Let Me Finish Read Free

corrupt but colorful governor of Texas, Ma Ferguson. We had no radio but stayed alert anyway. Tex was the one to spot the first buzzard aloft and the rare passing North Dakota license plate, and to pick up on roadside or billboard names. ("Sweet Orr Pants," he said, musingly. "Coward Shoes?") He challenged me to recite all the Burma-Shave jingles we'd encountered ("The bearded lady / tried a jar / she's now / a famous movie star / Burma-Shave"; "Rip a fender / off your car / mail it in for / a half-pound jar / Burma-Shave") and make up some of our own. He made me rate the girls in my class for looks and then for character, and said, "If our left front tire is six feet around, how many revolutions will it make by the time we reach Cleveland?" Late in our trip, wheeling down an unpopulated gravel highway west of Edina, Missouri, Tex slowed as we came up to three black sedans, oddly parked crossways on the road at a little distance from each other. As we passed the first one, to our left, the second moved forward from the right to block our path, but Tex spun us hard right, spewing gravel, passed behind him, and floored it up the road and away. Prohibition revenue inspectors, he thought, or maybe a highway stickup. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were around here somewhere, making do in hard times.
    Â 
    I keep forgetting how hot it was, driving. Two summers along, in late August of 1934, my father replanned the second part of our trip by leaving my uncle's place in Green Castle, Missouri (the same haven Tex and I had been heading for), around noon and driving non-stop to Santa Fe. We'd do Kansas by night and stay cool. Our party—Father, my eighteen-year-old sister Nancy, her Concord Academy classmate Barbara Kidder (the two had just graduated), and I—were experienced car people by now. We hated motels, carried water in our two big thermoses (later, in New Mexico, we bought a waterskin and slung it on a front fender), and favored gas stations with the old-style pumps that were cranked by hand like an ice cream freezer while you watched your Sunoco or Gulf slosh into a glass ten-gallon container up on top, then empty into your tank. We knew how to open a Coke by sticking a silver dollar under the cap and banging the bottle with your fist, and we'd learned to stop wincing or weaving when another languid or headlight-entranced rabbit in the road—ba-bump—went to the great cabbage patch in the sky. The floor in the back of the car filled up with crumpled sections of the Kansas
City
Star
or the St. Joseph
News-Press
that we'd picked up at the last diner.
    Nancy was driving by now, and could spell my father for two-hour stretches. She was a better driver than he was. Her hair was tied up with a string of red yarn, keeping it off her ears; at the wheel, she'd fire up a cigarette with the dashboard lighter, then hold it in the air in her long fingers, a ring of scarlet lipstick around the nearer end. Too classy for Bryn Mawr, I thought. I liked Barbara Kidder, who wore a blue neck bandanna and shorts, and had a nice store of rattlesnake and Gila-monster stories; her parents were archeologists—she was joining them later at a dig in Nevada. My father overcorrected while driving and favored long silences, but he was a soldier, a
commandante,
at the wheel, good for a five-hour bore through the blazing Indiana afternoon while we dozed and told dumb jokes. He didn't go in for jokes, but laughed out loud when we imitated him trying to order his breakfast café au lait from a waitress at our creaky small-hotel dining room. This always started our day. "I want a glass of milk," he began, speaking loudly and fashioning the shape of a glass in the air. "
Cold
milk, in a glass. Then, and in addition, I'd like a cup of coffee"—his hands moved to one side, forming an invisible cup with a saucer underneath—"and with it a pitcher of
hot
milk, to put into the coffee. Now, again: cold milk, please, in a glass"—he