So there we sat. Every now and then we would hear a car approaching, and we would pile out, flagging wildly. A couple of guys actually stopped, but lacking tow chains there was nothing they could do. Salvation finally appeared in the form of a local farmer in a pickup with studded tires. “You boys’ve got yourselves in a pickle, fer sher!”
“Yew betcha!” said Red Chief.
Our Good Sam matter-of-factly produced a tow chain, and quick as it takes to tell, we were on dry land again. Time pressure was weighing heavily on us now, so we had to turn down his offer of supper and beds for the night, and directly were tooling down the road again, doing eighty-five. (Incidentally, further research has confirmed that if you
must
have a disaster, have it happen in the Midwest. Whatever their cultural quirks, those folks can be really nice.)
Night driving in that part of the world is an entirely different thing from what I was used to. Back east there is always some kind of man-made light: a house with a colicky baby, a neon sign, the horizon glow of a distant town,
something
. But here, out beyond the power lines, especially when the sky is overcast, there is a surreal quality, an isolation that at once numbs the mind and fills it with a vague sense of apprehension.
We raced across the Nebraska plains, preceded by our little cowcatcher of light, in a kind of hypnotic trance. Occasionally, the lights of an oncoming truck would appear, brights clicking on, off, on, off: “Cop ahead,” “Shitty coffee up the line,” or just “Hello, are you alive?” Truckers’ signals. I used to be able to read them, but they have pretty much died out now that all the drivers have radios, and I have long since forgotten.
Maybe we were too spaced-out to notice, or maybe the son of a bitch just materialized like a phantom trooper in a Stephen King novel, but the next thing we knew we were being pulled over by Dudley Do-right. The usual routine: high-powered flashlight in the eyes; license, registration; “Do you know how fast you were going?” The fine, he informed us, was based on the number of miles per hour over the speed limit the culprit was clocked at, and since we had been caught red-handed doing 600 miles per hour, we owed the people of Ignominee County $60. At least that was the gist of it. Then he produced a new wrinkle: since court was closed for the night, we could either go with him into town and wait—in jail, naturally—until it convened, which would be two full days since tomorrow was Saturday, or we could waive the hearing and pay the fine on the spot. Just to guarantee that there was no hanky-panky involved, he would watch while we placed the cash in an envelope, addressed it appropriately, and dropped it into a mail slot at the courthouse. This had all the earmarks of a well-oiled scam, but what could we do? We drove into town with him close behind and stopped in front of City Hall, where with the cop watching, A.K. dug an envelope out of his Boy Scout knapsack and I stuffed the sixty bucks (almost all we had) into it, addressed it, and dispatched it as ordered. A galling and nerve-wracking experience.
Over shitty coffee in an all-night truck stop up the line, we reviewed our position. Gary and I had about $30 between us, there was another $30 or so of gas money from Triple-A, and that was it. Red Chief had some money, but still refused to say how much, and announced that he would pool it with us “over my dead body.” (To myself I muttered, “Ah yes, the scenic route.”) It was a dilemma: we were pressed for time, and if we proceeded legally and sedately at the speed limit, it would take us forever to get out of Nebraska; but if we continued tearing up the pea patch, we ran the risk of having the same rip-off pulled on us again, and that would leave us too broke to continue, sedately or otherwise.
“I say, give ’em the old ‘bait and switch,’” said A.K. with a conspiratorial smirk.
“The old what and which?”
“Here,” he said, “let me show you.” He delved into his knapsack and fished out a box of stationery, did a bit of scrawling on a sheet of letter paper, and before folding it into an envelope, let us take a look. It read,
“Deed to the Brooklyn Bridge”—I think he even signed it, “Peter Minuit.” He addressed the envelope to “Town Clowns—Fishfart, Neb.,” and handed it to me. “If we get stopped again and they try that same routine on us, all you have to do is switch envelopes at the last minute.”
“Oh, is
that
all? And what’s the cop supposed to be doing while I’m prestidigitating? The last one was watching me like a hawk.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll think of something.” How a twelve-year-old could come up with a scheme so devious and baroque filled my heart with wonder, but he explained: “Oh, I got it out of a kid’s book.” It is the only time I have heard the
Newgate Calendar
described as a “kid’s book.”
