by Carolyn Myers
The Japanese hitchhiker smiled, unconcerned. Inexperienced with funky cars or states the size of California, he could not imagine the day ahead. But I had felt the engine thunk as much as heard it, and I recognized the diagnosis in my bones. This was the cardiac arrest, the stroke, the grand mal of engine physiology. This was a thrown rod, the end of the line for the Fiat. Fiat finita.
“Don’t worry,” he was still smiling, “Now we must drive very slowly to the next gas station, and we will find the best mechanic to fix the fiat. I am OK, on vacation, no hurry.”
I was out of the car by then, under the hood. Not that I knew anything about engines, except their propensity toward inconvenient death; but I had checked the oil, which was, as I had feared, completely gone. My mother-in-law had mentioned an oil leak when bequeathing me the car that morning, but I had thought I could make it to Redding and fill up on gas and oil at the same time. I always liked to push a car past Corning, I had broken down there before.
This was late August and very hot. The hood burnt my hands. The Central Valley was toasted bland and chipped with California Live Oak gray. So was the fiat, on the outside at least. Inside, the car looked like a tropical rain forest. Besides my lovely, thin, longhaired, tie-dyed Japanese wanderer, the car was filled with exotic houseplants. I was transporting these precious lovelies for an unpleasant friend of a friend. Although I couldn’t identify them, I knew they were valuable, both emotionally and on the open plant market, whatever that might be.
“Don’t swerve,” their mother, the irritable Earth Goddess had instructed me, “don’t let them tip over. They mustn’t break stems. And whatever you do, do not park in the sun.” Now the freeway stretched in either direction, bare, without a tree or overpass.
I climbed back into the fiat and arranged small window towels for shade as best I could. “Listen,” I told my companion, “we can’t drive anymore, no matter how slowly. The car’s probably ruined, but on the off chance that it’s repairable, we better not move one inch. Here, have a Chinese pastry.”
Really, he was so thin. I wondered if he might be anorexic, though I thought only girls suffered that affliction. He hadn’t ordered even tea in Berkeley, so maybe he was broke, though I didn’t think Japanese people were ever broke. Maybe he thought I was ignorant of the difference between China and Japan and so kept pushing pastries on him. I was afraid to explain that I knew the difference for fear he might find me subtly racist. Social mores can be so difficult in these complicated times.
Actually, it was annoying to be thought either ignorant or racist, I mused, munching on a mysterious and sickening Chinese pastry. After all, I had picked up the pastries before I even saw the hitchhiker. They were for my husband’s party, ten pounds of assorted pastries in a stained, large and flimsy, pink cardboard bakery box. These were treats of a kind most Americans never encounter. They are either unbelievably gooey or heavily flakey, and they are filled with substances of the strangest textures: truffles maybe, or cactus? Certainly there were beans and roots and eggs and sweet pastes dyed bright pink, florescent turquoise. “My husband’s weird,” I decided once again, licking my fingers.
I felt ill. The day was far too hot to eat such food. I spritzed the plants. The Fiat steamed.
I asked the hitchhiker if he would stay with the car. It didn’t lock. He was still happy, certainly he would stay, certainly I was over-reacting. I told him this might take a long time, shouldered my purse, hitched to the nearest exit, arranged for towing, and then called the California Highway Patrol, as always your helpful and charming public servants.
“We run a law enforcement agency, lady, not a taxi service.”
“But the tow truck is coming from the South, from Corning,” I explained. “I am North of my car. I’ll have to hitchhike back. What if I’m mugged or raped?”
“Then you can call us.” Chuckle. Click.
I stood at a freeway on-ramp in the Central Valley, thumb out. The heat, the icy Pepsi, the overload of sugar in my stomach from the earlier pastry binge, and the sense of standing all alone in a big field, took me back to summers spent on my grandparent’s ranch. My grandparents were large, blond, friendly, poor, and never went anywhere. I was their direct descendent in body and in predilection, and yet fate and personal karma had decreed that I must travel two times a month from Oregon to San Francisco and back again, traversing the I-5 corridor in broken cars. Feeling large, hot, blond, and sorry for myself, I squatted by the side of the road, sun burning.
A car pulled up and I was instantly pygmied. The couple in the front seat were more than large, they were gigantic; more than blond, they were practically albino; and more than regularly poor, they were driving a car so derelict that the doors were tied on by ropes and the whole bottom, not just the muffler, scraped the ground.
