Read Online Keep the Change by Thomas McGuane - Free Book Online

Greyhound Vista-Cruiser lay on its side: red, white, and blue with tinted windows, in the ditch. Joe crept by in case he was needed, but the passengers were having their moment as they watched the driver set out orange cautionary cones, and they didn’t seem to need or want Joe, who had not been with them when it happened but rather with the well-dressed babies of the radio.
    A little way past the town of Goodnight, he could see cattle running the fenceline in wild amazement at nature. A truck went by like the home repair truck back in Louisiana but this one said, “Don’t sleep with a drip—Call a plumber!” The day was almost done. Joe flew through the slush to Amarillo, took a room, ate in a Japanese restaurant and went to bed. He felt like he was breaking his back trying to get through Texas. This ghost wanted to go home.

9
    The next day, before he was fully awake, before he had had any opportunity for banishing thoughts, he was in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, where the wind blew so hard the shadows flew on the roadway and where, stopping on the edge of a plowed field, he had to lean backward into the wind to take a leak and even then it just sprayed from his dick like sleet. The radio said that Kansas steer prices were down because several of the packing plants had been closed by blizzards. Joe drove on. Near the horizon, there was the most overcrowded feedlot of Black Angus cattle Joe had ever seen. He stared at it until he overtook what turned out to be a vast depot of worn-out automobile tires, extending over many acres.
    He began to see mountains and his spirit rose with the accumulating altitude, kept climbing until it sank again around Monument Hill and new snow and population; finally he was in the Denver rush hour, which caused him to sink into complete apathy as he took his place in the teeming lanes.
    He cleared out of north Denver, traffic thinning about thetime he passed a vast illuminated dog track, amazing against the darkening Front Range. It was dark and wild and cold after that, after the St. Vrain River and the Wyoming line. A genuine ground blizzard was falling by the time he got to Cheyenne, so he stopped at a place called Little America, the home of fifty-five gas pumps, and slept like a baby, knowing all that gasoline was out there. There was enough gasoline for a homesick person to drive home millions of times. Joe was hugely annoyed to have had this thought.
    He was gone before daybreak, following a Haliburton drilling equipment truck with a sign on its rear that said it braked for jackalope. Joe’s sense of mission had reached a burning pitch and he tailgated the big rig over sections of road varnished by the manure that ran out of the cattle trucks. The two vehicles went down through Wyoming in a treacherous eighty mile an hour syncopation.
    Wheatland, Wyoming, had sentimental Spanish haciendas out in the windswept tank farm at the edge of the sage. A somber and detached-looking herd of buffalo stared out at the highway across five strands of barbed wire. Tonight was going to be Olde Southe Gumbo Night at the restaurant in Douglas where Joe released the Haliburton truck and stopped for breakfast. There was an array of condiments that suggested people ate at all hours here. Joe examined the salad dressing. It looked like the styling gel in a beauty parlor. Buddy Holly sang “True Love Waits” from a red and chrome speaker at the end of his booth. While he ate, the sun burst out like a hostile and metallic stunt. Beyond the window, the land of the jackalope shone under a burnishing wind.
    Back on the highway, a sheriff’s car shot past with a little gray-haired prisoner in the back. Joe drove until he reached Kaycee, not much more than a small depression in the groundeast of the highway: gas station, quonset buildings, a few houses. He stopped and bought some homemade elk sausage from a man he knew there. He was getting close.
    The Tongue River was green and low and clear. It was the last