by Jenny Diski
She said no, she felt better being with people.
The door opened suddenly and a young man in his early twenties came in. He was black and hip, with even baggier trousers than Maddy’s that concertinaed around his ankles, his head covered with a black beret. He saw Maddy and flung himself down in the seat beside her, offering her a cigarette which she took and he lit with a snap of his see-through Zippo before lighting and dragging hard on one of his own. Maddy perked up a little more at the cool new company.
‘Man,’ he wailed. ‘I can’t believe I gotta be on this train for two nights. But a lot can happen on a train.’
Maddy and I showed a polite interest.
‘I’m a DJ. My man called from LA. He said come on out here, there’s gigs and bitches and sunshine all the time. I think, fuck, I’ll go. I can DJ in LA, NY, any place, you dig? Hey, you a fucking model or something? Wanna beer?’
Maddy looked quite perked up. Suddenly, just a couple of hours after I’d got up, I was limp with exhaustion. I decided I needed a nap.
‘I’m going back to my compartment,’ I said to Maddy and told her where it was if she needed to lie down later.
‘Sure,’ she said, distractedly.
* * *
I slept until we pulled in to Pascagoula, Mississippi at around 11 a.m. There was a tap on my door and Bet called out that she was going to the smoking coach. I said I would join her in a minute. DJ and Maddy were still there, smoking, sipping beers and deep in conversation. Gold Dress was back in the same place. Conal was sitting with a tumbler of bourbon and a cigarette, but no Virginia. As well as Bet, there were two or three men I hadn’t seen before, a smiling Mexican, another tall, lanky black man with his baseball cap the right way round, and a middle-aged guy in a cowboy hat with a face that seemed carved out of stone, smoking solitary and quiet.
‘Come over here, English Lady, and be friendly,’ crooned Conal, his voice turning a corner into a sneer. I shrugged and sat next to him. He put an arm round me. I removed it.
‘My people are from Kerry. You know Ireland?’
‘Not really.’
‘You don’t say much, do you? A proper icy English lady with your grey hair and crossed legs. They teach you that at finishing school, did they? Do you ever uncross your legs?’
‘Let it go, Conal.’
‘I just want to know…’
‘You never will.’
We were sitting at the far end of the coach by a window. Bet in the corner, then me and Conal. There was a slight lurch, barely noticeable, but enough to make Conal have to hold on to his tumbler to stop the bourbon from spilling. A second later, Bet, looking out of the window, made a low whistle.
‘Well, I hope we didn’t do that.’
I glanced out in time to see the wreck of an upturned car on the side of the track.
‘Mmm,’ I said, thinking like Bet how, though we hadn’t done it, some train obviously had at one time. Then I saw that the cloud which for a second I thought was disturbed dust, rising from the wrecked car because of the turbulence of the passing train, was actually smoke. At the same time, the train was decelerating sharply.
‘Oh my god, we did do it,’ I gasped.
‘Hell,’ complained Conal, whose bourbon slopped over the side of his glass. ‘They’ve no respect for good drink.’
Bet put her hand over her mouth, and whispered, ‘We hit that car.’
‘Shit,’ said the stone-carved man, getting up to peer out of our window. ‘Stupid bastards. They tried to beat the train. Happens all the time in these godforsaken places.’
The others gathered round the window, but we were too far past the wreck to see it. They headed out of the coach to the corridor and opened the door. Conal, Bet and I stayed where we were, Bet and I, at least, too stunned to move. The commentary came from the people by the door, and we saw our guard walking back along the track with another conductor, talking into a handset.
‘Kids, probably,’ one of the observers said. ‘Playing chicken with a train. That only ends one way. The train’s always gonna win.’
‘Hit a truck last week out of Chicago. Same thing. Truck driver and his passenger were killed outright.’
Other people added their reminiscences of rail kills they’d experienced. Everyone seemed to have one, and the tones of voice were matter-of-fact. It was all part of train travel in America, apparently. But at least one life had been extinguished just seconds before by our train without us feeling anything more than a mild jolt. It turned out to be three lives.
