Stranger on a Train (7 page)

When they left, he came to tell me about them. Nothing had come back to him during the meeting, but he liked both of them, an intelligent daughter of my age and a wife he found attractive and good company. He thought he might have had a good marriage. He couldn't imagine he had walked out. He must have been mugged. He was saying goodbye to me, although several meetings were planned, and he wouldn't be going home for a while. There was no more talk about adopting me, and though he spent most of his time with me when his new family weren't around, I could feel him separating. He talked about what they had told him of his life, as if trying to fit himself into it. It was an ordinary life, but clearly full of affection. He liked the idea of it more and more.

‘But why did you run away from it?' I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No, I'm sure I must have been mugged.'

I gave him up to his life. But we went on playing poker and smoking together until his wife came with a suitcase to take him home. John introduced me to her. She seemed very nice.

Smoking is a love that has never gone wrong, never seen sense. I trust cigarettes. Thirty-seven years after I first practised smoking in front of my bedroom mirror, I sat on the hotel veranda overlooking a lush garden in Savannah late into the singing, sweaty night, smoking and waiting for Saturday when I would start travelling again. I woke, washed and left my elegant bedroom to take breakfast on the front porch so that I could smoke while I drank my coffee and watch the joggers, alone, isolated behind earphones, alone but connected by mobiles, with dogs, with babies in buggies, with lovers or encouraging companions, young, old, fat, thin, black, white, running, puffing or effortlessly, round and round the outside of Forsthye Park across the road. Walking slowly, each step taking account of the saturating heat, I crossed the elegantly gardened public squares surrounded by gothic mansions, past live oak trees dripping with Spanish Moss to Shriner's bookshop to buy Faulkner to read while I lunched in Clary's Diner – ‘Smoking section, please' – on gazpacho or a salt beef sandwich. Then I'd walk, to the river, or just through the squares. Never very far and always slowly. Watch people, take in place names and proud plaques on the older houses claiming not their inhabitants but their age as their fame, stop at a café (non-smoking) for mint tea, sit in a square on an unoccupied bench so I could have a cigarette and read or look at the squirrels – the city is overrun with them. One bench declares that it is in the place of the bench that Tom Hanks sat on in
Forrest Gump.
The actual bench has been taken away back to Hollywood by the studio. Still tourists come to stare and click their cameras at the substitute. It's a fake bench, but it's a fake bench in the right place. Back at the hotel I'd have a shower and then take my tea from the lounge out to the front porch again to smoke and watch the late afternoon joggers doing their programmed circuits round the sultry park whose one-mile-long periphery seemed to be its main civic purpose. I returned to the back veranda on the first floor to watch the light die and my cigarette begin to glow as I drew on it in the dark. One, two, three days. All stillness, all alone in a strange city, not lonely for a second. Never alone with a cigarette in my hand.

And if I thought about anything at all, I wondered with a heat-inspired lassitude what I was doing in this far-off southern city, waiting, pausing between a sea voyage and a train journey, neither of which I had any reason to do other than the theoretical wish to be moving through grand empty spaces.

*   *   *

A gangly young man queued behind me to have the conductor collect his ticket and board the train at Savannah station.

‘Are you familiar with Jacksonville?' he asked me nervously as we sat next to each other in our allocated seats and he noticed from my ticket that I was connecting at Jacksonville to the
Sunset Limited.
‘It's a ten-hour layover. What will you do all that time?'

‘Wait. There must be something to do in Jacksonville.'

