Broken Vessels Read online

  We sleep in Pennsylvania with the shade up so we can watch the darkness and street lights and silhouettes of trees. I wake at five-thirty in sunlight and the flat green country east of Fort Wayne: farms, the neighborhoods of white houses looking less desperate, more sturdy that those east of us, crouching at the sides of cities, like sleeping rabbits in the shadow of the hawk. I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air. From the tracks, Fort Wayne is attractive. Under a light blue sky streaked with cirrus clouds, the city’s few tall buildings are pale beige. The streets are wide and quiet, probably looking wide because they are quiet. The houses near the tracks are old; many of them are two-storied, and in their lawns are old trees. Leaving these, as I order poached eggs on corned beef hash, we move through wooded country, then farms again and country neighborhoods, the houses spaced among low hills and clustered trees.

  At Chicago the train passes homes where blacks live: at first they are decently spaced, single-story, with yards and trees, much like the white suburbs outside other cities, but juxtaposed with vacant weed-grown lots and junkyards; farther on, the houses become four- or five-storied tenements with less and less space between them until, in the final area before the train yard, there is none. It is strange to come into a city after the expanse of country, and I feel I am looking at pictures of my country’s history: a city built because of a lake, and on the city’s outskirts the blacks, descended from slaves, cheap labor pushed northward, holding their piece of the land — the few rooms, the screened windows — under the concrete-pierced sky.

  We are in Chicago at nine-thirty and spend the day in the city with a friend, showers and a change of clothes, margaritas and Mexican food at la Margarita; we walk to book-stores on Michigan Avenue and buy Simenon, Zola, James Webb, and Sara Vogan. We leave at six-fifty that evening on the San Francisco Zephyr, with a family room for the three of us: the couch becomes a double bed and there is a fold-down bunk above it and another at its foot; a few paces away, down the hall, are six good bathrooms. We are on the first floor. Before dinner we go to the second floor club car, with wide windows and overhead windows, swivel chairs and couches, and we go through green farm country under the enormous circus tent of the midwestern sky, the sun descending, an orange ball over trees and rooftops, a long grey-blue cirrus cloud at the horizon, almost the color of a distant ship; then, the sun gone, a strip of gold cloud and trees silhouetted against the rose and golden sky, their crowns burnished, and we go with that sunset for miles, then into the night.

  On Friday we wake in Nebraska, and I think about the blacks: the porters and stewards, bartenders and waiters, each of them with a certain duende, so that, like the porter leaving New York (“You’re in the wrong room”), they are friendly in a way that lets you know they are not paid attendants, servile to the whim of anyone owning a ticket, but your proud and sometimes avuncular hosts. Perhaps this comes from knowing the train so well, from the camaraderie of work, from the skillful legs and hands that don’t stumble or spill, from feeling finally that it’s their train; and it occurs to me that this is good work for the dispossessed of the land: seeing the country’s landscapes from a clean mobile home and place of work, a place they know and command, as if The Man Without a Country had been given command of a ship to cruise America’s coasts and rivers.

  At breakfast we enter Colorado, the country mostly flat and grassy, with scattered trees and low green scrub brush. The sky is cloudless, an expanse of unbroken blue from horizon to horizon. Cows watch us, and a jackrabbit bolts. After breakfast, the club car is filled, so we go down to our room, which occupies the width of the car, with wide windows on both sides. To the north there are ridges as we move toward Denver. West of Fort Morgan we are in rolling terrain, some large farms, penned cattle, then grass and white and yellow flowers growing wild. By eleven o’clock we can see the Rockies. Leaving Denver, we skip lunch, sit in the club car, and look out at the snow-capped mountain range to the west, as the train goes north to Cheyenne, where we turn west toward Laramie and see antelopes standing in the open. Because they are so close to the train, they seem tame; but then I realize that there are no people out there, and the train is going through their country, whose flat scrub-grown surface is split by long draws, and rises steeply into buttes and, in the distance, mesas. We stop at Rawlins and I go downstairs, to the bar, to buy cigarettes. A black woman named Sharon Avington is tending bar, selling snacks, and working a microwave oven. She doesn’t have Marlboros.

