The Drifters Read Online Free PDF Page A

that?’
    ‘There’s a church on Washington Square in New York—that’s in Greenwich Village. You report there and they ship you north.’
    Joe said nothing, so Mrs. Rubin concluded: ‘I am legally required to advise you to go to jail now, and I so recommend.’ She took down a form, carefully noted Joe’s nameand university address, and wrote: ‘I recommend that this young man submit himself now for his jail sentence.’
    But when Joe rose to leave she accompanied him to the door, grasping his hand and whispering, ‘My personal opinion is that you ought to flee this insanity. Go to Samarkand or Pretoria or Marrakech. Youth’s a time for dreaming and adventure, not war. Go to jail when you’re forty, because then—who gives a damn?’
    On New Year’s Day 1969 Joe started his trip into exile, and it was typical of him that he chose not the easy southern route to Boston but rather the ice-bound highways of the north, and it did not occur to him to call his ineffectual parents: his father would snarl and his mother would cry, and between them they would say not one relevant thing.
    He hitchhiked up California’s central valley and at Sacramento struck east toward Reno. The high passes were covered with snow, so that at times he could look up on either side and see solid banks three or four feet above his head. He then cut across bleak and empty Nevada to Salt Lake City, where he wasted some days getting the feel of the Mormon capital, but his first moments of grandeur—the excitement he sought, the feel of America—came later when he crossed the vast and barren wastes of Wyoming. The road swept eastward in noble curves through mountains and across limitless plains. He traveled fifty or sixty miles at a clip without seeing so much as a gasoline station, and the occasional tiny town looked like a steer strayed from the herd and lost in the immensity of sky and wasteland.
    At the Continental Divide, that chain of mountains separating the western lands Joe had known from the eastern he was about to see, a snowstorm overtook him, and as he rode through the night on a truck bound for Cheyenne, the headlights reflected back from a million glittering flakes.
    ‘This is some country,’ he mumbled approvingly to the truck driver, who was worried about the road ahead and growled, ‘They shoulda left it with the Indians.’
    East of Rawlins the snowdrifts became so deep that the plows bogged down, forcing a long line of trucks andventuresome private cars to halt at the crossroads where Route 130 cut in from the south. Drivers and passengers crowded into a small diner, where the harassed owner, caught without waitresses, was dishing out coffee and rolls.
    ‘This is some country,’ Joe said to a group huddling about a heater vent.
    ‘You headed east or west?’ one of the men asked.
    ‘East.’
    ‘You not in service?’ an older man asked, indicating Joe’s hair.
    ‘No.’
    What happened next Joe could not reconstruct later, but somehow the men got the idea that he was heading east to report for induction into the army, and they insisted upon paying for his coffee and buying him cigarettes. ‘Best years I ever spent were in the army,’ one of the drivers said.
    ‘They taught me how to keep my nose clean,’ another agreed.
    An older man broke in to say, ‘I spent three wonderful years in Japan.’ He laughed. ‘From Guadalcanal to Leyte Gulf, I fought the little yellow bastards; from Osaka to Tokyo, I slept with them—and I’d do both all over again.’
    ‘Them Japanese girls A-okay?’ a younger man asked.
    ‘The best.’
    ‘Is the country as interesting east of here?’ Joe ask.
    ‘Interesting?’ the older man snorted. ‘There’s not an inch of Japan that isn’t interesting. You ever hear of Nikko? Son, when you’re in Vietnam and get some leave, haul your ass up to Tokyo and catch the train to Nikko. You’ll see something.’
    ‘I meant this country. Is it good east of here?’
    ‘This is a