Stranger on a Train (25 page)

‘How do you live now?'

‘I'm an artist, like you. I carve sculptures out of wood. I live alone, and I have my work and fifteen acres of land my dad left me. I manage OK on a day-by-day basis, but I'm not the same man I was. I lead a very isolated life. I stay very quiet. If I didn't have my sculpting, I don't know if I'd be OK. I guess I'm still depressed. It all preys on my mind, what happened to me and how I felt and everything. It goes round and round in my head, you know, the whole thing. My mom and dad and the pills and the depression. I think about depression twenty-two hours a day, every day. Every day of my life. I try to get it into my work, but I'm a visual artist. I can't write my feelings down. People should hear about what happened to me. About the Prozac and depression. You're a writer. So you can write my story.'

*   *   *

By the late afternoon the unchanging landscape in the distance ahead of us seemed to be coming to a conclusion. We were approaching the outskirts of Glacier Park, which was the far edge of the prairie and the beginning of the Rockies. The great plain just came to an end and the jagged snow-topped mountains rose abruptly like a retaining wall. The train commenced its climb of the foothills just when the sun began to set and as we headed into the new landscape, rising towards the snow level, the daylight went out. We had to take the beauty of the Rockies and Glacier Park on trust. The man sitting next to me in the observation car sighed at the last dying rays of the sun.

‘Just when there was something to see, there's nothing to be seen.'

I laughed and said I supposed we'd have to take the train in the other direction to see the Rockies in daylight. ‘Holidaying?' I asked.

‘Yes, kind of. I'm recovering from brain surgery. I'm sixty-seven. I was an engineer. When I retired I started to get these seizures. I reckon it was because I was bored. Nothing to do apart from walk the dogs. The wife still works. So they operated. Said I had to lead a quiet life, but I figured it was the quiet life that was killing me. So I'm taking trips around the country by train. Just for something to do.'

‘What do the doctors say?'

‘That I shouldn't.'

He looked gloomy as he spoke, though his features had a natural downturn to them. Then he changed the subject, asking me about how things were going in Northern Ireland. He was Irish by descent. He'd supported the IRA for a long time, but now he was beginning to think he'd been wrong.

‘I want our side to be good, but they turn out just to be terrorists, the way they behave, the way they treat people.' He shook his head. ‘It's all wars. It seems like people just don't want a quiet life.'

‘You don't, either,' I said.

‘No, you're right. But I don't want to be dead more.'

At dinner life let up a little as a rather upmarket elderly gentleman in a good suit of clothes expressed delight that I was from the UK and regaled me with the pleasures of British television. Imported programmes from Britain were all he considered worth watching on US TV, especially the crime dramas. Through three courses he told me about his favourites and asked me about upcoming series that had yet to be shown in the States. He lovingly listed the programme names with the relish of a connoisseur:
Morse, Cracker, A Touch of Frost, Bergerac, Midsomer Murders, Poirot, Prime Suspect, Miss Marple
 … did I know them, were there any he had missed, he wondered anxiously? And Oxford, Manchester, Jersey, Denton, Badger's Drift, St Mary Mead: were they just as they were portrayed? Morse, he had heard, though the episode had not yet arrived, had revealed his first name. Was that true, no, don't tell him what it was. And there was a rumour that Morse was going to die. Had I heard that? It was just terrible. How could they do such a thing? And there didn't seem to be a date for a new series of
Cracker.
But Jack Frost, Inspector Frost of Denton police, was still all right, wasn't he? Could I at least assure him of that?

I went to bed early, my head reeling with the intimate instant lives of others, strangers who popped up next to you, told you everything you needed to know about themselves and then waved as you or they moved on. You acknowledged people you'd spoken to with a nod and a smile as you passed them again in the aisle or at the bar or in the smoking coach, but you didn't have to speak to them just because they'd told you about their despair or their sickness or the looming shadows of their lives. Nor did they require that you tell them anything about you. The niceties were over once you had said where you were from and where you were going. It was OK by them if you wanted to tell them more, but it wasn't compulsory. You could stay as private as you wanted to, and when they told you about themselves, even terrible things that brought tears to your eyes, you weren't expected to make a long-term commitment to them. They told for the sake of telling, you listened because you were there.

I also went to bed early because I had to get up early. In the middle of the night, at Spokane, the
Empire Builder
split in two. One half went to Seattle, the other half, my half, went to Portland, Oregon. Unfortunately, the smoking coach went with the other half of the train to Seattle. There would be no smoking from Spokane until we reached Portland. The next stop after Spokane was Pasco at 5.23 a.m. There would be a few minutes while the train waited at the station. I set my alarm.