  “I’ve got exotic brands: Merit, Kent III, Salem Lights — but you see those machines in the station?” She points through the open door at a window in the small station. “You go in there. But don’t dawdle.”

  I go, stopping long enough to read the sign on the station door:

  Rule of the day: DON’T get off the train if you

  can’t hurry back.

  Missed this month — 3

  Near misses — 0

  In the club car we watch grazing antelope, russet buttes, and the citizenry. While driving the highways and walking the streets and roads of America, I blame the garbage I see on an abstraction: they dropped their emptied cigarette packs and cans and bottles and wrappers and boxes. Here on the train we watch them do it. There are no waiters in the club car, but there is a large garbage can; the arms of the chairs and the tables have ashtrays. By mid-afternoon smokers and drinkers have come and gone, leaving behind their coat-of-arms: ashes and cans and plastic glasses. I watch one couple, a man with greying short hair and his wife; their dress and faces appear conservative, and I imagine their kitchen at home: clean, orderly, the emptied can or bottle immediately removed from the table and dropped in the garbage hidden behind a cupboard door. Yet on the table they share between their seats at the window, and in the shallow trough for drinks beneath the window, cans and glasses accumulate, ashes and matchsticks scatter. Then they leave.

  First call for dinner is supposed to be at five, but today it is late, and the citizenry are lining up in the club car aisles, muttering behind our chairs as we watch the country. Downstairs Sharon is chilling the champagne we brought. A large woman keeps saying she will write to Amtrak. Others call for the steward. A wiry greying man in his fifties goes into the dining room and comes back with word: We were late getting to Rawlins and they had to turn off the power when we stopped there and the chefs did not want to start cooking before that, and then lose power.

  “But he’s only a Negro,” the wiry man says.

  My wife goes downstairs to the bar, comes back with the champagne, and I hold plastic glasses over her lap while she works on the cork. It pops loudly and the large woman softly screams.

  “I thought it was a gun,” she says.

  People laugh nervously, and for a while their anger dissipates. We drink the bottle of champagne while behind us in the aisle the voices rise again, and people sway against the backs of our seats. Outside the land stretches wide and treeless, broken by the steep sides and flat tops of buttes. Then we see a prairie dog village. At some of the holes, prairie dogs stand erectly and watch the passing train.

  On Saturday, the last day of the journey, I wake in Carlin, Nevada. We are going through foothills then Battle Mountain, a town of trailers, with a sign at the highway: The Barite Capitol of the World. I go upstairs, through sleeping cars and the dining car, the smells of bacon and pancakes coming from the kitchen below, a few people eating early breakfast, through the club car, clean now and empty, and down to the bar. Sharon is working, and while I drink coffee a woman and her daughter, about eight, come in. The girl is barefooted and Sharon tells the woman not to let the child walk barefooted on the train. She says to the girl: “When you grow up and get married your husband will want to kiss your toes, and you want to have all five of them.”

  Near the tracks, a coyote trots west. My wife comes in for coffee, and Sharon sits with us in a booth; in the booth across the aisle are a couple and their seven-year-old daughter and a boy who belongs to no one
in the car, and who wears a T-shirt with, printed across the chest: Caution: Here Comes Trouble. Sharon talks to him. He is five, and his name is Casey. He is sitting beside the girl and, now and then, he peers at her and smiles. He and his mother and two-year-old sister are going to Martinez, he says. He keeps striking his left palm with his right fist. After a while, a conductor comes to the foot of the stairs.

  “Did you know you’ve been lost?” he says. “Come on, son.” He looks at the girl, and says: “I don’t blame him for following that pretty girl around.”

  Casey leaves with him, and the girl says: “I wish that boy took an airplane.”

  “They lose them all the time,” Sharon says. “Soon as they come aboard, they expect the conductors to look after the kids. We had one drunk woman who got off in Omaha and forgot her little boy. A conductor found him curled up asleep in a men’s room. So they wrapped him in blankets and left him at the station in Sparks.”

  “How far is that from Omaha?”

  “Five hundred and twenty-two miles. But there wasn’t anyplace to leave him in between.”

