The Lost Continent (29 page)

At Red Cloud, home of Willa Cather, I joined US 281 and headed south towards Kansas. Just over the border is Smith Center, home of Dr Brewster M. Higley, who wrote the words to
Home on the Range
. Wouldn’t you just know that
Home on the Range
would be written by somebody with a name like Brewster M. Higley? You can see the log
cabin where he wrote the words. But I was headed for something far more exciting – the geographical centre of the United States. You reach it by turning off the highway just outside the little town of Lebanon and following a side road for about a mile through the wheat fields. Then you come to a forlorn little park with picnic tables and a stone monument with a wind-whipped flag atop it and a plaque saying that this is the centremost point in the continental United States, by golly. Beside the park, adding to the sense of forlornness, was a closed-down motel, which had been built in the evident hope that people would want to spend the night in this lonely place and send postcards to their friends saying, ‘You’ll never guess where we are.’ Clearly the owner had misread the market.

I climbed onto a picnic table and could instantly see for miles across the waving fields. The wind came at me like a freight train. I felt as if I were the first person to come there for years. It was a strange feeling to think that of all the 230 million people in the United States I was the most geographically distinctive. If America were invaded, I would be the last person captured. This was it, the last stand, and as I climbed down off the table and returned to the car I felt an uneasy sense of guilt for leaving the place undefended.

I drove into the gathering evening gloom. The clouds were low and swift. The landscape was a sea of white grass, fine as a child’s hair. It was strangely beautiful. By the time I reached Russell, it was dark and rain was falling. The headlights swept over a sign that said
WELCOME TO BOB DOLE COUNTRY
. Russell is the home town of Bob Dole, who was at this time running for the Republican nomination for
President. I stopped and got a room for the night, figuring that if Dole were elected President, I could tell my children that I had once spent the night in his home town and perhaps thereby deepen their respect for me. Also, every time Russell was shown on TV over the next four years I could say, ‘Hey, I was there!’ and make everybody in the room stop talking while I pointed out things I had seen. In the event, Dole dropped out of the race two days later, primarily because nobody could stand him, apart from his family and some other people around Russell, and the town, alas, lost its chance at fame.

I awoke to a more promising day. The sun was bright and the air was clear. Bugs exploded colourfully against the windscreen, a sure sign of spring in the Midwest. In the sunshine Kansas seemed an altogether more agreeable place, which surprised me a little. I had always thought one of the worst things anyone could say to you was, ‘We’re transferring you to Kansas, son.’ Kansas calls itself ‘the Wheat State’. That kind of says it all, don’t you think? It really makes you want to cancel that Barbados trip, doesn’t it? But in fact Kansas was OK. The towns I went through all looked trim and prosperous and quintessentially American. But then Kansas is the most quintessential of American states. It is, after all, where Superman and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz grew up, and all the towns I went through had a cosy, leafy, timeless air to them. They looked like the sort of places where you could still have your groceries delivered by a boy on a bike and people would still say things like ‘By golly’ and ‘Gee willickers’. At Great Bend, I stopped on the square beside the Barton County Courthouse and had a look around. It was like
passing through a time warp. The place appeared not to have changed a fraction since 1965. The Crest Movie Theater was still in business. Nearby stood the
Great Bend Daily Tribune
and the Brass Buckle Clothing Store, with a big sign on it that said
FOR GUYS AND GALS
. Gee willickers. A man and his wife passed me on the sidewalk and said good morning like old friends. The man even tipped his hat. From a passing car came the sound of the Everly Brothers. This was almost too eerie. I half expected Rod Serling to step out from behind a tree and say, ‘Bill Bryson doesn’t know it, but he’s just driven into a community that doesn’t exist in time or space. He’s just embarked on a one-way trip into . . . The Twilight Zone.’

I had a look in the window of the Family Pharmacy and Gift Shop, which had an interesting and unusual display that included a wheelchair, a packet of disposable absorbent underpants (it isn’t often you find a store catering for the incontinent impulse shopper), teddy bears, coffee-mugs bearing wholesome sentiments like World’s Best Grandma, mother’s day cards and a variety of porcelain animals. In one corner of the window was a poster for a concert by – you are never going to believe this – Paul Revere and the Raiders. Can you beat that? There they were, still dressed up like Continental soldiers, prancing about and grinning, just like when I was in junior high school. They would be performing at the Civic Auditorium in Dodge City in two weeks. Tickets started at $10.75. This was all becoming too much for me. I was glad to get in the car and drive on to Dodge City, which at least is intentionally unreal.

Somewhere during the seventy miles between Great Bend and Dodge City you leave the Midwest and enter the
West. The people in the towns along the way stop wearing baseball caps and shuffling along with that amiable dopeyness characteristic of the Midwest and instead start wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots, walking with a lope and looking vaguely suspicious and squinty, as if they think they might have to shoot you in a minute. People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo.
^fn1
Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you’ve ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from 2 million to 90,000.

Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000 Indians, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West.

When they weren’t shooting things, the people of the West went into towns like Dodge City for a little social and sexual intercourse. At its peak, Dodge City was the biggest cow town and semen sink in the West, full of drifters, drovers, buffalo hunters and the sort of women that only a cowboy could find attractive. But it was never as tough and dangerous as you were led to believe on
Gunsmoke
and all those movies about Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. For ten years it was the biggest cattle market in the world; that’s all.

In all those years, there were only thirty-four people buried in Boot Hill Cemetery and most of those were just vagrants found dead in snowdrifts or of natural causes. I know this for a fact because I paid $2.75 to go and see Boot Hill and the neighbouring ‘Historic Front Street’, which has been rebuilt to look like it did when Dodge City was a frontier town and Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were the sheriffs. Matt Dillon never existed, I was distressed to learn, though Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were both real enough. Bat Masterson ended his life as sports editor on the
New York Morning Telegraph
. Isn’t that interesting? And here’s another interesting fact, which I didn’t tell you about earlier because I’ve been saving it: Wyatt Earp was from Pella, the little Iowa town with the windmills. Isn’t that great?

