it was to keep buying one-ounce shots at a nickel a glass.

Three or four small raggedy boys attached themselves to me as I walked unsteadily toward the house of blue lights on the far edge of town. They begged me for pennies, but I cursed them and told them to get the hell away from me. They just laughed and followed me anyway, so I tried to ignore them. When I paused to have a pull from my bottle, they giggled with delight and shouted, "Borracho!" But I was a long way from being drunk, at least in my mind, even though my legs were rubbery. My mind was clear, and I wanted another girl, a younger girl than the middle-aged whore at the cantina.

I entered the bar at the house of blue lights and sat at a table by the hardpacked adobe dance floor. I put my bottle inside my shirt and ordered a mescalito from the waiter. Three girls sat at the table next to mine and jabbered at me in Spanish. I was supposed to choose one of them and invite her to my table. If I wouldn't do that, they wanted me to buy all of them a cerveza. I only knew a few words of Spanish-just those I had picked up on the playground at John Adams junior High- but I could understand what they wanted all right. On the other side of the dance floor, a man started to play a guitar and sing, and his voice was so beautiful and the song was so sad that I began to cry. When he finished the song, I tossed him a quarter and he sang another. Weeping, I drank my fresh drink and ordered another, but before I finished the new one nausea gripped me. I barely made it outdoors before my insides erupted. One of the whores held my forehead in the palm of her hand as I leaned over the hitching rail outside the cantina. When I was breathing normally again she left me and went back inside. I was breathing much easier now. I crossed the patio and sat on a stone bench beside the well. The blue lights that encircled the roof of the cantina made little circles in the air. When I closed my eyes the bench whirled. When I opened them the bench stopped whirling. I had a long pull from my bottle and closed my eyes again. I left the bench and circled upward in a gradually narrowing spiral flight, ascending into the starry sky. The stars, blue and white, made little orbits of their own in the dark sky, and it was a beautiful sight. There was a tugging at my feet, as if the earth was unwilling to release me. I kicked out and I was alone and floating in the blackness of an endless night, and far beyond the stars.

I awoke shivering. My teeth were chattering with cold, and a stiff gelid wind battered my naked body. Except for my blue-and- white necktie, which had a small knot tied so tight it couldn't be undone (I could only slip the tie over my head without untying it), I didn't have a stitch of clothes left. The tugging at my feet I had felt, just before I had passed out, had undoubtedly been those Mexican boys pulling off my new work shoes. I had been well out of everything when they had stripped off the rest of my clothes. They had even taken my bottle of mescal, although there couldn't have been much liquor left in it. The night was very dark, and there were no lights anywhere. The cantina was closed and shuttered, and they had switched off the little blue lights. But the lights at the border station, I knew, were very bright. Not only were the Mexican and the U.S. border offices well-lighted, there was a very bright overhead streetlight that illuminated the twenty-five yard stretch between the two customs offices. If I arrived naked at the Mexican office, I would be arrested, and, if the Mexicans didn't arrest me, the U.S. border patrolman would put me in jail. The border patrolman would simply call for the Douglas police.

I gagged a little as I sat up, but there was nothing left inside me to throw up. My forehead hurt, and there was a sharp throbbing pain behind my eyes. Shivering like a dog passing broken glass, I got shakily to my feet and tried to get my bearings. I was southwest of town, with only a very few widely spaced adobe houses between me and the dirt road into the Mexican interior and the Sonoran desert. If I walked beyond these remaining houses, and then made a wide circle to my right, into the desert, I could cross the creek about two miles away from the border checkpoints and be back in Arizona without going through the official gateways.

Still shivering uncontrollably, I walked into the wind, head down, crept by the sleeping adobe houses and barking pariah dogs, and made a wide looping circle into the desert. I worried about stepping on a sharp rock, or perhaps on a sleeping rattler, with my bare feet. But I kept moving and the cold wasn't so devastating now that my blood was circulating. It was frightening, however, when bulky unexpected tumbleweeds, driven by the strong wind, came out of nowhere and bounced lightly off my naked body. I was able to keep my bearings without any trouble because, when I reached the shallow creek, I could see the lights from the two border stations and the bright streetlight between them. The water in the creek came barely to my ankles. On the other side, back in Arizona, I focused on the distant light that came from the all night smelter, which was hard by the railroad yards. I headed for the light, watching the ground for hazards, and then looking up again at the distant light as I threaded my way across the desert.

