Picking oranges in Florida. Pushing a broom in New Orleans. Mucking out horse-stalls in Lufkin, Texas. Handing out real estate brochures on streetcorners in Phoenix, Arizona. Working jobs that pay cash. Observing the ever-changing faces on the bills. Noting the different names in the papers. Jimmy Carter is elected President, but so are Ernest “Fritz” Hollings and Ronald Reagan. George Bush is also elected President. Gerald Ford decides to run again andhe is elected President. The names in the papers (those of the celebrities change the most frequently, and there are many he has never heard of) don’t matter. The faces on the currency don’t matter. What matters is the sight of a weathervane against a violent pink sunset, the sound of his heels on an empty road in Utah, the sound of the wind in the New Mexico desert, the sight of a child skipping rope beside a junked-out Chevrolet Caprice in Fossil, Oregon. What matters is the whine of the powerlines beside Highway 50 west of Elko, Nevada, and a dead crow in a ditch outside Rainbarrel Springs. Sometimes he’s sober and sometimes he gets drunk. Once he lays up in an abandoned shed — this is just over the California state line from Nevada— and drinks for four days straight. It ends with seven hours of off-and-on vomiting. For the first hour or so, the puking is so constant and so violent he is convinced it will kill him. Later on, he can only wish it would. And when it’s over, he swears to himself that he’s done, no more booze for him, he’s finally learned his lesson, and a week later he’s drunk again and staring up at the strange stars behind the restaurant where he has hired on as a dishwasher. He is an animal in a trap and he doesn’t care. Sometimes there are vampires and sometimes he kills them. Mostly he lets them live, because he’s afraid of drawing attention to himself— the attention of the low men. Sometimes he asks himself what he thinks he’s doing, where the hell he’s going, and such questions are apt to send him in search of the next bottle in a hurry. Because he’s really not going anywhere. He’s just following the highways in hiding and dragging his trap along behind him, he’s just listening to the call of those roads and going from one to the next. Trapped or not, sometimes he is happy; sometimes he sings in his chains like the sea. He wants to see the next weathervane standing against the next pink sunset. He wants to see the next silo crumbling at the end of some disappeared farmer’s long-abandoned north field and see the next droning truck with TONOPAH GRAVEL or ASPLUNDH HEAVY CONSTRUCTION written on the side. He’s in hobo heaven, lost in the split personalities of America. He wants to hear the wind in canyons and know that he’s the only one who hears it. He wants to scream and hear the echoes run away. When the taste of Barlow’s blood is too strong in his mouth, he wants to drink. And, of course, when he sees the lost-pet posters or the messages chalked on the sidewalks, he wants to move on. Out west he sees fewer of them, and neither his name nor his description is on any of them. From time to time he sees vampires cruising— give us this day our daily blood— but he leaves them be. They’re mosquitoes, after all, no more than that.