In Oakland I had a beer among the bums1 of a saloon with a wagon2 wheel in front of it, and I was on the road again. I walked clear across Oakland to get on the Fresno road. Two rides took me to Bakers- field, four hundred miles south. The first was the mad one, with a bur- ly blond kid in a souped-up rod. "See that toe?" he said as he gunned the heap to eighty and passed everybody on the road. "Look at it." It was swathed in bandages. "I just had it amputated this morning. The bastards3 wanted me to stay in the hospital. I packed my bag and left. What's a toe?" Yes, indeed, I said to myself, look out now, and I hung on. You never saw a driving fool like that. He made Tracy in no time. Tracy is a railroad town; brakemen eat surly meals in diners by the tracks. Trains howl away across the valley. The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled--Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tange- rine groves4 and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed5 with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragrant6 air. It was the most beautiful of all moments. The madman was a brakeman with the Southern Pacific and he lived in Fresno; his father was also a brakeman. He lost his toe in the Oakland yards, switching, I didn't quite understand how. He drove me into buzzing Fresno and let me off by the south side of town. I went for a quick Coke in a little grocery by the tracks, and here came a melancholy7 Ar- menian youth along the red boxcars, and just at that moment a locomo- tive howled, and I said to myself, Yes, yes, Saroyan's town.
I had to go south; I got on the road. A man in a brand-new pickup8 truck picked me up. He was from Lubbock, Texas, and was in the trailer business. "You want to buy a trailer?" he asked me. "Any time, look me up." He told stories about his father in Lubbock. "One night my old man left the day's receipts settin on top of the safe, plumb9 forgot. What happened--a thief came in the night, acetylene torch and all, broke open the safe, riffled up the papers, kicked over a few chairs, and left. And that thousand dollars was settin right there on top of the safe, what do you know about that?"
He let me off south of Bakersfield, and then my adventure began. It grew cold. I put on the flimsy Army raincoat I'd bought in Oakland for three dollars and shuddered10 in the road. I was standing11 in front of an ornate Spanish-style motel that was lit like a jewel. The cars rushed by, LA-bound. I gestured frantically12. It was too cold. I stood there till midnight, two hours straight, and cursed and cursed. It was just like Stuart, Iowa, again. There was nothing to do but spend a little over two dollars for a bus the remaining miles to Los Angeles. I walked back along the highway to Bakersfield and into the station, and sat down on a bench.
I had bought my ticket and was waiting for the LA bus when all of a sudden I saw the cutest little Mexican girl in slacks come cutting across my sight. She was in one of the buses that had just pulled in with a big sigh of airbrakes; it was discharging passengers for a rest stop. Her breasts stuck out straight and true; her little flanks looked delicious; her hair was long and lustrous13 black; and her eyes were great big blue things with timidities inside. I wished I was on her bus. A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world. The announcer called the LA bus. I picked up my bag and got on, and who should be sitting there alone but the Mexican girl. I dropped right opposite her and began scheming right off. I was so lonely, so sad, so tired, so qui- vering, so broken, so beat, that I got up my courage, the courage necessary to approach a strange girl, and acted. Even then I spent five mi- nutes beating my thighs14 in the dark as the bus rolled down the road.
You gotta, you gotta or you'll die! Damn fool, talk to her! What's wrong with you? Aren't you tired enough of yourself by now? And before I knew what I was doing I leaned across the aisle15 to her (she was trying to sleep on the seat) and said, "Miss, would you like to use my raincoat for a pillow?"
She looked up with a smile and said, "No, thank you very much."
I sat back, trembling; I lit a butt16. I waited till she looked at me,with a sad little sidelook of love, and I got right up and leaned over her. "May I sit with you, miss?"
"If you wish."
And this I did. "Where going?"
"LA." I loved the way she said "LA"; I love the way everybody says "LA" on the Coast; it's their one and only golden town when all is said and done,"That's where I'm going too!" I cried. "I'm very glad you let me sit with you, I was very lonely and I've been traveling a hell of a lot." And we settled down to telling our stories. Her story was this: She had a husband and child. The husband beat her, so she left him, back at Sabinal, south of Fresno, and was going to LA to live with her sister awhile. She left her little son with her family, who were grape-pickers and lived in a shack17 in the vineyards. She had nothing to do but brood and get mad. I felt like putting my arms around her right away. We talked and talked. She said she loved to talk with me. Pretty soon she was saying she wished she could go to New York too. "Maybe we could!" I laughed. The bus groaned18 up Grapevine Pass and then we were coming down into the great sprawls19 of light. Without coming to any particular agreement we began holding hands, and in the same way it was mutely and beautifully and purely20 decided21 that when I got my hotel room in LA she would be beside me. I ached all over for her; I leaned my head in her beautiful hair. Her little shoulders drove me mad; I hugged her and hugged her. And she loved it.
