We Ate the Road Like Vultures by Lynnette Lounsbury Read Free Book Online

which was one of life’s simple pleasures. But to say something like that makes you a petty misanthrope so I thanked him and tried to continue a conversation I no longer had any interest in. As soon as he descended into the weirdness again he lost me.
    â€˜You die in your bed? Did you have a vision about that or something?’
    â€˜Sort of—I dream about the future sometimes and Jesus tells me what will happen. I dreamed about you.’ He turned to me. ‘I recognised you at the door.’
    What do you say to that sort of thing anyway? Jesus giving someone a message about me seemed unlikely given the fact that I have never prayed to him and only mentioned his name as part of some sort of curse, but just in case, I jumped in. ‘I don’t want to know when I die or even when you think I will die. In fact I don’twant to know anything of that nature whatsoever. No future stuff. Talk about something else okay?’
    He stopped walking to look at me. I kept walking and heard him laugh as he stepped up to catch me.
    â€˜Okay, no future for you, eh?’
    I hoped that was a mistake in translation rather than a prophecy and I tried to think of a change of conversation. I didn’t have to as he began asking me all the same sorts of questions the old guys had and I found myself telling him about my travels and my farm and finally about the real reason I was there.
    â€˜I’m not really his granddaughter you know?’
    â€˜Yeah. I know that. You are too young.’
    He didn’t ask any more than that so I continued. ‘He’s actually a very famous writer.’
    He smiled and nodded, more at me than the information, and kept up his muscled stride as though what I said was peripheral to the need to get closer to Jesus, and it made me persistent in a teenage way I hate but can’t help.
    â€˜He’s Jack Kerouac. On the Road . You know?’ He still smiled but added a slight shrug that used a variety of muscles I was unaware of.
    â€˜It’s the defining beat generation novel, Adolf. It changed literature.’
    He paused and looked at me and I had to take two steps back to look up at him.
    â€˜I don’t mean to seem uninterested, Lulu, I just haven’t read it or heard of it or ever heard his name. My parents had a huge library and if you ever want a specific quote from Mein Kampf I can name the page. I have read the personal letters of Czar Nicholas II. I had never read a novel until I left home, and since then I have read only Jewish writers and the Bible.’
    He looked suddenly sad and filled with regret, or maybe it was anger at his insane parents, and I felt sorry for my own stupid sense of superiority, which I hadn’t even known I had until that moment. My friend Dale from home, another cattle farmer, but one who supplemented his income with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of organic marijuana, tried to read some of my favourite books and told me they werepretentious to the point of being flammable, and we argued so long and hard that we were barely friends again before I left. He told me I was stuck in a time warp of people who thought themselves better for doing nothing at all and having no money and calling it art. I was so angry I smashed into the doorframe on my way out of his house and dislocated my shoulder and I didn’t say anything to him about it, even though I spent the night in emergency waiting for a doctor to pop it back in and give me exactly the same sort of painkillers Dale had growing under his three-storey treehouse.
    And finally there I was in the heat and the desert with a supermodel, and thinking myself better than him for having read a couple of books, not even having written them, just turned the pages and sighed over someone else’s thoughts and adventures and ideas. I hung my head for a moment.
    â€˜Sorry. I can take it all a bit seriously sometimes.’ I wasn’t very good at apologising and