Long Way Home (17 page)

“Sit there at the Liars' Table, why don't you?” a bustling woman suggested, trying to be helpful. She carried hot plates of food in both hands, carefully maneuvering through the obstacle course. “They won't bite.”

But I wasn't so sure about that. I sidled to the only vacant chair, with a liar on either side of me like bookends. They didn't exactly rise up to welcome me. Nobody held out a paw and bellowed, “Howdy, partner.” “Ignored” would be the best word to describe it. I buried my nose in the menu and studied it diligently, as if to bone up for a final exam in diner food that afternoon.

Rural Kansas has two prevailing body types, and Chuck, the older liar, conformed to the first. Well into his seventies, he was a lean, narrow-hipped, stiff-backed wheat farmer, and a model of rectitude. He picked very deliberately at his Mexican Special of ground beef, beans, rice, and cheese, chewing every bite to shreds. He had a dry sense of humor, but he only let little rays of it shine through.

The other liar, middle-aged, represented the second body type, being round, soft, and heavyset. Seated in a wheelchair, he voiced many more opinions than Chuck on lots of different subjects without any hesitation. He wasn't eating, just sipping coffee and opinionating.

The plate-carrying woman—she owned the Chuck Wagon, I think—breezed by and alerted me, “You'll have to speak up. He don't hear too good.”

“That's only when you're doing the talking,” the fellow in the wheelchair retorted.

His wisecrack livened things up. A sliver of curiosity came my way, so I parceled out a brief bio, and he reciprocated. He'd intended to settle somewhere warm when he left Nebraska, maybe in the South, but his wife took a liking to Florence, so he bought a motel in town. He'd since sold it.

That seemed to exhaust our interest in each other. We fell quiet for a brief interlude, after which he inquired of his friend, “Chuck, how's that knee doing?”

Chuck looked up from his food. “It's all right. I'm getting the other replaced soon.”

“My wife needs one done. But the doctor says she's too young, and she'll have to lose some weight.”

Chuck chewed and thought before he spoke. “It's wonderful what they can do now,” he said. “I'm grateful for it. Your knee's never really the same, though.”

My sandwich arrived, a grilled chicken and Swiss. The chicken turned out to be a hamburgerlike patty—the cook must have pounded it into submission, or maybe ground it up—on a bun with seven or eight potato chips as a garnish. I stared longingly at the last of Chuck's Mexican Special, wishing I'd risked the beans.

“How's your 401(k) going, Chuck?” the second liar started up again.

“It's been better.”

“That's for sure. I've been looking into gold and silver myself.”

“Silver could do well.”

“Wall Street's as slow as molasses. It's still a bear market.”

“I don't believe that'll change very soon,” Chuck ventured.

The table talk, previously lurching along, gained momentum. Other liars joined in to compare the value of their portfolios and swap investment tips. I hadn't heard anybody mention Wall Street since Maryland. Of all places, I said to myself. What about pork bellies? Shouldn't they be talking about them?

I ate what I could of the sandwich, then pushed it aside. As Chuck got ready to leave, I took a last shot at teasing out some information unrelated to the Dow Jones.

“Have you lived in Florence a long time, Chuck?”

“That's right. A long time.”

“A small town like this, there must be plenty of gossip.”

“Plenty.” He grabbed his check. “But you'd have to sit here for three or four days to hear it all.”

A DRIVE ACROSS
western Kansas has the shape of a dream. The space and the big sky lull you into a tender complacency, and the affairs of the great world seem very far away. It's simple to lose yourself in the pattern of the landscape—cattle ranches and fields of wheat, corn, and soybeans, then a sprinkling of sorghum and sunflowers. The crops, by and large, wind up as feed for livestock.

For mile after mile, I'd drift along in a bubble and almost forget where I was, but then I'd flip the radio dial and connect with a conservative talk show by accident, and the world returned full force. With the Republicans slipping badly in the polls, the brand-name hosts were apoplectic. Rush Limbaugh practically foamed at the mouth, raising the old questions about his OxyContin habit.

