Blue Highways (43 page)

I ordered two eggs anyway, a slab of hashbrowns, and a cut of ham. The conversation next to me was about a trucker killed in a wreck. He had been pulling a “fatload” of fifty thousand pounds of hanging beef in a reefer well above legal speed.

“Heard Bouncer bought pork over to Black Eagle,” one said. “Was he up?”

A garrulous teamster whose handle was Rubberlip said, “That wasn’t it. Half-ton come on the other way and tossed a brick straight in the air and let him run into it. Half-ton was probably doing eighty so that brick come through the windshield at a hunerd and fifty mile an are.”

“He had union problems all along.”

“Ain’t no tongue gonna tell for sure now, but that union bull is coverup. Some seatcover’s old man finally got word on him. He’d pornicate a snake if you held its head.”

The waitress slid a platter of three eggs down her arm.

“Only ordered two,” I said.

“The eggs was small tonight.”

W
HAT
does the traveler do at night in a strange town when he wants conversation? In the United States, there’s usually a single choice: a tavern.

The Oil City Bar was north of the railroad tracks near the spot where the Great Northern accidentally founded Shelby in 1891 by dumping off an old boxcar. From it the town grew, and the antecedents still showed.

One of the authors of the Montana Federal Writers’ Project describes Shelby in the 1890s as

the sort of town that producers of western movies have ever since been trying to reproduce in papier-mâché…. The town playboys were featured in the
Police Gazette
after holding up an opera troupe passing through on a railroad train…. The men shot out the engine headlight, the car windows, and the red signal lights, and forced the conductor to execute a clog dance.

I was out looking around to see how the old Wild West was doing when I came across the Oil City Bar. Although the night had turned cold and gusty, only the screendoor was closed; the wooden one stood open so men in down vests wouldn’t overheat. A shattered pool cue lay in the corner, and to one side was a small room lighted only by the blue neon flicker of a beer sign—the kind of light you could go mad in. Left of the ten-point buck trophy and above the gallon jars of pickled pig’s feet and hard-boiled eggs hung a big lithograph of a well-formed woman, shotgun in hand. She was duck hunting. Other than her rubber boots, she wore not a stitch.

A man, somewhat taller than the barstool and dressed in yellow from shoulders to cowboy boots, drank with assembly-line regularity. He leered wobbly-eyed at the huntress, tried to speak, but blew a bubble instead.

I blame what was about to happen to him on the traditional design of the American bar: a straight counter facing a mirrored wall, which forces the customer to stare at himself or put a crick in his neck looking at someone else. The English build their bars in circles or horseshoes or right angles—anything to get another face in your line of sight. Their bars, as a result, are more sociable. For the American, he stares into his own face, or at bottles of golden liquors, or at whatever hangs above the bar; conversation declines and drinking increases. If the picture above the bar is a nude, as is common in old Western bars, you have an iconography for creating unfulfilled desire: the reality of a man’s own six o’clock face below the dream of perfect flesh.

I turned away from the huntress to watch a pool game. There was a loud
flump
beside me. Knees to his chest, the man in yellow lay dead drunk on the floor. He looked like a cheese curl. His friend said, “Chuckie’s one good little drinker.”

A woman of sharp face, pretty ten years ago, kept watching me. She had managed to pack her hips into what she hoped was a pair of mean jeans; a cigarette was never out of her mouth, and, after every deep draw, her exhalations were smokeless. She was trying for trouble, but I minded my own business. More or less. The man with her, Lonnie, walked up to me. He looked as if he were made out of whipcord. “Like that lady?” he said.

“What lady is that?”

“One you been staring at.”

“Without my glasses, I can’t distinguish a man from a woman.” That was a lie.

“The lady said you were distinguishing her pretty good.”

Well, boys, there you have it. Some fading face trying to make herself the center of men’s anger, proving she could still push men to their limits.

“Couldn’t recognize her from here if I did know her.”

He pressed up close. Trouble coming. “Don’t tell
me,
” he said. “Happens all the time. She thinks men stare at her.”

“Look. No offense, but I’ve no interest in the woman.”

“I can see it, and she can see it, and that’s the trouble. But let’s talk.”

It was an act he had been coerced into. He was faking it. He called for two beers and set one in front of me. “Take it,” he said. “When I sit down, I’m going to tell her you apologized for staring but you just thought she was one hell of a fox. Don’t make a liar out of me.”

He walked off. That was the silliest row I never got into.

