While Bel enjoyed a cold beer and the collection of nude calendars in Sanch’s kitchen, I unzipped my money belt and took out the notes. Back in the kitchen, Sanch had already filled in the relevant details on his ownership papers.
‘Hey,’ he said, handing me a beer, ‘I meant to ask you, what you gonna use the car for?’
‘Just some driving.’
‘That’s the way to see America.’
‘Yes, it is,’ I said, handing over the money. He examined it, but didn’t count it.
‘Looks about right. Here, I got something for you.’ It took him a little while to find what he was looking for. It was a Rand-McNally Road Atlas, its covers missing, corners curled and oily. But the pages were all there. ‘I got about half a dozen of these things laying around. After all, you don’t want to get lost between here and there.’
I thanked him, finished the beer, and put my part of the ownership document in my pocket.
Then we drove to Lubbock.
It served as a nice introduction to American driving. Long straight roads, the occasional shack planted in the middle of nowhere, and sudden towns which disappeared into the dust you left behind. The car was behaving, and, lacking a TV, Bel was communing with the radio. She liked the preachers best, but the abrasive phone-in hosts weren’t far behind. One redneck was praising the gun.
‘Guns made America, and guns will save America!’
‘You’re loon-crazy, my friend,’ said the DJ, switching to another call.
Albuquerque is only about 250 miles from Lubbock. We could do it inside a day easy, but we weren’t in any particular rush. When we stopped at a place called Clovis and I still got an answering machine in Lubbock, we decided to check into a motel. The place we chose was choice indeed, twenty dollars a night and decorated in 1950S orange. Orange linoleum, orange lampshades, orange bedspread. We looked to be the only guests, and the man in the office could have given Norman Bates some tips. He rang up our fee on an ancient till and said he was sorry about the swimming pool. What he meant was, the swimming pool wasn’t finished yet. It was a large circular concrete construction, waiting to be lined. It was unshaded and sat right next to the road. I couldn’t see many holidaymakers using it. There was a hot wind blowing, but the motel boasted an ice machine and another machine dispensing cold cola.
‘The TV hasn’t got cable!’ Bel complained, already a seasoned traveller in the west. Along the route we’d been offered water beds and king-size beds and adult channels and HBO, all from noticeboards outside roadside motels. Bel wasn’t too enamoured of our bargain room, but I was a lot more sanguine. After all, the owner hadn’t made us fill in a registration card and hadn’t taken down the number of our licence plate. There would be no record that we’d ever stayed here.
‘Let’s go do the sights,’ I said.
We cruised up and down the main and only road. A lot of the shops had shut down, their windows boarded up. There were two undistinguished bars, another motel the other end of town with a red neon sign claiming NO VACANCIES, though there were also no signs of life, a couple of petrol stations and a diner. We ate in the diner.
There was a back room, noisy from a party going on there. It was a fireman’s birthday, and his colleagues, their wives and girlfriends were singing to him. Our waitress smiled as she came to take our order.
‘I’ll have the ham and eggs,’ Bel said. ‘The eggs over easy.’ She smiled at me. ‘And coffee.’
I had the chicken dinner. There was so much of it, Bel had to help me out. Since there was no phone in our room, I tried Lubbock again from the diner, and again got the answering machine. After the meal, we stopped at the petrol station and bought chocolate, some cheap cola, and a four-pack of beer. I had a look around and saw that the station sold cool-boxes too. I bought the biggest one on the shelf. The woman behind the till wiped the dust off with a cloth.
‘Fill that with ice for you?’
‘Please.’
Then I added another four-pack to our bill.
Next morning we filled the cool-box with ice, beer and cola, and had breakfast at the diner. The same waitress was still on duty.
‘Good party?’ Bel asked.
‘Those guys,’ clucked the waitress. ‘Practically had to hose them down to get them out of here.’
It was ten o’clock and already hot when we headed out of town. One thing Sanch hadn’t told us about the Trans-Am, its air conditioning wasn’t a hundred percent. In the end, I turned it off and we drove with the windows down. At another service station, Bel bought some tapes, so we didn’t have to put up with the radio any more. The drivers on these long two-lane stretches of Texas were kind to a fault. If you went to overtake someone, the car in front would glide into the emergency lane so you could pass without going into the other carriageway. Even lorries did it, and expected you to do the same for them. Not that many people passed us. We cruised at between 70 and 80 and I kept an eye open for radar cops. Every time we passed a car or lorry, Bel would wave to it from her window.
This was the most relaxation I’d had in ages. I’d driven part of the way across the USA before, and had enjoyed it then too. As Bel said, you became your favourite film star in your own road movie. More importantly from our point of view, no one could trace your route.
Lubbock, birthplace of Buddy Holly, was a prairie sprawl with a museum dedicated to ranching. The museum boasted a large collection of types of barbed wire, plus a rifle display that took the breath away. That was all I could tell you about Lubbock. The last time I’d been here, I had failed to find a centre to the place, but that’s not so surprising in American cities. Last time, I stayed in a run-down motel near the Buddy Holly statue. But after last night, I reckoned Bel would object, so we found a new-looking hotel just off the highway and registered there.
American hotels and motels used to ask for your ID, but these days all they did was ask you to fill in a registration card. So it was easy to give fake names, fake car details and fake licence. Bel liked the room: it had Home Box Office on cable, plus in-house pay-movies. It also had a king-size bed and a telephone. I called the number one last time, then decided to head out there anyway.
‘So do I get to know now?’ Bel said as we got back into the Trans-Am.
‘What?’
‘Who you’ve been trying to call.’
‘A guy called Jackson. Spike Jackson. You’ll like him.’
Spike lived not far from Texas Tech and the Ranching Heritage Centre. He’d taken me there on my previous visit. There was a dual carriageway, with single-storey shops along one side, and a couple of lanes off. Up one of these lanes, at the end of the line, was Spike’s place. I hoped he wasn’t out of the country on business. I knew he did most of his business from home.
We came off the dual carriageway and drove alongside the shops. Bel spotted a western-wear emporium, and wanted us to stop. I dropped her off and said I’d be back in five minutes, whatever happened. She disappeared through the shop door.
There were a couple of cars parked outside the two-storey house, but that didn’t mean anything. Like all ‘good old boys’, Spike usually had a few cars hanging around. He owned at least two working cars, and sometimes bought another dud, which he’d tinker with for a while before towing it to the junk yard. I revved the Trans-Am a couple of times to let him know he had a visitor. I didn’t want him nervous.
But there was no sign of life as I walked up the steps to the front door. There was a screened-in porch either side of the door, with chairs and a table and a swing-bench. Spike hadn’t had the maid in recently; there were pizza boxes and beer cans everywhere. I rang the bell again, and heard someone hurtling towards the door. It flew open, and a teenage girl stood there. Before I had a chance to say anything, she waved for me to follow her, and rushed back indoors again.