I was able to dodge the scattered clumps of chaparral and cacti because they were darker shapes against the black and distant mountains behind Douglas. Eventually, and with very sore feet, I reached the spur tracks of a siding. I then walked the ties of the spur into the yards. Before I reached the jungle, southeast of the yards, I picked up a piece of newspaper and held it in front of me, waist high, trying to block some of the wind. There was a single fire burning in the jungle, with two silhouetted figures sitting on the ground across from one another. I stopped about fifty yards away from the fire and called out:

"Hey, 'Bo!"

"Hey, 'Bo!" a black man's voice called back. "Who dat callen 'Hey, 'Bo'?"

"Me," I said, and I walked up to the fire so they could see me.

That's how I met Pearson and Billy Tyson. Pearson, after he finished laughing, which took some time, removed his Chesterfield and put it around my shoulders. He then divested himself of some of his multi-layered clothing. He gave me a red-and-blue plaid flannel shirt (the third shirt under), and a pair of shabby tweed pants that were frayed slightly at the knees and cuffs. The tweed trousers were between his outer Big Boy work pants and his black wool suit pants. I slipped into the tweed pants and flannel shirt, and gave Pearson his overcoat back. The tweed pants, worn without underwear, were sticky and scratchy. Little twigs woven in the cloth worked their way out of the material occasionally and pricked my legs and backside, but they were warm. I was still barefooted, and I sat on the ground with my feet to the little fire, flexing my blue toes.

I had to tell and retell my story several times before Pearson and Billy Tyson were satisfied. Pearson was astonished by the easy way I had crossed the border back into Arizona. He had thought, or had been told, that there was an electrified barbed-wire fence along the entire length of the border between the U.S.A. and Old Mexico, and he was indignant and slightly alarmed about the idea that the U.S.A. was wide open to Mexicans; that hordes of Mexicans, if they had a mind to, could swarm into our country at will.

"What're your plans now, Jake?" Billy Tyson said.

"Well," I said, after thinking about it for a moment, "somehow or other, I've got to get a pair of shoes."

He nodded. "I'll tell you what, Jake. I'll help you get some shoes if you'll help me get a cowboy hat."

Billy Tyson, I soon discovered, was desperately home- sick for his home back in Harlan County, Kentucky, but he couldn't go back until he got a cowboy hat. Before he left he had told all of his friends that he was going out West to become a cowboy. He had not, of course, become a cowboy, but he had gradually, piece by piece, acquired a cowboy costume. He had a pair of scuffed cowboy boots that were cripplingly tight in the toes, a pair of blue jeans, a denim jacket, and a scruffy sheepskin vest. He had obtained these clothes by trading with other bums, from the Goodwill department store in Dallas, and by theft. He also had a pair of worn leather gloves that were nicked and scarred from barbed wire. But until he could obtain a cowboy hat to complete his outfit, there was no way that he could return home and claim that he had been a cowboy. He didn't mind lying, or claiming that he had been a cow- boy when he had not been one, but without the complete outfit- and the cowboy hat, next to the boots, was the most important item- his friends back in Harlan would never believe his story.

"Sure," I said. "I'll help you. It shouldn't be too hard to rustle up a cowboy hat."

But I was wrong; it was very difficult to obtain a cowboy hat. Billy Tyson didn't want a cheap straw cowboy hat. He wanted an authentic hat, a felt cowboy hat, and preferably a Stetson, the best cowboy hat ever made. The color was not of great importance to him, although his preference was for black, nor did the hat have to be brand new. A good Stetson cowboy hat lasted almost forever, anyway, so a used hat would be okay. A cowboy hat was a work hat, and it would hold water for a horse, if a cowboy's horse wanted a drink. But these ideal Stetson cowboy hats were so expensive that the cowboys who owned them- and there weren't that many cowboys left-rarely removed them from their heads. As a consequence, a cowboy hat was almost impossible to steal. Billy Tyson had been trying to find or steal a cowboy hat from Texarkana to El Paso, and from El Paso to Phoenix, and now back to Douglas, and so far he hadn't even come close to getting himself one. His boots were already too tight, and if he kept on growing, he might even have to get himself another pair of cowboy boots before he got his hat. But the one fact remained: Until he got his cowboy hat he could not go back home.

Billy Tyson had a mission in life-a goal. I was impressed.

"When you go to the back door and ask for a handout," I said, "d'you ever ask the woman if she's got a spare cowboy hat in the house? It seems to me that you might run into the widow of a cowboy, and she'll still have his hat to give you-"

Billy Tyson laughed derisively. "Cowboys don't get married, Jake. Didn't you know that? And if they ever did get hitched, and then died later on, they'd get buried with their hats. I seen it in movies. When they bury a cowboy on the lone prairie, they put his hat on his chest and fold his arms across it. It stays with him in the pine box."

