Then Morgan had looked at his birthday watch and said, “It’ll be pulling out of La Salle about now,” and they left the river and stationed themselves as close to the railroad tracks as possible.
In the west they heard the purring of a giant cat, the swift movement of some immense creature across the prairie. It was like nothing they had heard before, a singing rush of air. and Morgan called, “Paul! Here it comes!”
It was the City of Denver, that majestic gold-and-silver streamliner that left Denver each afternoon at four-fifteen, speeding almost nonstop to Chicago. It bore down upon them, its mighty engines humming. It had been built without a single protrusion—a sleek, perfect thing. Its thirty cars could not be differentiated, for flexible doors enclosed what in former days had been open space between them. This humming. lovely thing moved as a unit, swift and unbelievably quiet.
“Oh!” Morgan whispered as it bore down upon him, ninety miles an hour, a flashing drift of gold on its way to Chicago. He sighed as the last car leaped onward, vanishing in the distance.
It was the finest train that had ever run, a marvel of grace and utility. But it had dominated the prairie only briefly. It was the most civilized form of travel thus far devised, but after less than three decades its elegance was no longer appreciated and now it gathered rust.
Garrett stared across the silent tracks and saw, on the far side of the Platte, automobiles whizzing by in one unbroken chain, filled with men and women who had left Omaha that morning and who would sleep in Denver that night, ghosts of the Interstate, most of them zombies who set their speed at ninety and ignored all of America except the big cities, where tonight’s motel was totally indistinguishable from last night’s.
“Look at the stupid bastards,” he said to no one. “They haven’t even seen Grand Island, where the rivers join, or Ogalalla, where the cowboys rioted, or Julesburg, where a third of a million emigrants swam the Platte ...” He stayed for some minutes watching the unceasing flight down the Interstate. Soon the drivers would be safe in Denver, and each year that city would grow larger, uglier and less congenial.
“Those bastards would be afraid to detour for an hour at Line Camp.” he mused. “Afraid to see American history staring at them.” And he knew that with the continuing exodus, one day soon Centennial would become the next ghost town. Kicking at the rotting boards of the veranda, he said gloomily. “Well we’ve had a good hundred years. Perhaps another hundred years from now people with sense will start coming back to these towns.”
About nine that night Cisco Calendar was told by friends that Paul Garrett was sloppy drunk in the Railway Arms, so he called me and we took charge. We led Garrett unsteadily to Flor de Méjico, where we forced him to eat a chili-size—toasted bun, hamburger with onions, all smothered in hot chili beans and covered with melted cheese—after which Garrett sobered a little and asked Cisco to sing “Buffalo Skinner.”
“Don’t have my guitar,” Cisco said.
“Get the damned thing.” Garrett said, and a boy was sent to fetch it. Then the diners quietened as Cisco sang of Jacksboro, Texas, in the spring of 1873. He sang many other songs, so aching with the memory of the west that Garrett lowered his head on the table, lest his neighbors see his reddened eyes.
After a while Cisco put the guitar aside and told Garrett, “I know how you feel, Paul. I could live anywhere in America ... anywhere in the world, I suppose. All I need is my guitar and a Sears Roebuck catalogue for buyin’ a new pair of jeans now and then. But I keep livin’ in that old clapboard house my grandpappy built. You know why?
“A man needs roots. Specially a singin’ man tryin’ to catch at the heart of people. He needs to know where his pappy worked and which families his mom did washin’ for. When he walks down the street it’s got to be his street. The rootless guys I sing about are interestin’ only if they’ve lost one place and are lookin’ for another. Like they say, Paul, a man springs from the soil but he don’t spring far.
“I live in Centennial because at night, when I’m through workin’ I can jump into my pickup and be up in the Rockies inside of an hour—pitch my tent in Blue Valley up beyond the crud, beside a real stream of water, and wake up with trees in my eyes, and maybe in the high country an elk starin’ at me. Paul, that’s somethin’—that is truly somethin’.
“But what I like even better, I head the pickup east and in fifteen minutes I’m lost on the prairie with nothin’, absolutely nothin’, visible to the horizon except maybe a jet airplane thirty thousand feet high streamin’ from New York to L.A. I pitch my tent the way men been doin’ out there for ten thousand years. And when you do that you are alone ... Man, are you alone! And somethin’ seeps into your soul you simply can’t pick up in Chicago or Dallas.
“I live in Centennial because it’s maybe the best spot in America ... could even be the best remainin’ spot on earth.”
“Could be,” Garrett said. “It damn well could be.”
THE END.
About the Author
JAMES A. MICHENER was born in New York City in 1907. He was graduated summa cum laude from Swarthmore College and did research work at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, Ohio State University, Harvard, the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), and the University of Siena (Italy). He taught at the George School (Pa.), Colorado State College, and Harvard. Mr. Michener skyrocketed to fame with his first book, TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC, which won the Pulitzer Prize and became the basis of the musical, “South Pacific.”
James A. Michener, Centennial
(Series: # )
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