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; I lurched, a rider grabbed me, and I sat down.
Somebody passed a bottle of rotgut, the bottom of it.
I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical, drizzling air of Nebraska.
"Whooee, here we go!" yelled a kid in a baseball cap, and they gunned up the truck to seventy and passed everybody on the road.
"We been riding this sonofabitch since Des Moines.
These guys never stop.
Every now and then you have to yell for pisscall, otherwise you have to piss off the air, and hang on, brother, hang on."
I looked at the company.
There were two young farmer boys from North Dakota in red baseball caps, which is the standard North Dakota farmer-boy hat, and they were headed for the harvests; their old men had given them leave to hit the road for a summer.
There were two young city boys from Columbus, Ohio, high-school football players, chewing gum, winking, singing in the breeze, and they said they were hitchhiking around the United States for the summer.
"We're going to LA! "they yelled.
"What are you going to do there?"
"Hell, we don't know.
Who cares?"
Then there was a tall slim fellow who had a sneaky look.
"Where you from?" I asked.
I was lying next to him on the platform; you couldn't sit without bouncing off, it had no rails.
And he turned slowly to me, opened his mouth, and said,
"Mon-ta-na."
Finally there were Mississippi Gene and his charge.
Mississippi Gene was a little dark guy who rode freight trains around the country, a thirty-year-old hobo but with a youthful look so you couldn't tell exactly what age he was.
And he sat on the boards crosslegged, looking out over the fields without saying anything for hundreds of miles, and finally at one point he turned to me and said,
"Where you headed?"
I said Denver.
"I got a sister there but I ain't seed her for several couple years."
His language was melodious and slow.
He was patient.
His charge was a sixteen-year-old tall blond kid, also in hobo rags; that is to say, they wore old clothes that had been turned black by the soot of railroads and the dirt of boxcars and sleeping on the ground.
The blond kid was also quiet and he seemed to be running away from something, and it figured to be the law the way he looked straight ahead and wet his lips in worried thought.
Montana Slim spoke to them occasionally with a sardonic and insinuating smile.
They paid no attention to him.
Slim was all insinuation.
I was afraid of his long goofy grin that he opened up straight in your face and held there half-moronically.
"You got any money?" he said to me.