Read Online Mission to America by Walter Kirn - Free Book Online Page A

fumes with dignity, eking out blessed relief in spurts that raised him from his seat an inch or so. We were brothers now, and I felt for him.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    Central Wyoming was like hell without the flames, an underworld thrust up onto the surface. Treeless gray gravel-pit mountains, dry silt riverbeds, dump trucks heaped with mine tailings and slag, lethargically pumping gas rigs, crumbling buttes, and expanses of dead, abrasive-looking grass crisscrossed by sagging barbed wire with tufts of hair in it. There was no color anywhere but in the sky, and a lot of the time no color in the sky, just a uniform high layer of linty clouds that bled all the happy light out of the sun. A lot of Montana was plain and arid, too, but Wyoming was punishment for having eyes. Even the roadkill was uglier. In Montana the deer on the shoulders of the roads lay there intact and peaceful, with long curved backs, but here their bodies were blown apart in chunks.
    â€œI'm reading through Lauer's Well-being Quiz again. It's impossible not to fail it,” I told my partner.
    â€œI believe that's very much on purpose. Reach behind you, would you? There's a bag. Never mind. I'm reaching it. You want some?”
    I soured my face. I'd had my fill of the caterpillar-shaped orange crunchy things. I read out loud to my partner from the Quiz. “‘Are you ever aware of your own heartbeat?' Is that saying people
shouldn't
be aware?”
    â€œI'm not. Not in the busy daytime hours.”
    â€œThe Quiz says ‘Are you
ever
?' Ever includes the night.”
    â€œThat one would have to go against me then.”
    â€œâ€˜In a dining establishment, when informed that only one portion of a certain menu item remains available for consumption, have you ever ordered that scarce item despite your keen prior interest in another item?'”
    â€œI love how Lauer writes things. He lays it out for people, end to end.”
    â€œI can check ‘No,' but I hardly ate out before. Just twice in Missoula when I needed X-rays and once in Spokane at a hotel.”
    â€œThe hotel underneath the two raised highways? Right underneath where they crisscross?”
    â€œIt could have been. I was only eight,” I said. “I went with my father for his police convention.”
    â€œIt had to be that one. Apostles get a deal there.”
    My partner's eyes sharpened because a prairie dog that was still twenty seconds or so ahead of us was up on its back legs and all alert, the way they get when they're about to sprint. They see everything but your gigantic looming car, it seems, and yet, when you really think about it afterward, you realize they must have seen you awfully clearly, because they timed their destruction so precisely. Once you've barreled over enough of them, not only do you not bother to slow down (their hot compact wizardly brains just recalculate, they wait a touch longer, and things come out the same), but you understand in a fresh, convincing way why science—microscope and number science, not AFA Etheric Science—will utterly fail and fail and fail.
    My partner said, at the same instant it failed again, “That second question goes against me, too. I did that in Billings the other day. Remember? That chili con carne the place was so damned famous for? I was about to try salmon done in butter.”
    â€œHere's one I'm thinking you'll have a better chance with. ‘When courting members of—'”
    â€œThat's fine. Let's stop. Go on and work out your own score, if you want. I know mine.”
    â€œYou took the Quiz already?”
    â€œI've
given
the Quiz.” He reached out for the dashboard. “I'm dialing a new station. I know this one
sounds
like drumbeat rock and roll, but if you listen, the ‘you' in all the songs, the person they love so much and can't stop cooing over? It's not a pretty girl.”
    I nodded. I'd already noticed and didn't mind. But my partner