Fifty miles beyond Dodge City is Holcomb, Kansas, which gained a small notoriety as the scene of the murders described with lavish detail in the Truman Capote book
In Cold Blood
. In 1959, two small-time crooks broke into the house of a wealthy Holcomb rancher named Herb Clutter because they had heard he had a safe full of money. In fact he didn’t. So, chagrined, they tied Clutter’s wife and
two teenaged children to their beds and took Clutter down to the basement and killed them all. They slit Clutter’s throat (Capote described his gurglings with a disturbing relish) and shot the others in the head at point-blank range. Because Clutter had been prominent in state politics, the
New York Times
ran a small story about the murders. Capote saw the story, became intrigued and spent five years interviewing all the main participants – friends, neighbours, relatives, police investigators and the murderers themselves. The book, when it came out in 1965, was considered an instant classic, largely because Capote told everyone it was. In any case, it was sufficiently seminal, as we used to say in college, to have made a lasting impact and it occurred to me that I could profitably re-read it and then go to Holcomb and make a lot of trenchant observations about crime and violence in America.

^fn1
Many people will tell you that you mustn’t call them buffalo, that they are really bison. Buffalo, these people will tell you, actually live in China or some other distant country and are a different breed of animal altogether. These are the same people who tell you that you must call geraniums pelargoniums. Ignore them.

I was wrong. I quickly realized there was nothing typical about the Clutter murders: they would be as shocking today as they were then. And there was nothing particularly seminal about Capote’s book. It was essentially just a grisly and sensational murder story that pandered, in a deviously respectable way, to the reader’s baser instincts. All that a trip to Holcomb would achieve would be to provide me with the morbid thrill of gawping at a house in which a family had long before been senselessly slaughtered. Still, that’s about all I ask out of life, and it was bound, at the very least, to be more interesting than Historic Front Street in Dodge City.

In Capote’s book, Holcomb was a tranquil, dusty hamlet, full of intensely decent people, a place whose citizens didn’t smoke, drink, lie, swear or miss church, a place in
which sex outside marriage was unforgivable and sex before marriage unthinkable, in which teenagers were home at eleven on a Saturday night, in which Catholics and Methodists didn’t mingle if they could possibly help it, in which doors were never locked, and children of eleven or twelve were allowed to drive cars. For some reason I found the idea of children driving cars particularly astonishing. In Capote’s book, the nearest town was Garden City, five miles down the highway. Things had clearly changed. Now Holcomb and Garden City had more or less grown together, connected by an umbilicus of gas stations and fast food places. Holcomb was still dusty, but no longer a hamlet. On the edge of town was a huge high school, obviously new, and all around were cheap little houses, also new, with barefooted Mexican children running around in the front yards. I found the Clutter house without too much trouble. In the book it stood apart from the town, down a shady lane. Now the lane was lined with houses. There was no sign of occupancy at the Clutter house. The curtains were drawn. I hesitated for a long time and then went and knocked at the front door, and frankly was relieved that no-one answered. What could I have said? Hello, I’m a stranger passing through town with a morbid interest in sensational murders and I just wondered if you could tell me what it’s like living in a house in which several people have had their brains splattered on to the walls? Do you ever think about it at meal-times, for instance?

I got back in the car and drove around, looking for anything that was familiar from the book, but the shops and cafés all seemed to have gone or been renamed. I stopped at the high school. The main doors were locked –
it was four in the afternoon – but some students from the track team were drifting about on the playing fields. I accosted two of them standing along the perimeter and asked them if I could talk to them for a minute about the Clutter murders. It was clear that they didn’t know what I was talking about.

‘You know,’ I prompted. ‘
In Cold Blood
. The book by Truman Capote.’

They looked at me blankly.

‘You’ve never heard of
In Cold Blood
? Truman Capote?’ They hadn’t. I could scarcely believe it. ‘Have you ever heard of the Clutter murders – a whole family killed in a house over there beyond that water-tower?’

One of them brightened. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘Whole family just wiped out. It was, you know, weird.’

‘Does anybody live in the house now?’

‘Dunno,’ said the student. ‘Somebody used to live there, I think. But now I think maybe they don’t. Dunno really.’ Talking was clearly not his strongest social skill, though compared with the second student he was a veritable Cicero. I thought I had never met two such remarkably ignorant young men, but then I stopped three others and none of them had heard of
In Cold Blood
either. Over by the pole-vaulting pit I found the coach, an amiable young social sciences teacher named Stan Kennedy. He was supervising three young athletes as they took turns sprinting down a runway with a long pole and then crashing with their heads and shoulders into a horizontal bar about five feet off the ground. If knocking the hell out of a horizontal bar was a sport in Kansas, these guys could be state champions. I asked Kennedy if he thought it odd that so many of the students had never heard of
In Cold Blood
.

‘I was surprised at that myself when I first came here eight years ago,’ he said. ‘After all, it was the biggest thing that ever happened in the town. But you have to realize that the people here hated the book. They banned it from the public library and a lot of them even now won’t talk about it.’

This surprised me. A few weeks before I had read an article in an old
Life
magazine about how the townspeople had taken Truman Capote to their hearts even though he was a mincing little poof who talked with a lisp and wore funny caps. In fact, it turns out, they disdained him not only as a mincing little poof, but as a meddler from the big city who had exploited their private grief for his own gain. Most people wanted to forget the whole business and discouraged their children from developing an interest in it. Kennedy had once asked his brightest class how many of the students had read the book, and three quarters of them had never even looked at it.