Old Glory (20 page)

“Yes, sir,” said Hal, grinning emptily, “that’s my baby. What are you drinking?”

As quietly as I could, I asked the bartender to call me a cab. “Hey, where are you going?” Hal said, putting his arm round my shoulder. “A
hotel? You
can stay at our place. Francie loves to have guests.”

Tonight, though, I was going to break my rule and be my own man. The cab came. I escaped the clubhouse. As I heaved my luggage into the trunk, I saw a figure in a checked dress standing between the trees. I waved; but Francie must have had her back to me and been gazing into the black Mississippi.

“What you want to come to La Crosse for?” asked the cabdriver. He had Jesus Christ hair and a straggly mustache. “They’re not too bright around here. I hate this fuckin’ city.” He himself had been beached in La Crosse four years before. He and his brothers, from Newark, New Jersey, had been playing in a rock group “out of St. Louis.” The group had broken up in a fistfight on stage. The others had left in separate directions. My cabdriver had stayed, to suppurate like Francie over his failed musical career. He was eaten up with resentment. He still wrote songs between rides, and someday, he said angrily, he was going to make his comeback and kick La Crosse in the teeth.

“What I like about music is you can be yourself. Plus the feeling that you’ve got so much love from so many people. You can feel the vibes coming at you. Waves of love. That’s what I like: so much love from so many people.”

He dropped me on the edge of the ruins of what had once been La Crosse’s grand hotel. Its marbled lobby was grimy and badly lit by a few bare bulbs. It had been built for rich steamboat passengers, grain merchants, visiting politicians: a huge red-brick palazzo. Now it was used by a handful of elderly residents, railroad crews and the poorest sorts of traveling salesman. The desk clerk was idly engaged in hunting down bluebottles with a red rubber flyswatter. He gave me the key to a room on the third floor (cash in advance). It was big and dusty. I guessed that I must be its first tenant in months. I opened the window to air the place, and listened to the wind rattling the chains of the sign that hung outside. It wasn’t a cheering sound: if the wind kept up, I might be stuck here for days, moldering like the cabdriver or getting furiously drunk with the boat-club gang. I took my notebook off to one of La Crosse’s marvelous restaurants and ate an overdone steak and a limp, shredded salad. I was still writing on my third coffee and second brandy.
My room
, I wrote,
looks custom-built for a very dreary act of suicide. Hitchcock, perhaps, in 1940s black-and-white. The body
wouldn’t be found for days, perhaps weeks. The corridor smells of burned biscuits
.

On the street, I couldn’t face returning to it. Scouting around a corner, I found a line of “club” bars advertising nude cabaret. I chose what sounded like the least noisy one and set up my notebook on the bar. A young black woman was taking her clothes off on a tiny rostrum, jigging mechanically to an acid-rock record. Neither she nor her customers looked at all interested in this activity. She waved her unstrapped bra from side to side and handed it to the disc jockey. She put her thumbs in the front of her pants and rolled them down just far enough to show the tangled fuzz on her pudendum, wriggled a couple of times, and stepped out. She pretended to masturbate, gave that up, shook her buttocks at the audience, splayed her legs, and settled to gyrating sulkily to the music. I went back to my notebook. There was nothing touching or vulnerable in her nudity. Perhaps that was the point: she had the gift of making sex look almost unbearably tedious and ordinary. The men along the bar seemed to prefer staring into space to watching her. The only people who moved were the house hookers, sifting the bar for customers; and even their attempts to drum up trade seemed curiously spiritless.

A fair-haired young woman eventually drifted up to me. She must have been eighteen or nineteen; probably she should have been in school.

“You gotta light?” Her voice was professionally toneless, but her Southern accent came clearly through her studied deadpan. I lit her cigarette for her.

“Okay,” she said.

“You’re not from La Crosse?”

“West Memphis, Arkansas.” She opened her mouth and blew a bubble of smoke in my face. It wasn’t a signal of invitation that I was used to, and my eyes stung. She made a long, careful study of the notebook in front of me and the pen in my hand.

“You’re
writing.…
”

“That’s right. Just notes.”

