But it was a good hundred miles into Nebraska, and of course,we jumped for it.
Eddie drove alone, the cowboy and myself following, and no sooner were we out of town than Eddie started to ball that jack ninety miles an hour out of sheer exuberance.
"Damn me, what's that boy doing!" the cowboy shouted, and took off after him.
It began to be like a race.
For a minute I thought Eddie was trying to get away with the car – and for all I know that's what he meant to do.
But the cowboy stuck to him and caught up with him and tooted the horn.
Eddie slowed down.
The cowboy tooted to stop.
"Damn, boy, you're liable to get a flat going that speed.
Can't you drive a little slower?"
"Well, I'll be damned, was I really going ninety?" said Eddie.
"I didn't realize it on this smooth road."
"Just take it a little easy and we'll all get to Grand Island in one piece."
"Sure thing."
And we resumed our journey.
Eddie had calmed down and probably even got sleepy.
So we drove a hundred miles across Nebraska, following the winding Platte with its verdant fields.
"During the depression," said the cowboy to me, "I used to hop freights at least once a month.
In those days you'd see hundreds of men riding a flatcar or in a boxcar, and they weren't just bums, they were all kinds of men out of work and going from one place to another and some of them just wandering.
It was like that all over the West.
Brakemen never bothered you in those days.
I don't know about today.
Nebraska I ain't got no use for.
Why in the middle nineteen thirties this place wasn't nothing but a big dustcloud as far as the eye could see.
You couldn't breathe.
The ground was black. I was here in those days.
They can give Nebraska back to the Indians far as I'm concerned.
I hate this damn place more than' any place in the world.
Montana's my home now – Missoula.
You come up there sometime and see God's country."
Later in the afternoon I slept when he got tired talking – he was an interesting talker.
We stopped along the road for a bite to eat.
The cowboy went off to have a spare tire patched, and Eddie and I sat down in a kind of homemade diner.
I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and here came this rawhide old-timer Nebraska farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner; you could hear his raspy cries clear across the plains, across the whole gray world of them that day.
Everybody else laughed with him.
He didn't have a care in the world and had the hugest regard for everybody.
I said to myself, Wham, listen to that man laugh.
That's the West, here I am in the West.
He came booming into the diner, calling Maw's name, and she made the sweetest cherry pie in Nebraska, and I had some with a mountainous scoop of ice cream on top.
"Maw, rustle me up some grub afore I have to start eatin myself raw or some damn silly idee like that."
And he threw himself on a stool and went hyaw hyaw hyaw hyaw.
"And throw some beans in it."
It was the spirit of the West sitting right next to me.
I wished I knew his whole raw life and what the hell he'd been doing all these years besides laughing and yelling like that.
Whooee, I told my soul, and the cowboy came back and off we went to Grand Island.
We got there in no time flat.
He went to fetch his wife and off to whatever fate awaited him, and Eddie and I resumed on the road.
We got a ride from a couple of young fellows – wranglers, teenagers, country boys in a put-together jalopy – and were left off somewhere up the line in a thin drizzle of rain.
Then an old man who said nothing – and God knows why he picked us up – took us to Shelton.
Here Eddie stood forlornly in the road in front of a staring bunch of short, squat Omaha Indians who had nowhere to go and nothing to do.