Stranger on a Train (27 page)

What was more, in his careful account of his diagnosis and prognosis, I caught the note of someone laying his cards on the table. Of making his situation quite clear before going any further. He had a very pleasant house, he told me, and he was semi-retired. Once again an unlooked-for change of direction in my life beckoned; sort of picked me up and played with me the game of unconsidered possibilities. Mrs Ivy League Eugene in my late middle age, five stepchildren, a well-appointed house in Rochester, NY, regular concerts, visits to European cultural centres, time and room to work in a civilised and mature relationship. Of course, in my current real life I had time and room to work, as well as something rather more than a civilised and mature relationship. I lived in a European cultural centre. My home in England was fine and I prefer CDs to going to concerts. Still, I slipped into the possibility of a new existence as, in the changing room of a frock shop, I would try on a dress of the kind I would never wear, just to see who I would be if I wore such a thing. We got on to politics. Eugene praised the eighties as the dying hope of a lost civilisation. Thatcher and Reagan were last-stand heroes of fiscal sanity. Thatcher, in particular, he admired, for her single-minded belief in free-market economy. I itemised the damage her single-minded belief had done to the British health service, affordable housing and state education. Eugene shook his head against my soft, wrong-headed and unthinking leftist attitudes and explained that the poor could only benefit from a strong independent economy and became feckless if supported by the state. This was a civilised disagreement, not like the occasion at dinner with Glenys and the awful man who was so upset by her. Eugene and I argued politely, even enjoyably from our mutually irreconcilable positions, but it became clear that the wedding was off. I took off the life in Rochester, NY, and let it drop to my feet, and Eugene gave up his dinner parties with his acerbic English novelist wife. We veered into talk about London and the theatre, and other harmless topics, but the edge was gone. I hadn't seriously considered myself as Eugene's consort, but now that our unsuitability was so clear, I had just a momentary twinge of disappointment, as if I really had lost something that had come into existence and died all in a fleeting moment. With a degree of regret on both sides, we finished our breakfast and, when the time came for him to go to his appointment, wished each other good luck. I hoped the eye operation was successful and he trusted my book would turn out well. I also wished very much, though I did not say so aloud, that he would soon find the sort of person he was looking for. I didn't think it would take very long.

*   *   *

I had three hours before the train to Denver was due, so I followed the signs that pointed to ‘Old Sacramento', forgetting, for a moment, that I was in America. That's how much train travel insulates you. ‘Old Sacramento' meant, of course, ‘New but Distressed Sacramento'. It was the old part of town that had been suffering from inner-city blight for decades. In frontier days, the handful of streets had indeed been the original site of the town, but for a long time since, the area had been derelict and a hangout for junkies, the homeless, the criminal. But all that had been swept away by a city council who knew the value of investment in history. Old Sacramento had been pulled down and rebuilt as a replica of a chocolate-box American West. You've seen it in the movies – though they were more likely to be Audie Murphy oaters than Sam Peckinpah meditations on the passing of the old. Of course, it was only the frontages that were rendered out of date. By-laws and health directives required that the interior of the buildings provided late-twentieth-century safety and comfort, however much timber clad the modern building materials, and shopkeepers were not going to risk tourists missing items for sale with out-of-date lighting or old-fashioned displays. You clattered along the boarded, porched sidewalks complete with horse-retaining rails, but entered bright air-conditioned emporia selling cheap, tatty replicas of items that were once desirable mainly for their practicality: durable hats, boots, leather bags for cowboys to improve their peripatetic existence, now remodelled in shoddy materials and badly but equally suitably made for the life they would lead in the backs of wardrobes. Subsistence supplies had changed, too. Barrels of flour were replaced by Perspex containers keeping popcorn warm. A slug of whisky was more likely to be a Tequila Sunrise. A lunch of just-off-the-hoof steak with beans became toasted goat's cheese and oakleaf salad. Old Sacramento turned out to be theme streets of tourist shops. Heritage with fries. But signs (done as old ‘Wanted' posters) boasted proudly of the restoration of the deteriorated and decayed ‘historical district', at the sweeping away of inner-city blight and the reclaiming of the past for the edification of visitors. Of course, the past was not so much reclaimed as sanitised and sold, and it is startling how quickly these bright new versions of history become tawdry, as the gilding wears off and reveals the paper-thin profit motive. Apparently, if you tidy things up in order to sell crap, the crap wins out. Glum-looking men and women wearing western outfits greeted me with weary bonhomie, welcoming me into their empty, pointless shops. I slouched around, killing time before I could return to the interior of a train that was in every way more of a destination than any of this, staring at stuff made of plastic that lit up, or made a sound, or turned out to be something it didn't look like, and came away, eventually, with a small rubber replica of a brain, the size of a walnut, which was guaranteed to swell to twenty times its size when placed in water.

