Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  Random Walk.

  The book went out of print quickly enough, and sometime in the mid-1990’s I was given the opportunity to make it available again through iUniverse, the print-on-demand publisher. They brought it out in trade paperback format, and for a while they had a relationship with Barnes & Noble that got the book on the store’s shelves. And it remains in print, and every six months or so I get a four-figure royalty check. Two of the four figures are after the decimal point, but at least the book is out there, and every once in a while somebody buys a copy.

  One of these days I probably ought to persuade HarperCollins to publish the book, in mass-market or trade format, to give it a chance to find its audience. But when the thought occurs to me, I find myself thinking of an incident in Tom Robbins’s fine first novel, Another Roadside Attraction.

  One of the book’s characters is upset over the fact that the life span of the butterfly is so short. So she goes into a trance to meditate on the phenomenon, and emerges therefrom with the insight that the life span of the butterfly is precisely as it ought to be, neither too long nor too short.

  And so I wonder if one might not make a similar observation about Random Walk. Perhaps I don’t need to take any action so that the book might find its audience. Perhaps it has already found—and continues to find—as much of an audience as it deserves or requires. An audience that is neither too large nor too small, but precisely as it ought to be.

  14

  Random Walk DIDN’T HAVE much impact on the world of American letters. And, notwithstanding the occasional hyperbole of the occasional fan, I don’t know that it changed many lives.

  But it did change mine.

  It was in the weeks immediately after my return from Virginia that Lynne and I realized our Florida experiment was a failure. Fort Myers Beach was a nice enough place, and the people we met were decent folks, but it just wasn’t where we belonged. We’d come, we now realized, because our life in New York had been an exhausting one; Lynne was running a demanding bookkeeping and accounting practice, I was writing books and a magazine column, and together we were flying around the country on weekends, putting on writing seminars. We were tired out, and one weekend back in 1985 we visited my aunt and uncle in Pompano Beach, Florida, and were struck by how much more relaxed their life was than ours.

  Well, no kidding. My Uncle Hi was essentially retired, working maybe fifteen hours a week. My Aunt Mim was playing a lot of golf. We looked around and decided Florida was the answer, and the next thing you knew we were living there. But not in Pompano Beach. We picked the west coast, because we’d heard it was quieter there.

  Right.

  Two years later, we were pretty sure we didn’t want to stay. But where else would we go? Back to New York?

  Maybe. But maybe not. We weren’t really ready to make that decision yet.

  But suppose we were to close the Fort Myers Beach house and hit the road. Suppose we tried life without a fixed address, just breezing along with the breeze. It was a fantasy we’d both had for some years, and it looked as though we were now in a position to give it a whirl.

  We set about packing things up, giving some of them away and putting the rest in storage. We planned our departure for early in 1988, but still didn’t know where we’d be heading. And I picked up that road atlas, and remembered the hours I’d spent with it in Virginia.

  One thing I’d noted at the time was the great profusion of towns and villages named Buffalo. Growing up in that city, I’d been aware that it was not the only Buffalo in the nation. There was one in Wyoming, I knew, and it seemed to me there was one in Texas, and perhaps there were others.

  While writing Random Walk, I learned that there were far more Buffalos than I’d ever suspected. The atlas’s index yielded quite a few, but I was soon to find out that there were far more places on the state maps than found their way into the index—and my list of Buffalos began to grow, including of course such permutations of the name as Buffalo Grove and Buffalo Gap and—eureka!—New Buffalo.

  I reported all this to Lynne. “There’s something like twenty of these Buffalos,” I said, “and they’re mostly in the western part of the country, but there’s a batch in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and one in Alabama. What I was thinking, see, was when we’re driving around, with no place we absolutely have to get to, well, maybe just for the hell of it we could go to some of these Buffalos.”

  “WHAT A REMARKABLY indulgent wife you have,” I’ve been told repeatedly. “To put up with your madness, and chase around the country after towns named Buffalo.”

