Part 14 (1/2)

”They smell the natural gas,” Wayne says. ”Pipeline companies use them to find leaks.”

Somewhere around Tatum, the radio quits. The cigarette lighter, where we plug in the recharger for the computer, has also gone dead, and the left turn-signal light is clicking in double time.

At Weatherford, just outside Fort Worth, we stop at a Toyota dealers.h.i.+p. The service bay is empty, immaculate. It looks as though the place was just built and hasn't opened yet. As soon as we pull in, however, a cl.u.s.ter of mechanics surrounds the car like sharks around a bucket of chum. The flickering turn signal is a loose connection; the silent radio and dead lighter socket are a burnt fuse. A lanky boy who looks as if he could be Lyle Lovett's son fixes both.

”Where y'all headed?” he asks.

We tell him we're going to get on the interstate that skirts Fort Worth and Dallas, then pick up Highway 80 on the other side.

”Just you wait, we'll pull y'all up a map.”

By the time we get to the service desk, the four young men are huddled around the computer, as they had been around the car, trying to decide where we should go next. Lindale, says one. Caddo Lake, suggests another. Marshall, for sure.

”Naw,” Lyle Lovett's son says decisively. ”Jefferson. Girlfriend and me went there for the weekend a while back. Nice little town. Y'all have to go to Jefferson, Texas.” He prints us out a map.

We thank the men and ask how much we owe for the repairs. When I reach for my wallet, Lyle, Jr., holds up his hand.

”Nope. No charge. Y'all have a good trip and drive safe now.”

WEATHERFORD'S CLAIM to fame-and in the Internet age, every town, county, state, and person has to have one (Wayne tells me a Texas town voted in a beer-drinking goat as mayor in order to attract tourists, and it worked)-is that Abe Lincoln lived his last days there.

”I bet you thought he died after he was shot at Ford's Theatre. He was watching a play called Our American Cousin, did you know that?” I say to Wayne, who doesn't respond. ”But this says he was spirited away, his death staged so that he could escape the burdens of public office and a marriage gone bad. Apparently he was reincarnated in Texas as Alexander 'Billy Bob' Hamilton, who used to wander the streets of Weatherford quoting the Gettysburg Address and apologizing for the Civil War.”

”I wonder who we'll find in Jefferson,” Wayne says.

On the interstate, we drive under concrete overpa.s.ses and pa.s.s a sprawl of cookie-cutter houses that could be Mississauga or Calgary or Bayridge back home. Once past Dallas, we pick up US 80, a four-lane highway that takes us into the night, following the Sabine River, though we can't see it. We agree to stop at the first mom-and-pop we pa.s.s.

We pa.s.s none. In the main-street towns, huge churches are lit up, their parking lots full on a Wednesday night, billboards flas.h.i.+ng, inviting more into the fold.

We pa.s.s a small cottage with a sign: Lattes $199. Support our troops.

”Expensive coffee,” Wayne says.

”It's an expensive war,” I reply.

The truth is, we've seen few flags and even fewer yellow ribbons or b.u.mper stickers promoting the war in Iraq. I think of our trip to Princeton two years ago, when all the truck stops and restaurants, even the cars themselves, were festooned with the Stars and Stripes. The b.u.mpers here are oddly bare, not even the usual ”My wife, sure; my dog, maybe; my gun, never.”

By the time we get to Jefferson, the town is dark, but we know we've come to the right place. The main street is straight out of the mid-1800s, one beautifully restored building after another, framing a red-brick road.

We stop at the Jefferson Hotel. The door is locked; the parlour we glimpse through the window looks like a stage set for an Ibsen play. I knock. I am jabbing some obvious combinations into the security lock when a man with long hair, wearing a leather vest, comes up behind us. He is the spitting image of Lee Marvin.

”They lock that door at five o'clock,” he says. ”D'y'all have a key?”

”No, we're looking for a room,” we say in unison, like Hansel and Gretel, lost and hungry in the forest.

”Well, there's another hotel down the street. If that's full,” he says enigmatically, ”come back to my place and we'll set you up with some karaoke.”

Karaoke?

Fortunately, the Excelsior House, the hotel down the street, has a room, a large luxurious room with a four-poster canopied bed and a gla.s.sed-in sunroom with a red-tiled floor and white wicker furniture. The sunroom gives onto an interior courtyard where we can hear the splash and laugh of a fountain. We take it for two nights. I don't say a word about the price.

”Do you know what time the president is addressing the nation?” I ask the woman who checks us in. She's wearing a smart suit, expensive pumps, eighteen-karat jewellery. She can't be the night clerk, I think. We must have roused the manager.

”No, I don't,” she says with complete indifference. ”I'm reading a cookbook and watching a cooking show.” She s.h.i.+fts her eyes from page to screen, as if demonstrating a complicated manoeuvre.

