“So what are you doing out here? And on such an unsafe mode of transportation?”
“So what are you doing out here? And on such an unsafe mode of transportation?”
“Gathering material.” Johnny found his eyes dropping to the cop’s blood-stiffened right sleeve and forcibly dragged them back up to his sunburned face. He doubted if many of the people on this guy’s beat gave him a hard time; he looked like he could eat nails and spit razor-wire, even though he really didn’t have the right skin for this climate.
“For a new novel?” The cop was excited. Johnny looked briefly at the man’s chest, hunting for a name-tag, but there was none.
“Well, a new book, anyway. Can I ask you something, Officer?”
“Sure, yeah, but I ought to be asking you the questions, I got about a gajillion of em. I never thought . . . out in the middle of nowhere and I meet . . . ho-lee shit!”
Johnny grinned. It was hotter than hell out here and he wanted to get moving before Steve was on his ass—he hated looking into the rearview and seeing that big yellow truck back there, it broke the mood, somehow—but it was hard not to be moved by the man’s artless enthusiasm, especially when it was directed at a subject which Johnny himself regarded with respect, wonder, and yes, awe.
“Well, since you’re obviously familiar with my work, what would you think of a book of essays about life in contemporary America?”
“By you?”
“By me. A kind of loose travelogue called”—he took a deep breath—“Travels with Harley”?
He was prepared for the cop to look puzzled, or to guffaw the way people did at the punchline of a joke. The cop did neither. He simply looked back down at the tail-light of Johnny’s bike, one hand rubbing his chin (it was the chin of a Bernie Wrightson comic-book hero, square and cleft), brow furrowed, considering carefully. Johnny took the opportunity to peek surreptitiously at his own hand. There was blood on it, all right, quite a lot. Mostly on the back and smeared across the fingernails. Uck.
Then the cop looked up and stunned him by saying exactly what Johnny himself had been thinking over the last two days of monotonous desert driving. “It could work,” he said, “but the cover ought to be a photo of you on your drag, here. A serious picture, so folks’d know you weren’t trying to make fun of John Steinbeck . . . or your own self, for that matter.”
