Authors: Jonathan Raban
“You see my passport there? Now, look at it.”
“
You
get it,” Houma said. “I’m watching you, man.”
I picked it up and showed it to him.
“What is this shit?”
“It proves that I’m an English citizen. I’m a foreigner. I’m a visitor to this country.”
“It don’t prove fucking nothing—” The madness had gone out of his voice, though. Connecticut, feeling the tension slacken, came over to us again.
“He’s just a goddamn tourist, man—”
Houma took my packet of tobacco from the bar and sniffed at it. “Shit. Why you keeping it in this fucking stuff, man? You want to get yourself killed?” His voice had turned to a feeble whine. He was just a little runt with a knife in his belt and an addict’s jitters. “Okay … so I made a mistake. I was wrong, okay? Will you shake my hand, now?”
Absurdly, ceremonially, we shook hands.
“You’re my friend now, okay, man?” He tried to put his arm around my shoulder, but it didn’t quite reach. “You want another beer?”
“No, thanks.”
“Come on—you and me, we’ll shoot some pool, huh?”
“Okay.”
His cue trembled in his hands; my cue trembled in mine. The balls on the table went everywhere except into the pockets. When Houma shambled jerkily off to the men’s room, I fled the bar, and didn’t stop running until I reached my boat.
• • •
A single-engined seaplane was coming in to touch down on the Waterway, and I had to pull over to the dock where a fleet of little planes rocked on their pontoons. A pilot came across to talk: he had spotted the Wisconsin registration on my boat and wanted to know what it was doing so far from home.
“God, that’s something I’d like to do sometime. That’s just the kind of thing I’m into myself.”
He was a stranger here too. He had gone broke in the Florida Keys, flying a one-man passenger service. The day before, he had signed on as a pilot here, ferrying crewmen and supplies out to the drilling platforms offshore. He and his wife were living in a camper down the street. They had lost their house in Florida: Louisiana was their chance for a new start.
“So where are you going now?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. Morgan City, I think.”
“Morgan City? I heard that place is a
real
dump.”
“So did I.”
I pushed on up the waterway as it cut from bayou to bayou: Bayou Cocodrie … Bayou Chene … Bayou Boeuf. Ahead of the boat, the water was like jade; behind, it was roiling cocoa. Wherever there was a bump of high ground in the swamp, someone had built himself a shack with a muddy yard full of chickens, a dock, a tethered boat. One could live like Crusoe here. The income-tax man would have to paddle out in a canoe to collect his revenue in crawfish, alligator skins and the pelts of nutria rats; there’d be no mail, no telephone calls—just pelicans and vultures in the garden and the slow tidal swill of the water around one’s house. Louis Beauregard’s story of the froomids did correspond to something real: somewhere up the Bayou Capasaw or the Bayou Penchant there must be secret places where men have been living in hiding for years. I had heard rumors of a clandestine colony of Chinese shrimp fishermen who occupied a stilt city in the swamp and shot anyone curious enough to stumble on their hideout; the rumors weren’t wholly unbelievable, and the pilots of the seaplanes must often have noticed things that were best left uninvestigated.
The Bayou Boeuf opened into the estuary of the Atchafalaya River, and Morgan City was a ramshackle patchwork of low roofs squatting on the junction. I cruised along its beach looking for a place to land. On the edge of the estuary there was a fisherman’s jetty with two jonboats moored to its few remaining piles. I grounded on soft mud, and was met by an old man trailing a line of catfish hooks.
“What you want?”
“I wondered if I could tie up here for the night.”
“You could lose your boat. Nothing’s safe in this town.”
“Why’s that?”
“
Lot
of drifters about.”
He took in my scuffed cases with a glance of scornful recognition.
“Oh. Why do
they
come here?”
“Looking for work.” He looked at me again and gave an amused snort. “They don’t get none, though. It’ll cost you a dollar—”
“Fine.”
“In advance.”
