“Ride the rails?” Eric said.
“Jumping into empty boxcars, trains,” I said.
“Like hitchin’,” Eric said.
“Yeah. One night in Galveston we went out on a tear —”
“What’s that?” Star asked.
“A drinking binge. Anyway the next day I woke up and Hollister was nowhere to be seen. He was completely gone. I waited a day or two but then I had to move on before the local authorities arrested me for vagrancy and put me on the chain gang.”
I could see that Eric was now seeing me in a new light. But I didn’t care about that young fool.
“What happened to your friend?” Star asked.
“Twenty years later I was driving down in Compton and I saw him walking down the street. He’d gotten fat and his hair was thinning but it was Hollister all right.”
“Did you ask him what happened?” Eric asked.
“He’d met a girl after I’d passed out that night. They spent the night together and the next couple’a days. They drank the whole time. One day Holly woke up and realized that at some point they’d gotten married — he didn’t even remember saying I do.”
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“Whoa,” Eric said in a low tone.
“Did they stay together?” Star wanted to know.
“I went back with Hollister to his house and met her there.
They had four kids. He was a plumber for the county and she baked pies for a restaurant down the street. You know what she told me?”
“What?” both children asked at once.
“That on the evening she’d met Holly I had picked her up at the local juke joint. We’d hit it off pretty good but I drank too much and passed out. When Holly came into the lean-to where we were stayin’, Sherry, that was his wife’s name, asked him if he would walk her home. That was when they got together.”
“He took your woman?” Eric said indignantly.
“Not mine, brother,” I said. “That lean-to was our own private little commune. What was mine was me, and Sherry had her own thing to give.”
Eric frowned at that, and I believed that I was the first shadow on his bright notions of communal life. That made me smile.
I let them out at the foot of the off-ramp I had to take to get to the airport.
While Eric was wrestling the backpacks out of the backseat Star put her skinny arms around my neck and kissed me on the lips.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’re really great.”
I gave her ten dollars and told her to stay safe.
“God’s looking after me,” she said.
Eric handed her a backpack then and they crossed the road.
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18
After leaving my Hertz car at their airport lot I went to the ticket counter. The flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Western Airlines was $24.95.
They took my credit card with no problem.
While waiting for my flight I called home and got Jesus. I gave him the flight number and told him to be there to pick me up.
He didn’t ask any questions. Jesus would have crossed the Pacific for me and never asked why.
In a small airport store — where they sold candy bars, newspapers, and cigarettes — I bought a large brown teddy bear for $6.95.
I sat in the bulkhead aisle seat next to a young white woman who wore a rainbow-print dress that came to about midthigh.
She was a beauty but I wasn’t thinking about her.
I buckled my seat belt and unfolded the morning paper.
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Ky had given in to Buddhist pressure and agreed to have free elections in South Vietnam. The bastion of democracy, the United States, however, said publicly that it still backed the dictator.
A couple who were going to lose a baby they were trying to adopt had attempted suicide. They didn’t die but their baby did.
I put that paper away.
The captain told us to fasten our seat belts and the stewardess showed us how it was done. The engine on the big 707 began to roar and whine.
