me and Earl was hauling chickens on the flatbed out of Wiggins and we'd spent
all night on the uphill side of 37 miles of hill called Wolf Creek Pass which is
up on the Great Divide we was sitting there sucking toothpicks and drinking
knee-highs and onion soup mix and I says Earl let's mail a card to mother and
send them chickens on down to the other side yeah let's give them a ride
well Earl put down his bottle and ash his foot down on the throttle and then a
couple of boobs with a thousand cubes in the 1948 Peterbilt screamed alive we
woke up the chickens we roared up off of that shoulder spraying pine cones rocks
and boulders and put 400 head of them Rhode Island Reds and a couple of
burnt-out roosters on the line look out here we go
well we commenced trucking and them hens commenced a clucking and Earl took out a
match and scratched his pants and lit up the unused half of a dollar cigar took a
puff says my ain't this pretty up here I says Earl this hill can spill us you
better slow down you gonna kill us just make one mistake and it's the pearly
gates for them 85 crates of USDA approved cluckers you want to hit second
well Earl grabbed on the shifter and he stabbed her into fifth gear and then the
chromium plated fully illuminated genuine accessory shift knob come right
off in his hand I says you won't screw that thing back on Earl he's trying to
thread it on there when the fire fell off of his cigar and dropped on down
sort of roll around and lit in the cover of his pants and burn a hole in his sock
yeah sort of set him right on fire I look going out of the window and I
start counting phone poles going by at the rate of four to the seventh power
well I put two and two together and added 12 and carried five I'm up at 22,000
telephone poles an hour I looked at Earl and his eyes was wide his lip was curled
and his leg was fried and his hand was froze to the wheel like a tongue to a
sled in the middle of blizzard I says Earl I'm not the type to complain but the
time has come for me to explain that if you don't apply some brake real soon
they're gonna have to pick us up with a stick and a spoon well Earl reared back
cocked his leg and stepped down as hard as he could on the brake and the pedal went
clear of the floor and stayed right there on the floor didn't stand it says
it's sort of like stepping on a plum well from there on down it just wasn't
real pretty it was hairpin county and switchback city one of them looked like
a can full of worms another one looked like malaria germs right in the middle
of the whole damn show was a real nice tunnel now wouldn't you know sign says
clearance to the 12-foot line but the chickens was stacked to 13-9 well we
shot that tunnel in 110 like gas through a funnel and eggs through a head we took
that top row of chickens off slicker to scum off a Louisiana swamp went down
around around and down we run out of ground at the edge of town bashed in the
side of the feed store downtown Pagosa Springs
the other side