even Roland Major, my old college writing buddy, was there. I looked forward to all of them with
joy and anticipation. So I rushed .past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des
Moines.
A guy with a kind of toolshack on wheels, a truck full of tools that he drove standing up like a
modern milkman, gave me a ride up the long hill, where I immediately got a ride from a farmer and
his son heading out for Adel in Iowa. In this town, under a big elm tree near a gas station, I made the
acquaintance of another hitchhiker, a typical New Yorker, an Irishman who’d been driving a truck
for the post office most of his work years and was now headed for a girl in Denver and a new life. I
think he was running away from something in New York, the law most likely. He was a real red-
nose young drunk of thirty and would have bored me ordinarily, except that my senses were sharp
for any kind of human friendship. He wore a beat sweater and baggy pants and had nothing with him
in the way of a bag - just a toothbrush and handkerchiefs. He said we ought to hitch together. I
should have said no, because he looked pretty awful on the road. But we stuck together and got a
ride with a taciturn man to Stuart, Iowa, a town in which we were really stranded. We stood in front
of the railroad-ticket shack in Stuart, waiting for the westbound traffic till the sun went down, a good
five hours, dawdling away the time, at first telling about ourselves, then he told dirty stories, then we
just kicked pebbles and made goofy noises of one kind and another. We got bored. I decided to
spend a buck on beer; we went to an old saloon in Stuart and had a few. There he got as drunk as
he ever did in his Ninth Avenue night back home, and yelled joyously in my ear all the sordid dreams
of his life. I kind of liked him; not because he was a good sort, as he later proved to be, but because
he was enthusiastic about things. We got back on the road in the darkness, and of course nobody
stopped and nobody came by much. That went on till three o’clock in the morning. We spent some
time trying to sleep on the bench at the railroad ticket office, but the telegraph clicked all night and
we couldn’t sleep, and big freights were slamming around outside. We didn’t know how to hop a
proper chain gang; we’d never done it before; we didn’t know whether they were going east or west
or how to find out or what boxcars and flats and de-iced reefers to pick, and so on. So when the
Omaha bus came through just before dawn we hopped on it and joined the sleeping passengers - I
paid for his fare as well as mine. His name was Eddie. He reminded me of my cousin-in-law from the
Bronx. That was why I stuck with him. It was like having an old friend along, a smiling good-natured
sort to goof along with.
We arrived at Council Bluffs at dawn; I looked out. All winter I’d been reading of the great
wagon parties that held council there before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails; and of course
now it was only cute suburban cottages of one damn kind and another, all laid out in the dismal gray
dawn. Then Omaha, and, by God, the first cowboy I saw, walking along the bleak walls of the
wholesale meat warehouses in a ten-gallon hat and Texas boots, looked like any beat character of
the brickwall dawns of the East except for the getup. We got off the bus and walked clear up the hill,
the long hill formed over the millenniums by the mighty Missouri, alongside of which Omaha is built,
and got out to the country and stuck our thumbs out. We got a brief ride from a wealthy rancher in a
ten-gallon hat, who said the valley of the Platte was as great as the Nile Valley of Egypt, and as he
said so I saw the great trees in the distance that snaked with the riverbed and the great verdant fields
around it, and almost agreed with him. Then as we were standing at another crossroads and it was
starting to get cloudy another cowboy, this one six feet tall in a modest half-gallon hat, called us over
and wanted to know if either one of us could drive. Of course Eddie could drive, and he had a
license and I didn’t. Cowboy had two cars with him that he was driving back to Montana,
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His wife was at Grand Island, and he wanted us to drive one of the cars there, where she’d take
over. At that point he was going north, and that would be the limit of our ride with him. But it was a
good hundred miles into Nebraska, and of course ,we jumped for it. Eddie drove alone, the cowboy
and myself following, and no sooner were we out of town than Eddie started to ball that jack ninety
miles an hour out of sheer exuberance. .Damn me, what’s that boy doing!. the cowboy shouted,
and took off after him. It began to be like a race. For a minute I thought Eddie was trying to get
away with the car - and for all I know that’s what he meant to do. But the cowboy stuck to him and
caught up with him and tooted the horn. Eddie slowed down. The cowboy tooted to stop. .Damn,
boy, you’re liable to get a flat going that speed. Can’t you drive a little slower?.