He didn't look convinced. His name was Troy and he was making the two-hour journey to connect with the
Sunset Limited
at Jacksonville to get him to Sanderson, Texas from where he had a six-hour drive to the small town where he lived and worked as a teacher. He'd spent a long weekend in Savannah having read
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,
a story of gay love and death in the mannered South. It was his first weekend away from home on his own. It was a real adventure, a breaking-away, an acknowledgement (though he didn't say so explicitly) of his own sexuality. He had wandered about the old city, and spent hours sitting in Madison Square looking at the house where the drama of the book took place. He had even knocked on the door, but no one had answered. He had cruised the gay bars and perhaps made contact with other gay men, but somehow it seemed unlikely. I got the feeling it was quite enough just for now that he had come to this sinful city alone. He was in his mid-twenties. Troy would come to Savannah again, he said, now that he knew he could. The town where he lived was where he had grown up. His father had been a teacher in the same infants school where Troy now taught, and still lived locally, widowed and retired. Troy had had to travel a long way to come out, and he was filled with surprise at himself. Even so, ten hours in Jacksonville on his own alarmed him.

‘Well, we'll find something to do,' I comforted, half promising to stick with him.

‘It's supposed to be a dangerous city.'

‘Why?'

He shrugged, uneasy and awkward. ‘Oh, you know…'

Jacksonville station was a utilitarian box, a few seats, a Coke machine and not much else, except a stationmaster who rather proudly told us there was nothing nearby. It was miles away from the city. So what did people with ten hours on their hands do? He shrugged. There was the Jacksonville Landing, a riverside shopping development, and a bus left for it every fifteen minutes. The answer to what to do in Jacksonville for ten hours, while the
Sunset Limited
chugged its way up to us from Orlando, was a mall.

‘Hold on, I'm gonna hang out with you guys,' a husky woman's twang behind us said.

Bet stepped on the remains of her cigarette with the toe of her black cowboy boot and joined us at the bus stop. We had been adopted by a small, delicately thin woman in her early sixties, neatly packaged in tight denim jeans, a white poplin shirt with a black string tie at the collar, and a smart black jacket. Her face was scored with lines, well lived in but with a recollected prettiness emphasised by big blue eyes starkly outlined with kohl and fringed with spiky mascara'd lashes. Her thin lips were lipsticked pink and her cheeks rouged. Her curly, reddish, light-brown dyed hair was caught in a small ponytail at the nape of her neck. She had a swagger, a consciously boyish way about her that jostled with her physically frail appearance.

The three of us sat on the bus with three or four other people heading into town. During the twenty-minute trip the bus stopped several times to pick up passengers, passing through obviously black suburbs on the way into the centre of Jacksonville. By the time we were nearing the mall, it was almost full and we were the only white people on the bus. I noticed this vaguely, but it seemed no odder than being on a bus going through Brixton. Troy and Bet, however, had become silent and I could feel their tension. Our travelling companions were the usual range of passengers: old, middle-aged, young, working people, noisy teenagers, the usual urban busload, with us as tourists. When we arrived at the Landing, Bet let out a deep sigh of relief. Troy nodded and said, ‘Yeah.' There were beads of sweat on his forehead from more than the heat.

‘Jeez,' Bet said, releasing her pent-up breath. She was sweaty too.

‘What?' I asked.

‘That was pretty scary.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't care to be outnumbered like that. In a strange city.'

‘Me too,' said Troy.

‘But what was so scary? Outnumbered?' I insisted, as we walked towards the entrance of the mall.

‘We were the only whites on that bus. This is a black city. People like us … white and strangers … it's not safe.' Bet spoke in an undertone.

No one, as far as I could tell, had given us a second look on the bus. But it wasn't what people did that represented the threat, it was the idea of being a stranger, of being in a white minority that made Bet and Troy deeply uneasy. Blackness was dangerous. We didn't look substantially richer than most of the people on the bus. So the danger from a black majority would have had to come from our whiteness and their hatred. It was a historical fear. And hysterical. Neither of them lived in inner cities. Troy came from small-town Texas, and Bet lived on and kept to the suburban outskirts of Albuquerque. In their America a bus full of black people was a rumour, a story they'd heard about an America in which they did not, and were pleased not to, live. Nightmare in Jacksonville was a bad dream come true. We might have been travelling on a bus full of aliens, or retributive ghouls, those creatures from movies that represent the fear of being overwhelmed by otherness, so strangely dangerous, so dangerously strange was the situation for them. It was probably the fact of the city that frightened my companions as much as the racial ratio. Neither had ever been to New York, neither would have contemplated it. America might look vast on the map, but for many people it's as small as their local town, beyond which is an uncharted wilderness inhabited by monsters. Once we'd left the street and entered the air-conditioned, security-policed mall, Bet and Troy relaxed. The shops, restaurants and ambience were familiar or versions of the familiar, and peopled by a much higher proportion of whites. Even so, the danger lurked outside.

