the little two-by-four post office and wrote my aunt a penny postcard. We went back to the gray road. There she was in front of us, Shelton, written on the watertank. The Rock Island balled by. We saw the faces of Pullman passengers go by in a blur. The train howled off across the plains in the direction of our desires. It started to rain harder.
A tall, lanky fellow in a gallon hat stopped his car on the wrong side of the road and came over to us; he looked like a sheriff. We prepared our stories secretly. He took his time coming over. “You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?” We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question.
“Why?” we said.
“Well, I own a little carnival that’s pitched a few mile down the road and I’m looking for some old boys willing to work and make a buck for themselves. I’ve got a roulette concession and a wooden-ring concession, you know, the kind you throw around dolls and take your luck. You boys want to work for me, you can get thirty per cent of the take.”
“Room and board?”
“You can get a bed but no food. You’ll have to eat in town. We travel some.” We thought it over. “It’s a good opportunity,” he said, and waited patiently for us to make up our minds. We felt silly and didn’t know what to say, and I for one didn’t want to get hung-up with a carnival. I was in such a bloody hurry to get to the gang in Denver.
I said, “I don’t know, I’m going as fast as I can and I don’t think I have the time.” Eddie said the same thing, and the old man waved his hand and casually sauntered back to his car and drove off. And that was that. We laughed about it awhile and speculated about what it would have been like. I had visions of a dark and dusty night on the plains, and the faces of Nebraska families wandering by, with their rosy children looking at everything with awe, and I know I would have felt like the devil himself rooking them with all those cheap carnival tricks. And the Ferris wheel revolving in the flatlands darkness, and, Godalmighty, the sad music of the merry-go-round and me wanting to get on to my goal—and sleeping in some gilt wagon on a bed of burlap.
Eddie turned out to be a pretty absent-minded pal of the road. A funny old contraption rolled by, driven by an old man; it was made of some kind of aluminum, square as a box—a trailer, no doubt, but a weird, crazy Nebraska homemade trailer. He was going very slow and stopped. We rushed up; he said he could only take one; without a word Eddie jumped in and slowly rattled from my sight, and wearing my wool plaid shirt. Well, alackaday, I kissed the shirt good-by; it had only sentimental value in any case. I waited in our personal godawful Shelton for a long, long time, several hours, and I kept thinking it was getting night; actually it was only early afternoon, but dark. Denver, Denver, how would I ever get to Denver? I was just about giving up and planning to sit over coffee when a fairly new car stopped, driven by a young guy. I ran like mad.
“Where you going?”
“Denver.”
“Well, I can take you a hundred miles up the line.”
“Grand, grand, you saved my life.”
“I used to hitchhike myself, that’s why I always pick up a fellow.”
“I would too if I had a car.” And so we talked, and he told me about his life, which wasn’t very interesting, and I started to sleep some and woke up right outside the town of Gothenburg, where he let me off.
4
The greatest ride in my life was about to come up, a truck, with a flatboard at the back, with about six or seven boys sprawled out on it, and the drivers, two young blond farmers from Minnesota, were picking up every single soul they found on that road—the most smiling, cheerful couple of handsome bumpkins you could ever wish to see, both wearing cotton shirts and overalls, nothing else; both thick-wristed and earnest, with broad howareyou smiles for anybody and anything that came across their path. I ran up, said “Is there room?” They said, “Sure, hop on, ‘sroom for everybody.”
I wasn’t on the flatboard before the truck roared off;