Chapter 32
As hard and as long as we tried, we couldn’t think of any creative, outrageous and adventurous escape plans. Aside from Phil, who suggested that we create a diversion by setting fire to a large section of the town and then riding off while the cops and firefighters were tending to the fires, we were mired in conventional thinking. Dave rejected Phil’s suggestion. It had been raining most of the day with no signs of a letup, and with all that rain it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to start fires.
Phil disagreed, but did concede that we would have needed an enormous amount of gasoline to do the job, and that it would have aroused suspicion in a small town if three strangers bought up all the red metal and plastic gas cans from the hardware stores and went to gas stations to fill them.
Several hours of scheming got us nothing but the idea that we either make our escape in a heavy rainstorm when the cops wouldn’t be so inclined to look for us or to chase us, or at three in the morning in the dark when there would be only a skeleton force of cops on patrol, and when we could ride with our lights off and not be seen.
But finally, after several cigars and the rest of Phil’s whiskey, our minds started to loosen up. Dave suggested that we dismantle our bikes and smuggle them out of town piece by piece and then reassemble them at a remote location. Not only would that have taken weeks, but I explained that I was mechanically inept and would never be able to put my bike back together, and that that would be the end of the trip for me.
“Not really,” Dave said in pushing for his plan, “if you can’t put the thing back together you can throw all the parts into a huge wheelbarrow and push it around. That way you’ll still be on the trip. Think of the benefit of it. Pushing six hundred pounds of motorcycle parts around the country will get you into incredible shape. You’ll have more muscles than the muscleiest of the musclemen. And babes like muscles. Women will be dying to meet you. You won’t even have to talk to them. They’ll just be interested in the muscles.”
I told myself that a body knotted up with muscles on top of muscles would be a winner with women, especially Shirley, and was something that I wanted. I also figured that people would laugh if they saw a guy pushing a wheelbarrow filled with a dismantled motorcycle around the country. As much as I wanted the muscles, I wasn’t willing to pay the price of the ridicule.
Phil didn’t like the idea of dismantling and rebuilding the bikes because he didn’t want to get his hands dirty.
“I’ll tell you what,” he told Dave, “you take apart my bike and put it back together and I’ll go along with it. And get me some beer while you’re out there.”
That idea was junked, and so was one of Phil’s that we race out of town during the day and we tell any cops who stopped us that we were modern day Pony Express riders.
A Babe Magnet
“Everybody loves the Pony Express—everybody! We just tell them we’re using motorcycles instead of horses. People are stupid; they’ll believe anything.”
“Yeah, but what do we do when they see we ain’t got no mail?” I asked.
“How are they gonna know? We’ll put big sacks on the bikes and fill them with flour. And if the cops ask to see the mail, we just say that no one sees the U.S. mail, that the mail is none of their damn business.”
That idea also went nowhere. Then I thought of one.
“Since the streets are already flooded because the sewers are clogged, why don’t we flood the whole town out by clogging up all the sewers?” I said after one satisfying drag on a cigar. “If the place is flooded, everybody will have to leave, and then we could build rafts for the bikes and float them and us out of town when everybody is gone.”
Dave liked the idea, but Phil didn’t because it involved work. He eventually bought into it, though, and we spent several hours that night running around trying to clog up all the sewers. We must have stuffed paper and garbage into thirty or forty sewers before we realized there were hundreds of sewers in the town and that we’d never get to them all. Besides, by early that next morning the stars in the sky told us that the weather had cleared and that the chance for rain, and thus a huge flood, was unlikely.
No, it looked like we’d have to do something as dull and as ordinary as a mad dash out of town in the dark of night. It was about four or five in the morning when, exhausted from drinking and from clogging up dozens of sewers, we decided to sleep. Before we passed out, Dave announced that he had a bold plan and that he’d share it with us when he woke up. That said, we unrolled our sleeping bags and went to sleep.
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