The Old Patagonian Express Read online

  ‘What’s the weather report like?’

  ‘Terrible,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working on this train for fifty years and this is the worst winter I’ve ever seen. Ten below in Chicago, winds going a hundred miles an hour. It took the signs down in Cleveland. Shee!’

  One thing about the cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone. The temperatures, the wind speeds, the chill factors were always different, but always bad. And yet, even if they were not the exaggerations they seemed, I would be out of this glaciation in a day or so. I had not seen one green tree or one unfrozen body of water since leaving Boston. But there was hope – I was going south, more southerly than anyone on this southbound express would believe. Somewhere below, the wind was in the palm trees. On the other hand, we were only now in Streator, Illinois.

  Streator was dark, and my one glimpse of Galesburg was a rectangle of snow and a sign that said PARKING and a little lighted shed and a half-buried car – a scene with the quaint insignificance of a New Yorker cover. This I saw from the dining car, looking up from my halibut and chablis. Propped against the wine bottle was The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett. I had hurried through the Faulkner and left it in Chicago, in the drawer of the vanity table in the Holiday Inn, with the Gideon Bible.

  The criminality in The Thin Man was not half so distracting as the drinking. Everyone drank in this book; it was, in the Hammett world, eternally cocktail time. The Faulkner had disturbed me with torrential irrelevance and set my teeth on edge with confederate metaphysics. Hammett’s English was more lucid, but the plot was plainly concocted, and the detective-work seemed a poor excuse for boozing sessions.

  I turned my attention to the three people at the next table, who were drawling away happily. A middle-aged couple had discovered that the stranger who had seated himself at their table was also a Texan. He was dressed in black and yet looked raffish, like one of those adulterous preachers who occur from time to time in worthy novels set in this neck of the woods – it was nine o’clock, we were in Fort Madison, Iowa, on the west bank of the Mississippi.

  ‘Yep, the mighty Miss,’ said the waiter, when I asked him to confirm this. He took my empty plate away and crooned, ‘The Mississippi, the Mississippi’ to the other diners.

  The preacher, like the couple – and this thrilled them – was from San Tone. All three were returning from New York. They took turns telling horror stories – Eastern horror stories of drugs and violence. ‘One night we were going back to our hotel and I saw this man –’ That sort of story.

  And this sort of rejoinder. ‘You think that’s bad? A friend of mine was over in Central Park –’

  Soon they were reminiscing about Texas. Then boasting. Finally, their boasting took an unexpected turn. They talked about all the people they knew in Texas who carried guns. ‘My cousin carried a gun his whole life’ and ‘Ron knew a politician who never went anywhere without his gun’ and ‘My granddaddy had a beautiful gun.’

  ‘Everyone had a gun in those days,’ said the preacher.

  ‘He gave it to my Daddy,’ said the lady.

  ‘My Daddy had two guns,’ said the preacher. ‘One here and one here.’ He spanked two pockets.

  The lady said that one day her Daddy had tried to take a gun into a Dallas department store. He was just a stranger in town, from San Tone. Woke up that morning and strapped on his gun, like he always done. Nothing funny about that. Done the same thing every day of his life. Went in the store, packing this old gun. He was a huge man, way over six feet tall. The department store girls figured it was a hold-up as soon as they seen him. They stomped on the alarm. All Hell busted loose, but Daddy didn’t mind one bit. He pulled out his gun and when the police came along Daddy said, ‘Okay, boy, let’s git ‘im!’

  The lady’s husband said that Daddy had been eighty-four years old at the time.

  ‘ “Okay, boy, let’s git ’im!’ ”

  The preacher had listened to this story with a growing look of defeat. He was silent for a moment, then he spoke up.

  He said, ‘My Daddy had eight heart attacks.’

  The lady squinted at him. Her husband said, ‘Wow.’

  ‘Coronary thrombosises,’ said the preacher. ‘Lived through all eight.’

  ‘He from San Tone, too?’ asked the man.

  ‘He surely was,’ said the preacher.

  ‘Must have been tough,’ said the lady.

  ‘No Easterner could survive that,’ said the preacher. ‘Only a Westerner could survive eight heart attacks.’