.Well, I’ll be damned, was I really going ninety?. said Eddie. .I didn’t realize it on this smooth
road..
.Just take it a little easy and we’ll all get to Grand Island in one piece..
.Sure thing.. And we resumed our journey. Eddie had calmed down and probably even got
sleepy. So we drove a hundred miles across Nebraska, following the winding Platte with its verdant
fields.
.During the depression,. said the cowboy to me, .I used to hop freights at least once a month. In
those days you’d see hundreds of men riding a flatcar or in a boxcar, and they weren’t just bums,
they were all kinds of men out of work and going from one place to another and some of them just
wandering. It was like that all over the West. Brakemen never bothered you in those days. I don’t
know about today. Nebraska I ain’t got no use for. Why in the middle nineteen thirties this place
wasn’t nothing but a big dustcloud as far as the eye could see. You couldn’t breathe. The ground
was black. I was here in those days. They can give Nebraska back to the Indians far as I’m
concerned. I hate this damn place more than’ any place in the world. Montana’s my home now Missoula.
You come up there sometime and see God’s country.. Later in the afternoon I slept when
he got tired talking - he was an interesting talker.
We stopped along the road for a bite to eat. The cowboy went off to have a spare tire patched,
and Eddie and I sat down in a kind of homemade diner. I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in
the world, and here came this rawhide old-timer Nebraska farmer with a bunch of other boys into
the diner; you could hear his raspy cries clear across the plains, across the whole gray world of them
that day. Everybody else laughed with him. He didn’t have a care in the world and had the hugest
regard for everybody. I said to myself, Wham, listen to that man laugh. That’s the West, here I am in
the West. He came booming into the diner, calling Maw’s name, and she made the sweetest cherry
pie in Nebraska, and I had some with a mountainous scoop of ice cream on top. .Maw, rustle me
up some grub afore I have to start eatin myself raw or some damn silly idee like that.. And he threw
himself on a stool and went hyaw hyaw hyaw hyaw. .And throw some beans in it.. It was the spirit
of the West sitting right next to me. I wished I knew his whole raw life and what the hell he’d been
doing all these years besides laughing and yelling like that. Whooee, I told my soul, and the cowboy
came back and off we went to Grand Island.
We got there in no time flat. He went to fetch his wife and off to whatever fate awaited him, and
Eddie and I resumed on the road. We got a ride from a couple of young fellows -wranglers,
teenagers, country boys in a put-together jalopy -and were left off somewhere up the line in a thin
drizzle of rain. Then an old man who said nothing - and God knows why he picked us up - took us
to Shelton. Here Eddie stood forlornly in the road in front of a staring bunch of short, squat Omaha
Indians who had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Across the road was the railroad track and the
watertank saying SHELTON. .Damn me,. said Eddie with amazement, .I’ve been in this town
before. It was years ago, during the war, at night, late at night when everybody was sleeping. I went
15
out on the platform to smoke, and there we was in the middle of nowhere and black as hell, and I
look up and see that name Shelton written on the watertank. Bound for the Pacific, everybody
snoring, every damn dumb sucker, and we only stayed a few minutes, stoking up or something, and
off we went. Damn me, this Shelton! I hated this place ever since!. And we were stuck in Shelton.
As in Davenport, Iowa, somehow all the cars were farmer-cars, and once in a while a tourist car,
which is worse, with old men driving and their wives pointing out the sights or poring over maps, and
sitting back looking at everything with suspicious faces.
The drizzle increased and Eddie got cold; he had very little clothing. I fished a wool plaid shirt
from my canvas bag and he put it on. He felt a little better. I had a cold. I bought cough drops in a
rickety Indian store of some kind. I went to the little two-by-four post office and wrote my aunt a
penny postcard. We went back to the gray road. There she was in front of us, Shelton, written on
the watertank. The Rock Island balled by. We saw the faces of Pullman passengers go by in a blur.
The train howled off across the plains in the direction of our desires. It started to rain harder.
A tall, lanky fellow in a gallon hat stopped his car on the wrong side of the road and came over to
us; he looked like a sheriff. We prepared our stories secretly. He took his time coming over. .You
boys going to get somewhere, or just going?. We didn’t understand his question, and it was a
damned good question.
.Why?. we said.
