Good Vibrations (10 page)

One of the fishermen squinted at me from a stool pitched squarely not 10 feet from a 2-foot catfish, belly-up, in the medium stages of decay.

‘Pretty day, mister.' He seemed not to notice the humidity as his sweat dripped on to his large basket.

‘We thought this was the ferry,' I said, although it was already obvious that the idea had been a hopeless pipe dream.

‘Ain't been no ferry here since the bridge,' the fisherman replied, casting out into the current. ‘Place has silted right on up in any case,' he finished, indicating the stranded barge and turning back to the water.

I kicked some sand and walked slowly away.

Just then, a pick-up skidded on to the ramp with five kids jostling in the open back. They poured out and ran noisily down to the water where they set about investigating the rotten fish. A handsome young couple hopped from the front drinking bottled Budweiser.

The man was tall and slim in Levi's, a loose, checked shirt and the inevitable baseball hat advertising some unknown brand of cattle feed. The woman was lithe, with an uncompromisingly beautiful face. She reminded me of the actress Meryl Streep.

Meryl inspected the bikes in detail, then walked over to where Roz was leaning in the shade of a wilting tree.

‘The yellow one yours?' she asked.

Roz said that it was.

‘More women should ride their own,' Meryl continued, ‘and that is one cute machine.'

They handed us a beer each from the bottomless depths of their cooler, tossing the caps into the undergrowth.

‘You folks local?' I asked, getting the hang of things.

‘Sure,' replied Randy, introducing himself. ‘We live up the road, but I'm a trucker. Away more 'n I'm home.'

‘Do you drive for yourself, or someone else?'

‘Christ, I wouldn't drive my own truck in this country. Hauling's the most inefficient industry there is. It's OK if you just sit up behind the wheel like I do and collect your pay, but if you have to jack up the loads as well, you'd never get started; what with the insurance and the worries about lawsuits and some guy getting aggressive 'cause you're operating his favourite pitch, and all the rest.'

Another barge a quarter of a mile long steamed slowly by from left to right.

‘Cotton goin' north,' Meryl remarked to nobody in particular, pushing the hair back off her sweat-damp face.

‘Too early yet for cotton,' Randy contradicted gently, ‘but if it ain't cotton, I dunno what it is, 'cause that barge is deep down in the water.'

So it was, but Randy had already lost interest. He threw his empty bottle into the trees as naturally as if it had been a stone, then pulled out another and one for me. He topped his and handed me the opener, keeping up the litter barrage with powerful dedication. Meryl lobbed her own bottle after her husband's then offered the same for Roz, but one beer on a hot day with an empty stomach and a motorbike to be ridden was enough for her.

As the kids paddled in the mud and the heavy, unhurried afternoon cooked up way past blood heat, Meryl was still anxious to learn. She wanted to know exactly why Britain continued to support a royal family when the rest of the world had opted for the republican persuasion. I took a life-saving swig of the ice-cold beer and began attempting to explain the inexplicable. The unelected constitutional monarch, universal and unquestioned allegiance to whom is a vital factor in individual freedom left her unimpressed, and after a minute she interrupted to demand that we dish the dirt on the Prince of Wales' sex life.

‘You probably know more about that than we do,' I said. It was true. Every corner shop in the US carries a selection of pocket-sized ‘human interest' newspapers such as
The National Enquirer
. These creative publications will give you the facts about men from Mars enjoying kinky sex with TV stars, massive ladies who lost 140 pounds in two weeks and, of course, up-to-the-minute data about sultry nights down at Buckingham Palace. They are a lively read in a lonely motel room, so long as you don't bend your head by making a habit of it. I've no doubt that Randy brought an occasional copy home from the road to keep Meryl abreast of developments.

Pouring clouds of half-burned fuel oil from the deep throats of their exhausts, the two tug boats now decided to buckle down to a full-power heave. They churned up the riverbed in a boiling stream of thick mud, their hawsers creaking and dripping as the water was squeezed out of them by their 40-ton bollard pulls. After a protracted float-or-bust equilibrium, the barge came off the mudbank and was towed out to safety in the main stream.

Turning to Meryl, I observed that it was difficult to imagine how a professional barge skipper could strand his vessel so comprehensively in what must be one of the world's better charted rivers.

