Another Fine Mess Page 24

  I could barely register surprise, or, I’m afraid, much in the way of appreciation, when serendipity was heaped upon this mountain of good fortune. One of my elderly onlookers had owned a Model T, the other had a pick-up full of tools and they both had a lot of time on their hands. Even in lonely North Dakota I could tap into the Universal Car’s collective folk memory, the hive mind that was still fixing Ts a century on.

  Jim and Lynn, as my senior saviours had introduced themselves, crawled straight under Mike and got to work. I sank to my haunches, pale and harrowed, fit only to watch and listen. ‘Lot of folk hear us talk and think we’re Canadian,’ said Lynn, spannering off a filthy half of tie rod. ‘I mean, shit, we got an accent, but we don’t say “oot and aboot” or any of that dumb crap.’

  Jim’s rigger boots and neatly creased jeans were sticking out the other side. ‘I got a farm doon by the dam,’ he said, as loosened nuts and bolts clunked to the concrete. ‘Good huntin’ roond there. Last year I went oot shootin’ with a military sniper. He shot a runnin’ coy-yoot from 300 yards right up the frickin’ asshole. No holes in the pelt, see. Shot came straight oot the mooth.’

  A modest audience began to assemble. I don’t imagine much happens in Bowman (‘SMALL-TOWN VALUES; BIG-TOWN OPPORTUNITIES’) and word had clearly got around. Presently a bearded young man approached and introduced himself as a reporter from the Bowman Extra. He took a couple of photos and asked a few polite questions. ‘Take it you’re going coost to coost?’ I had at last passed the geographical tipping point where my intent spoke for itself. Then Jim and Lynn rolled out, pristine outfits slathered, each bearing an oily length of steel. ‘Let’s go get these fellers welded,’ said Jim, and led me away to his pick-up.

  Bowman’s fire chief remarried my tie rod at the welding shop he ran with his ninety-year-old father. ‘If anything, my boy’s done too good a job on that,’ wheezed the old man, as his son flipped up his tinted visor. I couldn’t quite see what he meant: my life would henceforth be entrusted to an aged length of metal of proven fragility, its two fractured halves very roughly combined in thirty hot, bright seconds. When Jim and Lynn inspected the rod, they did so with sceptical frowns. But nobody wanted to argue with a man who had been melting things together for seventy-four years. The fire chief reluctantly accepted a ten-dollar bill; after running me back to the gas station and refitting the tie rod, Jim and Lynn wouldn’t take a cent. ‘You’d do the same for us,’ said Lynn, holding out a hand. Except I wouldn’t, because I couldn’t.

  The milky sun was going down, and in Bowman-ese I still had quite a wees to go: Dickinson lay 74 miles north, and I needed to be there in just over two hours. Recent near-death experience and a suspect repair job urged caution, but instead I had to cane it over the rolling wheat fields, braced for imminent directional emergency with the steering wheel clamped in that six-point grip. Oncoming traffic held a whole new level of fascination. Every time a vehicle approached I’d picture those smiles and waves morphing into gurns of flailing panic as Mike lurched drastically into their path. It was debilitating in the extreme, and after 50 miles of stress and strain my reserves of adrenalin suddenly ran dry. At once I flipped from white-knuckled red alert to a state of floppy resignation, bouncing bonelessly towards a twilit cluster of man-made shapes.

  The Hertz office was located at Dickinson’s provincial airport, a large pitched-roof shed 6 miles south of town. With four minutes to spare I stumbled raggedly in through the door, encountering an ominous absence of activity. I was wondering how best to destroy the unmanned Hertz desk when a voice called out from behind me. ‘Don’t panic,’ said a woman behind the United Airlines counter, the airport’s solitary fellow occupant. ‘They’ll be back in aboot an oar for the Denver flight.’

  ‘Right. Hang on – you can fly here from Denver?’

  ‘Twice a day, direct.’

  ‘Um … any seats in two days’ time?’

  She clicked away at a keyboard, then frowned at the screen before her.

  ‘Showing full. Looks like the last seat went two oars ago.’

  ‘Gosh, how terribly frustrating!’ I said, or at least implied by means of a single, heartfelt imprecation. So sixty-five hours and 1,200 miles later I was back at Dickinson, transferring several bags and a spouse from a 2017 Chevrolet Malibu to a filthy old Ford.

