Stranger on a Train (24 page)

‘Honey, this land is flat, featureless and it ends in mountains. That's good. It keeps the inmates from spreading out into the real world.'

It was true that sitting there for an hour or two there is nothing to see but the grass and scrub, with occasional glimpses of the Mississippi winding and trickling through the land. Then suddenly you see a farmhouse. Just there, plonk in the middle of nowhere. Cows and horses standing about. Trees. Fences. Fences to keep the cows and horses in, I suppose, not to keep anyone out, because for 360 degrees around these signs of human life, and stretching to every horizon, there is blank nothing. No road; nowhere for a road to lead. Just empty space filled with wilderness. And how, I wondered, and continued to wonder for the next day as North Dakota became the grasslands of Montana, had these homesteaders decided that it was here, just
here,
in this actual spot, that they were going to build a house and a life. Why not a couple of hundred yards further along? Or back? Or to the right or left? What difference would it make? How could you ever make a decision? I imagined myself pacing back and forth trying to place my stake in the spot where I would build my house, but never managing to decide, because in the absence of defining detail, and assuming the Mississippi near enough by, absolutely any spot would do. And wouldn't you need, having travelled God-knows-how-far – from the East by wagon train, or from old Europe by ship – to feel that the place where you decided to settle was the most particular place you could find? Here is the perfect spot, your eyes and your heart sing together, recognising what and where it is you came all that way for, risked everything to find. But no, hang on, perhaps it's just a little to the left, or a mile and a half to the right. Well, let's assume that the pioneers and refugees had more practical minds than me daydreaming on a train, and had the good sense to get down and digging. Any place they hung their hat was home.

I gazed out of the window, a member of the audience for the moving picture that we were passing through, and started to see how it had all come about. The geography of movie America, the reason for all those celluloid dreams, rolled across the picture windows like a festival of film, freed from individual stories and script, but including all of them, making them necessary, inevitable. The genres had sped by. The industrial landscapes of Pittsburgh and Chicago, the railyards, the smoking factory chimneys, all spoke of fast urban tales of people doing their best and worst to make a living in a thundering black-and-white world. The poor and destitute, living rough, riding the rails, the dogged workers falling away from the civilised centres to the drab and dangerous peripheries, the corruption, the blind bland rich. The clichés jostled in my head as those movies had scrolled by until gradually they were replaced by the flat, featureless plains of Montana that caused the heart to pound in alarm at such endless space. For hours, for whole days, miles and miles of agricultural land, unrelieved by the slightest incline or hollow, each mile indistinguishable from the last, from the last hundred and the next hundred. This was the vastness that the pioneers had sought, the good living, the chance to do more than subsist. It was almost unbearable.

At breakfast I saw Glenys and joined her. She was sitting opposite a very small, wisp of an elderly black man, who still wore the natty clothes of his heyday. His face was creased and crumpled, but along with the feather he wore in his pork pie hat that had ‘Indianapolis' written above the brim, he sported an embroidered waistcoat to put Big Daddy to shame, flared denims and a black leather string tie. This – I'm aware that I am forever describing Americans in terms of their likeness to movie or showbiz stars, but try though I might, this was inescapable – was Sammy Davies Jr revisited. Tiny, spry, fast-talking, and, in our breakfast companion's case, a little mad. He was as inclined to talk to himself as to us, so sometimes he was hard to follow, but he was, as his hat indicated, from Indianapolis, and he was, like Glenys, taking a long-waited-for vacation on his own. He was going to Seattle to, again like Glenys, see the mountains he had never been in. It is astonishing how many Americans tell you of longing for American landscapes but fail to get to them decade after decade. The remarkably untravelled lives of many of the people I met on the train quite pulled against the notion of a continent in flux, all its people on the move. Actually, for the most part, they seem to stay still and dream. Indianapolis, who was in his sixties, I guessed, had only a few days away to see the mountains at last, even though he was retired, presumably because his funds were too limited for a longer holiday, but his train to Chicago to catch the
Empire Builder
had been so late that he had missed his connection. He muttered much of this out through the window, but Glenys had begun his monologue by asking where he had got on the train, so it seemed all right to interrupt his private recollections.

