Another Fine Mess Page 20

  Speed limits and other roadside notices often carried a rider that spoke of ingrained rebellion: ‘OBEY SIGNS – STATE LAW.’ In some US states a third of drivers still refuse to wear seat belts, in defiance of mandatory regulations.

  From now on the default farewell urged me to ‘stay safe’ or to ‘have a safe one’, a perception of peril entirely at odds with the ever more harmless reality. These guys rarely locked their front doors. I was leaving more and more stuff in the car overnight, and no longer bothered to take my phone out of the windshield mount when I went into gas stations to pay. The obsession with lawless murder that held urban America in its morbid thrall at least had some foundation in fact (though not much: violent crime has been steadily falling across the nation for more than twenty-five years). But to encounter it out in the benign, studiously law-abiding boondocks was a source of deep bewilderment. Perhaps it was a hangover from the lawless Wild West, like the courthouse in every town. Perhaps they cultivated it as justification for all those vast domestic arsenals. On my first night in Texas, I walked past a pick-up truck with a sticker on the door that read: ‘NOTHING IN THIS VEHICLE IS WORTH YOUR LIFE.’ Its windows had been left open and the keys were in the ignition.

  The landscape crisped up and sandy grit began to drift across the road. Ahead, beyond my motometer gunsight, a long and empty strip of undeviating asphalt bisected the ochre plains, a view that began to appear on the inside of my eyelids as I stood blinking at every gas-station urinal and motel reception. James Dean, who had taught me how to start a Model T, met his end on a dead-straight desert road, and I found myself scanning the hazy fundament of every flat brown vista for inattentive rustics like the one who drove into his path one broiled afternoon in 1955.

  Dean was going faster than I’d ever go when he crashed, but speed was rarely a factor in the appalling toll of road fatalities that accumulated in the Model T era. In 1927, the T’s final year, 24,470 Americans died on the nation’s roads: well over half the current annual total, with a tenth as many registered vehicles. Road safety wasn’t even a consideration back then; indeed, reports of fatal accidents were recorded with graphic relish. ‘Mrs McCormick’s head was impaled upon the maple tree’s lowest branch,’ reads an eager newspaper account of a 1912 crash in Connecticut, ‘and a great rent was torn in her side by a blow from the steel wheel of the wrecked machine.’ After Mr McCormick – flung into a neighbouring field – died in hospital the same evening, doctors found a clipping in his pocket describing a previous accident in which he had cheated death, just five miles away. ‘Since he married the Poughkeepsie beauty,’ the article concluded, ‘he and she have been in no less than a dozen auto wrecks, ranging in territory from Maine to Missouri, and in seriousness from explosions to mutilated legs and arms.’

  McCormick was estimated to have been driving at no more than 40mph when his car left the road for the last time. A century of material fatigue was hardly an encouragement to push Mike any faster. In 2011, a Model T on a tour of Minnesota suffered a suspension collapse at 30mph on a flat, straight road that pitched the car into a double roll, killing the driver and badly injuring his wife. Two years later, a Model T driving four-up on a state highway in Utah pulled over to allow traffic to pass; on crossing into the rough verge, the right-hand front wheel disintegrated, again throwing the car into a roll that left a fifty-one-year-old passenger dead. Without seat belts, it didn’t seem to take much. The MTFCA forums were full of harrowing close shaves: one member reported that his car had completely fallen apart, Laurel and Hardy style, while crossing a cattle grid at unremarkable speed. As much as these reports concentrated the mind, they also infused me with a sense of helpless fatalism. Something fundamental might give way without warning: there was nothing I could do to stop it doing so, and nothing I could do if and when it did. Stay safe.

  That fierce south-westerly wind was a bullying menace in the days ahead. When it blew me onward it also blew me about, requiring a new stability-control technique in which I braced both elbows against the bottom of the steering wheel as my whitened fists grasped the top. Through slitted eyes and flapping wisps of grey fringe I watched the motometer nose high into the red zone: when a T is outrun by a tailwind, there’s nothing to cool it down. More than once I had to pull over and park Mike up to chill out with his face to the oncoming blast. His flanks, so durably glossy, were now dulled by an ancient orange dust that forced itself deep into every crevice.

