William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

“Tallapoosa city limit. Welcome. City of Tallapoosa. Please obey all ordinances. Population 2,869. Drive carefully.” City of Tallapoosa?

The day was hot and the sky cloudless. Soon, on either side of the road, were small wooden bungalows with porches carrying the usual freight of azaleas. At first it all looked too pretty. Then there was a grain silo — a silver cigar — and the houses seemed to fall away as the road climbed quite steeply. Then you hit the brow of the hill and it turns into the main street.

The road is straight. For a hundred yards it runs alongside railway-tracks. A railroad running smack through the centre of town, freight trains passing cars in the main street. It looked very strange. I parked the car and got out. Across the tracks was a wide tarmacked area that fronted a modest mall of shops — flat-fronted, two-storey, flat-roofed buildings. Black cable power-lines, that ubiquitous feature of all American townscapes, looped haphazardly here and there. “Tallapoosa Drugs” said a big sign above one store. A Coke machine stood outside. The plate-glass window of the shop seemed to contain no items for sale. On the other side of the road were rutted lanes leading to more shops: Tallapoosa Auto, Electrical Goods, Dr Tire, Tallapoosa Seed Merchants, Tallapoosa Home Center. The name was everywhere. Tallapoosa Baptist Church.

It was hot and the sun spangled off the railway-tracks and off the windscreens of the large matt and battered cars and pickups parked in front of the mall of shops. There were very few people out and about. Occasionally a car roared through on the way to Bremen down the road, but it was generally very quiet. The town sat low and squat beneath the sun, the pavements were cracked and weeds sprouted freely from the cracks. The fat cars stood squarely on their patches of shadow. I felt no foreboding, only a sense of relief and pleasure.

The mind herein attains simplicity …

The body is no body to be seen

But is an eye that studies its black lid .

Let these be your delight, secretive hunter…

There certainly was no body to be seen. I stepped up on to the raised wooden sidewalk. On this side of the road, opposite the mall and the railway-tracks, there was a bar. Standing in the doorway behind a mosquito-proofed screen was a man holding a can of beer, wearing dusty denim overalls and a wide, manic smile on his face. I walked by, following the sidewalk to its end. Beyond that there were some sheds, a gas station and an auto shop. Beyond them stretched Alabama and a whole dry country.

The gas station had a small cafe that operated a drive-thru window. Three cars were parked outside. In each, two women sat in the front and children lounged in the back. Everybody was eating. A girl hung out of the drive-thru window, talking to the women in one of the cars.

As I approached, they stopped talking and turned and looked at me. I changed course, crossed the street, stepped tentatively over the thick, burnished railway-tracks, through a strip of knee-high, sun-bleached grass and weeds, and on to the broiling parking-lot in front of the mall. Dusting my trouser legs free of seeds and grass burrs, I saw the red neon rosette of a Budweiser sign glowing palely in the sunlight. Bars at Tallapoosa. I went in.

It was very dark. And full of men — white men. Drunk men.

A long bar stretched back into the depths of the room where there was an antiquated mechanical skittle-machine. Dusty plastic beer signs advertised Miller, Budweiser, Pabst. There were racks of old bottles of what I took to be country wines. A hand-printed sign said “No credit. No personal checks,” but some drunken good ol’ boy was loudly trying to persuade the taciturn, impassive barman to break his own house rules.

I asked politely for a beer and was given one in the can. Looking around, I saw that everyone drank direct from the bottle or the can. There wasn’t a glass in sight. I stood there, one hand in one pocket, and tried to drink my beer as fast as possible. No one spoke to me or showed the slightest curiosity. They were just waiting patiently for me to get my drinking done and get out. I didn’t belong here, I was an irritant in the melancholy life of the bar. When I put my empty can down, the barman muttered the obligatory Southern valediction, “Y’all come back and see us again some time, heah?” but his heart wasn’t in it.

Outside I was dazzled by the glare of the sun. Then I saw a big maroon car cruising very slowly through the mall. A girl was driving and another sat beside her in the front. It slowed to a crawl as it passed the bar. The girls — eighteen going on thirty — were smoking and had dyed blonde hair. The car had a hubcap missing. It looked too big for the girls to drive. I let it pass and walked across the car park, stepped back over the railway-lines and across the main street. The car pulled out of the mall, bumped across the tracks and accelerated away in the direction of Bremen. The girls were laughing at something.

Their pleasure that is all bright-edged and cold …

Making recoveries of young nakedness …

The town seemed stuck in its hot midday stupor. Where was everybody? I wondered. In the bars? I walked down towards the white Baptist church, wooden, painted white. The Baptists have Georgia sewn up. I saw a pawn shop and next door another drugstore. I went in, hoping to find a soda fountain or some kind of snack-bar but with no luck. Instead, I bought another reel of film from the little mustachioed man who worked inside. He asked me where I was from. I told him. He said, maybe to make me feel less of a stranger, that there were two or three European girls who lived in Tallapoosa; German girls who had married Tallapoosa men serving in Germany and who had been brought back to the States to live. I wondered what the German girls must have made of their new home. The promise of a new life in the USA. The reality of a lifetime in Tallapoosa.

I asked the little man if there was a nice restaurant in town where I could get a bite to eat. He thought for a while — it was clearly something of a poser — and said that I should head out of town on the road to Bremen; then turn left, following the signs for Interstate 20. There was “quite a decent little place” about two miles down that road.

I followed his instructions. Turning off the Tallapoosa-Bremen road, I saw a large factory: the Tallapoosa Rubber Company. Perhaps its presence explained the paucity of men on the streets. I drove on, looking for the restaurant. Then I saw it: the “Big O” hamburger house, on the Tallapoosa exit of Interstate 20. So this was the best restaurant in town.

Inside it was empty, not a solitary trucker. Greasy formica, battered, chipped chairs, drab curtains. The “Big O” offers that day were Mountain Man stew and steak sandwiches. I chose a steak sandwich.

Two bored girls took my order. They looked like younger sisters of the girls in the car: heavy make-up, streak jobs, glinting jewellery. My sandwich came — a small steak fried in batter, a leaf of iceberg lettuce and a squirt of mayonnaise. I hankered vaguely for Mountain Man stew.

I ate my sandwich and thought about Tallapoosa. It had been the evocativeness of the poem that had lured me here. But in my reading I had imagined something entirely different from the banalities of smalltown America. Now the lines between the stars were merely the haphazard loopings of electric cable spanning the street and alleyways. The stars themselves were reduced to sunbursts off windscreens and dusty chrome. To a significant extent the topography of the poem is redundant — no doubt Stevens never expected any reader to check it out. Its power resides in the potency of its phrase-making: “secretive hunter,” “recoveries of young nakedness,” “the lost vehemence the midnights hold.” And yet it wasn’t all disappointment. Even though I had no idea what Wallace Stevens was doing in the place, I sensed an understanding, some sixty years or more later, of the entrancement he seemed to have felt, or at least a rendered-down, displaced 1980s version. Tallapoosa was so tawdry and down-at-heel and yet here, undeniably, I had found the very frisson I was after, that formed a bridge, albeit a flimsy one, between the experience of the poem and the reality of the present. The atmosphere on the main street had been a kind of brazenness, a flashiness, a self-confidence manifested in the constant reiteration of the name: Tallapoosa this, Tallapoosa that. Perhaps it was the name alone that had attracted Stevens — some incantation in its utterance that infected the citizens and the environment. Or was I merely wishful-thinking, investing the place with my personal designs on it, my eye studying its own black lid?