She bent over the ball-point squiggles as if she’d never seen such marks before. I wondered if she could read, and hoped she couldn’t. She turned from my notebook to me. Her face now was altered by the animation of serious thought.

“You a salesman? Or are you some kind of a student?”

“Oh, I’m some kind of a student.”

“Okay,” she said, and went on up the bar in search of a better-heeled prospect.

I was halfway through recording this unconsummated dialogue when I was interrupted again. This time it was a man. He was holding his beer glass with both hands to keep it steady.

“You read books, man?”

“Yes.”

“You read
Body Count?
”

I hadn’t caught the title.

“
Body Count
, man.
Body Count.
”

“No, I haven’t.”

He had a stubbly black beard, and his eyes were recessed in their sockets like glittering nuggets of iron pyrites.

“You want to read that book.
Body Count
. Look—” He reached for my pen and notebook and wrote the two words out in huge jagged capitals so that they filled half a quarto page. “You read that book, it’s like you’re there, man. I was there. I know. Eight times I read that book, and every time I’m back there, man. You wasn’t in ’Nam—”

“No—”

“Shit.” His glass trembled in his hands. “I was there. Seventy to ’72. You read
Body Count
, man. Guy that wrote that book, he’s got it there. That’s the only fuckin’ book I ever read. Eight fuckin’ times.”

He worked as a casual laborer now for the Milwaukee Road, repairing ties. I guessed that his pay did not go very far toward feeding whatever habit he was on. I tried to see whether he might be carrying a knife or a gun.

“Listen, man, you’re okay. You like to smoke a little with me, hey? I know a place, we could score. You and me together. The guy’s a friend of mine. He’s got good stuff. What you say?”

“I’m not into that anymore. Besides that, I’m broke,” I said. “I’ve got about two dollars fifty cents on me.”

He studied my face, first with suspicion, then with depressed resignation.

“Two fifty.”

“Two seventy-five, maybe,” I said, trying to sound as gloomily honest as I could about my penury.

“Shit. You and me, we could’ve scored, man.”

“Yes, it’s a pity.”

“Well, see you, man.” His bony hand gripped my upper arm for a moment and he left the bar. I waited for a long, long time before I dared go out into the street, and as I walked I listened for his following footsteps. The wind moaned in the telegraph wires and blew scraps of garbage down Main Street but, so far as I could hear, I wasn’t being shadowed. Perhaps he really had been just lonely, hunting for a friend
and not a victim; or perhaps I had given him long enough to find a stray drunk on the way to his car in a deserted lot where no one would observe a pulled knife or a drawn service revolver.

Trying to sleep, I listened to the rattle of the chains outside my window and to the intestinal rumble of the hotel’s Victorian plumbing system. Before I switched off the flyspecked bulb, I’d seen an irregular rusty stain on the pillowcase, itself so old that it had gone to the texture of thin muslin. Blood, chains and gurgles in the pipes fed my dreams; by morning, when I woke to a ragged sky and a sudden chill in the air, I was decided that no wind short of a hurricane would keep me from lighting out for some less dismal territory.

T
 he little towns
were going past as smudges on the far shore: Brownsville, Stoddard, Genoa, Victory, De Soto—every one a temptation to be resisted. I was too immersed in the risky business of keeping moving to care very much about the landscape I was passing through. It was all I could do to keep the boat headed steadily into the waves. Whenever I saw a tow coming upstream, I pulled in to a sandbar and waited for it to go by: having once been caught between the roll of a wake and the chop the wind had raised on the river, I didn’t want to get trapped that way again. The boat had heaved and yawed, its motor thrashing ineffectively against the much more powerful counterswell of the water. The clouds of early morning had blown over, leaving the sky a frigid blue. It was shivery weather, and on my sandbars I dosed myself against it with swigs from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The going was slow—a series of nervous sprints downriver, none of them lasting more than fifteen or twenty minutes before the sight of a barge fleet drove me off the channel to another island shelter; but I meant to put as many miles as I possibly could between myself and the cheerless fun of La Crosse. I watched the wind flattening the smoke from the towboats and blowing it ahead of them in shreds of purple which dissolved in the air long before they reached the leading barges in the fleet.