  I tell her about the angry people waiting for dinner last night.

  “They’re just bored,” she says. “If they had some distraction, they’d be all right. And they’re the same ones that’ve been nickel-diming me all afternoon for snacks.”

  We talk about Amtrak people losing jobs because of Reagan’s budget; and propositions thirteen in California and two and a half in Massachusetts taking away more jobs, and public services as well, and she says: “Those people in power: they make a decision on paper, in their offices. But where’s the heart? The heart, that is this country.”

  After breakfast we move southwest along the Truckee River, through the mountains. A huge bird flies over the valley between the tracks and the mountains: dark grey, wide wings, moving up toward the high brown slopes spotted green with scattered brush. Two palominos are drinking in the river; they stand among rocks, the water beneath their knees, and the high country is closing in on the tracks, cutting off and diminishing the blue sky with small puffs of solitary white clouds, and we go to the club car to watch the Sierra Nevadas.

  Reno’s so close to hell you can see Sparks, a trainman said. In Reno we pass tawdry casinos and hotels, and look away, at the mountains beyond them. Quickly we are past Reno’s outskirts, going between hills and past grazing sheep, to California: to Truckee in the Sierra Nevadas which rise now on both sides with slender evergreens growing up their slopes and with green shrubs on the lower hills and grass farther up. A young man and a boy are wading in the smooth-flowing river, fishing for trout. To the north, across the river, high on a bank, is Highway 80, and beyond it the mountains rise steeply, slopes of rock and brush and evergreens. We cross the river, it is south of us now, and I turn my seat around to watch it and the peaks we are leaving. We stop at Truckee, where the buildings are old, made of bricks, brown ones and red ones and one of yellow stone. They are lined facing the tracks on Donner Pass Road: Capitol Saloon and Dance Hall, shops, and on the hills above the road, old wooden houses among the evergreens.

  The train climbs and the sun comes into my lap through the overhead window; behind us there is snow on the peaks. We reach Donner Lake, large and surrounded by trees, deep blue in the sunlight and dry air. We are in Donner Pass where they froze and starved, then through a long tunnel, someone’s lighter flares in the dark, and we come out in pines where houses are, trees growing thickly between them, the houses of redwood with aluminum roofs shining silver in the sun. We are going gradually down, the highway beneath us now, and beyond it is a narrow valley of trees, then the upward slope of a mountain, with evergreens covering most of it except for a wall of rock and patches of bare earth. The pines are tall and straight and slender, some almost cylindrical until the final tapering at their tops, others the shape of cones. A lone red peak, ridge-shaped, appears behind the peaks to the north of us, across the highway, which is far below now as we pass large rocks, deep gorges and, always, the evergreens. On a red rock near the tracks someone has written in white stones: HELLO.

  We go through a short tunnel, come out with cabins below us, aluminum-roofed, a winding dirt road going down the mountain. Slowly we descend, pass south of and above a lake, ringed by brown hills and pines; the power lines in the distance are going downhill like silver ribbons through the trees. Then, between the slope we ride on and the mountain to the north, there is a long green valley stretching west, so that power lines and rails and train and the earth itself, the mountains and valley, are moving toward the sea.

  My daughter tells me to look at the organized trees behind me: to the south the pines grow from a draw up the mountain so uniformly that a man from Ireland asks if they were planted, then says: “If you built a house in there, you’d have a bear at your door.” I go down to the bar for a beer and when I come up again I look down a ravine and across a deep wooded draw at mountains; the tracks curve and descend through trees and rocks and red earth, and the Irishman says: “I’ve seen trees in my time, but never like this: as far as the eye can see, and then some.”

  We leave the mountains and move into rolling country that feels hot through the windows; a cactus grows in a box in a backyard, there are palm trees and apple orchards, and a pasture where cows graze and, among them, a white goat stands motionless on a lone rock. Groups of trailers are parked against palm trunks, under the wide leaves. The country changes to gently rolling land, and between lumber yards and houses, horses graze; we cross a river where a man fishes from a small island, and a man and his black dog ride in an outboard.

