Authors: Jonathan Raban
So the boy ran away to the river. It was the only place he knew where his father didn’t loom over him like a headachy, angry god. He was often forbidden to go there: rough boys from the village fished at the mill and gave him bits and pieces of tackle. These enviable creatures bred maggots in the carcasses of rabbits they’d snared, and he was once given a whole tin of precious, wriggling larvae—the perfect bait for roach. His father found the maggots in his room; for a time after that, going to the river was roughly equivalent to a British soldier’s crossing to the German lines and signing himself into the service of the Axis powers.
At the river, I was free to dream of what it might be like not to be a child; and all I could imagine was that there would be no father, no constraints. In this improbable future, I would somehow move at my own will. I’d breed maggots. I’d make friends with the ragged toughs from the village. I’d waste my days away at the water’s edge and be muddy and profane. When I tried to make the River Wensum grow as wide as the Mississippi, I suppose I was attempting to stretch it until it corresponded with the amazing breadth of the freedom I thought I was going to enjoy as a grown-up.
Now, going past Cassville and the black windows of another great derelict hotel, I was living the daydream for real; and I felt that even
the seven-year-old, with his hopes of limitless irresponsibility, would have been shaken by the gigantic reach and width of the thing. This long, careless drift through other people’s lives, with the boat always moored ready for a fast getaway, and the solitude of the river never more than a stone’s throw away from the society of the town, would have impressed him as being grander than anything he’d imagined. He hadn’t predicted the fright of it. In those days he hadn’t been afraid of drowning. I was. I kept on seeing myself dead in the river, a body strewn untidily on a sandbar, its clothes ridden up over its head. The child wouldn’t have anticipated the possibility of feeling twinges of guilt about this life, either: he wouldn’t have cared one way or the other about the dangerous morality of an existence of temporary pickups and friendships, of people dropped almost as soon as met, of the indifferent, deep egoism of moving for moving’s sake. He had, perhaps, been wise in his decision to include maggots in his paradise.
At North Buena Vista, I stopped to fill my gas tanks and make the long steep walk up to the village. Old Glory flew over the wooden post office and the brick schoolhouse, but in other respects the place might have belonged to another continent. A painted statue of the Virgin stood in a grotto cut into the rock face, surrounded by dead flowers, candle stubs and colored stones. A wooded path, noisy with buzzings and rustlings and slitherings, led to a hilltop cemetery, and I sat on the fine granite tomb of Peter and Mary Ludovissy, looking down on the river. The Ludovissys had been born in 1855 and 1860, and they’d died ten years before I was born. Overshadowed by a stand of pines, their mountain grave had a view of first the river, then the green plateau of Wisconsin, then the misty violet of the “East,” from where, presumably, they had themselves made the trek out here to Iowa, to make, or find, just such a town as the one they’d left behind in Europe.
Maybe that was what I was doing on my own journey. There was a good deal of conceit in the way that I thought of myself as the stranger from the big city; I wasn’t really that at all. I’d been brought up in a succession of villages, always within sniffing distance of a farmyard. The little towns I was passing through—Lansing, Prairie du Chien, Guttenberg, North Buena Vista—were places I could instantly recognize from childhood. They smelled the same. The faces of the people in the bars had a cousinly look to the agricultural workers of Pennington, Hempton Green, Aldwick. It was all, in one sense, a coming back, but a coming back with the liberty to move out and on. Perhaps the Ludovissys had felt much the same. To so many of the European peasantry who had come to the Midwest to build farms of their own, America had given their original life back to them; at the same time, it had released
them from the bonds of authority which had chained them like dogs in Europe. It had freed them from patriarchy while leaving them within the sight and smell of home.
I climbed back down the path to the village and stopped in at the bar. The bartender insisted that he was a “Luxembourger,” even though he and his father had both been born and raised in North Buena Vista.
“You stay what you are,” he said. “Like my wife. She’s from Louisiana. She’s lived here fifteen years. But folks in town, they still think she’s a stranger. Or take these German towns around here. In the war, some of them was on the German side. They was
Nazi
towns, they wasn’t American.”
