The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

'I'm sure He understands.'

'I love to hear you say it. I was on this train a week ago, going east. We were delayed by the snow, but it was fantastic. They put us up at the Holiday Inn!'

'I hope they don't do that to us.'

'Don't say that.'

'I've got nothing against the Holiday Inn,' I said. 'It's just that I have a train to catch.'

'Everybody does. I bet I'm going further than you - Flagstaff, remember?' She took another sip of her tonic and said, 'In the end it took us days - days - to get from Chicago to New York. There was snow everywhere! There was a boy on the train. He was from Boston. He was on the seat beside me.' She smiled - a kind of demure leer: 'We slept together.'

'That was lucky.'

'I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't like that. He was on his side and I was on my side. But' - she went pious - 'we slept together. What a time that was. I don't drink, but he drank enough for the both of us. Did I tell you he was twenty-seven years old? From Boston. And all through the night he said to me, "Gawd, you're beautiful." and he kissed me I don't know how many times, "Gawd, you're beautiful." '

'This was at the Holiday Inn?'

'On the train. One of the nights,' she said. 'The Chair Car. It was very, very important to me.'

I said it sounded like a very sweet experience and tried to imagine it, the drunken youth pawing this plump freckly woman while the Chair Car (smelling, as it always did at night, of old socks and stale sandwiches) snored.

'Not just sweet. It was very important. I needed it just then. That's why I was going East.'

'To meet this fellow?'

'No, no,' she said peevishly. 'My mother died.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I got word of it in Flagstaff and caught the train. Then we got held up in Chicago, if you call the Holiday Inn being held up! I met Jack round about Toledo - right about here, if this is Toledo.' She looked out the window. ' "Gawd, you're beautiful." It really cheered me up. It came between so much.'

'My condolences. It must be very sad to go home for a funeral.'

'Two funerals,' she said.

'Pardon?'

'My father died, too.'

'Recently?'

'Tuesday.'

This was Saturday.

'God,' I said.

She smiled. 'I love to hear you say that.'

'I mean, that's terrible about your father.'

'It was a blow. I thought I was going home for my mother's funeral, but it turned out to be both of them. "You should come home more often, honey," Dad said. I said I would. Flagstaff is pretty far, but I've got my own apartment and I'm making good money. Then he died.'

'A sad trip.'

'And I'll have to go back. They couldn't bury them. I have to go back for the interment.'

'I would have thought that would be done by now.'

She looked at me sharply. 'They cain't bury people in New York City.'

I asked her to repeat this strange sentence. She did, in just the same tones.

'God,' I said.

'You sound like Jack.' She smiled: such odd Eskimo-granny teeth.

'Why can't they bury people in New York?'

'The ground's too hard. It's frozen. They cain't dig - '

In the severe winter of '78, I thought, when the ground was so hard they couldn't bury people, and the mortuaries were stacked to the rafters, I decided to take the train to the sunniest parts of Spanish A merica.

The lady from Flagstaff went away, but over the next eight or nine hours, again and again, in the Club Car and the Chair Car and the Diner, I heard her flat, dry corncrake voice repeating slowly, ' - because they cain't bury people in New York City.'

Twice, when she saw me, she said Gawd! and laughed.

The frozen switch, the buckled track, the snow: we were running very late and my conductor insisted that I did not have a hope of arriving on time or making my connection for Fort Worth. 'You don't have the chance of one of these in Hell,' he said at an Indiana station. He was holding a snowball. And there was a new problem. A wheel was overheating and (I think I have this right) a fuse had blown; there was a frosty stink of gas seeping through the end of the train. To avert an explosion, the speed of the train was brought down to about 15 miles an hour, and we remained at this creeping pace until an opportunity arose to detach the afflicted car from the Lake Shore Limited. At Elkhart we were able to rid ourselves of this damaged car, but the operation took an unconscionably long time.

While we stopped, things were calm in the 'Silver Orchid' sleeping car. Only the conductor fussed. He said the steam was freezing and jamming the brakes. He hurried back and forth importantly with a push-broom and told me that this was much better than his previous job. He had been desk-bound in an electronics firm, 'but I'd rather deal with the public.'

'The trouble with you,' said the ticket collector, who saw the conductor growing anxious, 'is you fret before you stew.'

'Maybe so.' The conductor banged his broom on the ice that had accumulated inside the door.

'Won't be as bad as the last trip, though. That was frozen bananas.'

The conductor said, 'I've got my passengers to think of.'

My passengers. There were three of us in the 'Silver Orchid', the Bunces and me. The first thing Mr Bunce said to me was that his mother's people had been on the Mayflower. Mr Bunce wore a cap with earflaps and was zippered into two sweaters. He wanted to talk about his family and Cape Cod. Mrs Bunce said that Ohio was far uglier than the Cape. Mr Bunce also had a Huguenot pedigree. In one sense, old Bunce was an untypical bore. Characteristically, the American boasts about how desperate and poverty-stricken his immigrant ancestors were; Mr Bunce's were a huge success, right from the start. I listened with as much patience as I could muster. It might, I thought, have been Bunce I had offended that first day ('This is like the Trans-Siberian' 'No, it's not'). After that, I avoided the Bunces.

And still at Elkhart a great panic overtook the Lake Shore Limited. Now, everyone knew he would miss his onward connection in Chicago. A large group of single girls were heading for New Orleans and the Mardi Gras. Some elderly couples had to catch a cruise ship in San Francisco: they were very worried. A young man from Kansas said his wife would think he'd left her for good. A black couple whispered, and I heard the black girl say, 'Oh, shoot.' One of the Mardi Gras girls looked at her watch and said, 'We could be partying by now.'

The lady from Flagstaff, whose parents had just died, caused this mood to become festive and, at last, one of celebration. She explained she had been on the train going east just ten days before. The same thing had happened - delays, snow, missed connections. Amtrak had put everyone up at the Holiday Inn in Chicago and given everyone four dollars for taxi fare, and meal vouchers, and one phone call. Amtrak, she said, would do the same thing this time.

The news spread through the train and, as if proof of Amtrak's good intentions, a free meal was announced in the dining car: soup, fried chicken and vanilla ice cream. This vindicated the no longer bereaved lady from Flagstaff, who said, 'And wait till we get to Chicago!'

Elsewhere, passengers were spending the four dollar taxi fare they had not yet been given.

'Okay, Ralph,' said a greasy-haired boy to the bartender, and put a dollar down, 'let's get drunk.'

'We been setting here eight hours,' said the loudest of three youths, 'we already drunk.'

'I'm working overtime,' said Ralph the bartender, but obediently began cramming ice cubes into plastic cups.

There were other voices.

This: 'Never go home in the spring. It's never the same.'

And this: 'Jesus Christ' (a pause) 'was black. Like a Ethiopian. White features and a colored face.' (pause) 'All them usual descriptions are bullshit.'

And again: ' - because they cain't bury people in New York City.'

They were, all of them, frightfully happy. They were glad about the delay, delighted with the snow (it had begun to fall again) and they rejoiced at the promises made by the lady from Flagstaff about a night - or maybe two - at the Holiday Inn. I did not share their joy or feel very kindly towards any of them, and when I discovered that the car to be detached lay between the 'Silver Orchid' and this mob I told the conductor I was going back to bed: 'Wake me up when we get to Chicago.'