S A M E N E S S
1
“Where you headed?”
An old nondescript K-car, in not-bad condition and the only vehicle I’ve seen since returning to the road, has pulled up beside me, windows down. Inside is a pleasant-looking older black man, skinny, fuzzy hair turning grey, dressed in a stylish dark suit but wearing white sneakers and a round white Styrofoam carnival hat.
“I’m headed to the next town with a bus station,” I replied, conscious of how I looked, dripping sweat.
“Might’s well get in, ain’t nobody else gonna stop for you.”
“Yeah, I’m finding that out. Thanks for stopping.”
I stowed my pack in the back seat and sat down in the front. He pressed the accelerator and I was grateful for a soft seat and a somewhat cooling wind blowing through the car.
“Why you ain’t on the main highway? Lots mo’ cars there,” he asked, thankfully with only a slight timbre to his voice suggesting I might be the most foolish person he’s ever met.
“I was visiting someone in the town back there. And I like the back roads. Harder to hitchhike, but you see a lot more. Backroads are my main highway.”
“I guess,” he said, glancing at me doubtfully.
I was beginning to realize that ‘I guess’, said in a certain tone around here, means ‘I suspect you’re a damn fool, but I won’t say anything more about it’.
“Why are you driving these back roads?” I asked. “Not that it matters. You’re a lifesaver, I was getting barbecued out there.”
“Salesman.” He thumbed behind him. “Samples in the trunk. Hit all the small town stores. Got T-shirts, underwears, swimwears an’ stuff for summer.”
He turned on the radio, preferring staticky AM programming to conversation. As he found an in-tune station he said, “Next town got a bus depot. Have to wait, only one a day come through here goin’ south. Two, three hours.”
Ten minutes later I was purchasing a ticket, he was gone on his way, and I sat down in the café to read for a couple hours and await the bus.
2
Hitchhiking is a wonderful adventure, but can be bootstrap and taxing, especially where it’s blazing hot and there are no rides for hours or days. A bus is a welcome rest, and an air-conditioned bus is exceptionally welcomed.
Beside me sits a youth, maybe seventeen or eighteen, excited about whatever he’s doing and wherever he’s going. He’d mentioned this was the first time, ever, that he’d been out of his small home town area. From the moment I sat down next to him he’d talked energetically about anything and everything, without editing himself. Eventually his questions and exuberance couldn’t be contained merely to our seat and he turned sideways and asked, “So, where you goin’?” of the red-and-grey-whiskered, slightly rough-looking gent sitting alone in the seat behind us.
The gent looked at the boy for a patient moment, sizing up both him and his question.
“Up here, next town,” he answered, gruffly though not unkindly. He wasn’t taciturn but he wasn’t offering anything, either.
“Yeah? What were you doing back there, visiting someone? Working?”
My teen seatmate, being from a small town where everyone knew everyone else’s business, obviously hadn’t learned the fine social art of keeping his nose out of a complete stranger’s business while out in the rest of the world.
The gent didn’t seem offended.
“Been in prison,” he said.
“Oh yeah? Wow. So what’re you, heading home now? Bet your family will be excited. When’s the last time you were home? I couldn’t imagine being in prison. You got kids?”
Like most teens, the boy rapid-fired comments, suppositions and questions into a mixed tangle, and you had to un-pretzel them to try answer in some kind of order. Or respond with one statement that seems to cover it all in one sweep:
“Been thirty-five years,” the gent said.
He had the ‘prison stare’, a rock-solid and unflinching gaze, but he was tempering it with mildness, or kindness or something, while answering the boy’s questions. He must have been not much older than my teen seatmate, when he first went to prison.
He offered a little more: “When you get out they give you a bus ticket and a few bucks to get back home. Got a brother there, put me up, I guess.”
“You mean, you just got out today? After thirty-five years?” asked the teen, the delayed-realization finally piercing past his chatter.
“Just before I got on the bus.”
The teen looked at him for some moments, unable to process this in one helping.
“So what are you going to do now?” he asked, searching for something to say.
“Don’t know.”
“So you must be on parole?”
“Yeah. Find work, I guess. See if I can stay with my brother.”
“Does he know you’re coming?”
“Yeah. But I don’t know if I can stay there.”
My seatmate didn’t have anything to say after that except, “Well, good luck, man.”
The gent nodded and turned his face back to the window.
Silenced in the face of this profound life experience, the youth turned forward and gazed at the hot prairie fields whizzing by for the rest of our journey. When our bus stopped at a small town—hot, dusty, arid, no signs of life or anything to see, just like the last few small towns—the gent disembarked. We gave a nod to each other as he walked by in the aisle, but my young seatmate seemed to be either dozing or purposely keeping his eyes closed.
