by Paul Theroux
‘Beautiful,’ I said, and started away.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll wire ahead in Elkhart. When we get to Chicago we’ll just dump the whole thing in Amtrak’s lap. They’ll put you up at the Holiday Inn. You’ll be in good shape.’
‘But I won’t be in Texas.’
‘You leave this to me, sir.’ He touched the visor of his cap. ‘Ever see snow like this? God, it’s terrible.’ He looked out of the window again and sighed. ‘Can’t imagine what happened to that switchman. Probably got frostbite.’
It was hours before we got to Cleveland and, as with most delays, the slowness of our arrival created a sense of anti-climax: I felt I had already given it all the thought it deserved. Now the snow only bored me, and the houses depressed me – they were tiny bungalows not much bigger than the cars parked beside them. The greatest joke was that Cleveland, which had been smothered by the previous week’s snowstorm, which had broadcast news items about survival techniques at home (intelligence – welcome, one would have thought, to Arctic explorers – about sleeping bags, body heat, keeping your condominium warm in an emergency, cooking on Sterno stones and the like) – this city, which was frozen solid under drifts of snow, had to cheer it a long story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the monstrous inefficiency of the Russians in snow removal. The Russians! Under the headline MOSCOW SNOW DIG-OUT CROWN TARNISHED, with its Moscow dateline, the story began, ‘This city’s once-renowned snow removal capabilities have been drastically diminished this winter by a combination of bureaucratic blunders and unexpectedly heavy snowfalls.’ It continued in the same gloating vein: ‘The problem is apparently not a lack of special equipment … Residents are complaining bitterly this winter about the sad state of the streets … Still, heavy December snows and inadequate parking regulations seem a poor excuse for streets that are still clogged several weeks later.’
It was Mid-West smugness. In order to boast in Ohio you have to mention the Russians. Even better, a mention of Siberia which, as a matter of fact, Ohio in winter greatly resembles. I read that news item in Cleveland. I read the entire Plain Dealer in Cleveland. In Cleveland we were delayed nearly two hours. When I asked the conductor the reason he said it was the snow; and the track had been buckled by ice.
‘It’s a real bad winter.’
I told him that in Siberia the trains run on time. But it was a cheap crack. I would choose Cleveland over Irkutsk any day, even though – this was obvious – Cleveland was colder.
I went to the Club Car and had a morning pick-me-up and read The Wild Palms. Then I had another pick-me-up, and another. I considered a fourth, ordered it, but decided to nurse it. If I had many more of these pick-me-ups, I’d be under the table.
‘What are you reading?’
It was a plump freckled-faced fiftyish lady sipping a can of sugar-free tonic.
I showed her the title.
She said, ‘I’ve heard of it. Any good?’
‘It has its moments.’ Then I laughed. But it wasn’t anything to do with Faulkner. Once, on an Amtrak train not far from here, I had had a book which no one had queried; and yet it had aroused considerable interest. It was the biography of the writer of horror tales, H. P. Lovecraft, and the title Lovecraft had led my fellow passengers to believe that throughout a two-day trip I had had my nose in a book about sexual technique.
She was from Flagstaff, she said, and ‘Whereabouts you from?’
‘Boston.’
‘Really?’ She was interested. She said, ‘Will you say something for me? Say G-o-d.’
‘God.’
She clapped her hands delightedly. She was, despite her plumpness, very small, with a broad flat face. Her teeth were crooked, slanting in a uniform way, as if they had been filed. I was baffled by the pleasure I had given her in saying the word.
‘Gawd,’ she said, mimicking me.
‘What do you say?’
‘I say gahd.’
‘I’m sure He understands.’
‘I love to hear you say it. I was on this train a week ago, going east. We were delayed by the snow, but it was fantastic. They put us up at the Holiday Inn!’
‘I hope they don’t do that to us.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘I’ve got nothing against the Holiday Inn,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I have a train to catch.’
‘Everybody does. I bet I’m going further than you – Flagstaff, remember?’ She took another sip of her tonic and said, ‘In the end it took us days – days – to get from Chicago to New York. There was snow everywhere! There was a boy on the train. He was from Boston. He was on the seat beside me.’ She smiled – a kind of demure leer: ‘We slept together.’
