Good Vibrations by Tom Cunliffe Page B

life to a nearby town in search of food. Here, Polly of Polly’s Pizza asked us what we were about. We chatted pleasantly of this and that, and she glided away to her kitchen, all soft white tennis shoes, soft voice, soft blonde hair and plump, welcoming body. A wholesome girl.
    We were halfway through a huge ‘Western Special’ with extra cheese when she slid up to us quietly.
    â€˜I don’t want I should alarm you, or anything,’ she purred, ‘but if you folks are ridin’ out to the Midwest, y’all ought to be real careful out there.’
    â€˜What’s the problem?’
    â€˜Thing is, once you’re west of the mountains, you’ll find some pretty strange people.’
    â€˜What about round here?’ I asked her gently, and making sure not to offend, I glanced meaningfully at the assorted group gathered around the black Heritage out on the shadowy sidewalk.
    â€˜Those guys are OK,’ she assured us. ‘They’re all from round here.’ Which made it all right. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t sayin’ nothin’, but in some of them states out West terrible things happen, and the folks is weird…’
    We didn’t tell Polly where we were staying when we paid the bill. I’m not suspicious by nature and she surely meant nothing but good, but she couldn’t have checked out all those guys sizing up my motorcycle. One of them just might have been from out of state, and careless talk costs bikes, especially after dark away in Nowhere Land. So we roared off into the velvet night and returned to base by a roundabout route.
    As I waited for sleep in the comfortable bed, I thought on Polly’s remarks and recalled being warned by an otherwise perfectly sane lady back at the Annapolis dealership not to travel through Tennessee, our next state after the mountains.
    â€˜That place is full of hicks.’
    As always, a chance remark made in daylight grew into horrors by the early hours, so I crept out to look around. All quiet, but just to be sure, I locked the bikes together with a large chain I’d lugged over from Britain and pondered on what folks out West must make of Easterners.
    Roz slept late the following morning, still beaten up after her first two full days in the saddle. I slipped out of Room 3 without my boots hoping for breakfast with the clock man.
    I was in luck.
    The kitchen walls were as beset with timepieces as those of the rest of the house, but the coffee was far stronger than normal in the US and the waffles Olympian. Mine Host had obviously passed a disturbed night considering the enigmas of ethnic bonding and collective business responsibility.
    â€˜This country’s full of fragmented national groups,’ he said, taking a hefty draught of the thick, dark, un-American coffee. ‘They’re consumed by mutual suspicion and often they hate each other.’
    â€˜Surely all that went out seventy years ago – apart from colour down South?’
    â€˜Never believe it.’ He wiped his mouth and poured maple syrup on a waffle.
    â€˜The other problem comes from big business. Taxes have multiplied in my lifetime, and big business is taking over everything worth having. People are so busy squabbling over the petty differences of their ex-nationalities that they don’t see the genuine bandits coming. So they lose their freedom and the capacity to do things for themselves.’
    â€˜And who are the bandits?’
    â€˜Multinationals, and politicians on the make. The time’s long gone when a little guy like Eli Terry can survive by building better clocks.’
    â€˜Who’s he?’
    â€˜Eli was what you might call the last craftsman and the first industrialist. He set up in Connecticut back in 1807. Contracted with a major furniture maker to produce four thousand grandfather clock movements at four dollars apiece in three years. Everyone said he was mad. A quality movement took