Good Vibrations

by Tom Cunliffe

  ‘You guys headin’ up for Sturgis?’

  ‘No decision yet,’ I replied dismally, avoiding Roz’s eyes. ‘I guess you’re going?’

  ‘We are,’ said the grey-haired man. ‘I’ve been a coupla times, but Red here goes most years.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ I got in first, for once.

  ‘I’m from the East Coast,’ said our man. ‘Merchant seaman. I work three months, get three off. I love it up in Dakota. Cooler in summer, but don’t mess with winter.’

  Roz brightened at the prospect of sweat-free slumber.

  ‘So you’ve ridden across this far, same as we have?’

  ‘No way!’ cut in Red, ‘Rich has a camper van. We travel in that, sleep over in it nights. The Guzzi goes on a trailer. We take her down for a buzz round sometimes in the evening.’

  ‘Don’t you feel you should be riding all the way?’ asked Roz, perhaps deliberating about a better way of doing this thing.

  ‘Jesus no,’ responded Red. ‘Not on that ol’ Guzzi. Have you seen the buddy seat? My ass would never stand it. Plus, it’s cheaper this way. No room bills. Most people ship their bikes out to Sturgis one way or another. If you ain’t riding there, where are you going?’

  ‘San Francisco, then maybe back to Baltimore.’

  ‘Sweet Jesus!’ Red took another look at Roz. I had to say that if the two women had been assessed on image alone, it would have been Red cracking on across the prairie with her headband flowing in the endless wind, and Roz pruning lupins in her garden. But as Bernard Shaw’s butler observed, ‘You never can tell, sir. You never can tell.’

  Jim’s girlfriend Kim now joined in the conversation. Red was dressed for the road, if provocatively, but Kim was in a cocktail dress and heels, long blonde hair and manicured hands. She was another reminder that things are often not what they seem. Her main interest in Red, Rich and the Brit contingent was the machinery. She turned out to be a motor mechanic, more interested in how a Harley can air-cool its back cylinder at desert temperatures than anything, except Jim himself, who cut a manly figure as he kept the punters’ glasses topped up.

  Nobody could say why it is that Harleys don’t seize up in the heat, but Rich was soon extolling the virtues of the stylish Moto-Guzzi, whose own twin cylinders are arranged so as to poke out on either side into the airstream. Roz had lost interest before he started and soon Red had also heard enough.

  ‘Jim!’ She called along the bar, ‘bring us all a rattlesnake!’

  Jim upturned a variety of spirit bottles into a huge shaker, whirled it around a few times, then poured the contents into six large glasses.

  ‘Better drink along with you guys, I guess,’ he said. ‘That way I know how bad things are getting.’

  Roz had taken a cocktail of pills before leaving the cabin, and I glanced at her anxiously, but she was obviously firing on both cylinders, so I put the question of her sickness from my mind. The rattlesnake bit like its namesake and Red had ordered another round before the first had reached the bottom of our glasses.

  ‘We’ll all get together up in Sturgis,’ she said, loosening up, but handling the booze like a professional. ‘You’ll change your mind, Roz. Bound to. Bear Bluff’s the place to camp. I pitch my tent right under the cliff. There’s plenty of action, but I never saw nobody get shot.’

  ‘That all’s at the Buffalo Chip campground,’ put in Rich. ‘You don’t wanna go there. Not with a lady.’

  ‘So how do we find Bear Bluff – if we ever make it?’

  Before he could respond, a scuffle broke out at a table near the door. Four youths, who according to law must have been over twenty-one, began pushing and shoving. Standing by them was a girl perfectly turned out for stirring up the boys in shark-skin jeans with a chunky zip at the back and a black, lace-up bodice.

  Jim watched them hard for ten seconds, then things simmered down again.

  ‘Bear Bluff?’ Red continued, ‘Well, you go down towards… you take a right… Oh shit, I don’t know. You can’t miss it. Sturgis is a tiny town. Just ask anyone.’

  After two more rattlesnakes I was facing up to the fact that I must either leave the bike where it was for the night or run the gauntlet of the cops. The looming buildings surrounding the bar were perfect for hiding bike bandits. All manner of people passed though Branson and I’d heard reports of organised gangs heaving half a dozen Harleys on to low loaders and driving them away. The drunken ride home was going to be the best of two bad options, so I decided that I might as well be shot for a bull as a calf, stood my corner and ordered more rattlesnakes.