He told me the story of how, when he’d been a teen-ager, a German farmer had confiscated his driver’s license at gunpoint. His father, who had fought with the U.S. Army in Europe, had driven out to the German’s farm armed with a twenty-gauge. “You don’t give me that kid’s license back,” the father said, “I’m gonna shoot you dead. I killed enough goddamn Germans in my time; one more won’t make no difference.” The driver’s license had been returned. The story was told with filial pride.
“You know what’s wrong with this country now?” said the bartender. “They should’ve hung Jane Fonda fifteen years ago. Them sonofabitch ‘liberals.’ Just look up there—” He pointed at all the forms and licenses that were thumbtacked to the wall behind the bar. “The goddamn state
makes
you into a crook. The income tax makes you into a crook. I’m a crook. Like, talking with you I’m not being crooked, but every other way I gotta be crooked to live. What the hell kind of country is this when it does that to folks?
“You know,” he said two beers later, “if only we’d had George Wallace or Barry Goldwater for President, things might’ve been a whole lot different around here.”
It was a line I’d heard a hundred times. It still made me shudder.
“Ronald Reagan?” I said.
“That sonofabitch. Look at when he was governor of California! Ronald Reagan, I’m telling you, he’s a goddamn
liberal.
”
It was possible, I thought, that the bartender spoke truer than he knew. His assertion that Germans were still Germans, Luxembourgers still Luxembourgers, was a denial of America’s capacity really to transform its immigrants. It might unlock the bonds of patriarchy, yet three and four generations on, the liberated peasantry was still pining for a
Führer
-figure. These lovely villages like North Buena Vista were full of people demanding a “strong leader” and baying for blood—someone’s
blood; anyone’s blood would do. Put Jane Fonda to death. Elect a good hard-line racist on an antitax ticket. As someone from the fringe of America’s colonial sphere, I was frightened a good deal more by this than by the Mississippi River.
Preoccupied, I rode the Dubuque pool without giving it a thought. I slipped, a little bumpily, from black buoy to black buoy. Only when I reached the lock gate above Dubuque did I remember the warning the lockmaster had given me back in Minneapolis. “That’s one of the worst pools, the Dubuque pool. She’s wide open, for as far as you can see …” From the entrance to the chamber, I looked back on a darkening spread of yellow scud and rough water; and I felt grateful to the bartender for having distracted me into this uncharacteristic outbreak of fearlessness.
A sociologist might have created Dubuque as an elementary model of a stratified society. A woman cabdriver took about three minutes to explain to me how the whole structure worked. “I’m nobody around here,” she’d said. “I come from the Flats.” The ‘Flats,’ down by the river, was where all the nobodies lived. North Side was German, and Germans were nobodies hoping to be somebodies; South Side was Irish, and the Irish were the nobody-nobodies. The cabdriver came from the Flats, South Side. Between the nobodies and the somebodies lay the four-block-thick cavity insulation of the business district. Then, as the bluffs began to rise steeply above the town, so the people and their houses grew more and more important. Right at the top of Dubuque life was Alpine, a rocky stratosphere of mansions and ranch houses.
“How do you get out of the Flats and up to Alpine?”
“You don’t. You take a ride up there by cab, and then you come all the way down again.”
Perhaps it was the robust simplicity of this way of arranging life that had endeared Dubuque to Al Capone. He liked plain pyramids, and Dubuque had been a favorite retreat of his. According to the cabdriver, he’d rented the third floor of the Julien Hotel by the year; and when things got uncomfortably warm for him in Chicago, he’d brought his court to Dubuque, a three-hour drive by fast car at night. There were stories that he’d also maintained an underground hideout, accessible only by boat, somewhere in the tangle of islands in Dead Man’s Slough. No one I talked to later would exactly confirm, or exactly deny, any of this. I suspected that Dubuque people had spent rather too much time on feeding and watering the legend of Capone’s association with their town. The suggestion of romantic thuggery had helped to make up for the famous slight to the reputation of Dubuque that was
made in 1925 by Harold Ross. When he defined
The New Yorker
, he said it was
not
a magazine for “the old lady in Dubuque.” The town’s response had been to hint that that was no old lady; that was a Mafioso in drag.
