options open to me as a Pizza Hut patron.
'You're kinda slow, aren'tcha?' she observed brightly.
I was embarrassed. 'I'm sorry. I'm out of touch. I've ... just got out of prison.'
Her eyes widened. 'Really?'
'Yes. I murdered a waitress who rushed me.'
With an uncertain smile she backed off and gave me lots and lots of time to make up my mind. In the end I had a medium-sized deep-dish pepperoni pizza with extra onions and mushrooms, and I can recommend it without hesitation.
Afterwards, to round off a perfect evening, I clambered over to a nearby K Mart and had a look around. K Marts are a chain of discount stores and they are really depressing places. You could take Mother Teresa to a K Mart and she would get depressed. It's not that there's anything wrong with the K Marts themselves, it's the customers. K Marts are always full of the sort of people who give their children names that rhyme: Lonnie, Donnie, Ronnie, Connie, Bonnie. The sort of people who would stay in to watch 'The Munsters.' Every woman there has at least four children and they all look as if they have been fathered by a different man. The woman always weighs 250 pounds. She is always walloping a child and bawling, 'If you don't behave, Ronnie, I'm not gonna bring you back here no more!' As if Ronnie could care less about never going to a K Mart again. It's the place you would go if you wanted to buy a stereo system for under thirty-five dollars and didn't care if it sounded like the band was playing in a mailbox under water in a distant lake. If you go shopping at K Mart you know that you've touched bottom. My dad liked K Marts.
I went in and looked around. I picked up some disposable razors and a pocket notebook, and then, just to make an occasion of it, a bag of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, which were attractively priced at $1.29. I paid for these and went outside. It was 7:30 in the evening. The stars were rising above the parking lot. I was alone with a small bag of pathetic treats in the most boring town in America and frankly I felt sorry for myself. I clambered over a wall and dodged across the highway to a Kwik-Krap minisupermarket, purchased a cold six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and returned with it to my room where I watched cable TV, drank beer, messily ate Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (wiping my hands on the sheets) and drew meager comfort from the thought that in Carbondale, Illinois, that was about as good a time as you were ever likely to get.
CHAPTER 5
IN THE MORNING I rejoined Highway 127 south. This was marked on my map as a scenic route and for once this proved to be so. It really was attractive countryside, better than anything I knew Illinois possessed, with rolling hills of winebottle green, prosperous-looking farms and deep woods of oak and beech. Surprisingly, considering I was heading south, the foliage here was more autumnal than elsewhere-the hillsides were a mixture of mustard, dull orange and pale green, quite fetching-and the clear, sunny air had an agreeable crispness to it. I could live here, in these hills, I thought.
It took me a while to figure out what was missing. It was billboards. When I was small, billboards thirty feet wide and fifteen feet high stood in fields along every roadside. In places like Iowa and Kansas they were about the only stimulation you got. In the 1960s Lady Bird Johnson, in one of those misguided campaigns in which presidents' wives are always engaging themselves, had most of the roadside billboards removed as part of a highway beautification program. In the middle of the Rocky Mountains this was doubtless a good thing, but out here in the lonesome heartland billboards were practically a public service.
Seeing one standing a mile off you would become interested to see what it said, and would watch with mild absorption as it advanced towards you and passed. As roadside excitements went, it was about on a par with the little windmills in Pella, but it was better than nothing.
The superior billboards would have a three-dimensional element to them-the head of a cow jutting out if it was for a dairy, or a cutout of a bowling ball scattering pins if it was for a bowling alley.
Sometimes the billboard would be for some coming attraction. There might be a figure of a ghost and the words, VISIT SPOOK CAVERNS! OKLAHOMA'S GREAT FAMILY ATTRACTION!
JUST 69 MILES! A couple of miles later there would be another sign saying, PLENTY OF FREE
PARKING AT SPOOK CAVERNS. JUST 67 MILES! And so it would go with sign after sign promising the most thrilling and instructive afternoon any family could ever hope to have, at least in Oklahoma. These promises would be supported by illustrations showing eerily lit underground chambers, the size of cathedrals, in which the stalactites and stalagmites had magically fused into the shapes of witches' houses, bubbling caldrons, flying bats and Casper the Friendly Ghost. It all looked extremely promising. So we children in the back would begin suggesting that we stop and have a look, taking it in turns to say, in a sincere and moving way, 'Oh, please, Dad, oh, pleeeeease.'
Over the next sixty miles my father's position on the matter would proceed through a series of well-worn phases, beginning with a flat refusal on the grounds that it was bound to be expen sive and anyway our behavior since breakfast had been so disgraceful that it didn't warrant any special treats, to studiously ignoring our pleas (this phase would last for up to eleven minutes), to asking my mother privately in a low voice what she thought about the idea and receiving an equivocal answer, to ignoring us again in the evident hope that we would forget about it and stop nagging (one minute, twelve seconds), to saying that we might go if we started to behave and kept on behaving more or less forever, to saying that we definitely would not go because, just look at us, we were already squabbling again and we hadn't even gotten there, to finally announcing-sometimes in an exasperated bellow, sometimes in a deathbed whisper-that all right we would go. You could always tell when Dad was on the brink of acceptance because his neck would turn red. It was always the same. He always said yes in the end. I never understood why he didn't just accede to our demands at the outset and save himself thirty minutes of anguish. Then he would always quickly add, 'But we're only going for half an hour-and you're not going to buy anything. Is that clear?' This seemed to restore to him a sense that he was in charge of things.
By the last two or three miles, the signs for Spook Caverns would be every couple of hundred yards, bringing us to a fever pitch of excitement. Finally there would be a billboard the size of a battleship with a huge arrow telling us to turn right here and drive eighteen miles. 'Eighteen miles!' Dad would cry shrilly, his forehead veins stirring to life in preparation for the inevitable discovery that after eighteen miles of bouncing down a dirt road with knee-deep ruts there would be no sign of Spook Caverns, that indeed after nineteen miles the road would end in a desolate junction without any clue of which way to turn, and that Dad would turn the wrong way. When eventually found, Spook Caverns would prove to be rather less than advertised-in fact, would give every appearance of being in the last stages of solvency. The caverns, damp and ill lit and smelling like a long-dead horse, would be about the size of a garage and the stalactites and stalagmites wouldn't look the least bit like witches' houses and Casper the Ghost. They would look like-well, like stalactites and stalagmites. It would all be a huge letdown. The only possible way of assuaging our disappointment, we would discover, would be if Dad bought us each a rubber Bowie knife and bag of toy dinosaurs in the adjoining gift shop. My sister and I would drop to the ground and emit mournful noises to remind him what a fearful thing unassuaged grief can be in a child.