‘Hell,’ someone said. ‘This is going to make us even later. They have to test the wheel balances before we can move again. Every damn wheel. It can take hours. Jesus, we’re going to be stuck in this hole half the day, and we’re already over two hours late.’
Some voices mumbled agreement, the killing already forgotten in the inconvenience.
Our conductor came back.
‘Sorry, folks. We hit a car. We going to be a while sorting this out. Two kids were killed outright. One in the back’s alive. Pretty badly hurt. We’re waiting for the ambulance and we can’t leave until they find the local coroner to pronounce death. We’re checking the train for damage while we’re waiting.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a real mess. You all stay where you are. The one in the back is screaming something awful. But there’s nothing anyone can do until they’re cut out of the wreck.’
So we waited in the dusty heat on the outskirts of some nameless town between Pascagoula and Biloxi, Mississippi, for a coroner to be found, for the wheels to be tapped, for our journey to recommence. We were instructed over the loudspeaker system not to leave the train and asked if there was a doctor or paramedic on board for one of the chefs who had fallen hard when the train came to a halt and possibly broken his arm. How much you felt the jolt of the car or of the emergency stop depended on where you were on the train. We were towards the rear, so felt very little, because the first two carriages absorbed the force (and, of course, the car and its passengers), but near to the engine, people knew immediately that something had been hit. For us in the smoking carriage, it had been little more than a few spilled drops of bourbon and a flash of smoking metal, as the car was struck at nearly full speed and somersaulted to the side of the track. It was hard to take in. The upturned automobile I had seen might have been there for weeks or months even – it was probably an ancient vehicle already – so settled had it looked in its final resting place. It was now already quite a way behind the train, so we couldn’t hear any sounds coming from it. The train had been speeding along on the flat, past one after another one-horse town with unprotected train tracks at their outer boundaries. To our right was the sweaty marshy landscape of the South and a bit of a dirt road that led perhaps to the next place; to our left, small groups of clapboard houses and unkempt rubbish-strewn backyards could be glimpsed between the trees. This was poor country. The train whistle had blown two or three times as it approached each residential area to warn of its coming. There were no level crossings, no traffic lights in these backwoods places. The single dirt road out of town ran across the tracks, an oncoming train blew its whistle, that was all. Although you could see it coming for a long way through the flat landscape, it is notoriously hard for someone watching it come to judge the speed and distance of a moving train, but who in a place like this would be in such a hurry that they would try to beat it? Someone suicidally, pointlessly impatient, someone whose judgement was hopelessly impaired by drink or drugs, or someone terminally bored. One thing everyone knew was that in a race between a car and a train, the train always won. At least everyone on the train knew that. Maybe the three people in the car didn’t know. Or they were young enough to believe that nothing like death could ever happen to them, that taking risks always had the desired outcome. Perhaps they wanted to make the train and its passengers pay attention at whatever cost. But the one person left alive in the car was screaming. The worst thing in the world had happened and for no good reason.
Th
e coroner came quickly. He was in the bar nearby, at the back end of town. The two people in the front were pronounced dead, the third cut out and driven off in the ambulance (‘Nah, she’s had it,’ the conductor confided), and the wheel balances were checked in record time, so that despite the worst fears of my fellow travellers, we started to pull away from the sight of the accident just three quarters of an hour after we first struck the car. People expressed relief that the delay wasn’t as great as they had feared.
‘What about the driver?’ I asked my conductor, Ashley, when I got back to my compartment.
She was very distressed, she had gone out to the car. ‘It’s so terrible when that happens. If you’re crew, you feel, I don’t know, sort of responsible. I know we couldn’t do anything, but … I heard that poor girl screaming.’ She shook her head hopelessly. The driver was back driving the train. There wasn’t anyone who could take over until we got to New Orleans four hours or more away. Amtrak didn’t carry relief drivers.
‘You mean he just got back in and started up?’
