I’m just stripping out the last of her.” Joe’s head withdrew. Hank put the milking stool back on top of the big box that housed the emergency generator and carried the pail of milk to the side door. He put his shoulder against the door and slid it wide, then returned to unlatch the stanchion from the cow’s drowsing head and hurry her back into the pasture with a slap on the flank. By the time he had walked back to the house with the pail of milk knocking against his leg, Viv had finished the dishes and Jan was upstairs getting her kids ready for bed. Joe was bent intently over the postcard on the breakfast table, rereading it. Hank put the pail down on the drainboard and wiped his hands on his thighs. “Let me have a look at it ...I suppose I should add something.” ...and the postman, sneezing blood over a tableful of third class, advises his superior: “I don’t think it was any accident; I think it was too perfect to be coincidental. I think that boy out there is a dangerous psycho and I think the blast was planned!” And the pinball machine flashes. And the clouds file past. The bus huffs and hisses its blunt nose out into the traffic finally, where it swings hugely, ceremoniously west through the bright, picture-postcard countryside. The hand appears. The postcard flutters, dips, explodes, splintering wood and window. The lawn bucks and glitters. Evenwrite spreads his rear end on another gas station toilet seat and opens another package of Tums. Jonathan Draeger leaves a meeting in Red Bluff before it is half over, with the excuse that he has to drive on north to Eugene, but goes instead to a café where he sits and writes in his notebook: “Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever—the blasphemer, the dissenter—will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies. A schoolboy hates the cocky-acting kid who says he can walk the fence and never fall. A woman despises the girl who is confident that her beauty will get her man. A worker is never so angered as by an owner who believes in the predominance of management. And this anger can be tapped and used.” And inside the bus, reclined in his seat near the window, Lee dozed and woke, and dozed again, seldom opening more than one eye at a time to watch America flash past behind his tinted glasses: Slow ... Stop ... Resume Speed ... Step up to quality . . . with elegant young sociables entertaining each other at a cookout . . . It’s what’s up front with the same young sociables elegantly relaxing indoors after the ordeal outside... Caution ... Slow ... Stop ... Resume speed ... Lee dozed and woke, moving west over the bus’s big strumming engine; (Evenwrite leapfrogs down the Southbound 99, from restroom to restroom) dozing and waking indifferently, and watching the roadsigns explode past; (Draeger cruises up from Red Bluff, stopping frequently for coffee and writing in his book) and was rather glad that he hadn’t bought that paperback novel (Jenny watches the clouds marshaling out to sea, and begins a low singsong deepdown chant, “Oh clouds . . . oh rain . . .”). From New Haven to Newark, to Pittsburgh Where there’s life with lots of even teeth, lots of spaghetti and garlic bread there’s Bud and beer cans turned label-tocamera (Dyin’ of the drizzlin’ shits, goddammitall! Evenwrite chalked another mark up against his Nemesis as he swung to stop at another station). Cleveland and Chicago “Get your kicks . . . on Route 66! (“Café owners are more frustrated than the common laborer,” Draeger writes. “The common laborer answers only to the foreman; the café owner answers to every patron who stops in”) St. Louis...Columbia...Kansas City for a man size way to stop perspiration odor Mennen speed stick with the scent that’s all man! (Who does that hardnose think he is, dammit, actin’ like God Almighty?) Denver... Cheyenne...Laramie ...Rock Springs The soft coal capital of the world. (“The hardest man,” Draeger writes, “is but a shell.”) Pocatello...Boise ... Welcome to Oregon speed limit strictly enforced. ( Just wait till I shove this report under that damned hardnose!)...Burns ...Bend...88 miles to Eugene Oregon’s second market (“Man,” Draeger writes, “is ...does... will... can’t . . .”)...Sisters ...Rainbow... Blue River (“Oh clouds,” Jenny chants, “Oh rain . . . come against the man I say . . .”) . . . Finn Rock...Vida... Leaburg . . . Springfield ...and only in Eugene seemed to come awake. He had made his trip without quite realizing it. During stops he had bought candy bars and Coke and gone to the bathroom, then returned to his seat, though there might have been twenty minutes left before departure. But as he neared Eugene the scenery began to brush long-shut doors and rattle rusty locks, and as the bus—a different bus, rickety and uncomfortable—began the climb from Eugene into the long range of mountains that separates the coast from the Willamette Valley and the rest of the continent, he foun............