Blue Highways (21 page)

Next to me, a lady nearing her seventh decade kept between us a white purse big enough for a mugger to hide in. She wore a black wig. Her devil-may-care red lipstick had come unhitched and slipped a notch; her layers of nail polish were chipped like paint on an old dory; and her hands lay in two piles on the bar, the slack skin taken up by plumpness. As for the Jungle Gardenia perfume, it was only a question of time before tsetse flies hit.

She reached over and lifted my can of Jax as if to test the weight. Then she turned, saw me, and jumped. “Oh! Gracious! You’ve scared me! I’m sorry! I thought you went off and left your beer. Gracious!”

“May I buy you one?”

“Oh! Gracious, no! Beer does things to me. I just look after the girls.”

“Are you related?”

“Goodness, no! Only a friend. I worry about them with these cowboys.”

The “girls” were the bartender and a pool player, both of whom looked quite capable of handling any of the spinstool cowboys (Shreveport is more Dallas than New Orleans). The bartender was, in the lingo, one tough broad. A snake fits its skin no tighter than she fit her bluejeans. The pool player, a woman of sleek legs, wore a tank top and cut-offs that had seen the absolute maximum of strategic cutting. The game she played was, nominally, eight ball, but the real purpose was to make spectacular shots—never mind if the cue ball ended up in someone’s Schlitz.

After each shot, she groaned and took a long, hard stretch out of her hustler’s crouch and said, “Ah cain’t shoot worth a damn today.” Who had noticed her shooting, watching as we were her form? She kept a beercan on a stack of damp dollar bills. As lousy as she played, she managed to beat the Louisiana cowboys who laughed with beer commercial heartiness. They knew a good entertainment value when they saw it.

The overripe lushness of Jungle Gardenia enveloped me again. “Who’s your favorite picture-show actor?” she said.

“I don’t know. Alan Bates. Jimmy Stewart. Chief Dan George.”

“Mine’s Franchot Tone.”

There followed a long recital of movie titles, bits of plot, pieces of dialogue. As she talked, she laid a soft curl of fingers over my wrist; it wasn’t a gesture of friendship so much as an ascertaining of my presence, a holding of her audience. Once she had heard that Mr. Tone wore a stomach corset in his later years, but she knew that couldn’t have been true. The lady must have known more about Franchot Tone than anyone else in the world. Whatever empty spaces had opened in her life she filled with dreams of a flickering vision. As Jesus or Mozart or Crazy Horse fill hollows in others, so Franchot Tone had come to his lady moist in her Jungle Gardenia.

I called my cousin again, got directions, and drove to her house. The sun was gone when the family sat down to dinner. A pair of heavy moths bumped the screen, and we took barbecued chicken from the platter. It had been a long time since I’d eaten among faces I’d seen before, and I knew it would be hard leaving.

F
ROM
the Cherokee there had been no letter. Now, under a low gray sky, highway 79 stretched out like a dead snake. I watched the empty road and hated the solitude. The wanderer’s danger is to find comfort. A weekend in Shreveport around friends, and security had started to pull me into a warm thrall, to enfold me, to make the wish for the road a craziness. So it was only memory of times in strange places where the scent of the unknown is sharp that drew me on to the highway again.

William Carlos Williams: “Memory is a kind of accomplishment.” Maybe. And maybe too, in the end, it’s the only thing one can call truly his own. Memory is each man’s own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

I crossed into Texas. I’ve heard Americans debate where the West begins: Texans say the Brazos River; in St. Louis it’s the Mississippi, and they built a very expensive “Gateway Arch” to prove it; Philadelphians say the Alleghenies; in Brooklyn it’s the Hudson; and on Beacon Hill the backside of the Common. But, of course, the true West begins with the western state lines of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. It’s a line, as close to straight as you could hope to find, that runs from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada; fewer than a hundred miles from the geographical east-west division of the continental states, it lies close to the hundredth meridian, the twenty-inch rainfall line, and the two-thousand-foot contour line—all of which various geographers recognize as demarcations between East and West. When you stand east of those states you’re in the East; cross over and you’re in the West. It’s simple and clear.

