'Yep, the mighty Miss,' said the waiter, when I asked him to confirm this. He took my empty plate away and crooned, 'The Mississippi, the Mississippi' to the other diners.
The preacher, like the couple - and this thrilled them - was from San Tone. All three were returning from New York. They took turns telling horror stories - Eastern horror stories of drugs and violence. 'One night we were going back to our hotel and I saw this man -' That sort
of story.
And this sort of rejoinder. 'You think that's bad? A friend of mine was over in Central Park -'
Soon they were reminiscing about Texas. Then boasting. Finally, their boasting took an unexpected turn. They talked about all the people they knew in Texas who carried guns. 'My cousin carried a gun his whole life' and 'Ron knew a politician who never went anywhere without his gun' and 'My grand-daddy had a beautiful gun.'
'Everyone had a gun in those days,' said the preacher.
'He gave it to my Daddy,' said the lady.
'My Daddy had two guns,' said the preacher. 'One here and one here.' He spanked two pockets.
The lady said that one day her Daddy had tried to take a gun into a Dallas department store. He was just a stranger in town, from San Tone. Woke up that morning and strapped on his gun, like he always done. Nothing funny about that. Done the same thing every day of his life. Went in the store, packing this old gun. He was a huge man, way over six feet tall. The department store girls figured it was a hold-up as soon as they seen him. They stomped on the alarm. All Hell busted loose, but Daddy didn't mind one bit. He pulled out his gun and when the police come along Daddy said, 'Okay, boy, let's git 'im !'
The lady's husband said that Daddy had been eighty-four years old at the time.
' "Okay, boy, let's git'im!" '
The preacher had listened to this story with a growing look of defeat. He was silent for a moment, then he spoke up.
He said, 'My Daddy had eight heart attacks.'
The lady squinted at him. Her husband said, 'Wow.'
'Coronary thrombosises,' said the preacher. 'Lived through all eight.'
'He from San Tone, too?' asked the man.
'He surely was,' said the preacher.
'Must have been tough,' said the lady.
'No Easterner could survive that,' said the preacher. 'Only a Westerner could survive eight heart attacks.'
This met with general agreement. I wanted to ask what a Westerner was doing with eight heart attacks. But I kept my peace.
'Back East -' the lady began.
It was time to go. I returned to my bedroom, through a succession of deep freezes, the ice chests that lay between the cars. I yanked the covers over my head and said goodnight to Kansas. I'm staying here, I thought, and if I see snow on the ground tomorrow morning I'm not getting out of bed.
Dawn at Ponça City, Oklahoma, was a wintry shimmer under a sky of grey oatmeal. We were nearly 800 miles south of Chicago and headed towards Perry. The land was flat and barren; but the traces of snow - pelts of it blown into ruts and depressions, like the scattered carcasses of ermine - was not enough to keep me sulking in bed. I did not realize how cold it was out there in Oklahoma until I saw the white ovals of frozen ponds and the narrow ice-paths at the center of stony riverbeds. The rest was brown; a few bare brown trees; a small herd of brown cattle, lost in all that space, nibbling at brown turves. At the topmost portion of the sky's dome, the mournful oatmeal dissolved and slipped, leaving a curvature of aquamarine. The sun was a crimson slit, a red squint in the mass of cereal, a horizontal inch steadied above the horizon.
For twenty minutes or so, and as many miles, the land remained utterly empty: no houses, no people, very little snow, only that changeless brown. It was the unadorned surface of the earth, old humpless grasslands, every lick of weed combed flat by the wind, and no mooching cow anywhere to give it size.
These are the gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name -
The Prairies.
We came to Perry. Perry's bungalow styles were from Massachusetts and Ohio, and some with tarpaper roofs and air-conditioners rusting on the windows were nearly hidden behind the large sun-faded cars parked in their driveways. The cars were as wide as the roads. But one Perry house was tall and white, with three porches and gables and steeply sloping roofs, and newly painted clapboard. It would not have looked unusual on an acre of green lawn in Cape Cod; but in Perry, surrounded by trampled stones, and towering in the prairie like a beacon, it seemed a puzzle. Yet it was a vivid puzzle, so clear in design it required no solution. The assertive clarity of the thing was distinctly American, and I found it as remarkable in its way as the sudden parking lot (the lighted shed, the sign, the buried car) I had seen the previous night in Galesburg, or the snowy swimming pool with the painted palm trees in Chicago. I would not have found it so beautiful if I had not also found it slightly comic. But it was American humour, unambiguous, newly-minted, half cliché, half genius, and visually memorable, like the minute we spent in Norman, Oklahoma: the Sooner Movie House at the corner of Main and Jones, the Stars and Stripes flying over the store-fronts, the five parked cars, the selfconsciously severe row of low buildings, and Main Street a perfectly straight line from here, the train station, to the end of town, that brown smudge of prairie at the end of the street.
'It's cold out there, boy!' the conductor said at Oklahoma City. He advised me to stay in the train. Oklahoma City was really no different from Perry. The sheds, the stores, the warehouses were bigger, but the shapes were the same, and like Perry it had the temporary and unfinished look of a place that had been plunked down in the prairie.
These Western towns had no apparent age. They were settlements of Baptist utility: the citizens worked and prayed, tore down the buildings they ceased to need and put up new square ones and did not bother to decorate them, except with flags. So the towns slipped by, one Main Street scarcely distinguishable from another, church and post office cut to the same pattern, two-story buildings in the centre of town, one-story buildings at its edge. It was not until I saw a certain house, or barn, or a side road with a row of blackened fractured sheds, that I remembered how old these places were or received a whiff of their romance.
'Want to hear something awful?' said a man entering the Dining Car for breakfast. 'Forty-five thousand schoolkids just got on the train.'
He grumbled and picked up the menu which served as a place-mat.
I finished my coffee and, heading back to my car, saw what he meant. There were not quite as many as he had said, perhaps two or three hundred, women and children, each wearing a name-tag: Ricky, Sally, Tracy, Kim, Kathy. Kathy was gorgeous; she was chatting to Marilyn, who was also a knockout. Both stood near their chubby little girls.
'Daddy's got a real bad cold,' said Kathy, glancing down. 'I had to put him right to bed.'
'Our daddy's at the office as usual,' said Marilyn.
Overhearing them, another woman said in the same TV-mummy voice, 'And where's our daddy, honey? Tell them where our daddy is.' Her small girl sucked a finger and looked at the floor. 'Our daddy's on a trip! And when he comes back, we're going to tell him that we took a trip. On a train!'
It was, I was sure, mostly self-parody. Dressed to kill, sprung from their kitchens for a day's outing to Fort Worth, they were lumbered with their kids. It was a taste of freedom, but clearly not enough: tomorrow they would be back home, cursing housework and hating the mummy-daddy stereotype. They had the wise-cracking good looks of the television commercial housewives, who sell soap flakes and anti-Perspirant. If there had been only a dozen or so, I would not have reflected on their condition. But the hundreds of them, turned into governesses and talking with gentle sarcasm about their daddies, was an impressive example of wasted talent. It seemed unfair, to say the least, that in one of the most socially-advanced countries on earth, here was a group behaving no differently from the wariest folk-society. Apart from me - and I was only passing through - there were no grown men in the three cars they occupied. So there was an atmosphere of purdah in these cars, which was not only grim for a feminist, but rather pitiable for the hard-liners there as well. And since at least half of these bright-looking girls had probably majored in sociology, it could not have escaped their notice how closely they resembled the Dinka womenfolk of the southern Sudan.