Good Vibrations (7 page)

‘That car come up fast,' he said, ‘and he drove in so close behind me that I couldn't see the lights no more 'cause they were under my trunk, just this bright glow. It had to be either a cop or a criminal and either way I didn't want him, so I booted the Ford on some. At 130 the lights were still under my fender, so I stamped the gas pedal hard down on the firewall. We was flat out through them pine woods. That road ran dead straight for fifty miles clear to the state line and I knew I'd out-run him. At 160, when I had no more to give, he just cruised up alongside me an' turned on his blue light.

‘I stopped and he pulled in ahead of me. Wasn't nuthin' else I could do. I didn't want to end up in the ditch at that speed. I climbed out quick, 'cause you're always better looking 'em in the eye, and I checked their car. It was the Mercury all right. Fat bulge on the hood an' it was burble-burbling away on idle, the whole thing sort of shaking like there was a wild animal inside it just waitin' for the gas pedal to let her out.

‘Well, let me tell y'all, one of the biggest men I ever saw climbed out of that car. The trooper who was drivin' got out too. He was a sizeable man, but he looked like a little kid alongside this revenue man. That guy weighed three-fifty pounds and then some more and he had tobaccer juice runnin' down from both sides of his mouth.'

Jim had lit a hurricane lamp and now he passed around the bottle. I had been so engrossed in Earl's tall story that I didn't even realise my glass was empty. I poured a stiff slug as Earl continued.

‘The trooper kept me covered while the big guy checked through the car. All the jars had gone of course, but we used to keep a whiskey tank in the trunk. He opened her up an' she smelled to high heaven, but there wasn't even a puddle left inside.

‘“OK,” he says, “Where d'you drop the stuff off.”

‘“Not in this state anyway,” I told him. I thought I'd get a pistol whippin' at least, but they just steps back an' the big feller says, “There's a diner open twenty miles up the road. Seems it'd be the neighbourly thing for me to buy y'all a coffee there, but your ol' Ford's so slow the coffee'd be cold by the time you dawdled in to drink her.”

‘It's three in the morning by this time and it's midsummer, but it's still dark. Away goes the Mercury. I heard him burn rubber as he changed into third an' he must have been doin' well over 100 by then, but I wasn't about to let him get away with his mouth. I was still tremblin', I'll tell you, but I give the Ford her head and ten minutes later I was walkin' into the diner. Like the man said, it was twenty miles. They'd bought me a coffee, an' it wasn't cold. I drank it and tried to get neighbourly, but they just stared me down, so I cleared out an' never used that road again.'

‘Quit your jaw, boys. Supper's on the table.' Dolly called us through the open front door.

We ate braised steak and potatoes with macaroni cheese and the ‘biscuits' of the South. These are more like large lightweight dumplings than anything else and are generally served with gravy, which they soak up with remarkable efficiency. As we filled our boots, Earl mentioned his plans for hunting over the weekend and Haggerd remarked that things had quietened down a lot since he was a kid.

‘In them days, we'd only get beef steak once in a while, when times was good in the store. Mostly, Pa'd go up an' shoot squirrels. That squirrel gravy was often the bes' thing we could manage with our biscuits.'

‘What about the 'coon hounds, Haggerd?' asked Dolly.

‘My ol' pa, he had the best pair of 'coon hounds in the hollow,' Haggerd rose to the cue. ‘Specially bred they was, to ‘tree' them suckers…'

‘Which suckers?' asked Roz.

‘Them racoons,' continued Haggerd, emphasising the first syllable. ‘You can't get close enough for a shot often. They're quick when they know you're after 'em. But them 'coon hounds'll run 'em up the nearest tree. Mebbe there'd be two or three. Once you've got 'em cold you could shoot up there amongst 'em.'

‘What did they taste like?'

Haggerd hesitated. ‘Kinda like 'coons, I s'pose.'

‘When I was bein' raised,' he continued, ‘most families kept pigs. Hog butchering was a community activity. Folks'd bring their animals together in an open field down the way, then Pa and the other men'd slaughter up to twenty-five at a time. Nothing was wasted and sometimes me and the other kids'd be given a cup of that good, warm blood. Ma said it'd make us strong.'

‘And did it?' Roz was hanging on to her steak gamely.

‘Sweetest thing you ever did taste.' With his fork, Haggerd cut up another chunk of meat.

