The Lost Continent (30 page)

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 describes 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, neighbors, 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 reread it and then go to Holcomb and make a lot of trenchant observations about crime and violence in America.

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 spattered onto the walls? Do you ever think about it at mealtimes, for instance?

I got back in the car and drove around, looking for anything that was familiar from the book, but the shops and cafes 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 fag who talked with a lisp and wore funny caps. In fact, it turns out, they disdained him not only as a mincing little fag, 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.

I said I thought that was surprising. If I had grown up in a place where something famous had happened I would want to read about it. “So would I,” Kennedy said. “So would most people from our generation. But kids these days are different.”

We agreed that this was, you know, weird.

There is nothing much to be said for the far west of Kansas except that the towns are small and scattered and the highways mostly empty. Every ten miles or so there is a side road, and at every side road there is an old pickup truck stopped at a stop sign. You can see them from a long way off—in Kansas you can see everything from a long way off—glinting in the sunshine. At first you think the truck must be broken down or abandoned, but just as you get within thirty or forty feet of it, it pulls out onto the highway in front of you, causing you to make an immediate downward adjustment in your speed from sixty miles an hour to about twelve miles an hour and to test the resilience of the steering wheel with your forehead. This happens to you over and over. Curious to see what sort of person could inconvenience you in this way out in the middle of nowhere, you speed up to overtake it and see that sitting at the wheel is a little old man of eighty-seven, wearing a cowboy hat three sizes too large for him, staring fixedly at the empty road as if piloting a light aircraft through a thunderstorm. He is of course quite oblivious of you. Kansas has more drivers like this than any other state in the nation, more than can be accounted for by simple demographics. Other states must send them their old people, perhaps by promising them a free cowboy hat when they get there.

^*
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.

21

I
should have known better, but I had it in my mind that Colorado was nothing but mountains. Somehow I thought that the moment I left Kansas I would find myself amid the snow-topped Rockies, in lofty meadows of waving buttercups, where the skies were blue and the air was as crisp as fresh celery. But it was nothing like that at all. It was just flat and brown and full of remote little towns with charmless names: Swink, Ordway, Manzanola. They in turn were all full of poor-looking people and mean-looking dogs nosing around on the margins of liquor stores and gas stations. Broken bottles glittered among the stubble in the roadside ditches and the signs along the way were pocked from shotgun blasts. This sure wasn’t the Colorado John Denver was forever yodeling on about.

I was imperceptibly climbing. Every town along the highway announced its elevation, and each was several hundred feet higher than the previous one, but it wasn’t until I had nearly reached Pueblo, 150 miles into the interior, that I at last saw mountains. Suddenly there they were, blue and craggy and heavy with snow.

My plan was to take State Highway 67 north up to Victor and Cripple Creek, two old gold-mining towns. The road was marked on my map as scenic. What I didn’t realize was that it was unpaved and that it led through a mountain pass ominously called Phantom Canyon. It was the most desolate and bone-shaking road I have ever been on, full of ruts and rocks—the kind of road that makes everything in the car dance about and doors fly open. The problem was that there was no way to turn around. One side of the road hugged a wall of rock, rising up and up, like the side of a skyscraper; the other fell sharply away to a creek of excited water. Meekly I pressed on, driving at a creeping pace and hoping that things would improve in a while. But of course they didn’t. The road grew ever steeper and more perilous. Here and there the two sides of the canyon would narrow and I would be hemmed in for a while by walls of fractured stone that looked as if they had been struck with a hammer, and then suddenly it would open out again to reveal hair-raising views down to the twisting canyon floor far, far below.

Everywhere above me house-sized boulders teetered on pinheads of rock, just waiting to tumble down the mountainside and make a doormat of me. Rock slides were evidently common. The valley floor was a graveyard of boulders. I prayed that I would not meet another vehicle coming down the hill and have to reverse all the way to the valley floor. But I needn’t have worried because of course not a single other person in the whole of North America was sufficiently moronic to drive through Phantom Canyon at this time of year, when a sudden storm could turn the road to mud and bog the car down for months—or send it slipping and sliding over the void. I wasn’t used to dealing with landscapes that can kill you. Cautiously I pressed on.

High up in the mountains I crossed a wooden bridge of laughable ricketyness over a deep chasm. It was the sort of bridge on which, in the movies, a slat always breaks, causing the heroine to plunge through up to her armpits with her pert legs wiggling helplessly above the chasm, until the hero dashes back to save her, spears falling all around them. When I was twelve years old, I could never understand why the hero, operating from this position of superiority, didn’t say to the lady, “OK, I”ll save your life, but later you have to let me see you naked. Agreed?”

Beyond the bridge wet snow began to fly about. It mixed with the hundreds of insects that had been flinging themselves into the windshield since Nebraska (what a senseless waste of life!) and turned it into a brown sludge. I attacked it with window washer solution, but this just converted it from a brown sludge to a creamy sludge and I still couldn’t see. I stopped and jumped out to wipe at the window with my sleeve, certain that at any moment a bobcat, seeing the chance of a lifetime, would drop onto my shoulders and rip off my scalp with a sound like two strips of Velcro being parted. I imagined myself, scalpless, stumbling whimpering down the mountainside with the bobcat nipping at my heels. This formed such a vivid image in my mind that I jumped back into the car, even though I had only created a small rectangle of visibility about the size of an envelope. It was like looking out of a tank turret.

The car wouldn’t start. Of course. Drily I said, “Oh, thank you, God.” Up here in the thin air, the Chevette just gasped and wheezed and quickly became flooded. While I waited for the flooding to subside, I looked at the map and was dismayed to discover that I still had twenty miles to go. I had done only eight miles so far and I had been at it for well over an hour. The possibility that the Chevette might not make it to Victor and Cripple Creek took root in my skull. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps no one ever came along this road. If I died out here, I reflected bleakly, it could be years before anyone found me or the Chevette, which would obviously be a tragedy. Apart from anything else the battery was still under warranty.

But of course I didn’t die out there. In fact, to tell you the truth, I don’t intend ever to die. The car started up and I crept up over the last of the high passes and thence into Victor without further incident. Victor was a wonderful sight, a town of Western-style buildings perched incongruously in a high green valley of the most incredible beauty. Once it and Cripple Creek, six miles down the road, were boom towns to beat all boom towns. At their peak, in 1908, they had 500 gold mines between them and a population of 100,000. Miners were paid in gold. In 25 years or so the mines produced $800 million worth of gold and made a lot of people rich. Jack Dempsey lived in Victor and started his career there.

Today only a couple of working mines are left and the population is barely a thousand. Victor had the air of a ghost town, though at least the streets were paved. Chipmunks darted among the buildings and grass was growing through cracks in the sidewalk. The town was full of antique stores and craft shops, but almost all of them were closed, evidently waiting for the summer season. Quite a few were empty and one, the Amber Inn, had been seized for nonpayment of taxes. A big sign in the window said so. But the post office was open and one cafe, which was full of old men in bib overalls and younger men with beards and ponytails. All the men wore baseball caps, though here they advertised brands of beer—Coors, Bud Lite, Olympia—rather than brands of fertilizers.