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘It’s terribly sweet in here,’ said my wife, settling down beside me amidst that tumult of aged creaks. ‘Like a horse carriage.’

  She is quite the trouper. In our regular Skype calls I’d made little effort to varnish the long-distance Model T experience. My traumatised account of that first day in Virginia was frankly enough to put anyone off. Yet there she was, beaming like a competition winner: first prize, ten days in a treacherous boneshaker with a hopeless, blubbering imbecile! I smiled back, thinking there would be a better time to tell her about the tie rod episode, though as it turned out there wasn’t.

  I’d feared that reacquaintance with rapid, silent, air-conditioned motoring might spoil me. But driving a modern car shared so little with the T experience that it felt like a completely different mode of transport: you might just as usefully compare a piggyback with a monorail. I simply rebooted my mindset and forgot it had ever happened. The transition was more jarring for my new passenger. By the time we crossed into Montana she had been brutally exposed to the elemental in-car trinity of wind, noise and merciless sun, and was making game efforts to adapt to a diet of warm water and processed meat. Her toughest struggle, though, was reconciling the hectic, all-action manner of our progress with the fact that it took for ever to make any headway across the map that whipped and flapped in her grasp. The interminable Badlands upped the ante: a crispy-grassed outback cleaved here and there with sandy gulches, like an overgrown golf course the size of Belgium. This inhospitable vastness kept white men at bay for longer than anywhere else. It was 1928 before anyone felt brave enough to build a railway out here. But the trains never made it to Jordan, the most isolated county seat in the nation.

  ‘You are waaaaay out in the toolies,’ the manageress at Fellman’s Motel told us. ‘Never even had a bus come here. For anything more than gas or groceries you gotta drive 83 miles.’ Fellman’s, she said, had been opened by her great-grandfather, who arrived in 1916 with four young children on the stagecoach after doing a flit from North Dakota: his wife had died and her family were angling to take the kids away from him. ‘Few years before, they found the first T-Rex out here, so he had a lot of fossil hunters staying. We still have ’em here for the whole of July, they kind of keep us going.’

  We got the full nine yards down at Jordan’s kindly little museum, run by a white-haired old schoolteacher and wallpapered with newspaper clippings and typewritten memoirs. ‘There’s a creationist fossil museum in Glendive that have some issues with this exhibit,’ she said wryly, standing before the centrepiece display of dinosaur footprints. ‘They’ve told us humans left those prints.’ I wouldn’t like to have met them.

  It was Barnum Brown, we learned, who dug up that fossilised T-Rex, out in the Hell Creek badlands north of town in 1902. Brown had been named after the fabled showman P. T. Barnum, and he certainly made an unusually colourful palaeontologist. He would attend digs in a full-length fur coat, and later worked as an ‘intelligence asset’ in both world wars. In essence, Brown was exactly the sort of character unlikely to play well with the locals, though they only chased him out of town at gunpoint once. ‘Those times in Jordan were wild,’ read one yellowy account on the museum wall, ‘and every shady character who could not stand the spotlight of civilisation drifted in, always ready to have fun or start trouble.’ We duly read of the night that Jordan’s sheriff returned from a trip to find that the post office was now a pop-up saloon, whose well-oiled patrons had shot up the general store and the town’s only restaurant. When the first school opened, the mayor couldn’t find any teacher willing to accept the challenge, so recruited a man known only as ‘Gambler Browne
’, who turned up on the first day of term carrying a bullwhip. A judge in Glendive, 90 miles east, once sentenced a recidivist troublemaker to live in Jordan for six months.

  We took a stroll up Main Street, still readily identifiable as the broad thoroughfare we’d just seen lasso-twirling sepia cowboys ride four abreast down in the museum archives. (Charles Toyne out of Sedgwick had explained to me that the expansive avenues running through even the humblest old settlements were proportioned for a team of horses to turn around in.) I familiarised my wife with the small-town staples: the decommissioned gas station, the soaped-up retail premises, the pick-ups plastered in deep-red sentiment: ‘I’m one of the people who pays for all the free stuff Obama gives you.’ The drug store was still in business, and had pleasingly retained its venerable soda fountain. ‘We had 4,000 citizens when this store opened in 1937,’ said the elderly assistant, frothing out a couple of Coke floats. ‘Down to 250 now. Just thirty-five students enrolled at our high school.’ She pulled up a chrome lever and clunked two brimming fluted vases on the counter. ‘Could be worse. School in the next county went three years with one kid.’