‘Ma'd bring the carcass home, cut it up, scald it and shave it clean. She'd salt some down, but Pa'd come in and demand we ate a hunk fresh while it was there. We had some famous parties on hog-killin' night. But hard times aplenty came in between. Buttermilk and corn bread was all we saw some weeks.'

I remarked to Dolly that I had noticed no black people in the hollow, and she replied that when she and Haggerd were children there had been a fair sprinkling of dark faces. The Haggerds' neighbours were black; the children played together and often went into the kitchen of one another's homes looking for tit-bits. There, however, any fraternisation had to stop. Total segregation was enforced in school and Dolly remarked to my astonishment that intermarriage was illegal in Virginia until over a decade after World War Two.

Black people had first arrived in the area one by one as runaway slaves. They were taken on by the local landowners, many of whom helped them out by giving them soil to till as well as a job. It was these workers who led the way clearing the fields, but as time progressed they moved to the industrial centres looking for regular wages. By the 1990s, not a single African American remained in the area. There had been no open racial strife. The migration appeared to have come about as a result of some mysterious economic process that did not apply itself to the whites.

Notwithstanding an open-handed attitude to the question of colour, Haggerd's father had maintained a tight grip on the way his children should live and who they should adopt as role models. When the white neighbours were visited by their relatives from the next valley there was always music and singing across the lane from the store. This is no surprise when you realise that the callers were Mabelle Carter with her family, who later recorded with Doc Watson and Earl Scruggs, and whose daughter June would grow up to marry Johnny Cash.

‘Pa'd git madder 'n Lucifer if we went anywhere near them girls!' Haggerd chuckled to himself and poured a round of whiskey and lemonade.

‘“Bunch o' damn gypsies! Always singing.” Said they'd never come to no good. Wish he could see 'em now…'

Haggerd was interrupted by two of Jim's cronies arriving with guitar and fiddle. They settled in with the ritual drink, tuned up and away they went. It was a good night for music, with sweet songs and driving rhythm beating down the storm.

The rain stopped on Monday morning, but the sky said there was more to come. The weekend had resounded to the sound of incessant gunfire echoing around the hollow as the mountain men bagged their victuals. Now all was quiet. They had returned to their jobs, Haggerd was serving in the store and it was time for us to go. Sadly, we packed our saddlebags to haul out for Cumberland Gap and the widening countryside of Tennessee. As we cruised onwards, each locked inside our individual reflections, my own head still rang with the hard-driving lick of Jim and the boys ranting through ‘Soldier's Joy'.

Following the route blazed by Daniel Boone towards the sunset, we passed a selection of motorcycles coming in the opposite direction. As they swung by, each rider stretched out the left hand of brotherhood offered by all-American bikers on the highway. The fingers never touch, but the gesture helps generate tribal feeling. A few were on giant Honda Gold Wing cruisers that made me think of armchairs on wheels. These guys always seemed to wear helmets. In contrast, the hard men and their girls on Harleys snatched off their headgear on principle every time they entered a state with no compulsory helmet law. Often they flouted enforcement where the regulation was nominally in force. The Honda Gold Wing is so sophisticated that it seems odd to me that anyone would choose one in preference to an automobile. Our noisy, inefficient, powerhouse Harleys embodied the spirit of Earl's mad dash to New Mexico and I was content with a bike which that symbol of American freedom might select if ever he travelled west again.

We stopped for the night in a motel run by a family from the Indian subcontinent. The cooking smells wafting into the office would have seemed to be more at home in the Indian quarter of Bradford, England, than in the Appalachians. Roz asked the sari-clad woman taking our money if there was any chance of a chicken tikka, but was given the thumbs down. Instead, we ate from the local store. The victuals didn't come near Shannon's standard and seemed a bad choice until we remembered the large bottle of mountain dew that Haggerd had stuffed into the top of my pack as we left. We drank some now, and felt a whole lot better.

Just before Roz fell asleep, she suddenly spoke from her side of the immense bed.

‘If Daniel Boone had been offered a motorbike to break through into Kentucky, do you think he'd have ridden a Gold Wing or a Harley-Davidson?'

I turned on the light. The lines at the corners of her eyes were laughing at me and although the banjos were still marching through my own mind, I rejoiced, because I understood that she at least had returned to the road and was looking ahead. The visit with the mountain folk had settled her into this huge, wayward land, leading her thoughts from her immediate challenges and helping her shed the worst of her novice's nerves. She was beginning to feel a pride in her iron pony.

