mother for a piece of pie, and she had given it to him, and when the hobo went off down the road the little boy had said, “Ma, what is that fellow?” “Why, that’s a ho-bo.” “Ma, I want to be a ho-bo someday.” “Shet your mouth, that’s not for the like of the Hazards.” But he never forgot that day, and when he grew up, after a short spell playing football at LSU, he did become a hobo. Big Slim and I spent many nights telling stories and spitting tobacco juice in paper containers. There was something so indubitably reminiscent of Big Slim Hazard in Mississippi Gene’s demeanor that I said, “Do you happen to have met a fellow called Big Slim Hazard somewhere?”
And he said, “You mean the tall fellow with the big laugh?”
“Well, that sounds like him. He came from Ruston, Louisiana.”
“That’s right. Louisiana Slim he’s sometimes called. Yessir, I shore have met Big Slim.”
“And he used to work in the East Texas oil fields?”
“East Texas is right. And now he’s punching cows.”
And that was exactly right; and still I couldn’t believe Gene could have really known Slim, whom I’d been looking for, more or less, for years. “And he used to work in tugboats in New York?”
“Well now, I don’t know about that.”
“I guess you only knew him in the West.”
“I reckon. I ain’t never been to New York.”
“Well, damn me, I’m amazed you know him. This is a big country. Yet I knew you must have known him.”
“Yessir, I know Big Slim pretty well. Always generous with his money when he’s got some. Mean, tough fellow, too; I seen him flatten a policeman in the yards at Cheyenne, one punch.” That sounded like Big Slim; he was always practicing that one punch in the air; he looked like Jack Dempsey, but a young Jack Dempsey who drank.
“Damn!” I yelled into the wind, and I had another shot, and by now I was feeling pretty good. Every shot was wiped away by the rushing wind of the open truck, wiped away of its bad effects, and the good effect sank in my stomach. “Cheyenne, here I come!” I sang. “Denver, look out for your boy.”
Montana Slim turned to me, pointed at my shoes, and commented, “You reckon if you put them things in the ground something’ ll grow up?”—without cracking a smile, of course, and the other boys heard him and laughed. And they were the silliest shoes in America; I brought them along specifically because I didn’t want my feet to sweat in the hot road, and except for the rain in Bear Mountain they proved to be the best possible shoes for my journey. So I laughed with them. And the shoes were pretty ragged by now, the bits of colored leather sticking up like pieces of a fresh pineapple and my toes showing through. Well, we had another shot and laughed. As in a dream we zoomed through small crossroads towns smack out of the darkness, and passed long lines of lounging harvest hands and cowboys in the night. They watched us pass in one motion of the head, and we saw them slap their thighs from the continuing dark the other side of town—we were a funny-looking crew.
A lot of men were in this country at that time of the year; it was harvest time. The Dakota boys were fidgeting. “I think we’ll get off at the next pisscall; seems like there’s a lot of work around here.”
“All you got to do is move north when it’s over here,” coun seled Montana Slim, “and jes follow the harvest till you get to Canada.” The boys nodded vaguely; they didn’t take much stock in his advice.
Meanwhile the blond young fugitive sat the same way; every now and then Gene leaned out of his Buddhistic trance over the rushing dark plains and said something tenderly in the boy’s ear. The boy nodded. Gene was taking care of him, of his moods and his fears. I wondered where the hell they would go and what they would do. They had no cigarettes. I squandered my pack on them, I loved them so. They were grateful and gracious. They never asked, I kept offering. Montana Slim had his own but never passed the pack. We zoomed through another crossroads town, passed another line of tall lanky men in jeans clustered in the dim light like moths on the desert, and returned to the tremendous darkness, and