The Last Great Road Bum Read online

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  A Note About the Author

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  In memory of Gus Gregory

  Some Introductory Remarks from the Author

  THE PROTAGONIST OF THIS NOVEL was a real-life person who lived in the United States in the twentieth century. He left behind several boxes of typed pages and handwritten letters in which he recounted the many humorous, surreal, tragic and grand adventures that fill the pages of this book. Joe Sanderson was the youngest son of an educated family, raised in a college town set amidst the bountiful farmland of the central United States; he was also lucky enough to live during a time when the U.S.A. was the most powerful and dazzling empire on the globe. But unlike most of the people he grew up with, he did not bask in the perks and the glory of a professional career, or sign up for multiple mortgages and marriages. He chose not to enjoy the privileges and creature comforts of the American middle class, even though such comforts were his birthright. Instead, Our Hero dropped out of college and roamed the world for twenty years, telling his mother and father he was gathering the raw material he needed to write the Great American Novel.

  Put another way, the Protagonist of this book was a real person who tried to become a novelist by living his life like a character in a novel. Joe Sanderson did many bold things that were like the plot elements of the books he liked to read. He traveled as a “road bum” across the United States, Africa, South America, Southeast and Central Asia and the Middle East, rode ships across the seas and worked to heal the sick and feed starving children. And he carried firearms. Our Hero drank beer and wine, whispered sweet words to the women who fell in love with him, learned to fly airplanes and was detained by the police and local military forces in half a dozen different countries. He dodged bullets in three different wars (on three different continents), even though he was never actually drafted to fight in one. While doing these things, Joe Sanderson wrote thousands of pages of fiction—not a word of which was ever published. As you’ll soon see, he loved books from an early age and believed so deeply in the power of the novel that he risked his life again and again trying to write one. Eventually, Our Hero talked his way into a guerrilla army in Latin America. When he died, he was carrying about four hundred pages of notes for his masterpiece: a novel about the civil war and revolution in El Salvador.

  Unfortunately, Joe Sanderson was unable to complete, or even start, really, this last book. And to be perfectly honest, all the other novels he did finish are largely unreadable, in the unanimous opinion of those who’ve tried to read them. (While God blessed Joe Sanderson with all the brio and the daring of a great fictional character, He gave Our Hero very little writerly discipline.) The bulk of this book is based, then, on the letters Joe wrote home to his mother, Virginia Colman, his father, Milt Sanderson, his brother, Steve Sanderson, and to one of the many lovers with whom he corresponded, a woman who wishes to be identified only as Mafalda. I’ve quoted from his letters verbatim, except for changing a name here and there, and correcting his spelling. (Even though I’m as poor a speller as he was, I have the luxury of spell-check, and I’m not writing, like he was, from desert camps and bombed-out villages.) And I’ve done all the normal things novelists do in bringing true events back to life: I’ve imagined scenes, created composite characters and entirely fictional characters and I’ve spent a lot of time praying to the Muses to help me conjure Our Hero’s world and enter his nicotine-fed brain.

  The book that follows is, then, a work of fiction. But before we leave the rigorous realm of nonfiction, I’d like to say one last thing: During the many years I’ve spent writing this novel, I have not failed to notice the wrinkled brows that occasionally greet me when I describe the Protagonist to people I meet. Height: five foot eleven. Hair color: blond. Eyes: blue. Complexion: pale, waxy even, unless he’d been tanned in the sun, which he usually was. The unspoken but obvious question that follows is this: Why would I, a person “of color,” want to write a novel about a man who isn’t? Well, because it’s a great story. And it just happens to reach a true-life climax in Central America, that beautiful and suffering isthmus where my own family history begins. More precisely, the final half of this book takes place in El Salvador, “the pinkie finger of the Americas” (as the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral called it), a country that is home to a brave people with proud indigenous and mestizo roots. The Protagonist and I are therefore completing a circle together. To live this novel, Joe Sanderson left behind his Illinois homeland and learned Spanish and ate pupusas and drank atol de elote, and he climbed tropical volcanoes, and slept in hammocks under banana trees. And to write this novel I learned to appreciate the polite but emotionally reserved Midwestern way of being, and ate lots of mashed potatoes and buttered corn on the cob, and I allowed myself to be seduced by the unpretentious enchantments of Urbana, Illinois, and all its swell people.