His latest hero was Joe the Plumber, an unlicensed tradesman with a tax problem, who had the “guts” to stand up to Obama and criticize him at an Ohio rally. Such was Limbaugh's influence that John McCain alluded to Joe—regular Joe, a stand-in for the common man—twenty times in the final presidential debate.

In New Orleans, John Steinbeck had listened to the disreputable Cheerleaders spew their bigotry at the black and white children attending an integrated school. Disgusted, he realized “something was wrong and distorted and out of drawing.” He had friends in the city who embraced a tradition of kindness and courtesy, but he didn't see their faces in the crowd. Maybe his friends and their ilk felt helpless, he thought, just as he did, but their absence misrepresented New Orleans as a whole.

In the same way, the talk show hosts took up all the oxygen. They drowned out all the other voices and discouraged constructive debate. They seemed, at least to me, linked to the entertainment industry rather than to the political process. Whether they truly conveyed the conservative message or only served to muddy it would be left for their audience to decide.

MY DAY DREW
to a close in Hutchinson, once known as Temperance City, where wheat is king. A giant grain elevator in town, almost half a mile long, holds about eighteen million bushels. Hutch's attractions include the Cosmosphere, a museum devoted to the space program and the Apollo astronauts, and the State Fair.

With a population of forty thousand or so, it's got a mild mix of races—a few blacks, a few Hispanics. Often you'd mistake the city for a giant mall, except for the railroad tracks and the train whistles.

“There's something to do here once in a while, anyway,” mumbled the clerk at the Grand Prairie Hotel and Convention Center.

Unable to face another motel, I'd upgraded myself to the Grand Prairie at somewhat lavish expense. In my room, I could move around without knocking anything over, and the bed did not depress me with the afterimage of thousands of previous guests. Once I'd cleaned up, I made the rounds of the hotel and ran into a noisy bunch of teenagers in costume, students from Hutchinson High.

They were rehearsing some skits for a review, trying them out on a big stage at the Convention Center. They'd taken to the limelight, too, and had an excellent adrenaline rush going, both boys and girls. Though they were mostly juniors and seniors, they looked a dozen different ages. A little more of life, and they'd even out a bit.

Josh Lightsey and Summer Gajewski were the most outspoken, while the others hung back and functioned like a Greek chorus. They got really excited and animated when I produced a notebook. A grown-up—a writer, no less—was going to record their words and possibly use them in a book. That meant it was time to quit fooling around and be serious, an amusing transformation to watch. Seriousness doesn't come readily to kids who've just spent the past two hours skylarking onstage.

What's Hutchinson like for a young person? That was my first query. They mulled it over and inclined toward “very boring” at first, but it sounded too harsh an assessment, so they revised their opinion and agreed Hutch has many pluses.

“We've got the Cosmosphere,” said one.

“And the State Fair,” another contributed.

“Hutch isn't too big, and it's not too small,” Josh Lightsey concluded, putting a fine point on it—end of topic one. Josh played with Clean Slate, a Christian rock band, and guessed he'd stay in Kansas forever, while Summer was more adventurous and dreamed about visiting Italy someday.

With all the problems in America, how did the future look to them? They were okay with it. No mention of plummeting 401(k)s, no dabbling in gold and silver. No craving for material toys, either. They saw no limits to their prospects.

“A lot of stuff will improve.” That was Josh again, very intense and positive, a small boy with spikey blond hair. “There are technologies available we don't know anything about yet.”

“Robots,” somebody else chimed in. “They'll have a significant role in our lives.”

“The Internet,” Summer said. “And computers!”

Another voice. “Some diseases will be cured. Maybe even cancer.”

“Does anyone ever get afraid?” I asked.

They glanced at one another, then dummied up for nearly a minute.

“I worry about the war,” Josh confided at last. “My cousin Cory on my dad's side, he just left for Iraq. If something happens to him, there'll just be two of us men left to carry on the family name.”

“Are you all interested in politics?”

“Yes!” they almost shouted.

“All right, let's have a show of hands, then. Who's for John McCain?”

“Me!” Only Summer's hand went up, and she looked crushed. You could almost hear her thinking, “Damn, that was stupid!”

“And Obama?”