No one got off at Pasco, and a couple of very chilly-looking travellers got on in the steely, freezing dawn on the far foothills of the Rockies. The tired woman whose son had been in the Gulf was the only other passenger standing on the platform smoking. We looked at each other, puffing and shivering, and laughed.

‘Did you put your alarm on, or did you just wake up and decide to have a cigarette?' I asked.

‘Alarm,' she rasped.

‘We're the last of the serious addicts.'

‘Dying breed.'

We concentrated on smoking while stamping our feet to keep out the chill air. I managed the best part of two cigarettes before the conductor called out, ‘Suck hard, ladies, we gotta go. That oughta hold you till Wishram.'

Incredibly, in spite of what everyone knows about US trains, in spite of my own experience of being hours late on the previous two trips I had taken, in spite of the
Empire Builder
having travelled 2256 miles since I boarded in Chicago, we pulled into Portland's Union station at 9.55 a.m., fifteen minutes ahead of time.

Just Like
Misery

If it was Sunday lunchtime, it had to be Portland, Oregon. By Monday breakfast I would be in Sacramento, California; by Tuesday suppertime in Denver, Colorado. Then I had to spend the night in a hotel I had booked near the station and catch the bus at 6.15 the following morning – Wednesday – to Raton in New Mexico, to arrive twenty minutes before it was time to pick up the 10.56 a.m.
Southwest Chief
that would deliver me to Albuquerque by Wednesday at 4 p.m. – half a week away from Portland.

This was my social visit to Bet and her hero. Five days in real America with real Americans. Instead of just heading round the States in a moving corridor, I had a destination, people to meet me at the station, a house to stay in for five days that didn't move, didn't shake or rock or go any place at all. In England nothing would induce me to go and stay with perfect strangers for five days, but this was a journey, a contrivance, and it seemed like a good idea to renew a previous accidental meeting that offered a new insight into an America I didn't know. What made me think it would be all right was that I liked Bet, and had enjoyed her company on the train. You meet someone you like, you arrange to see them again. What could be more reasonable than that? More normal? Perhaps it was an attempt to give up being a stranger. At any rate, to see if I could give it up.

When I called Bet from London and proposed the visit, she sounded delighted. What was more, she and the hero had just bought a trailer, and I could stay in it, a place of my own, while I was there. So I wasn't going to be on exactly rock-solid foundations during my time off the train, but I was delighted at the idea of living in a trailer in suburban New Mexico for a few days, and, of course, of having a bolt hole, as well as not having to feel too bad about being in my hosts' hair day in and day out. For all the apparent normality of the visit, the trailer made the five days I planned to spend with these very generous perfect strangers seem less insane.

‘Stay a couple of weeks,' Bet urged. ‘More. A month.'

‘No, really, I have to get back on the train and finish the journey, and I have to be back in New York by the end of the month.'

‘Just the five days, then. Well, you can always come back.'

*   *   *

Meantime, the glancing acquaintances of train travel continued. In the waiting room at Portland, before the train arrived, a well but quietly dressed, unshowily good-looking man in his mid-fifties smiled at me and asked the regulation question. He was delighted to hear that I was English. I was intrigued by him because he was the only executive type I had come across so far on these travels. He was an estate lawyer, he told me in a quiet, slightly anglicised, cultured voice. Eugene was taking the train to Sacramento from his home in Rochester, NY, because he had a meeting there first thing in the morning and it was cheaper and simpler to take the overnight train than to fly out the previous day and book into a hotel for the night. He didn't strike me as someone who chose very many cheaper options, so I took him to mean that he preferred to travel this way. By the time the train arrived, he had quoted Pliny at me on the subject of serving bad wine to one's guests, told me that there had been a great cultural falling away since the eighteenth century and that we had passed from the Golden Age, through the Silver Age, beyond the Bronze Age to something a good deal more leaden. He was, he said, a Yale man, and an active but old-fashioned Christian (there was nothing happy-clappy about Eugene), working in his spare time at trying to save the Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer had done for prose what Shakespeare did for poetry. Eugene was a different kind of American from my other train acquaintances, alarmingly wrapped up in lost worlds and boastfully ill-at-ease in the present one. He had been married for thirty-six years, he said, and then his patrician manner softened.

‘We dated every week for every one of those thirty-six years, as if we were lovers. We were always lovers…' They had five children who were now grown up. In fact, he was well into his sixties, a decade older than I had taken him for. ‘I missed the Sixties,' he said. ‘But I am having a good time in
my
sixties.'