  It is, I suppose, a natural reaction for people to have. And mine is, to be sure, a remarkably indulgent wife in any number of respects. So I nod and smile and let it go.

  But here, for the record, is my remarkably indulgent wife’s response to my tentative suggestion that we might, just might, try visiting some of those dots on the map:

  “I think,” Lynne announced, standing up very straight, and speaking in a tone that brooked no argument, “we should go to all of them.”

  WELL, WE CERTAINLY TRIED.

  In the months before we left Florida, I spent some time at the library, where I happened upon what I took to calling an industrial-strength atlas. Consequently, by the time we hit the road, our list of Buffalos had grown from around twenty to just over forty.

  Now, almost twenty years later, we’ve been to eighty-four of those towns, and know of about a dozen more.

  You know, it reminds me of what they used to say about Rembrandt—that in the course of his life he produced three hundred canvases, of which four hundred are in Europe and the remaining five hundred in the United States. The analogy holds only so far. With the paintings, the implication would seem to be that there are a lot of counterfeit Rembrandts floating around, while it seems rather unlikely that anyone is producing bogus Buffalos.

  So how to explain the numbers? The answer, I’ve come to believe, lies not in the realm of geography at all, but in the more unsettling world of modern physics. The best I can do is to theorize that, in accordance with Heisenberg’s principle, Buffalos are like subatomic particles; the mere act of looking for them causes new ones to spring into existence.

  OUR FIRST BUFFALO was in Alabama, and Rand McNally knew about it, so finding it was a simple matter of driving there. But it seemed to have gone out of business; there were no highway signs welcoming one, and the word buffalo hand-lettered on a wall was the only indication of where we were.

  A local tradesman advised us that people still called the place Buffalo, and that the name had originally been Buffalo Wallow, because once upon a time there had been bison wallowing there. They were long gone, but then so was just about everything else.

  We put on our Buffalo shirts—we had a batch of these, products of New Buffalo Graphics, our favorite showing the noble animal and the civic motto, Buffalo, City of No Illusions. Then, suitably attired, we took Polaroid photos of each other in front of the sign on the wall, and next to a sign we found at a half-acre lot next to a general store. The sign didn’t have a Buffalo reference, but what it did have was a message sternly advising one and all that the lot was a private club, restricted to members, and that trespassers would be prosecuted. It was, for God’s sake, a vacant lot, sprouting rank weeds and strewn with trash. Who would want to trespass? Who would care to be a member? And what was the point of the sign?

  “It’s to keep out the Jews,” Lynne said.

  BUFFALO, MISSISSIPPI, was our second conquest. And it began to give us an indication of what lay ahead of us. Because it wasn’t on any of the maps, and it hadn’t shown up in any of the volumes I consulted, not even the industrial-strength atlas. In all the years since then, I’ve never seen a reference to the place anywhere. It was pure happenstance that we had any reason to look for it.

  Or perhaps it was the agency of a Higher Power, operating in this instance through the medium of a CB radio. Lynne had insisted that we obtain this device, but when I was in the car I woul
dn’t let her turn it on, because I couldn’t stand the thing. But after we’d logged our Alabama Buffalo we had moved on to Mobile, where I hung out for a day while Lynne tended to some family business over in George County, Mississippi.

  I stayed in our motel room, writing my monthly Writer’s Digest column, and I’d just wrapped it up when she came in, telling me it was a damn good thing we’d bought the CB. “Because two truckers were talking,” she said, “and one of them mentioned Buffalo, Mississippi. I didn’t even know there was a Buffalo in Mississippi.”

  “There isn’t,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “there is now. I got all excited, and I cut in and called ‘Breaker One-Nine,’ the way you do.”

  “The way I do?”

  “The way people do. The way CBers do. I asked about Buffalo, Mississippi, and how you get to it, and one of those old boys said it’s near McLain.”

