started laughing. God, it feels good to laugh. It seems I haven’t laughed out loud in six months. And normally I’m a big laugher, with a terrible snuffling walrus guffaw. I laugh so hard I worry I might be getting hysterical. Billy’s laughing too, I think most at my laughing.
‘Dad, what this world needs is some new cowboy songs, maybe porno lyrics closer to the way it is.’
We go through tunnels and there are incredible rock formations, beautiful as Bryce. Probably somewhere along in here we’ve crossed the Continental Divide.
You can tell we’ve passed over something. From here on, everything’s different. It’s the first long step east. It’s a giant step to Europe when you go over that big rock hill. This side is more civilized, tame. It’s less exciting, sure, but a hell of a lot easier to live with.
Here’s where tame animals start. The people aren’t tame yet, neither are the plants much, no real agriculture.
Back on the other side it’s all wild: wild plants, wild rocks, wild people, wild skies, wild water and wild animals. The only exceptions, a few people-ghettos like Los Angeles or San Francisco.
We’ll be going through some of the most extensive tame-animal country in the world, straight across Kansas, four hundred miles of prime tame-animal country. When we cross the Mississippi, tame plants really start; and on the other side of the Appalachians tame people.
We’ve come out of the mountains and are on straight four-and-four highway. This is our payoff. Billy seems hypnotized. I look over and we’re going eighty. Christ, there’s a fifty-five-mile speed limit.
‘Look at the speedometer, Billy; heh, heh, heh, we’re really moving.’
I don’t lay it on, just say it the way I’d say, ‘Look at that yellow cow out the window there.’ But he does slow down, slows to sixty-five. After eighty, it feels as if we’re going thirty.
There’s nothing out the windows; the road doesn’t curve an inch; like a flat railroad. And tame animals, cows, steers, are out there all around us.
Billy’s started laughing and giggling to himself. Sometimes he hums and then marks time with his left foot.
‘Listen to this, Dad; the first meaningful set of Western lyrics since “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie”.’
He starts singing, a blend of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie. He’s using number three of the cowboy tunes.
‘In the valleys and the hills of the Oregon wood,
Not a chain saw screams like Frieda’s could.
Fightin’ and acussin’ are a logger’s game
But they all go quiet at Frieda’s name.
‘Then there’s a chain-saw solo. I could do it on a guitar easy.’
He starts humming and razzing, making noises that are supposed to be a chain-saw chorus.
‘Then it goes – wait a minute – Yeah!
‘Frieda has elbows like an elephant’s knees;
Some people say she stands when she pees;
She just ain’t much for the birds and bees,
But you oughtta see Frieda fellin’ them trees.’
He does his buzzing, humming, razzing again. There’s a long quiet while he’s putting the next part together. He’s still beating it out with his bare foot and giggling.
‘OK, here it is, I think.
‘Frieda met her end one dark, gray day,
Fellin’ two at once or so they say;
The logs cut easy and she wondered why,
Then saw the saw sticking through her thigh.’
We have some more mouth noises. I never knew he could make so many different sounds; he almost does sound like a guitar. I’ve heard him make all the motorcycle noises but this is something new to me.
He pauses briefly, but then he’s off and running. We’re both laughing now.
‘Frieda fell to one stump, then to the other,
Some even say she muttered MUTTHUH!
She looked straight up at the trees spinning round;
Then, with a sigh, Frieda hit the ground.’
He’s buzzing and laughing so hard he can hardly drive. He even forgets to keep his foot on the accelerator and we’re doing a legal fifty-five for the first time all day. I’ve got tears in my eyes and my sides hurt; definitely working up a hysterical laugh. I’ve got to watch myself.
About five miles farther on we pull up for gas and some lunch. The lunch stand is a converted trailer chocked up on railway ties. A lightweight swinging aluminum door latches shut behind us.
Along the back is a counter and there are two tables on the side we came in. We order hamburgers, then sit at one of the tables. There are no other customers. It’s almost two, late for the lunch crowd. We order milkshakes with the hamburgers.
Now, there’s something about an American hamburger in America; it’s like French bread in France. Maybe it’s the atmosphere, or the grass the cows eat, but an American hamburger in America is something special.
And these hamburgers we have in this jacked-up trailer are sensational. We spread them with everything: relish, mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise. Those hamburgers leak out our fingers. The milkshakes are solid ice cream, stiff enough to hold the straws straight up. If there were an American equivalent to the Michelin Guide, this place deserves three stars with an asterisk.
Counting the milkshake, I’m probably putting back on three pounds in one sitting. I lost almost twenty over the past five months, twenty I could well afford to lose, and now I’ll be packing them back on.
Pizzas, hot dogs, hamburgers, milkshakes; by the time we get to Philadelphia I won’t be able to squeeze behind the wheel.
I’m still waiting for Billy to elaborate on his reasons for leaving Santa Cruz. I didn’t even know he’d left school till he showed up at Mother’s. I asked then if he’d walked out in the middle of the quarter but he said he didn’t even start.
He’s been up in Oregon working as a choker, living out Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, I think. I only wish he’d told me, for income tax purposes at least. I’m carrying him as a deduction and if he’s getting W-2 forms I’m in trouble. All I need is the IRS on my tail.
I can just see Billy up there in the woods, no experience with that kind of life or even work itself, and he’s choking: hooking cables on felled timber. Lord! It’s like me going into the infantry when I’d never had a BB gun or firecrackers. I know Billy did get hurt; he told me that much.
We drive on, skipping all the big towns. Once you get off the highway, you’re dumped into local traffic. None of these towns have any real interest. When you’ve lived in Paris for over fifteen years, it’s hard to work up a big interest in Abilene, Kansas, even if Dwight D. Eisenhower did spend his profitable boyhood there. The most you can hope for is a town like Denver, which is a smoothed-over Westernized imitation of Chicago, which is an imitation of New York, which is an imitation of Paris or Rome or Athens or London.
For dinner we stop and have another pizza. We haven’t had a pizza for over twenty-four hours. We get a big, green salad too, because we’re plugged up. The salad’s more expensive than the pizza, but we both definitely need grass-type food. Later, we find a motel well off the road.
This is a true Midwest town, all separate houses with porches, everything wood or fieldstone; sidewalks.
After dinner, Billy and I walk around. The people on the porches stare at us.
There are locusts or crickets in the trees, making the most godawful noise. It sounds