.Well, I own a little carnival that’s pitched a few mile down the road and I’m looking for some
old boys willing to work and make a buck for themselves. I’ve got a roulette concession and a
wooden-ring concession, you know, the kind you throw around dolls and take your luck. You boys
want to work for me, you can get thirty per cent of the take..
.Room and board?.
.You can get a bed but no food. You’ll have to eat in town. We travel some.. We thought it
over. .It’s a good opportunity,. he said, and waited patiently for us to make up our minds. We felt
silly and didn’t know what to say, and I for one didn’t want to get hung-up with a carnival. I was in
such a bloody hurry to get to the gang in Denver.
I said, .I don’t know, I’m going as fast as I can and I don’t think I have the time.. Eddie said the
same thing, and the old man waved his hand and casually sauntered back to his car and drove off.
And that was that. We laughed about it awhile and speculated about what it would have been like. I
had visions of a dark and dusty night on the plains, and the faces of Nebraska families wandering by,
with their rosy children looking at everything with awe, and I know I would have felt like the devil
himself rooking them with all those cheap carnival tricks. And the Ferris wheel revolving in the
flatlands darkness, and, God almighty, the sad music of the merry-go-round and me wanting to get
on to my goal - and sleeping in some gilt wagon on a bed of burlap.
Eddie turned out to be a pretty absent-minded pal of the road. A funny old contraption rolled by,
driven by an old man; it was made of some kind of aluminum, square as a box - a trailer, no doubt,
but a weird, crazy Nebraska homemade trailer. He was going very slow and stopped. We rushed
up; he said he could only take one; without a word Eddie jumped in and slowly rattled from my sight,
and wearing my wool plaid shirt. Well, alackaday, I kissed the shirt good-by; it had only sentimental
value in any case. I waited in our personal godawful Shelton for a long, long time, several hours, and
I kept thinking it was getting night; actually it was only early afternoon, but dark. Denver, Denver,
how would I ever get to Denver? I was just about giving up and planning to sit over coffee when a
fairly new car stopped, driven by a young guy. I ran like mad.
.Where you going?.
.Denver..
16
.Well, I can take you a hundred miles up the line..
.Grand, grand, you saved my life..
.I used to hitchhike myself, that’s why I always pick up a fellow..
.I would too if I had a car.. And so we talked, and he told me about his life, which wasn’t very
interesting, and I started to sleep some and woke up right outside the town of Gothenburg, where he
let me off.
17
4
The greatest ride in my life was about to come up, a truck, with a flatboard at the back, with
about six or seven boys sprawled out on it, and the drivers, two young blond farmers from
Minnesota, were picking up every single soul they found on that road - the most smiling, cheerful
couple of handsome bumpkins you could ever wish to see, both wearing cotton shirts and overalls,
nothing else; both thick-wristed and earnest, with broad howareyou smiles for anybody and anything
that came across their path. I ran up, said .Is there room?. They said, .Sure, hop on, ‘sroom for
everybody..
I wasn’t on the flatboard before the truck roared off; I lurched, a rider grabbed me, and I sat
down. Somebody passed a bottle of rotgut, the bottom of it. I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical,
drizzling air of Nebraska. .Whooee, here we go!. yelled a kid in a baseball cap, and they gunned up
the truck to seventy and passed everybody on the road. .We been riding this sonofabitch since Des
Moines. These guys never stop. Every now and then you have to yell for pisscall, otherwise you have
to piss off the air, and hang on, brother, hang on..
I looked at the company. There were two young farmer boys from North Dakota in red baseball
caps, which is the standard North Dakota farmer-boy hat, and they were headed for the harvests;
their old men had given them leave to hit the road for a summer. There were two young city boys
from Columbus, Ohio, high-school football players, chewing gum, winking, singing in the breeze, and
they said they were hitchhiking around the United States for the summer. .We’re going to LA! .they
yelled.
.What are you going to do there?.
.Hell, we don’t know. Who cares?.
Then there was a tall slim fellow who had a sneaky look. .Where you from?. I asked. I was lying
next to him on the platform; you couldn’t sit without bouncing off, it had no rails. And he turned
slowly to me, opened his mouth, and said, .Mon-ta-na..
Finally there were Mississippi Gene and his charge. Mississippi Gene was a little dark guy who
rode freight trains around the country, a thirty-year-old hobo but with a youthful look so you couldn’t
tell exactly what age he was. And he sat on the boards crosslegged, looking out over the fields
without saying anything for hundreds of miles, and finally at one point he turned to me and said,
.Where you headed?.
