After beer six, they lunched in Fossil and tried to behave in a respectable
"just-a-couple-of-good-ol'-boys-out-fishin" manner. They smelled bad and didn't stay long.
Cletis had it in mind to get back on the road and work their way through to The Dalles in
time to see if Chief Broom was back from is rest yet before they headed on home through
Washington. Broom had been away for some time - mid sixties probably when Ken Kesey had
penned him into the institution where Nurse Ratchet would fasten down the bolts. Somewhere
in "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" Chief informs the reader that things are very much as
they don't seem. "It's the turth" he says, "it's the turth, even if it didn't really
happen."
Cletis was wrestling with this remembrance and with his role as an agent of social control (welfare fraud investigator) as they nodded south out of Fossil. He had never wanted to see himself in that role, but he knew someone had to hold down the revs. Someone had to slow the relentless rotating of the machine that would eventually either blow apart or be ground to a halt if the bolts were too tight. Cletis knew that social control wasn't just about making people adhere to the laws and behave as they were suppose to, it was also about ensuring enough flex and slack in the machine to allow it to run - smooth and purposefully.
Besides, he couldn't even control himself. And the more control he tried to exert, the
tighter his head became and the greater the pain. The tighter it got, the more scrambled
it seemed. His mind was unraveling IN a vice, and unraveling more than it had through the
peyote experiences. Colours and emotions flashed and danced through his cortex. In an
oozing weepy rage he twisted tight the top of an empty Mickey's before launching it out
the window into the dry grasses that girdled the fences along the side of the road. The
empty smashed - Cletis belched and his mind returned to the passenger seat. Calmer now -
for no reason.
Some 40 minutes or 30 miles out of Fossil, working their way down through the heat and wind back to the Columbia River, Billy Bob pulled over and said "you drive - I'm too tired".
Ten minutes further down the road, Cletis behind the wheel was jolted awake by the LOUD sudden KERUNCH of something off the right front of the vehicle. Squinting up he saw the wobbling orange triangle extended above what turned out to be the KERUNCH's younger sister. He swerved hard left to avoid the bicycle by more than a lane's width and swerved back almost as suddenly to avoid the motorcycle coming up the hill. The truck careened loosely by another cyclist before Cletis realized that the KERUNCH had been the sound of a junior sized bicycle bouncing off the bumper and down the embankment.
In his mirror he could see a larger bike on the ground - wheel spinning and contents of a dislodged pannier strewn out across a lane and a half of highway.
He stopped the truck and turned around and drove back to where the large bike was laid out on the ground and where the sibling and mother were rushing back to a point where the truck had bounced the child over the guardrail.
The bolts had flown off. The family wailed in terror as the father jolted in panic down the embankment - feet slamming hard on loose rocks and sand, and bouncing again off the next clump of grass or tuft of sage - to a spot forty feet below where the child lay motionless. The mother too, raced to her silent child.
Cletis stared down the slope and heard the wails and sobs of the terrorized family. Billy Bob put his hand on Cletis's shoulder and steered him back to the truck.
Beyond thought, Cletis acquiesced and turned in numb silence.
Later, Cletis still behind the wheel, they crossed the river north of the Dalles but were turned back on their tracks by smoke, grass fire and road closure. "Some grass fire - probably started by a broken beer bottle in the hot sun" the roadblock ranger told them after they had crossed the bridge.
Still later they stopped for the night in Tee Ah Millatoona campground in the pines looking down on the ghosts of Columbia River fishing weirs. The sign post said: Tee Ah Millatoona Chief Broom's father, - The Pine That Stands Tallest on the Mountain. An Indian chief, he married a Caucasian woman named Bromden and took her last name, but she drove him to alcoholism.
"I don't know" said Billy Bob "doesn't look like any Chinookan language I ever read. Think the people around here are allowing some 60's acid freak to re-write their history for them?"
Cletis didn't care.