"The Platte!" I gasped.
"None other," Leeds said.
"That"s the sorriest river in America. You"ve heard all the jokes about the Platte. "Too thick to drink, too thin to plow." That"s a nothing river."
"That"s why we chose it," Leeds said.
Miss Endermann broke in. "We specifically wanted to avoid notorious places like St. Joseph, one of my favorite cities on earth, because it would be too easy to do. A great deal of American history was drab, just as you said now-a nothing river, "a mile wide and an inch deep." "
"We reasoned, and properly so I"m convinced," Ringold said, "that if we can make the Platte comprehensible to Americans, we can inspire them with the meaning of this continent. And G.o.dd.a.m.nit, that"s what we"re going to do. We"ll leave the drums and bugles and flying eagles to others. We are going to dive into the heart of that lousy river ..." He stopped in embarra.s.sment. Obviously, the editors of US had made a major commitment to the Platte, and I respected their enthusiasm.
"I understand your approach," I said. "Now you have to understand that I can"t be expected to be a world authority on the Platte. I know about its settlement, its Indians, its irrigation-the general things. But I must not pose as an expert."
"We know that," Miss Endermann said eagerly. "We want you for what you have been, not for what you are. You can immerse yourself in this subject within a week."
"That"s true," I said. "I"ve already reconnoitered the North Platte twice in connection with the Oregon Trail. I know most of the sites along the North Platte, know them well."
Harry Leeds broke in: "What we had in mind was the South Platte."
"Good G.o.d!" I couldn"t help myself. The South Platte was the most miserable river in the west, a trickle in summer when its water was needed, a raging torrent in spring. It was muddy, often more island than river, and prior to the introduction of irrigation, it had never served a single useful purpose in its halting career. I couldn"t think of even one town situated on the South Platte. Yes, there was Julesburg-most evil town along the railroad-burnt by Indians in 1866 or thereabouts.
Then I remembered. "There is Denver," I said lamely, "but if you didn"t want a major river, I"m sure you don"t want a major city. It isn"t Denver, is it?"
Miss Endermann answered my rhetorical question: "Have you ever heard of Centennial, Colorado?"
For some moments I racked my brain, and from somewhere a tag-end piece of information such as scholars earmark for possible future use surfaced. "Centennial. Am I wrong in thinking that it had another name? Didn"t they change it in 1876 ... to honor Colorado"s entrance into the Union? What was the old name? Rather well known in early chronicles, seems to me. Was it Zendt"s Farm?"
"It was," Miss Endermann said.
"You know, I can"t recall a single fact about Zendt"s Farm. Gentlemen, I am not well versed in your chosen subject. Sorry."
I a.s.sumed that this was the end of the interview, but I a.s.sumed wrong. "It"s for that reason we want you," Ringold said. "Listening to your non-faked reactions to a town you never heard of and a river you despise convinces me that you"re precisely the man we want. The job"s yours if you want it, and we"re d.a.m.ned lucky to find you."
With that he ushered us from his office, instructing Harry Leeds to go over details with me and bring the crowd to Toots Shor"s for lunch at twelve sharp. "We"ll discuss money then," he said, "but so far as I"m concerned, you"re hired, unless your fee is unspeakable."
Four of us went to Harry Leeds" office, where gigantic photographic blowups of George Catlin"s paintings of Indians adorned the walls. "My tipi," he said.
We discussed how I would work. I would drive to Centennial as soon as my cla.s.ses ended, establish contacts with the Denver Public Library, which was some fifty miles away, introduce myself to the faculties at Greeley, Fort Collins and Boulder, and prepare research reports on what had actually happened at Centennial during its history, which had started only in 1844 with the arrival of Zendt and one of the mountain men.
"I might want to go further back," I suggested.
"The Spanish never settled that far north," Wright said, "and the French never settled that far south. Lewis and Clark ignored the Platte altogether. We can start safely with Zendt in 1844."
I was not to bother about literary style. I was writing neither a doctoral thesis nor a novel. I was simply submitting arbitrarily selected insights as to the character and background of Centennial and its settlers, and I could depend upon the home office to polish whatever segments they might want to publish.
"And regardless of what fee you and Ringold agree upon," Wright a.s.sured me, "we want you to purchase whatever maps, agricultural studies, reports you need-you name it."
"We would want you to send them back at the end of the study," Leeds said.
"How much do you expect me to write?" I asked, still not clear as to the creative relationships.
"By Christmas, a fairly complete reaction to the site."
"Usually I spend that much time on a chapter," I said. "There"s a h.e.l.l of a lot of first-cla.s.s work been done on the west by some very good men, and I"m not going to presume ..."
