The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [14]
I had a shower – that is to say, water dribbled onto my head from a nozzle in the wall – and afterwards went out to check out the town. I had a meal of gristle and baked wiffle ball at a place called – aptly – Chuck’s. I didn’t think it was possible to get a truly bad meal anywhere in the Midwest, but Chuck managed to provide it. It was the worst food I had ever had – and remember, I’ve lived in Britain. It had all the attributes of chewing-gum, except flavour. Even now when I burp I can taste it.
Afterwards I had a look around the town. There wasn’t much. It was mostly just one street, with a grain silo and railroad tracks at one end and my motel at the other, with a couple of gas stations and grocery stores in between. Everyone regarded me with interest. Years ago, in the midst of a vivid and impressionable youth, I read a chilling story by Richard Matheson about a remote hamlet whose inhabitants waited every year for a lone stranger to come to town so that they could roast him for their annual barbecue. The people here watched me with barbecue eyes.
Feeling self-conscious I went into a dark place called Vern’s Tap and took a seat at the bar. I was the only customer, apart from an old man in the corner with only one leg. The barmaid was friendly. She wore butterfly glasses and a beehive hairdo. You could see in an instant that she had been the local good-time girl since about 1931. She had ‘Ready for Sex’ written all over her face, but ‘Better Bring a Paper Bag’ written all over her body. Somehow she had managed to pour her capacious backside into some tight red toreador pants and to stretch a clinging blouse over her bosom. She looked as if she had dressed in her granddaughter’s clothes by mistake. She was about sixty. It was pretty awful. I could see why the guy with one leg had chosen to sit in the farthest corner.
I asked her what people in Dullard did for fun. ‘What exactly did you have in mind, honey?’ she said, and rolled her eyes suggestively. The ‘Ready for Sex’ signs flickered, an occurrence I found unsettling. I wasn’t used to being hustled by women, though somehow I had always known that when the moment came it would be in some place like downstate Illinois with a sixty-year-old grandmother. ‘Well, perhaps something in the way of legitimate theatre or maybe an international chess congress,’ I croaked weakly. However, once we established that I was only prepared to love her for her mind, she became quite sensible and even rather charming. She told me in great and frank detail about her life, which seemed to have involved a dizzying succession of marriages to guys who were now in prison or dead as a result of shoot-outs, and dropped in breathtakingly candid disclosures like: ‘Now Jimmy kilt his mother, I never did know why, but Curtis never kilt nobody except once by accident when he was robbing a gas station and his gun went off. And Floyd – he was my fourth husband – he never kilt nobody either, but he used to break people’s arms if they got him riled.’
‘You must have some interesting family reunions,’ I ventured politely.
‘I don’t know what ever became of Floyd,’ she went on. ‘He had a little cleft in his chin rot year’ – after a moment I realized that this was downstate Illinois for ‘right here, on this very spot indicated’ – ‘that made him look kind of like Kirk Douglas. He was real cute, but he had a temper on him. I got a two-foot scar right across my back where he cut me with an ice-pick. You wanna see it?’ She started to hoist up her blouse, but I stopped her. She went on and on like that for ages. Every once in a while the guy in the corner, who was clearly eavesdropping would grin, showing large yellow teeth. I expect Floyd had torn his leg off in a moment of high spirits. At the end of our conversation,