‘That was lucky.’
‘I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t like that. He was on his side and I was on my side. But’ – she went pious – ‘we slept together. What a time that was. I don’t drink, but he drank enough for the both of us. Did I tell you he was twenty-seven years old? From Boston. And all through the night he said to me, “Gawd, you’re beautiful.” and he kissed me I don’t know how many times. “Gawd, you’re beautiful.’ ”
‘This was at the Holiday Inn?’
‘On the train. One of the nights,’ she said. ‘The Chair Car. It was very, very important to me.’
I said it sounded like a very sweet experience and tried to imagine it, the drunken youth pawing this plump freckly woman while the Chair Car (smelling, as it always did at night, of old socks and stale sandwiches) snored.
‘Not just sweet. It was very important. I needed it just then. That’s why I was going East.’
‘To meet this fellow?’
‘No, no,’ she said peevishly. ‘My mother died.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I got word of it in Flagstaff and caught the train. Then we got held up in Chicago, if you call the Holiday Inn being held up! I met Jack round about Toledo – right about here, if this is Toledo.’ She looked out the window. ‘ “Gawd, you’re beautiful.” It really cheered me up. It came between so much.’
‘My condolences. It must be very sad to go home for a funeral.’
‘Two funerals,’ she said.
‘Pardon?’
‘My father died, too.’
‘Recently?’
‘Tuesday.’
This was Saturday.
‘God,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘I love to hear you say that.’
‘I mean, that’s terrible about your father.’
‘It was a blow. I thought I was going home for my mother’s funeral, but it turned out to be both of them. “You should come home more often, honey,” Dad said. I said I would. Flagstaff is pretty far, but I’ve got my own apartment and I’m making good money. Then he died.’
‘A sad trip.’
‘And I’ll have to go back. They couldn’t bury them. I have to go back for the interment.’
‘I would have thought that would be done by now.’
She looked at me sharply. ‘They cain’t bury people in New York City.’
I asked her to repeat this strange sentence. She did, in just the same tones.
‘God,’ I said.
‘You sound like Jack.’ She smiled: such odd Eskimo-granny teeth.
‘Why can’t they bury people in New York?’
‘The ground’s too hard. It’s frozen. They cain’t dig –’
In the severe winter of ’78, I thought, when the ground was so hard they couldn’t bury people, and the mortuaries were stacked to the rafters, I decided to take the train to the sunniest parts of Spanish America.
The lady from Flagstaff went away, but over the next eight or nine hours, again and again, in the Club Car and the Chair Car and the Diner, I heard her flat, dry corncrake voice repeating slowly, ‘– because they cain’t bury people in New York City.’
Twice, when she saw me, she said Gawd! and laughed.
The frozen switch, the buckled track, the snow: we were running very late and m
y conductor insisted that I did not have a hope of arriving on time or making my connection for Fort Worth. ‘You don’t have the chance of one of these in Hell,’ he said at an Indiana station. He was holding a snowball. And there was a new problem. A wheel was overheating and (I think I have this right) a fuse had blown; there was a frosty stink of gas seeping through the end of the train. To avert an explosion, the speed of the train was brought down to about 15 miles an hour, and we remained at this creeping pace until an opportunity arose to detach the afflicted car from the Lake Shore Limited. At Elkhart we were able to rid ourselves of this damaged car, but the operation took an unconscionably long time.
While we stopped, things were calm in the ‘Silver Orchid’ sleeping car. Only the conductor fussed. He said the steam was freezing and jamming the brakes. He hurried back and forth importantly with a push-broom and told me that this was much better than his previous job. He had been desk-bound in an electronics firm, ‘but I’d rather deal with the public.’
‘The trouble with you,’ said the ticket collector, who saw the conductor growing anxious, ‘is you fret before you stew.’
‘Maybe so.’ The conductor banged his broom on the ice that had accumulated inside the door.
‘Won’t be as bad as the last trip, though. That was frozen bananas.’
