'Ohio,' said a lady at the next table.
Her husband, looking uncomfortable in a baggy yellow shirt, said, 'It doesn't look like Ohio.'
I knew what he meant.
The waiter said, 'Yep. That's Ohio all right. Be in Cleveland soon. Cleveland, Ohio.'
Just beyond the tracks there was a forest of frozen branches, poplars made out of frost, like ghostly sails and masts in a sea of snow. The elms and beeches had swelled cleanly into icy manifestations of exploded lace. And flat windswept snow, with hair-strands of brown broken grass buried to their tips. So even Ohio, covered in snow, could be dreamland.
The train was sunlit and emptier. I did not see Mr Chick or hear his pfweet; and Wendy, the raw foodist, was gone. It seemed to me here - and I was not very far from home-as if more of the familiar was slipping away. I had not really liked either one of them, but now I missed them. The rest of the people on the train were strangers.
I picked up my book. I had gone to sleep reading it the previous night; it was still The Wild Palms and still opaque. What had put me to sleep? Perhaps this sentence, or rather the tail end of a long straggling sentence: '. . . it was the mausoleum of love, it was the stinking catafalque of the dead corpse borne between the olfactoryless walking shapes of the immortal unsentient demanding ancient meat.'
I was not sure what Faulkner was driving at, and yet it seemed a fair description of the sausage I was eating that early morning in Ohio. The remainder of the breakfast was delicious - scrambled eggs, a slab of ham, grapefruit, coffee. Years before, I had noticed how trains accurately represented the culture of a country: the seedy distressed country has seedy distressed railway trains, the proud efficient nation is similarly reflected in its rolling stock, as Japan is. There is hope in India because the trains are considered vastly more important than the monkey-wagons some Indians drive. Dining cars, I found, told the whole story (and if there were no dining cars the country was beneath consideration). The noodle stall in the Malaysian train, the borscht and bad manners in the Trans-Siberian, the kippers and fried bread on the Flying Scotsman. And here on Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited I scrutinized the breakfast menu and discovered that it was possible for me to order a Bloody Mary or a Screwdriver: 'a morning pick-me-up,' as that injection of vodka into my system was described. There is not another train in the world where one can order a stiff drink at that hour of the morning. Amtrak was trying hard. Near my toast there was an Amtrak brochure which said that for the next 133 miles the track was perfectly straight - not a curve in it anywhere. So I copied down that shin-barking Faulkner sentence without any swerve of the train to jog my pen.
By the middle of the morning, the vapour I had seen between the cars had frozen. Each small passageway smoked like a deep freeze, with complicated crusts of frost covering it, and solid bubbles of ice, and new vapour pouring from cracks in the rubber seal. It was pretty, this snow and ice, and no less pretty outside; but it was also a nuisance. It was now past eleven and we had not yet reached Cleveland. Where was Cleveland? And I was not the only one who was perplexed. Up and down the train, passengers were buttonholing conductors and saying, 'Hey, what happened to Cleveland? You said we were supposed to be there by now. What's the story?' And yet Cleveland might have been right outside the window, buried under all that snow.
My conductor was leaning against a frosted window. I wanted to ask him what happened to Cleveland, but before I could speak he said, 'I'm looking for my switchman.'
'Anything wrong?'
'Oh, no. It's just that every time we go by here, he throws a snowball at me.'
'By the way, where's Cleveland?'
'Way off. Didn't you know we're running four hours late? Frozen switch back in Erie held us up.'
'I have to catch a train at four-thirty in Chicago.'
'You'll never make it.'
'Beautiful,' I said, and started away.
'Don't worry. I'll wire ahead in Elkhart. When we get to Chicago we'll just dump the whole thing in Amtrak's lap. They'll put you up at the Holiday Inn. You'll be in good shape.'
'But I won't be in Texas.'
'You leave this to me, sir.' He touched the visor of his cap. 'Ever see snow like this? God, it's terrible.' He looked out of the window again and sighed. 'Can't imagine what happened to that switchman. Probably got frostbite.'
It was hours before we got to Cleveland and, as with most delays, the slowness of our arrival created a sense of anti-climax: I felt I had already given it all the thought it deserved. Now the snow only bored me, and the houses depressed me- they were tiny bungalows not much bigger than the cars parked beside them. The greatest joke was that Cleveland, which had been smothered by the previous week's snowstorm, which had broadcast news items about survival techniques at home (intelligence - welcome, one would have thought, to Arctic explorers - about sleeping bags, body heat, keeping your condominium warm in an emergency, cooking on Sterno stoves and the like) -this city, which was frozen solid under drifts of snow, had to cheer it a long story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the monstrous inefficiency of the Russians in snow removal. The Russians! Under the headline MOSCOW SNOW DIG-OUT CROWN TARNISHED, with its Moscow dateline, the story began, 'This city's once-renowned snow removal capabilities have been drastically diminished this winter by a combination of bureaucratic blunders and unexpectedly heavy snowfalls.' It continued in the same gloating vein: 'The problem is apparently not a lack of special equipment. . . Residents are complaining bitterly this winter about the sad state of the streets . . . Still, heavy December snows and inadequate parking regulations seem a poor excuse for streets that are still clogged several weeks later.'
It was Mid-West smugness. In order to boast in Ohio you have to mention the Russians. Even better, a mention of Siberia which, as a matter of fact, Ohio in winter greatly resembles. I read that news item in Cleveland. I read the entire Plain Dealer in Cleveland. In Cleveland we were delayed nearly two hours. When I asked the conductor the reason he said it was the snow; and the track had been buckled by ice.
'It's a real bad winter.'
I told him that in Siberia the trains run on time. But it was a cheap crack. I would choose Cleveland over Irkutsk any day, even though - this was obvious - Cleveland was colder.
I went to the Club Car and had a morning pick-me-up and read The Wild Palms. Then I had another pick-me-up, and another. I considered a fourth, ordered it, but decided to nurse it. If I had many more of these pick-me-ups I'd be under the table.
'What are you reading?'
It was a plump freckled-faced fiftyish lady sipping a can of sugar-free tonic.
I showed her the title.
She said, 'I've heard of it. Any good?'
'It has its moments.' Then I laughed. But it wasn't anything to do with Faulkner. Once, on an Amtrak train not far from here, I had had a book which no one had queried; and yet it had aroused considerable interest. It was the biography of the writer of horror tales, H.P. Lovecraft, and the title Lovecraft had led my fellow passengers to believe that throughout a two-day trip I had had my nose in a book about sexual technique.
She was from Flagstaff, she said, and 'Whereabouts you from?'
'Boston.'
'Really?' She was interested. She said, 'Will you say something for me? Say G-o-d.'
'God.'
She clapped her hands delightedly. She was, despite her plumpness, very small, with a broad flat face. Her teeth were crooked, slanting in a uniform way, as if they had been filed. I was baffled by the pleasure I had given her in saying the word.
'Gawd,' she said, mimicking me.
'What do you say?'
'I say gahd.'