  ‘I’ll do these.’ A tall, elderly man with the regulation Stetson and perfect cowboy drawl joined our group. ‘Tired of drinkin’ alone!’

  Cactus Jack stood 6 feet 3 inches, lean and hard with a bootlace tie and high-heeled boots under a pair of blue jeans finished off by a cow’s-skull belt.

  ‘Where you from?’ Jim asked as we made space. I was struck by the relevance of this gambit between strangers who, on the face of things, have no more in common than having to choose between the same presidential non-entities. Never again would I open a conversation by mentioning the weather.

  ‘Down in Texas,’ Jack grabbed a stool, ‘grew up over the border in New Mexico. Right now, I’m sellin’ jerky. Used to be a cattle man, but my wife passed away three months gone. Home’s kinda empty. I’ll stay on the road for a year or so. Mebbe then I’ll settle down again.’

  We drank quietly for few minutes while Roz found out that ‘jerky’ is dried meat of the type that cowhands would victual on for the long trails before the days of refrigeration. Like the similarly redundant salt cod of the North Atlantic, its backers were guaranteed a market long after the product could have been consigned to history.

  ‘That stuff jus’ tastes so good.’

  It was around midnight when the girl in the lace-up leather top over by the door started screaming at the guy next to her to take his hands away. In no time, the young men were laying into each other. One hit the deck and was taking a kicking, the others kept upright and were lashing out with their fists. No knives yet. Rich and I were full of drink and little use to anyone, but Jim came flying over the bar like a champion hurdler, powered up by a tankful of rattlesnakes. He waded into the war zone without hesitation while the rest of us were clambering to our feet to go and help him. All four fighters gave him their immediate attention, urged on by the girl who had caused all the trouble. Things turned difficult and one of the guys managed to pin Jim from behind. I lurched off my stool, but before I could take a step, Cactus Jack sprang into the action like an antelope. Ignoring his undoubted age and what must have been half a pint of whiskey, he grabbed two of the guys by the hair, literally cracked their skulls together and while they were still staggering, threw them out on to the street. The odds were now even and the other pair didn’t wait to be asked to leave, but as they rushed for the door, Jim grabbed one by the collar.

  ‘The check’s forty-seven dollars, mister,’ he announced grimly, bleeding slightly from the corner of his mouth. ‘I’ll take fifty for cash.’

  The man fished a bill out of his shirt pocket and scurried out, dragging the girl after him.

  Jim straightened his collar, shook Jack solidly by the hand, mopped his face and served up a free round. Jack muttered something about the diversion having blown away a few cobwebs, and began to talk as only a man who spends too much time alone can.

  Being raised on a New Mexico ranch back in the forties and fifties, he had been at once innocent and sophisticated.

  ‘Didn’t know white girls had fannies ’til I was eighteen,’ he announced solemnly. ‘Thought that was only for them Spanish women.’

  I watched his eyes. He didn’t seem like a racist, but then he winked at me. He’d done well for himself with the girls from the kitchen and had steered clear of the boss’s daughter, that was all. Without a pause, he began describing the days when he and a partner ran cattle up to New York City on trucks. A thousand he
ad at a time.

  ‘We’d come blastin’ up that ol’ New Jersey Turnpike in a convoy like an army on the move. Cost a grand every time we gassed up. One station was just short of the George Washington Bridge. We was fillin’ our tanks an’ nobody came to clean my windscreen. I gave them a minute, then I told them to quit pumpin’. We was headin’ back out on to the highway when the guy comes chasin’ after me, cool as you like, an’ offers me a discount.’

  ‘You sure showed him,’ said Kim.

  ‘I sure did, and I told that mean-minded sonofabitch that there’s more in life than a few bucks. Old-fashioned manners is what this country needs. Them guys making that fuss jus’ now, they didn’t have no manners. If they had, they’d have gone outside to settle up, not bothered folks enjoyin’ a quiet drink. This guy sellin’ gas, he had no manners either. So we hauled on out and the next station cleaned our screens, swept our floors an’ checked our oil without bein’ asked. That’s what you want when you do business…’

  Jack suddenly broke off. I hadn’t noticed, but Roz had faded right out.