  This met with general agreement. I wanted to ask what a Westerner was doing with eight heart attacks. But I kept my peace.

  ‘Back East –’ the lady began.

  It was time to go. I returned to my bedroom, through a succession of deep freezes, the ice chests that lay between the cars. I yanked the covers over my head and said good night to Kansas. I’m staying here, I thought, and if I see snow on the ground tomorrow morning I’m not getting out of bed.

  Dawn at Ponca City, Oklahoma, was a wintry shimmer under a sky of grey oatmeal. We were nearly 800 miles south of Chicago and headed towards Perry. The land was flat and barren; but the traces of snow – pelts of it blown into ruts and depressions, like the scattered carcasses of ermine – was not enough to keep me sulking in bed. I did not realize how cold it was out there in Oklahoma until I saw the white ovals of frozen ponds and the narrow ice-paths at the centre of stony riverbeds. The rest was brown; a few bare brown trees; a small herd of brown cattle, lost in all that space, nibbling at brown turves. At the topmost portion of the sky’s dome, the mournful oatmeal dissolved and slipped, leaving a curvature of aquamarine. The sun was a crimson slit, a red squint in the mass of cereal, a horizontal inch steadied above the horizon.

  For twenty minutes or so, and as many miles, the land remained utterly empty: no houses, no people, very little snow, only that changeless brown. It was the unadorned surface of the earth, old humpless grasslands, every lick of weed combed flat by the wind, and no mooching cow anywhere to give it size.

  These are the gardens of the Desert, these

  The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,

  For which the speech of England has no name –

  The Prairies.

  We came to Perry. Perry’s bungalow styles were from Massachusetts and Ohio, and some with tarpaper roofs and air-conditioners rusting on the windows were nearly hidden behind the large sun-faded cars parked in their driveways. The cars were as wide as the roads. But one Perry house was tall and white, with three porches and gables and steeply sloping roofs, and newly painted clapboard. It would not have looked unusual on an acre of green lawn in Cape Cod; but in Perry, surrounded by tramped stones, and towering in the prairie like a beacon, it seemed a puzzle. Yet it was a vivid puzzle, so clear in design it required no solution. The assertive clarity of the thing was distinctly American, and I found it as remarkable in its way as the sudden parking lot (the lighted shed, the sign, the buried car) I had seen the previous night in Galesburg, or the snowy swimming pool with the painted palm trees in Chicago. I could not have found it so beautiful if I had not also found it slightly comic. But it was American humour, unambiguous, newly-minted, half cliché, half genius, and visually memorable, like the minute we spent in Norman, Oklahoma: the Sooner Movie House at the corner of Main and Jones, the Stars and Stripes flying over the store-fronts, the five parked cars, the self-consciously severe row of low buildings, and Main Street a perfectly straight line from here, the train station, to the end of town, that brown smudge of prairie at the end of the street.

  ‘It’s cold out there, boyl’ the conductor said at Oklahoma City. He advised me to stay in the train. Oklahoma City was really no different from Perry. The sheds, the stores, the warehouses were bigger, but the shapes were the same, and like Perry it had the temporary and unfinished look of a place that had been plunked down in the prairie.

  These Western towns had no apparent age. They were settlements of Baptist utility: t
he citizens worked and prayed, tore down the buildings they ceased to need and put up new square ones and did not bother to decorate them, except with flags. So the towns slipped by, one Main Street scarcely distinguishable from another, church and post office cut to the same pattern, two-storey buildings in the centre of town, one-storey buildings at its edge. It was not until I saw a certain house, or barn, or a side road with a row of blackened fractured sheds, that I remembered how these old places were or received a whiff of their romance.

  ‘Want to hear something awful?’ said a man entering the Dining Car for breakfast. ‘Forty-five thousand schoolkids just got on the train.’

  He grumbled and picked up the menu which served as a placemat.

  I finished my coffee and, heading back to my car, saw what he meant. There were not quite as many as he had said, perhaps two or three hundred, women and children, each wearing a name-tag: Ricky, Sally, Tracy, Kim, Kathy. Kathy was gorgeous; she was chatting to Marilyn, who was also a knockout. Both stood near their chubby little girls.