Outside, the gent shouldered his gear, walked across the heat-shimmering tarmac into the small-town bus station, and disappeared.
3
You can doze in and out while riding a bus, and when you wake up hours later the outside world can be vastly changed. Instead of fields and crops, the land was now a patchwork of dirt flats, sandy hills, green grassy areas, and rolling forests of low and vivid green trees, all quilted together in a colorful but harum-scarum mosaic. We crossed a bridge over a small bayou of clear-ish water, where on one sandy bar a dark five-foot alligator soaked in the final mid-evening rays.
A sign speeding past said my destination was only six more miles. I’d decided to head south to the gulf ocean, and this city was as good as any, since I hadn’t been in this area before.
More than the landscape can change when you wake up in a bus: a few hours of air conditioning, in hindsight, may not have been the brightest idea for someone who has been near exhaustion for a few days and has hardly eaten or slept in that time. My head felt thick and surreal, sinuses stuffed, throat a little sore. I welcomed the thought of stepping out into the heat again. A comfortable evening warmth should nip this beginning-cold in the bud.
We veered from the highway onto a slow exit curve, and after wending through streets of older, modest neighborhoods we pulled into a terminal, not downtown but in an outlying commercial area. When I stood in the aisle a sudden dizziness washed through me and I had to take extra care balancing while I stepped off the bus. Woozy and weakened, I fumbled through the familiar procedure of hefting and strapping on my backpack.
Inside the terminal a ticket clerk scratched me a little notepad-map to the nearest cheap-but-not-too-run-down motel in the area. The ocean could wait. The internet, finding my next ‘teacher’, could wait. My ballooning head and wilting body needed to flop somewhere, sleep, eat, heal, sleep, eat, heal.
4
I could have taxied, but even in this tired state I needed to walk a little, breathe the humid, warm gulf air, feel open space around my closed-in head.
As I walked through the parking lot toward the road, a sparrow landed beside me with a beautiful butterfly in its beak. It held the butterfly to the ground with a foot and tore first one side of wings off and then the other. Then it gobbled the little wingless caterpillar-like body down in a single swallow, and flew away. This instant carnage took less than five seconds.
Thank you so much for your first ‘sign’ to me in this new land. You going to rip my limbs off too? Is this where I’ll be gobbled up, where my dreams of transformation will end violently?
A few blocks from the terminal, past identity-less warehouses and small industrial strip-offices, my street entered residential neighborhoods again.
Evening was in full swing. The air smelled like dry dust suspended in moist ocean. Street lamps beamed a row of yellow circles along the pavement ahead, and I watched my shadow appear, stretch out, and fade again as I walked under each lamp and toward the next.
The dusk sky here was a deeper, more vivid blue than the same dusk sky a few hundred miles north, and the humidity haloed ghostly orbs around the street lamps and porch lights. Long sharp shadows speared across the sidewalks from large spiky plants that pierced out of the ground. The street’s ambient glow radiated upward to the tall palms, bottom-lighting them into gamma-green feather dusters swaying in the twilight sky.
The houses were small and old, like ‘fifties homes that are now used as rentals or first-buys for young families. Most had small front yards of grass or dirt or both.
I walked past two young men hunched on their shadowed porch steps, smoking, beer can beside each of them, chatting quietly.
“Yo,” one of them nodded to me in passing.
“ ‘Evening. This the right way to the motel?” I asked, to double-check I’d been given accurate directions.
“Yeah, keep going. Couple motels up there.”
“Thank you. Take care, guys.”
I moved on, stepping carefully on a sidewalk that was crumbling apart and had weeds growing through the cracks and missing chunks. A Yellow Lab leaped from one porch and rushed across a yard at me; it could easily have vaulted the fence, but it stood with paws on the top wire, barking. A head inside the window turned to look, eyes and half-face lit flickering blue by a TV somewhere in the dark room, then turned away.
5
Up ahead a young couple strolled out of a yard and crossed the street to a jacked-up four-by-four pickup truck. They leaned against it, romantic in the lamplight and the long palm shadows, kissing, giggling, murmuring.
As I neared the yard they’d come from I saw a handful more people there, sitting at a picnic table and on plastic deck chairs, beneath a huge oak tree shading the small mostly-dirt lawn. A battery-op radio issued forth a classic rock song, politely low-volumed so they could converse and neighbors could relax. Children’s bikes and plastic toys pebbled the yard, a barbecue with lid open stood cooling, the picnic table was still littered with a neighborly gathering’s worth of paper plates and eating utensils, food and drink.
“Hey there, where are you from?” called out a thirty-something lady with a friendly face, reclining with a drink in hand, legs crossed. The rest of them looked around at me, an assortment of twenty- and thirty-somethings in shorts, tanks or halters, bare feet or sandals. Friendly faces, no drunken arrogance or challenge.
