Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon Page A

his signature drink with real grape juice and cane sugar, and the resulting excellence of his beverage caused it, over the following decade, to reach from little Camden across the nation. (An early slogan: “Particular Folks Drink Fooks Drinks.”) After the family sold the company, Grapette eventually ended up in the hands of a rival that let it decline until yet another group brought it back and returned it in a small way to certain areas, one of them its natal town where once again you can find it in the little clear bottles.
    “Let me go in first,” Indigo said as if he needed to open a safe passage for us through a lair, and he disappeared inside the cabin. Suddenly the dark windows took on an unearthly glow, and we heard him call out for us to enter, and in we went, Q keeping so close behind me I heard her mutter her grandfather’s strongest oath, “Cheese and crackers!” As I looked about, mine came out stronger.
    Our eyes had to adjust to the dimness and shadows, but before that could happen fully, Indigo, nowhere to be seen, must have hit another switch because the room seemed to change. Cheese and crackers indeed! It was a phantasmagorium!
    Entering Indigo’s parlor was like stepping into the back of a vacuum-tube radio of the same vintage as the first Grapette: the space was full of inexplicable objects, some glowing and others only seeming to glow from reflections; shapes curvilinear and right-angled, bulbous and boxy, yet all in a complex order it would take a schematic drawing to explain; the lower objects were ostensibly attached or anchored or plugged in, while the upper things appeared airborne. A chamber aloft, a room in hover.
    I’d never seen so much light — 
particles of light
 — in a dim room; it was as though they were little bungs and stoppers to keep the cool darkness from leaking in and extinguishing everything. Clobbered by surprise, I saw two or three sparklings where perhaps there was only one. Yet the effect wasn’t a banishment of darkness but a shivering of it with fractured radiance: glistenings, glisterings, gleamings, glintings, glimmerings, glowings, refractions and refulgences, candescence and luminescence, little shining beacons, small shimmering bulbs, twinklings and blinkings, lamplets and lanternlets bespangling the walls in a carny of luminations. It was as if a cut-glass prism full of entrapped sunbeams had fallen and shattered, each brokenness still shedding its wavelength of spectral light. A color wheel spun so fast the pigments had flown off to bespatter whatever they hit: ceiling, floor, Q’s head. Her flaxen hair now magenta, now vermilion, and, with another step forward, orchid, heliotrope, cobalt blue. A student of chromatics could go mad. “Your face!” she said. “You’re a chameleon. A redskin. No, now you’re a green man from planet Quoz.”
    I said, Let it be like this when I cross over, and she said, “Maybe you just crossed. Maybe you’re there.”
    Where was Indigo? Not the color, the man, because the color — and a hundred others — fluoresced everywhere.
    Did I hear music? Was sight turning to sound? A little night music? Light music? A true chromatic scale sung sotto voce? A chorale of colors? Was I seeing radiance or hearing ragtime? The disassociation of synesthesia. Where the devil was Indigo?
    Ah! Of course we couldn’t see him, because we were inside his kaleidoscope skull where he’d transformed his imagination into light and color splattered all over constructions made from hundreds upon hundreds of found objects: buttons, beads, baskets, bottles, Christmas ornaments, saucers, seashells, vases, candlesticks, small brass horns, stalks of river cane, gelatin molds, twigs, a fly-swatter. Look long enough, and somewhere there’d be green cheese and crackers, shellacked and polished and reflecting light like the evening star. He’d turned the place into a loom where he could weave a two-dimensional world of murals into a