CLINTON stood at the cash register paying for his coffee. As the woman made change, Clinton asked her to tell him the name of the town they were now in. Every hour or two the bus would stop to give the passengers a chance to stretch their legs and attend to personal comforts. And at each of these stops Clinton made it a point to find out where he was. Then when he got back on the bus he would make a note of it: “Malted milk in Leesburg, Tennessee. Jukebox playing The Wheel of Fortune. Waitress with pretty eyes and bad teeth tried to sing along with it. I’ll bet she’d like to get on the bus and go someplace. Maybe not, though, because she had on a wedding ring. But even so, who knows?” Just a brief note was all he would need, later on, to remind him of the places he had been. However, Leesburg had been last night. Since then, while he slept, they’d passed another state line into Georgia. Now it was high noon on the fifth day of June, and another long blue-sky afternoon of sitting on the bus lay before him, an afternoon of a dozen more new places drifting past the window.

“This is Micah, G.A., sonny boy,” she said, and her eyes seemed to add, “Don’t you forget it.” Clinton had noticed that all the waitresses in southern places were either hostile or friendly; none of them seemed to want to be caught without an attitude. He made a mental note of this lady’s category, hostile, and the name of the town, Micah, and then walked to the screen door of the place. Before going through it, however, he counted his belongings: duffel bag, notebook, money belt, and a pocketful of assorted small possessions. Other passengers left their bags on the bus when they made a stop, but Clinton did not want his trip spoiled by the loss or theft of any of these articles.

Aside from the clothes he had on his back—blue jeans and a T-shirt, shoes and socks—his duffel bag contained a pair of sneakers, a sweater, two shirts, extra socks, a supply of pencils, and various toilet articles. These toilet articles did not include a razor because even now, at sixteen, he did not have use for one. In his determination to travel light, free, ready for a quick move, he wore no underwear, nor did he carry any. It was summer anyway: if later on he and Berry-berry went off to some cold-weather place, Clinton figured it would be a simple matter to purchase such objects on the spot. Meanwhile, there would be no heaviness of belongings to weigh down the vagabond whims that would stir them.

The notebook he carried was large and thick, but after long habit it encumbered him little more than his own arms and legs. And because it had been nearly as vital to him as these other members, he now handled it and made use of it with an unconscious ease similar to that of walking or feeding oneself.