‘So you had to lose a whole day out of your vacation waiting for the next train?'

He looked up and shook his head.

‘Nope, this here is the train I was booked on. Amtrak flew me from Chicago to St Paul's to pick it up. I was waiting when it arrived. The plane was on time.'

I was impressed. He wasn't.

‘Yeah, but the train was part of the vacation, and the reason I travelled by train is that I'm afraid of flying.'

I've rarely seen a man look so mournful, as he shook his head, dismayed at the memory of finding himself flying courtesy of the train company.

In the smoking coach were a new collection of people along with the old. Sitting in the near corner was a tired-looking woman with a body that had broken free of its youthfully contained voluptuousness and weary blonde hair with roots so badly in need of doing that it was almost half and half fair to black. Opposite her was a young man with severely cropped hair and dim, close-together eyes that I guessed not only tiredness had rendered unalert, but with a body that rippled with youth and fitness under his white T-shirt. I took him for a soldier. He was indeed a soldier on his way back to his base after a couple of weeks' leave. A woman called Martha, who I had met in line in Chicago station and who had immediately begun recounting in detail her adventures on the internet discovering her genealogy, and how everyone should do it, I should do it, and what, precisely, she had discovered, and who I had been avoiding ever since, was bending a willing acolyte's ear, as indeed she was whenever I came across her. She talked on and on and on. When she finished with the importance of finding one's roots, she moved to canonical books by women and feminist history. She was unstoppable, as if her every word was of everlasting interest and it was her duty to induct any lone female (and, because of the loudness of her voice, anyone nearby) into her world of historical self-justification. I wondered now, though, if perhaps she was manic, from the way she shot out the words as if they were all queuing and jostling to be said and couldn't wait their turn. Next to her, but turned firmly away, was the conductor on another break, telling a man next to him almost word for word about the liberal lie. Martha finished some exposition about the invisibility of women in the historical record by blaming ‘the usual suspects'. Uncharacteristically, she paused and looked around the coach.

‘Ha,' she gloated. ‘The joke went over their heads. No one got the reference to
Casablanca. The usual suspects.'

‘I never saw that movie,' the soldier said, trying to be helpfully dumbed down.

‘That is so sad. We've become ignorant of our own culture. Movies are very important…'

And she continued with a lecture about the educational and social value of film. But Martha's cultural understanding was stuck in the Forties. She clearly did not know that the film the soldier hadn't seen was not
Casablanca
(which he could hardly have missed if he were an avid TV watcher), but the more modern cultural must-know
The Usual Suspects.
Thankfully, no one cared to explain the gap in her knowledge and Martha was allowed to remain satisfyingly superior.

‘Were you in the Gulf?' the tired woman asked the soldier.

‘Yes, ma'am.' He spoke quite neutrally. He was a soldier describing where he had been, not venturing an opinion. He seemed too archetypal to be true.

‘My son was in the Gulf,' she said, looking quite haunted. ‘I watched it happening on the TV all the time. I never turned it off, slept in front of it, ate in front of it. The doctor put me on tranquillisers and said I had to turn off the TV and stop watching the war. But I couldn't. It was like I had to to keep my son alive. And, my god, when that stuff about friendly fire came out … Jesus, friendly fire, killing our own…'

‘Yeah,' the soldier said, without any kind of expression on his face. ‘My sergeant said watch out for friendly fire. He said friendly fire kills you worse than enemy fire.'

There was a small pause while we took this in, but no one indicated their appreciation for his exquisite irony. I looked at him a little harder, but I couldn't see anything in his face that knew the weight of what he had just said. The eyes stayed dim, the voice flat.

The blonde woman nodded. ‘It's all the stuff they don't tell you. Like when they killed JFK. God, I cried and cried over that. I loved that man. We still don't know what really happened. They kept the truth from us.' She spoke with raw passion and a grief that dated back to 1963. ‘I'm telling you, if we knew what we don't know, we'd be angry.'

The young soldier nodded, slow and solemn. ‘Yes, ma'am, if we knew what we don't know, we'd know more.'