I went to the restroom. When I came out, Lonnie was standing at the bar and the woman had gone to sit with three other women. She didn’t buy it, I thought. D
RIFTER
B
LOWN
A
WAY IN
B
AR
.

“Trouble?” I said.

“Forget it. She works with those broads. Casterating bitches every one.”

There was a commotion that got loud and moved outside to the windy street. Two men from Mountain Bell, the phone company, were going to fight. They came at each other, locked outstretched arms and pushed, circling slowly as if turned by the prairie wind. They tired and revolved slower, but neither let go or fell down. A police car drove up and honked. The fighters went to the squadcar, both leaning on the window to listen. After a while, they slumped off in opposite directions, and that was the end of it.

Lonnie and I watched from the bar. After it was over, he said, “Jack Dempsey had a real fight here.”

“A fight in this very bar?”

“Not a bar fight—heavyweight boxing. Shelby built a grandstand for it. Forty thousand seats. Seven thousand people showed up. Town almost went bust.”

The woman came over to Lonnie and said, “Let’s go.” She was mad. I left soon after, walking out into the streets of the new Wild West.

T
HE
first thing I knew that morning in Shelby was that I was catching cold. My throat felt like a cat had got a paw down it and scratched out a strip. Then I saw the day: blustery and foul. I went back to the Husky grill and let them fill me with potato-skin hashbrowns and eggs and their hot, fierce coffee. I was trying to burn out the cold, the weather, trying to get ready for a long passage across the Great Plains of the North.

A man wearing denim—hat, jacket, pants, boots, and probably even his shorts—sat down beside me. “Is that your truck with the Missouri tags?” he asked. I told him it was. He said, “Shoulda named the Missouri River ‘the Montana,’ you know. That dammed river, and I’m not cussing, is born, you might say, due south of here a ways. And we got more miles of it than you people down south.”

“Might as well call the Mississippi ‘the Minnesota’ then,” I said. “Anyway, explorers named the Missouri after Indians who lived along it.”

“So where’d those Indians live?”

“In Missouri.”

“That’s what I’m saying. Doesn’t stand to reason.”

“The men who named it didn’t know where the river came from. They saw the bottom end first.”

“That’s how the jackass got named.”

I asked where he was from. “Next county over. Liberty County. Only three other Liberty counties in the country. For the talking Americans do about freedom, I’d say that’s interesting. Tell me a county not named after a man or an Indian tribe.”

“Well, you have… there’s…” I couldn’t do it.

“Three thousand and some counties in the country and half are Jefferson, Jackson, Johnson, Monroe, Madison, Washington, or Lincoln. What’s your county?”

“Born in Jackson but I live in Boone.”

He smiled. “I’ve studied it. In Montana we got Beaverhead, Deer Lodge, Silver Bow, Petroleum, Sweet Grass, Wheatland, Rosebud. Even one called Musselshell. But the nation’s got a problem—no counties left to name things after. No rivers or mountains either. Got to use freeways now.”

He started to say something else when a woman put her head in the door and blasted us with cold, wet air. “Clay! Late again!” she shouted.

“Coming,” he said. “So long, Jackson.”

“Talk about names,” a man who sold potato chips said and pushed a receipt in front of me:

FIRST AND LAST CHANCE LIQUORS

202
BRONTOSAURUS BLVD
.

DINOSAUR, COLORADO

“Try spelling Brachiosaurus Bypass or Triceratops Terrace in the morning,” he said.

Time for the road. People who equate travel with getting the miles behind them love U.S. 2 as it strikes a more or less flat, straight line for a thousand miles across the north. The great ice sheets cut the tops off the hills and dumped glacial debris in the valleys so that nothing interrupts the rush of wind off the east slopes of the Rockies.

On that May morning the wind came strong at my back, and the square stern of Ghost Dancing served as sail; even resting easy on the accelerator, I blew past clusters of buildings that had got in the way of 2 so they could call themselves towns: Joplin, Rudyard, Hingham, Gildford, Kremlin. Russian settlers, half mad from the vast openness and the sway of prairie grass, thought they saw the Citadel of Moscow. Tractor-trailers, noses to the wind, hammers to the floor, highballed west, drivers rapt in the CB chatter of their cabs. The mountains would slow them, but they had the Great Plains behind.

