After I figured out that I wasn’t going to get clothes off a line, I sat in a dark corner of somebody’s garage and tried to think what to do next. I thought about going where the clothes were. Clothes in general, I mean. Not my own clothes, which were all in my room, which was a place I knew better than to go back to. But other clothes, that I could sort of find before they were lost. The first ideas I had all involved breaking into someplace or other. Somebody’s house, or some store that sold clothes.
I figured if I broke in anyplace I would get caught, and if I got caught I would be worse off than ever, because in addition to fraud and statutory rape they could also put me in jail for burglary. And while I thought if worst came to worst I could probably get a suspended sentence for the other charges (assuming Flick remembered who to bribe for a change), I could see myself spending a long time in prison for burglary. I also figured anybody breaking into a house or a store stood a very good chance of getting opened up with a shotgun.
Then I thought, but not for long, about Lying In Ambush and crowning somebody with a brick or something heavy, say a traditional Blunt Instrument for example, like a saxophone. Having just been hit on the head myself, I didn’t want to do the same to a stranger. Besides that, you may remember that I’m not even coordinated enough to pace the Upper Valley basketball team to a regional title, and that I get nauseous just thinking about violence for any length of time. I was violent enough with the three cops, but that’s something else. I mean, I had something to fight for.
Then I tripped over a muddy shoe.
To give you an idea how brilliant I was, I looked at what I tripped over and said to myself, Oh, it’s a shoe, and put it out of the way so I wouldn’t trip over it again. And I must have sat around scheming for another five minutes before I remembered that shoes were things you wear on your feet, and that I wasn’t wearing any at the moment, and that, therefore, a muddy shoe was better than no shoe at all, and I ought to follow the old proverb that starts out If the shoe fits.
Here’s another proverb. If the shoe doesn’t exactly fit, wear it anyway, because shoes are almost as hard to come by as clotheslines.
These shoes were a little loose, and down at the heels, and thin in the soles, and one of the laces had been broken and tied together again. If they’d been in better shape, the owner wouldn’t have used them for gardening and I wouldn’t have tripped over them, so I didn’t really have any right to complain.
I didn’t have time to complain, either. Because I figured out that some people had special shoes that they used for gardening or painting or any kind of yard work, and others had special pants and shirts, and that if I looked in enough garages I could probably put together a wardrobe that would get me a lot of curious glances, I’ll admit, but that would, all things considered, get me less attention than my present costume of shoes and nothing else.
Some people lock their garages, but most of them don’t. Most people don’t have anything wearable in their garages, but some of them do. And I wasn’t fussy about fit or looks or style, and garages are fairly easy to get in and out of without disturbing anybody, and to make a long story short (or at least as short as possible, at this stage of the game) I wound up wearing the muddy shoes and a pair of paint-blotched dungarees and a red-and-black plaid hunter’s jacket and a little peaked gardener’s cap.
And in the same garage where I found the hunter’s jacket I found something else, and while it didn’t take the nose of a bloodhound to ferret it out (or the nose of a ferret to bloodhound it out), I’m going to come right out and say that it was brilliant of me to take it along. Look, I’ve told you about all of the idiot things, so I might as well take whatever credit I can get.
It was a fishing rod. The way I was dressed, there were only two things on earth I could be — a criminal on the run or a lunatic fisherman. So I took the fishing rod and transformed myself from a Threat To Society to an All-American Boy, and I walked right through the dippy town without a bit of trouble.
If this was a movie, the thing to do now would be to cut straight on through to September. Not for the sake of cheating, the way they do when they refuse to tell you how Stud Boring got dressed again, but just because nothing very interesting happened during the next two months. And if we just cut to two months later and fifteen hundred miles east of there, you wouldn’t miss much.
But if you’re like me you always want to know about things like that, like what happened during the two months it took me to get from the fifth largest city in Indiana to where I was in September, which is also where I am now. If I like a book and get interested, I want to know everything.
When it comes to novels, I like the old-fashioned approach where they tell you what happened to the characters after the book ended. You know, the plot’s all tied up and the story is all used up and done with, and then there’s a last chapter where the author explains that Mary and Harold got married and had three children, two boys and a girl, and Harold lived to be sixty-seven when a stroke got him, and Mary survived him by twenty years and never remarried, and George went back together with his wife but they broke up again after three years, and George went to California and has never been heard from since, and his wife died of pleurisy the year after he left. I like to feel that the people are so real that they go on doing things even when the book is done with them, and sometimes I’ll make up my own epilogue for a book in my head if the author didn’t write one himself. It’s called an epilogue when you do this.
Anyway, ever since I started writing this, in fact ever since Mr. Burger said I really ought to write it, I decided I would just act as though the person reading it was more or less like myself. With a similar way of looking at things and so on. So whenever I have to decide whether to put something in or not, I ask myself whether or not I would want to read it. That’s why I put in all that crap about the termite racket, for example.
What I did for the rest of July and all of August and the first week of September was farm work, for the most part. I headed east when I left town and didn’t stop walking and hitchhiking until I was in Ohio. I didn’t think the police would bother sending out an alarm for me, since I wasn’t exactly Public Enemy Number One. I mean I wasn’t the most sought-after criminal since Arlo Guthrie dumped the garbage in Stockbridge, Mass. I was breathing fairly easy as soon as I got out of the county, but I still thought it would be good to get across the state line without taking any chances.
I kept getting lifts for a couple of miles at a time because this particular highway wasn’t one that anybody would take for any great distance. But on a bigger road I would have stood out like acne with my clothes and my fishing rod. On this road people either assumed I was going to a particular fishing spot or when they asked I would just say Down the road a piece and they figured I was keeping the spot a secret. Fishermen do crazy things like that all the time. Then I would just sit in the car until they let me out because they were turning off.
Eventually, though, I got sick of having to talk about fishing with people who all knew more about it than I did. And I got sick of carrying the pole. So I left it on a bridge over a little creek that I happened to walk over between rides. I figured whoever found it would be able to get some use out of it right away.
Then, since I didn’t have the pole, people assumed I was a drifter, which was what I was, actually. And one man said, “Bet you’re looking to get work picking. Cherries is gone but early peaches is coming in, and won’t be a week and they be picking summer apples, the weather the way she be.”