‘You did, Mr Walker, you did.’
‘But I don’t know quite what I did.’
‘Oh, well, if you don’t know . . .’
Walker got out of the car and went over to the wounded Volkswagen. He found some cupcakes and the stove and a jar of instant coffee. He started up the stove in the corner of the dirty garage and made two cups of coffee. He took them back into the car. ‘It tastes of oil,’ said Julie.
‘It’s called Offee.’
‘Where did you get the water from?’
‘There’s a tap in the corner.’
‘Okay, so we die of typhoid as well. Who cares?’
‘Want me to cook anything else? There’s a can of beans.’
‘I don’t think I can face beans right now,’ said Julie. ‘Oh, Mr Walker, you know what you did? You gave in. You lost style. You let it beat you. There were two of us and you acted like there was only one.’
‘Yes,’ said Walker.
‘I thought you’d grown up, I’d thought we’d rescued you from all that. But no. You let me do all the talking. You rode on my back. You looked away when I needed a little help. I thought you’d have taken to your feet and run away across the border, except I guess you thought it was too far.’
‘I never thought of it,’ said Walker.
‘Technology scares you, primitive people you hate. You look like a coward to me.’
‘That’s unfair.’
‘Well, anyway,’ said Julie, ‘there comes a time when a girl needs a man for other purposes than the one you seem most interested in.’
‘You’re being unfair.’
‘Oh, I know it. But I’m trying to tell you something. I’m trying to tell you that you don’t impress me so much any more. I think you’re a leaver. I think you don’t hold on. The offers you make don’t last.’
‘I think that’s unfair too.’
‘I’ll tell you something, Mr Walker. I love you. I’d marry you if you asked me, right here, right now. But what I know about you is that you won’t.’
‘Why won’t I?’
‘Oh, you’ll find a reason,’ said Julie. ‘But you can prove me wrong.’
‘Why does marriage matter so much to you?’
‘I suppose because it’s you. I suppose because I want to know how far your belief in the one good, which you said was love, really goes. Because I wonder what that means, when you say it.’
‘Oh,’ said Walker. ‘How to lose friends and isolate people. That’s the book I should write.’
‘I expect you will,’ said Julie. ‘Hey, is there a can anywhere around here?’
‘I think there’s a kind of place on the forecourt. Not that I’d recommend it.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t recommend anything around here, would you?’
When Julie had gone, Walker sat in the back of the Ford and put his head on his knees. The day, with its sun and its depression, had given him a headache. He couldn’t get access to his sentiments, which seemed bottled up within him. His sense of suffering had driven him only into solitude. He wanted to break out, to engage, to say ‘yes’ to Julie, but all that he found ready to hand was the emotion of despair. There was no volition in him now; it had been there, but the last sad day of the journey had exhausted it. It had disappointed Walker in himself; it had questioned all that, in the last week, had taken place around him and within him. The drab, primitive, poverty-stricken town, corrupt, defeated, and senseless, was a place to escape as quickly as possible. Its insecurity and its vulgarity sent him back again in his thoughts to England. And its harsh light and its cruel questions had left him with nothing. The relationship with Julie, even, was not free of intrusion, and today the intrusion had been made. He looked out of the broken car at the shattered wooden frame of the garage, and heard, outside, hungry dogs barking in the backstreets of the town. Julie stumbled in the entrance, coming back. He reached over the front seat and looked for the lights of the car, flicking switches on the dashboard panel. But nothing was working. ‘I think I sprained my goddam ankle,’ said Julie. He got out and made his way through the darkness, over a floor covered with oil patches and parts, to the doorway. Julie was leaning against it, holding her foot. ‘What else needs to happen in this place?’ she said.
‘Does it hurt? Can you walk on it?’
‘I can get to the car if you’ll lend me your shoulder to lean on,’ she said.
‘Hold on, isn’t there a torch in your car? I’ll get it.’
‘A flashlight? Yeah.’
Using the flashlight, they made their way to the Ford. Julie took off her shoe; the foot was puffy, and Walker said, ‘Do you think I should try to find a doctor?’
‘Hell, he’ll only say he has to send me to San Diego for a bandage,’ said Julie. ‘No, we’ll just sit this thing out. What time is it?’
