Chip Harrison Scores Again

Four

The bus station in Bordentown was just an Atlantic gas station that sold bus tickets. They had a Coke machine, but I passed it up. I was down to about two and a half dollars and I didn’t know where I was going to get a room, or how much it would cost. I figured the Y was the best bet, and I asked an old guy at the station how to get to it.

He scratched his head and said, “Why?”

“Because I need a place to stay.”

“But you asked—”

“The Y,” I said. He was still puzzled. “The YMCA,” I said.

“Oh, the YMCA. Let me just think. I believe they have one over to Savolia, but I couldn’t say for sure.”

“How far is that?”

“Oh, I guess I’d put it at twenty-eight miles. Say thirty at the outside.”

There was a hotel in Bordentown, he told me. It was called the Bordentown Hotel, which seemed logical enough, and it was on Main Street, which wasn’t all that much of a surprise either. Salesmen would stay there, if they had to be in Bordentown overnight, and if they wanted to save money, because those motels over on the highway all ranged from eight to twelve dollars a room, whereas you could stay at the hotel for five dollars, or seven-fifty with a private bath. And then there were some single people who lived there year-round, widowers for the most part, and they paid by the month, which made it considerably cheaper.

“Of course you wouldn’t be wanting to spend a month in Bordentown,” he said.

I had the feeling he might be right. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to pay by the month. I couldn’t even afford to pay by the night. I asked if there were any less expensive places. He said there were some women who took in tourists for two or three dollars a night, but it was too late to go knocking on their doors.

“How would it be if I slept in the back here?” I suggested. “It would just be for tonight.”

“Company wouldn’t allow that.”

I said I wouldn’t tell them if he didn’t, but he didn’t even bother answering that. He didn’t get exactly hostile, just sort of turned away. I had the feeling that he didn’t see much point in wasting any more time on me, and I could understand his point of view.

I must have spent half an hour walking through the main part of town, and that was enough to cover it pretty thoroughly. There really wasn’t a lot there. It was about then that I started wondering if coming to Bordentown might not have been something of a mistake. Of course, it was the middle of the night. You couldn’t really expect a small town to be lit up like Times Square.

Until now, though, I had been very much into the idea of going to Bordentown. The weirdness of it, finding the bus ticket and using it, had a special beauty of its own. In the normal course of things I might have spent the last few hours of the bus trip thinking about what I would do after I got off the bus, making plans and working things out in my mind. But you know how I spent the last few hours of the bus trip. I spent the last few hours of the bus trip with Willie Em, and the company of Willie Em tends to make one live very much in the Now.

As a matter of fact, the memory of Willie Em tends to make one live very much in the Past, and while I walked around downtown Bordentown, such as it was, I found myself thinking as much about her as about my future. I couldn’t really get into anything like long-term planning at all. Just short-term goals, like getting a place to sleep and finding some kind of job, were the only things I could really handle.

The place to sleep was the hard part. At that hour it seemed impossible. The only place I could go was the hotel, and I couldn’t afford it. If I had only had a suitcase it would have been all right, because I could tell them I was staying for a week, and if things went well I would have enough money at the end of the week to pay what I owed. On the other hand, if things went badly I could leave them the suitcase at the end of the week and go someplace else, and all that would mean was that I could never go back to Bordentown again, which didn’t sound that terrible anyway.

No suitcase, though. Nothing but the clothes on my back, which had seen cleaner days. So any hotel would be sure to ask for cash in advance. The fact that I was poor but honest wouldn’t help. They’d rather have someone who’s rich but crooked.

It’s funny how problems solve themselves, though, when you just let things happen. I had more or less resigned myself to finding some diner and sitting up drinking coffee until morning, at which time I could get some old lady to rent me a room that I could afford, when I got a place to sleep that didn’t cost me a dime.

The Bordentown Jail.

I was walking along when this car pulled up and a voice said, “Git over here, boy.” And when I got over there I knew who the guy was without him saying another word. I recognized him right away from all those Dodge commercials.

He never did advise me of my rights, but I don’t guess he had to because he never exactly arrested me, either. He just told me to get in the car with him, and he drove over to a little concrete block building a few blocks from where he picked me up, and he asked me a lot of questions and took my fingerprints and put me in a cell. He took my belt and my shoelaces and my comb. I was getting sick of losing combs, and I hadn’t been eating much lately and my pants, without the belt, tended to fall down a lot. But I didn’t complain.

I didn’t complain about any of this, actually. I was at a tremendous psychological disadvantage, especially when he made me empty my pockets and I had to take out that pair of undershorts and put them on the desk. Maybe some people can do that without feeling stupid. Not me.