  In the morning we drove to McLain, which is on the road to Hattiesburg. A fellow at a gas station steered us toward the road to Buffalo. “There’s not much there,” he said. “Why do y’all want to go there?”

  Why indeed? We followed his directions, and right where it was supposed to be we found an old graveyard, with a sign proclaiming it to be the Buffalo cemetery. That was the sole indication that there’d ever been a community here, but it was plenty. On with the Buffalo shirts, out with the Polaroid, and our Buffalo collection had doubled in size.

  “That’s pretty amazing,” Lynne said. “How many people do you figure have ever been to Buffalo, Mississippi?”

  “We’re not the only ones,” I said. “But all of the rest of them seem to be dead.”

  THE BUFFALOS WERE never the point. What they did was provide the illusion of purpose for an essentially purposeless odyssey. We’d left Florida with the intention of seeing something of the country, but if that’s all you’ve got in mind, it’s impossible to decide where to go next. The Buffalo hunt was always ready to tell us whether to turn left or right. We’d just head for the nearest Buffalo, and along the way we’d probably find something interesting.

  The Buffalos themselves were sometimes interesting and sometimes not. Buffalo, Mississippi, was only the first of a whole slew of ghost Buffalos, towns that had once been actual communities but had failed to thrive. Buffalo Gap, Saskatchewan, was one of these, with only a cemetery to give proof of its former existence, while others lacked any population whatsoever, living or dead.

  Buffalo, Texas, was situated at an Interstate exit, which made it one of the few Buffalos with a motel where we could stay overnight. The town also boasted a really good lunch place, the Rainbow Café. And Buffalo Gap, Texas, not too far south of Abilene, was home to Judy’s Gathering Place, where the food (and Judy’s company) was so good it was worth a detour on another drive across Texas.

  But most of these towns were just there to be checked off the list, not much more than photo ops. Some of them were right where the map said they’d be, but others proved elusive. I remember spending half a day driving around looking for Buffalo Cove, North Carolina, and I’m not sure we ever did find it; we took a picture at some cove or other, and I don’t suppose anybody could prove it wasn’t the right spot, and I don’t suppose it matters, either.

  And what did we do, while looking for Buffalo?

  We drove around, and spent our nights in budget motels. The road atlas, and the prospect of one Buffalo or another, pointed us in a certain direction, and a set of Mobil travel guides let us know what diversions we might find along the way. We hit our share of national parks and monuments, including such big attractions as Yellowstone and Grand Canyon and Glacier, but also including Big Bend and Zion and Arches and Badlands and Crater Lake. We rode mules at the Grand Canyon and horses at Zion, but at most of the parks we hiked a few miles on the trails.

  The Mobil guides pointed us to some interesting places we’d never have thought to look for. I remember a morning in western Kansas when we found our way to a house that had served as a hideout for the Dalton brothers, a place to hole up between bank robberies. There was, we were given to understand, an escape tunnel leading from the house to the barn in back, but we had to take that on faith. Still, it was an interesting stop.

  From there we drove south into Oklahoma, where we picked up Buffalo, Oklahoma, before heading east through Ponca City and Bartlesville. There was a museum in Bartlesville, where an oilman’s collection of Western art was on display, and from there we drove north across the Kansas line once again, to Coffeyville, where a museum commemorated the day when those same Dalton brothers held up two banks at once.

  It wasn’t the brightest move they ever made. The law was waiting for them, and pretty much riddled them with bullets. (Emmett Dalton survived his wounds, served his time in prison, and moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote a couple of films before building a successful career in real estate. You can’t make this stuff up—but if you drive aimlessly around the country, you can find out about it.)

  Coffeyville would have been well worth a detour, but none was required. Because, after we’d seen all there was to see in the museum, and mused on bank robbery as a preparation for dabbling in Hollywood real estate, we just kept on going north on U.S. 169 to Chanute, turned west on State Highway 39, and a few miles down the road we were in Buffalo, Kansas.