The conductor said, ‘I’ve got my passengers to think of.’
My passengers. There were three of us in the ‘Silver Orchid’, the Bunces and me. The first thing Mr Bunce said to me was that his mother’s people had been on the Mayflower. Mr Bunce wore a cap with earflaps and was zippered into two sweaters. He wanted to talk about his family and Cape Cod. Mrs Bunce said that Ohio was far uglier than the Cape. Mr Bunce also had a Huguenot pedigree. In one sense, old Bunce was an untypical bore. Characteristically, the American boasts about how desperate and poverty-stricken his immigrant ancestors were; Mr Bunce’s were a huge success, right from the start. I listened with as much patience as I could muster. It might, I thought, have been Bunce I had offended that first day (‘This is like the Trans-Siberian’ ‘No, it’s not’). After that, I avoided the Bunces.
And still at Elkhart a great panic overtook the Lake Shore Limited. Now, everyone knew he would miss his onward connection in Chicago. A large group of single girls were heading for New Orleans and the Mardi Gras. Some elderly couples had to catch a cruise ship in San Francisco: they were very worried. A young man from Kansas said his wife would think he’d left her for good. A black couple whispered, and I heard the black girl say, ‘Oh, shoot.’ One of the Mardi Gras girls looked at her watch and said, ‘We could be partying by now.’
The lady from Flagstaff, whose parents had just died, caused this mood to become festive and, at last, one of celebration. She explained she had been on the train going east just ten days before. The same thing had happened – delays, snow, missed connections. Amtrak had put everyone up at the Holiday Inn in Chicago and given everyone four dollars for taxi fare, and meal vouchers, and one phone call. Amtrak, she said, would do the same thing this time.
The news spread through the train and, as if proof of Amtrak’s good intentions, a free meal was announced in the dining car: soup, fried chicken and vanilla ice cream. This vindicated the no longer bereaved lady from Flagstaff, who said, ‘And wait till we get to Chicago!’
Elsewhere, passengers were spending the four dollar taxi fare they had not yet been given.
‘Okay, Ralph,’ said a greasy-haired boy to the bartender, and put a dollar down, ‘let’s get drunk.’
‘We been setting here eight hours,’ said the loudest of three youths, ‘we already drunk.’
‘I’m working overtime,’ said Ralph the bartender, but obediently began cramming ice cubes into plastic cups.
There were other voices.
This: ‘Never go home in the spring. It’s never the same.’
And this: ‘Jesus Christ’ (a pause) ‘was black. Like a Ethiopian. White features and a coloured face.’ (pause) ‘All them usual descriptions are bullshit.’
And again: ‘– because they cain’t bury people in New York City.’
They were, all of them, frightfully happy. They were glad about the delay, delighted with the snow (it had begun to fall again) and they rejoiced at the promises made by the lady from Flagstaff about a night – or maybe two – at the Holiday Inn. I did not share their joy or feel very kindly towards any of them, and when I discovered that the car to be detached lay between the ‘Silver Orchid’ and this mob I told the conductor I was going back to bed: ‘Wake me up when we get to Chicago.’
‘We may not be there until nine o’clock.’
‘Wonderful,’ I said. I fell asleep with The Wild Palms over my face.
The conductor woke me at ten to nine. ‘Chicago!’ I jumped up and grabbed my suitcase. As I hurried down the platform, through the billows of steam from the train’s underside, which gave to my arrival that old-movie aura of mystery and glory, ice needles crystalized on the lenses of my glasses and I could hardly see.
The lady from Flagstaff had been dead right. I was given four dollars and a berth in the Holiday Inn and three meal vouchers. Everyone who had missed a connection got exactly the same: the Bunces, the drunken louts from the Club Bar, the young man from Kansas, the Mardi Gras girls, the gaffawing peckerwoods who had slumbered the trip away on cheap seats in the Chair Car, the elderly people on their way to San Francisco, the lady from Flagstaff. We were met by Amtrak staff and sent on our way.
‘See you at the hotel!’ cried a lady whose luggage was two shopping bags.
She could not believe her luck.