He said, “No identification, no visible means of support, no clothing. You say you’re from New York, boy? What you think you’re doing here?”

I don’t remember what I said.

“You an agitator? Come down to make trouble? Or a runaway? You wanted up North? Get your prints and description to Washington and see if there isn’t somebody looking for you.”

There was something about the way the cell door closed that left me feeling it would never open again. I walked around the cell, which was a lot like walking around Bordentown except that it didn’t take quite so long. There was a kind of a toilet, which I’m just as glad I didn’t have to use, and a corn husk mattress that was more comfortable than it looked.

During the summer some of my fellow apple-knockers had told me stories about Southern jails. About getting caught in a speed trap and being fined the amount they had on them, and then winding up on the chain gang on a vagrancy charge because they didn’t have any money. About trying to hitchhike through Georgia and getting sentenced to three months of chopping weeds with a road crew.

I remembered all this now, and I really didn’t think I was going to get much sleep. But I must have been more exhausted than I realized.

I woke up when the sun came through the bars. I just lay there for about an hour before the Sheriff turned up, trying to put together pieces of a story that would keep me off the chain gang.

At first I decided to tell him the truth. I must have read a hundred murder stories where some poor idiot is suspected of a crime, and if he had just played things absolutely straight from the beginning it would have worked out with no trouble, but instead he tells one little lie or holds something back and gets in deeper trouble, until he has to go out and find the real killer himself. Of course, if he played things absolutely straight there wouldn’t have been any book, so I can understand why writers do it that way, but the moral always seemed to be that the truth shall make you free.

But it seemed to me that the truth in my case would make me very much unfree. In the first place, nobody was going to believe it. If I said I found a wallet that somebody had already stolen, anyone with half a brain would decide that I had stolen it. And if I said I came to Bordentown because I had a ticket that made it a toss-up between Bordentown and Boston, and Bordentown was warmer, and I didn’t want to spit in the face of destiny, and how one Mary Beth could lead to another, well, all that would do was keep me off the chain gang and land me in the insane asylum.

The trouble with the truth was that it just didn’t sound true enough. And by the time he unlocked my cell door and came on in, I had thought up a few ways to improve it.

“Well, now,” he said. “I guess you ain’t precisely Johnny Dillinger after all. Your fingerprints didn’t ring any bells and nobody up in Washington got too excited about your description.”

I had been a little worried that I might still be wanted in Indiana for statutory rape, but I guess that got straightened out somewhere along the way. I knew my fingerprints had never gotten on file.

(Until now.)

“But that seems to make you what they call an unknown quantity, boy.” He clucked his tongue. “Chip Harrison. That some kind of a nickname?”

“It’s my real name.”

“Your folks handed you that, did they? Where are they now?”

“They were killed in an auto crash a little over a year ago.”

“Any other kinfolk?”

“None.”

“And no way on earth to prove you’re who you say you are. No identification at all.”

“My wallet was stolen. In New York.”

He looked at me.

“They got my wallet and my suitcase. I was on my way to Florida. To Miami, I couldn’t stand it in New York with the weather and the kind of people you meet up there. I had my ticket bought and I was on my way to the bus station when they jumped me.”

“Jumped you?”

“Three big buck niggers,” I said. “One of them held a razor to my throat. I think you can still see the nick. Then one of the others hit me a few times in the stomach. They got my watch and my wallet and my suitcase, they even got the change out of my pocket. I had the ticket in my shoe.”

“That was good thinking,” he said. “You go to the police?”

“In New York? What good would that do?”

“I hear tell it’s another country up there.”

“More like another world. If you tell those New York police you’ve been robbed, they act like you’re wasting their time.” Which was true enough, incidentally. When I had a place in the East Village, somebody kicked the door in one day and robbed me, which was actually one big reason why I didn’t have anything but the clothes on my back. I wasn’t there at the time, and there had never been anyone holding a razor to my throat, but you can see that the story had elements of truth to it. It was sort of a matter of arranging the truth so that it made sense.

“So all I had was the ticket,” I went on. “I had sixty-two dollars left after I bought my ticket, but they got it when they got the wallet. I figured it would be plenty to keep me going until I found work in Miami. A fellow was telling me there were plenty of jobs down there. At those hotels.”

“That the kind of work you did in New York?”

“No, I was bussing tables in a cafeteria.” I actually did that for a day once, in a cafeteria on Second Avenue. That job ended when I dropped a tray. They took it for granted that you would drop a tray now and then, but not on a customer. “But from what I heard you didn’t need much experience to hire on as a bellhop or something.”