And for me it was one of those moments when, like the transition that occurs when an oil and egg-yolk mixture suddenly emulsifies into mayonnaise, the texture of human existence cohered and thickened. I have no idea if life does this sort of thing accidentally or because it has an independent sense of humour and it knows you're listening. Whichever, or whatever else, the humanity of humanity was on a roll just then on that train, and it wasn't going to stop until I did. It was altogether a day of rich textures.

Later that afternoon another stranger, Annie, seemed to be having the same thoughts as me about the arbitrariness of the homesteads.

‘Now why did they put that house right there?' she wondered aloud, as we both happened to be staring out of the same window while we puffed on our cigarettes.

Annie was from New Orleans and on holiday from her regular life. She had six kids aged from thirty-three down to ten. She was a single mother, black, and used to be a cook but had retired, earning extra money by doing a little babysitting now. She told me about her twenty-one-year-old boy who was diagnosed as hyperactive. He still lived at home, needing full-time attention, but the older children took it in turns to have him sometimes so that Annie could have a break.

‘The boy has trouble with angritude,' she explained.

She took him regularly to classes to help him deal with his emotional ups and downs. They wanted Annie to become a volunteer and work with other troubled kids.

‘You got to listen to kids. It's no good shouting. I grew up with my grandmother shouting and screaming. I cried a lot. No need for that. There's enough hatred in the world without having it in the family.'

While she was away she called her son twice a day. He resented her leaving him. Her other kids were good with him, but if he was having a tantrum they couldn't cope with, they'd get her on her mobile and she'd speak to him.

‘Sometimes it takes two hours of me talking to him before he can calm himself down. He needs to hear someone speaking quietly to him, and he needs to talk himself and be listened to. Then he's all right. Hey, life is like a train, it goes round and round.'

‘And it's always late.'

Annie laughed. ‘Yup. And why the hell
did
they put that house just there?'

Human life in all its inescapable difficulty and the astonishing human capacity for somehow coping with or enduring it was positively parading itself on the
Empire Builder.
By mid-afternoon we were at Havre, another water stop where passengers could get out and air themselves. Taking advantage of a regular captive audience, the platform at Havre sported a large signpost explaining how the town got its name when two rivals in love fought over a local beauty. After hours of fisticuffs the loser stormed off shouting, ‘You can have'er.' Every American town likes to have its mythic founding story, but Havre, I felt, just hadn't tried hard enough.

‘Dumb, huh?' a voice said in my ear as I finished reading it. ‘I hear you're a writer.'

A man in his late thirties or early forties stood beside me. He was short and stocky, in regulation baseball cap, jeans and a T-shirt. As ordinary-looking a man as you could imagine. ‘I don't mean to intrude, but hearing you're a writer, I've got a story for you.'

I lit another cigarette and waited, trying to project a look that said I was interested but I wasn't going to get in any way involved in his life no matter how terrible his story was. It was clearly going to be pretty terrible, because the ordinary guy's eyes had taken on an intense and fiery look as he prepared to relate, yet again but never often enough, what had happened to him.

‘I was OK until nine years ago. I led a normal life working as a joiner in a local firm. I lived at home. We were a regular family. Then my mom died. I got bad feelings about it, but I carried on. Then five years later, when my dad died, I went berserk. I got suicidal. Real crazy. Putting a gun to my head. Playing Russian roulette and stuff. I packed in the job and went to live alone in the woods for a long time. I got crazier and crazier out there in the woods, and then one day I realised that I had to get help. I saw a doctor, a psychiatrist who put me on Prozac, thirty milligrams twice daily. It was depression, he said. That shit hit me hard. In a month my teeth were chattering so bad that they broke. My teeth actually shattered to pieces because they rattled so bad. I thought my brain was going to be shaken to a froth. If I was crazy before, I was twice as crazy on the fucking – excuse me – Prozac, and it wasn't even my own craziness. When I finally saw a dentist, the state had to pay out seven thousand dollars to fix my teeth, I'd done that much damage to them. But they should have paid me a lot more. Damages. I should have sued them for what that stuff did to me. Prescribed by a doctor. I was trying to get better and it ruined my life, with the shakes and panics and what not. They still haven't gone away completely.'