‘About eight,’ said Walker, flashing the torch on to his watch.
‘That boy should be back now,’ said Julie.
They heard his motorcycle drive up about an hour later. Then he drove off again. ‘He’ll be going to fetch the mechanic,’ said Walker.
‘I’ll believe that when I see him.’
‘How’s the foot?’
‘It’s all puffed up. I just hope I can still drive when they get this goddam thing fixed. Oh, why aren’t you a driver, Mr Walker?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Walker, ‘I seem to be short on all the skills.’
‘Oh no, duckie, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry, really I am, Mr Walker, about all those things I said. But you must admit we just don’t work out, you and I. It’s been a great experience and I’ll always love you and never forget you, but I think it’s all wrong. What do you think? Honestly and truly? Blessing the truth, being sincere?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Walker, ‘I think perhaps you got an inflated view of me, or came somehow to expect too much of me, and I’ll go on being a disappointment to you.’
‘But what about me? What are your feelings for me? That’s something you never say.’
‘Well,’ said Walker, ‘I’m proud to be in your company, and you attract me more, you’re more beautiful and human, than anyone I ever met. I can’t use the word “love” because it’s been queered for me, but among all my ambitions for myself, staying in your company counts highest.’
‘But for how long?’
‘Now that I don’t know. When the other parts of life come in, when the world starts pushing, then I’m lost. Like today.’
‘What you mean is I’m an idyll?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well, what happens when we leave here?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Walker, ‘but I think I go home.’
‘To England?’
‘Yes.’
‘To your wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not even going back to Party?’
‘Not if I can get a passage home.’
‘Yes, well, I should have guessed,’ said Julie.
‘No, you couldn’t, I didn’t know before.’
‘I suppose I did, I knew from when I met you on the ship. And the way you behaved to that sad kooky English girl. What was the name?’
‘Miss Marrow.’
‘Yes, that was it,’ said Julie. ‘That red hair and those funny clothes all hanging off her. She was about your level.’
‘She was a nice girl,’ said Walker.
‘Oh, I believe it. And she didn’t ask you for a thing. And that’s what you like. You’re a passive man; there isn’t a decision in you. You can’t stand the questions. You’re an intellectual but the questions make you shiver. Isn’t that right?’
‘I try to stand the questions.’
‘Oh, you have the ambition, duckie, but the problem is, you’re too kind. You carry too many woes. You get thrown all the time. There’s everything waiting, if you chase it, but you stop on the way and then say that the world doesn’t give people what it used to. I don’t believe that. I believe you can have ever
ything, if you just know you’re free. But you, Mr Walker, you think you are, but really you’re fixed. It’s all those coronations and all that changing the guard. They hooked you, and you can’t get loose.’
‘Not a knight of infinity?’
‘No, sir,’ said Julie, ‘you’re more a knight of finity. I guess that’s something, or we wouldn’t have had this great week. But there it ends, I think; don’t you?’
‘No future?’
‘Well, future’s something you can’t see but can believe in. I miss the belief, Mr Walker. You haven’t any hope.’
‘Yes, I miss it too,’ said Walker.
‘Hey,’ said Julie, ‘look, here comes the mechanic. We should be out of here soon. Back in motion, duckie.’
‘Yes,’ said Walker, ‘back in motion.’
Back, back, back. The highway flicked under the wheels, the blank and hopeless desert of the west rolled by, and Walker, in his bright madras jacket, looked sadly and sullenly out through the green sunshielded window from the height of a Greyhound bus. Indian dwellings of corrugated iron and tar-paper formed small mounds in the desert sand. Beyond on the horizon were red ferocious hills. The thin strip of road wound across the sand, marked out by the lines of telegraph poles, and going the other way, going west, were cars with canvas water-bags hanging on their fenders. Walker put his head on the high seat rest and dozed remotely. Back, back to the family, back to the safe compound where freedom was held in by obligation, where the fire burned with connubial coal, where a daughter played eternally with a panda on the hearthrug. ‘I’ve been too far off for too long,’ he had written to Elaine in the quick note that was all he had had time for during the rest-stop at Flagstaff. ‘I wanted to be free but you were right; there isn’t enough there to make free with. I’ll come home like Tom Jones to be the good squire, and hope you’ll want me.’