‘We've got to make sure and catch the bus back to the station before dark. If we get separated, we'll meet at the entrance at 5 p.m. OK?' Bet told Troy, who, delighted to find himself under the protection of this tough matron, nodded vigorously and checked his watch.

‘I need a beer,' Bet announced.

There was a piazza outside by the river, with cobbles, a plashing fountain and half a dozen places to eat. We settled on the least crowded and found a smoking table. Troy didn't smoke, but he was happy to go along with the requirements of his two older women companions. Bet downed a bottle of beer fast and ordered a second. I sipped mine, more intent on nicotine. Troy ordered southern-fried chicken and fries and tucked in.

‘So where you all going?' Bet asked.

Troy retold his story, wide-eyed in surprise at himself for his achievement. Bet concurred.

‘Good for
you.'

I explained that I was from London, had just been on a freighter and fancied taking the slow route across the continent to see my friends in Phoenix.

Troy was amazed. ‘On your own?' He'd only just made it to Savannah, he couldn't begin to imagine crossing an ocean to another continent alone in the company of strangers. I wondered for the first time if it
was
a bit odd, remembering my sophisticated London friends asking, ‘On your own?' in much the same tone of voice as Troy.

I said that I was writing about the freighter trip for a British newspaper, and that I liked travelling alone. He shook his head in disbelief. Bet approved.

‘I'm a train freak. I travel the trains whenever I can. I write about them for local newspapers.'

We were bonded. Her parents were both children of Irish immigrants, and she had been a wages clerk in a local government office in Albuquerque for twenty-five years. Now she and her husband were retired on a small pension and living in the same house they had bought thirty-odd years ago. Before that he had been in the army, and she an army wife, travelling the world but living always in the America of the base.

‘What was the boat journey like?' Bet asked.

I told them about how I'd set off with the idea of writing about nothing happening for three weeks while I crossed the Atlantic only to find tragedy caught up with people anywhere.

Bet nodded grimly. She took a long drag on her cigarette.

So was Bet writing about this train trip, I asked?

‘No, this is a different kind of trip. I was in South Carolina for a funeral. I figured I'd take the train back to give myself time to recover.' Her mouth turned hard as she spoke. ‘I guess one of the reasons I was so upset by that bus ride was because of what happened.'

Bet had a brother who lived in a small town in South Carolina. When he was young, he'd thought about becoming a monk, but Bet said that wouldn't have worked out. He was too keen on girls. Either in spite of or because of that, he had never married. He was in his late fifties and owned the town hardware store. He lived alone. ‘Drank some,' Bet said. ‘But he minded his own business and ran the store.' He sounded like a sad, ageing and lonely man. One night, a week or so before, he'd closed the shop, had a drink in a bar, and was walking home on his own, when he was shot several times in the back by three kids.

‘Black,'
she said in a stage whisper, after a quick glance at the nearby tables. ‘The youngest was thirteen. When the police picked them up they said they had nothing special against him, they just wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone. They didn't even know him. He wasn't anyone to them. They wanted to kill someone and it happened to be my brother. They killed a perfect stranger for kicks. My brother. We weren't that close, but he was my baby brother. I buried him two days ago. Oh, it makes me so mad. What are kids like now? What the hell's going on in this country?'

The nightmare of America, although still somewhere else, was closer to Bet than I had imagined. Troy looked aghast.

‘My god, you read about these things, but…' The house from
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,
which he'd stared at with such fascination, was as close as he had come to the nightmare. Now he was right here, almost at the centre of the drama, he could reach out and touch it, and it wasn't just a story set in the past. ‘Oh my god…'