The Scummers

Four

14 Four Two Lane Blacktop Western South Carolina October 1956 Winter was coming on in the Carolinas. The land rose to the west and lifted higher into the mountains and I could feel the cold flowing down and out of the hills and wrapping itself around me in my beach shirt and old jeans and I wished I were back there, sitting on the sand, sweat running down into my eyes and a can of cold beer dangling from my hand. I carried a thin, tattered gym bag but there was nothing much in it but an old shirt. I started walking down and around the mountains and farther into the South, my thumb out every time I heard a car, trying to keep my eyes straight ahead. I thought about going home, but I really was not sure where home was. And it didn’t seem to matter. I just ended up in places I didn’t want to be, after taking off from some other places I didn’t want to be. Actually, I had no intention of going home, ever again. Wherever it was. The rain was pissing down out of a sky I could not see and the tree did little to protect me. I sat under it anyway, pretending it was better than nothing. But it wasn’t. I pulled the tattered shirt out of the gym bag and wrapped it around my head, but it was soaked instantly and all it did was feel cold and clammy as it slid down around my neck. I clutched the gym bag to my stomach, trying to keep it dry. There 15 was nothing in it now but a piece of soap in a plastic box. There wasn’t even a book in there. No book. I squeezed the bag harder, and that’s when I felt it. A book. I opened the bag. There was a book in there—well, not a real book, not the sort of book you buy in a store. It was one of those hard-backed notebooks with the pages stitched in. Composition books, the kids called them, dark cardboard covers , thick sheets of paper. It was my book, my notebook. I wrote in it. It was my journal, but I didn’t remember putting it in the bag. I did not know what it meant to keep a journal. I just wrote. And it became a habit. It is still a habit, but one I have been trying to break for years. The tree was up a slight rise and back a ways from the road and I knew anybody driving past would not see me. I would wait until the rain stopped and then walk down to the pitted blacktop and keep on walking west. No one was going to stop and pick up a guy my size, soaking wet, carrying nothing but an old gym bag. It didn’t matter. I really had no place to go. The rain stopped and I stuffed the wet shirt back into the gym bag. Blue holes began to show in the overcast sky. The air did not move, an absolutely still wrapping of cold around my wet clothing, chilling me as I walked. The trees dripped with wet, their leaves still green but hanging limply, knowing they were dead but refusing to change color and drop. The road came out of the trees and onto the side of a high ridge and I could see other ridges in the distance, identical to the one I was on, the heavy clouds capping the higher points, the valleys below so narrow and deep that they were black at the bottoms. I knew I was somewhere in the Western Carolinas, but I did not know where. I followed the road and the rolling ridges and I did not give a damn 16 where they went as long as it was west. The entire world was wet and green and cold and steep and the narrow road just kept going and I knew I was not where I wanted to be. Yet. Maybe never. But the road led west. I walked for the rest of the day. With nothing to eat. When I knew I was not going to get a ride I started looking for a place to hole up for the night. A pile of concrete culvert sections was stacked off...