"Vernor," young Wright explained patiently, "we are not hiring you to do a research study on the sugar-beet industry of the South Platte. We are hiring you as a sensitive, intelligent man, and all we want from you are some letters which share with us your understanding of what transpired at Centennial, Colorado, between the years 1844 and 1974. Just write us some letters, as if we were your friends ... your interested friends."
The other two agreed that that was exactly what they wanted, and we went off to lunch fairly satisfied that the project would work, but at Toots Shor"s, a restaurant I had not visited before, I was to receive a series of shocks which altered the whole prospect.
As we entered the restaurant the proprietor, a large man, ambled over to Harry Leeds and shouted, "h.e.l.lo, you miserable son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h, haven"t they fired you yet?"
Leeds took this in stride, and Shor turned to me, grabbing me by the collar. "Don"t let this crumb.u.m talk you into doing his dirty work. He"s known as the literary pimp of Sixth Avenue." With that he showed us to our table, where James Ringold was waiting.
"He"s dead drunk already," Shor warned me. "How this stumbleb.u.m keeps that magazine goin", I"ll never know."
With that he departed, and Ringold asked Leeds, "All settled?"
"All settled," Leeds said. "We couldn"t be happier, right?" He addressed this question to Wright and Endermann, and they nodded.
"Then it"s simply a matter of money. Use your car and we"ll pay twelve cents a mile. We"ll pay your hotel bills, but we do not expect you to take a suite at the Brown Palace. Don"t be alarmed if board and keep run a hundred and seventy dollars a week. You can travel as required but you cannot rent airplanes, road graders or dog sleds. Under no circ.u.mstances are you ever to be out a penny of your own money, except for wh.o.r.ehouses. We do, however, expect itemized expense sheets, and we pay out money only when they are verified." I was accustomed to asking Dean Rivers if I might have thirty dollars for a new atlas. This. .h.i.t me so fast that I simply could not digest the details, but I noticed that young Wright was taking note of everything. "He"ll send you a copy," Ringold a.s.sured me.
"Now as to fee," he said, "you"re a top professor in Georgia. You"re worth a lot of money, and I"m sure they don"t pay you according to your worth. I"m not going to haggle. We"re asking two quarters of your time, half a year"s salary. We"ll give you eighteen thousand dollars."
I could have fainted. After I had sipped a little consomme I said something which led to my next shock. I said, "Mr. Ringold, that"s generous pay and you know it. But if you"re gambling so much on this special issue, what if I get sick? Can"t provide the ma.n.u.script?"
He looked at me in amazement. "Haven"t you told him?" he asked Leeds.
"Never occurred to me," Leeds said, and the other two shrugged their shoulders as if it had slipped their minds too.
"Vernor," Ringold said expansively, "we have the article already written-every word of it. Ill.u.s.trations and maps are well started. We could go to press next week. All we want from you is a.s.surance that we"re on the right track."
This information staggered me. I was being hired to write not a polished article which would appear under my name, but merely a house report to back up something already completed, a report which might never be published and might not even be used. When the article appeared, a sleazy job at best, there would be this byline: "Prepared with the a.s.sistance of Professor Lewis Vernor, Department of History, Georgia Baptist." I was being bought, for a good price ... but I was being bought.
The food went sour and my disappointment must have shown, for Ringold said, rea.s.suringly, "We always work this way, Vernor. We work like demons month after month on a project ... best writers in America ... but at the end we always want someone with real brains to vet the d.a.m.ned thing. That"s why we stay in business-facts are important to us, but understandings are vital. We inject a very high percentage of understandings in our rag and we"re asking you to help us on our next big project."
My vanity was destroyed and my intellectual integrity humiliated. "I think this lunch is over, gentlemen," I said. I tried to rephrase the sentence so as to include Miss Endermann, and loused things up.
It was young Wright who faced up to the debacle. "I"m going to make a suggestion. Professor Vernor, as you must know, Mr. Ringold"s offer was most generous. I handle these things all the time and I can a.s.sure you we would not hesitate to offer Arthur Schlesinger such a deal. We made such a generous offer because we respect you. You thought you were writing an article for us. I understand your confusion. Let me suggest this. Go out to Centennial. Carol"s already cased the joint. She"ll go with you to see if you respond the way she did. We"ll pay someone to take your cla.s.ses. You can leave tomorrow. Better still, leave tonight. And if you decide to join us, when your report is finished, you"ll be free to publish it under your own name-maybe as a book. Six months after our publication the property becomes yours."