  I did a lot of scary High Plains drifting when the road weaved around on the desolate, dust-bowled moorland mesas. Wind scooped into the big front fenders, knocking them up and about. Fat crickets shot into the cabin and pinged about like bullets. Twice my sunglasses were blown clean off my face and out into the sand-blasted, sundried tussocks. I battled to keep the car on the road, on occasion forcing my knees up against the steering wheel for a six-point grip. It felt like a bumpy fairground ride that just wouldn’t stop. Every few hours I tottered across a gas-station forecourt on wobbly legs, my stomach lurching. The tousled, ruddy survivor that stared vacantly back in the restroom mirror might have just been airlifted from a storm-shattered raft.

  Yet there was evidence of a long-rooted human determination to brave this environment and make it home, described by historical markers that sang and quivered in the gusts. Over 15,000 years ago, some of America’s earliest known humans chased mammoths over these windswept plains. And in 1919, the 300 citizens of Ochiltree showcased the T era’s boundless get-up-and-go in the most literal fashion: a new railway had been laid across the prairie 8 miles north, so they hitched every single building – post office, church, the works – to a fleet of tractors and moved the whole town to meet it. They could have just nailed sheets across their chimneys and sailed there.

  The sign that welcomed me into Oklahoma had been shot to shit by exiting Texans. It didn’t take long to establish that residents of surrounding states really don’t care much for their Lone Star neighbours: too shouty and uncouth, too full of themselves, and maybe – though nobody admitted this – just too irksomely prosperous. The road shrank to half its Texan girth as I passed from one geographical panhandle to another. If there’s one thing Americans love more than a belt – Sun, Bible, Rust, Corn, Snow – it’s a panhandle, no matter how stupidly stubby.

  Until 1890 the Oklahoman panhandle was a bona fide no man’s land, an ungoverned free-for-all that attracted only outlaws and the very wariest settlers. The state itself was only admitted into the union in 1907, the year before the T, and still looked like a hayseed latecomer. Wooden farmhouses sat hunkered into hollows, many reduced to a dishevelment of bleached planks strewn about the totem pole of a stone chimneybreast. A trail of weeded ballast marked the route of a defunct railway. The towns were palpably forlorn, littered with abandoned cars and dusty, bill-posted requests for roustabouts that flapped against lampposts. And that was it for Oklahoma. After my thousand-mile trans-Texan epic I went through the next state up in a couple of hours.

  Liberal, the gateway to Kansas, sat right on the dark-red Trump spine that ran north from Texas to the Canadian border. This incongruity delivered such appealing juxtapositions – ‘LIBERAL POLICE’; ‘VISIT THE LIBERAL RODEO’ – that on a whim I decided to stay there, even though doing so meant a night in the kind of motel I had vowed to shun after that terrible dawn scuttlefest in Paducah. The Budget Host La Fonda sat behind a drained pool and a row of scabby hacienda arches, somewhere a C-list mobster might end up under a witness protection scheme. I was applying a veneer of aerosol insecticide to every suspect in-room surface when knuckles rapped my door.

  ‘We just love everythin’ about your antique,’ said a man in a suede bucket hat after I opened up, showing me a crescent of tiny, jet-black teeth. Beside him stood a woman in a smock dress with a smudged blue tattoo on her neck. Beside her was a freckled girl of about ten. All three were wearing wire-framed spectacles, and had teamed socks with sandals. ‘Look, baby-girl,’ said the father, pointing a nicotine fingertip at the legen
d stamped into Mike’s radiator. ‘“Made in USA.” Don’t see that much no more.’

  I glanced at the Honda saloon behind them, its wan blue paint sandblasted here and there to scabby bare metal, a tattered sheet of opaque tarpaulin standing in as a rear windshield.

  ‘Damn hailstorm took that out,’ he said, following my gaze. ‘Stones the size of softballs.’

  ‘Three years ago,’ added his wife, neutrally. ‘Gas gauge don’t work neither.’

  His name was Trent, and he told me he’d lived in Liberal all his life. The town had earned its appellation, he explained, courtesy of a nineteenth-century homesteader famed for offering free water to passing pioneers: ‘“That’s mighty liberal of you,” they all told him, and when the town was incorporated it seemed as good as any. Kind of a funny story, right?’