There was nothing gangsterish about the Julien Hotel now. It was a red-brick giant, clinging to what was left of its gentility by its fingernails. I didn’t mind its drafts and cobwebs. I liked its creaking elevator cages. For sixteen dollars I got myself a room on Capone’s floor, with a bath, a telephone and a laundry service. When the plump waitress in braids, with a brace on her top teeth, suddenly broke off her routine, one-word inquiry about
Hashrownsmashbakemericanorfrenchfries?
to point at my copy of John Updike’s
Pigeon Feathers
and say
Hesagudorthor
, I decided to lay up in the Julien for a day or two. I hadn’t had a literary conversation for ages. I asked the waitress what else she’d read by Updike.
“Oh, I dunno …
Couplesnrabbitreduxnmarrymenmonthofsundays … nsuch.
” The trouble was that too much waiting on tables had turned books into kinds of potato too. She had an Iowa voice, with a high abrasive rattle of silica sand in every syllable.
“How on earth do you learn to talk so fast?”
“I dunno.
Guessitskindajustthewaymymindclicks.
”
She was too quick for me. Feeling pleasantly lonely, I wandered out onto Main Street. It had fallen into the deep, vacant sleep which, each night, possesses only American cities of a certain size. Nothing moves. You mistake leaves guttering on the sidewalks for rats. The noise of a distant bar carries halfway across town. Digital display signs outside the banks go through their monotonous retelling of time and temperature, as if they were being pestered by an idiot child. Electric gas lamps on the new brick shopping mall light up benches on which no one sits and trash cans that were emptied at dusk. One by one, the waxwork theaters of the illuminated storefronts are switched off by automatic clocks, and you are left with only the faint splashing sound of cars going by, miles out west, on the Interstate Highway. It is a moment when you suspect that you are the one person who hasn’t been told about the disaster which has hit the place like plague.
I stood in front of a window display of colored plaster busts of Elvis Presley until it went out. I crossed the street to another lighted window: it was full of animals. Stuffed racoons, stuffed fish, stuffed coyotes,
FOR YOUR TROPHY ROOM
… I copied down the name and phone number of the taxidermist. In the last few weeks, I had seen so many lacquered corpses in glass cases that I now accepted them as inevitable bits of furniture, like ashtrays and table lamps. In this part of the country
taxidermy seemed as much a part of everyday culture as psychoanalysis in Manhattan. I’d heard people talking about “my taxidermist …”; and I decided that I too had reached the point in life when I ought to see a taxidermist.
In the meantime, I found a singles bar. The best that one could say about it was that, unlike its counterparts in Boston and New York which I’d visited briefly and miserably years before, it made no pretense of being anything else. It was a singles bar: loud, gloomy, tense with unshared and unallayable sexual frustration. The singles looked as if they belonged nowhere. They certainly hadn’t come from the Flats, or from Alpine. Their dress-to-kill leisure gear hung stiffly on their bodies, as if it were taken out of the closet only on very rare occasions. No one was under thirty. Everyone had run to fat and worse. I could see no face with a glimmer of humor in it. The smiles were glued on, and tired lust showed through every one.
I tried to read Updike and happened on a story in which a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford finds himself in a cinema watching a Doris Day movie set in a Hollywood mock-up of a Midwestern small town. The man comes from the East, not the Midwest. He sees the tacky artifice with which the filmmaker has sentimentally recast down-home America. Yet he discovers that he is weeping over his own real exile. The image fascinated me. I could place that moment exactly in my own life. It had been February 1972, and I’d cried in a poky little movie house in Northampton, Massachusetts, watching, of all things, Twiggy in
The Boy Friend
, for just the same reasons, and with the same qualifications, as Updike’s hero. I wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or sad that eight years on, even a singles bar in Dubuque couldn’t raise a homesick tear.
“Hi, my name’s Ellie.”
Ellie combined in her person all the reasons why, in my right mind, I should never have sought out a singles bar. She was thirty-five, thirty-six, and looked as if she’d devoted most of her life to ice cream and chocolate-chips. Her frilly pink blouse might have looked party-sweet on a slender ten-year-old. On Ellie it just looked a terrible mistake. She had put on a squeaky baby voice, but it was fogged with bourbon-and-cola.
“You like to dance? My mother … she always said … I couldn’t dance … ’cause my butt was too big.…” She laughed unhappily, and waited for me to contradict her mother. I couldn’t.