  Between Roseville and Sacramento the land flattens and is crowded and we have reached, or returned to, cluttered America living close enough to each other to hear and recite the neighbors’ quarrels and exclamations of joy and grief, the only spaces those cleared of trees and reserved for sport: softball diamonds and golf courses. I am saddened by what we make: the buildings where they might as well hang a sign: THIS UGLY PLACE IS WHERE YOU WORK, the playing fields and parks, and the house to contain you. While somehow there is a trick at work and you have been removed not only from the land itself, but from its spirit; or, as Sharon says, the heart. After the open country and mountains, the earth looks punished, and it is hard to believe that its people have not been punished as well, for nothing more than the desire to love and to prove oneself worthy of that by going to work.

  West of Davis there are irrigated farms and fields of yellow-brown hay with a wide black strip where they have burned it. To the south the sky is broad, nearly midwestern, but it seems lower; to the north it is hazy and broken by a mountain range. Corn is growing. Near us the low hills are grown with hay, and the trees on them are darker green against their sand dune color. Turning southwest we go through a stretch of marsh, white herons rising from it; then rows of grey ships are sitting on green and yellow grass, and we see the wide Sacramento and cross it and from the bridge we see the ships mothballed at Vallejo. We stop at Martinez and watch Casey outside with his mother and two-year-old sister, their hair moving in the breeze, Casey punching his palm with his fist.

  Then we go downriver. On the opposite bank are blond hills; then men are fishing from a wharf, there is a marina with sailboats and fishing boats, and we are going south along the Bay. It is wide, muddy near the shore, then green, and across it there are blue ridges against the pale sky. Then we see the Oakland Bridge and, far off, the Golden Gate Bridge, and trees shaped by the wind leaning forever to the east, and a teenage black boy, lean and muscular in his shorts, jogging north along the tracks, his hands high, at his shoulders, punching: hooking and jabbing the sunlit air.

  1981

  Part Two

  OF ROBIN HOOD AND WOMANHOOD

  WHEN I WAS a graduate student at the University of Iowa I had a wife and four children, and an income of about four thousand dollars a year, and I stood in line monthly for food handed out by the state. My juxtaposition with the others in line made me uncomfortable, f
or I was usually wearing a tie and jacket for my duties as a teaching assistant, I was in my twenties, and I felt that, to the others in line, I looked like a man with hope and direction; at the very least, a man who was only temporarily a part of that line and the life it helped support. I brought home cans and cartons of butter, cheese, peanut butter, flour, and chunks of strange meat reminiscent of C-rations; but with imagination, the meat could be made into a casserole that was more than merely edible. I also knew, as I stood in line with the poor, that I had chosen to leave a good salary, had chosen to go to graduate school, while for those other people the act of choosing was so limited that it was not, and would probably never be, an essential part of their lives.

  But there was another way I brought home the bacon, a romantic way that could not have been romantic when it was the only way a man could feed the bodies he loved. In the fall we went hunting, my friends and I; sometimes there were so many of us that we resembled a rifle squad walking abreast through the cornfields. None of us went hunting because it was a cheap way to feed families. The money for licenses and shells would have bought more food in a supermarket. We hunted because we were friends, and because we loved to hunt: to slip between the cornstalks in autumn and, as winter started, to walk over the snow or frozen earth and the cornstalks lying now stiff as wood; to flush the rabbit and fire over his bounding tail at his head; and, best of all, the sudden rush of the pheasant, the quick shooting, and the always fair decision, in doubtful cases, about whose gun, whose finger and eye, had killed the bird. At the end of those weekend afternoons I brought home the game and placed it on the picnic table where we ate in the kitchen, and I was able to forget what it had actually cost in time and money, to see it simply as lovely meals I had brought home, a supplement to the C-ration casseroles, the spaghetti, the beans and rice. They were meals which even demanded that rarity in the house, a bottle of wine. All of this was a delusion, but it was a good one: gun in hand, looking at a cock pheasant on the table, its feathers bringing to the kitchen the aura of the field, the cold wind, the intensity of the hunt, and the thrilling release of the death shot. I felt I had done what a man should do for his family.