Although we could have made it into Louisiana, we've decided to stay in Texas because it is George W. Bush's home state. Being here tonight will be like being in Cuba for the semifinals of the World Baseball Cla.s.sic. We imagine sitting among Americans, all eyes on the president as he outlines his plan to send another twenty thousand troops to Iraq. Will everyone cheer? I imagine cautioning Wayne to wipe the scorn off his face. I want to know what Americans think about their leader.

We stop at Lee Marvin's Internet cafe, thinking we can watch the address on his television while Wayne teaches. But no. ”Our server is down,” Marvin says apologetically. The television in the corner is resolutely tuned to a sitcom. ”I have no interest in the president's address,” he says, then goes on to add that Jefferson is the most haunted town in Texas. ”Spiritualists came here to verify that fact, and counted 150 ghosts in the downstairs of this establishment alone. Right where you're standing. The Excelsior, too,” he adds for good measure. ”Steven Spielberg stayed there once, and halfway through the night he got up and drove to Marshall, he was so spooked. What room y'all in?”

”Diamond Bessie's,” Wayne says.

”He was in the Jay Gould Room. The one y'all're in, that's more haunted than all the rest of 'em put together.”

We leave him to his sitcom before he remembers about the karaoke, and continue down Austin Street. The only other place open is Auntie Skinner's Riverboat Club, named, I presume, for the old Dixieland song ”Auntie Skinner's Chicken Dinners.” It really is a club: the waitress says we have to join if we want to be served alcohol.

”How much?” Wayne asks.

”It's free.”

I ask her if we get a members.h.i.+p card.

”No, you don't get anything, but without it, you don't get a drink.”

”Without what?” Wayne asks.

”Without you joining the club,” she says. ”It's like that pretty much everywhere in East Texas now. Y'all want to sit at the bar?”

The television above the bar is tuned to a basketball game that no one is watching. We take a table at the back, where Wayne can plug in his laptop.

”What time does the president come on?” I ask the waitress.

”Oh, I wouldn't know about that,” she says.

”We thought everyone would be watching.”

She screws up her pretty face and looks around. There is a birthday party under way at one long table; the others are occupied by people who look like locals, dressed in jeans, plaid s.h.i.+rts, and workboots. The men, too. No one is glued to a television screen.

”Honestly,” she says, leaning close, ”I don't think anybody in here would be much interested, if you know what I mean.”

After dinner we retire to our room and channel surf, looking for George W. We listen to the leader of the House and the leader of the Senate both bemoaning the lack of consultation, switch to a string of speeches in the Senate, find a Republican from Minnesota saying he'll never support increasing troops in Iraq, then a well-meaning Democrat reading his email into the record. Then suddenly there he is, with his too-narrow eyes and disappearing upper lip. The president looks scared. He is wearing a pale blue tie, as if he tried to look like a banker but the fabric faded in the glare of the television lights. Gone is the windbreaker of 9/11. This is the fourth year of the war: three thousand died last year alone.

”The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people,” he says. That much, at least, is true.

We are lying in bed in George's home state, apparently the only two people in town interested in what George W. Bush has to say. Not even two: Wayne has fallen asleep. I feel as if the little homunculus on the screen is talking to me and me alone. I reach over to turn out the light.

”Give it a rest, George,” I say, clicking the remote. ”n.o.body's listening.”

WACO, Texas, is in the morning papers. There's an army base in Waco, and troops interviewed there fully support George Bush's ”surge”-sending twenty thousand more soldiers to Iraq. To me, the town is better known as the scene of two horrific events: the ma.s.sacre of eighty-three Branch Davidians in 1993 and the brutal lynching of a black boy, Jesse Was.h.i.+ngton, in 1916. I guess I'm still feeling spooked by Albany. I've never been anywhere where racism is even acknowledged, let alone celebrated, where lynch mobs are such a proud part of the local heritage that reminders of them are etched in gla.s.s. What other Klan memorabilia is hidden away in trunks and closets along the Lynch Line, waiting for the call to be brought back to use? My father's unwillingness to inhabit his own skin is making more sense. Wouldn't it be easier to do what he did: pretend I'm as white as everyone thinks I am? It's what I did in Albany. It's what I'm doing in Jefferson.

Admittedly, Jefferson seems at first to be only nominally part of Texas. It sits at the tip of a long bayou that connects it to Louisiana: there is more of New Orleans in Jefferson than there is of Houston. The Excelsior has been in continuous operation since it opened in the 1850s. In fact, so little has changed in the hotel over the years that it is easy to imagine that the Civil War is still being fought or is only recently over and the news that the North won hasn't come up the bayou yet. Jefferson is a decidedly white town; the only blacks in evidence are either carrying rakes or pus.h.i.+ng trolleys heaped with hotel laundry.