They were magnanimous and welcoming, though they smelled like fungus. The smell turned out to be fermentation from beer and pop bottles, which they had hunted down, bagged, and were now taking to turn in someplace. I had to climb through the front window and into the back seat, to settle amidst the leaky garbage bags, gray hillocks of aluminum all around me.
“There must be five hundred cans in here,” I gasped.
“Oh, more,” they assured me, “more.”
They were so kind. They confirmed that my towing choice was the approved and only possibility. They explained that the towing charge would probably equal the price offered to buy the car, Ernie’s Towing and Hank’s Garage being adjoining Corning businesses. They took me all the way back to my car, even though that meant they had to take an exit and return the way they had come. They shared my amazement and dismay when I discovered that my Japanese hitchhiker had fled and that all ten pounds of Chinese pastries were missing. All I had to offer them in exchange was my empty Pepsi can and for this small donation they thanked me profusely.
Ernie towed me to Hank’s garage. The towing fee was $50.69. I walked around the block while Hank’s mechanics determined that the Fiat was wrecked beyond repair. They offered me $50.00. I owed Ernie 69 cents. I paid these highwaymen willingly. I needed their help. I had larger items to bargain for: the plants.
I had to convince at least one mechanic to spritz these plants, regularly and tenderly, until either the Earth Goddess or I could make it back to Corning. I took each plant out of the Fiat and politely and gingerly paced it in an out of-the-way corner or on an unused bench or oil drum. Delicate greens and hairy purples, lovely blossoms and curly leaves, each set in the best potting soil in lovely crockery, placed selectively around a huge and greasy tin barn.
I approached Hank himself. He grinned, picked up a hose with a power nozzle.
“Let me at ‘em.”
Uncertainty filled my soul. This was not a man who lost sleep over the fate of vanishing species. I picked up a particularly splendid fern, and left.
The Greyhound station lay across town. The walk was dizzying, the temperature reached 108 that day. The station itself was a living room of a small house, staffed by Ray and Charlene Goodfellow, who sold silver buckles, Mars Bars, used paperbacks and Charlene’s needlework on the side. Over the T.V. was a Presidential shrine. A bust of Lincoln, a portrait of Kennedy, and an autographed photo of the current president, Ronald Reagan, shared a shelf encircled with tiny Christmas lights. A cross-stitched cover cloth read, “Our Greatest Presidents.” I considered questioning the combination but realized my mental state was inadequate to debate.
I had only enough money for a ticket to Yreka. My husband would have to drive down and meet me there, which would be difficult of him to arrange, and then he would never believe me that a Japanese hitchhiker had stolen his Chinese pastries. How had the hitchhiker done it, anyway? Had he eaten all ten pounds? Had he stuffed them, gooey and flakey, into his neat little backpack? Had a mini-van of Chinese people stopped to give him a ride and they all had a pastry eating party on I-5? Even to me the story seemed unlikely.
I reached for my bus ticket. But Ray held on.
“Unh-uh, he said, “I don’t give tickets to anyone afore they say ‘I love Ronald Reagan’ three times.”
“No,” I grinned. “No way. This has got to be illegal.”
“Bus is leaving,” he replied.
“I love Ronald Reagan, I love Ronald Reagan, I love Ronald Reagan.”
I ran for the bus, holding the fern out in front of me.
We passed other small towns. Red Bluff, where I would the next month spend the night with biker teenagers while my VW was getting repaired. Anderson, where the following summer a motel maid would sneak me into a motel room, while her boyfriend fixed my car under a shade tree; Mt. Shasta, where an elderly magician would find me in a car graveyard and offer me a room to share with his free-flying homing pigeons. In every case, I would be saved by the poorest and most marginalized of folk; in every case officials would refuse to help me.
But for now, Greyhound sped on, and I could look down into the cars we passed, into other self-contained little worlds, no less strange than my own. One of them probably held my Japanese hitchhiker.
“Do I love Ronald Reagan?” I nodded sleepily. “Sure, why not? But does Ronald Reagan love me?” Having come of age during Reagan’s governorship of California, I was used to blaming him for everything. Could this day also somehow be his fault? These were weighty thoughts and only the presence of the enormous delicate fern kept me, and my lucky seatmate, awake.
All this happened over 25 years ago. I am twice as old as I was then. My extended family has prospered, so the cars they pass on to me don’t break down so often. I have prospered too; I carry enough cash and credit to sleep over at cheap hotels. I raised kids, stopped picking up hitchhikers.
Sometimes I catch myself looking with scorn at the young and indigent. Then I remind myself of this earlier life, the years of bad cars on the big road.