darkness, he goes out with a hundred-foot tape measure and measures the distance from his house to the school and damn me but it's 997
yards. So he just stops selling dope, just like that.' Horner drank his beer sadly. 'It's really frustrating. I mean, have you ever tried to watch American TV without dope?'
'It must be tough,' I agreed.
'Dortmeier gave me the name of his supplier so I could go and get some myself. Well, this guy was in Kansas City. I had no idea. So I drove all the way down there, just to buy a couple of ounces of pot, and it was crazy. The house was full of guns. The guy kept looking out the window like he was expecting the police to tell him to come out with his hands up. He was half convinced that I was an undercover narcotics officer. I mean here I am, a thirty- five-year-old family man, with a college education and a respectable job, I'm 180 miles from home and I'm wondering if I'm going to get blown away, and all so that I can just have a little something to help me get through 'Love Boat'
reruns on TV. It was too crazy for me. You need somebody like Dortmeier for a situation like that-somebody with a lust for drugs and no brain.' Horner shook the beer can by his ear to confirm that it was empty and then looked at me. 'You wouldn't by any wild chance have any dope with you?' he asked.
'I'm sorry, John,' I said.
'Shame,' said Horner and went out to the kitchen to get us more beers.
I spent the night in Horner's spare room and in the morning stood with him and his pleasant wife in the kitchen drinking coffee and chatting while small children swirled about our legs. Life is odd, I thought. It seemed so strange for Horner to have a wife and children and a paunch and a mortgage and to be, like me, approaching the cliff face of middle age. We had been boys for so long together that I suppose I had thought the condition was permanent. I realized with a sense of dread that the next time we met we would probably talk about gallstone operations and the relative merits of different brands of storm windows. It put me in a melancholy mood and kept me there as I reclaimed my car from its parking space downtown and returned to the highway.
I drove along old Route 6, which used to be the main highway to Chicago, but now with Interstate S0 just three miles to the south, it is all but forgotten, and I hardly saw a soul along its length. I drove for an hour and a half without much of a thought in my head, just a weary eagerness to get home, to see my mom, to have a shower, and not to touch a steering wheel for a long, long time.
Des Moines looked wonderful in the morning sunshine. The dome on the state capitol building gleamed. The trees were still full of color. They've changed the city completely-downtown now is all modern buildings and bubbling fountains and whenever I'm there now I have to keep looking up at the street signs to get my bearings-but it felt like home. I suppose it always will. I hope so. I drove through the city, happy to be there, proud to be part of it.
On Grand Avenue, near the governor's mansion, I realized I was driving along behind my mother, who had evidently borrowed my sister's car. I recognized her because the right turn signal was blinking pointlessly as she proceeded up the street. My mother generally puts the turn signal on soon after pulling out of the garage and then leaves it on for pretty much the rest of the day. I used to point this out to her, but then I realized it is actually a good thing because it alerts other motorists that they are approaching a driver who may not be entirely on top of matters. I followed along behind her. At Thirty-First Street the blinking turn signal jumped from the right side of the car to the left-I had forgotten that she likes to move it around from time to time as we turned the corner for home, but then it stayed cheerily blinking on the left for the last mile, down Thirty-First Street and up Elmwood Drive.
I had to park a fair distance from the house and then, despite a boyish eagerness to see my mother, I took a minute to log the final details of the trip in a notebook I had been carrying with me. It always made me feel oddly important and professional, like a jumbo-jet pilot at the end of a transatlantic flight. It was 10:38 A.M., and I had driven 6,842 miles since leaving home 34 days earlier. I circled this figure, then got out, grabbed my bags from the trunk and walked briskly to the house. My mother was already inside. I could see her through the back window, moving around in the kitchen, putting away groceries and humming. She is always humming. I opened the back door, dropped my bags and called out those four most all-American words: 'Hi, Mom, I'm home!'
She looked real pleased to see me. 'Hello, dear!' she said brightly and gave me a hug. 'I was just wondering when I'd be seeing you again. Can I get you a sandwich?'
'That would be great,' I said even though I wasn't really hungry.
It was good to be home.
PART II WEST
CHAPTER 20
I WAS HEADED for Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to have to say too often if you can possibly help it. Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states. Compared with it, Iowa is paradise. Iowa at least is fertile and green and has a hill. Nebraska is like a 75,000-square-mile bare patch. In the middle of the state is a river called the Platte, which at some times of the year is two or three miles wide. It looks impressive until you realize that it is only about four inches deep. You could cross it in a wheelchair. On a landscape without any contours or depressions to shape it, the Platte just lies there, like a drink spilled across a tabletop. It is the most exciting thing in the state.
When I was growing up, I used to wonder how Nebraska came to be lived in. I mean to say, the original settlers, creaking across America in their covered wagons, had to have passed through Iowa, which is green and fertile and has, as I say, a hill, but stopped short of Colorado, which is green and fertile and has a mountain range, and settled instead for a place that is flat and brown and full of stubble and prairie dogs. Doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? Do you know what the original settlers made their houses of? Dried mud. And do you know what happened to all those mud houses when the rainy season came every year? That's correct, they slid straight into the Platte River.
For a long time I couldn't decide whether the original settlers in Nebraska were insane or just stupid, and then I saw a stadium full of University of Nebraska football fans in action on a Saturday and realized that they must have been both. I may be a decade or so out of touch here but when I left America, the University of Nebraska didn't so much play football as engage in weekly ritual slaughters. They were always racking up scores of 58-3 against hapless opponents. Most schools, when they get a decent lead, will send in a squad of skinny freshmen in unsoiled uniforms to let them run around a bit and get dirty and, above all, to give the losers a sporting chance to make the score respectable. It's called fair play.
Not Nebraska. The University of Nebraska would send in flamethrowers if it were allowed.
Watching Nebraska play football every week was like watching hyenas tearing open a gazelle. It was unseemly. It was unsporting. And of course the fans could never get enough of it. To sit among them with the score 66-0 and
