Monday, 23 July 2012

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narrow bridge that crossed one of these lovely little rivers he shot precipitately into an almost impossible situation. Two slow cars were bumping over the bridge: coming the other way was a huge truck-trailer with a driver who was making a close estimate of how long it would take the slow cars to negotiate the bridge, and his estimate was, just to keep going and by the time he got there they'd be over. There was absolutely no room for such a truck and cars going the other direction on the bridge. Behind the truck cars pulled out and peeked for an opening. In front of the slow cars even slower cars were push-ing along. The road was crowded and exploding to pass. In the middle of this mess was the almost one-way narrow bridge. Neal came down on all this at 110 miles an hour and never hesitated. He passed the slow cars, made a slight mistake and almost hit the left rail of the bridge, was going head-on for the unslowing truck, cut right sharply, almost hitting the first slow car, and had to cut back in line with another car pulling out from behind the truck to look, toot the horn, push him back, and all in a matter of two seconds flashing by and leaving nothing worse than a cloud of dust instead of a horrible five-way crash with cars lurching in every direction and the great truck humping its back to die in the fatal red afternoon of Illinois with its dreaming fields. I couldn't get it out of my mind, also, that Stan Has-elgard the famous bop clarinetist had died in an Illinois car-crash, probably on a day like this. I went to the backseat again. The boys stayed in the back too now. Neal was bent on Chicago before night-fall. At a road-rail junction we picked up two hoboes who rounded up a halfbuck between them for gas. A moment before sitting around track by the watertower polishing off the last of the wine, now they found themselves in a muddy but unbowed and splendorous Cadillac limousine headed for Chicago in precipitous haste. In fact the old boy up front who sat next to Neal never took his eyes off the road and prayed his poor bum prayers, I tell you. "Well" the only thing they said "we never knew we'd get to Chicaga so fast when we left the gang last night." As we passed drowsy Illinois towns where the peo-ple are so conscious of Chicago gangs that pass like this in limousines

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