leaves you with a stopping distance of about three miles. I lumped on the brakes with all my teet and made a noise like Tarzan missing a vine as the car went into a skid. It slide sideways past the stop sign and out onto a paved highway, where it came to a halt, rocking gently from side to side. At that instant an enormous semitrailer truck-all silver horns and flashing lights-blared mightily at me as it swept past, setting the car to rocking again. Had I slid out onto the highway three seconds earlier it would have crushed the car into something about the size of a bouillon cube. I pulled onto the shoulder and got out to examine the damage. It looked as if the car had been divebombed with bags of flour. Bits of raw metal showed through where paint had been pinged away. I thanked God that my mother was so much smaller than me. I sighed, suddenly feeling lost and far from home, and noticed ahead a road sign pointing the way to Quincy. I had come to a halt facing in the right direction, so at least something had come of it.
It was time to stop. Just down the road stood a little town, which I shall call Dullard lest the people recognize themselves and take me to court or come to my house and batter me with baseball bats.
On the edge of town was an old motel which looked pretty seedy, though judging by the absence of charred furniture in the front yard it was clearly a step up from the sort of place my dad would have chosen. I pulled onto the gravel drive and went inside. A woman of about seventy-five was sitting behind the desk. She wore butterfly glasses and a beehive hairdo. She was doing one of those books that require you to find words in a mass of letters and circle them. I think it was called Word Puzzles for Morons.
'Help yew?' she drawled without looking up.
'I'd like a room for the night, please.'
'That'll be thirty-eight dollars and fifty cents,' she replied, as her pen fell greedily on the word yup.
I was nonplussed. In my day a motel room cost about twelve dollars. 'I don't want to buy the room,'
I explained. 'I just want to sleep in it for one night.'
She looked at me gravely over the tops of her glasses. 'The room is thirty-eight dollars and fifty cents. Per night. Plus tax. You want it or not?' She had one of those disagreeable accents that add a syllable to every word. Tax came out as tayax.
We both knew that I was miles from anywhere. 'Yes, please,' I said contritely. I signed in and crunched across the gravel to my suite du nuit. There appeared to be no other customers.
I went into my room with my bag and had a look around, as you do in a new place. There was a black-and- white TV, which appeared to get only one channel, and three bent coat hangers. The bathroom mirror was cracked, and the shower curtains didn't match. The toilet seat had a strip of paper across it saying SANITIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION, but floating beneath it was a cigarette butt, adrift in a little circle of nicotine. Dad would have liked it here, I thought.
I had a shower-that is to say, water dribbled onto my head from a nozzle in the wall-and afterwards went out to check out the town. I had a meal of gristle and baked whiffle ball at a place called-aptly-Chuck's. I didn't think it was possible to get a truly bad meal anywhere in the Midwest, but Chuck managed to provide it. It was the worst food I had ever had-and remember, I've lived in England. It had all the attributes of chewing gum, except flavor. Even now when I burp I can taste it.
Afterwards I had a look around the town. There wasn't much. It was mostly just one street, with a grain silo and railroad tracks at one end and my motel at the other, with a couple of gas stations and grocery stores in between. Everyone regarded me with interest. Years ago, in the midst of a vivid and impressionable youth, I read a chilling story by Richard Matheson about a remote hamlet whose inhabitants waited every year for a lone stranger to come to town so that they could roast him for their annual barbecue. The people here watched me with barbecue eyes.
Feeling self-conscious, I went into a dark place called Vern's Tap and took a seat at the bar. I was the only customer, apart from an old man in the corner with only one leg. The barmaid was friendly.
She wore butterfly glasses and a beehive hairdo. You could see in an instant that she had been the local good- time girl since about 193-1. She had 'Ready for Sex' written all over her face, but
'Better Bring a Paper Bag' written all over her body. Somehow she had managed to pour her capacious backside into some tight red toreador pants and to stretch a clinging blouse over her bosom. She looked as if she had dressed in her granddaughter's clothes by mistake. She was about sixty. I could see why the guy with one leg had chosen to sit in the farthest corner.
I asked her what people in Dullard did for fun. 'What exactly did you have in mind, honey?' she said and rolled her eyes suggestively. 'Well, perhaps something in the way of legitimate theater or maybe an international chess congress,' I croaked weakly. However, once we established that I was only prepared to love her for her mind, she became quite sensible and even rather charming. She told me in great and frank detail about her life, which seemed to have involved a dizzying succession of marriages to guys who were now in prison or dead as a result of shootouts, and dropped in breathtakingly candid disclosures like, 'Now Jimmy kilt his mother, I never did know why, but Curtis never kilt nobody except once by accident when he was robbing a gas station and his gun went off. And Floyd-he was my fourth husband-he never kilt nobody neither, but he used to break people's arms if they got him riled.'
'You must have some interesting family reunions,' I ventured politely.
'I don't know what ever became of Floyd,' she went on. 'He had a little cleft in his chin rot year'-after a moment I realized that this was downstate Illinois for 'right here, on this very spot indicated'--'that made him look kind of like Kirk Douglas. He was real cute, but he had a temper on him. I got a two-foot scar right across my back where he cut me with an ice pick. You wanna see it?' She started to hoist up her blouse, but I stopped her. She went on and on like that for ages.
Every once in a while the guy in the corner, who was clearly eavesdropping, would grin, showing large yellow teeth. I expect Floyd had torn his leg off in a moment of high spirits. At the end of our conversation, the barmaid gave me a sideways look, as if I had been slyly trying to fool her, and said, 'Say, where do you come from anyway, honey?'
I didn't feeling like giving her my whole life story, so I just said, 'Great Britain.'
Well, I'll tell you one thing, honey,' she said, 'for a foreigner you speak English real good.'
Afterwards I retired with a six-pack to my motel, where I discovered that the bed, judging by its fragrance and shape, had only recently been vacated by a horse. It had a sag in it so severe that I could see the TV at its foot only by splaying my legs to their widest extremity. It was like lying in a wheelbarrow. The night was hot and the air conditioner, an aged Philco window unit, expended so much energy making a noise like a steelworks that it could only manage to emit the feeblest and most occasional puffs of cool air. I lay with the six-pack on my chest,