Across the street there was a grocery with a pay phone. It took half an hour to raise a cab which was circling the town picking up passengers as it went along. The driver, a huge morose youth, introduced himself as Tiny; the elderly woman in the front seat was Miss Leonie.
“You new in town?” asked Miss Leonie.
“Yes, I’ve just arrived.”
“You come to the armpit of the world,” she said, making every vowel of the phrase last as long as it possibly could, like a particularly toothsome sweet.
We came to a scruffy little housing project, with piles of old clothes flapping in yards of unplanted sand. Tiny hooted, and a black teen-ager came out dressed in a sharp dude suit and wearing pink-framed glasses. He sat beside me. “Know what I’m going to do?” he said. “I’m gonna buy me a machine gun.”
“Why’s that?” Miss Leonie said. “What you want with a machine gun?”
“Climb to the top of the highest building in Morgan City …” He swiveled in his seat, holding an imaginary carbine and spraying us all with bullets. “Rat-a-tat-a-rat-a-tat-a-rat-a-tat-a-rat-a-tat-a …” He rolled back and laughed, holding his knees.
I had asked to be set down at the best motel in Morgan City. This had driven Miss Leonie into a cigaretty coughing fit.
“
Best
motel in Morgan City? You ain’t asking much, are you, mister?”
“Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a …”
In the event, I was set down by a cluster of peeling cabins grouped around a courtyard with a dead banana plant in the middle. I was given a key to a room with a bare concrete floor. The sheets on the bed looked slept in; the single blanket was riddled with burns and stains. The floral shower curtain was cracked on every fold. I went back to the motel office to talk to two identically fat girls in tight stretch pants and Hawaiian blouses.
“Haven’t you got a better room than that? One with a bath?”
“They don’t none of them have
baths.
”
“It’s about the worst motel room I’ve ever seen.”
“Oh, it ain’t
good
. Ain’t no worse than none of the others, though.”
“Is there another motel in town where I could find a better room?”
“Nope. The rest of them, they’re
worse.
”
“Jesus.” I was deeply impressed by Morgan City’s pride in its own scabbiness. “What do people
do
in Morgan City?” I asked.
“Fight. Get drunk. Pick up women.”
“You can get rolled around here,” said the other girl tentatively, picking at a speck on her scarlet-panted buttock.
I wasn’t sure whether “rolled” meant mugged or laid.
“I don’t think I much want to get rolled.”
“Okay,” she said.
I went for a long walk around the town. It had a certain repetitious charm, since it consisted of acre after acre of exactly the same house. Half a dozen rough brick platforms, eighteen inches high, supported a shack with a corrugated-iron roof, a veranda draped in torn screening, a single, gray Grecian column made of wood, a broken rocker and a faded blue statue of the Virgin on the doorstep. There were many more cats than people on the streets, and the cats had the same glandular fattiness as the girls at the motel. They grazed on the little heaps of garbage that stood in front of almost every house, spilling appetizingly from leaky bags.
Three miles later I was back to where I’d started, on Brashear Avenue, which was as near as Morgan City seemed to come to possessing a Main Street. In the middle of the road there was one of the most arresting exercises in civic statuary that I had ever seen. It was called
The Spirit of Morgan City
and had been molded in some kind of lividly colored fiberglass. A life-size shrimp boat was in collision with something that at first I took to be the Eiffel Tower, but later decided was meant to be an offshore oil rig. The hideous glory of this marvel had been a little softened for Christmas: it had been wrapped up in tinsel ropes, stars and bangles, as if Morgan City were thinking of mailing it to someone as a surprise gift.
One building in Morgan City didn’t fit at all. On the far side of the street beyond a high wall and a row of trees, a colonnaded mansion with a texas-deck front looked out over the Atchafalaya River. The rest of the town barely came up to the windows of its ground floor. This sugar planter’s castle had once been all there was of Morgan City; now it was loftily marooned in a cheerful slum, so grand and tall that
its owner might never have noticed the steady encroachment of the shantytown around his feet. From his bedroom, he could probably see clear across to Texas and halfway down to Mexico; with luck, he might not even yet have set his eyes on Morgan City. Perhaps he took its tin roofs for a widening of the river and was wondering whether, granted this addition of a paddy field to his plantation, he might change from sugar cane to rice.
