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this boiling blue sky. Once a big truck drove by, but it wouldn’t stop for me. All it did was kill a rattlesnake that was crawling across the road.
    “I kept thinking something was bound to turn up somewhere. A garage. Now and then cars passed, but I might as well have been invisible. I began to feel sorry for myself, to understandwhat it means to be helpless, and to understand why it’s a good thing that Buddhists send out their young monks to beg. It’s chastening. It rips off that last layer of baby fat.
    “And then I met Mr. Schmidt. I thought maybe it was a mirage. An old white-haired man about a quarter mile up the highway. He was standing by the road with heat waves rippling around him. As I got closer I saw that he carried a cane and wore pitch-black glasses, and he was dressed as if headed for church—white suit, white shirt, black tie, black shoes.
    “Without looking at me, and while some distance away, he called out: ‘My name is George Schmidt.’
    “I said: ‘Yes. Good afternoon, sir.’
    “He said: ‘ Is it afternoon?’
    “ ‘After three.’
    “ ‘Then I must have been standing here two hours or more. Would you mind telling me where I am?’
    “ ‘In the Mojave Desert. About eighteen miles west of Needles.’
    “ ‘Imagine that,’ he said. ‘Leaving a seventy-year-old blind man stranded alone in the desert. Ten dollars in my pocket, and not another rag to my name. Women are like flies: they settle on sugar or shit. I’m not saying I’m sugar, but she’s sure settled for shit now. My name is George Schmidt.’
    “I said: ‘Yes, sir, you told me. I’m George Whitelaw.’ He wanted to know where I was going, what I was up to, and when I said I was hitchhiking, heading for New York, he asked if I would take his hand and help him along a bit, maybe until we could catch a ride. I forgot to mention that he had a German accent and was extremely stout, almost fat; he looked as if he’d been lying in a hammock all his life. But when I held his hand I felt the roughness, the immense strength of it. You wouldn’t have wanted a pair of hands like that around your throat. He said: ‘Yes, I have strong hands. I’ve worked as a masseur for fiftyyears, the last twelve in Palm Springs. You got any water?’ I gave him my canteen, which was still half full. And he said: ‘She left me here without even a drop of water. The whole thing took me by surprise. Though I can’t say it should have, knowing Ivory good as I did. That’s my wife. Ivory Hunter, she was. A stripper; she played the Chicago World’s Fair, 1932, and she would have been a star if it hadn’t been for that Sally Rand. Ivory invented this fan-dance thing and that Rand woman stole it off her. So Ivory said. Probably just more of her bullshit. Uh-oh, watch out for that rattler, he’s over there someplace, I can hear him really singing. There’s two things I’m scared of. Snakes and women. They have a lot in common. One thing they have in common is: the last thing that dies is their tail.’
    “A couple of cars passed and I stuck out my thumb and the old man tried to flag them down with his stick, but we must have looked too peculiar—a dirty kid in dungarees and a blind fat man dressed in his city best. I guess we’d still be out there if it hadn’t been for this truckdriver. A Mexican. He was parked by the road fixing a flat. He could speak about five words of Tex-Mex, all of them four-letter, but I still remembered a lot of Spanish from the summer with Uncle Alvin in Cuba. So the Mexican told me he was on his way to El Paso, and if that was our direction, we were welcome aboard.
    “But Mr. Schmidt wasn’t too keen. I had practically to drag him into the caboose. ‘I hate Mexicans. Never met a Mexican I liked. If it wasn’t for a Mexican … Him only nineteen and her I’d say from the touch of her skin, I’d say Ivory was a woman way past sixty. When I married her a couple of years ago, she said she was