Roz had once given me a book about sailing the oceans and had written a quotation from John Masefield inside the flap. It was put there for me, but really it was her.

Most roads lead men homeward,
My road leads me forth.

7
FIRETRUCKS
AND BIBLES

The following morning we traversed the Cumberland Gap near the tri-state border of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. This crucial pass to the West was discovered in 1750 and named for some reason to immortalise the villainous ‘Butcher Cumberland', the unlovely English Duke who had harried the Scots to their hearthstones after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie, 4,000 miles from here on Drumossie Muir. The pass was not blazed as a settlers' route until twenty years later by Daniel Boone and a group of hard-nosed veterans of the French and Indian Wars. Using ancient Indian tracks, they constructed the ‘Wilderness Trail', along which 100,000 settlers penetrated to the wide, undulating richness of Kentucky as far north as the Ohio River.

As we breezed down a broad valley from which the blue mountains seemed to have backed right off, Hurricane Bertha had dissipated into thin air, but the atmosphere was beginning to show signs of the constant threat of the summer storms of central USA. West of the Appalachians, a good day is just plain hot, but as one sunrise follows another the weather works itself into a series of steamy, humid climaxes until massive electric storms clear the sky.

From here to the Rockies, we saw these systems wind themselves up, drawing damp, tropical air masses into the heartlands from the remote Gulf of Mexico. Towards lunchtime on a typical storm day, the unsullied blue of the distant sky puffs up into fluffy white cumulus. An hour later, groups of these have crowded together into cumulonimbus giants full of evil potential. By 3.30 their undersides have turned grey and the tops are bubbling to impossible heights in undisciplined cauliflower confusion. Dismount to watch one and you can see it churning aloft to the very edge of space as the heat engine exhales in a colossal convection. Somewhere up there in the unbreathable stratosphere, the cold becomes too much for the cloud to hold on to its moisture and it collapses into deluging rain, accompanied by a tumult of thunder and lightning whose capacity for heavy damage is made plain by shattered trees and occasional gravestone inscriptions.

American summer downpours bear absolutely no relation to the ‘soft, refreshing rain' of England. They can drop their load in the form of devastating hail that flattens a crop and ruins a farmer in fifteen minutes, but even in the rain mode, they make driving an automobile extremely dangerous, so dense is the water in the air and on the ground. Anyone caught out is drenched in seconds, as thoroughly as if he had jumped into a river. Motorcycling while a summer storm cloud is venting its anger is unthinkable for all but the clinically insane.

Our first downpour trapped us immediately west of the Cumberland Gap in the town of Middlesboro. We had been searching the pitted streets for the
poste restante
and news from home when lightning split the afternoon and the initial spots of precipitation heralded an imminent insanity of falling water. The bikes were standing outside the large, square fire station and I was across the street returning from the mail drop when I saw Roz start up Betty Boop and cruise boldly through the huge open doors to worm her way into the cave between two red trucks. Fire stations in America are holy places into which I could not imagine pushing even a dinky car without being consigned to the electric chair. The whole scene is decidedly macho and since it involves ‘the safety of life', a subject in which America takes an even more morbid interest than Britain, it would be a foolish biker who risked getting in the way.

Worried, I dashed across, only to discover Roz chatting with a fireman who was urgently beckoning me to pull my monster under cover before the rain. I had almost made it back to my bike when the sprinkling drops suddenly turned into marble-sized projectiles. Black Madonna might as well have been under the fireman's hose by the time I squelched aboard, but she started up nonetheless and I threaded her gratefully into the echoing dryness of the garage. There she sat above a growing puddle, her engine and exhausts steaming, alive with the nostalgic pungency of the hot, wet de-greaser I used to clean her engine.

In their cultural impact, the fire trucks were like oversized six-wheeled Harleys; their paintwork a deep, scarlet gloss, their chunky chrome buffed to a markless finish and the externally visible machinery that gave them their butch character was heavy on shine and ready for action. Like our motorbikes and the enormous trucks out on the interstate, these were unashamed examples of US engineering at its best. Their mentor was proud of them, delighted that we appreciated them, and awarded us the freedom of the station.

We didn't take up the offer of a shower, but we did venture into the mess room where the ‘watch on deck' were enjoying a raucous game of cards. It was clear from the dexterity of the dealing and the sharpness of the decisions to hold, draw or fold that these servants of the community spent weeks honing poker skills that would have been the envy of a riverboat operator in Maverick's day. Coffee and ‘donuts' perched on the side, so we loaded up. The foreman sat out the next deal and after expressing surprise, came to terms with the fact that our accents were English and not from the northern outback of Queensland.

