I write to make a difference. “It is always a writer’s duty,” said Samuel Johnson, “to make the world better.” I write to give pleasure and promote aesthetic bliss. To honor life and to praise the divine beauty of the natural world. I write for the joy and exultation of writing itself. To tell my story.

Abbey
The Fool’s Progress

Postlude

Roaring westward at evening, top down, red sun of Texas burning in their eyes. Smoke or El Paso—a city on fire—smeared across a yellow sky. Barbed wire. Windrows of dead tumbleweed piled on the fence. Scrub cattle with splintered borns, fly-covered hides, broken hooves range through the rocky desert, munching on cactus, on the dried seedpods of thorny mesquite. Newspapers yellow with lies, bleached by the sun, flap like startled fowl with ragged wings across the asphalt road. Welcome to the West.

Welcome to the West I he shouts in the wind, grinning his vulpine grin, teeth hanging out, and hugs her tighter to his side, his gaunt ribs, his beating swelling joyous heart. By Gawd we’re gonna get there, Ellie, we’re a-gonna make it yet, I tell you, there’s no way they can stop us now.

The child gazes ahead in wonder, her dark eyes shining in fear and excitement, long black hair whipped wildly by the stream of air pouring in mad invisible vortices over the windshield, around their shoulders, across and through the baggage—suitcases, duffelbags, stuffed bears, bedrolls, books, boxes, sacks full of food—jammed in a fury of haste within the well and upon the back seat of the open, boat-shaped, rollicking automobile.

Self-propelled. The open boat on the desert sea. A fat faded near-antique almost-classic but rumpled-looking motorcar, of dubious value, doubtful make, uncertain age but clearly a piece of iron. Detroit iron. A fringe of mud hangs from the fenders. Hubcaps missing. One savage portside sideswipe scar from headlight to tailfin reveals the cancer of rust beneath the veneer of baked-on bleached-out once purple-hued enamel. A repaint job. The niggerized convertible. The rednecked dreamboat. Choice of any country boy with big feet, a limber cock, a lank frame too long in the torso.

He lifts his eyes from the girl to the road to the rearview mirror and its image: blueblack highway tapering off into the eastern dark. An empty highway, at the moment, no red glare or blinking blue of police, no menacing array of tractor-trailer rig, nothing nobody following whatsoever. At the moment. But the wicked flee pursued or not.

Once we get there, he goes on, speaking hoarsely but loudly above the rush of wind, we’ll hide this junkyard wreck under the willows down by the crick for a year or so, give it some rest, let them pistons get some rest, we’ll ride the horses into town, you and me, yessir and we’ll eat good too I tell you.

Where do you mean, Daddy? What horses?

Most anywhere, honey, anywhere. Anywhere west of the Rio Grandee. There’s Cherry Creek under Aztec Mountain. There’s Bisbee, good old hippie town, we’re welcome there. Maybe Mexican Hat up in Utah. Over there under the cottonwoods along that old Green River south of Ruby Ranch. Honey, I know a hundred places. Lone Pine in the Owens Valley. Or why not Big Pine or by Gawd Independence? There’s Arcata on the coast. And just a little ways beyond lays that big island down below. Brisbane’s a good city. You might like Alice Springs. Or what the hell, go all the way to 80-Mile Beach, the Kimberly Mountains, the Black Swan River, watch the sun go down over the bloody Indian Ocean toward bleeding Africa where it all began. Look in my eyes, Ellie, tell me—