But going home to be the good squire, he could not forget the days on the road. Security already present in his heart, protected already by those green sunshield windows and the Greyhound driver – ‘Safe, reliable, courteous,’ said the legend over his head – Walker was going home like a sacrifice. The wandering wilful self he had spent these last months upon was already starving to death in him from lack of sustenance. And Walker was sorry, very sorry, for he knew already that it was pleasanter by far to be that man. He patted his pocket where his steamship ticket lay; a travel agent in San Francisco had been able to advance his booking by seven months. The eastward journey was well in motion; after five days of day-and-night travel, he had only one afternoon in New York before he took his ship. America was only the things that lay behind him: Jochum getting ready to wander sadly out of Party, Julie lying in bed in the borrowed apartment in San Francisco and saying, ‘I don’t want you to write me any letters, Mr Walker. I told you how to be cool and that wouldn’t be.’ He had forgone all those ties by misunderstanding them; they were wrecked on the reefs, part of the barren voyage that had seemed to be going so well and so far. For this voyage Walker had no mythology; he refused to grant it any order or design. The country he was crossing had stopped making sense, and he was pleased; this was an anti-journey, a journey away from meaning. One slept during both light and darkness; they would stop suddenly, at two in the morning, when all the airplane-style seats were tipped back and everyone was dozing, and the driver would announce through his microphone a one-hour stop for a meal. The passengers would stumble forth, their eyes crusty with half-finished sleep, and go into the post-house, some ordering dinner, others breakfast, from local cooks who had been playing poker in the back and awaiting the invasion. They ate fast, bought postcards and chocolate bars, and returned to the sceni-cruiser. It was like travelling by air on the ground; one connected with the world only at whimsical points where there chanced to be towns or toilets, and penetrated a culture only for minutes. There were other illogicalities; sometimes the other buses, travelling in convoy, would appear in front of them, at others behind them, without any visible overtaking. Sometimes the sceni-cruiser would turn back on itself after leaving a stop and go in the direction it had come. Walker accepted this as a fact of other people’s designs for journeys; it had stopped making sense, but sense was not what he was looking for. All journeys are in some sense fortuitous, but to them we give ourselves, and so make a shape. Walker gave nothing except his presence. Every now and then he had to count days and stops in order to understand where he was and how far he had come. Today it was January the first, the day teaching began again in Party; it was the day everyone would know he had taken an incomplete in his course, refused to come back.
So only casually he watched the infertile desert slip past. Cactus spikes stood up in the red sand. The bus overtook an old truck, the back laden with junk and Indians. A sign beside a shanty said NAVAJO RUGS. Then he saw something curious: a large round object passed by the side of the bus and disappeared in front of it. A moment later the driver picked up the microphone and said: ‘Howdy, folks. I’m just lookin’ through my windshield here and I seen one of my wheels go by and head out for the sagebrush. Ain’t no need to panic, it’s off the rear someplace and we got plenty more back there, but I’m going to have to pull off the highway and put that maverick right back on there where it belongs. ’Pologize for the delay. And oh, this desert sun’s kind of hot, so if you folks get out there don’t stay long with your heads uncovered or you’ll get sick.’ The bus pulled on to the verge and stopped; the driver operated the manual lever on the door and climbed out and disappeared into the desert. Some of the passengers got out, putting handkerchiefs on their heads, and talked together by the door. After a while the driver came back rolling the wheel. ‘Beep, beep,’ he said to the crowd, ‘I’m a train.’ The heat beat into the stationary coach. Walker tried to sleep in his seat, but the scorch from above was too intense. After about half an hour the driver came and stood at the front of the aisle, looking up the coach. He was a stout elderly westerner, in grey uniform, his cap pushed back. ‘I’m having some trouble with this godderned wheel, folks, and I guess I’ll have to wait for the other bus to come by to get a message to the depot,’ he said. ‘Now, I’m worried about all you good people gettin’ heatstroke out here, so I got to ask you, for your safety would you mind steppin’ out and lyin’ under this bus out of the sun? Otherwise I can’t take responsibility for you’ll.’ The passengers murmured and then began to file out. They got, one by one, under the coach, in the shade, lying full-length with their faces close to the bus’s underbelly. They laughed a lot and someone passed around a bottle of Coca-Cola. They didn’t seem uneasy, but Walker, lying in the sand in his harlequin jacket, sweating profusely, grew privately distraught. Deserts he feared; places of breakdown were places of misfortune. He saw his evil chance at work again. He thought of rattlesnakes and of running out of water; such disasters must be run-of-the-mill news, small print, in this big country where planes were always falling from the sky and car pile-ups were so common that they played carols early for the Christmas automobile casualties. He thought of cold desert nights and coyotes. He listened to the desperate clatter of the driver as he worked on the wheel. Was this the question he asked in the desert when, going the wrong way, an admitted failure, he was arrested even in that progress? The desert said what Jochum said they said: nothingness is here, the world is bland. Desert and New York said the same in different guises: Out of visions; this is what you have made; there is no you.