  ‘Did you vote for Donald Trump?’

  My wife has always preferred the direct approach.

  ‘Ha, well, he’s certainly popular in these parts.’ She didn’t seem offended, though she also didn’t answer.

  We knew he was, of course. That was why we were here, out in the toolies, away from the spotlight of civilisation. Lawless, boozy Jordan was the solitary settlement in Garfield County, an electoral district that stood at number four in my Top Trump chart. This was Donald’s last redoubt, final bastion of the deep-red Trump Belt. My westward progress would still take me through staunchly Republican territory, but it would be incrementally less staunch from here on.

  The Hell Creek bar was pretty busy when we went in. A dozen-odd drinkers sat in high chairs at the bar, amongst them identical young triplets in white Stetsons, sipping Cokes. Hunting trophies lined the wall and there were Rocky Mountain oysters – bulls’ bollocks – on the letter-board menu.

  ‘What’s that big ashtray doing down there on the floor?’ whispered my wife. I peered into its dented chrome mouth, then wished I hadn’t.

  ‘Spittoon,’ I whispered back.

  I didn’t have a Model T outside to make the introductions on my behalf, but my wife stood in.

  ‘Gin and tonic, please. Ice and a slice. Could you recommend a good rodeo?’

  This conspicuous exchange brought us into conversation with a group of four friends at the bar. We told them about our trip to the museum, and they all said they’d been taught by its curator back in the day.

  ‘I was kinda unteachable,’ said Steve, Jordan’s fire chief. ‘We were mean little shits. Kid who sat beside me in first grade got kicked out for chewing tobacco.’

  ‘I couldn’t be a teacher,’ said Zander, a young man who never did tell us what he did for a living, though whatever it was involved getting absolutely marinated in dust and grease. ‘I’d want to beat the kids. And the parents.’

  My wife shot him a stern look. ‘Actually, I’m a teacher as well,’ she said.

  ‘Woah!’ yelled Chantelle, a voluble young German who’d lost all trace of an accent in the twenty-four years since her parents emigrated to open a dude ranch. ‘A teacher from Jordan would say, “I’m a teacher too.” But a teacher from England says, “I’m a teacher as well!”’

  ‘The bar for sophistication is set kinda low here.’ Mark’s hesitant smile matched his murmured delivery. He would mumble only two further words, when I enquired about his line of business: ‘Got cows.’

  We enjoyed a splendid couple of hours with those four. Small-towners are always good company, even the rare exceptions who retreat from conversation. There’s a wonderful dedication to convivial routine, congregating en masse for breakfast, then after dark for beer. Retreating to a life spent online must be a powerful temptation in America’s loneliest county seat, which is perhaps why our new friends expressed such vehement loathing for the internet in general and social media in particular. ‘I really do not like Facebook and all that bullshit,’ said Zander, with immense feeling. ‘Why can’t people just talk? One big nuke in the sky over the Google server would make the world a much better place.’

  ‘So I guess that’s your T parked out at Fellman’s.’ We’d bought a farewell round of drinks and I’d been telling Steve about my journey. I nodded.

  ‘You know there’s an old guy in town, he’s got two Model Ts and I bet there’s enough parts in his barn to build three more. You oughta meet him.’

  ‘See?’ I turned to my wife with a look of wonderment. ‘This always happens. It’s incredible!’

  ‘Just one problem.’ Steve steadied his features. ‘He died yesterday.’ Silence entombed the bar. Then everyone, even Mark, roared with laughter.