In any case, what were the odds on getting popped the same way twice in one night? Lightning doesn’t strike etc., etc. Well, just ask any lightning rod about that old saw. Sure enough, not far from the Wyoming line, it happened again. It was still dark. Different cop, but exactly the same routine. As we drove, hangdog, into town, Red Chief said, “When you get out of the car, leave the door open. I’ll divert him.” What the hell was he going to do, throw a brick at the guy? He giggled, and would say no more.
As I trudged, scared shitless, toward the municipal building, one envelope in my hand, the other in my pocket, I suddenly heard a piercing yell: “Hey! Shut that door, I’m freezing to death back here!” The kid had lungs of steel, and I don’t know about that cop, but it sure diverted the hell out of me. I was so startled that I almost botched the substitution, but the thing came off without a hitch. We laughed hysterically all the way to Wyoming.
I guess we must have stopped for gas and even had some breakfast, but other than that we drove straight on through the night. We were rolling merrily along, some fifteen miles east of Cheyenne on a sunny Saturday morning, when we blew a gasket. The Chevy was still ambulatory, but just barely. Gary howled obscenities as we limped down the road at five or ten miles an hour, looking for an open repair shop. At that speed, it took us a while to get into town, where we finally spotted one. “Yep,” the fellow agreed that it was a head gasket. “Nope,” he couldn’t fix it today. The garage closed at noon on Saturday, and it was almost eleven o’clock. The best he could do would be to have it ready early on Monday. Gary explained that Triple-A would be footing the bill, and showed him some papers that seemed to satisfy him. We walked the rest of the way into the center of town.
“First,” said Gary, “we get a cheap room. Then a call to Triple-A for some money, and then some sleep.” The sleep part sounded especially good. We had been going for at least 24 hours and were walking around in a cocoon of daze.
Cheyenne was the state capital, but first and foremost it was a cow town. Ranch hands, who worked half days on Saturday, crowded the sidewalks looking for ways to spend their week’s pay. The atmosphere was festive, although almost nobody was drunk yet.
So we’re walking along, taking it all in, when up steps the Marlboro Man and says (I swear to God), “You boys new in town?” With one hand he flipped open a wallet and flashed a badge, and with the other he produced a cannon that looked to me like Big Bertha. We were so surprised, and so zonked with fatigue, that we could only stand and stare: was this joker for real? All too real, as it turned out. In seconds he had Gary and me handcuffed together, and A.K. cuffed to his left wrist. “I think we’d better go down to the station and have a little talk.” He kept Gary and me in front of him, with A.K. at his side, and he kept that damned bazooka pointed right at us all the time. That hombre didn’t take no chances.
It must have been quite a sight: there we were at high noon, being marched at gunpoint down the main street of Cheyenne, Wyoming, by Wyatt Earp. The locals were enjoying it immensely. They gasped with delight and craned their necks, probably looking for the movie cameras. Nor did they remain silent onlookers: “Hey Bud, looks like you finally caught up with the Dalton boys! Hee, hee, hee.” I must confess, the carnival atmosphere was lost on me at the time, but Red Chief got right into the spirit. He kept looking up at our grim-faced captor and asking, “Air yew the fastest gun in Cheyenne, Shairroff?” I could tell this was going over real big.
At the cop shop, they separated us and grilled us one at a time, with no hint of what the hell it was they were after. Over and over: “What’s your name? Where do you come from? What are you doing here?” and “Who’s the kid?” I kept explaining to them: “His father is a friend of mine. We’re giving him a lift to his mother’s place in San Francisco.” I had his pop’s number with me, and they let me try calling him. No answer.
After the third round of questioning, everybody was getting pretty exasperated, and they started to slap me around a little, on general principles, just to let me know they weren’t too happy with the way things were going.
It was looking like things could get very nasty indeed. They let me try the phone again, and—Praise God!—A.K.’s father was home. “Bert,” I said, “we’ve got a bit of a problem here.” I ran down the story for him, and one of the cops got on the line. After some palaver he hung up and said, “We’ve got to check on this. Wait here.” I had a lot of choice. Twenty minutes later he was back: “OK, you can go. Your friends are waiting outside.”
“Just like that?” I said. “Wait a minute. What was this all about?”
He looked a little embarrassed. “We kind of thought you two might have kidnapped the boy.”
I started to laugh. “Why didn’t you ask him?”
“We did,” he answered, “but he wouldn’t tell us a thing.”
“But his I.D. must have checked out.”
