Pilgrimage

A short story published in Red Bass 1983. Dedicated to Jay Murphy, editor.

                        The Trailways hurtled through the mountains, its headlamps probing the night.
                        A sudden tilt woke me. Emerging from the comforting placenta of sleep, I was disoriented and distantly aware of pain. Through the entire length of me rushed this angry river of needles, pumping from my heart and telling me the end of the remission had come. I was a dead man.
                        Since Memphis the trip had seemed like a descent in a bathysphere, down into the bowels of the darkest sea.
                        I needed a drink.
                        There was a pint of Jim Beam in my grip bag.
                        "Hey, punk. You awake?"  A voice full of tobacco cough from across the aisle.
                        "Who the fuck wants to know?"
                        "Me."
                        It was the old dude from the streetcorner. He had a beard like Walt Whitman. His long, frizzy gray hair was tied with a red bandana. His Goodwill clothes, a blazing assortment of wool, cotten and polyester, stank of urine and sweat.
                         "Hey, Mister Whitman."
                         "Hey, yourself."
                         "How did you get on the bus?"
                         "I got money."
                         "Evidently."
                         "You never see me panhandling."
                         "You asked me for a smoke."
                         "Ain't the same."
                         "OK. No argument. Excuse me. I've got to take a piss and wash up."
                         I took my grip bag. Walking back to the WC, I survived two bends and a climb.
                         You develope seaman's legs if you ride the bus a lot. I rode the bus a lot.
                        Hitchhiking used to be a good way to get around. Even up north during the winter. But that was long ago, before things got wired. Folks on the road are crazy now.
                        My grip bag was for two items. A pint of Jim Beam and my Colt .45 automatic. Everything else was incidental. Toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, a couple of Bic razors, shave cream, towel, rubbers.
                        Be prepared. The scout motto.
                        Inside the WC I sat down and had a drink.
                        Rocking and jolting, with chemicals sloshing beneath me. Confined in a space not much bigger than a coffin, I eased my mind and felt loose. I was a million light years from home, with no direction home, like a rolling stone---
                        Oh shit.
                        I had another drink and counted my dough from the VA.
                        There was enough money for whiskey, dancing, steak-and-eggs, books, movies, yeah, all-night movies. I prefer to snooze in theatres. Not flopjoints, bus stations or alleys.
                        Sometimes I hike into the country and sleep under the stars. But too often I wake up thinking I am in the bush with Charlie all around.
                         Ach!
                         After Hendersonville I would not need money.
                         Would not need a thing.
                         So what the hell? Spend like there is no tomorrow.
                         I was down to one clip of ball ammo.
                         Enough.
                         My traveling days were done.
                         Someone was rapping on the door.
                         I opened the door for a corpulent middle-aged woman wrapped in calico.
                         "Smells like a distillery in here!" she complained.
                         "Oh, shut up."
                         Without further words she locked herself  inside. I wondered if she would rat on me to the driver.
                         Walt Whitman was waiting for me.
                         "Hey, punk."
                         "Hey."
                         "Sit here."
                         "Want to talk? Sure. But I need an aisle between us. Can't you go to the laundry once a year?"
                         "Hah! Guess I am pretty offensive."
                         I squeezed his mottled wrist and asked with my hardest poker face, "OK. Now level with me. You're really Howard Hughes. Right?"
                         It was a mistake to make him laugh. His breayh was green with decay.
                         "I like you, punk. Tell me. How come you wear your hair like that? Makes you look mean. You're not mean."
                         "Naw. Not really."
                         He should have seen me in 1968, riding in the bay of a Cobra gunship, raking the bush with an M-60 with all the glee of a kid in a video arkade. Back then, I mixed whiskey with Dexedrene.
                        "That's what you call a Mohawk, isn't it?"
                        My hair was falling out. So I had given myself a haircut and dyed it white.
                         "It's a Mohawk."
                         "It's a sensation. You could get arrested for disturbing the peace."
                         "I know. Hey now. That was some scene in Memphis, eh? I could not believe those guys. Stealing a live chicken and sneaking it into the bus station icking it into a microwave."
                          "Is that what the ruckus was all about?"
                          "The damned thing exploded."
                          "Some kinds of food will do that. I bet it was an awful mess."
                          "It needed to be hosed into a bodybag."
                          "You were in Viet Nam."
                          "Fucking mind-reader."
                          "I like to play detective. You know. Figure people out Not much else to do when you loiter. I figured you were in the war and got sick. I mean, with some disease."
                          "Agent Orange. I think it gave me leukemia. At any rate, something did."
                          "Terrible shame. Young guy like you. I'm sorry."
                          He left me alone with my favorite book.
                          I read from "Look Homeward, Angel,"  a dog-eared companion during this final stretch of travel. From a windy prairie, across the Mississippi, making it to Memphis for a month, then into these mountains---

                           There would be a gentle rolling fog through the sycamore and maple trees, down the lane past white fences and willows glistening with dew and up over swards of cold grass among the mullberry, blackberry and pine.
                           There would be the angel carved from Carolina stone, undramatic in that graveyard, dingy with age, no splendor or grace, no eyes turned toward God's heaven or fingers pointing the way.
                           I  would lie there as Wolfe did so long ago, and I would breathe the autumn air and put into my mouth the blued muzzle of the .45.
                          Death, come swiftly!