I said Denver.
.I got a sister there but I ain’t seed her for several couple years.. His language was melodious
and slow. He was patient. His charge was a sixteen-year-old tall blond kid, also in hobo rags; that is
to say, they wore old clothes that had been turned black by the soot of railroads and the dirt of
boxcars and sleeping on the ground. The blond kid was also quiet and he seemed to be running
away from something, and it figured to be the law the way he looked straight ahead and wet his lips
in worried thought. Montana Slim spoke to them occasionally with a sardonic and insinuating smile.
They paid no attention to him. Slim was all insinuation. I was afraid of his long goofy grin that he
opened up straight in your face and held there half-moronically.
.You got any money?. he said to me.
.Hell no, maybe enough for a pint of whisky till I get to Denver. What about you?.
.I know where I can get some..
.Where?.
.Anywhere. You can always folly a man down an alley, can’t you?.
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.Yeah, I guess you can..
.I ain’t beyond doing it when I really need some dough. Headed up to Montana to see my father.
I’ll have to get off this rig at Cheyenne and move up some other way. These crazy boys are going to
Los Angeles..
.Straight?.
.All the way - if you want to go to LA you got a ride..
I mulled this over; the thought of zooming all night across Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Utah
desert in the morning, and then most likely the Nevada desert in the afternoon, and actually arriving in
Los Angeles within a foreseeable space of time almost made me change my plans. But I had to go to
Denver. I’d have to get off at Cheyenne too, and hitch south ninety miles to Denver.
I was glad when the two Minnesota farmboys who owned the truck decided to stop in North
Platte and eat; I wanted to have a look at them. They came out of the cab and smiled at all of us.
.Pisscall!. said one. .Time to eat!. said the other. But they were the only ones in the party who had
money to buy food. We all shambled after them to a restaurant run by a bunch of women, and sat
around over hamburgers and coffee while they wrapped away enormous meals just as if they were
back in their mother’s kitchen. They were brothers; they were transporting farm machinery from Los
Angeles to Minnesota and making good money at it. So on their trip to the Coast empty they picked
up everybody on the road. They’d done this about five times now; they were having a hell of a time.
They liked everything. They never stopped smiling. I tried to talk to them - a kind of dumb attempt
on my part to befriend the captains of our ship - and the only responses I got were two sunny smiles
and large white corn-fed teeth.
Everybody had joined them in the restaurant except the two hobo kids, Gene and his boy. When
we all got back they were still sitting in the truck, forlorn and disconsolate. Now the darkness was
falling. The drivers had a smoke; I jumped at the chance to go buy a bottle of whisky to keep warm
in the rushing cold air of night. They smiled when I told them. .Go ahead, hurry up..
.You can have a couple shots!. I reassured them.
.Oh no, we never drink, go ahead..
Montana Slim and the two high-school boys wandered the streets of North Platte with me till I
found a whisky store. They chipped in some, and Slim some, and I bought a fifth. Tall, sullen men
watched us go by from false-front buildings; the main street was lined with square box-houses. There
were immense vistas of the plains beyond every sad street. I felt something different in the air in
North Platte, I didn’t know what it was. In five minutes I did. We got back on the truck and roared
off. It got dark quickly. We all had a shot, and suddenly I looked, and the verdant farmfields of the
Platte began to disappear and in their stead, so far you couldn’t see to the end, appeared long flat
wastelands of sand and sagebrush. I was astounded.
.What in the hell is this?. I cried out to Slim.
.This is the beginning of the rangelands, boy. Hand me another drink..
.Whoopee!. yelled the high-school boys. .Columbus, so long! What would Sparkie and the
boys say if they was here. Yow!.
The drivers had switched up front; the fresh brother was gunning the truck to the limit. The road
changed too: humpy in the middle, with soft shoulders and a ditch on both sides about four feet deep,
so that the truck bounced and teetered from one side of the road to the other - miraculously only
when there were no cars coming the opposite way - and I thought we’d all take a somersault. But
they were tremendous drivers. How that truck disposed of the Nebraska nub - the nub that sticks
out over Colorado! And soon I realized I was actually at last over Colorado, though not officially in
it, but looking southwest toward Denver itself a few hundred miles away. I yelled for joy. We passed
19
the bottle. The great blazing stars came out, the far-receding sand hills got dim. I felt like an arrow
that could shoot out all the way.
