St. Petersburg, Florida

St. Petersburg, Florida, links Roy and Theodore’s present hardship to an earlier encounter with the police: at a public beach, Roy carries the increasingly frail Theodore to the water, while their conversation recalls a three-day jail stay after they preached on a street corner.

Setting and Beach Scene

The episode takes place at the north end of a public beach in St. Petersburg, a little south of Tampa. Roy lifts Theodore from his wheelchair and carries him across the sand, setting him down several times to rest before reaching the water. Theodore’s legs swing as Roy carries him; his worsening incontinence and the smell of his soiled clothes make the physical demands of the journey plain. Two women nearby gather their towels and lotions and hurry to the parking lot after seeing them. The beach is not an abstract backdrop: its sand, distance to the water, and other visitors shape the scene of care and visible discomfort.

Roy returns to the wheelchair for their supper: two fifths of White Port and a package of boiled ham, stolen from a grocery store a couple of blocks away. The pair had reached the area after a truck driver hauling oranges let them out. These details situate their beach stop within a precarious journey, with food and transport obtained opportunistically rather than through stable lodging or work.

Recalled Arrest

At the beach, Theodore asks whether they had once been locked up in St. Petersburg. Roy remembers that the arrest lasted three days. Police had taken them in for vagrancy shortly before dark while they were preaching on a street corner. Their recollection makes the city more than a point on their route: it holds the memory of their poverty being treated as an offense.

Roy recalls another prisoner protesting that the police could jail a person for having neither money nor an address, and questioning the freedom the country claimed to offer. Other prisoners said the man had been arrested for vagrancy twenty-two times in the previous year. Each morning, officers made him carry telephone books up and down the stairs; fellow prisoners complained that they were tired of feeding him. The recollection gives the earlier jail a specific routine of punishment, not just a name or duration.

Narrative Significance

The present beach scene and the jail memory place two kinds of exposure beside each other: Theodore’s failing body is conspicuous to strangers on the sand, while the remembered arrest shows how the men’s lack of money and an address made them vulnerable to confinement. Their brief exchange also turns the location into a point of uncertain memory. Roy can supply the three-day detail, but Theodore says he cannot remember and asks what the jail was like, leaving the place at once familiar to them and indistinct in his recollection.