“Yonder,” I smiled, pointing my thumb upwards or backwards vaguely. My stock answer to a crowd, this usually makes someone laugh, someone else confused, and someone else not even bother trying to figure it out.
“Ha ha,” she laughed, getting it. “Where are you headed?”
I stopped walking, my sudden stillness making me more aware of dizziness again, and leaned on the top of their low white picket fence.
“To a motel up here. I just came in on the bus but I caught a chill or something. Exhaustion plus air conditioning. I’ll hole up and sleep it off for a couple days.”
“Well, You’d better have some food here because there’s nothing open tonight near those motels. We have lots left over. Come on, dig in.”
As hungry as I am exhausted, it’s a no-brainer.
“Thanks very much, sounds great,” I said, gratefully.
I shucked my backpack beside the picnic table, plonked myself on an empty corner seat, and glommed onto whatever food they slid in front of me.
My head became too thick to remember any of the conversation, I just remember friendly eyes and faces, and sincerely interested questioning. I must have impressed them as a decent enough person—despite my drooping eyelids and sagging body—because the lady who’d invited me finally suggested, “Look, you’re wasted. You should stay here tonight. There are two empty bedrooms. You’d be doing us a favor, actually.”
A favor? Didn’t make sense, so I fished a little:
“Is this your house?”
“No, I’m next door. Single mom. My kids are in bed.”
“Whose place is it?” I looked at the rest of them.
“It’s none of ours,” she said. “He’s in bed asleep already. Takes meds to sleep so you don’t have to worry about waking him. We all kind of help out, but tonight no one can stay here, everyone’s got other things.”
“What’s the situation?” I asked. Who knows what I was getting myself into, though they seemed like kind enough people.
“He’s injured and he can’t get around by himself. But he has lots of friends and neighbors who all pitch in, informally. Most nights someone crashes here on a couch or something, just so he’s not alone. You wouldn’t have to do anything, it’s just good to have someone there. He doesn’t really wake up at night—the meds—but if anything’s wrong he’ll yell, and you can come and pound on my door and wake me up and I’ll take care of it. But that’s never happened at night, so don’t worry about it.”
She flipped her hand to simplify, “That’s all. I’ll explain more tomorrow, and you can meet him when you’re feeling better. So how about it?”
I’m usually a lone wolf, preferring to nurse my wounds and illnesses on my own, holed up someplace alone. But, strangely, this felt like the right thing. Tonight, at least.
“He won’t mind?”
“No, he’s great. He’ll appreciate it, when he meets you. No worries.”
I looked down at the table top for a few moments. Then at them.
“Okay. Let’s try it.”
It took her less than two minutes to quietly navigate me around the small, dark house, rooms dimly lit by the street lamp shining in through the curtain cracks. Then she left me alone in the house.
I used the washroom briefly, stepped into my bedroom—right beside another bedroom with its door shut—and closed my door. I didn’t turn on my light, just placed my gear where I hoped I wouldn’t trip over it if I needed to prowl in the night. Indoors again after two weeks of being used to sleeping outside, I needed to open my window wide to let the stuffiness escape.
My new friends were leaving the yard, walking to wherever they lived, but I still heard mild neighborhood sounds so I poked in a couple earplugs I always pack along with me. I figured if it wasn’t loud enough to wake me through earplugs, it wasn’t a real emergency. And I sorely needed one solid, healing sleep.
Thankfully the night air was pleasant, not hot and sweaty, and no air conditioner to start me coughing. In an unfamiliar home, with unusual shadows striping across walls and floor, breathing air of foreign qualities, I tried to relax and zone out but it still took me some restless in-and-out hours before I entered pure sleep.
6
I awoke late the next morning, hearing low female voices and kitchen noises through my earplugs. I took one out and listened to part of a conversation.
About me, I’m assuming, since I caught phrases like ‘was walking by last night’ and ‘has a cold or something’ and ‘don’t wake him up, probably needs sleep’.
Everything sounded safe, and I was still so weak I could hardly lift a finger, so I put the plug back in and blanked into slumber again.
A few hours later, maybe four o’clock in the afternoon, I fumbled back into consciousness. Hungry, needing to move my joints, I took my earplugs out. I heard nothing in or around the house. Quietly I opened my door and looked beside me; the other bedroom door was closed, and through it passed a low mechanical hum, perhaps from a fan or a humidifier. I silently went to the kitchen, found some breakfast bars, carried these and a glass of water to the living room and sank down on a very plain cat-clawed sofa. No cat in sight.
