Bill Pronzini - Bindlestiff

At first I couldn’t tell what he was doing; but as I moved closer, I realized he was shaving. There was a broken piece of mirror attached to the tree by a piece of string, and he was peering into it as he scraped at his face with a straight razor. He wasn’t using any lather. Just the razor and some water from a tin can he held in his other hand.

I walked up on one side of him, slowly, so that he could see me coming in the mirror. But he didn’t turn. And he didn’t quit scraping the razor over his cheek. He was a big guy, with not much hair and a roll of fat on his neck that bulged over the collar of a faded blue T-shirt. He looked about forty.

Five paces from him I stopped and said, “Morning. Mind if I talk to you for a minute?”

No answer. He dipped the razor blade into the tin can, shook the water and beard stubble off it, and went right on shaving.

“Excuse me,” I said, a little louder. “I’d like to talk to you.”

Still no answer. The scrape of the blade was audible in the stillness.

“Look, mister,” I said, “I know you can see me in that mirror. Are you deaf or what?”

He took the razor away from his face, dunked it in the can again, shook it-and then, in unhurried movements, he pivoted in my direction. His eyes had a bloody look, and there was something a little wild about them; they stared right through me.

“Fuck off, ’bo,” he said.

The words came out quiet, without any heat, but they were thick with menace just the same. The skin along my back tightened. I didn’t like those eyes, and I didn’t like the way he was holding that razor. He was nobody to prod; he was nobody I wanted to deal with at all.

I said, “Sure, ’bo,” in the same kind of voice he’d used, and took a couple of steps away from him to my right. He didn’t move, watching me. I put my back to him, a little tensely, and went past a couple of the cold campfires to where the path cut between some shrubs. Nothing happened. I made myself walk without looking back until I came up onto another piece of high ground. When I turned my head he was facing the mirror again, working the razor over his chin-just a fellow having himself a quiet morning shave.

A short distance ahead I came to another clearing. This one was occupied by two men sprawled in the shade of a live oak. One of them was leaning against a propped-up backpack, the kind campers use, and the other was lying with his head pillowed on a bedroll.

The one leaning against the backpack saw me first; he said something to the other man, and they both got to their feet in wary movements. I hesitated before I approached them, feeling just as wary. But they didn’t look particularly dangerous, and I did not see any potential weapons; I went ahead. They were standing shoulder to shoulder when I reached them, watching me with eyes that were neither friendly nor unfriendly. A couple of more or less harmless tramps, these two. As long as nobody did anything to rile them up.

“Howdy, gents,” I said. “You been around here long, have you?”

They were still sizing me up. Even though I was wearing an old pair of slacks and a chambray work shirt-you didn’t go mucking about in a hobo jungle dressed in a suit and tie-they knew I wasn’t one of their fraternity.

“What’s it to you?” the taller of the two said, finally.

“I’m trying to find a man who was here two days ago. Hobo named Charles Bradford, on his way to Washington to pick apples.”

“Yeah?”

“His daughter’s trying to locate him. For family reasons.” I dug out the photograph I had clipped from the Examiner and passed it over. “Bradford’s the man on the far left.”

The two tramps studied the photo. “Don’t know him,” the tall one said. “You, Hank?”

“No,” Hank said.

“We just rolled in this morning, mister. Headed south. You better talk to one of the residenters.”

“You mean hoboes who live here permanently?”

“Yeah. Over that way.” He pointed to the southeast. “There’s a gully. You’ll find it.”

“Thanks.”

“I’d walk in careful if I was you. They don’t take much to outsiders.”

“I’ll do that.”

He gave the clipping back to me, and I went off to the southeast through tall grass that was so dry it crunched like eggshells underfoot. The gully was a good three hundred yards away-shallow, wide, with underbrush and scrub pine growing along both banks. Clustered at the bottom were half a dozen one-room shacks made out of wooden frames and tar paper, a couple of them with corrugated-iron roofs; some had badly hung doors, some had nothing more than a flap of heavy tar paper across their entrances, and none had glass windows. I didn’t see any power lines; they probably didn’t have running water, either.

There was a communal fireplace in the center of the little complex, and sitting around it on rickety chairs that had no doubt come out of a trash dump were three old men-bindlestiffs who had retired because of old age or health reasons, but who wanted to live out their lives near the railroad. They had been passing around a near-empty gallon jug of white port wine, but they quit doing that when they saw me.

I made my way down a narrow path into the gully, my shoes sliding on the loose earth. None of the three men got up and none of them moved; they just sat there, stiff and staring, like blocks of gnarled old wood. They were all in their late sixties or early seventies, and one of them, the biggest and maybe the youngest, was black. Like the previous two tramps I’d talked to, their expressions were guardedly neutral.

I pulled up about ten feet from them. “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I could use some help. I’m looking for-”

“Help’s something we’re fresh out of,” the black man said. He had white hair and a grizzled white beard, and he must have weighed in at two hundred and fifty pounds, not much of it fat. The thumb on his left hand was missing. “Try the mission. They got lots of it, so they say.”

“Sympathy, too,” one of the white guys said. “Plenty of help and plenty of sympathy.”

“Sympathy, hell,” the other white guy said. “You know where you find sympathy? In the dictionary between shit and syphillis.”

All three of them laughed. Then they quit laughing and looked at me, and the black one said, “This here’s private property, man. You trespassing.”

I reached into my back pocket, being careful about it so they didn’t get any wrong ideas about what I was going for, and took out my wallet. Inside I found a ten-dollar bill and held it up where they could see it. Then I nodded toward the gallon jug the black guy was holding on his lap.

“You’re almost out of wine,” I said. “Hot day like this, a man gets pretty thirsty.”

None of them said anything, but they were watching the money.

“Ten bucks buys a cold jug for each of you,” I said.

They stirred, exchanged quick looks. The black man asked, “What else you figure it buys?”

“A little information, that’s all. I’m looking for a hobo named Charles Bradford. He came through here two days ago on his way north and managed to get his picture taken.” I put my wallet away and held up the newspaper clipping.

“Them San Francisco reporters,” the first white guy said. He was over seventy, thin and wizened, and he had a crippled-up look about him, the way people suffering from acute arthritis do. “We wouldn’t talk to ’em.”

“Well, Bradford talked to them,” I said. “And if he’s still around I need to talk to him.”

“Cop,” the second white man said. There was so much ground-in dirt on his seamed face that he looked sooty, as if he’d been caught in the middle of a recent fire.

I sensed that if I admitted my profession it would close them off; hoboes didn’t like cops, and it did not matter if they were public, private, or the railroad variety. I said, “No, I’m not a cop.”