"You're right," I agreed with him. "And in movies, anyway, that's the only time the other cowboys ever take off their hats, while the words are being said over the dead cowboy. They put their hats over their hearts, and then put 'em on again as soon as the trail boss finishes his little talk."

"That's right," Billy Tyson said. "You can't tell me nothen about cowboy hats I don't know already."

Pearson soon rolled himself into a black ball and went to sleep. Billy Tyson and I, taking turns gathering firewood, sat and talked by the fire for the rest of the night. It took me about a half-hour before I could fully understand his funny way of talking, but then I could understand him perfectly.

Pearson and Billy Tyson had been picked up in Phoenix by a cattle truck, and had ridden in the back, dodging two bellowing, pregnant cows, all the way to Bisbee. In Bisbee they had waited on the highway for about three hours, and then a man driving a Model A Ford had picked them up. He only drove about fifty yards before he stopped the car, and then he made them both ride in the rumble seat. They had almost froze back there before he let them off in Douglas. But they had smelled so bad from the cattle, the man couldn't have them sitting up front, he said.

They then decided to ride the freight train from Douglas to El Paso, but they had missed the last train by an hour by the time they got to the yards. They had baked some potatoes in the fire, and they were waiting, now, for the next freight out to El Paso.

Billy then told me about some of his adventures crossing Texas, including a long story about how he had evaded the notorious railroad bull, Texas Slim, in Longview, Texas. I had heard the identical story about dodging Texas Slim before, from a bum in the Tucson camp. And Billy had also heard it from someone before, too, I supposed, and then appropriated the story as his own. But the reinvention of or the appropriation of another man's story is common on the road, especially if the teller can show how deviously he has outwitted some town clown or railroad bull. So I didn't call Billy on it.

In turn, I told Billy Tyson about my aunt in Chicago, and about my promised job as a barker on the midway at the World's Fair. Both of us, who were fourteen, although I doubt that Billy was fourteen, as yet, told each other our true ages. And then we assured each other solemnly that we could both pass for seventeen. When a man has been alone and naked and suffering with a hangover in the desert, it is wonderful to encounter a sympathetic listener, so we became life-long friends.

In the morning, while Pearson remained in the jungle, Billy Tyson and I set off in opposite directions in Douglas in search of breakfast and shoes. There wasn't much point in Pearson's even trying to get anything to eat in Douglas. One of the bad features about having the new transient camps was that all of the Arizona residents knew about them now. As soon as a bum appeared at the back door and knocked, he was told by the resident about the camp, how to get there, and that he could eat and get free clothing there.

But I had a good excuse for begging in town. I was barefooted and my feet hurt, and I could display my stone bruises to prove it. I didn't feel that I could walk that far out to camp without any shoes, and besides, I said, I hadn't eaten for two days and I was faint with hunger. At the fourth house I tried, a big house with a tricycle in the yard, I lucked into a pair of black-and-white golf shoes, the kind with a fringed flap over the laces. The woman who gave me the shoes said that her husband had given up golf for the duration of the Depression, and that he had only worn them a few times. She also gave me a pair of wool pimento-and-black diamond knee socks to go with them, the kind that are worn with plus fours. She gave me a cheese sandwich, a glass of milk and an orange, too. I saved the orange, and took it back to the jungle for Pearson's breakfast.

On the way back to the jungle, I stopped at a gas station and borrowed a pair of pliers. It took some time to unscrew all of the metal cleats from the golf shoes. The metal-ringed screwholes were still in the shoes, which made the soles clatter some on the asphalt streets as if I were wearing taps. The Argyle socks were thick and warm, however, and they helped to take up some of the slack in the shoes that were at least two-and-a-half sizes too large for me. I couldn't lift my feet off the ground much as I walked, or I would step right out of the shoes.

Billy Tyson got back to the jungle around noon, bringing a pair of ten-inch high rubber boots, full of holes, that he had found in an alley. He also brought a pork chop sandwich and an apple for Pearson. I threw the rubber boots away, but it would have been good to have them if I hadn't lucked into getting the golf shoes.

For the rest of the day we either slept or dozed under the pepper trees in the jungle. I then left and got a can full of water for the trip. That night we all caught the Pacific Freight Express to El Paso, riding in an empty boxcar crowded with ten more bums.