The neighborhood was blessedly quiet, most people preparing for dinner, I guess. I didn’t know the score in this house, but things seemed taken care of and I didn’t want to go knocking on doors bothering people, since I still felt weak and not up to talking. I felt marginally better but still exhausted, slumped over, hardly able to lift my head to look around. If they were okay with me being here, no one knocking to kick me out today, that was great with me.
After my snack I returned to my room, closed the door, slid in the plugs, crawled back between the sheets, and slept through the evening, the night, and until early light the next morning.
7
“Hey, how are you?” he asked, in a hesitant but quiet, pleasant voice.
He was nothing like I’d imagined.
Young, barely out of high school. Handsome, like male supermodel handsome. Straight sandy-blonde hair and youthful mustache framed his tropical-blue eyes. The kind of guy who was rugged, exciting, a little wild, more worldly and into-things than most kids in high school. The genuine tough-but-nice hero-guy everybody loved, and deservedly so. That was my first impression of him at eight in the morning, me standing in the open doorway of his bedroom, we two alone in the house.
He was lying in bed, sheets pulled up to his waist, a few curls of fuzz on his bare chest. His mattress was angled into a semi-sitting slant in the electric bed frame. Machines, medical equipment, necessities were arranged around him in some kind of order, within easy reach.
But not within easy reach of him. From the neck down he was wasted away almost to a skeleton, unmoving except for his right arm and hand. Those he moved very slightly, in effort of some gesture to greet me. His head, teetering on a thin column of neck, was turned to me.
He wasn’t really smiling—smiling takes considerable effort when there’s not much left of you physically—but his face and eyes were calm and kind during his own first impression of me, whatever that may have been.
I took him in, too, took in the tragedies that must have shock-waved through the family and close friends of this beloved person. And my first physical feeling was of wanting to escape outside into the sun, sprint along the road under the palms and yell praise that my body could still do that.
But I didn’t flinch, didn’t tic an eye. In the next millisecond I knew I would not react at all. I would treat him not as the invalid his body is—there were enough people around to do that—but as whatever qualities his mind is. I would talk to him as if I’d just wandered over to him and his buddies in a parking lot to chat about his car. I’d give him that normalcy.
“I’m better this morning, thanks. Sorry I arrived sick and then locked myself in the bedroom for almost two whole days,” I said. “Nice introduction for a stranger in your home, hey?”
“No, man, it’s fine. We all appreciate having you in here, it’s no problem.” Kind eyes, kind voice.
“Do you mind if I come in?”
“Yeah, man. Can you pull that chair over by the bed? I can’t turn my head to the side for very long.”
I stepped into his bedroom, carried the visitor’s chair to face the foot of his bed, and sat.
“Oh, could you lift my window for me? They were in earlier to give me breakfast but it was a little chilly then. I wouldn’t mind some air now.”
I edged around his bed to the window beside him, slid and jammed it up a half foot.
“That okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s good. Thanks, man.”
He turned his head to look out the window. The filmy white curtains whispered toward him in the breeze, the dilute morning light pasteled a soft hue to the room. I sat and he turned to me again.
“They said you have a big backpack. Where are you from, man?”
“Way up north. I’ve been on the road for a few weeks. Hitchhiking.” I told him my city and country.
“Oh, yeah, I heard it’s really nice around there. Never been there, though.”
He looked out his window again and was quiet. Another person who didn’t feel the need to fill the silence with talk, just to be filling the silence. He turned back to me.
“Crashed my motorcycle. Had a real nice bike, thousand cc’s, big power, super fast. Missed a corner, wiped out. Landed on my head. My neck snapped. Coma for a few weeks, too.”
Looking at me. Quiet. Answering the unasked question, just to get it out of the way.
I wasn’t going to ask into the horror that must have followed his awakening from the coma. They’ve been through that enough, while all their worlds shattered and changed.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Twenty-two. Happened when I was eighteen.”
“Whose house is this? Rental?”
“No, my parents bought it for me. I know it’s old and tiny, but hey. Free. They’re separated. Actually they’re both married again, to others. I don’t see my dad, but Mom comes every couple days.”
He craned his neck to the window side, sipped a curved straw in a glass of water placed on a shelf near his shoulder.
“Does your dad live too far away?”
“No, lives here. He just can’t handle it. Never really comes around. But he helped buy the house.”
“You seem to get a lot of company, though. Good neighbors?”
“The best, man. This is a crash house. Pretty slow this week, maybe because they know you’re here, but there’s usually two or three, sometimes even five or ten people sleeping all over the house at night. They all help out. It’s great. They cook and clean up and do stuff. My fiancé—actually she’s my ex-fiancé, now she’s just my girlfriend again—she comes by every day. She’s a nurse. I actually met her after this happened.”
Journey continues on the next page.