‘He had to. He’s real upset. It kills drivers when that happens, but he has to carry on until we get to New Orleans. He’ll be OK. But you notice we’re going pretty slow.’
We were. There was no more hurtling through the bayous that day. Not that he had been going too fast, not that, even at our present speed, if we hit a car, anyone in it would survive. But you could feel his distress and caution in the movement of the train. And you could hear it. For the rest of the day, the whistle blew, not just once or twice as we approached a road crossing or a station, but from a mile or more away, long sad wails that resonated back through the stifling air to my compartment – the train is coming, the train is coming, for god’s sake don’t get in its way – the most mournful sound you could imagine, much more than was necessary, as if the driver were keening. Hear that lonesome whistle blow. And it blew and blew for as long as the driver drove the train. It called out like a banshee; while I lay in my bunk, watching the sky, it howled the miles away.
We got to New Orleans in the late afternoon where we stopped for an hour as scheduled to change crew and take on water. Bet and I walked through the chaotic station and stood outside smoking. We didn’t talk about what had happened, but Bet was morose.
‘Have you slept?’ I asked her.
‘No, I was just lying down. Couldn’t sleep.’
I nodded. When she finished her cigarette she asked a porter where the nearest liquor store was and headed off in the direction he indicated.
‘Supplies,’ she said. ‘Want anything?’
‘Shall I come?’
‘No, I’ll just walk. See you back on the train. Kids, Jesus.’ She left, head down, marching towards a new bottle of gin.
Too Much to Ask
To travel any but the shortest distance by train is bizarre to most people in the States. Why take three days to cross the country when you can do it in three hours by plane? A glossy US fashion magazine thought it so quaint that they commissioned me to write an article describing the journey I was about to make. When I returned to the UK, I emailed the copy and then got a call from the features editor. It was fine, but could I cut some of the stuff about the train and my fellow travellers and put in more landscape and scenery? I did, of course, see a lot of landscape. I watched America go by inch by inch, just as I had obsessively examined the passing ocean on the freighter, staring for hours at a time out of the observation cars or the window of my sleeping compartments. My suitcase was weighted down with the books I had brought to read, but I didn’t complete a single chapter while on the move because I couldn’t keep my eyes on a page of print when every kind of the most extreme and extraordinary, changing and changeless landscape was rolling past my eyes. I often wished the train were slower so that I could examine the bayous, the rivers, the grasslands, the mountains and deserts in more detail. But it became clear to me that the passage of landscape before my eyes was in itself a particular way of viewing the country. At any rate, a particular way of being in the country. Everyone knows the pleasure, even on the shortest train journeys, of staring out at the world that goes by beyond the viewer’s control, to the accompaniment of the rhythm of the wheels on the rails and the swaying of the carriage. Hypnotic, the landscape forever approaching and passing, skimming along, the eye snatching a detail, noticing a cloud, a bizarre building, a blasted tree, a startled creature, but not being able to hold on to it as the view rolls by. Our thought processes work more slowly than the speed of a train or the eye. There’s as much relief as frustration in that. Thoughts can exist independently of what the eye is taking in, they can be allowed to take care of themselves. Alternatively, you can read a book or open your laptop and ignore the whole thing while you get from A to B. I, at any rate, couldn’t tear myself away from the passing parade of America, and I let my thoughts do what they would. Passive watching is an intense and private activity. It leaves a residue. The eyes look and take in the fleeting images, absorb them into the processor inside the head which transforms them into a memory: the recollection of a split second gone by which will become a memory of something seen yesterday, a week ago, a decade past, somewhere back in the mists of time. The flashing pictures remain, but they settle in beside other related images. And most of the related images are in Technicolor and wide-screen. Was that image, that memory, from the train journey or a movie you once saw? American landscape is known, like famous speeches in Shakespeare’s plays or phrases in the King James Bible are known. They are already read, so that when you come across them in their proper context, they jar and falsify the moment. In the auditorium, Macbeth’s nihilism and despair are weakened as you overtake the actor in his assessment of life as