The whiskey enabled me to keep my nerve in the four-mile crossing of Coon Slough. It was almost bare of islands; only the odd windswept tree stuck up out of the miserable open veld of stumps and whitecaps. Ahead of me, a tow was beating up the channel, foam spuming over the fronts of the barges. I ran as close in as I dared to a stump field; the waves licked at my gunwales as I wallowed there, running the motor
just fast enough to keep the bow facing up into the wind. When the wash came, it bared the stumps to their roots, parting the water to expose, with the rapid blink of a camera shutter, the shallow bottom of black sludge and rotted branches.

After that, things were easier. The river stayed wide—four thousand yards from bank to bank—but the islands thickened until they lay as dense as the pieces in a disturbed jigsaw puzzle, with the buoys marking out a narrow wriggling path between them. On the right-hand shore, the Upper Iowa River dribbled into the Mississippi. I’d crossed my first state border, and I burned my tongue with a slug of bourbon in celebration.

At Lansing, Iowa, I stepped out onto a beach of punched clam shells. Another button town. The riverside hotel at the bottom of Main Street had closed down. Someone called Mel had commandeered its lobby for a pizza parlor, but that was shut too. There was a small motel a mile up on the bluff, and I checked into a cabin like an anchorite’s cell, with a swept concrete floor and a black-and-white TV whose foggy picture trembled fitfully on the screen. It turned Walter Cronkite into a washed-out fever victim.

The news seemed remote—something about Moon Landrieu—but not as remote as the commercials which intermitted it. The families who populated this bland fiction of American middle-class life looked and sounded like a pack of fancy weirdos. They were skinny fast-talkers, jabbering about laxatives and cake mixes and automobiles. They were as foreign to the America that I was living in as I was myself. Their voices mingled with the crickets on the far side of my screen door.

There was one moment when life and television briefly coincided: when, in an ad beamed by the local station in Decorah, an Iowa farmer spoke stiffly to the camera in testimony to the bags of fertilizer that were heaped in front of him. He squinted into the lights from under his billed cap, his burred
r
’s exaggerated by the microphone. Watching him with the sudden intentness usually reserved for happening on an interview with a friend, I thought how tamely we had all succumbed to the theory that television automatically draws the world together. Surely it had just as strong a tendency to pull the world apart. It was television that had fueled Bob’s hatred of the “beautiful people,” the Washington outlaws, Angelenos and New Yorkers who bedeviled his imagination. He switched his set on in order to be reminded of their beastliness. Now I was beginning to do much the same thing. From the perspective of this bluff in Iowa, Scotland or Patagonia would have seemed more recognizably familiar than the CBS studios in Manhattan.
I was awakened before seven by the proprietor of the motel. He’d promised to take me and my luggage to the café where the town ate its breakfast. He’d struck me as morose and growly when I had met him the previous afternoon. Wondering why, I asked him about business.

It was bad. He had bought the motel to cushion his retirement, but as cushions went, it was turning out to be hard and lumpy. The total turnover from his string of cabins was, he said, about four, sometimes five, hundred bucks a week. A few fishermen came to stay, a few hunters, the occasional stranded salesman.

“Look at this place,” he said, pointing at the pretty slope of Lansing as it ran down to the river. “It ought to be a
re
-sort. The folks around here, though, they don’t care too much for strangers. They see a Dubuque County license plate and they think those people don’t have the right to walk on our Main Street. So they freeze every tourist out of town.”

Dubuque was seventy miles south. On that basis, the citizens of Lansing should dislike me roughly seven hundred times as much as they loathed the people from Dubuque County.

“Oh, no,
you’re
okay. They’ll like you because you’re a foreigner. They love foreigners; it’s just strangers they hate.”

I sat up at the counter in the bright clatter of the café, taking my place in the line of identical lumberjackets, boiler suits and muddy farm boots. The man next to me, in his green parka and checked button-down shirt, looked like a holidaying college professor. Hearing me give my order for eggs and hashed-browns, he introduced himself as the owner of the local newspaper, the
Allamakee Journal
. His name was John Dunlevy. His grandfather had come to Lansing as a young man and started the paper in 1880. The population of the town had dwindled over the last hundred years; now the
Journal
was just managing to keep alive on a circulation of little more than a thousand copies a week.