Page "Clint, Texas" Paragraph 11

" Dean and Marylou parked the car near Van Horn and made love while I went to sleep.

I woke up just as we were rolling down the tremendous Rio Grande Valley through Clint and Ysleta to El Paso.

Marylou jumped to the back seat, I jumped to the front seat, and we rolled along.

To our left across the vast Rio Grande spaces were the moorish-red mounts of the Mexican border, the land of the Tarahumare ; soft dusk played on the peaks.

Straight ahead lay the distant lights of El Paso and Juarez, sown in a tremendous valley so big that you could see several railroads puffing at the same time in every direction, as though it was the Valley of the World.

We descended into it.

" Clint, Texas!

" said Dean.

He had the radio on to the Clint station.

Every fifteen minutes they played a record ; the rest of the time it was commercials about a high-school correspondence course.

" This program is beamed all over the West ," cried Dean excitedly.

" Man, I used to listen to it day and night in reform school and prison.

All of us used to write in.

You get a high-school diploma by mail, facsimile thereof, if you pass the test.

All the young wranglers in the West, I don't care who, at one time or another write in for this ; it's all they hear ; you tune the radio in Sterling, Colorado, Lusk, Wyoming, I don't care where, you get Clint, Texas, Clint, Texas.

And the music is always cowboy hillbilly and Mexican, absolutely the worst program in the entire history of the country and nobody can do anything about it.

They have a tremendous beam ; they've got the whole land hogtied.

" We saw the high antenna beyond the shacks of Glint.

" Oh, man, the things I could tell you!

" cried Dean, almost weeping.