full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. On the page In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth slips by in a far too familiar rhythm, so you forget to wonder: what beginning? Created from what? Why? And as you actually pass through the boundless grasslands of Montana, or deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, a thousand Westerns complete with their wide-open background scores rush to clog the mind. The Big Country, The Searchers, Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Wagon Train, Red River and, of course, Blazing Saddles. John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Ward Bond, James Stewart, Montgomery Clift stride or lope into view and people the empty vista outside the window, filling it with human endeavour. There’s a stored image for every inch of the landscape passing by. Gunslingers on galloping horses kick up the dust getting out of town fast ahead of the posse, cowboys bed down by the campfire, guns at the ready beneath the saddle under their head, ranchers locked in sullen, greedy conflict with immigrant farmers plan violent evictions, wagon trains full of pilgrims in search of a new life and the odd run-out-of-town whore circle as the Indians charge down from the hills to attack the intruders, the lonely hero walks away westward from the danger of being included in the civil society he has helped to bring about. Each image comes complete with its own landscape. Every landscape comes with its own set of meaningful images, seen already in darkened cinemas and on TV. We know the landscape of America, even if we have never been there. We’ve inhabited it, even if we’ve never set foot outside London, Delhi or Helsinki. We’ve been a part of it, even if we’ve never been further west than the movie house at the local mall in a New England suburb, or if we spend our days shopping till we drop on Fifth Avenue.
But what do I do with all this view? I can attempt to describe what the eye catches, and try to nail down the strobing images in an approximation of words. So. The sky is vast and vacuously blue, the empty deserts at sunset threaten the spirit with their scrubby grey-green dying light, the rivers wind from bare trickles in parched earth to thunderous rushing torrents, the canyons dismay and dizzy you as you stare down into them and try to make out the bottom, the mountains loom in anthropomorphic shapes of things seen best in dreams, the grasslands and wheatfields wave like an endless syrupy ocean tickled into motion by the breeze. You know, you’ve seen it in the movies. What is remarkab
le, what is strange about passing through America, peering at it through the screen of the train window, is that everything is familiar. It is much more as if America is passing through you, what you are, what you’ve known. Sitting there looking out at the landscape is like having a dye injected so that the tendrils of memory in the brain light up and trace the private history of your mind. As I sit and watch the weird rock formations, sagebrush, cactus and Joshua trees of the desert land go by, the cinema in Tottenham Court Road where I saw my first shoot-outs jumps vividly into my present. The smell and plush of the carpet underfoot comes flooding back to me, the tense anticipation as the lights begin to fade, the solid dark presence of my father sitting beside me, the blue smoke from his cigarette curling up into the bright beam on its way to the screen which will light up with dreams and places and complexities of human joy and trouble that my striving six-year-old brain can barely imagine, let alone make sense of. That’s what the landscape of America is like.
On sunny days in mid-fifties London, I went to Russell Square and played cowboys and Indians on a landscaped hill with a tarmacked path cut through it like a perfect canyon. When it rained, I went with my friend – S, I expect – to the Egyptian Gallery of the British Museum and we played my favourite game. Surrounded by monumental stone fragments – an icy-smooth foot bigger than a bathtub, a marbled sinewy arm extending to a closed fist as broad as the front of a bus – S and I would sit on a bench intended for weary or thoughtful culture seekers and pretend in loud voices and almost certainly execrable accents to be American children on holiday – no, vacation. With our voluminous knowledge based on the films and TV we had seen, we discussed the incredibly luxurious and automated homes we had left behind, what we thought of little England (cute, very cute), the contents of our wardrobes (bobby socks, real denim jeans) and the shimmering stars who dropped in regularly for tea. We could think of nothing more glamorous to be, nowhere more extraordinary and magical to persuade people we were from, while genuine American tourists – more crisp and matronly than glamorous – passed by smiling at our unconvincing twang and improbable fantasies. That is what the landscape of America is like: being a child in Fifties London.