'Not too awful long ago,' said the fat man in the ten gallon hat, using a construction that was new to me, and making it sound - by saying it slowly - like a complete sentence, 'folks here would have started a revolution if they couldn't read the rodeo scores. Sure, we're glad to have it.'
But rodeo news was little more than a balance sheet listing the winnings of the cowpoke pictured tormenting a bull. I found it a mystifying triumph, and the amassing of two thousand dollars - there was no mention of technique - an ungainly, if not unworthy, victory. Aside from the barbarity of it, this was the first sports page I had ever seen where there were dollar signs beside every score.
Hoping for a little light relief I turned to the Letters to the Editor. After all, if I was going to spend the night here it would help if I had some clue to the city's character. The first letter began, 'It is generally known that the theory of evolution is being taught in the public schools as a fact. . .' There followed some rather clumsy sarcasm about science eroding 'moral values', and every indication that a Scopes-like Monkey Trial might follow the Fat Stock Show as Fort Worth's next attraction. Letter Two: Hold on to the Panama Canal, for Christ's sake! Letter Three was an extraordinary denunciation of the Texas Democratic Committee for inviting Cesar Chavez to Texas. It implied that Mr Chavez was a troublemaker for wanting to organize farm labourers. This letter ended, 'Unions are doing more to destroy our national economy, promoting unemployment and inflation than any one cause.'
Unions, the Canal, the Bible: they were not getting down to basics in Fort Worth - they had never got away from them in the first place. I really hadn't the strength to grapple with Adam and Eve and the child labour laws, and so I handed my newspaper to Fatty and headed out of the Silver Dollar and past the billboards (Listen to Redneck Radio!) to the railroad station.
There was some delay, but waiting I met a very happy man. He was a newcomer to Fort Worth, he said, but six months in the city had convinced him of the limitless opportunities of the place I had no trouble dismissing in an afternoon.
'Tennis, golf, bowling,' he said. 'Swimming.'
I said, 'You can do those things in Cleveland.'
'Here, you can do anythink.'
Any think?
I said, 'Are you English?'
Yes, indeed, he was a Londoner. He had been a policeman in a wretched precinct of south London, but he had grown sick of the taxes and the general gloom and the British passions for amateurism and failure. He had migrated to Fort Worth: 'More for the kids' sake than anythinkelse.'
In London, as a bobby in a funny helmet, unarmed except for his truncheon and his whistle, he had been jeered at. He had always wanted to play golf. But policemen in London do not play golf. He liked swimming. But one cannot be a serious swimmer at the Public Baths in Tooting. He had been at the bottom of the pay-scale, on the last rung of the social ladder. Here, as a hotel clerk in the city of bull riders, calf ropers, bail-bondsmen, wholesalers of cowboy suits, Fundamentalist drawlers and - it was their own word - rednecks, his whiffling south London accent marked him out as an aristocrat and gave him a Churchillian authority.
'I'm staying,' he said.
'You could be a policeman here,' I said.
'They do all right here,' he said.
I wished him luck, and then, somewhat reassured, and still sticking to this cattle drive in reverse - the Chisholm Trail which the railway had inherited - made tracks for Laredo.
3
THE AZTEC EAGLE
It was a rainy night in Laredo - not late, and yet the place seemed deserted. A respectable frontier-town, sprawling at the very end of the Amtrak line, it lay on a geometric grid of bright black streets on a dirt bluff that had the clawed and bulldozed look of a recent quarry. Below was the Rio Grande, a silent torrent slipping past Laredo in a cut as deep as a sewer; the south bank was Mexico.
The city lights were on, making the city's emptiness emphatic. In that glare I could see its character as more Mexican than Texan. The lights flashed, suggesting life, as lights do. But where were the people? There were stop-lights on every corner, Walk and Wait signs winked on and off; the two-storey shop-fronts were floodlit, lamps burned in the windows of one-story houses; the street lights made the puddles bright holes in slabs of wet road. The effect of this illumination was eerie, that of a plague city brightened against looters. The stores were heavily padlocked; the churches lit up in cannonades of arc-lamps; there were no bars. All that light, instead of giving an impression of, warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze.
No traffic waited at the red lights, no pedestrians at the crosswalks. And though the city was silent, in the drizzly air was an unmistakable heart-murmur, the threep-threep of music being played far away. I walked and walked, from my hotel to the river, from the river to a plaza, and into the maze of streets until I was almost certain I was lost. I saw nothing. And it could be frightening, seeing - four blocks away -a blinking sign I took to be a watering hole, a restaurant, an event, a sign of life, and walking to it and arriving soaked and gasping to discover that it was a shoe store or a funeral parlour, shut for the night. So, walking the streets of Laredo, I heard only my own footsteps, the false courage of their click, their faltering at alleyways, their splashes as I briskly returned to the only landmark I knew - the river.
The river itself made no sound, though it moved powerfully, eddying like a swarm of greasy snakes in the ravine from which every bush and tree had been removed in order to allow the police to patrol it. Three bridges linked the United States to Mexico here. Standing on the bluff I heard the threep-threep louder: it was coming from the Mexican side of the river, a just-discernible annoyance, like a neighbour's radio. Now I could see plainly the twisting river, and it struck me that a river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God.
Looking south, across the river, I realized that I was looking towards another continent, another country, another world. There were sounds there - music, and not only music but the pip and honk of voices and cars. The frontier was actuaclass="underline" people did things differently there, and looking hard I could see trees outlined by the neon beer-signs, a traffic jam, the source of the music. No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, was a black slope - the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America.
A car drew up behind me. I was alarmed, then reassured when I saw it was a taxi. I gave the driver the name of my hotel and got in, but when I tried to make conversation he responded by grunting. He understood only his own language.
In Spanish I said, 'It is quiet here.'
That was the first time on my trip that I spoke Spanish. After this, nearly every conversation I had was in Spanish. But in the course of this narrative I shall try to avoid affecting Spanish words, and will translate all conversations into English. I have no patience with sentences that go, ' "Carramba!" said the campesino, eating his empanada at the estancia . . .'
'Laredo,' said the taxi driver. He shrugged.
'Where are all the people?'
'The other side.'
'Nuevo Laredo?'
'Boys' Town,' he said. The English took me by surprise, the phrase tickled me. He said, now in Spanish again, 'There are one thousand prostitutes in the Zone.'
It was a round number, but I was convinced. And that of course explained what had happened to this city. After dark, Laredo slipped into Nuevo Laredo, leaving the lights on. It was why Laredo looked respectable, even genteel, in a rainswept and mildewed way: the clubs, the bars, the brothels, were across the river. The red-light district was ten minutes away, in another country.