  In other words, dear reader, this is our book. A collaboration between central Illinois and Central America. The Protagonist lived it, and I wrote it, and I hope that wherever he is, Joe Sanderson appreciates my efforts.

  A STATEMENT FROM OUR PROTAGONIST

  My name is Joe Sanderson, and you are about to read the book that killed me.

  One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me.

  —David Foster Wallace, on growing up in Urbana, Illinois

  I

  The Part About the Boy: Natural Histories

  1

  Urbana, Illinois, U.S.A.

  BETWEEN THE SWAY OF WIND-CATCHING WILLOWS, Joe Sanderson searched. He climbed over the knotty skeletons of old shrubs, and planted his feet into spongy soil. His sneakers snapped dead branches in two. These were the early days of autumn, and his arms and cheeks were still summer-bronzed and freckled over the last layers of his baby fat. He was eleven years old and an expert butterfly collector. Probably the top kid-lepidopterist in Champaign County, in his own humble opinion. At night his bones ached and added marrow, and each morning his limbs felt more sinewy and masculine, as if he’d somehow entered the body of Davy Crockett. Or Daniel Boone. Manhood was calling to him in the contracting muscles of his calves and his bulkier biceps, but not yet in his loins. For the moment, he was still a boy.

  Joe’s friend Jim trailed behind him. Above them, the Illinois sun streamed through the tree canopies and their leaves became emeralds and rubies. Joe looked down at the ground before him, which had been made wet by weeks of rain showers, and saw slugs, snails and hopping insects, creatures that were burrowing and slithering. An earthworm oozed over his foot. His new canvas tennis shoes were covered in mud and ruined. Mom’s going to be heaping mad! Nah, that’s a dumb thing to think. A scientist doesn’t worry if his shoes are covered in mud. His father, Professor Milton W. Sanderson, was an entomologist at the University of Illinois and the world’s leading expert on the June beetle. Joe had been trying to sound like his father when he invited Jim on this butterfly expedition. They had traveled from Joe’s house on Washington Street on bicycles, down the straight and flat asphalt strip of Race Street to the edge of town, past the asterisk petals of yellow wildflowers, to this grove of university-planted trees. Nearby, the last patches of native prairie grass in Champaign County were catching the wind and drawing bugs, while the shallow stream whispere
d to the butterflies and dragonflies to come rest by its muddy shores.

  Muddy shores. Muddy shoes. My mother will be angry at these muddy shoes.1

  * * *

  TWO HOURS EARLIER, Joe’s mother, Virginia Sanderson, née Colman, had watched Joe emerge from his bedroom in his pajamas. She felt, for what would prove to be the last time, the sensation that had often come over her when Joe was a cotton-diapered infant and milk-toothed toddler: that he had somehow stretched out, thinned out, and grown taller overnight.

  On most days, Virginia sat behind a desk at the Champaign County Bank and Trust. She spent her workdays keeping ledgers and turning the crank on a machine whose gears could add up to $9,999,999.99. When she got home, Virginia kept on counting. One man, two boys (Joe and his brother, Steve), four steaks, one pan, four potatoes, one cup of milk, two teaspoons of butter, four hours till bedtime. Four feet eleven inches, size-eight shoes. With each new school year and season, her healthy, freckled son presented new puzzles. He had a mouth of mostly new permanent teeth, with perhaps one last baby canine or premolar still left to drop. His energy was boundless, protomasculine and unfocused, as evidenced by the ever-growing collection of bugs and other artifacts in his bedroom, filling his room with the sugary, unnatural aroma of preserved death; and sometimes, the musky, fermented scent of the urine and wet fur of the living mammals he brought into the house from the wild. More than two hundred and fifty butterflies in his collection. The rescued baby rabbits she helped him feed with an eyedropper. Mom is the mother rabbit, Steve! Look at Mom! She kept waiting for him to grow out of his collecting and wandering stage.