A lout said, ‘This is costing Amtrak a fortune!’
The wild snow, the sudden hotel, Chicago – it seemed unreal. But this unreality was amplified by the other guests at the Holiday Inn. They were blacks in outlandish uniforms, bright green bell-bottoms, white peaked caps and gold braid; or red uniforms, or white with medals, or beige with silver braid looped around the epaulettes. Was it a band, I wondered, or a regiment of pop-art policemen? It was neither. These men (their wives were not in uniform) were members of the Loyal Order of Antlers. Their shoulder badges said so, in small print. The men gave Antler salutes and Antler handshakes and paraded very formally around the lobby in white Antler shoes, looking a trifle annoyed at the class of people the storm had just blown in. There was no confrontation. The Amtrak passengers made for the ‘Why Not? Discotheque’ and the Bounty Lounge, and the Antlers (some of whom wore swords) stood and saluted each other – stood, I suppose, because sitting would have taken the crease out of their trousers.
The swimming pool was floodlit and filled with snow. Green palm trees were painted on the outside wall. These appeared to be rooted in the snowdrifts. The city was frozen. There were cakes of ice in the river. Last week’s snow was piled by the roadsides. There was new snow on the streets. And with this newly falling snow was a sleet storm, tiny pelting grains that made driving treacherous. The Gideon Bible in my room was open at Chronicles (2, 25). Was there a message here for me? ‘The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, or the children be put to death for the fathers; but every man shall die for his own sin.’ Amen, I thought. I shut the Bible and unpacked Faulkner.
Coincidentally, Faulkner had a message. ‘Now it was winter in Chicago,’ I read. ‘… the defunctive days dying in neon upon the fur-framed petal faces of the wives and daughters of cattle and timber millionaires and the paramours of politicians returned from Europe … the sons of London brokers and Midland shoe-peg knights …’ He went on jeering at their status and then described how they all went south and deserted Chicago’s snows. They were ‘members of that race which without tact for exploration and armed with notebooks and cameras and sponge bags elects to pass the season of Christian holiday in the dark and bitten jungles of savages.’
I was not sure about my tact for exploration, and I had neither a camera nor a sponge bag, but twenty-four hours in the Holiday Inn in wintry Chicago convinced me
that the sooner I got to the savage jungle, however dark and bitten, the better.
2 The Lone Star
There seemed to me nothing more perfect in travel than boarding a train just at nightfall and shutting the bedroom door on an icy riotous city and knowing that morning would show me a new latitude. I would leave anything behind, I thought, for a sleeper on a southbound express.
And it was impossible to be on the Lone Star out of Chicago, beginning this crossing of six states, and not hear the melodies of all the songs that celebrate the train. Half of jazz is railway music, and the motion and noise of the train itself has the rhythm of jazz. This is not surprising: the Jazz Age was also the Railway Age. Musicians travelled by train or not at all, and the pumping tempo and the clickety-clack and the lonesome whistle crept into the songs. So did the railway towns on the route: how else could Joplin or Kansas City be justified in a lyric? We rolled out of Union Station towards Joliet and this nice combination of privacy and motion – and the bass notes of the wheels on the tracks – brought me a melody and then words. The wheels were saying, ‘It ain’t nothing like my daddy’s big cigar – no, it ain’t – ’
I hung up my coat and set out my belongings, poured myself a glass of gin and watched the last pinky sunset flecks disappear from the Joliet snow.
Keep your money and your liquor and your fancy car –
It ain’t nothing like my daddy’s big cigar.
‘Don’t matter if he’s broke,
‘Cause how that man can smoke …
Keep your special table at that downtown bar –
It ain’t nothing like my daddy’s big cigar.
He offers me a puff
But one just ain’t enough …
Not a bad start. It seemed to strike the right note, but obviously it needed work. Anyway, here was the ticket-man.
‘You’ve been involuntarily upgraded,’ he said, looking at my ticket. He perforated it expertly. ‘Anything you need, just holler.’
I said, ‘Is there going to be anyone else in this bedroom?’
‘Nope. You got the whole place to yourself.’