  ‘Daddy’s got a real bad cold,’ said Kathy, glancing down. ‘I had to put him right to bed.’

  ‘Our daddy’s at the office as usual,’ said Marilyn.

  Overhearing them, another woman said in the same TV-mummy voice, ‘And where’s our daddy, honey? Tell them where our daddy is.’ Her small girl sucked a finger and looked at the floor. ‘Our daddy’s on a trip! And when he comes back, we’re going to tell him that we took a trip. On a train!’

  It was, I was sure, mostly self-parody. Dressed to kill, sprung from their kitchens for a day’s outing to Fort Worth, they were lumbered with their kids. It was a taste of freedom, but clearly not enough: tomorrow they would be back home, cursing housework and hating the mummy-daddy stereotype. They had the wise-cracking good looks of the television commercial housewives, who sell soap flakes and anti-perspirant. If there had been only a dozen or so, I would not have reflected on their condition. But the hundreds of them, turned into governesses and talking with gentle sarcasm about their daddies, was an impressive example of wasted talent. It seemed unfair, to say the least, that in one of the most socially-advanced countries on earth, here was a group behaving no differently from the wariest folk-society. Apart from me – and I was only passing through – there were no grown men in the three cars they occupied. So there was an atmosphere of purdah in these cars, which was not only grim for a feminist, but rather pitiable for the hard-liners there as well. And since at least half of these bright-looking girls had probably majored in sociology, it could not have escaped their notice how closely they resembled the Dinka womenfolk of the southern Sudan.

  I went to my compartment and could not help but brood. Seeing a pump in the prairie I recalled that I had been watching them for the past three hours, the up-and-down motion of a black spindle upraised on a tower, see-sawing all over Oklahoma, sometimes in clusters, but more often a solitary arm-swinging contraption in the middle of nowhere.

  After Purcell, 900 miles from Chicago, we emerged from the ice-age. The creeks were soggy, no longer knobbed with frost; and the snow was sparse – hardly snow-like, it lay in scraps in the tight grass like waste paper. Here, a town was two streets of bungalows, a lumberyard, a grocery store, an American flag and, a moment later, prairie. I looked for details and after an hour or so of close scrutiny was glad for the occasional tree or see-sawing well to break the monotony. I wondered what it must be like to be born in a place like this, where only the foreground – the porch, the storefront, the main street – mattered. The rest was emptiness, or did it only seem that way to me because I was a stranger, passing through on a train? I had no wish to stop. The Oklahoma or Texan celebrates his freedom and speaks of the confinement of the New Yorker; but these towns struck me as confining to a suffocating degree. There was a pattern of defensiveness in the way they were laid out, as if they had simply sprung out of a common fear. And the pattern? It was that of a circle of wagons. And the small oblong houses even had the look of wagons – wagons without wheels, which had been parked there for no better reason than that there were others already there. The land was vast, but the houses were in huddles, regarding the neighbours and the narrow street, their backs turned to the immense spaces of the prairie.

  Ten miles out of Ardmore, on the Oklahoma–Texas border, an old man at the window said, ‘Gene Autry.’

  But asking him for an explanation I missed the place, which was not the cowboy but another town and a railway station so small the Lone Star bowled through it without slowing down.

  ‘Maybe he was born there,’ said the man. ‘Or maybe buried.’

  Low dry hills giving on to grey-green plains marked the Texas border. No ice, no snow; the weather looked mild. Followed by blackbirds, a farmer ploughed a field in a tractor, screwing six stripes out of the ground as he went. I was relieved to see that he was not wearing mittens. So the season had changed; it was early spring here in the first week of February, and if I kept to the trains it would be summer for me in a few days. The air traveller can be jetted to any climate at short notice, but the railway passenger on the southbound express has the satisfaction of seeing the weather change hour by hour and watching for its minutest alteration. At Gainesville there was planting, and more ploughing, and some inch-high shoots. There were trees around the houses here and less constriction than I had seen in the Oklahoma settlements. There were homesteads, with wells and wind-vanes and what might have been orchards.

  Here, where the red man swept the leaves away

  To dig for cordial bark or cooling root,

  The wayside apple drops its surly fruit.