I spotted a large television in the corner, spewing out nothing of value.

‘Why does everybody in this country think we are from Oz?' I asked him. ‘I know the accents are similar to you, but there are so many more Brits than Aussies. Your chances of meeting one of us are far greater.' I glanced towards the screen. ‘Do you watch a lot of Australian soaps?'

‘Ain't never seen no soaps from outside the US,' he confessed. ‘I guess it must be that guy Crocodile Dundee. He was a major hit a few years back. You sound just like him.'

I reflected on Winston Churchill, the Beatles, Her Majesty the Queen and Benny Hill, to name but a few famous British voices. The awful truth was that each of them had been eclipsed in the American vernacular mind by a fictitious Australian with a large knife, a funny hat and endless resources of survival cunning. Thankfully, the fireman was the last person to put us through this particular interrogation. Perhaps Crocodile Dundee had been banned by the authorities beyond the Cumberland Gap on suspicion of not using a gun.

The land continued to open out after Middlesboro, although it remained largely wooded, keeping any distant views under some sort of control. Ever since the West Virginia hollow, evidence of heavy community involvement with Christianity had been building up. Churches and chapels were everywhere, and in greater profusion than bars, which comes as a surprise to an observer from heathen Britain. National churches such as Episcopalian, Lutheran and Roman Catholic were rarely seen, but sectarian meeting houses proliferated. People here said grace before every meal, and casual radio stations socked out Jesus as we surfed the dial for something worth hearing. Tub-thumping sermons from passionate orators were broadcast on television and they made compulsive viewing. We had rumbled into the Bible Belt, where peeling black letters on yellow plastic hoardings rivalled one another for the punchiest one-liner to lure sinners into the clinical insides of the missions.

‘Jesus wants one Bride, not a Harem' blared a ‘wayside pulpit' on a clapboard chapel whose preacher was clearly sick of his congregation's adulterous tendencies. I chugged by, recalling a Virginia mountain folk song.

They had a big meetin' on the Cumberland drag
An' the people gathered in.
The preacher preached till his tongue wouldn't wag
But he couldn't stop their sin…

It seemed that little had changed.

Along the road in the same town we discovered another man of God with similar problems, reminding the faithful that, ‘The law of sowing and reaping has never been repealed.'

Still at the Lord's work, the Free Will Baptist warned readers in red letters 2 feet tall that, ‘The worst company for a man is when he gets into a rage and is beside himself.'

The best tracts of the day, however, were nothing to do with hot gospel. These secular offerings came a couple of hours later on a street lined with knee-high hoardings encouraging those of voting capacity to take part in the democratic process:

‘Elect Pam O'Grady for another great term in Municipal Cleaning', and ‘Vote D'Eath for Sheriff and keep crime underground'.

Ten miles out of town we were running a wide, straight road through scrubby pine woods when Roz slowed to a halt alongside a house parked on the back of a truck. Tired and sagging, it sat on the flatbed uneasily, looking as though it might fold down on either side. I wheeled my bike around and we parked in the dirt. Half a dozen men were guzzling sodas in the shade of the gable end.

‘Is the house coming or going?' I asked a tall, rangy individual in brown overalls who stepped forward.

‘She's coming,' he replied.

For a while, we talked of the pleasures and pitfalls of moving house with our man, who was the owner. Literally shifting your dwelling from one location to another is a realistic possibility in parts of North America where land is cheap, construction comparatively inexpensive and houses built of timber can be hoisted off their foundations and shunted around in one piece. Some builders specialise in movable homes. These are thrown together on spec, sold by house salesmen from lots like used cars, trucked to the site of your choice, with erection on the spot as part of the deal. They come fully wired and plumbed. You plant them, hook them up and it's ‘home, sweet home'. Many are well put together, remarkably roomy and a sensible option where carting bricks across a distant field is going to be pricey. The building on this truck had nothing in common with one of these miracles of engineering.

Listening in to our conversation, the gang slowly gathered around to admire the bikes. One stepped forward. Pants dragging on the road, cream shirt work-weary and torn, unshaven for three days at least, and the most beaten-up straw hat this side of Arkansas. He looked like the hickest hillbilly in the West.

He held out his hand. ‘Geoffrey Whitehead from London,' he announced in pure cockney.

