One for the Road Read Free Page B

offers me the other. It is almost sunset: the hustling hour.
    “Pick a heart, any heart,” he says, drawing a well-worn deck of cards from the pocket of his tuxedo pants.
    “Six.”
    He opens the deck to a six.
    “Dollar says I can find the ace.” I nod. He cuts to the ace.
    “King?” The king it is. A two-dollar note trades hands.
    I ask for the deck and deal out a round of poker. Another note disappears into his pocket. We try euchre and I lose again. I am ten dollars down when a truck pulls up and offers a ride to Dubbo. There is only room in the back for one.
    “You take it, lad,” Boots says, folding up the deck. “Them boots are still not tired of walking.”
    I watch the moon rise from the back of the truck and take stock of my first day on the road. A meal offer, my first kangaroo, and a true Australian swagman, albeit at some cost.
    There will be much shared food and more kangaroos than I can count before this journey is done. But the travel is lonely from here on. Boots is the last hitchhiker I will see for three thousand miles.
    * A glossary of Australian usage appears on this page .

3 …
Woop Woop and Other Places
           I t’s all Jon Hamilton’s fault, this thing I have about hitchhiking. We were best friends at sixteen when Jon thumbed his way across America over summer vacation. I stayed at home, in Washington, D.C., serving French fries at a Wild West version of McDonald’s.
    “I’m holed up at this flophouse filled with naked old winos,” Jon wrote from New Orleans. “They lie in bed all day with their doors wide open, so I walk down the hall and look at the bottoms of their feet. Too much. Jon.”
    I studied the card between customers on the fast-food assembly line. “Howdy, partner, want some fries?” I’d ask. They always did. So I’d scoop a pile of spuds between the milkshake and the cheeseburger, point them to a cowgirl at the cash register, and cry out, “Happy trails!” I lasted a week.
    Jon was halfway across the continent by then. “Hopped a freight train in Shreveport and rode it all the way to Santa Fe,” he wrote from New Mexico. A pair of Navajos galloped across an open plain on the other side of the card. It looked like cowboy country, only the real thing, not a French-fried version of it. “Got drunk on ripple wine with some hobos in a boxcar. The desert out here is unreal. Happy trails, Jon.”
    Jon showed up at school that September with a beret and an adolescent stubble sprouting across his cheeks. Between classes he’d sit alone under a tree and roll cigarettes, looking shell-shocked, only in a good way;like he’d seen something vast and important out there, in a New Orleans flophouse or a freightyard in Santa Fe.
    All through the school year, I studied the pages of the
Rand McNally Road Atlas of America
. I read and reread Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
and pinned a poster from
Easy Rider
over my bed. Wanderlust mingled with other passions in my adolescent dreaming.
    And so it was that I found myself the following summer, a month of dishwasher’s pay in the pocket of my jeans, standing beside a highway headed west out of Washington. My destination was California, three thousand miles away. My route was to be as random as the drivers who took me in.
    In the two months that followed I found out just how boring the amber waves of grain can be. I threw up my first shot of tequila behind a Mexican bar in South Dakota. I landed in a Nevada jail for riding on a motorcycle without a helmet—behind a biker who was going a hundred miles per hour, with an ounce of grass in the pocket of his leather jacket.
    But misadventure was part of the appeal. Hitchhiking was a rite of passage, and a way to slum it across America like so many generations before. Go West, young man. Get your kicks on Route 66. At seventeen, there was nothing that compared to sprinting toward an open car door, half in terror and half in exhilaration, to climb in for another ride with a total