"I love love," she said, closing her eyes. I promised her beautiful love. I gloated over her. Our stories were told; we subsided22 into silence and sweet anticipatory23 thoughts. It was as simple as that. You could have all your Peaches and Bettys and Marylous and Ritas and Camilles and Inezes in this world; this was my girl and my kind of girlsoul, and I told her that. She confessed she saw me watching her in the bus sta- tion. "I thought you was a nice college boy."
"Oh, I'm a college boy!" I assured her. The bus arrived in Hollywood. In the gray, dirty dawn, like the dawn when Joel McCrea met Veronica Lake in a diner, in the picture iSullivan's Travelsi, she slept in my lap. I looked greedily out the window: stucco houses and palms and drive-ins, the whole mad thing, the ragged24 promised land, the fantastic end of America. We got off the bus at Main Street, which was no different from where you get off a bus in Kansas City or Chicago or Boston--red brick, dirty, characters drifting by, trolleys25 grating in the hopeless dawn, the whorey smell of a big city.
And here my mind went haywire, I don't know why. I began getting the foolish paranoiac26 visions that Teresa, or Terry--her name-- was a common little hustler who worked the buses for a guy's bucks27 by making appointments like ours in LA where she brought the sucker first to a breakfast place, where her pimp waited, and then to a certain hotel to which he had access with his gun or his whatever. I never con- fessed this to her. We ate breakfast and a pimp kept watching us; I fan- cied Terry was making secret eyes at him. I was tired and felt strange and lost in a faraway, disgusting place. The goof28 of terror took over my thoughts and made me act petty and cheap. "Do you know that guy?" I said.
"What guy you mean, honey?" I let it drop. She was slow and hung-up about everything she did; it took her a long time to eat; she chewed slowly and stared into space, and smoked a cigarette, and kept talking, and I was like a haggard ghost, suspicioning every move she made, thinking she was stalling for time. This was all a fit of sickness. I was sweating as we went down the street hand in hand. The first hotel we hit had a room, and before I knew it I was locking the door behind me and she was sitting on the bed taking off her shoes. I kissed her meekly29. Better she'd never know. To relax our nerves I knew we needed whisky, especially me. I ran out and fiddled30 all over twelve blocks, hurrying till I found a pint31 of whisky for sale at a newsstand. I ran back, all energy. Terry was in the bathroom, fixing her face. I poured one big drink in a water glass, and we had slugs. Oh, it was sweet and delicious and worth my whole lugubrious voyage. I stood behind her at the mirror, and we danced in the bathroom that way. I began talking about my friends back east.
I said, "You ought to meet a great girl I know called Doric. She's a six-foot redhead. If you came to New York she'd show you where to get work."
"Who is this six-foot redhead?" she demanded suspiciously. "Why do you tell me about her?" In her simple soul she couldn't fa- thom my kind of glad, nervous talk. I let it drop. She began to get drunk in the bathroom.
"Come on to bed!" I kept saying.
"Six-foot redhead, hey? And I thought you was a nice college boy, I saw you in your lovely sweater and I said to myself, Hmm, ain't he nice? No! And no! And no! You have to be a goddam pimp like all of them!"
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"Don't stand there and tell me that six-foot redhead ain't a ma- dame32, 'cause I know a madame when I hear about one, and you, you're just a pimp like all the rest I meet, everybody's a pimp."
"Listen, Terry, I am not a pimp. I swear to you on the Bible I am not a pimp. Why should I be a pimp? My only interest is you."
"All the time I thought I met a nice boy. I was so glad, I hugged myself and said, Hmm, a real nice boy instead of a pimp."
