effectively immobilized, and drank the beers one by one. On the TV was a talk show presided over by some smooth asshole in a blazer whose name I didn't catch. He was the kind of guy for whom personal hair care was clearly a high priority. He exchanged some witless banter with the bandleader, who of course had a silvery goatee, and then turned to the camera and said in a solemn voice, 'But seriously, folks. If you've ever had a personal problem or trouble at work or you just can't seem to get a grip on life, I know you're gonna be real interested in what our first guest has to tell you tonight. Ladies and gentlemen: Dr. Joyce Brothers.'
As the band launched into a perky tune and Joyce Brothers strode onstage, I sat up as far as the bed would allow me and cried, 'Joyce! Joyce Brothers!' as if to an old friend. I couldn't believe it. I hadn't seen Joyce Brothers for years and she hadn't changed a bit. Not one hair on her head had altered a fraction since the last time I saw her, droning on about menstrual flow, in 1962. It was as if they had kept her in a box for twenty-five years. This was as close as I would ever come to time travel. I watched agog as she and Mr. Smoothie chattered away about penis envy and fallopian tubes. I kept expecting him to say to her, 'Now seriously, Joyce, here's a question all America has been wanting me to ask you: What sort of drugs do you take to keep yourself looking like that?
Also, when are you going to do something about that hairstyle? And finally, why is it, do you think, that talk- show bozos like me all over America keep inviting you back again and again?' Because, let's be frank, Joyce Brothers is pretty dull. I mean, if you turn on the Johnny Carson show and she is one of the guests you know that absolutely everybody in town must be at some really big party or premiere. She is like downstate Illinois made flesh.
Still, like most immensely boring things, there is something wonderfully comforting about her. Her cheery visage on the glowing box at the foot of my bed made me feel strangely warm and whole and at peace with the world. Out here in this crudbucket motel in the middle of a great empty plain I began for the first time to feel at home. I somehow knew that when I awoke I would see this alien land in a new but oddly familiar light. With a happy heart, I fell asleep and dreamed gentle dreams of southern Illinois and the rolling Mississippi River and Dr. Joyce Brothers. And it's not often you hear anyone say that either.
CHAPTER 4
IN THE MORNING I crossed the Mississippi at Quincy; somehow it didn't look as big or majestic as I had remembered it. It was stately. It was imposing. It took whole minutes to cross. But it was also somehow flat and dull. This may have had something to do with the weather, which was likewise flat and dull. Missouri looked precisely the same as Illinois, which had looked precisely the same as Iowa. The only difference was that the car license plates were a different color.
Near Palmyra, I stopped at a roadside cafe for breakfast and took a seat at the counter. At this hour, just after eight in the morning, it was full of farmers. If there is one thing farmers sure do love it is to drive into town and spend half a day (a whole day in winter) sitting at a counter with a bunch of other farmers drinking coffee and teasing the waitress in a half-assed sort of way. I had thought that this was the busiest time of their year, but they didn't seem to be in any rush. Every once in a while one of them would put a quarter on the counter, get up with the air of a man who has just loaded six gallons of coffee into his belly, tell Tammy not to do anything he wouldn't do, and depart. A moment later we would hear the grip of his pickup truck's wheels on the gravel drive, someone would say something candid abouT him, provoking appreciative laughter, and the conversation would drift lazily back to hogs, state politics, Big Eight football and-when Tammy was out of earshot-sexual predilections, not least Tammy's.
The farmer next to me had only three fingers on his right hand. It is a little-noticed fact that most farmers have parts missing off them. This used to trouble me when I was small. For a long time I assumed that it was because of the hazards of farming life. After all, farmers deal with lots of dangerous machinery. But when you think about it, a lot of people deal with dangerous machinery, and only a tiny proportion of them ever suffer permanent injury. Yet there is scarcely a farmer in the Midwest over the age of twenty who has not at some time or other had a limb or digit yanked off and thrown into the next field by some noisy farmyard implement. To tell you the absolute truth, I think farmers do it on purpose. I think working day after day beside these massive threshers and balers with their grinding gears and flapping fan belts and complex mechanisms they get a little hypnotized by all the noise and motion. They stand there staring at the whirring machinery and they think, 'I wonder what would happen if I just stuck my finger in there a little bit.' I know that sounds crazy. But you have to realize that farmers don't have a whole lot of sense in these matters because they feel no pain. It's true. Every day in the Des Moines Register you can find a story about a farmer who has inadvertently torn off an arm and then calmly walked six miles into the nearest town to have it sewn back on. The stories always say, 'Jones, clutching his severed limb, told his physician,
'I seem to have cut my durn arm off, Doc.' ' It's never: 'Jones, spurting blood, jumped around hysterically for twenty minutes, fell into a swoon and then tried to run in four directions at once,'
which is how it would be with you or me. Farmers simply don't feel pain-that little voice in your head that tells you not to do something because it's foolish and will hurt like hell and for the rest of your life somebody will have to cut up your food for you doesn't speak to them. My grandfather was just the same. He would often be repairing the car when the jack would slip and he would call out to you to come and crank it up again as he was having difficulty breathing, or he would run over his foot with the lawn mower, or touch a live wire, shorting out the whole of Winfield but leaving himself unscathed apart from a ringing in the ears and a certain lingering smell of burnt flesh. Like most people from the rural Midwest, he was practically indestructible. There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor and old age. It was old age that got my grandfather.
I drove on forty miles south to Hannibal, and went to see Mark Twain's boyhood home, a trim and tidy whitewashed house with green shutters set incongruously in the middle of the downtown. It cost two dollars to get in and was a disappointment. It purported to be a faithful reproduction of the original interiors, but there were wires and water sprinklers clumsily evident in every room. I also very much doubt that young Samuel Clemens's bedroom had Armstrong vinyl on the floor (the same pattern as in my mother's kitchen, I was interested to note) or that his sister's bedroom had a plywood partition in it. You don't actually go in the house; you look through the windows. At each window there is a recorded message telling you about that room as if you were a moron ('This is the kitchen. This is where Mrs. Clemens would prepare the family's meals. . . .'). The whole thing is pretty shabby, which wouldn't be so awful if it were owned by some underfunded local literary society and they were doing the best they could with it. In fact, it is owned by the city of Hannibal and it draws 135,000 visitors a year. It's a little gold mine for the town.
I proceeded from window to window behind a bald fat guy, whose abundant rolls of flesh made him look as if he were wearing an assortment of inner tubes beneath his shirt. 'What do you think of it?'
I asked him.
He fixed me with that instant friendliness Americans freely adopt with strangers. It is their most becoming trait.
'Oh, I think it's great. I come here whenever I'm in Hannibal-two, three times a year. Sometimes I go out of my way to come here.'
'Really?' I tried not to sound dumbfounded.