  * * *

  FOR THE REST OF JOE SANDERSON’S LIFE, butterfly collecting will be a metaphor for curiosity and adventure. When he’s on battlefields distant from Urbana and the United States, he’ll jokingly call himself a “butterfly collector” and say his M16 rifle is his “butterfly net.” At the age of eleven, he keeps picture frames with his captured and pinned butterflies, and also jars filled with snakeskins. He can identify the castes in his ant farm. He has a stuffed oriole, dried maple leaves and beetles. Intricate, startling and perfect things that remind him of the infinite variety of the living world. The wing of a monarch butterfly when he blows it up five hundred times in his father’s microscope and sees rows of delicate scales, a feathery field of saffron-colored grass. The exoskeleton of a beetle, and the stacked-coin patterns in the snake’s rattle.

  Now, in this small ecosystem tucked between the city and the cornfields, wounded sparrows died and putrefied, the caterpillars secreted smelly vapors, and the short-tailed shrews and meadow voles dropped feces. Cycles of living things. The mud inside his shoes made music as he marched. Swish, issh, swish, issh.

  “This is a good spot,” Joe told Jim. “There’s water nearby. And all these shrubs down here. You catch them near what they eat.”

  A stiff breeze came rushing into the grove of willows, cottonwoods and oaks again, causing the branches and leaves over his head to fill with a sound that made him think of sand falling through an hourglass. The tall pillar of air around Joe shifted westward, then eastward, with him and Jim and all the other living things inside it moving in the same cadence, every leaf and every branch, every bird, every nest. The swaying stopped, and a warm air was born from the stillness, the final hot humid breath of a Midwestern summer. Joe saw a brown, beating stain in the shadowy light, a butterfly rising and falling on currents of air as if careening down some invisible roller coaster. It passed a foot or so from his left ear and came to rest upon a shrub. Quickly, expertly, Joe plopped his net down and the fat butterfly was his, spotted wings beating furiously in the white mesh. “It’s a silver-spotted skipper,” Joe said, and he held the net closed with one hand and reached into the pocket of his collector’s jacket with the other, retrieving a jar and a wad of cotton, which he moistened with ether. The butterfly fluttered its wings in a final convulsion. So cruel to kill a living thing.

  When they were done collecting, Joe and Jim marched out of the woods and heard the elephant wail of a passing train, and felt a tremor moving through the ground: the Illinois Central, on its diesel march between Chicago and New Orleans. The boys stepped out onto Race Street, into full sunshine, and they retrieved their bikes and pedaled northward through two parallel fields of harvest-high corn. A wind-wave rippled through the ears, the tassels and the silk. Urbana was surrounded by so much corn it made you feel like a castaway on an island in a corn ocean. They passed the sign announcing the city limits: URBANA: ELEV. 730 FEET. He could follow this road all the way to Chicago. Maps at the gas station with this highway and many others, and railroad lines. Danville, Bloomington, Decatur. The blue whorls of the Sangamon River.

  Joe forgot about the butterflies and the dragonfly in his jacket. What next? What now? He felt the book shift in its pocket. Maybe I should write this down. Words made adventures live forever. His father was reading Les Misérables to him at night. They were almost finished. Dad said they’d read Robinson Crusoe next. When he visited his grandmother in Kansas, she read Huckleberry Finn to him. Books brought him joy, and books doomed him, because from an early age he believed every exciting thing that happened to him belonged in a book. Even now, as a fifth grader, he believes his story can fall onto a sheet of paper as easily as the rubber tire of his bicycle rolls onto the black asphalt. One day he’ll write as many words as there are white dashes in the center of this road. You live something, you write it down with words, words, words. Men set off on ships to conquer new territories, across the ocean, wave after wave, word after word.

  * * *

  HIS MOTHER WASN’T HOME, and Joe stepped into the backyard and washed his shoes with the garden hose and left them out on a clothesline to dry. He slipped on some older leather shoes that felt like a vise around his ankles.

