Free Educating Peter by Tom Cox Page A

anyway.’
    â€˜Where are we now?’ said Thunderbolt.
    â€˜Hell’s canyon. Snake river,’ replied Lightfoot.
    â€˜You’re better off getting as far away from me as you can, kid.’
    â€˜In for a penny, in for a pound.’
    â€˜Lonely country, kid. You got any folks?’
    â€˜You know what? I don’t even know any more. That’s weird.’
    I turned the television off, retrieving my Windolene wipes from the top of the set.
    You had to hand it to the road movies of the 1970s.Some of them might not have aged as well as others, but the fact was that all of them were very good at making the experience of high adventure on the open highway seem real and exciting. When it came to recreating the dreaming, the drugs, the drink, the violence and the guttural engine noises, you couldn’t really fault them. I could confirm this, of course, because I too was now an established road warrior, with at least a modicum of experience of all of these things (if you really think about it, Wheat Crunchies are a kind of drug, aren’t they?). Yet I couldn’t help feeling that some of my favourite directors had missed one major element – something that every road tripper has to deal with, sooner or later, no matter how long he avoids it; something which, in its own way, is as hair-raising as a race against the County Sheriff to the state line, as spine-chilling as having a phantom juggernaut bearing down on you from the wrong side of the road, and as intrinsic to the outlaw experience as being chased by a truckload of bloodthirsty rednecks.
    Cleaning.
    The puzzling thing was, when I’d been in the car with Peter I hadn’t really got the impression he’d made that much mess. Sure, he’d munched his way through two family-size multi-packs of crisps, four Mars Bars, two Burger King value meals and a packet of sherbet lemons, but now, as I returned to the car and searched in vain for a vacuum cleaner attachment sophisticated enough to fit down the gap between the passenger seat and the ashtray, I found myself gazing at the carnage before me in something halfway between reverence and outrage. Where had thatspearmint Polo wrapper come from? Who had hidden that half-eaten doughnut in the glove compartment? And why, when Thunderbolt and Lightfoot stopped in a valley, did you never see Clint Eastwood trying to prise a half-sucked mint imperial off the carpet beneath the clutch pedal, while Jeff Bridges stood poised behind him with his finger on the trigger of a bottle of Febreeze?
    â€˜I thought you were doing this journey with one teenager, not ten,’ said my wife, Edie; who, clearly tired of overhearing me make noises like ‘mmmrrr’, ‘jjjrrr’ and ‘ohmygodwhat’sthat?’, had come out to see what all the fuss was about.
    It was exactly twelve hours since the end of my first segment of adventures with Peter. We’d parted on good terms, promising to meet again in a fortnight’s time – karate classes, fencing lessons, a visit to his dad’s place and a couple of parties were going to make it impossible for him to see me again before then – and not to let on to Jenny about the snack food. I’d driven home, woken up wired from a dream about more driving, then spent the morning alternating between the Ford Focus in the driveway and the
Thunderbolt And Lightfoot
and
Vanishing Point
videos in the living room. I felt that, all in all, our quest was progressing successfully and fulfilling Jenny’s criteria of ‘ammunition’ for Peter’s decisions about his future. Something, though, was unsettling me, and I couldn’t quite put a name to it. It wasn’t the endless litter. It wasn’t the boarded-up waxwork museum. It wasn’t the sixty-pound parking ticket that I’d had slapped on my windscreen in Hastings after being distracted byEd The Troubadour and his tights. It wasn’t even the fact that,