*   *   *

‘Why do you make sexist assumptions?'

I had just asked the woman sitting next to me at dinner if she was a nurse. She was travelling with two other women and I was sharing their table for lunch. The three of them were on their way to a convention of franchised sales representatives who bought and sold to their friends and acquaintances a large sea-green capsule that was filled with dehydrated extract of vegetables. It was, apparently, the latest way for West Coast would-be entrepreneurs to supplement their income. The three were a group of gay women in their late twenties who all had other jobs. The woman sitting next to me worked, I was told by her friend opposite, in a medical facility.

‘Are you a nurse?' I asked.

Which brought down the accusation of sexism by her friend who seemed to be in charge of testing the world for wrong thinking.

‘Why don't you ask if she's a doctor?' she snapped.

‘Because why would she be selling vegetable capsules in her spare time if she had a doctor's salary? Are you a doctor?'

‘No,' the woman next to me said. ‘I'm a nursing assistant.'

There was a short silence.

‘We believe in what we sell,' the one in charge berated. ‘It's a complete supplement. One capsule gives you all the nutrition that you would get from the recommended daily intake of fresh fruit and vegetables.'

‘Good,' I said. ‘I hate vegetables. So if I have one of these a day, does that mean I won't ever have to eat vegetables again? I'll take a lifetime's supply.'

‘You don't seem to be a very serious person,' I was told. And it was true; except for in the area of eating vegetables, which I seriously do not like to do.

I was aware that I should have taken more interest in the veggie-for-life-selling lesbians on the way to their feel-good convention, but I had suddenly come over profoundly uninterested in all things vegetable, lesbian and feel-good. The smoking coach beckoned and then my new sleeping accommodation. The
California Zephyr
was a satisfyingly dog-eared change from the
Coast Starlight,
with ageing rolling stock and worn upholstery. And it had a smoking coach as shabby as any I had seen. I smoked a couple of cigarettes in it, keeping my eyes on the increasingly empty landscape to avoid being drawn into any conversation. Then I padded off to my bed and slept until 5.15 p.m., when the train drew into Reno, Nevada.

Back in the smoking car the sun was setting, but it felt more as if the light was dying. Outside the desert passed by, grey-green, sparse, bleak and getting bleaker every moment. The sunset should have been beautiful, slipping through pastel shades from pink to blue to beige, but it only increased the sadness of the landscape and brought out that dying-of-the-light desolation that lurks in some corner of me waiting for the physical environment to match it. The coach was empty apart from a man with a face as long as my gloom, who sat opposite me, saying nothing. I was halfway through my cigarette before he spoke.

‘I hope it's not cold in Winnemucca.'

His voice was as doom-laden as his face. He wore a suit and tie and lace-up shoes. A regular guy. A salesman, perhaps. We were due to arrive in the improbably named Winnemucca at seven forty-five that evening. I had no option but to ask why he was worrying about the temperature. He nodded his approval at my question.

‘I left my coat on the door knob at home. Clean forgot it.'

‘That's a nuisance. You'll have to get a new one when you arrive.'

He sniffed. ‘Stores will be closed by then. That's not all. I left the car in the three-hour car park. The wife was going to pick it up after work, but when I got on the train I found the spare keys in my pocket, so she won't be able to. I'm away for three days. It's better not to imagine what the parking fine's going to be.'

‘That's terrible.'

‘Yes. And I left my travel bag in the car,' he shook his head and then looked at me with real distress as it all came together in a single dreadful fact. ‘You know, I can put up with only having white socks to wear, I don't like it, but I can tolerate that if I have to, but what I can't even bear to think, what is really too awful to face, is having to spend three whole days using a hand-operated toothbrush.'

