That’s about all I know right now and I’m not one to cry over spilt milk though it does sort of rub me the wrong way that the fire department didn’t bother to put out the fire in GASCOYNE CENTER. Everybody’s suing me and my assets are either all tied up or going to pot and I could use a little cash, you know how lawyers are about twiddling their thumbs until they’re dead sure there are cookies in the cookie jar. But anyway, when you come right down to it I haven’t got much to complain about since I was smart enough to salt a little away here and there, namely in Powderville which is about a hundred and fifty miles out of town right smack in the desert, so in the meantime I’ve got just enough to squeak by on.
So I’m just being nice and quiet until the time comes I can go back into town and give a piece of my mind to my so-called friends and I just sent my man George off on the Greyhound bus to town to take a little look-see at the scenery there, he’s the one who went back in last week and rescued the ’52 Hudson convertible I’ve got now and also my house trailer, and I told him to find out just one thing and that’s who’s running the shooting match now because I can’t make any big plans until I know that little item, and next week I’ll send him up north to the capital to see what’s going on, haven’t heard a peep out of anybody up there.
But I’ve been pretty busy since I got here though Powderville’s no great shakes of a town, a bunch of chicken farms and junkyards. It’s the first burg out of town where people start having car trouble and running out of money at the same time, you know how the desert is, but there’s a lot of opportunity out here and this is one I’m not letting slip by. I’ve already got options on all the land the big interstate freeway’s supposed to cross thanks to a little deal I pulled with the town council, bunch of drunks though they may be, and I just finished working my way into part ownership of the SAVAGE DESERT REPTILE FARM -THE WORLD’S LARGEST!, which isn’t true, but it’s going to be a lot bigger as soon as I scrape up the cash to get seven alligators out of hock in the train depot, bastards must have fed them top sirloin all the way from Pensacola, Florida. But those alligators and me are going to put Powderville on the map some day soon and there’s no sense sitting around and letting somebody else do it, so right now I’m heading out the main highway east with a bunch of SAVAGE DESERT REPTILE FARM signs in the trunk of the old Hudson to plant in the landscape to catch the suckers coming from back east who’ll pay anything for a cold beer while the kiddies watch the snakes and lizards.
I still get a lot of driving in out here, it’s the best way to keep cool, though the Hudson starts knocking and getting hot under the floorboards over forty-five, and right now I’m running past the DESERT JEWEL BEAUTIFUL ESTATES TRACT which has got the streets all laid out and a few fake phone poles on this dry lake bed but no houses because we haven’t found anybody yet with the proper frontier spirit to put down a thousand bucks to get the boom rolling. Rome wasn’t built in a day and it sure wasn’t built by people who asked silly questions about electricity and water and sewers first. I think this country’s getting too damn soft.
About now the phone rings but I wait and it turns out to be two shorts and a long which is for the quack who calls himself a doctor out here and not for me which probably means that some cactus farmer fell off his tractor. I don’t get much in the way of phone calls these days but seeing as I kind of need the rest that’s all right, the heat out here’s pretty exhausting and right now that old sun is zeroing in on the rearview and so I flip it down just as a Greyhound bus goes screaming past me about thirty miles over the speed limit, but from now on it’s going to be a little cooler so it won’t be so bad planting the signs, about five of them I’ve got to do this evening.
The site of my next BIG DADDY STATION comes into view on the left, nothing there now but a pile of rocks and some stakes and a few colored flags but as soon as we get this one up and the one planned for the other end of Powderville it’ll teach those Powderville yokels that if they won’t let me join them I’ll beat them at their own game. Just beyond here I think will be a good place for the next sign so I cross over the left lane and roll her into the sagebrush and hop out and untie the trunk lid and pull out a big one, SEE THE SERPENT THAT BIT EVE!!, and hammer it into the ground. Well that looks pretty good so I hop back inside and take a swig from the old canteen, having worked up a sweat over that one even though the sun’s going down. Then I drop her in low and plow through the sagebrush for a couple of hundred yards and stop and put up the next one, SEE CLEOPATRA’S ASP!!!, which is about enough for this neck of the woods so I roll her back through the beer cans onto the highway and head on east. I figure that in two more months we’ll have so many signs on the highway coming from the East that you’ll be able to drive for three hundred miles without ever being completely out of sight of one, no better place than the desert to do a little brainwashing.
I run her up to about forty and let a couple of semis pass and settle back in the seat and hold her on that long white line, thinking that what I really ought to do is pull back over to the side and take a little snooze until the heat goes down some more, and so that’s just what I do. I shut off the motor but since the Hudson’s seat won’t go back, probably some chewing gum in the works, I stretch out sideways and prop my head against the door and watch the cars go by, wondering which ones are going to have the good sense to stop at the SAVAGE DESERT REPTILE FARM and plunk down a buck-fifty a head, every little bit helps.…
Gascoyne Page 19