Hum de-dum de-dum, Woolly hummed as he took another look at the map in his lap. Performance is sweeter, nothing can beat her, life is completer . . . Oh, hum de-dum de-dum.
—Get out of the road! someone yelled as they passed the Studebaker with a triple honk of the horn.
—Apologies, apologies, apologies! replied Woolly in reciprocal triplicate, with a friendly wave of the hand.
As he angled back into his lane, Woolly acknowledged that it probably wasn’t advisable to drive with a map in your lap, what with all the looking up and looking down. So keeping the steering wheel in his left hand, he held the map up in his right. That way he could look at the map out of one eye and the road out of the other.
The day before, when Duchess had secured the Phillips 66 Road Map of America at the Phillips 66 gas station, he handed it to Woolly, saying that since he was driving, Woolly would have to navigate. Woolly had accepted this responsibility with a touch of unease. When a gas station map is handed to you, it’s almost the perfect size—like a playbill at the theater. But in order to read a gas station map, you have to unfold and unfold and unfold it until the Pacific Ocean is up against the gear shift and the Atlantic Ocean is lapping at the passenger-side door.
Once a gas station map is open all the way, just the sight of it is likely to make you woozy, because it is positutely crisscrossed from top to bottom and side to side by highways and byways and a thousand little roads, each of which is marked with a tiny little name or tiny little number. It reminded Woolly of the textbook for a biology class that he had taken while at St. Paul’s. Or was it St. Mark’s? Either way, early in this volume, on a left-hand page was a picture of a human skeleton. After looking carefully at this skeleton with all of the various bones in their proper places, when you turned to the next page fully expecting the skeleton to disappear, the skeleton was still there—because the next page was made of see-through paper! It was made of see-through paper so that you could study the nervous system right on top of the skeleton. And when you turned the page after that, you could study the skeleton, the nervous system, and the circulatory system with all of its little blue and red lines.
Woolly knew that this multilayered illustration was meant to make things perfectly clear, but he found it very unnerving. Was it a picture of a man or a woman, for instance? Old or young? Black or white? And how did all the blood cells and nerve impulses that were traveling along these complicated networks know where they were supposed to go? And once they got there, how did they find their way home? That’s what the Phillips 66 road map was like: an illustration with hundreds of arteries, veins, and capillaries branching ever outward until no one traveling along any one of them could possibly know where they were going.
But this was hardly the case with the place-mat map from Howard Johnson’s! It didn’t have to be unfolded at all. And it wasn’t covered with a confusion of highways and byways. It had exactly the right amount of roads. And those that were named were named clearly, while those that weren’t named clearly weren’t named at all.
The other highly commendable characteristic of the Howard Johnson’s map was the illustrations. Most mapmakers are particularly good at shrinking things. The states, the towns, the rivers, the roads, every single one of them is shrunk to a smaller dimension. But on the Howard Johnson’s place mat, after reducing the towns, rivers, and roads, the mapmaker added back a selection of illustrations that were bigger than they were supposed to be. Like a big scarecrow in the lower left-hand corner that showed you where the cornfields were. Or the big tiger in the upper right-hand corner that showed you the Lincoln Park Zoo.
It was just the way the pirates used to draw their treasure maps. They shrunk down the ocean and the islands until they were very small and simple, but then they added back a big ship off the coast, and a big palm tree on the beach, and a big rock formation on a hill that was in the shape of a skull and was exactly fifteen paces from the X that marked the spot.
In the box that was in the lower right-hand corner of the place mat, there was a map within the map, which showed the center of town. According to this map, if you took a right on Second Street and drove an inch and a half, you would arrive at Liberty Park, in the middle of which would be a great big statue of Abraham Lincoln.
Suddenly, out of his left eye, Woolly saw the sign for Second Street. Without a moment to spare, he took a sharp right turn to the tune of another honking horn.
—Apologies, he called.
Leaning toward the windshield, he caught a glimpse of greenery.