Chapter20 Long road to Amarillo
Oklahoma stretched out for so long, it seemed as if Texas would never arrive. Signs announced Elk City just ahead, which according to Bill was close to Texas.
Billboards littered both sides of the highway, often advertising accommodations still hundreds of miles away. Behind them, like the backdrop to an old wester, flatlands stretched out to the horizon.
Texas came without fanfare, little changing except for the signs that announcing Amarillo ahead, though a number of small towns came first, like Shamrock, popping up out of the dusk like a cactus, with its already famous U-Drop Inn Cafe, a building of white brick, awning over the side windows like vintage Victorian building and two pointy towers, one saying cafe, above the U-Drop Inn, the other saying Conoco, with a 76 degrees cool sign, and an overhang next to this for the Tower Motel. Signs dotted that whole side of the highway, making the place look more crowded than it actually was.
Once the bus rolled out of the tiny town again, the vast emptiness reappeared, miles and miles of it, with no relief until the next tiny town, Alanreed with its Regal Reptile Ranch and a huge orange sign with black letters saying rattlers snakes on it and a small building, like a gas station with a couple of windows and additional signs advertising live poison rattle snakes being shown today. A thing like a snake hung down from a wire, and an additional sign beyond that advertised things other similar items. A silver trailer sat behind the largest of the signs, as if the owners sought to make a quick getaway if things got out of hand.
Caroline came by where I sat, paused, but went on without saying anything other than hello. I daydreamed, frequently thinking of Louise in Colorado, and wondered if she expected me at all, rumor having reached her of my coming.
The daydreams of my uncles lurking somewhere nearby startled me back to full wakefulness and the boring landscape passing by my hand clutching the pistol in my pocket.
At McLean, the bus passed the Cowboy Drive-In, or at least the sign if not the outdoor theater, and in town, the Avalon theater, a stunning accomplishment that a town the size of a postage stamp could house two movie houses.
From the landscape on either side of the road, Texas seemed nearly as barren as the moon. Just west of McLean, a tall sign mostly made of wires broke up the flatness a little, with letters across the high part that spelled out the word "Rattlesnakes," with smaller letters have way down saying, "exit now." Needless to say, the bus rolled on passed the exit as highway signs indicated the approach to Amarillo and a number of buildings along either side suggesting civilization.
A diner boasted of fine beef and exquisite sea food. The beef made sense. But the ocean – even the Gulf of Mexico southeast was a stretch. This was the Panhandle, an odd northern projection at the Northwest corner of the state, nearly as far from the Gulf as from the Pacific.
Amarillo proved to be a letdown, differing from the other towns along the highway only in size, except that it had more industry – like Pittsburgh, a lot of motels.
One motel neon sign was actually shaped like the state of Texas and another Inn called itself the Big Texan Steak Ranch with a cartoon cowboy sign that looked a little like Roy Rogers. Dismal men wearing cowboy hats lounged outside nearly every building, watching the bus pass by.
When the bus stopped fully, the driver rose, stretched, then shouted back his thanks to the passengers. Caroline pranced down the aisle from the rear, carrying a coat over her arm, touching people here and there in a hurried attempt to shake their hands. She did not pause when she passed me nor tried to touch my hand, but gave me a wink and a nod, then stopped when she got to the front, to speak one last time over the PA system, saying a new hostess and driver would take us on the next leg of our trip.
And just like that, she was gone, flowing down the steps and into the gravel yard, where I lost sight of her, but the Wartons, leaning closer to the window watched where she went and who she reached when she got there. A moment later, a sagging station wagon rattled out onto the road in a cloud of smoke, her face framed by the passenger side window.
"She was with a black man," Mrs. Warton told me with a clearly sarcastic laugh. "Did you know your girlfriend had a black man for a lover?"
"She's not my girlfriend," I said and sank a little deeper into my seat, not exactly ashamed, so much as amazed at the flow of circumstance, wondering what Caroline would have done had I decided to get off with her. Would the three of us driven off together? Or would I have stood in the flat gravel yard like a fool staring off at the two lovers as they laughed over the joke, they had played on me?
"Leave off the boy," Bill said, giving me a nod, as if saying he approved of my decision.
"You've got to watch yourself," Mrs. Warton said, ignoring her husband's advice. "You never know what can happen to you if you start taking off with strange people like her.”
"I suppose not," I said, shivering, waiting for the new driver and hostess to come, knowing that it would be a wait before they did, and that I should get off, stretch me legs, take a pee in a toilet that didn't shake, rattle and roll with every bump. Yet somehow, I just wanted to sit where I was, wanted to keep my feet from ever setting down on Texan soil.
I slept a little, and woke when the bus began to move, having seen neither the new driver nor new hostess board.
Just west of Amarillo, a small sign advertised a place call Jesse's Cave, where they served homemade pies, steaks and dinners, and suddenly, I found myself hungry again.
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