The Early Posthumous Work

Out There, Lucky and Loose

45 Out There, Lucky and Loose When I was about seven, my father used to take the family to the beach at Galveston, a drive of about eighty miles from our home in West Houston. As we rolled along old Texas Highway 6, sometimes he would sing out the names of the small towns we passed, towns whose names seemed all to begin with the letter “A.” This litany—Arcola, Alvin, Algoa—was one of the many things which made the trip an adventure. Coming back, tired, late at night in the dark backseat surrounded by the low sounds of the car, watching lights like pinpricks all around, I felt fiercely content. Oddly, my most vivid memories of Texas are often memories of highway, and even now, when twice a year I come back, it’s only when I get on US 10 and then on Texas 71 between Houston and Austin that an old feeling comes over me: yeah, I like it here. Ten or so years after those childhood beach trips to Galveston with my family, fresh from a year at college in Boston, one afternoon I left my parents’ house and headed for Austin, hitchhiking . I had never hitchhiked before going to Massachusetts, had only rarely seen hitchhikers in Texas, but it was commonplace in the East and my new college friends’ principal means of travel. The highways up there seemed tame compared to ours, with the towns close together and few long, empty stretches of bare road. 46 The Early Posthumous Work I was a very green eighteen-year-old boy, but a girl I knew was in Austin. I left without saying anything to anyone and walked a few suburban blocks to the highway. I didn’t know the way, wasn’t sure which highway to take, started out at five o’clock in the afternoon. I was the only pedestrian out there, and more than a little anxious. What amounts to a less-than-three-hour drive took me about eight hours. My first ride was with an old trucker, an easy-going, talkative guy who sort of adopted me on the spot. I had never been inside a semi before, so he got to tell me all about what he loved best. He dropped me off on the side of the road in a desolate spot somewhere before Columbus, and almost as soon as I got thumb up in the air, two cars pulled off just past where I was standing. Damn, I thought, I’m pretty good at this. I ran and got in the first car. It developed that the six men in the two convertibles—a Cadillac and a white Thunderbird—were all traveling together. Did I want to go to Las Vegas with them? Their eagerness was unsettling, didn’t seem quite right, but maybe there was nothing to it. When I didn’t want to go to Las Vegas, they said at least ride to El Paso. Nah, sorry, I can’t, I said, and when the seven of us were walking into a restaurant where we’d stopped a half hour later, I faded to the end of the procession and then turned around at the door and walked off down the highway. Another trucker, a young guy who didn’t talk, picked me up and carried me to about Bastrop, where I sat at a brand new highway intersection for three hours, ignored by the half dozen cars that passed during that time. It was an eerie atmosphere. In the streetlights, the new concrete and curbs were a white island with the odd, abandoned feel of brand new streets at night. Beyond the cones of light, the darkness was total. Sitting there felt like being in a terrarium. After twelve midnight a car finally stopped, a beat-up Oldsmobile , loud, with the paint pretty much gone. It looked real good to me after several hours sitting around watching grasshoppers and moths catch the light when they rose briefly out of the weeds Steven Barthelme 47 by the highway. I stood up and approached a little cautiously until a woman’s big voice came from the passenger’s seat, “Well, c’mon, honey, if you’re coming.” I hustled over and got in the back seat of the car. The black woman who was talking said something I didn’t catch to her husband and...