I began to feel much better. He was a gold-mining consultant, he told me when he could get his mind off his many tribulations.

‘There's still gold in the Sierra Nevada, but it's all dust. The nuggets they mined for in the Gold Rush days are long gone. There's still plenty of money in the dust, but only if you can afford to collect it. It's not a game for individuals any more. Just recently they moved an entire mountain – I mean a real mountain-sized mountain – and sifted it, every last ounce of earth, to get out the gold dust. Then, because of the environmental lobby, they remodelled it. They rebuilt the whole damn mountain back where it had been. This is the landscape of gold and gambling. That's all that happens here. Sifting through the dust and playing on the tables. I don't remember the last time I brushed my teeth by hand.'

It was dark by the time we arrived at Winnemucca and it looked decidedly cold, I was sorry to note. That night we were passing through Salt Lake City, invisible in the dark. By the early morning we would have passed through the towns of Provo and Helper in Utah. Before reaching Denver we had to cross the Colorado Rockies in the daylight, and it was the most stunning part of the whole trip. Visually, it was extraordinary, chugging at a slow, careful speed around the mountains, carpeted at that height with snow, along a twisting track only just wide enough for the train, so that through one window was sheer rockface while through the other, if you dared look out, you stared straight down at an apparently diminutive ribbon of the Colorado River winding through the canyon two thousand feet below. And then there was the thought of those who made, and often died making, those tracks, blasting away the mountain to make a ledge for the rails or a tunnel through the solid rock. Human life was no impediment to humanity's will to press on. It was one of the most precarious and moving journeys I have ever made. Absurd really, to look at implacable mountains and decide to go straight through them. But perhaps not so absurd when you consider that the men who blasted and sweated and died were for the most part Chinese or Irish labourers working for a pittance, desperate for whatever work they could get, while the entrepreneurs followed on in moving staterooms making corrupt deals with the politicians. The usual background to humankind's most monumental achievements.

We approached Denver, spiralling down from the top of the Rockies, as the sun set. Denver proudly calls itself the ‘Mile High City', but we dropped down into it like a plane making its grand and gracious descent towards a runway. Except that this runway was a whole city, flooded, sparkling and twinkling with light, spread out in front of us for half an hour or more before we were finally down at ground level.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,' the conductor breathed over the loudspeaker. ‘Isn't that a beautiful sight?'

*   *   *

Which was considerably more than could be said for Raton, New Mexico, when I arrived there after a three-and-a-half-hour bus journey that began around six in the morning. I hadn't slept much that night, being quite unaccustomed to the six-foot bed that remained perfectly still and the oceanic pleasures of the black jacuzzi that mysteriously was plumbed into a corner of my hotel room. I tried to enjoy both, but being in transit and geared quite differently, I found them only delicious distractions that I didn't want to become accustomed to. They were not what I was presently about so I rather wanted to get them both over and done with and on to the main business of moving on. I've never been able to take pleasure as it comes. I need warning and practice. In any case the edge is taken off the joy of a luxury room, giant bed and bubbling bath when you know you have to stagger out of bed at five the next morning to catch a bus to a godforsaken spot whose name you can't remember except that it has something to do with rodents.

Raton (pronounced Ra-
tone,
though I can't help but think of it, even now, as Rat-on) wasn't much to write home about. The station building was a squat, square, concrete and asbestos affair, though the stationmaster clearly took pride in the concrete planters on the platform, which were profuse with fiery red and orange flowers in the otherwise grey surroundings. The single track cut through the flat drab landscape extending right and left into empty infinity. If destiny in the form of gunslingers was on the train heading your way, you could see it coming for miles and watch the speck in the distance grow into looming inevitability. The train came through Raton once a day, every day of the year, including Christmas, and every day, including Christmas, the uniformed stationmaster, a man of quiet if slightly amused efficiency in his thirties, was there to greet it and wave it off. He greeted the half dozen or so of us off the bus, checked our baggage on to his trolley and told us that the train would be a couple of hours late. No one was pleased. We had got up early and now found ourselves with the choice of waiting in the blazing sun or the un-air-conditioned station building. On the other hand, Raton in the midday heat did not look promising to explore as we peered at the empty featureless streets we could see from behind the station. But people lived there. Surely they had lunch, or drank in a bar?