  Before I had time to agree Trent fixed me with a sudden and threatening glare. ‘This place is a trap and I want to get out,’ he said, his voice scaled down to an urgent, bitter whisper. ‘Been over a hundred all summer and it’s colder than hell in winter. So damn flat you can watch your dog run away for three days. Had no work for six years. I can weld, I can paint, I can drive a truck and do all kinds of shit, but the only place hirin’ is the meat-packin’ plant, and they wouldn’t take me on because I don’t speak fuckin’ Spanish.’ He put his hands on his hips and let out a bull-like snort. ‘I want to go as far away from here as I can get without a passport. I want to go to Florida.’

  This tirade seemed to drain Trent as much as it alarmed me, and I watched him shuffle back to the Honda with his head down. His family, though, had evidently heard it all and more before. ‘My daddy wants to live on a boat,’ said his daughter in an amiable sing-song, sounding at least six years younger than she was. And then they were gone.

  An hour passed. I was just about to crack open a cheeky Lime-a-Rita and start swearing at Fox News when there was another knock at the door. It was Trent again, this time alone.

  ‘My wife and I been talkin’ about that story of how our town got its name, and we thought, well, it would be kinda fittin’ if we could invite a traveller over for a bite to eat.’ He took off his suede hat and cradled it humbly, revealing a thin mat of damp grey hair. ‘She makes a mean burrito.’

  It was the most touching invitation I had yet been offered, and the most shriekingly ominous. Ten minutes later, Liberal’s Friday-night pedestrians watched an ancient black car turn off the main drag and follow a partly glazed Honda down one of their town’s least promising residential side streets.

  The hours ahead presented an invaluable insight into the Trump phenomenon, something I kept having to remind myself. Trent ushered me into a clapboard shack of interwar appearance, with a lot of missing shingles and wooden walls I could have pushed my thumb through. The tiny, low-ceilinged front parlour was hemmed in by teetering stacks of VHS tapes and magazines, most topped with a brimming ashtray. Decades of tobacco-tipped fingers had left broad yellow smudges around every door handle and light switch. A framed pencil sketch of Kenny Rogers hung on the wall. Two small, tubular dogs yapped half-heartedly at me from a collapsing sofa. ‘That’s my police scanner,’ said Trent, indicating a clunky black box with about ninety buttons on the front. ‘Friday nights are pretty fun. We got a lot of Mexicans here and they sure like to fight.’

  I was led into the kitchen beyond and met by his wife, his daughter, and a very complicated aroma. Everything below chest height was Jackson Pollocked with hard-baked matter. Everything above it was lacquered in nicotine. The fridge might have been dragged out of a canal.

  ‘Hope you like sweet tea.’

  Trent held out a chipped beaker and bid me sit at the little table. Then his wife withdrew a sweating platter of rolled tortillas from the ancient enamel stove, adding a top note of cheese-grease to the miasma.

  ‘I honestly couldn’t eat more than one,’ I said, theatrically patting my stomach.

  ‘Ain’t no need for those Briddish manners here,’ she protested, tipping three on to a liver-spotted plate. In a panic I forked one and crammed it whole between my lips.

  ‘Pretty good, huh?’ said Trent, winking. I took aboard a desperate gulp of sweet tea and managed a gurgle of assent.

  ‘I’m told I’m extremely antisocial,’ he continued, with a mirthless laugh that I would be hearing a lot of. ‘And it’s true – I just don’t like people. Been in this house thirteen years and I know two people on the whole block. Rest of them I don’t care to know. They’re mostly Hispanic. If you don’t speak Spanish they won’t speak to you.’ He took a thoughtful swig of tea. ‘I hope Trump does build that wall. I truly hope so. I would volunteer to help him build it.’

  ‘And Mexico will pay for it,’ added his wife, bisecting a flaccid burrito. ‘Everywhere you look here it’s Mexicans. We got 22,000 people in this county, and 86 per cent of them are Hispanic. Can you believe that?’ (I couldn’t, and was right not to. The actual ratio, I later established, is just under half that.)