I’m an authority because my family lives two hundred feet from where this line passes through Kansas City. I’ve hit numerous backyard homeruns from the East into the West. Kansas City, Missouri, is the last Eastern city, and Kansas City, Kansas—the two divided only by hedges, a street, a piece of river—is the first Western one.

The land west of this line used to be known as the Great American Desert, but only geographers use that term now as far as I can tell. By “desert” they mean a high land (two thousand feet and up), commonly arid (less than twenty inches rainfall), with mountains, evergreen forests, prairie grasses, and even some sand. They don’t mean trackless Saharan dunes and palmy oases.

The true West differs from the East in one great, pervasive, influential, and awesome way: space. The vast openness changes the roads, towns, houses, farms, crops, machinery, politics, economics, and, naturally, ways of thinking. How could it do otherwise? Space west of the line is perceptible and often palpable, especially when it appears empty, and it’s that apparent emptiness which makes matter look alone, exiled, and unconnected. Those spaces diminish man and reduce his blindness to the immensity of the universe; they push him toward a greater reliance on himself, and, at the same time, to a greater awareness of others and what they do. But, as the space diminishes man and his constructions in a material fashion, it also—paradoxically—makes them more noticeable.
Things show up out here.
No one, not even the sojourner, escapes the expanses. You can’t get away from them by rolling up the safety-glass and speeding through, because the terrible distances eat up speed. Even dawn takes nearly an hour just to cross Texas. Still, drivers race along; but when you get down to it, they are people uneasy about space.

On the west side of the Sabine River, the land became hilly and green with deciduous trees and open in a way Louisiana was not. The long horizon gave a sense of flatness, but in truth, it was only a compression through distance of broad-topped hills.

The towns: Carthage, Mount Enterprise, old Nacogdoches (not to be confused with old Natchitoches, Louisiana; Nacogdoches sounds as it looks, but Natchitoches comes out NACK-uh-tesh). Alto, on Texas 21 and about an hour west of the great line, was a pure Western town: streets broad and at right angles, canopies over sidewalks, false-front stores, the commercial section a single long street rather than a cluster around a confluence of streets. And the businesses tended in one manner or another toward ranching and lumbering.

To drive blue highway 21 is to follow Texas history. Older than the mind of man, it started as a bison trail (buffalo walk in surprisingly straight lines); then Indians came up it to hunt the buffalo. In 1691, Spain established a thousand-mile
camino real,
a royal road, that would link San Antonio with Mexico, French Louisiana, and Spanish Florida; the Spaniards figured the Indians knew best and marked their course over the old track (often the
camino
was only a direction). Up it came adventurers, padres, traders, smugglers, armies, settlers. And so it was that wandering bison, in a time even before red men came to east Texas, laid down a route that a nation whose explorers steer tangents past the planetary arcs still follow. And all travelers coming in season see the orange and red nobs of Indian paintbrush blow in the spring winds.

Signboards:
NEW BOGGY BAPTIST CHURCH. NEW ENERGY BAPTIST CHURCH. YARD EGGS.
I stopped for that one. A disfigured dog, ancestral bloodlines so crossed it looked like the first dog on earth, took up a crouch at the van door and gave a long, low, ugly snarl. A woman, shrunken into odd angles, her fingers wrung into arthritic claws, came from the house; with a swing of her cane, she sent the son-of-a-bitch howling. She pushed her old head up to the window. Had her face been cut from cloth, it would have been in tatters. “You the tellyvision repair feller?” Like a curtain opening, the tatters drew back in a smile.

“I’d like to buy some eggs.”

“Oh.” The tatters dropped. “You see, my layers fell sick over winter, and I got no extries for sale.” The dog had crept back into growling range. “Sure you ain’t the tellyvision feller? This looks like one of them repair trucks. Don’t let the mutt cur scare your bones.” I assured her it didn’t and never took my eyes off the mongrel as it growled me back to the road. But my loneliness fell away after seeing hers.