What little topographical relief there was came from creeks notching the tablelands. Cottonwoods, like cattle, followed the streambeds for water and escape from the wind. Indian children used to twirl leaves of the holy tree of life into toy tepees, and women made a brew from the inner bark to soothe stomach disorders; sprigs fed Indian ponies in winter, the catkins lured grouse in spring, and in summer everyone searched hollows of the trunks for wild honey. A white, inner pulp furnished a delicacy later called “cottonwood ice cream.” When settlers arrived, they cut the biggest cottonwoods for lumber although it was prone to warping; and Missouri rivermen fueled steamboats with it. White men learned they needed the tree too, so they set out thousands of seedlings, but today the cottonwood still keeps to the streams as if it knows the primogeniture of the grasses.

Clear Creek, typically, ran full with an earthen goo the ducks could walk more easily than swim, but it was the only surface water for miles. Yet the language of the plains harks to the ocean: pioneers came in “prairie schooners” (some even rigged with sails) and spoke of the “sea of grass” and the “prairie ocean,” and they cured hangovers with calf ballocks they called “prairie oysters.” Maybe the sodbusters saw seascapes in the undulations of the grasses or in the immensity of sky or in the lack of refuge from wind and storm. Perhaps a sea crossing was still in the minds of the newest immigrants. And maybe also, their words expressed a prescient awareness of the tug between coming and going; for the buffalo grass, the wheat and rye spring from the limestone bones of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs lying under stony blankets of the ancient seabed where molecules turn to soil and cellulose. Perhaps those people of the land knew the cycle (Whitman’s “perpetual transfers”): that time mineral, this time vegetable, next time animal, sometime man.

The grasses. Mile after mile after mile. Miles. Then mile marker 465. By afternoon, half of Montana still lay ahead, with the even flatter plains of North Dakota yet to come. For a state whose name is “mountain,” Montana shows thousands of miles of level prairie. I’ve read that if all the space
within
the atoms of the earth were pressed out, the planet would have a diameter of three hundred twenty-eight feet—not even the distance of a good major league homerun. I don’t know whether it’s possible to believe that figure, but I do know if you’re driving across Montana you’ll never believe it.

Pock-pock
went the tarred road cracks.
Pock-pock
. The day remained dark, showers fell and stopped and came again, the uneven roadway collected water, the van hydroplaned every few minutes. The clamor of wind numbed my ears; the fever made me woozy.
Pock-pock
. First the highway held me, then it entered me, then I was the highway.
Pock-pock, pock-pock
. Prairie hypnosis. I drove miles I couldn’t remember, and the land became a succession of wet highway stripes, and I wished for a roadfellow. I sat blindly, dumbly like a veiled stone sphinx. Finally, to dispel the miles, I stopped, got out, and held my face to the rain. I shook myself. But, once more on the road, I again became part of the machine: generator, accelerator, humanator. I knew nothing. A stupefied nub on the great prairie.

East of where the muddy Milk River begins rubbing its back against the highway, I stopped again, climbed a fence, and walked out to a pair of rusty boulders that an ice sheet dropped on its northward retreat. Stones like these the Indians carved into billboards, scorecards, boundary markers, prayer books. I hoped for a message from the first people, but the stones sat as featureless as the land.

Back in the truck, I fired my little stove to heat water for coffee. I threw in some cocoa for energy, and sat, and watched, and sipped. The prairie was blowing and gray, interrupted here and about by the white faces of Herefords. A century ago the Sioux tribes—Assiniboines (“stone boilers”) and Gros Ventres (“big bellies”)—who hunted bison on these plains, found in those descendants of the mastodons a four-legged grocery, hardware, and dry goods store. For generations the people stalked buffalo and dried and pulverized the meat and mixed it with bone-marrow grease and wild berries and packed it in buffalo skin bags. The pemmican lasted indefinitely and had ten times the nutrient value of fresh meat. Tanned bison hides gave the Sioux shelters and bedding, moccasins, leggings, shields, boats, buckets, even vessels to boil food in. Horn and bone gave spikes, drills, knives, scrapers, axes, and spoons. Ribs and jawbones provided children with snowsleds. The hooves furnished glue, the scat heat. When a Sioux finished with a buffalo, he had used all of it, even its spirit, for it was the bearded buffalo, alive and dangerous, weighing nearly a ton, snorting and short-tempered, that stood at the heart of the rituals and religion of the Plains Indians. Until the ghost dance generation—the one that kissed the old life goodbye to face an enemy future—the tribes that dominated these grasslands for eight thousand years fought most of their battles over hunting territory. The red man ate buffalo (transubstantiation in the Indian manner), he dressed in buffalo, he imitated and talked to it, and he died for and by the sacred buffalo.