Sal leaves Mill City for Los Angeles

Sal leaves Mill City for Los Angeles at the end of a westward venture whose promise has unraveled. The departure is at once a break with Remi Boncoeur, a return to the road, and a turn toward Terry: after arriving in California to write and pursue a seafaring job, Sal leaves without ever boarding the old ship, the Admiral Freebee, and reaches Los Angeles by a chain of rides, a forced bus journey, and a chance meeting that changes his immediate destination from solitary travel to companionship.

The friendship’s unraveling

The departure is prepared by a household already strained by money, resentment, and the persistent rain. Remi and Lee Ann have no money left in the house; Remi studies his black book of debtors, while the grocery receipts he pins to the bathroom wall make Sal feel that his small contribution is under scrutiny. Lee Ann suspects both men of concealing money, threatens to leave, and tells Remi to pack and go. When she reaches for the gun during their confrontation, Remi hands it to Sal to hide. Sal retreats in fear, imagining himself alone in the shack with Lee Ann and wondering what he is doing so far from home. The scene makes the practical insecurity of Mill City inseparable from the collapse of the household’s personal ties.

Remi nevertheless asks Sal and Lee Ann for one final favor: to join him when his distinguished stepfather visits San Francisco, and to behave as though the life Remi has described in his letters is true. He says he has tried to find work for Sal, buy Lee Ann dresses, and introduce them to people, and that he had hoped their shared life would become something lasting. The request reveals both his generosity and the gap between the life he wanted to present and the precarious reality in the shack. Sal agrees to take part, but the evening becomes an ordeal rather than a repair.

At the hotel, Sal arrives drunk and greets the visiting doctor with a mangled attempt at French. At dinner at Alfred’s in North Beach, Remi pays about fifty dollars for the five of them, only for Roland Major, just arrived from Denver and already drunk, to appear and needle the doctor by pretending he teaches high-school French. Sal drinks heavily, speaks drunkenly to the doctor’s young wife, and repeatedly climbs over the doctor’s lap to reach the men’s room. Remi is mortified; Sal recognizes that the evening has gone disastrously wrong and that his stay in San Francisco is ending. His regret is sharpened by his affection for Remi and his conviction that few people understood how genuinely generous he was. The dinner thus turns an intended performance of respectability into a public exposure of the distance between Remi’s hopes and their actual circumstances.

One last day above the coast

The next morning, as Remi and Lee Ann sleep, Sal considers leaving while looking at the large pile of laundry that he and Remi had once treated as a cheerful shared chore. He checks himself: he had promised not to leave before climbing the mountain. Rather than depart immediately, he stays for the day and makes that climb. From the summit he sees the Pacific beyond the foothills, the white fog advancing toward the Golden Gate, and San Francisco spread beneath it. The view holds both the attraction of California and the loneliness of the traveler who has reached the continent’s edge.

The panorama also turns Sal’s attention eastward. Looking back across the continent toward New York, he contrasts California’s whiteness and apparent emptiness with the East’s brown, sacred quality. This is his thought at that moment, not a final judgment on either region: the city and ocean below him mark the farthest point of his planned western line, while the imagined East becomes the direction of return. The mountain climb is therefore a brief fulfillment of his promise, but it does not restore the future he had expected to share with Remi.

Leaving Mill City and heading south

The following morning Sal quietly packs while Remi and Lee Ann sleep, slips out through the window, and leaves Mill City with his canvas bag. He never spends a night aboard the Admiral Freebee. The ship that had figured in his original plan to earn money at sea remains a destination unrealized, and Sal says that he and Remi are lost to one another. His exit is quiet rather than confrontational: after the failed dinner and the final climb, he does not attempt another explanation or farewell.

In Oakland, Sal has a beer in a saloon frequented by bums, then walks across the city to the Fresno road. Two rides carry him to Bakersfield, about four hundred miles south. The first comes from a young brakeman driving a souped-up car at eighty miles an hour, his recently amputated toe still bandaged; he had left the hospital that same morning. The reckless speed and the rider’s abrupt escape from medical care bring the road’s danger and impetuous freedom into a single episode. The driver drops Sal in Fresno, where the rail yards, boxcars, and passing locomotive briefly make the town feel like the California of William Saroyan.

A man in a new pickup takes Sal farther south, then leaves him outside Bakersfield. In the cold, Sal tries for two hours to hitch a ride among cars rushing toward Los Angeles. He wears a flimsy Army raincoat bought in Oakland for three dollars, but it does not solve the immediate problem: with no ride forthcoming, he spends a little more than two dollars on a bus for the remaining miles. The forced switch from hitchhiking to paid transport makes the trip less a smooth westward advance than a succession of improvisations shaped by exhaustion, weather, and dwindling money.

The meeting that redirects the journey

While waiting at the Bakersfield station for the Los Angeles bus, Sal notices a young Mexican woman on another bus making a rest stop. He wishes he were on her bus, but then discovers her sitting alone opposite him on the Los Angeles bus he boards. Lonely, tired, and nervous, he gathers the courage to approach her. They begin by exchanging stories, and her circumstances give the encounter its weight: she has left her abusive husband in Sabinal and is heading to Los Angeles to stay with her sister. Her young son remains with her family, grape-pickers living in a shack among the vineyards.

The conversation becomes intimate without a formal agreement or elaborate courtship. She says she enjoys talking with Sal and wishes she could go to New York too. As the bus climbs Grapevine Pass and descends toward the lights of Los Angeles, they begin holding hands; by the time they reach the city, they have silently decided that she will be with him when he gets a hotel room. Sal leans his head against her hair, and she welcomes his embrace. She says she loves love, while he promises her beautiful love. The immediacy of their attachment contrasts with the failed attempt to sustain a shared life in Mill City: where his friendship with Remi has broken under the pressure of money and disappointed expectations, the bus journey produces a new bond through mutual disclosure and physical closeness.

Sal identifies the woman as Terry and calls her the girl he wants, distinguishing her from the women he has known before. Yet the scene also establishes the uncertainty beneath that declaration. Terry is traveling toward her sister after leaving an abusive marriage, has left her child behind with her family, and is considering a destination beyond Los Angeles; Sal has arrived with no settled plan after abandoning the route he once mapped toward the West. Their agreement emerges in the motion of the bus, not from a secure home or a clearly arranged future. The departure from Mill City therefore ends not in a stable arrival, but in another improvised beginning.