Friday, December 20, 2013
dead and gone. Neal hopped in his chair convulsively. “Well yes, well
yes, and now I think we’d better be cutting along because we gotta be in
Chicago by tomorrow night and we’ve already wasted several hours.” The
college boys thanked Uhl graciously and we were off again. I turned to
watch the kitchen light recede in the sea of night. Then I leaned ahead.
In no time at all we were back on the highway and that night I saw the
entire state of Nebraska unroll perceptibly before my eyes. A hundred
and ten miles an hour straight through, an arrow road, sleeping towns,
no traffic, and the Union Pacific Streamliner falling behind us in the
moonlight. I wasn’t frightened at all that night; it was the next day
when I saw how fast we were going that I gave it up and went in the back
seat to shut my eyes. Now in the moony night it was perfectly
legitimate to go 110 and talk and have all the Nebraska
towns---Ogallala, Gothenburg, Kearny, Grand Island, Columbus---unreel
with dreamlike rapidity as we roared ahead and talked. It was a
magnificent car, it could hold the road like a boat holds water. Gradual
curves were its singing ease. But Neal was punishing this car and by
the time we got to Chicago, not the next night but when it was still
daylight, the rods were all but gone. “Ah man what a dreamboat” sighed
Neal. “Think if you and I had a car like this what we could do. Do you
know there’s a road that goes down Mexico and all the way to Panama?-
-and maybe all the way to the bottom of South America where the Indians
are seven feet tall and eat cocaine on the mountainside? Yes! You and I,
Jack, we’d dig the whole world with a car like this because man the
road must eventually lead to the whole world. Ain’t nowhere else it can
go? Right? Oh and are we going cut around old Chi with this thing! Think
of it Jack I’ve never been to Chicago in all my life.” We’ll come in
there like gangsters in this Cadillac!” “Yes! And girls!---we can pick
up girls, in fact Jack I’ve decided to make extra special fast time so
we can have an entire evening to cut around in this thing. Now you just
relax and I’ll ball the jack all the way.” “Well how fast are you going
now?” “A steady one-ten I figure---you wouldn’t notice it. We’ve still
got all Iowa in the daytime and then I’ll make that old Illinois in
nothing flat.” The boys
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