Then the cops got on, politely asked him to step outside and pulled his bags from the luggage compartment, and the dog went nuts whining and wagging while the kid stood there frozen with regret. One of the State troopers lifted out and displayed on the burning tar a 9 millemeter automatic sidearm, a bag of what looked like coke, some pipes, some grass . . . lifted out each item like it was a holy thing, some saints relic, and lovingly displayed it on the road as two of the plainclothes ever so politely stepped up, pulled the brother's hands behind and cuffed him and ever so lovingly pushed him down to the hot tar. You're ours now, baby. And once it was this young couple of hippie grunge kids couldn't have been more than, say, nineteen, twenty, him with long hair and a headband and her in this long sixties Judy Collins dress and just one subtle tattoo of a bluebird on her leg. And then a kind of pillowcase sewn shut that he ripped open at the seam and held up for the others to see.
Pot burst out like mattress stuffing.
They grinned at the kids and one of them stepped up first to the boy and still smiling put his hands behind and cuffed him while the girl watched, face screwed up in tears. And now it was her turn and she collapsed, hysterical, suspended from his hands by her twisted arms like Joan of Arc. It's a place where the gamblers eat. All you can chow down for two bucks, and before I became a vegetarian Buddhist I'd have fried chicken, mashed potatoes, clam chowder, string beans, salad, garlic bread, the wickedest peach cobbler this side of the Snake River, chocolate pudding, coffee, coca cola and a mint-flavored toothpick. And the hole they were going to rot in wouldn't be fit for any kind of dog.