‘The channels shift all the time,' she said, screwing up her eyes against the glare, ‘I've been coming down here to swim ever since I was fifteen. Sometimes I'll work out towards the middle in the full current, then suddenly I'm standing in two feet of water. The next week, the bank'll have gone again. The pilots out there have a tough job.'

An hour later we crossed the river into Arkansas on the interstate, slumped off the bikes and tottered into a diner, more for the air-conditioning than the prospect of an afternoon snack. The Harleys were so hot that it hurt to sit on them. After a round of double iced waters, Roz spread out the map on the Formica. There were numerous routes from here to Kansas. They all looked the same and they all looked like a long way on a burning saddle.

9
MUSIC OF THE
OZARKS

A traveller's state of mind when riding a motorcycle depends entirely on the road. If this is challenging, as it invariably is in Britain, it fills your head. Either you are setting the bike up for the next bend and moulding your body into the machine to hit the power and the shift of balance just right, or you are concentrating so hard looking out for flashing blue lights or the gravel slurry that you have no time for anything else. In the States, however, particularly in the vast tracts between the Rockies and the Appalachians, it is normal for the straight roads to demand less of you than walking down a country lane. The all-important surface quality varies, but any bike-slaying cracks are generally visible well before you arrive. In a car you click up the air-conditioning and the cruise control, turn on the radio, play your favourite tape until you are sick of it, or talk the sanity out of your companion. The bike offers none of these options for evading the main issue. You are alone, surrounded by nature with time defined by the scrolling highway. Your consciousness is in freewheel to follow what track it will.

One thing I never ask Roz is, ‘What are you thinking?' This includes what was in her mind when riding. We both lived inside our own heads. For me, this often meant speeding along with my ears full of phantom music. Much of this took the form of ‘country' numbers, some was ‘rock'n‘roll' from the simplistic world before Sergeant Pepper, but right now and all the way through the Appalachians, my personal bubble resounded with traditional mountain music. At Haggerd's place, I felt I could reach out and touch the Carter Family with their ageless values and Mother Mabelle's spine-crawling accent. Thinking of the Virginia clan as I rode down the road, the droning nostalgic truths of ‘Will the Circle be Unbroken?' sang intermittently. Later, contemplating the awful realities of a smashed automobile with freshly mangled bodies spilling out of it, the cracked tones of a pensioner I had heard somewhere came droning back:

There was whiskey and blood run together,
All on the road where they lay.
I saw the wreck on the highway,
But I didn't hear nobody pray…

Running across Arkansas towards the Ozark mountains, I recalled an album on tape that I had been given in the mid-seventies by a man called Ambrosio. The cassette looked as though someone had been sleeping on it and it must have been at least the fifth rerecord from the original, but it became a part of life aboard the boat I had then.

Roz and I had run out of luck in Charleston, South Carolina, but found a snug haven up a muddy creek alongside the shrimp boats. Here, we fell in with a mixed community of fishermen and freelance engineers with a sprinkling of out-of-work hippies who styled themselves ‘The Hungry Neck Yacht Club'. The fishermen were hard, but they gave us a crab pot that fed us night after night. The engineers sorted our mechanical problems which had defied the best brains in the North Atlantic basin. The hippies gave us a music tape.

Ambrosio wore the classic ‘freak' outfit of ragged jeans, flower shirt, beads and a beard that would have been the envy of Moses as he turned the Nile to blood. This not-so-young American lived aboard a no-hope yacht of around 35 feet overall length. His partner in the enterprise was a girl of fiery temper and hair so carroty that if it hadn't been genuine it would have been unbelievable. She was said to be the owner of the vessel. Then there was Ricky, who squatted with an extensive stash of grass in a rusted-out Cadillac Eldorado that had once been pink, a mad Irish farmer busted out from Oklahoma and a lawyer called Suzie who was right on the edge. Suzie lent us a $50 Plymouth in which you shifted gear by pressing buttons. It was a wild car that was even nearer falling over the cliff of polite society's bitter end than its owner.

One day, Roz and I had taken the Plymouth into Charleston to buy a part for the boat. Homeward bound across the narrow river bridge one of the tyres blew, so we stopped to change the wheel. This blocked up one lane. The more athletic traffic managed to squeeze by outside us, but we had soon created a tailback. I opened the trunk to grab the spare and discovered it was flat. Help was needed, so I left Roz in charge and flagged a lift to the creek a mile or two further on. Ricky mustered the troops and we found a wheel that looked as though it might do. Then we all piled into the massively illegal Cadillac; Ambrosio, the carrot-haired girl, Ricky, myself, a mechanic named Andy, his girl who was memorable for the legend on the bulkhead of her boat, ‘Isn't this a lovely day? Just watch some bastard louse it up!' and a shady fellow said to have murdered several people.