  ‘Ma’am, you don’t look so good,’ he said gently. ‘Why don’t I drive you an’ your man back home?’

  ‘What about the bike?’ I asked. My head felt like a pumpkin and Jack’s offer sounded just the ticket, but I was determined not to leave our iron steed outside this bar all night, even locked to the stanchion.

  ‘I’ll open both doors,’ said Jim decisively, ‘crank her right on in here. The Guzzi can stop over too, Rich, if you want.’

  And so Jim held open the batwing doors while I somehow wrestled Madonna up the steps and through the tables. Rich followed me in. He was in even worse shape and dropped the white bike on the porch. Willing arms dragged it up and soon the machines were on their props, gleaming in the low lights, smelling of hot oil and giving the bar-room a surreal air.

  Jack led the four of us out to the Jeep, we piled in and whirled away down the night. As we fell out again in front of our cabin, Roz started throwing up. I put her to bed while the rest limped into the kitchen. We put our feet up and drank until the sun flickered over the window sill.

  The following afternoon, I walked back to the bar to pick up Madonna. She was parked outside. No sign of Jim, no Guzzi, nobody there at all. Just a waiter I didn’t recognise and a few dropouts hanging over the bar.

  An hour later I was cleaning the bikes outside the cabin while Roz pulled herself around. We had to leave this place sometime, and tomorrow was going to be the day. The partner of the manageress stopped by to admire the machinery.

  ‘Saw y’all had a party last night,’ he said with a twinkle.

  ‘We got a bit bent down the road and some guys ran us back.’

  ‘Everyone needs to cut loose now and then.’

  He picked up a rag and started poking it between Betty’s awkward cooling fins, squatting on his haunches. He was fit, clear-skinned and as true-bred Anglo-Saxon as his girl was Hispanic. As we worked together in the afternoon sunshine, we exchanged life stories. He had seen things I could only imagine.

  He and his wife had married twelve years previously. They’d had a couple of children before drugs and hard liquor began to invade their idyll. Within a year, she was an addict and he a hopeless drunk. They’d fought, cheated and in the end divorced because, as he put it, their habits were incompatible and had become the pivot point of their existence. Still in love, they parted in despair and the children were taken into state care.

  At his lowest ebb, he had somehow found himself in Branson and been given a job in, of all places, a rehabilitation centre. He was introduced to the church and began to take a grip of his life. Three years later he was sufficiently recovered to trace his ex-wife to a strip joint and persuade her to rejoin him. Under his guidance, she had straightened out and now the kids had been restored to them. They had, as my host said, given their lives to the Lord.

  As I polished my crank case I thought what a success story this family was for old-time, Southern religion. The tracts in our room had seemed simple to the point of idiocy, yet here was the living proof. This man and his striking wife had been so deep in the gutter that all the experience of human behaviour would say there could be no scrabbling out. Now, in spite of everything, he was bringing up his kids in a clean little business someone had trusted him to look after. Neither he nor his wife had a hint of the ‘holier than thou’ anywhere in them, and in the morning I rode out reminding myself that it is unwise to laugh at a whole group on the evidence provided by an outspoken few. The ‘Bible’ Christians had done these people well.

  11

  RIDING THE PLAINS

  ‘Don’t go to Kansas and Oklahoma,’ had been the serious advice of many people as we proceeded west. ‘They’re so boring you’ll fall asleep on the bike,’ or, ‘Once you’ve seen one cornfield, you’ve seen them all,’ were typical reactions. After visiting Branson on the recommendation that it was a place not to be missed, we were starting to doubt advice of this type, though Branson had turned out to be a vital port in a storm despite itself.

  Changes in American scenery come on a continental scale and tend to creep up on you. In a small island like Britain, they smack you in the eye. After 50 more miles weaving though the hills, we became aware that the land was slowly easing away into a gently undulating green infinity. We were dropping down on to the Great Plains at last. Ahead, dancing in the heat that was once more establishing a stranglehold, lay Oklahoma. To the north burned the vast expanse of Kansas, described by the historian Carl Becker as a ‘state of mind, a religion, and a philosophy’.