"Terry," I pleaded with all my soul. "Please listen to me and understand, I'm not a pimp." An hour ago I'd thought she was a hust- ler. How sad it was. Our minds, with their store of madness, had di- verged33. O gruesome life, how I moaned and pleaded, and then I got mad and realized I was pleading with a dumb little Mexican wench and I told her so; and before I knew it I picked up her red pumps and hurled34 them at the bathroom door and told her to get out. "Go on, beat it!" I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever. There was a dead silence in the bathroom. I took my clothes off and went to bed.
Terry came out with tears of sorriness in her eyes. In her simple and funny little mind had been decided the fact that a pimp does not throw a woman's shoes against the door and does not tell her to get out. In reverent35 and sweet little silence she took all her clothes off and slipped her tiny body into the sheets with me. It was brown as grapes. I saw her poor belly36 where there was a Caesarian scar; her hips37 were so narrow she couldn't bear a child without getting gashed38 open. Her legs were like little sticks. She was only four foot ten. I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary morning. Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an LA shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon.
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1
bums
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| n. 游荡者，流浪汉，懒鬼，闹饮，屁股 adj. 没有价值的，不灵光的，不合理的 vt. 令人失望，乞讨 vi. 混日子，以乞讨为生 | |
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2
wagon
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| n.四轮马车，手推车，面包车；无盖运货列车 | |
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3
bastards
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| 私生子( bastard的名词复数 )； 坏蛋； 讨厌的事物； 麻烦事 （认为别人走运或不幸时说）家伙 | |
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groves
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| 树丛，小树林( grove的名词复数 ) | |
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slashed
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| v.挥砍( slash的过去式和过去分词 )；鞭打；割破；削减 | |
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fragrant
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| adj.芬香的，馥郁的，愉快的 | |
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melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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pickup
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| n.拾起，获得 | |
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plumb
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| adv.精确地，完全地；v.了解意义，测水深 | |
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shuddered
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| v.战栗( shudder的过去式和过去分词 )；发抖；（机器、车辆等）突然震动；颤动 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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frantically
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| ad.发狂地, 发疯地 | |
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lustrous
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| adj.有光泽的；光辉的 | |
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thighs
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| n.股，大腿( thigh的名词复数 )；食用的鸡（等的）腿 | |
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aisle
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| n.（教堂、教室、戏院等里的）过道，通道 | |
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butt
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| n.笑柄；烟蒂；枪托；臀部；v.用头撞或顶 | |
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shack
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| adj.简陋的小屋，窝棚 | |
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groaned
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| v.呻吟( groan的过去式和过去分词 )；发牢骚；抱怨；受苦 | |
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sprawls
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| n.（城市）杂乱无序拓展的地区( sprawl的名词复数 )；随意扩展；蔓延物v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的第三人称单数 )；蔓延；杂乱无序地拓展；四肢伸展坐着（或躺着） | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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subsided
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| v.（土地）下陷（因在地下采矿）( subside的过去式和过去分词 )；减弱；下降至较低或正常水平；一下子坐在椅子等上 | |
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23
anticipatory
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| adj.预想的，预期的 | |
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ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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trolleys
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| n.（两轮或四轮的）手推车( trolley的名词复数 )；装有脚轮的小台车；电车 | |
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paranoiac
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| n.偏执狂患者 | |
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27
bucks
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| n.雄鹿( buck的名词复数 )；钱；（英国十九世纪初的）花花公子；（用于某些表达方式）责任v.（马等）猛然弓背跃起( buck的第三人称单数 )；抵制；猛然震荡；马等尥起后蹄跳跃 | |
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28
goof
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| v.弄糟；闲混；n.呆瓜 | |
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meekly
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| adv.温顺地，逆来顺受地 | |
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30
fiddled
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| v.伪造( fiddle的过去式和过去分词 )；篡改；骗取；修理或稍作改动 | |
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pint
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| n.品脱 | |
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dame
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| n.女士 | |
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verged
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| 接近，逼近（verge的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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34
hurled
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| v.猛投，用力掷( hurl的过去式和过去分词 )；大声叫骂 | |
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35
reverent
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| adj.恭敬的，虔诚的 | |
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36
belly
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| n.肚子，腹部；(像肚子一样)鼓起的部分，膛 | |
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37
hips
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| abbr.high impact polystyrene 高冲击强度聚苯乙烯，耐冲性聚苯乙烯n.臀部( hip的名词复数 )；[建筑学]屋脊；臀围（尺寸）；臀部…的 | |
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38
gashed
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| v.划伤，割破( gash的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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