leaving England: thirty-three and a half miles an hour in a thirty zone.
A couple of hours at the wheel and I am almost confident. The Hummer is rock steady. I am familiar with the controls. The rain has ceased, the sun is bright and the satellite radio is tuned to Nashville. I risk taking my eyes off the road. Cattle graze vast paddocks. A brace of wild turkeys scurry off the verge and hide in the mesquite.
I follow the boys on bikes into the town of Turkey in mid afternoon. ‘Town’ in west Texas is fifteen houses and a store that closed in the sixties. We are in Turkey for the annual Bob Wills memorial concert. Bob Wills was a country and western singer. He and his band, The Texas Playboys, topped the charts back in the forties.
The memorial concert is in a dirt field beside Turkey’s disused redbrick high school building. Tents and RVs and trailers are parked among the standard farm mishmash of new and disused agricultural machinery – abandoned pickups and rusted metal stuff that even the manufacturer wouldn’t recognise. Texas machinery is big. The driver climbs a ladder to reach the controls – no place here for a man with vertigo.
The Bob Wills memorial concert is true west Texas. Three plank-and-scaffolding stands face a stage that is as permanent as anything is permanent in west Texas. Swallows or house martins have nested in the ceiling. The Texas Playboys are up there doing their stuff – those that are still alive, that is. Practised? They could play in their sleep.
Three or four generations of the same family lounge in folding chairs between stands and stage. Stetsons, blue jeans and boots are obligatory for the over-twos. The MC is a local doctor. He knows half the audience by name and knows at whom to direct his quips. Local girls collect dollars for the museum’s upkeep. Jack buys a Bob Wills memorial hat while I write my name in the visitors’ book and that I come from England. If there is another tourist, he got lost.
I remark on the quantity of old people’s transport: electric invalid chairs and golf carts. I am driving a Hummer! This is fun. My mistake is not buying a Bob Wills memorial hat. A Bob Wills hat would have protected me all the way south to Tierra del Fuego – or at least to the ranch down in Argentina where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hid out for a few years.
I have sinned. I have been overconfident. Pride comes before a fall. I am about to plummet from fearless driver of the Hummer to trembling Brit on the sidewalk. Disaster hits on the freeway into Amarillo. The boys on the bikes thread the traffic. One minute I am tapping along to Garth Brooks on the radio. Next minute I am in panic. The boys on the bikes have gone.
I drive a further ten miles with my gut in a knot. Too late, I spot a biker pulled in at an exit. Is he one of my bikers? Has he seen me?
I take the next exit. A biker races by on the freeway.
What should I do?
Help!
I don’t know who to pray to. Saint Anthony is good for finding car keys. I need to find three bikers. Bikers are bigger than keys. My address book is back in Dallas. I don’t have a mobile telephone. I don’t have a number to call Don. I am a Brit with a Brit’s driving licence. I am in a Hummer without car papers. I imagine bad-ass Texas cops ramming guns to my skull, hacking my feet apart. One wrong word and I’m dead.
I pull in at the parking lot of the Bourbon Street Café (live music Saturday night and all the shrimp you can eat for just over ten dollars). Two young women in long dresses sweep in through the entrance. I follow timidly. The restaurant lobby is dark and romantic. I have been outside in late sunlight and am momentarily blind. A friendly female voice enquires whether I have a reservation. I blink a few times and an attractive young lady materialises out of the gloom. She is Texas straw blonde, wears an off-the-shoulder evening dress and stands behind a wooden lectern that supports her table list.
I am probably sweating. I fidget my hands. And I am immensely British. ‘I am so sorry to bother you,’ I say. ‘I’m in a real mess.’
Why does she listen? Why doesn’t she call security?
‘I’m lost,’ I say. ‘I was following three bikers. Friends. I lost them. I’m really stupid.’
The lady is curious as to what I am and listens patiently.
I confess that I don’t have Don’s telephone number and that I don’t have the name of the hotel we’re booked into. Meanwhile I am blocking guests waiting to be assigned tables (smoking or non-smoking?).
I apologise for being a nuisance and, being a Brit, repeat my apologies again and again. If I could call directory enquiries? Except that I don’t have a phone. Nor, if I did have a phone, would I know how to call directory enquiries.
The lady calls on her mobile and obtains Don’s home number. She gives me the number and hands me her mobile. I explain that I am unfamiliar with mobile phones. Added to which, I am old and more than a little deaf.
She calls Don for me and we get an answering machine. I leave a message. Minutes pass while I wonder what to do next and while the lady wonders what she can do next (other than assign tables).
Her telephone rings. Don’s daughter, Elspeth, is on the line. I try not to sound panicky while Elspeth’s response is that of a calm mature woman aged eleven going on thirty. She consoles me. She gives me Don’s mobile number.
The lady calls Don, who is surprised at a woman calling. I am saved. And I am deeply, deeply grateful to the Angel of the Bourbon Street Café. I try to imagine the same scene in England at a popular restaurant on a Saturday evening.
I’d still be there, out on the pavement, lost …
Don leads me to the hotel. We shower, change and head for dinner at the ultimate Texas tourist restaurant. Call for a reservation and the restaurant dispatches a white courtesy car with cattle longhorns bolted to the bonnet. The building is a fake barn with dead deer heads mounted high on the walls. Right by the door there’s a steak on display the size of a pair of bricks. Eat the steak and they feed you free for a year. (Eat the steak and you wouldn’t want to eat for a year.) We are shown to a table beside a dais on which sits a competitor for Cholesterol Man of the Year. He already has a serious weight problem. He is midway through the two-brick steak. He is sweating and wears the defeated look of a foot soldier on the fourth day of the retreat from Moscow (take your choice – German or Napoleonic).
The maître d’ shows us to a table right beside the glutton dais.
Don says, ‘Great, so we have to look at that while we eat.’
We eat mini-steaks the size of quarter-bricks.
Don and I share a hotel room furnished with twin king-size beds. Midnight and a fourth biker joins the party – Eric, a forty-plus photographer who chews tobacco and rides the same model BMW GS as Jack. Eric bought his bike in the past few weeks. Jack bought his bike in the past few weeks. I guess that these two are competitors in some type of interpersonal rivalry as to who can be the hottest forty-year-old teenager on the block.
Eric unrolls a sleeping bag. I warn him to spread it the far end of the room because old men have to get up in the night and I don’t want to fall on him.
The king-size bed is comfortable. We have travelled 600 miles. I have driven a Hummer at ninety miles an hour without fear and am feeling confident as to the morrow.
Sunday is the day of rest. We have miles to cover and are up at seven. First stop is a farm twenty miles out of town. The farm grows Cadillacs. The Cadillacs are planted
