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By Root 1416 0

’t warrant any special treats, to studiously ignoring our pleas (this phase would last for up to eleven minutes), to asking my mother privately in a low voice what she thought about the idea and receiving an equivocal answer, to ignoring us again in the evident hope that we would forget about it and stop nagging (one minute, twelve seconds), to saying that we might go if we started to behave and kept on behaving more or less forever, to saying that we definitely would not go because, just look at us, we were already squabbling again and we hadn’t even gotten there, to finally announcing – sometimes in an exasperated bellow, sometimes in a death-bed whisper – that all right, we would go. You could always tell when Dad was on the brink of acceptance because his neck would turn red. It was always the same. He always said yes in the end. I never understood why he didn’t just accede to our demands at the outset and save himself thirty minutes of anguish. Then he would always quickly add, ‘But we’re only going for half an hour – and you’re not going to buy anything. Is that clear?’ This seemed to restore to him a sense that he was in charge of things.

By the last two or three miles, the signs for Spook Caverns would be every couple of hundred yards, bringing us to a fever pitch of excitement. Finally there would be a billboard the size of a battleship with a huge arrow telling us to turn right here and drive eighteen miles. ‘Eighteen miles!’ Dad would cry shrilly, his forehead veins stirring to life in preparation for the inevitable discovery that after eighteen miles of bouncing down a dirt road with knee-deep ruts there would be no sign of Spook Caverns, that, indeed, after nineteen miles the road would end in a desolate junction without any clue to which way to turn, and that Dad would turn the wrong way. When eventually found, Spook Caverns would prove to be rather less than advertised – in fact, would give every appearance of being in the last stages of solvency. The caverns, damp and ill-lit and smelling like a long-dead horse, would be about the size of a garage and the stalactites and stalagmites wouldn’t look the least bit like witches’ houses and Casper the Ghost. They would look like – well, like stalactites and stalagmites. It would all be a huge let-down. The only possible way of assuaging our disappointment, we would discover, would be if Dad bought us each a rubber Bowie knife and bag of plastic dinosaurs in the adjoining gift shop. My sister and I would drop to the ground and emit mournful noises to remind him what a fearful thing unassuaged grief can be in a child.

So, as the sun sank over the brown flatness of Oklahoma and Dad, hours behind schedule, embarked on the difficult business of not being able to find a room for the night (ably assisted by my mother, who would misread the maps and mistakenly identify almost every approaching building as a possible motel), we children would pass the time in the back by having noisy and vicious knife fights, breaking off at intervals to weep, report wounds and complain of hunger, boredom and the need for toilet facilities. It was a kind of living hell. And now there appeared to be almost no billboards along the highways. What a sad loss.

I headed for Cairo, which is pronounced Kay-ro. I don’t know why. They do this a lot in the South and Midwest. In Kentucky, Athens is pronounced AY-thens and Versailles is pronounced Vur-SAYLES. Bolivar, Missouri, is BAW-liv-er. Madrid, Iowa, is MAD-rid. I don’t know whether the people in these towns pronounce them that way because they are backward undereducated shitkickers who don’t know any better or whether they know better but don’t care that everybody thinks they are backward undereducated shitkickers. It’s not really the sort of question you can ask them, is it? At Cairo I stopped for gas and in fact I did ask the old guy who doddered out to fill my tank why they pronounced Cairo as they did.

‘Because that’s its name,’ he explained as if I were kind of stupid.

‘But the one in Egypt is pronounced Ki-ro.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ agreed