This was bizarre in the extreme.

‘How do you come to be here?'

‘I was in the Army in Aldershot back in 1988 when I was called by God to Tennessee.'

His nearest mate chuckled. ‘One of the Lord's saddest mistakes,' he remarked sagely.

I looked at the sign writing on the side of the truck.

‘Maranatha House Moving Co.'

The only time I heard the word ‘Maranatha,' it was the name of a nineteenth-century pilot cutter from Bristol, owned by a Calathumpian lay preacher who brought ships to safety between bouts of dedicated God-bothering.

I told Geoffrey about this obscure connection. He'd never heard of a pilot cutter and had not been to Bristol, but he asked if I knew what the word meant. I had no idea.

‘Even so, come Lord Jesus.'

Two brown and white puppies were panting quietly in the shade, being fed bologna sandwiches on white bread by one of the workmen. They belonged to the house owner. His bitch was lashed up in a makeshift kennel under a tree. Roz unzipped her leather jacket and bent down to fuss the pups.

‘She had eight, but she lost six by leaving them out in the heat.'

I understood how the poor things must have felt. By now we were up to 95 degrees and the afternoon smelt distinctly Mediterranean. The clouds were starting to look as though they meant business and I knew from bitter experience that if we hung around I'd end up having a thrash-out with Geoffrey about either transubstantiation or the Holy Trinity, so I tore Roz from the doggies, wished the owner well and pressed my starter.

Twenty miles down the road we stopped at a dilapidated gas station to tank up the bikes and take on a swift pint of iced water apiece. The woman in charge was incongruously dressed in a tweed frock. She had a hunted expression and was clearly hiding from something in her air-conditioned comfort zone. Glancing sideways at the usual group of guys in baseball hats with their heads together at her coffee table, she advised us to stay inside after sunset.

‘I don't go out after sunset at all now,' she said, her voice low.

‘Why not?' asked Roz, for whom the dark is pretty much as the light.

‘'Cause these crazies around here'll just run you off the road an' shoot you.'

‘What for?'

‘They're after your money, I guess, but some of them just do it for kicks. Years ago they'd never do nuthin' like that. Nowadays, they don't even ask you to hand over your pocket-book. They just shoot you.'

More talk of violence. Yet we still hadn't actually met anybody more threatening than the gentle-natured Christian house-mover. I considered the video stores in every town offering nightly entertainment in which nice people have their heads hacked off by maniacs armed with chainsaws, or muscular superheroes machine-gun the forces of darkness with graphically devastating effect. The toll of televised violent death is shocking. ‘Only when you know how to die can you know how to live' had declared the Church of God earlier that afternoon. At the time, this had seemed like muddled thinking compared with the reassurance offered in lunchtime's burger joint that, ‘We wash and sanitize our hands.' Now it didn't sound so soft. Somebody must believe all this stuff, I thought. But who? It certainly wasn't the mountain men, the clockmaker or my friends back on the coast. Nonetheless, I felt vulnerable on my bike as we started up again.

Later that afternoon we were again beaten by the rain. Storm clouds had been marching on either side of us since soon after lunch, and two major contenders had run parallel to our track for an hour or more. As we soared up the crest of a ridge, they altered course without warning and began converging. The air underneath them was opaque with precipitation and as I watched their relative motion with a sailor's eye, I knew that we were for it.

Thirty seconds before the deluge, a gust grabbed a pick-up driving along in front of us and hurled it to within a wheel's width of the ditch. I feared for Roz, gripped my own bike firmly between my knees and hung on. The downdraft hit like the sudden breath of a freezer. Surprisingly, it had less effect on the motorcycle than the truck, so that by leaning hard into the wind I kept Black Madonna on the road. As the first hammer blow passed, I glanced behind to see how Roz was faring. Betty Boop was taking it full on the beam, but Roz was reacting correctly and seemed in no particular trouble, although cranked well over. I remembered reading a discussion in the correspondence columns of Motorcycle News back in England, on whether or not one should lean into a cross-wind. In this wilder, wider land there was no question of scientific analysis. We responded like a pair of dinghy sailors scrabbling for the ‘high side' as their unsteady craft is heeled to the point of capsizing by a sudden blow. As with most questions of balance on a motorbike, the answer is not to think but to feel, and to marvel at the magic taking place in the dark tunnels of the inner ear which were never designed to handle the additional quotient of 70 mph.