"We'll just pick him up for kicks!" Dean laughed.
The man was a ragged, bespectacled mad type, walking along reading a paperbacked muddy book he'd found in a culvert by the road.
He got in the car and went right on reading; he was incredibly filthy and covered with scabs.
He said his name was Hyman Solomon and that he walked all over the USA, knocking and sometimes kicking at Jewish doors and demanding money:
"Give me money to eat, I am a Jew."
He said it worked very well and that it was coming to him.
We asked him what he was reading.
He didn't know.
He didn't bother to look at the title page.
He was only looking at the words, as though he had found the real Torah where it belonged, in the wilderness.
"See?
See?
See?" cackled Dean, poking my ribs.
"I told you it was kicks.
Everybody's kicks, man!"
We carried Solomon all the way to Testament.
My brother by now was in his new house on the other side of town.
Here we were back on the long, bleak street with the railroad track running down the middle and the sad, sullen Southerners loping in front of hardware stores and five-and-tens.
Solomon said,
"I see you people need a little money to continue your journey.
You wait for me and I'll go hustle up a few dollars at a Jewish home and I'll go along with you as far as Alabama."
Dean was all beside himself with happiness; he and I rushed off to buy bread and cheese spread for a lunch in the car.
Marylou and Ed waited in the car.
We spent two hours in Testament waiting for Hyman Solomon to show up; he was hustling for his bread somewhere in town, but we couldn't see him.
The sun began to grow red and late.
Solomon never showed up so we roared out of Testament.
"Now you see, Sal, God does exist, because we keep getting hung-up with this town, no matter what we try to do, and you'll notice the strange Biblical name of it, and that strange Biblical character who made us stop here once more, and all things tied together all over like rain connecting everybody the world over by chain touch… " Dean rattled on like this; he was overjoyed and exuberant.
He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there.
Off we roared south.
We picked up another hitchhiker.
This was a sad young kid who said he had an aunt who owned a grocery store in Dunn, North Carolina, right outside Fayetteville.
"When we get there can you bum a buck off her?
Right!
Fine!
Let's go!"
We were in Dunn in an hour, at dusk.
We drove to where the kid said his aunt had the grocery store.
It was a sad little street that dead-ended at a factory wall. There was a grocery store but there was no aunt.
We wondered what the kid was talking about.
We asked him how far he was going; he didn't know.
It was a big hoax; once upon a time, in some lost back-alley adventure, he had seen the grocery store in Dunn, and it was the first story that popped into his disordered, feverish mind.
We bought him a hot dog, but Dean said we couldn't take him along because we needed room to sleep and room for hitchhikers who could buy a little gas.
This was sad but true.
We left him in Dunn at nightfall.
I drove through South Carolina and beyond Macon, Georgia, as Dean, Marylou, and Ed slept.
All alone in the night I had my own thoughts and held the car to the white line in the holy road.
What was I doing?
Where was I going?
I'd soon find out.
I got dog-tired beyond Macon and woke up Dean to resume.