Innocents on the Lamb

It was an unbearable heat that made everything warm to the touch, from door handles to picture windows. Whole store displays melted before my eyes; plastic soldiers slaughtered by the rays through the glass.  I had felt worse back east, where it grew not so hot, but much more unbearable, moist air thick with pollution that seemed lacking here. I imagined I could sleep here in this heat, where as I could not back east during its muggiest nights. The suffering, of course, came later, with calamine lotion and prayers that the rays did not cause eventual skin cancer. I lit a cigarette and leaned against the warm wall of the building watching the other passengers exit the bus, each wearing the same expression of distaste after having been protected from the elements by tinted glass and air conditioning for most of the trip west. I kept thinking how unlike November this was, and how in New York the snow would soon be falling, and how I should have been back in my attic room, staring out ...

  The bus turned south. We turned off route 40 and slid down the center of the state along route 17. To one side of the road, the distant hills turned into a dusty haze, while croppings of stone showed to the other like skyscrapers built in the middle of nowhere. Signs along the roadside indicated the beginning of open range, and the fence that had accompanied along the road through the Painted Desert now vanished I could have hopped off the bus at any time and walked anywhere I wanted, though the scrub lands now nearly as wide as the sky itself. I would have perished within a few hours. The excitement of Flagstaff faded from the other passengers' faces, sending most back into that sleepish on-the-road mood that had filled them for most of the trip through the plains. While this part of the country had its stark contrasts, we all hungered for our final destination, and a rest to the ceaseless sense of motion that the last three days had meant. We had been on the road for three days...

    The road did not get any sweeter west of Albuquerque as if the planet had ceased to honor life as I remembered it back east, miles and miles of desert stretching out as far as I could see, although now, to the northwest, the dark smudge of mountains grew, the southern elbow of the Rocky Mountains as they twisted west across the edge of New Mexico and into Northeastern Arizona. Along with the gas stations and the roadside cafes, we passed signs of a different sort, images of the fearful past when vehicles struggled to make the trip across the next 700 miles of desert. One sign advertised waterbags, although from the signs of the place, the watering hole hadn't been used in many years, though the image of the sweating skull still showed like a deadly symbol of what the unprotected or unsuspecting traveler could expect. We had crossed into Indian Country, although only a few hints marked the change, as if in land so undesirable at this, few laid claim to the sage brush or the...

  Once we crossed into Arizona, I picked up in the book I had purchased in Philadelphia, a piece of what I thought at the time was airport fiction but centered around the state in which I now traveled. This was clearly a reprint because the picture of Anthony Quinn was on the cover from a movie made based on the book, he dressed as a plains indian.   My friend Hank, back East, would have been offended by the novel's title, The Drunken Indian, claiming it was politically incorrect. I did not automatically believe every Indian was a saint nor as Mark Twain seemed to think, every indian was a drunk. The only Indian I'd seen in my life were those on television and those on the side of the road now selling trinkets to the tourists. I wasn't even sure I wanted to meet one, not so much fearing the loss of my scalp, as the sense of alien-ness such a meeting might make me feel. Like many people I would talk to later, I felt an incredible sense of inferiority now that I had reached...

    Just where Texas ended and New Mexico began, I don't recall, having lost interest in the signs after leaving Amarillo.  I wanted to get the rest of the trip over and done with, so I could plan my next move, and the miles between me and L.A. seemed wasted to me, as if they had ceased to have any meaning in the overall context of my life. I hadn’t realized just how far 1,000 miles was or two or three until I had traveled it by bus, not just the length of it, but the constant buzz of the air conditioning, the rumble of the tires on the uneven road, even sounds of other passengers – the snores, the coughs, the mumbling complaints, the whispers in the dark into dawn, bickering couples, outbreak of someone stirred out of nightmare. Sleep – at least real sleep – was just not possible. I dozed, then jerked away at some bump in the road or some cough in the dark, and then struggled to slip back into semi-consciousness, at time, realizing that it was me that had cried out. Ever...

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 t...

  The land grew slowly out of darkness as the sun rose behind the moving bus, Clinton arriving as the last gasp of a city before the great plunge towards Texas. The route, loaded with is own landmarks, like the Ideal Trailer Park, where signs advertised wholesale fireworks with red and white letters and black and white painted rockets like some primitive cave painting, with a walkup window where a clerk might have sat. Then came Pop Hicks Restaurant next door to the Glancy Motor Hotel, then the Del Rancho Hamburger restaurant with its large cowboy sign holding up a large hamburger. Beyond this came wasteland again, windswept hills along one side of the highway, stucco-sided houses propped up in neat folds of land. A bus air conditioner struggled against the heat, steaming the windows, revealing streaks left by the leaning heads of passengers or at other times the nose and finger prints of kids pressing to see the world outside, like secret writing from some ancient tribe ...