And then gradually into his mind there seeped the further disturbing thought: it was that time was running out. The escape route was closing. He had only eight hours to spare between the arrival time of the Greyhound in New York and the hour he had to present himself at the West Side pier where his ship would sail. If it sailed away without him, he had little money. It might be weeks before another passage would come his way. So New York, that urban desert, would claim him as it nearly had before. He would lodge in some cheap hotel, without a job, with no way out, unadopted by England, unwanted by America. He would wand
er the city, peering hopelessly through the glass at the blueberry pies in the Horn and Hardhart automats. He would turn back and forth, back and forth, in a narrowing American circle, in perpetual loneliness, unable to reclaim his job in Party, unable to reach his wife and his home. His spirit would surely give out; it had little left to thrive on. Buffoon and plaything to the end, governed by his gift for misfortune, the final exhaustion of hope would come; the vision of no vision. That was the consistency that governed his life; it lay in the way the world had elected to disappoint him. Terror seized his bowels. Jochum had said, ‘You keep asking the universe, “How ought I to live?” But it can’t answer.’ Julie had said: ‘You’re a passive man. There isn’t a decision in you.’ But it had answered; he had given himself over to the fates who govern journeys, and they, fates of misfortune and not of fortune, had turned his journeys into nonsense. He had taken his clues from the universe, and it had told lies; but lies were an answer. How, though, had it known it could treat him as plaything? How had it known he was weak? When would the comic muse, whose literary friend he had tried so often to be, shower her famed, final good fortune upon him? ‘It’s fixed,’ said the driver.
The bus reached Albuquerque three hours late, and was taken out of service. The replacement was a sadder, older Greyhound, with an unconfident expression about its front, as if too much were being demanded of it. Porters changed the luggage over and stowed it beneath the replacement vehicle; Walker’s face peered forth until he saw his two cases, his typewriter, and his bongo drums safely brought across. The new driver, too, was a sadder, older man, depressed at the impossible task of making up his schedule. And as the hours went by, and the bus pressed onward across central America, it slipped more and more behind time. Walker sat in his seat, hot with tension. He watched the middle west unfold beyond the windows, corn and hogs. Then they penetrated into the rougher, rolling land of the eastern states and upward toward New York. The great conurbations appeared; the post-houses grew more sophisticated; the other passengers, who changed from time to time, were less friendly. The world was returning to the spirit of the old New York malaise. Two youths sitting behind Walker, drinking from a bottle, began to fight in their seats; the driver stopped the bus. ‘Get off or quit,’ said the driver, ‘I don’t move until you decide.’ ‘Oh, get on, get on,’ cried Walker in his heart. In the night a soldier slept on Walker’s shoulder, and toward morning vomited between his feet; Walker didn’t sleep at all. He watched the cold hard winter light come up over the urbanized landscape, tangled with high-tension wires and humming with traffic. His eyes were sandy and his body was cold. Philadelphia came up at last, five hours late; Walker checked his timetable with the clock in the post-house and went back even more disheartened to the bus. The door swished to on its air-operated lever and they were in motion again, new passengers unfolding new paperbacks and comics from the shiny facilities of the new Philadelphia bus depot. They blustered through snow on the superhighways, under a lead-coloured sky, passing through the derelict half-industry of New Jersey until, finally, well into the afternoon, New York came in sight, its skyscrapers blurred in the dark heavy sky.
Stepping Westward Page 40