The pink monster careered out on to the bridge in fine style. Its offside front panel flapped like a broken wing and its nonexistent shocks had it pitching like a ship in a heavy sea. On we went in a blue haze of marijuana smoke with Andy sitting on the trunk hanging on to the spare wheel and Ambrosio serenading us on a beat-up guitar. Breasting the summit under the criss-crossed girder structure, we could see a mile-long queue ahead on the other side of the road.

‘I think,' said Andy, leaning into the accommodation space, raising his voice against the slipstream and the roar of the lace exhaust, ‘we'd better keep right on going.'

‘Waddayamean?' shouted Ricky, a joint the size of an empty toilet roll clamped firmly in the side of his mouth against the buffeting wind.

‘Jus' take a look at the car behind the Plymouth,' drawled the mechanic with laconic deliberation.

We did. It was a state trooper.

‘Oh shit!' Ricky hit the gas. As we swept by on the other side, Roz was being slowly pushed, fender to fender, by an angry-looking cop. The Plymouth was limping badly and the only place for our car-load of crime to be was anywhere but here.

By the time we returned to the creek, Roz had managed to chat up the trooper who had seen to the tyre and had even bought her a burger. By the mercy of God, he left just before the Cadillac lurched into the yard.

We heaved up the wriggling crab pot, Suzie arrived with a crate of beer and life kicked in once more.

That night, Ambrosio gave me the album,
Music of the Ozarks
.

‘This is the very best music ever made, man,' he confided, his eyes bloody with booze and bonhomie. ‘And you can't buy the tape.'

Ambrosio was right.

The last we saw of him was some weeks later. He was motoring the battered yacht northwards out of the creek, with Carrot giving him major earache, just as the murderer was driving into the yard, tanked up on rum.

‘That bastard's got my money,' raved the enemy, dashing around the boats looking for one he could steal to give chase. ‘He did a job on my yacht an' it's all turned to horse-crap. The thing's sunk an' now he's away out of it. I'll kill him. Just gimme a boat!'

The assassin made off with a small, tatty speedboat and tore out into the harbour heading south. I hope they never met, though Andy had suggested we tip off the cops anonymously to look out for the sport boat, near to which there could well be a ‘homicide in progress'.

I still have Ambrosio's original tape.
Music of the Ozarks
is a collection of folk songs and instrumentals from amateur players in the mountains that now lay ahead of us, twenty years after Ambrosio puttered out from Shem Creek. There are tales of faithful horses, ‘The Tennessee Stud'; gospel songs from a cleaner, simpler time; obscure ballads about people dismembering their lovers for no apparent reason while the river flows on to Knoxville Town. Moonshiners fool the Revenue Men, and Old Bill Jones slips his reluctant mistress an anaesthetic dose of hooch then marries her while she is still unconscious. Pounding all through like the weft of a woven cloth, run wild fiddle and banjo rhythms, lifting the spirits of any but the dead of soul.

I have listened so often to Ambrosio's music that I know every lilt and slide as well as I know the tides of the Solent. Riding across that fertile plain west of the Mississippi, it took over my mind while the Harley churned ahead through the sultry afternoon, vibrating all through my body, urging onwards to the subliminal rippling of the long-dead hillmen's reels. The small farms of eastern Arkansas flashed by on the board-flat land as we turned off the main highway of Route 412 to jink our way via an unprecedented eight turnings between lunchtime and the storm-determined end of the day.

The threat of storms stalked us all the way from the Appalachians to the high plains of eastern Montana. Back in the hill country, or along the border of Tennessee and Kentucky, it had been tough to get a fix on cloud movements and impossible to organise any avoiding action, so we took what came on our chin straps. As the country opened out into wider spaces and large-scale chequer-board road patterns, storm dodging developed a remarkable similarity to operating at sea in squally conditions. We made radical course alterations using the 90-degree road junctions to enable the storm clouds to shift their relative bearings in the changing apparent wind. Half a lifetime of subconsciously analysing airflow patterns must have helped, and so long as we could keep the nearest edge of the rain moving backwards against the horizon, we stood a fair chance.