The bars on Front Street looked like places where I was certain to be ringed as a federal narcotics agent. I walked away up Brashear Avenue, searching for somewhere a little more salubrious, and ended up in a lounge crowded with other, bewildered strangers musing on their exile in Morgan City.
“What’s
happening
here? I don’t get it. I come from Chicago. In Illinois, or Missouri, you never see a dead dog on the highway. Here in Louisiana, Christ, you see more dead dogs than you can shake a stick at. What’s happening? People here, they go out of their way to run a dog down. It’s a goddamn sport!”
“Yeah, I’m from Tennessee. You don’t see none of that there neither.”
“Hell, when we was kids, we used to break off a car’s antenna, make a zip gun out of it. But now it’s
senseless
. Here, they take your antenna, no reason. Shoot! That’s thirty-nine bucks!”
“But them dogs on the highway … Who are these people? People who’ll kill a guy’s dog just for fun … I never seen anything so crazy, not till I came down to Louisiana.”
“Me neither.”
Me neither.
The morning was a wide-open door, the sky empty except for a single violet-edged cloud in the far north. I took the boat across Bayou Boeuf and into the seaward neck of Bayou Shaffer, sliding past gleaming mud flats and reedbeds where the tide sucked and whispered in the grasses. Ahead, the color of the water ran from streaky green into an even blue.
It was rich water. Dark with peat, thickened with salt, it was like warm soup. When the first things crawled out of the water, they must have come from a swamp like this one, gingerly testing the mud with their new legs. I trailed my hand over the gunwale and licked my wet forefinger. It tasted of sea.
If the man at Lockport was right, there should be alligators still awake out on these salt flats. If there were, they weren’t showing themselves. I made a slow circle around an inlet, watching for something to
move on the bank. I took an oar and prodded at a bank of mud. It was as soft and greasy as black butter, and the oar went in as far as my hand. There was no alligator there.
Ain’t nothing
.
I had crossed, or thought I’d crossed, the line from green to blue.
I turned the motor off and let the boat drift out on the tide for a while, then pointed the bow back, in the same dumb, urban direction that the armadillos set their noses.
M
r. John Tuzee
, of M.G.I., Cleveland, Wisconsin, took a kindly interest in my trip from the moment I proposed it. Had it not been for his help, the journey would have been far harder and more expensive to set up. He arranged for me to borrow a 16-foot Mirrocraft from the manufacturer; also a 15-horsepower Johnson outboard motor. Both boat and motor survived my amateurish maltreatment of them—a powerful tribute to their sturdiness and reliability. The boat was rigged by Herb Heichert, of Crystal Marine, Minneapolis, whose handiwork is admired elsewhere in the book.
Along the river, I met with so much hospitality from strangers that even a page-long list of their names would be invidious in its omissions. Some are recorded in the text; many others are not. I am grateful to them all.
I have been immensely lucky in having two editors, Jonathan Coleman in New York and Christopher MacLehose in London, who have done far more than any word like “encouragement” can reasonably convey. Coleman saw this book through from the start; MacLehose helped me to get it finished. For cheering transatlantic phone calls, for tactful silences, for supper, for jokes, for indecipherable postcards and for a tremendous amount of critical reading and deft editorial work, I am up to my eyes in debt to them both.
J.R.
BAD LAND
An American Romance
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders—many of them immigrants—went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In
Bad Land
, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Travel/United States/978-0-679-75906-5
HUNTING MISTER HEARTBREAK
A Discovery of America
In 1782 an immigrant named J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur— “Heartbreak” in English—wrote a pioneering account of one European’s transformation into an American. Some two hundred years later, Jonathan Raban arrived in Crèvecoeur’s wake to see how America has paid off for succeeding generations of newcomers. The result is an exhilarating, deliciously funny book that is at once a travelogue, a social history, and a love letter to the United States.