  The direction of the Lone Star – compare it with any history book map – is the direction of the main cattle drive north, the Chisholm Trail. At first, in the 1860s, the cattle were driven through what was known as the Indian Territory in Oklahoma, to the railhead in Abilene, Kansas. All the great railroad towns – Dodge City, Wichita (which we had passed at 6 A M), Cheyenne – flourished because of the cattle that were penned and graded there before being loaded on the Chicago-bound trains. Some of the cattle on the long drive from the Rio Grande were wild, but all were dealt with Mexican-style – the American cowboys had inherited the lariat and the branding iron and most of the lingo, including the word lingo, from Mexican cattlemen. The Chisholm Trail was only one of the routes; the Sedalia took cattle through Arkansas and Missouri, and the Goodnight-Loving Trail ran along the Pecos River. The railway took over these routes – the water supplies along the way, which had determined the course of the Chisholm Trail, were no less important to the steam locomotives’ thirst – and only much later did passengers replace cattle as a source of railway income.

  I saw the herds of cattle, and ducks in flight, and large black circling birds that might have been buzzards, but even here –nearly a thousand miles south of Chicago – the trees were bare. I had not seen one green tree in four days of cross-country travel. I watched for one, but only saw more birds of prey, or windmill pumps, or horses cropping grass. There were houses here, but no towns of any description; what trees I saw were dead but still upright like rather wicked coat-racks along dry creekbeds. Behind the isolated and rusty-roofed farmhouses there was empty space, and nearer the track and usually beside a fence of thorny barbed wire, I saw what I expected to see, the staves of cattle bones, the bleached knuckles and heaps of vertebrae, the cracked and hollow-eyed skulls.

  Texas pride, an amiable but tenacious vulgarity, was the grotesquely fat man wearing his ten-gallon hat in the Silver Dollar Saloon in downtown Fort Worth in February. It might have been a gesture of defiance – the day was overcast and chilly, the bar dungeon-dark (its only light the subaqueous flicker from a fish tank bubbling on a shelf of whisky bottles). I had ducked in here to get warm and quietly read The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Once my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I sat near the fish tank to read. I also had a decision to make: I could spend the night in Fort Worth, or leave in a matter of hours for Laredo. But I ha
d left my suitcase at the railway station. I had not liked the look of Fort Worth.

  It had been recommended to me as friendlier and more graspable than Dallas, and yet that February afternoon it looked merely grey and grit-blown, a Texas town of pompous insignificance, the desert wind whirling gory ketchup-soaked sandwich wrappers at men clutching their ridiculous hats. Every public place displayed the same ominous sign (or rather two signs –I’m not counting You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Work Here – But It Helps!). The warning went as follows:

  These premises may be occupied by a policeman armed with a shotgun. If ordered to halt – please comply!

  – Fort Worth Police Dept.

  It was perhaps a comment on Fort Worth friendliness that the citizens needed to be reminded that a man with a shotgun meant business, and was not the clay-pigeon enthusiast he seemed.

  That sign was in all the finance companies, and in the stores selling Western gear – Fort Worth had more than its share of these two enterprises: you could get a mortgage and a gold lamé cowboy suit on every corner. It was also in the Blood Donor Center ($50 a pint, and two scruffy individuals waiting to have their veins opened) and the narrow office of the bail bondsman (24-Hour Service said the sign, which also showed a poor devil in handcuffs) and all the chili parlours. It was in the Silver Dollar, too, but by the time I had taken refuge there I had seen it so often it had lost its power to intimidate me.

  In the gurgling light of the fish tank I read the newspaper. The headlines were indignant over local issues. I skipped to the sports page; here, the lead story was an exultant blow-by-blow account of the Southwest Exposition at Fat Stock Show Rodeo. No baseball, no football, no hockey – only the American equivalent of bear-baiting. A rodeo – this was sports? The report covered the entire page, and the next page as well (‘Bull Riding’, ‘Calf Roping’). These people were serious.

  ‘Not too awful long ago,’ said the fat man in the ten gallon hat, using a construction that was new to me, and making it sound – by saying it slowly – like a complete sentence, ‘folks here would have started a revolution if they couldn’t read the rodeo scores. Sure, we’re glad to have it.’