In the afternoon, we were passing though the town of Sedgewick when rapidly darkening clouds suddenly stopped cruising around aimlessly and gathered with ominous intent. Sedgewick didn't grab our fancy, and as it was only four o'clock we decided to chance our luck and blast up the main road towards the imaginatively named settlement of Pocahontas. For me, at least, romantic names formed the mainspring of parts of this trip, and Pocahontas was surely a queen in this department. Nearby was a smaller village called Powhatan. We had no special interest in this father-and-daughter team and their English chum John Smith the chart maker, but the name alone was pulling us in when we felt the now-familiar blast of cold air from the heavens. The bike was blown sideways by the gust, while away to the north-east a black wall of rain was establishing itself and advancing athwart our course with the speed of a modern mechanised division. The anvil cloud above it was striding straight towards where we would be in five minutes time and all seemed lost when we came upon a road junction offering a way out to the south-west. ‘Hoxie', read the signpost. In the intermediate distance we could actually see the buildings rising above the plain. Two miles, maybe three.

I decided unilaterally to swing the corner and together we opened up wide and let the rubber rip the road. For a few heady moments, Roz lost all speed-shyness as we cracked on up to the railroad crossing that stood between us and the single main street of town. The bells were ringing to announce a train, but the barriers were still up so I dropped the clutch and lurched across a rough set of rails. Turning to check Roz, hard on my back wheel, I saw her glance towards the storm. Shining out of the roaring blackness like a warning beacon, the powerful headlight of a locomotive was in plain view up the track, growing fast. Roz watched it coming, stopped and appeared mesmerised. Just as the barrier started to drop, condemning her and Betty Boop to an unavoidable soaking, the train whistle blew. ‘Whaaaa, Whaaaa!'

The American train siren has the psychological effect of a gigantic invisible hand sweeping anyone near the tracks clear of the approaching judgement day. The car-count on the freight trains pounding through Hoxie ran well into three figures, pulled by four locomotives strapped together weighing in at hundreds of tons apiece. Squealing to a sudden halt to avoid crushing a yellow motorcycle would not be an option for the engineer, even had the timetable permitted its consideration. To my astonishment, therefore, having apparently committed herself to the discomfort of the safe option, Roz scrutinised the storm cloud, glanced at the locomotive, then flicked the Sportster into gear with her left boot and shot across the iron road, arriving on the dry side just as the barrier slammed shut behind her. The rain was cutting towards us like a scythe with the train hot on its heels. I could hear the falling water hissing on the melting tarmac as we turned to flee before it, racing along a one-sided street with buildings to our right and railroad to the left. We wheeled into the shelter of the portico outside the Ol' Hickory Motel with not ten seconds to spare.

Thirty yards across the road, the giant diesel rumbled by shaking the ground, dirty yellow, with ‘Union Pacific' proudly painted down its flanks, the tail-end of its train fuzzing out of vision in the heat haze beyond the storm. The tan-vested engineer peered through the rain-lashed window of his cab and raised a hairy arm in ironic salute to Roz. It took two full minutes before the guard's van clanked by, leaving the scene oddly quiet and bare, with only the Mack truck drivers heading down to Little Rock, Arkansas behind their slapping windscreen wipers, and the brown swooshing sound of the rain on the shingle roof.

A little later, I strolled across the street to examine a stationary freight train. The wheels of the first boxcar I came to were chest-high from where I was standing and the whole unit was as tall as my cottage back in England, and considerably longer. I paced out the length of the carriage, added a few feet for the space between the wagons, and then multiplied the sum by one hundred. Totalling up a further 50 yards or so for three or four diesel locomotives, the train was a mile and a half long.

With the setting sun behind me, I drifted along the edge of the ballast for half a mile, fetching up at the caboose. The guard leaned out and put me in the picture about how they would be here for another five minutes while a train further down the line cleared the tracks. Divided from the engineers up front by over 2,000 yards of ironmongery, he was on his lonely way towards Wyoming to load up from the open-cast coal mines that are ripping the face off swathes of that fair state. He had worked on the Union Pacific all his life, and his father before him. Now, his only daughter's husband had gone clean off the rails into the new world of information technology. The railroad man saw no dignity in the boy's calling.