  When Joe entered the kitchen and faced his mother, her eyes were drawn immediately to his feet. What’s the story here, little man? But for the sizzling steak on the stove, she would have asked. Her boys moved toward the table, eager to take their seats and to eat, to grow, Joe growing fastest. The new boy Virginia saw in the morning, not the same one she’d seen the night before. These moments will stand out in the chain of her lived days. Suppers served here in Urbana, and on the Kansas farm where she grew up. Douglas County, North Fifteen Hundred Road, on high ground in the valley of the Kansas and the Wakarusa Rivers. The hay and the corn that fed the cattle; two horses, one sable, one ash colored, to pull the cart and the plow. Today, chuck eye, fifth rib of the cow, store-bought at forty cents a pound, blood browning in the heat of the skillet, blue kernels of flame, city-gas uniform and steady. A meal of marbled meat, flesh born from grass and the gnashing molars of the steer; a farm here in her skillet. Once upon a time, the cast-iron stove, the firewood and the coal, a singeing roar of orange flames. Fat curdling in the chuck eye, crystals of Morton salt in the blood juice, becoming salty vapor.2

  * * *

  “SMELLS GOOD, MOM!” Steaming string beans, like the ones they grew on the farm, by the barn, Virginia’s “easy” girl-work to water and weed. Vegetables sold here in grocer’s mounds under gray light tubes, filling up a pewter scoop. One meal, ten thousand meals, from the crushed apple, the dried milk, the boiled carrots for the toothless infant, to the potatoes in the saucepan for this supper, starch softening with butter and more salt and milk into mush. A bit of gravy from store-bought powder, because there was a limit to what one working mother could do. The gathering of the smells above the stove, scent of motherhood and mothering; a meal, here, from me, to you boys, patient boys, obedient, waiting, standing before my fancy new rubber place mats, just rinse them off and use them again and again.

  Suddenly and without preamble, Milt said, “We might go to war in Guatemala. Over bananas.” The boys chuckled at the sound of the word bananas. Earlier in the day Milt had read a story in The Atlantic Monthly about war rumblings in Central America. The United Fruit Company, based in New Orleans, was prodding Preside
nt Eisenhower to protect its bananas from the left-wing government there. In the pages of The Atlantic Monthly and Time, Milt read stories about the assorted tin-pot dictators who ruled most of the globe. Like the generalissimo Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Milt once collected carrion beetles in the mountains of that tropical country. The larvae grew inside the buried corpses of mammals and birds; to find them he traveled on roads past checkpoints manned by the dictator’s soldiers, who wore low-slung belts and carried old M1 rifles. Carrion beetles burrowed into dead flesh to lay their eggs and Trujillo dumped the corpses of his enemies in the cloud forests. In the big, wet world there was always a new war waiting to metamorphose somewhere from mud and moist air. The last one was in Korea. Maybe the next one would be in Guatemala.

  No one at the table asked Milt to explain the banana war. The Sandersons scooped from the plates of mashed potatoes before them, chewed and swallowed their steaks. Virginia saw a streak of mud on the back of Joe’s neck and then another one on the underside of his arm, and later she looked out the kitchen window to the backyard and saw his new pair of tennis shoes hanging over the clothesline, their white laces colored orange by the dusk. A little mystery in the mud and the shoes.

  Virginia was losing track of who Joe really was. Does every mom feel this, or is it just me? Have I neglected him in some way?3 She decided not to ask Joe about the shoes, and she returned to the kitchen, alone, standing before the open door of the refrigerator, looking at the nearly empty bottle of milk that was waiting there. The boys had really polished that off. She poured the final half glass, and left it there on the counter near the sink, and picked up the bottle to take it to the porch, for the man in the black tie to pick up tomorrow morning. He comes pulling a wagon on a horse. A little bit of the country in this college town. Outside, on the neighborhood doorsteps, more empty bottles awaited the milkman. Next door, and two doors down, where the Eberts and their son, Roger, lived. Empty bottles next to doors where other American boys were preparing for bed with milk in their stomachs, adding marrow to their bones.