OCR Text |
Show swampy and flat, like J. Cash's whiskv. The back of his truck was loaded with paint cans and ladders. J. Cash himself was about five and a half feet tall, with crafty blue eyes, a scraggly moustache the color of sand, and a mouthful of bigger-than-life wonderful white plastic teeth. He stepped for me just outside Monterey. "What's the matter with you, boy, don't you want to go home? Oregon's the other way." "I'm going to L.A.," I said. "Don't want to tell why? Well it's a free country-suit yourself." He fished a flat bottle from under his seat and passed it to me. "I wouldn't be the one to talk anyhow; it's been thirty-odd years since I was in Salt Lake City last. Wcman-trouble, is what it was in my case." I tried to hand back the bottle but he waved it away. "I had a good wife and I left her," he said. The truck swerved across the road and he brought it back with one hand. "I had a daughter prettier than Shirley Temple. A big brick house halfway up the mountain with a grass lawn and six shady trees. I was a king, that's the plain truth, boy, a fucking king." I looked down at my feet and saw the blacktop unwinding through a hole rusted in the floor. The cab was filled with an oily haze that filtered past the firewall; the hood was |