The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [102]
state I'd have realized sooner that Simon wasn't going to send any money. But all of a sudden I realized that that was so. He might not even have it to spare, just after the first of the month when there was the rent to pay. Thinking this, I told the telegraph girl to forget about the wire, I was leaving town. Not to be picked up on the road in northern New York, I took a ticket to Erie at the Greyhound Station, and I was in the Pennsylvania corner that evening. To get off in Erie gave me no feeling that I had arrived somewhere, in a place that was a place in and for itself, but rather that it was one which waited on other places to give it life by occurring between them; the breath of it was thin, just materialized, waiting. The flop I found was in a tall clapboard hotel, a kind of bone of a building, with more laths than plaster, with burns in the blanket, splits in the sheet opening on the mattress and its many stains. But I didn't care too much where I was; it would have been a nuisance to care; and I dropped off my shoes and climbed in. It sounded like a gale on the lake that night. Nevertheless it was a serene warm morning when I went out on the road to start thumbing. I wasn't alone; people in great numbers were on the highways. Sometimes they traveled in pairs, but more usually alone, because it was easier to get rides alone. There was the CCC, draining swamps and planting trees in the distance, and on the road was this wanderer population without any special Jerusalem or Kiev in mind, or relics to kiss, or any idea of putting off sins, but only the hope their chances might be better in the next town. In this competition it was hard to get lifts. Appearances were against me too, for the Renling clothes were both smart and filthy. And then in my hurry to put distance between me and the stretch of road near Lackawanna where Joe German had been picked up, I didn't have the patience to stand and flag for long but walked. The traffic dived and quivered past me, and when I reached a place near Ashtabula, Ohio, where the Nickel Plate line approaches the highway, I saw a freight going toward Cleveland with men sitting on 166 the boxcars, and in the flats, and in under-angles of gondolas, and eight or ten guys shagging after and flipping themselves up on the rungs. I ran too, down from the unlucky highway, up the rocky grade where I felt the thinness of my shoes, and took hold of a ladder. I wasn't agile, so ran with the red car, unable to swing from the ground until I was helped by a boost from behind. I never saw who it was that gave it-- someone among the runners who didn't want me tearing my arms from their sockets or breaking the bones of my feet. So I climbed to the roof. It was a high-backed cattle car topped with broad red planks. Ahead the slow bell was turning over and over, and I was in plenty of company, the rough-looking crowd of non-paying passengers the Nickel Plate was carrying. I felt the movement of the stock against the boards and sat in the beast smell. Until Cleveland, with the great yards and overbuilt hills and fume, chaff and grit flying at your face. There was a hotshot or nonstop express to Toledo making up in the yards, the word came, which would be ready in a couple of hours. Meanwhile I went up to the city to get some food. Going back to the yards, I climbed down a steep path, like a cliff of Pisgah, below the foundations of-factories, and emerged on rusty tracks by the Sherwin Williams paint factory--the vast field of rails and hummocky ground to the sides covered with weed stalks where people were waiting: catching a nap, reading old papers, mending. This was both a boring and a tense afternoon, soon dark with oncoming rain, while we squatted in the weeds, waiting; brackish and yet nerve-touching. Therefore I rushed up when I saw by the rising and motion along the darkening line that the train was coming. In the sudden shift toward the open and the tracks it seemed that hundreds had risen, the most distant already closing in upon the train. The locomotive came slowly, like a bison, the iron