blond God has fallen to untouchable vileness. Con men don't change, they break, shatter --explosions of matter in cold interstellar space, drift away in cosmic dust, leave the empty body behind. Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.... I left the Rube standing on a corner, red brick slums to the sky, under a steady rain of soot.
'Going to hit this croaker I know. Right back with that good pure drugstore M.... No, you wait here
--don't want him to rumble you.' No matter how long, Rube, wait for me right on that corner. Goodbye, Rube, goodbye kid.... Where do they go when they walk out and leave the body behind? Chicago: invisible hierarchy of decorated wops, smell of atrophied gangsters, earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halstead, Cicero, Lincoln Park, panhandler of dreams, past invading the present, rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses.
Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything 13
in, and they are not young very long. (Through the bars of East St. Louis lies the dead frontier, riverboat days.) Illinois and Missouri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of coastal Peru.
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
And always cops: smooth college-trained state cops, practiced, apologetic patter, electronic eyes weigh your car and luggage, clothes and face; snarling big city dicks, soft-spoken country sheriffs with something black and menacing in old eyes color of a faded grey flannel shirt.... And always car trouble: in St. Louis traded the 1942 Studebaker in (it has a built-in engineering flaw like the Rube) on an old Packard limousine heated up and barely made Kansas City, and bought a Ford turned out to be an oil burner, packed it in on a jeep we push too hard (they are no good for highway driving) --and burn something out inside, rattling around, went back to the old Ford V-8. Can't beat that engine for getting there, oil burner or no. And the U.S. drag closes around us like no other drag in the world, worse than the Andes, high mountain towns, cold wind down from postcard mountains, thin air like death in the throat, river towns of Ecuador, malaria grey as junk under black Stetson, muzzle loading shotguns, vultures pecking through the mud streets --and what hits you when you get off the Malmo Ferry in (no juice tax on the ferry) Sweden knocks all that cheap, tax free juice right out of you and brings you all the way down: averted eyes and the cemetery in the middle of town (every town in Sweden seems to be built around a cemetery), and nothing to do in the afternoon, not a bar not a movie and I blasted my last stick of Tangier tea and I said, 'K.E. let's get right back on that ferry.' But there is no drag like U.S. drag. You can't see it, you don't know where it comes from. Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision street --every block of houses has its own bar and drugstore and market and liquor store. You walk in and it hits you. But where does it come from?
Not the bartender, not the customers, nor the cream-colored plastic rounding the bar stools, nor the dim neon. Not even the TV.
And our habits build up with the drag, like cocaine will build you up staying ahead of the C bring-down. And the junk was running low. So there we are in this no-horse town strictly from cough syrup. And vomited up the syrup and drove on and on, cold spring wind whistling through that old heap around our shivering sick sweating bodies and the cold you always come down with when the junk runs out of you.... On through the peeled landscape, dead armadillos in the road and vultures over the swamp and cypress stumps. Motels with beaverboard walls, gas heater, thin pink blankets.
Itinerant short con and carny hyp men have burned down the croakers of Texas.... And no one in his right mind would hit a Louisiana croaker. State Junk Law. Came at last to Houston where I know a druggist. I haven't been there in five years but he looks up and makes me with one quick look and just nods and says: 'Wait over at the counter....' So I sit down and drink a cup of coffee and after a while he comes and sits beside me and says,
'What do you want?'
'A quart of PG and a hundred nembies.'
He nods, 'Come back in half an hour.'
So when I come back he hands me a package and says, 'That's fifteen dollars.... Be careful.' Shooting PG is a terrible hassle, you have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper --have to shoot it in the vein or you get an 14
abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls.... So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish....
New Orleans is a dead museum. We walk around Exchange Place breathing PG and find The Man right away. It's a small place and the fuzz always knows who is pushing so he figures what the hell does it matter and sells to anybody. We stock up on H and backtrack for Mexico. Back through Lake Charles and the dead slot-machine country, south end of Texas, niggerkilling sheriffs look us over and check the car papers. Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, desert and mountains and vultures; little wheeling specks and others so close you can hear wings cut the air (a dry husking sound), and when they spot something they pour out of the blue sky, that shattering bloody blue sky of Mexico, down in a black funnel.... Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water.
'Thomas and Charlie,' I said.
'What?'