  This, at last, was prairie country, where once the grass stood shoulder-high, where the endless herds of buffalo roamed in symbiosis alongside Native Americans who both hunted and revered them. Hawks and buzzards sailed the skies while the winds blew hot in summer and bitter cold in winter. Groups of cottonwood lived out their 100,000 days, surviving only if they escaped the axe of summer lightning or the tearing death of the tornado, while the tall grass rippled and waved through the centuries like the sea.

  One hundred and fifty years ago, an Act of Congress declared the territory open to settlement. It would never be the same again.

  The New World began here only six generations ago, but within two, most of the buffalo had been butchered as food for the new settlers and the army that protected their interests. The rest were slaughtered, an official policy designed to leave the Indians homeless, starving and bereft of the vital pillar of their culture. Much of the valuable carcass was trashed by the white man. The indigenous people had wasted nothing. Now they melted away like winter ice, retreating west and north. In the wake of this trauma a civilisation has grown up, and with it a radically altered landscape. Ad astra per aspera, is the state’s motto, ‘Through the wilderness to the stars.’

  Today, trucks and combines bowl by where once the buffalo was king; small towns have replaced nomadic encampments, but the snows still come, and the floods after summer storms. Tornadoes rip up houses, greedy for more than the trees, and giant hailstones pound down on tin roofs, leaving their mark as a reminder that modern man is only passing on the prairie breeze. Beneath the corn crops, the towering silos and the occasional sprawling city, the grasslands lie sleeping.

  We rode out on to this mysterious expanse in late afternoon. The worst of the heat was over, the roads ran straight at last and the bikes responded, seeming to change up a gear. Before we knew it, they had eaten up 100 miles of freshly harvested Oklahoma and had crossed the Kansas line.

  As the Harleys forged ahead, the journey took on a bizarre attitude, as though time were in suspension. For hours we floated weightless across infinite sunlit fields, only to be routed later in the day by monstrous rain and hail. The sense of being witness to a history so fearful and so close never left my mind, while the easier riding soothed Roz’s difficulties almost out of sight.

  In Kansas we came across the two extremities of historical monument presentation in a country which specialises i
n excess. The first was at eight after an early start from Coffeyville in the south-east of the state. The second came a day later in, of all places, Dodge City.

  Even since Kansas arrived on our itinerary, Roz had been anxious to visit The Little House on the Prairie. For much of our daughter’s early life, she was educated at sea by her mother aboard the traditional sailing boat that was our home. The exercise was successful, partly because Roz consistently presented the fact that life existed beyond the eccentricities of our immediate surroundings. Some of the vehicles for this leavening were the Little House books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, true stories of a pioneer family growing up in various frontier homesteads as the father tried to wrestle a living from virgin territory. Life in the Kansas cabin was precarious. Buffalo and Indians were still in residence and the wagon trains rumbled by, carrying those casting their lot even further from civilisation. A cottage has been reconstructed on the site where the family lived for one year.

  We puttered down a lonely lane to the Ingalls’ place across soft, undulating farmland. Not a cloud interfered with the sky and the dewy air was sweet with the scent of trees shading the cabin. It lay deserted in the morning sun, a statement of how to present heritage. Built of logs, caulked with mud and roofed with large shingles, it had a door at one end, a tiny window on each long wall and a stone chimney at the fourth side. It was secured with a simple padlock. A tasteful rustic sign gave a breakdown of the Ingalls’ travels, while a small notice advised that the caretaker would arrive at nine. I was for taking a quick look around then pressing on, but Roz pointed out that we were in no hurry. So we eased our souls by lying in the still grass, gazing up into the endless blue. The bike engines cooled off, ticking and pinging, while an insect orchestra tuned up for a hard day’s chirping as the players’ juices warmed in the sun.

  At ten minutes before nine, a pick-up stopped and a mature, weather-beaten man climbed down with a hint of arthritic stiffness. He walked with a stick, the complete plains farmer in blue denim dungarees and battered straw hat. His hands were broad, thick and work-hardened. Mr Hambling opened up for us and we brewed him tea on our bike stove which we all drank in the cool of the interior.