'We may not be there until nine o'clock.'
'Wonderful,' I said. I fell asleep with The Wild Palms over my face.
The conductor woke me at ten to nine. 'Chicago!' I jumped up and grabbed my suitcase. As I hurried down the platform, through the billows of steam from the train's underside, which gave to my arrival that old-movie aura of mystery and glory, ice needles crystalized on the lenses of my glasses and I could hardly see.
The lady from Flagstaff had been dead right. I was given four dollars and a berth in the Holiday Inn and three meal vouchers. Everyone who had missed a connection got exactly the same: the Bunces, the drunken louts from the Club Car, the young man from Kansas, the Mardi Gras girls, the guffawing peckerwoods who had slumbered the trip away on cheap seats in the Chair Car, the elderly people on their way to San Francisco, the lady from Flagstaff. We were met by Amtrak staff and sent on our way.
'See you at the hotel!' cried a lady whose luggage was two shopping bags.
She could not believe her luck.
A lout said, 'This is costing Amtrak a fortune!'
The wild snow, the sudden hotel, Chicago - it seemed unreal. But this unreality was amplified by the other guests at the Holiday Inn. They were blacks in outlandish uniforms, bright green bell-bottoms, white peaked caps and gold braid; or red uniforms, or white with medals, or beige with silver braid looped around the epaulettes. Was it a band, I wondered, or a regiment of pop-art policemen? It was neither. These men (their wives were not in uniform) were members of the Loyal Order of Antlers. Their shoulder badges said so, in small print. The men gave Antler salutes and Antler handshakes and paraded very formally around the lobby in white Antler shoes, looking a trifle annoyed at the class of people the storm had just blown in. There was no confrontation. The Amtrak passengers made for the 'Why Not? Discoteque' and the Bounty Lounge, and the Antlers (some of whom wore swords) stood and saluted each other - stood, I suppose, because sitting would have taken the crease out of their trousers.
The swimming pool was floodlit and filled with snow. Green palm trees were painted on the outside wall. These appeared to be rooted in the snowdrifts. The city was frozen. There were cakes of ice in the river. Last week's snow was piled by the roadsides. There was new snow on the streets. And with this newly falling snow was a sleet storm, tiny pelting grains that made driving treacherous. The Gideon Bible in my room was open at Chronicles (2, 25). Was there a message here for me? 'The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, or the children be put to death for the fathers; but every man shall die for his own sin.' Amen, I thought. I shut the Bible and unpacked Faulkner.
Coincidentally, Faulkner had a message. 'Now it was winter in Chicago,' I read. '. . . the defunctive days dying in neon upon the fur-framed petal faces of the wives and daughters of cattle and timber millionaires and the paramours of politicians returned from Europe . . . the sons of London brokers and Midland shoe-peg knights . . .' He went on jeering at their status and then described how they all went south and deserted Chicago's snows. They were 'members of that race which without tact for exploration and armed with notebooks and cameras and sponge bags elects to pass the season of Christian holiday in the dark and bitten jungles of savages.'
I was not sure about my tact for exploration, and I had neither a camera nor a sponge bag, but twenty-four hours in the Holiday Inn in wintry Chicago convinced me that the sooner I got to the savage jungle, however dark and bitten, the better.
2
THE LONE STAR
There seemed to me nothing more perfect in travel than boarding a train just at nightfall and shutting the bedroom door on an icy riotous city and knowing that morning would show me a new latitude. I would leave anything behind, I thought, for a sleeper on a southbound express.
And it was impossible to be on the Lone Star out of Chicago, beginning this crossing of six states, and not hear the melodies of all the songs that celebrate the train. Half of jazz is railway music, and the motion and noise of the train itself has the rhythm of jazz. This is not surprising: the Jazz Age was also the Railway Age. Musicians travelled by train or not at all, and the pumping tempo and the clickety-clack and the lonesome whistle crept into the songs. So did the railway towns on the route: how else could Joplin or Kansas City be justified in a lyric? We rolled out of Union Station towards Joliet and this nice combination of privacy and motion- and the bass notes of the wheels on the tracks - brought me a melody and then words. The wheels were saying, 'It ain't nothing like my daddy's big cigar - no, it ain't -'
I hung up my coat and set out my belongings, poured myself a glass of gin and watched the last pinky sunset flecks disappear from the Joliet snow.
Keep your money and your liquor and your fancy car -
It ain't nothing like my daddy's big cigar.
Don't matter if he's broke,
'Cause how that man can smoke . . .
Keep your special table at that downtown bar -
It ain't nothing like my daddy's big cigar.
He offers me a puff
But one just ain't enough . . .
Not a bad start. It seemed to strike the right note, but obviously it needed work. Anyway, here was the ticket-man.
'You've been involuntarily upgraded,' he said, looking at my ticket. He perforated it expertly. 'Anything you need, just holler.'
I said, 'Is there going to be anyone else in this bedroom?'
'Nope. You got the whole place to yourself.'
'What's the weather report like?'
'Terrible,' he said. 'I've been working on this train for fifty years and this is the worst winter I've ever seen. Ten below in Chicago, winds going a hundred miles an hour. It took the signs down in Cleveland. Shee!'
One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone. The temperatures, the wind speeds, the chill factors were always different, but always bad. And yet, even if they were not the exaggerations they seemed, I would be out of this glaciation in a day or so. I had not seen one green tree or one unfrozen body of water since leaving Boston. But there was hope - I was going south, more southerly than anyone on this southbound express would believe. Somewhere below, the wind was in the palm trees. On the other hand, we were only now in Streator, Illinois.
Streator was dark, and my one glimpse of Galesburg was a rectangle of snow and a sign that said PARKING and a little lighted shed and a half-buried car - a scene with the quaint insignificance of a New Yorker cover. This I saw from the dining car, looking up from my halibut and chablis. Propped against the wine bottle was The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett. I had hurried through the Faulkner and left it in Chicago, in the drawer of the vanity table in the Holiday Inn, with the Gideon Bible.
The criminality in The Thin Man was not half so distracting as the drinking. Everyone drank in this book; it was, in the Hammett world, eternally cocktail time. The Faulkner had disturbed me with torrential irrelevance and set my teeth on edge with confederate metaphysics. Hammett's English was more lucid, but the plot was plainly concocted, and the detective-work seemed a poor excuse for boozing sessions.
I turned my attention to the three people at the next table, who were drawling away happily. A middle-aged couple had discovered that the stranger who had seated himself at their table was also a Texan. He was dressed in black and yet looked raffish, like one of those adulterous preachers who occur from time to time in worthy novels set in this neck of the woods - it was nine o'clock, we were in Fort Madison, Iowa, on the west bank of the Mississippi.