“Yeah, it did, but it said he was from New York, and he talked like a shit kicker from Iowa. Now get out of here. It’s coming on Saturday night, and we’re gonna need all the jail cells we’ve got.”
Out on the street, I confronted the little swine: “Why didn’t you just tell them the truth?” I screamed.
All of a sudden he was Humphrey Bogart: “I don’t talk to cops.”
Post mortem in a ratty railroad hotel. Dave: “They hit me a couple of times—nothing serious.”
Gary: “That big bastard with the Stetson kicked me in the shins with those pointy-toed cowboy boots.” He raised his pants leg, and displayed a bruise that was beginning to look like a Turner sunset.
A.K.: “Yeah, they brought me a cold cheeseburger.”
Killing the weekend on a shoestring was no problem at all: We slept. Cheap eats were easy to come by, as well. I continued my culinary research with a substance called “son-of-a-bitch stew” (“S.O.B. Stew” on the lunchroom’s “Daily Specials” blackboard), made from beef unmentionables and seasoned with nasty little bird’s-eye chilies. Good, though.
Monday morning, refinanced by Triple-A by way of Western Union, we picked up the car and were tooling down Route 80 singing—what else?—“Goodbye, Old Paint, I’m Leavin’ Cheyenne.”
That stretch of highway across the high plains of Wyoming can be a traveler’s graveyard in the winter, but this trip it was like a superfast conveyor belt. Gary had previous experience with the route, though, and wanted to get over into Utah and the Great Basin before the shit hit the fan,
which at this time of year was almost inevitable. Hitchhikers were few and far between—hell, people were in short supply, period—so when we saw a guy standing on the road with his thumb out, I was usually inclined to give the poor soul a lift. Gary, on the other hand, was really in the slot now and did not want to stop for anything. But this time was different: “Gary!” I yelled, “Stop the car! That guy has a
beard!!
” He hit the brakes, and it was a lucky thing the road was dry—we must have been doing ninety. We backed up for what seemed like ten miles, and met the guy partway as he trotted to meet us.
Now, the beard factor had been an ongoing irritant in our dealings with the natives since we had left Chicago. Almost every stop we made, there would be comments about our facial hair, and once or twice, only our hasty departure had averted mayhem. Cops seemed especially hostile; both of the times we had been stopped in Nebraska, we had to grin and bear it while Ol’ Smokey trotted out his nimble wit at our expense, and remarks dropped at the station house in Cheyenne suggested pretty strongly that we would not have been collared had we been clean shaven. So it was a question of solidarity. There was no way we were going to leave that poor bastard out there to face the tender mercies of the aborigines.
As it turned out, the poor bastard
was
an aborigine, and an honest-to-God cowboy to boot. Andrew (“not Andy, goddammit”) could rope (“some”), ride (“pretty good”), and bulldog the kiyoodles (“huh?”) with the best of them. But mostly he wanted to get the hell out of Wyoming. The problem was his beard. He was not trying to make any kind of statement, but had grown it on a whim, and when it came in full, he kind of liked the way it looked—understandable, as it was a fine specimen of what I believe is called a “scup,” full around the edges, with no mustache, as worn by Horace Greeley and Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, Andrew was a handsome specimen entirely. Of medium height, and older than us (about thirty), with his battered Stetson and slightly weather-beaten look, he was the very image of that film director’s dream, “The Last American Cowboy”—and he knew it.
Apparently the scheme had been percolating in his mind for a while, and the beard had finally kicked off a hegira to the coast to get into the movies. His buddies on the ranch where he worked were giving him no peace, calling him “Abe” (in reference to Lincoln, I suppose, but with
anti-Semitic undertones), and perfect strangers were always trying to start fights.
“Yeah, tell us about it.”
“So I figured, if I’m gonna look like an extra in
Shane
, I might as well get paid for it.” I had heard tell of Will Geer’s theater in Topanga Canyon, where Woody Guthrie used to crash and where, according to the grapevine, Jack Elliott was currently holing up, so I passed the word along; maybe a connection with the film colony could be made from there. He liked the sound of that. Comfortably ensconced with a bunch of fellow outcasts, he settled into the backseat with A.K. and began teaching him “real cowboy songs.” As I recall, one of them went:
I am an old cow-puncher; I punch them cows real hard.
I’ve got me a cow-punching bag at home in my back yard.
It’s all made out of leather; it’s real cowhide of course.
When I get tired of punching cows, I go and punch a horse.