  We spent the night in a motel in Fort Scott, Kansas, that had more houseflies than we’d ever encountered anywhere. We changed our room, and the new room was just as bad. We swatted the little devils until our arms ached, and eventually we went to sleep, and in the morning we drove across into Missouri and passed through the towns of Nevada and Bolivar on our way to, yes, Buffalo.

  FUNNY WHAT YOU remember. I can trace our route—parts of it, anyway—because I highlighted it in yellow in that road atlas. And when I do, things come back to me that I haven’t thought of in years. Not those two Dalton sites, I’ve thought often enough of them, and Keller visited them both in Hit Parade. (On that same trip, Keller also managed a visit to a John Dillinger museum, in Nashville, Indiana. We went there, too, but in a different phase of the Buffalo hunt. It wasn’t when we crossed the northern part of the state to pick up Buffalo, Indiana, but on a later visit, after we’d paid a visit to Buffaloville, Indiana, a little ways east of Evansville.)

  But I’d forgotten that fly-infested motel in Fort Scott, and the dim proprietor thereof, who seemed implausibly astonished to learn that our room was buzzing with them, but quick enough to offer us a flyswatter. All of that had slipped my mind, as well it might, but it came back to me as I studied the atlas and followed the yellow line toward the Missouri border.

  BUFFALO, WYOMING, was an obvious destination. With a population of almost four thousand, it was the largest Buffalo but for my birthplace, and one I’d been aware of since boyhood. It was large enough to offer us a choice of restaurants and motels, and after we’d eaten and slept we got back in the car and drove to Cody.

  Where we stayed a week at the Hotel Irma, named for the daughter of the establishment’s founder and first owner, Buffalo Bill Cody. I’d been commissioned to write a lengthy autobiographical essay for a library reference work, and a week was time enough to do it, and Cody a pleasant venue for it, with several fine museums.

  After Cody we visited Yellowstone, and continued north into Montana, first on 81 and then on 191. We were on the latter road because it would take us to Buffalo, Montana, but before we got there we came to the town of Harlowton, where we visited an unassuming little museum that, all things considered, had a lot to be unassuming about.

  We spent a pleasant hour there, looking at stuff. Of all the wonders we saw, only one sticks in my mind, but it may be enough to give the flavor of the place. Some soft-drink manufacturer—Pepsi, I think it was, but it may have been 7-Up—had launched a promotion a few years back featuring a different commemorative can for each of the fifty states. The idea was that you could buy the cans, drink their contents (or pour the stuff down the sewer, as you preferred), and then y
ou could collect the empties, displaying them proudly until the day came when your mother made you throw them out.

  Well, one fellow had collected all fifty, and instead of throwing them out he’d donated them to the local museum, and there they were, all fifty of the little darlings, looking for all the world like, well, like empty aluminum soft-drink cans. There was something magnificently postmodern about them: They were a wonderful sight to behold, and the wonder lay in the fact that they were there. By themselves they were nothing; displayed as they were, they remained nothing, but nothing on a grand scale.

  One could make fun of the museum in Harlowton—indeed, I seem to have done just that—but here’s something to ponder. I’ve been to no end of museums over the years, large ones and small ones, but over time they and their contents tend to merge in memory. Or drop out of memory altogether.

  Not Harlowton, Montana. I’ll remember those empty cans forever.

  AFTER A PEAK experience of that sort, Buffalo, Montana, figured to be anticlimactic. Not so. It was a first-rate Buffalo, every bit as memorable as a row of empty cans.

  It was, alas, pretty much out of business. There were still people living there, but the place they were living had largely ceased to be a town. Once, though, it had been able to support a school, and the imposing red-brick building (or red stone; red, at any rate) was still standing, although most of its windows were gone.

  And the schoolyard was now given over to the grazing of sheep, and there stood the abandoned school, its front door gaping, with sheep wandering in and out of it. One had to think of Mary, and her little lamb. On with the Buffalo shirts, out with the Polaroid. Click!