  The Hell Creekers had forewarned us about the road out of Jordan. A recent wildfire had made over 300,000 acres of badland worse, we were told, and the wind that spread it was still blowing fiercely. For 75 miles we battled through an incinerated wilderness, brutalised by a tearing, tireless northerly gale that galloped unopposed across the extra-terrestrial plains. My wife lay her head against my shoulder, and then, in whimpery, burrowing stages, worked it deep into my armpit. Something with legs and wings clattered into the cabin and managed to lodge itself in my beaded seat cover; my wife battered the target zone, book in one hand and a shoe in the other, whilst I sat up like a jockey, screaming into the wind. When at merciful length we turned south and dropped into the lee of an escarpment, relief was short lived.

  ‘Can you hear that?’

  A ghostly under-bonnet clonk had begun to suggest itself on the road into Jordan, but my wife couldn’t hear what I was hearing, so I’d put it down to a doom-laden imagination. But she could hardly miss it now. There it was again, the dread rap of bony fist on biscuit tin. I’d done another con-rod bearing.

  ‘Is that bad?’

  We were just short of Billings, a sizeable town by any standards and gargantuan for Montana. I ought to have been able to get things sorted there, but it would take a while.

  ‘Well, you won’t be driving in a Model T Ford for a bit.’ I counted off the days until her departure. ‘In fact, maybe never again.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ she said, with an expression that politely begged to differ. I really couldn’t blame her. In three days we’d covered 400 miles, most of them unusually hard. Every night she’d been shattered. As a passenger experience, sitting in a T all day in high winds shares quite a lot with people smuggling.

  I nursed our clattering steed into a hotel selected by my wife for its proximity to the MetraPark Arena. Apparently she hadn’t had enough deranged bouncing for one day, and was determined to attend the Montana State Fair Rodeo, as recommended by the Hell Creek regulars. As a less excitable devotee of earthy macho fortitude I made a bit of a fuss about this, but it proved a memorable occasion, instructively encapsulating an awful lot of defining themes.

  ‘Tonight we’re going to celebrate the courage and moral conviction of ourselves as Montanans, cowboys and, above all, as Americans,’ began the PA announcer as every family around us rose to their feet. ‘I’d like you to stand and pray with me, to thank the Lord for allowing us to live another day as free Americans. And we ask your blessing for each and every one of those men and women and their families who have paid the ultimate price and are still sacrificing themselves in the service of our great nation.’

  ‘Is America always like this?’ murmured my wife, as a little cowgirl on a white pony belted out an emotional but painfully wayward rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Her previous experience of this country was limited to ten distant days in Boston and New York, places where you aren’t routinely ordered to instil future generations with grit and pride, or advised that your life is the Lord’s gift.

  I supposed America – the geographical bulk of it – was always like this. All those churc
hes. All those weapons. The whole live-free-or-die vibe. And that cult of the military veteran, such a pervasive feature of my trip. Every supermarket I’d been into had a ‘We salute our veterans’ notice by the tills, and plenty of retailers offered discounts to old servicemen. ‘Military Monday at Denny’s, 20 per cent off for veterans’; ‘Rovedale Beer & Liquor – operated by veterans, 5 per cent discount to all veterans night and day’. Small towns remembered their dead with displays in shop windows; in Liberty, Indiana, every lamppost around the square had borne a photograph of a kid who hadn’t come home from Okinawa or Vietnam. It was extraordinary to wander through a lonely Nebraskan cemetery and see how many farm boys had been lost on the fields of Flanders. Well over a million Americans fought at Meuse-Argonne in September 1918, the largest US fighting force ever gathered. And so many old small-towners wore caps and T-shirts with ‘Vietnam – I Served’ on them, or had bumper stickers commemorating their 58,000 fighting brethren who hadn’t made it back. Again it all seemed bound up with religion and patriotism. All these young men sacrificed in faraway wars must seem more like crusaders, fighting for the freedom of God’s own country. Over 1.3 million US servicemen and women are still fighting for it now: at $587 billion, the nation’s annual military budget is three times that of Russia’s and China’s combined.

  As a sporting spectacle, rodeo is a curious marriage of folksiness and appalling violence. ‘And tonight Hank will be roping with his son Brad,’ chirped the announcer as two lasso-twirling horsemen galloped out of the corral in pursuit of a terrified young cow. ‘One of the nice things about tie-down roping is that you can do it together as a family.’ One of the less nice things is that it sometimes ends with a calf breaking its neck and being taken out of the arena on a fork-lift truck.