"That"s a d.a.m.ned good idea, Wright," Ringold said. "That"s exactly what we"ll do. Vernor, can you fly out to Centennial this afternoon? There"s a United plane at three."
"I"d have to ask President Rexford."
"Get him on the phone. Toots! You got a phone there?"
For the first time in my life a waiter brought a phone to my table, curling the long black wire across my chair. In a moment I was speaking with President Rexford, but I had barely introduced myself when Ringold took the phone. "Rexford? Sure I remember you. The Baptist Committee, that"s right. We want to borrow your bright boy for one week. We"ll pay three hundred dollars for some graduate student to cover for him. Is that a deal?" There was some conversation, after which Ringold handed me the phone. "He wants to talk with you."
"h.e.l.lo, Vernor? Is the project germane to Oregon?"
"Totally. But it"s not what we thought at all. I"d just be doing legwork for background stuff."
"Could it lead to anything substantial?"
"Yes. It"s work I would have to do later."
"Do they pay well?"
"Very."
"Take it. Fly out to Colorado tonight. Professor Hisken could use the three hundred dollars and we"ll forget the graduate student."
So that afternoon at three Miss Endermann and I boarded the jet for Denver, and because of the time difference we arrived there at four. She hired a car, and while it was still light we drove north. To the west rose the n.o.ble Rockies, to the east stretched the prairies, mile upon mile of treeless land. At the end of an hour I saw the sight which had been familiar to all travelers westward, a line of scrawny, limb-broken cottonwoods.
"There"s the Platte," I said, and we entered upon a small north-south road which took us down to the river, one of the strangest in the world. It was quite wide, several hundred yards perhaps, but most of the width was taken up with islands, sand bars, rocks and stumps of trees. Where was the water? There was a little here, some over there, but the spring floods had not yet broken loose, and it was all a stagnant muddy brown. Its princ.i.p.al product seemed to be gravel, endless supplies of gravel waiting to be hauled away by trucks which lined the bank.
Across the Platte lay the little town of Centennial. The sign told the whole story: CENTENNIAL.
COLORADO.
Elev. 4618 Pop. 2618 When we turned right into the one-way circle that took us across the Union Pacific tracks and into town, I heard someone shouting, "Hey! It"s Carol!" and I looked over to see a black man standing before a barbershop.
"Nate!" Carol called. "How about Mexican food tonight?"
"Like always," he called back. "Eight?"
We pulled in behind the barbershop and parked where a sign said that if we did not intend to register at the Railway House, our car would be towed away at a cost of twenty-five dollars. The bellman who came out to greet us recognized Carol, and they too had a reunion.
"I wanted you to stay here, right by the railroad, in order to catch the old flavor," she explained as we registered, and this was prudent judgment, because everything about the place was old: the smell, the carpets, the uniform of the bellman and my room. But it was likable. Men traveling from one Colorado town to another in times past had climbed down from the Union Pacific and lodged here, and for a historian they had left memories.
At quarter to eight I met Miss Endermann in the lobby and she took me out onto Prairie-not Prairie Street or Avenue or Boulevard. Just Prairie.
"If you"re like me," she said, "you orient yourself properly at the start. Well, Prairie runs due north and south. The center of town is where Prairie and Mountain cross, because Mountain runs due east and west. We"ll walk there."
We went to the intersection, and she said, "It all starts from here. West to the Rockies. East to Omaha. South to Denver. North to Cheyenne. Streets begin at the east and run by number up to Tenth Street. Avenues begin at the railroad and run north to Ninth Avenue. It"s well laid out."
We turned east on Mountain and walked four blocks to a noisy restaurant called Flor de Mejico, and there again we were warmly greeted, this time by a robust Mexican introduced to me as Manolo Marquez. "We knew you"d be back," he told Miss Endermann. "Tonight the best in the house, on me."
He showed us to a table covered by a red-checkered cloth and a well-greased menu which Miss Endermann told me had been invariable for the past five years. "I hope you like Mexican food," she said.
"It"s not common in Georgia."
"We"ll introduce him to it, Manolo," she cried. "Three plates, with a sample of everything. And some Coors beer." She asked if I knew this Colorado beer, and I said no. "With Mexican food it"s sort of heaven," she a.s.sured me.
The door opened and the black man I had seen on the street entered and came to our table. Miss Endermann kissed him, then said, "This is my friend and counselor, Nate Person. Not only a good barber but a sagacious one. He knows where the bodies are buried."
Person, a gray-templed man in his fifties, asked where I was from, and when I said Georgia he laughed. "That"s a state not high on my list."
"It"s getting better," I a.s.sured him.
