The Complete Collection. William Wharton

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      Joan tried to keep them on the floor of the back seat with her but that space was needed for suitcases to go in and out of motels, so they packed them in the trunk of the car.

      They drove right across the desert in midsummer. When Joan unpacked the records, they were baked together into one solid wavy thick record, the thickest Glenn Miller record in the world.

      During the war, I’d dream about those records. When I got home, I was going to play them for at least two weeks getting myself straightened out. I’d make up different concerts in my mind, trying to remember the music.

      So I came home. After about an hour of welcoming, I ask where my records are. Joan motions me to follow her. Nobody says anything. She takes me into her room and from the bottom of her closet brings out this black, round lump. I cried. At that time I could cry easily. I was having a hard time keeping myself from crying about almost everything.

      I was in a tent in the middle of a muddy field being transported back to my outfit after being wounded the first time when we got the news Miller had disappeared. I’d been being shuffled from hospitals to repple-depples for almost a month. This place had a genuine old-fashioned bed-check-Charley type who’d come over our field at chow time and bomb the tents from an antiquated monoplane. There wasn’t any anti-aircraft unit around, so we’d all run out to fire MIs and BARs at him; our before-chow evening target practice.

      I think this nut dropped those bombs by hand over the side like W.W.I. They were handmade jobbies built from strapped-together masher grenades; about half didn’t go off. Another fanatic doing a German-style, old-man-Hemingway scene.

      He’s just done his little circle and dropped two bombs. They both dudded in a muddy field and we didn’t hit him. I’m going back to the tent for my mess kit when the mail clerk of this transient company comes by, passing out copies of Stars & Stripes. I open mine and there it is. ‘MAJOR GLENN MILLER MISSING IN ACTION OVER CHANNEL! SEARCHERS INDICATE PLANE IS PROBABLY LOST!’ I can’t believe it.

      I go back to my tent and let it soak in privately. All the music, the church dances, what seemed my wonderful abbreviated childhood, finished. I felt cheated; cut off from the best part of my life; knowing it would never be the same again.

      Sure, this is true for everybody and everything, even without a war or critical deaths. But I’d been sustaining myself on the illusion I’d be going back; not only going back in the geographic sense but going back to the way it was, continuing where I’d left off.

      Squatting there in the tent, in that spring evening, I let go. I was almost late for chow.

      The cowboy music on the radio is incessant. There can’t be more than ten different tunes they use; only the words are changed. I try listening to those words and they’re American all right, upside-down America or maybe inside out.

      I reach over and switch it off. Billy smiles.

      ‘God bless you, kind sir. Five more minutes and I’d’ve pulled out the trusty six-shooter and put one right through my Stetson.’

      I started laughing. God, it feels good to laugh. It seems I haven’t laughed out loud in six months. And normally I’m a big laugher, with a terrible snuffling walrus guffaw. I laugh so hard I worry I might be getting hysterical. Billy’s laughing too, I think most at my laughing.

      ‘Dad, what this world needs is some new cowboy songs, maybe porno lyrics closer to the way it is.’

      We go through tunnels and there are incredible rock formations, beautiful as Bryce. Probably somewhere along in here we’ve crossed the Continental Divide.

      You can tell we’ve passed over something. From here on, everything’s different. It’s the first long step east. It’s a giant step to Europe when you go over that big rock hill. This side is more civilized, tame. It’s less exciting, sure, but a hell of a lot easier to live with.

      Here’s where tame animals start. The people aren’t tame yet, neither are the plants much, no real agriculture.

      Back on the other side it’s all wild: wild plants, wild rocks, wild people, wild skies, wild water and wild animals. The only exceptions, a few people-ghettos like Los Angeles or San Francisco.

      We’ll be going through some of the most extensive tame-animal country in the world, straight across Kansas, four hundred miles of prime tame-animal country. When we cross the Mississippi, tame plants really start; and on the other side of the Appalachians tame people.

      We’ve come out of the mountains and are on straight four-and-four highway. This is our payoff. Billy seems hypnotized. I look over and we’re going eighty. Christ, there’s a fifty-five-mile speed limit.

      ‘Look at the speedometer, Billy; heh, heh, heh, we’re really moving.’

      I don’t lay it on, just say it the way I’d say, ‘Look at that yellow cow out the window there.’ But he does slow down, slows to sixty-five. After eighty, it feels as if we’re going thirty.

      There’s nothing out the windows; the road doesn’t curve an inch; like a flat railroad. And tame animals, cows, steers, are out there all around us.

      Billy’s started laughing and giggling to himself. Sometimes he hums and then marks time with his left foot.

      ‘Listen to this, Dad; the first meaningful set of Western lyrics since “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie”.’

      He starts singing, a blend of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie. He’s using number three of the cowboy tunes.

      ‘In the valleys and the hills of the Oregon wood,

      Not a chain saw screams like Frieda’s could.

      Fightin’ and acussin’ are a logger’s game

      But they all go quiet at Frieda’s name.

      ‘Then there’s a chain-saw solo. I could do it on a guitar easy.’

      He starts humming and razzing, making noises that are supposed to be a chain-saw chorus.

      ‘Then it goes – wait a minute – Yeah!

      ‘Frieda has elbows like an elephant’s knees;

      Some people say she stands when she pees;

      She just ain’t much for the birds and bees,

      But you oughtta see Frieda fellin’ them trees.’

      He does his buzzing, humming, razzing again. There’s a long quiet while he’s putting the next part together. He’s still beating it out with his bare foot and giggling.

      ‘OK, here it is, I think.

      ‘Frieda met her end one dark, gray day,

      Fellin’ two at once or so they say;

      The logs cut easy and she wondered why,

      Then saw the saw sticking through her thigh.’

      We have some more mouth noises. I never knew he could make so many different sounds; he almost does sound like a guitar. I’ve heard him make all the СКАЧАТЬ