  ‘At least this president has the balls to do somethin’. The last one was against this country from the start. He admitted being a Muslim, and said he would open the doors for his brethren. He openly said if there was a war against the Muslim countries, he would stand with them. Sorry, but that’s just not president material.’

  Sorry, but that’s just not true, I might have said, possibly even yelled. But I was a guest, and one with half a mouthful of acrid pulp to get down. In any case it was already abundantly plain that America’s polarised politics were now fully tribal: dissent would achieve nothing but ill-feeling and the further entrenchment of views. A couple of nights earlier, CNN had broadcast the results of a poll revealing that 62 per cent of Trump supporters – a third of all Americans – said they would never criticise anything he might do. Anything. And didn’t he know it. Almost a year before he was elected, Trump famously announced he ‘could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose a vote’.

  Trent gave good hate. As I forced ragged, weeping hunks of burrito between my teeth he revealed that along with Mexicans he despised Walmart, doctors, drug companies, the National Beef company, nasty teenage bastards, Haitians, unions and cars with plastic body panels. It would have been much quicker to catalogue things he liked, namely his police scanner, Donald Trump and the worst food in the world. Though this list took no account of the one thing he loved, now revealed in a scene I was pleasantly surprised to survive.

  ‘Hey, come out here, got somethin’ for you.’

  Trent had left the kitchen and was hailing me from the parlour. With one-third of my dinner still unfinished, I wasted no time in leaping to my feet. Three sticky steps later I rounded the corner and came nose to nose with Trent, breathing hard, his features alive with an excitement that I quite swiftly connected to the samurai sword he was holding aloft in both hands.

  ‘This is my baby,’ he cooed, jumping with unexpected grace into the stance of a ceremonial executioner. The sword’s honed blade shimmered before me. Trent was blocking the front door, but that Kenny Rogers wall looked pretty fragile and there seemed a decent chance of running straight through it. ‘It certainly is a beauty,’ I said, in a level, slow, keep-him-talking voice.

  ‘Full tang,’ he breathed, holding it lower. ‘Steel goes all the way down.’

  ‘Let me … let me take a look,’ I whispered promptingly, holding both hands out very slowly and fighting a grisly bolus of Tex-Mex back down into my stomach.

  ‘Swapped a long-bed GMC pick-up for her,’ he said, reverentially passing it to me, grip first.

  ‘Good, that’s good.’ I took the sword in my hands and with great deliberation lowered it on to the balding carpet. ‘Let’s just leave her to rest there.’

  That was that. Or so I vainly hoped, and kept on vainly hoping as Trent repeatedly darted from the claustrophobic parlour and burst back in brandishing a succession of terrible weapons. ‘Now this is for intruders!’ he cried, re-entering with what looked very muc
h like a Dothraki scimitar. ‘Keep it under the mattress, so when someone sticks a hand through the window – wham! – that’s comin’ off, it’s my property now!’ Next up was a vast broadsword. ‘This has a real good weight, could do you a lot of damage.’ He clanged it hard against an old iron stove. ‘Nice ring to it, too.’

  ‘My daddy done broke his phone with that one,’ piped up his daughter. The minute she joined us in the parlour, I’d manoeuvred myself into a position that employed her as a human shield.

  Trent let out that mirthless laugh. ‘Cellphone screen went black and the store said it was out of warranty. So I came home, gave it the chop, took it back to ’em in two halves. Their faces!’

  After a dagger and two further swords, he made his final reappearance with a double-barrelled sawn-off shotgun. ‘Accuracy by volume,’ he wheezed, aiming it at the front door. ‘Someone comes in, they’re getting this up the nose. I got rock salt in one barrel and a tube of dimes in the other and we’re gonna play a game.’ Trent was dangerously animated as he ran through this well-rehearsed routine. ‘Which barrel you gonna pick, huh? Huh? You chose the wrong house, dude. The door you kicked in was for your protection, not mine.’

  It was gone eleven when Mike creaked to a halt outside my door at the Budget Host La Fonda. I went in, opened the fridge and downed 25 fluid ounces of margarita-flavoured malt alcohol in several consecutive gulps. Then I lay down, waited for tranquillity to take hold, and tried to make sense of the last few hours.