And suddenly Mississippi Gene turned to me from his crosslegged, patient reverie, and opened
his mouth, and leaned close, and said, .These plains put me in the mind of Texas..
.Are you from Texas?.
.No sir, I’m from Green-veil Muzz-sippy.. And that was the way he said it.
.Where’s that kid from?.
.He got into some kind of trouble back in Mississippi, so I offered to help him out. Boy’s never
been out on his own. I take care of him best as I can, he’s only a child.. Although Gene was white
there was something of the wise and tired old Negro in him, and something very much like Elmer
Hassel, the New York dope addict, in him, but a railroad Hassel, a traveling epic Hassel, crossing
and recrossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer, and only because
he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but
everywhere, keep rolling under the stars, generally the Western stars.
.I been to Ogden a couple times. If you want to ride on to Ogden I got some friends there we
could hole up with..
.I’m going to Denver from Cheyenne..
.Hell, go right straight thu, you don’t get a ride like this every day..
This too was a tempting offer. What was in Ogden? .What’s Ogden?. I said.
.It’s the place where most of the boys pass thu and always meet there; you’re liable to see
anybody there..
In my earlier days I’d been to sea with a tall rawboned fellow from Louisiana called Big Slim
Hazard, William Holmes Hazard, who was hobo by choice. As a little boy he’d seen a hobo come
up to ask his mother for a piece of pie, and she had given it to him, and when the hobo went off
down the road the little boy had said, .Ma, what is that fellow?. .Why. that’s a ho-bo.. .Ma, I
want to be a ho-bo someday.. .Shut your mouth, that’s not for the like of the Hazards.. But he
never forgot that day, and when he grew up, after a shortspell playing football at LSU, he did
become a hobo. Big Slim and I spent many nights telling stories and spitting tobacco juice in paper
containers. There was something so indubitably reminiscent of Big Slim Hazard in Mississippi Gene’s
demeanor that I said, .Do you happen to have met a fellow called Big Slim Hazard somewhere?.
And he said, .You mean the tall fellow with the big laugh?.
.Well, that sounds like him. He came from Ruston, Louisiana..
.That’s right. Louisiana Slim he’s sometimes called. Yes-sir, I shore have met Big Slim..
.And he used to work in the East Texas oil fields?.
.East Texas is right. And now he’s punching cows..
And that was exactly right; and still I couldn’t believe Gene could have really known Slim, whom
I’d been looking for, more or less, for years. .And he used to work in tugboats in New York?.
.Well now, I don’t know about that..
.I guess you only knew him in the West..
.I reckon. I ain’t never been to New York..
.Well, damn me, I’m amazed you know him. This is a big country. Yet I knew you must have
known him..
.Yessir, I know Big Slim pretty well. Always generous with his money when he’s got some.
Mean, tough fellow, too; I seen him flatten a policeman in the yards at Cheyenne, one punch.. That
sounded like Big Slim; he was always practicing that one punch in the air; he looked like Jack
Dempsey, but a young Jack Dempsey who drank.
20
.Damn!. I yelled into the wind, and I had another shot, and by now I was feeling pretty good.
Every shot was wiped away by the rushing wind of the open truck, wiped away of its bad effects,
and the good effect sank in my stomach. .Cheyenne, here I come!. I sang. .Denver, look out for
your boy..
Montana Slim turned to me, pointed at my shoes, and commented, .You reckon if you put them
things in the ground something’ll grow up?. - without cracking a smile, of course, and the other boys
heard him and laughed. And they were the silliest shoes in America; I brought them along specifically
because I didn’t want my feet to sweat in the hot road, and except for the rain in Bear Mountain they
proved to be the best possible shoes for my journey. So I laughed with them. And the shoes were
pretty ragged by now, the bits of colored leather sticking up like pieces of a fresh pineapple and my
toes showing through. Well, we had another shot and laughed. As in a dream we zoomed through
small crossroads towns smack out of the darkness, and passed long lines of lounging harvest hands
and cowboys in the night. They watched us pass in one motion of the head, and we saw them slap
their thighs from the continuing dark the other side of town - we were a funny-looking crew.
A lot of men were in this country at that time of the year; it was harvest time. The Dakota boys
were fidgeting. .I think we’ll get off at the next pisscall; seems like there’s a lot of work around
