The Down Under Trio, as they were known to their coworkers, were all originally from Australia and had kept their slithery accents to prove it. All had once upon a time been journalists but now were employed by a scurrilous rag called the Weekly Galaxy, headquartered in a section of central Florida that looked — and was — even more godforsaken than this spot here, were that possible. The trio consisted first of Harry Razza, an aging matinee idol with thickly sculptured — and no doubt dyed — auburn hair, a remarkably untrustworthy narrow mustache, and the roguish smile of one who sees himself, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to be quite the ladies’ man. Second, there was Bob Sangster, a rangy, laconic, workmanlike fellow with a large nose and the unruffled manner of a paid-up union member. And finally, there was Louis B. Urbiton, oldest and usually drunkest of the trio, an indefatigable reveler and cutup with a deceptively mature and even bankerish mien.
Though not at the moment, in emergency conditions here at this intersection. “Something must be done,” announced Louis B. as he sensed the bourbon growing warm in the flask in his hip pocket, subjected to all these harmful rays of the sun.
“Ah, yes,” Harry agreed. “But what?”
“That fellow never gets tired,” Bob pointed out, nodding at the metronomic deputy.
The deputy had halted eastbound traffic on 76 to permit a lot of left turns here and there. “Let me see what I can do,” Harry offered, and approached a pickup truck in the stopped line of traffic, its cabin containing a man and a dog — the man driving — its bed empty. The dog’s window was open. Speaking politely to both man and dog, Harry said, “B’pardon. Do you know the Palace?”
Man and dog both glowered, reacting to Harry’s accent. The dog kept his opinion to himself, but the man said, “You a faggot?”
Harry recoiled, his mustache wrinkling. “Are you,” he demanded, “asking me for a date? The cheek!”
The man blinked. “What?”
“Next, you’ll want the dog in with us! What sort of place is this?” Without waiting for an answer, Harry turned about and made his way back to the sidewalk and his two compatriots, saying, “Perverts, would you believe it? In small-town America.”
The deputy had to wave at the man and the dog in the pickup a lot before they got their wits about themselves enough to drive away through the intersection. Meantime, Louis B. said, “Let me try next.”
“Be prepared for a shock,” Harry advised him.
The deputy had now stopped the northbound traffic on 165. Louis B. threaded through the turning southbounders over to a station wagon containing one woman and an indeterminate number of children — somewhere between four and seven. Producing from his clothing one of the many bits of false identification he kept on and about his person, he said, “Madame, I am, as you see, a journalist with the Washington Post, on an important assignment with my confreres over there, to—”
“Police!” screamed the woman.
“We are legitimate journalists, Madame, and—”
“Rape! Assault! Police!”
“Madame, intercourse with you of any kind is the furthest—”
“Children! Help!”
The children rolled down their window and gleefully threw a lot of candy at Louis B., most of it covered with lint. Some stuck to his clothing — for days — but most simply made stains, then rolled to the ground.
“Good day, Madame,” Louis B. said, lifted a nonexistent hat, took a jujube in the eye, and marched with dignity back to the sidewalk. “Not a friendly place,” he informed his team.
“Well, I’ll give it a try,” Bob said. Taking from his pocket a twenty-dollar bill, he stepped off the curb and raised both arms high above his head, the twenty stretched between his hands.
Immediately, a six-room mobile home driven by a gent of 127, with his 124-year-old wife in the copilot’s seat, slammed to a halt right next to them. The driver took his teeth from his pocket, popped them into his head, turned a white smile on Bob, and said, “Where you headed?”
“Palace Inn.”
“Climb aboard. You and your pals take the living room. Martha, give the boys some ice water.”
“Hospitality,” Bob murmured, turning over the twenty to the sweet-faced Martha. “It makes the world go round.”
4
And what fresh hell is this?
It wasn’t Sara’s own life that was passing before her eyes with horrid slowness as she edged infinitesimally forward with the rest of the traffic; it was somebody else’s life, someone Sara automatically both pitied and loathed. Nevertheless, Sara felt as though she were the one drowning.
Texans Bob-O-Links. Foggy River Boys. Ride the Ducks? What the hell is Ride the Ducks? Baldknobbers? Presleys? Isn’t he dead? All these signs, all these billboards, all these flashing lights, moving by her car on both sides in sloooooww mo.
The highway from Springfield had emptied Sara here at last, without warning, into the worst traffic jam she’d ever experienced in her life. Campers, pickups, huge tour buses, station wagons, every kind of motorized vehicle known to man — all crept both ways along this narrow, winding ridge road, two traffic lanes and an empty center lane for immediate left turns only, flanked by any number of country-music theaters intermixed with the most appalling examples of family fun: water rides, roller coasters, parachute jumps. Bungee jumping inside a tower. Family restaurants; all you can eat at our buffet. Family motels. Family shows. Family shopping malls. And all of it perched like colorful scavenger birds along the teetery rim of this ridgeline, so narrow that beyond the gauntlet of fun on both sides of the road, the stony land could be seen to fall precipitously away into semidesert, as though God had blasted everything else in the whole world and had left just this one meandering highland line of neon glitz as a reminder of what it was that had teed Him off in the first place.
Sara snailed westward. This endless traffic was like a punishment in a fairy tale; you have to push this vehicle forever with your nose while crows peck at your eyes. No, not crows; there’s nothing black in Branson.
And there’s no such thing as entertainment for the whole family, either.
A traffic light. (The pinwheeling deputy had left an hour ago, the light functioning less entertainingly in his place.) No one, faced with this light, seemed to know what to do next or which way to turn. (That’s why the deputy.) Get on with it, will you?
Through the light. Roy Clark; well, at least it’s a name a person has heard of. And just beyond Roy’s lil ole Celebrity Theatre is the Lodge of the Ozarks, which Trend’s travel person had assured Sara was the only possible place to stay in Branson.
Yes? Modest, discreet, dark wood, no flashing lights, a nice absence of the word family. Encouraging.
In the nice lobby, Sara used her Trend Optima card on the extremely nice lady behind the counter and was just writing her name when an Australian voice behind her said, “Would that be the delectable Sara?”
She turned and, by golly, it was Harry Razza, a coworker of hers from the old days, back when she had been employed by the Weekly Galaxy, the nation’s — probably the world’s — most despicable supermarket tabloid. “Harry!” she said, honestly happy to see the Razzer again. “Of course, you’d be here.”