One for the Road Read Free Page A

through middle age and into retirement as I wait for a car to pass. There is a paranoid clarity that comes to those who stand alone by the road, for hours. In this case, it’s directed at a garden statuette of a kangaroo in the yard behind me. I can feel its beady plaster eyes on my neck, hexing me for having ridden with animal killers all day.
    I beg forgiveness and pray to the ’roo to bring me a ride. I get another hitchhiker instead.
    “How long you been on the road, lad?” A disheveled man with two bloated duffel bags studies me from across the road.
    “First day out. How about you?
    “Thirty-three years, lad. And them boots are still not tired of walking.”
    Phil “Boots” Harris, cook by trade, card shark and con man by preference, kicks his bags into the shape of a chaise longue and stretches out on top. He spotted me from a ditch beside the road where he spent most of the day sleeping off an all-night card game. “Drunk, see.”
    The boots are high patent-leather pumps—night shoes, not for walking. Mid-shin, the boots give way to a tattered pair of tuxedo pants that must have once belonged to a stouter, shorter man. A massive beer gut droops above the man’s narrow waist, protruding from a T-shirt that reads: “My wife has a drinking problem. Me.” Alcoholism is written across his face as well: it is red, lumpy and deflated, like a day-old birthday balloon.
    “Landed these threads at a church in Orange,” Boots says, hooking his thumbs on an imaginary waistcoat. “Spun a real hard-luck yarn. Lost my job. Started drinking too much plonk. Wife showed me the door. Blah blah, boo hoo hoo.”
    He opens one of the bags and a few potatoes roll out. “Landed some tucker too. Blankets in the other bag. I’ll sell the bloody lot of it in Dubbo.”
    I ask to hear his story.
    “Information costs in the bush,” he says, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “Have you got a beer?” I haven’t, so I toss him a dollar coin instead.
    “Anyone can have a home and an honest job,” he says, leaning back and putting his hands behind his head. “But if a man lives by his wits, he can get by without all that. And stay free as a bird, like me.”
    Free to roam the continent, which is what Boots has done since running away from Kalgoorlie in West Australia as a teenager. The first stop in every town is the pub, where he hustles card tricks for schooners of beer. When the tricks play out, he hustles poker. On a good night he makes enough to walk on down the road a little farther. On a bad night he sleeps off the beer and starts all over the following day. “Fresh as a goose. Only poorer,” he says.
    “If there aren’t any mugs at the pub, there’s always one at the church,” he goes on. “Convents are the best. You can tell a nun any bloody nonsense and get everything but a place in her cot.”
    I interrupt his story as two cars approach, headed north. They pass. A few minutes later, several more drive by.
    “Still on city time, lad?” Boots asks, laughing. He hoists a bag over each shoulder and leads me up the road to a signpost that’s scratched with the names of hitchhikers who have languished here before us. There are memorials like this all across America, inscribed by legions of stranded travelers. Apparently Australia is the same.
    “Don’t ask me why, but Molong is bloody hard to get out of,” Boots says, locating his initials beside the years 1972, 1978, and 1981. He adds “P.H.” one more time for good measure. “Won’t be the last scratch, neither. Once I get to Dubbo I’ll probably just turn around. I get itchy feet if I stay in one place too long.”
    Hitchhiking etiquette seems to be universal as well. Since I arrived first on the road, Boots plants himself out of sight and juggles potatoes until I can coax a ride. There’s little traffic, though, and no one is interested in picking me up.
    Boots watches for half an hour before returning to the roadside. He sits on one bag and