Everybody else. “He'll bring change,” Josh insisted. “We need a new leader.”

“You don't mind that he's part African American?”

“No, sir!”

Summer was still embarrassed. “It's my parents' fault,” she apologized. “They're Republicans.”

The school's drama teacher interrupted us, rounding up her charges and herding them back to the stage. Going up to my room, I allowed myself to believe that a lot of stuff would improve in spite of the begrudgers and naysayers. The world truly does go quietly about the business of renewing itself while we're looking the other way.

Before bed, I searched for more info on Hutchinson on my laptop, and came across some poems by William Stafford, who was born there. Of his family home, Stafford wrote, “We sang hymns in the house, and the roof was near to God.”

UNENDING KANSAS, IT
went on and on and on, and—speaking of fear—I got a scare in Kinsley when I passed a sign with two arrows, one aimed at New York and the other at San Francisco, 1,561 miles in either direction. Could it be possible I'd driven only halfway across the country? My odometer already read 3,567 miles. If the sign was accurate, it seemed a mean trick for the monster land to play.

The wind blew hard as I approached Dodge City. It kicked up dust devils and threw a chill into the air even though the sun blazed. You could sense what a Kansas tornado would be like, the dark funnel visible from afar because of the flat prairie, while jittery people watched it advance, waiting to see if they'd be spared or destroyed.

Dodge City provided the setting for
Gunsmoke
, of course, but Matt Dillon, a fictional character initially created for a radio serial and modeled on Raymond Chandler's hardboiled Lew Archer, never wore a badge there. Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson did, though, and belonged to a gang that controlled the town through its whiskey trade, a key source of revenue. Everyone drank in Dodge. Its first business, opened after the Civil War, was a humble saloon of boards and sod.

The Kiowa and Cheyenne had been routed by then, and when the U.S. Army built Fort Dodge in 1865 to protect travelers on the Santa Fe Trail, the city began to grow and really took off with the arrival of the railroad in 1872. Soon after, it became known as the Queen of the Cow Towns or, alternately, Hell on the Plains.

A cattleborne tick made Dodge rich, reaching Kansas on the hides of Texas longhorns driven across the state to be transported to the East by rail. The longhorns were immune to the tick, but it caused “Texas fever,” a form of anthrax, in other breeds. To halt its spread, the government enacted a quarantine, routing the cattle away from densely populated Abilene and Wichita into the sparsely settled West.

The wild times started in earnest then. Cowboys, drifters, soldiers, railroad workers, hookers, and gunslingers poured into Dodge. Everything in town cost a quarter—a shave, a packet of pins and needles, a shot of liquor. Booze fueled the city's affairs, but drunks paid dearly for their excesses, tossed into a fifteen-foot-deep dry well until they sobered up.

The last of the buffalo hunters were still around, unspeakably filthy with their matted hair, grubby fingernails, and blood-soaked clothes. They smelled to high heaven, and everybody called them “stinkers.” They'd decimated the herds—about 1.5 million buffalo hides were shipped from Dodge between 1872 and 1878—and left the prairie strewn with rotting carcasses. Farmers collected the bleached bones and sold them to manufacturers of china and fertilizer for six to eight bucks a ton.

Any pleasure or vice known to humankind was available in Dodge. The villainous Long Branch was just one of nineteen saloons catering to a citizenry of twelve hundred or so. You could buy Russian caviar, fresh anchovies, and opium, and the busy bordellos swiftly filled up with soiled doves. Trainmasters toted the red lanterns from their cabooses when they visited the girls, hence the origins of the “red-light district.”

So many corpses piled up after gunfights that new plots were dug almost daily at Boot Hill Cemetery for those who'd given up the ghost with their boots on. No sheriff could do much to curb the violence. Even accepting the position amounted to signing your own death warrant, usually via a bullet in the back, although the lucky ones were just run out of town.

Under siege, Dodge's mayor hired Wyatt Earp, then a part-time lawman in Wichita, to police the city at the enormous salary of $250 a month. Earp used the railroad tracks as a line to divide the city. The north side, where guns were banned, approximated a civilized society, but the killing and the vice continued unabated in the free-fire zone of the south side.