"High time," he said evenly.
"You must tell him everything you told me," Miss Endermann said, and Nate nodded.
I suppose it was a good dinner, but the items that faced me were so unlike what I was accustomed to in Georgia that it all tasted like a hot jumble. "The toasted thing is a taco," Miss Endermann explained. To me it was more like French-fried cardboard, and the enchilada and tamale seemed so nearly identical that I never did discover which was which. The stuffed pepper, called a chili relleno, was mostly fried cheese, but the salad was great. So was the small gla.s.s of pomegranate juice. And the Coors beer was, as she had predicted, "as light as a cupful of mountain water."
After we had finished the dinner, which Miss Endermann and Person gulped as if they hadn"t eaten in weeks, I began to experience the most pleasing sensation. It was as if my stomach were in harmony with the world. "That must have been pretty good food," I said. "Tastes better now than it did going down."
"Join the club," Miss Endermann said. "Nate, remember that first time you made me try it? Thought I"d die."
There was a commotion at the door and Marquez hurried over to greet a tall, gangling westerner who had slouched in. He wore a cowboy hat, a bandanna and crooked-heel boots with fancy spurs. He was what western writers call a "lean, mean hombre," but he moved with an easy grace and made himself at home wherever he was.
He came directly to our table, where he grabbed Miss Endermann, pulled her to her feet and kissed her.
"Cisco!" she cried. "This is too much. I thought you were in Chicago."
"I was. Got back Monday. Heard you were in town. Knew I"d find you here."
She introduced him to me as Cisco Calendar, and he let me know at once that he didn"t think much of me. He turned a chair around and straddled it, resting his chin on the back. "Good to see you," he said to Carol. He spoke elliptically and kept his half-savage face close to hers.
It was obvious that he intended getting Miss Endermann off by himself, and it was just as obvious that she wished it that way, so after a few uneasy moments he said, "Got the car out here. Wanta take a spin?" She did, and that was the last I saw of this angular, aggressive cowboy.
In the morning Miss Endermann said, "If you"re up to it after the Mexican food, let"s reconnoiter." She drove me up and down the two main streets until my bearings were set. She then took me to the plush northwest segment: "The Skimmerhorns, the Wendells, the Garretts. Those are the names that count." In the northeast sector, where the homes were noticeably poorer, she said, "Zendt"s Farm, which started it all, and down here, the original Wendell place. There was a great scandal about it, and you"ll want to look into that."
As we pa.s.sed the Flor de Mejico in the southeast, she said, "That"s where we ate last night. Down here by the tracks is where Manolo Marquez lives, and along here is Nate Person"s barbershop, where we came into town yesterday." In the remaining sector, the southwest, there was not much: along the tracks the ramshackle home of Cisco Calendar. "He could afford much better, of course, but that"s where his family has always lived."
That was Centennial, at least the part I would be concerned with. "Not quite," Miss Endermann said. "Two more localities, and they loom large." And she drove me north on Prairie and well up toward the Wyoming line, where I saw something which astonished me: a ma.s.sive castle complete with spires and donjon.
"It"s Venneford," she said. "All the land we"ll be on today, and millions of acres more, once belonged to Earl Venneford of Wye. Greatest cattle ranch in the west."
"Does the n.o.ble earl figure in my story?"
"Not unless you want him to," she said. "But what we see next is the heart of your story."
And she drove me east onto dry land such as I had never before seen, bleak and desolate, and at the top of a rise she stopped the car and said, "This is how they found it. A vast emptiness. Nothing has changed in a million years."
In no direction could I see any sign that man had ever tried to occupy this enormous land-no house, no trail, not even a fence post. It was empty and majestic, the great prairie of the west.
Miss Endermann interrupted my reflections with a promise: "When we reach the top of that next hill you"ll see something memorable."
She was right. As we climbed upward through the desolate waste, we reached an elevation from which I looked down upon a compelling sight, one that would preoccupy me for the next half year. It was a village, Line Camp, she said, and once it had flourished, for a tall grain silo remained, but now it was deserted, its shutters banging, its windows knocked in.
We drove slowly, as if in a funeral procession, through the once busy streets marked only by gaping foundation holes where stores and a church had stood. We found only devastation, gray boards falling loose, school desks ripped from their moorings. Somehow I must make the boards divulge their story, but now only hawks visited Line Camp and the stories were forgotten.
Two buildings survived, a substantial stone barn and across from it a low stone edifice to whose door came a very old man to stare at us.
"The only survivor," Miss Endermann said, and as we watched, even he disappeared.
"What happened?" I asked.