He wasn't speaking salaciously. He meant that he had started to find life enjoyable again. One evening five years before, he was waiting for his wife to appear for a drink in a bar on their weekly date. She always did her hair and make-up and wore an elegant dress, as she had when they were courting. ‘We were always courting.' She never arrived that night. She collapsed and died of an aneurysm on her way to meet him. For a moment Eugene's eyes looked blank. Then he lifted his chin slightly. He was getting over it. It was time, his children told him, to think about remarrying. I had the strangest feeling as he said this that he was looking very closely at me. The train came, and we agreed that we might have a drink that evening before dinner in the observation car. As it turned out, I had other concerns that made me forget our vague arrangement.

The journey from Portland to Sacramento passed in a blur of discontent. The
Coast Starlight
was intended to bring back the American traveller and overseas tourist to the trains, with a pastiche of rail travel of days gone by. It was clearly designed to be the New World equivalent of the
Orient Express,
with all the printed matter, logos and furnishings echoing art deco. It was a luxury superliner of a train, much more glossy and well appointed than either the
Sunset Limited
or the
Empire Builder.
In keeping with the class values of days gone by, first-class passengers – or rather
guests
– defined as those with sleeping accommodation, had exclusive use of the Pacific Parlour Car, an observation coach with upholstered rotating armchairs by the panoramic windows and a bar of its own. There was no mixing of the classes on this train. First-and coach-class passengers met only in the dining car. Flowers, embossed stationery and branded soap in the sleeping compartments completed the trying-too-hard-in-the-wrong-areas feel of the train. And as for the usual other place of miscegenation, the smoking compartment – my first investigation after I stashed my bag in my room – well, there wasn't one. The
Coast Starlight
was, it turned out once I found myself trapped in its swaying comfort, a no-smoking train. There was no place for the bad guys to congregate; for the young, the poor, the phobic, the wealthy, the old to discover that they had at least addiction to nicotine in common. More to the point, there was nowhere for me to smoke. Although the specially produced brochure (‘the
Coast Starlight
with a tradition of excellence harkening [
sic
] back to the glory days of the “Streamliner Era” of the late 1940s') assured me that I was on ‘Amtrak's hottest train with the coolest scenery … offering some of the most spectacular scenery in the west' with a ‘Crew that makes the magic happen' and unequalled views of the Cascade Mountains, Crater Lake, the Klamath Falls, Mount Shasta in all its 14,380-foot glory and the Sacramento Valley, I concluded that the only way to survive the 650-mile, 16-hour, cigaretteless journey, was to sulk. I couldn't just sleep through the agony because there would be brief puffing opportunities at the nine stops between Portland and Sacramento, but that wasn't smoking, that was damage control. A cigarette is a ritual of pleasure that takes its own time, involves the entire body (posture, arm and hand movements, facial expression, tilt of head, cross of legs) and is at its most gratifying when smoked either in meditative solitude or as a buffer against social nakedness. It is not a thing to be snatched at in a moment of someone else's devising. The whole idea, once you are an adult smoker, is that whatever you happen to be doing, you can pull a cigarette out of a pack, light it and enhance the moment. Everything is made better, the good as well as the not so good, with the addition of a cigarette in the hand, the inhalation, the exhalation, the tapping of ash, the grinding out of the stub. The point of the body is made clear by smoking. Smoking is an art form that combines the separate capacities of the parts of the body and fulfils the meaning of the whole. The chastely limited satisfaction of gratifying the physical requirement for nicotine is quite far down on the list of the desirable effects of smoking. However, it is true that once the virtuous outside world outlaws smoking, the nicotine craving surges to a critical level and every minute of every hour is spent thinking about cigarettes and longing to scratch the itch in the blood and muscles with a fix. The entire Cascade mountain range could have erupted into a synchronised ballet of exploding fire and smoke, and it would only have put me in mind of the lack of ashtrays on the train. Crater Lake could have opened up and swallowed us whole, and my first thought would have been to wonder if under such special circumstances it would be permitted to smoke in the Parlour Car. When I was young and the world was in the grip of the Cold War, the question of what one would do if the four-minute warning sounded was on every pubescent's lips. The answer was almost invariably that we would grab the nearest member of the opposite gender and have the sex we were unwilling to die without experiencing before we were blown to smithereens. In those days, four minutes seemed like plenty of time for the short, sharp, explosive and by all accounts pleasurable experience we had only heard tell of. But for a long time now, though the question is no longer asked (the warning likely to be much longer, or much shorter than four minutes), my answer would be to have a final smoke. Even the harshest of authorities appeared to agree with me. No one is expected to face a firing squad without the lingering taste of tar and tobacco flavouring their last breath. What if the choice was to be between never having a cigarette again or having that last firing-squad fag, and of course the firing-squad? Well, I would have to think very carefully about that.