The sky turned the color of chimney soot. A massive, squared mound, quite unlike the surrounding hills, rose from a level valley; it had been the central element in a Caddoan Indian village a thousand years ago. I took a sandwich and climbed to the top to eat in the low overgrowth of wild blackberry bushes. There I was—a resident from the age of lunch meat, no-lead, and Ziploc bags—sitting on a thousand-year-old civic center.

The aura of time the mound gave off seemed to mock any comprehension of its change and process—how it had grown from baskets of shoveled soil to the high center of Caddoan affairs to a hilly patch of blackberries. My rambling metaphysics was getting caught in the trap of reducing experience to coherence and meaning, letting the perplexity of things disrupt the joy in their mystery. To insist that diligent thought would bring an understanding of change was to limit life to the comprehensible.

A raw scorch of lightning—fire from the thunderbird’s eye—struck at the black clouds. A long peal. Before the rumble stopped, raindrops bashed the blackberry blossoms, and I ran for Ghost Dancing. Warm and dry, I watched the storm batter the old mound as it worked to wash the hill level again. The wind turned leaves white side up and bent small trees into bows and snapped them like buggy whips, and thunder sounded like shivered timbers. It was a fine, loud, fulminating, cracking storm.

When it passed, I went back up to see what I’d missed. Later, on the way down, I saw in the bushes a great white rump. A woman crapping. Along the road, a black girl sat beside a window van, hands between her knees, a cigarette between her lips. I asked how she liked the Indian mound. She lifted her hands, both of them, to pull the cigarette away. She was handcuffed. “What mound?”

The woman in the bushes returned. “Get in, Karen.”

“I gotta go too.”

“How you gonna wipe in cuffs?”

The black girl looked at me. “Hit the dike on the head and take me witchoo.”

“Don’t mess, Charley, or you’ll be sorry.”

They drove off. I left and went through North Zulch on the way to College Station. I had witnessed an hour in the history of the Caddoan mound. Black Elk, looking down on the whole hoop of the world from Harney Peak, understood more than he saw. For me it was the other way.

D
IME
Box, Texas, is not the funniest town name in America. Traditionally, that honor belongs to Intercourse, Pennsylvania. I prefer Scratch Ankle, Alabama, Gnawbone, Indiana, or even Humptulips, Washington. Nevertheless, Dime Box, as a name, caught my ear, so that’s where I headed the next morning out of College Station.

In the humid night, the inside windows had dripped like cavern walls. Along state 21, I opened up and let warm air blow out the damp. West of the Brazos, the land unfolded even farther to the blue sky. Now the horizon wasn’t ten or fifteen miles away, it was thirty or forty. On telephone wires sat scissor-tailed flycatchers, their oddly long tails hanging under them like stilts. Roadside wildflowers—bluebonnets, purple winecups, evening primroses, and more—were abundant as crops, and where wide reaches of bluebonnets (once called buffalo clover, wolf flower, and, by the Spanish, “the rabbit”) covered the slopes, their scent filled the highway. To all the land was an intense clarity as if the little things gave off light.

Across the Yegua River a sign pointed south to Dime Box. Over broad hills, over the green expansion spreading under cedars and live oaks, on into a valley where I found Dime Box, essentially a three-street town. Vegetable gardens and flowerbeds lay to the side, behind, and in front of the houses. Perpendicular to the highway, two streets ran east and west: one of worn brick buildings facing the Southern Pacific tracks, the other a double row of false-front stores and wooden sidewalks. Disregarding a jarring new bank, Dime Box could have been an M-G-M backlot set for a Western.

You can’t walk down a board sidewalk without clomping, so I clomped down to Ovcarik’s Cafe and through the screendoor, which banged shut as they always do. An aroma of ham and beans. Four calendars. From long cords three naked bulbs burned, and still the place was dim. Everything was wood except a heating stove and the Coca-Cola cooler. Near the door, a sign tacked above the flyswatter and next to the machete explained the ten-year prison term for carrying a weapon onto premises where liquor is served.