He was nodding. He didn’t really look like that Dodge commercial anymore.

“After they robbed me,” I said, “I didn’t know what to do. I just knew I had to get out of New York.”

“No place for a white man.”

“That’s the truth,” I said. “Dope addicts and niggers and long-haired radicals and I don’t know what else. And being robbed and all, I just wanted to get away from there. But I didn’t want to go to Miami with no money at all. I figured I’d starve before I got settled. So I worked out how much money I would need and traded my ticket so that I could get as close as possible to Miami and still have a few dollars left to live on.”

“And that’s how you picked Bordentown. I was wondering about that.”

“I guess it would have been better to stop further north. In North Carolina, say, because that would have left me with more money. But I wanted to get as far as I could, and anyway my mother was from South Carolina originally—”

“Is that a fact?”

“She was born in Charleston. Her maiden name was Ryder. But there’s no family left now.”

“I didn’t think you seemed like the typical Yankee.”

“Well, I’ve always lived in the North. But I never felt, you know, that it was really home to me.”

We went on like this for a while, and he got less and less like that Dodge commercial and I got more and more South Carolina into my voice. I didn’t want to get carried away and lay it on too thick, but as long as it was going over well I figured it was worth staying with. He wanted to know about my plans. I said I would just try to find work in Bordentown. There weren’t many jobs, he said. Ever since the space people closed their operations in Savolia, jobs were tight all over the area. Especially in the winter, when there was no farm work to speak of. I said I was willing to do just about anything, and as soon as I had money saved I could go down to Miami.

“Don’t want to go anywhere without some identification,” he said. “You’d get the same reception anywhere. First police officer who sets eyes on you wouldn’t have no choice but to lock you up. I suspect you can write away for certain things. Driver’s license, for example.”

“I never had one.”

“Draft card, for certain. This day and age you don’t want to go anywhere without a draft card.”

“I’m only seventeen,” I said. On my eighteenth birthday I had decided that it wouldn’t hurt to stay seventeen as long as possible. It seemed to me that if you didn’t get around to registering for the draft you wouldn’t have to make any Big Decision as to whether or not you would burn your draft card.

“Need a social security card,” he said. “You must of had one, I guess. Recollect the number?”

I didn’t.

“Easier to go ahead and get a new one, then. You try writing to them for a replacement and those fellows in Washington, they’ll be a year getting back to you. I could tell you stories about those people up there. What else you’ll need is a Sheriff’s ID Card. I’ll fix you up with one of those. At least we can do that without going through a passel of red tape. You just apply for a social security card down to the courthouse, and on the form you put that you never had one before. That’s the easiest way to go about it. Not entirely legal, but in police work you learn that there’s laws and there’s laws. Know what I mean?”

“Laws to help people and laws to get in people’s way?”

“I guess you understand my meaning, boy.” He looked at me and I looked back at him, deciding that he was a pretty nice guy. He clucked his tongue again. “Reckon you could do with a bath and a change of clothes,” he said. “Or with running what clothes you got through the washing machine. The wife can do that while you’re in the tub.” I almost said I didn’t have a wife. Then I realized we were talking about his wife, and his washing machine, and his tub.

“Like to had me wondering when you pulled those drawers out of your pocket last night. I sat up wondering what kind of damned fool pervert carries his underwear in his pocket. Guess they must of been chafing you some on that bus ride. How long were you on that bus?”

“On to forty hours.”

He clucked again. “And eating in those greasy diners, were you? Fifty cents for a hamburger sandwich and you have to hunt for the meat, and fifteen cents for coffee. That’s not but brown water. Never had a real Southern breakfast up there, did you?”

“No.”

“Grits and eggs and fries and sausage and coffee that the spoon stands up in? I guess they don’t know how to eat up there. What’s that Northern food like?”

I didn’t mention brown rice. “Like a machine made it,” I said.

“You come on now,” he said, beaming. He led me out of the cell. “I’ll just get you set with a sheriff’s card, and then we’ll take a run over to my home and see if you got the kind of appetite that would have made your mother proud. Look at the way those pants are falling off of you. I swear the wife’s gone take one look at you and run straight for the kitchen. Nothing brings out her cooking like someone who looks like he could profit from it.” He patted his belly, of which there was quite a lot. “She feels guilty, feeding me. But you’ll be a real challenge to her.”

I said, “This is awfully nice of you,” or something like that.

“Oh, just put it down to Southern hospitality,” he said, grinning. “We don’t cotton to everybody. But we take care of our own kind, boy.”