that a trip to Holcomb would achieve would be to provide me with the morbid thrill of gawping at a house in which a family had long before been senselessly slaughtered. Still, that's about all I ask out of life, and it was bound, at the very least, to be more interesting than Historic Front Street in Dodge City.
In Capote's book, Holcomb was a tranquil, dusty hamlet, full of intensely decent people, a place whose citizens didn't smoke, drink, lie, swear or miss church, a place in which sex outside marriage was unforgivable and sex before marriage unthinkable, in which teenagers were home at eleven on a Saturday night, in which Catholics and Methodists didn't mingle if they could possibly help it, in which doors were never locked, and children of eleven or twelve were allowed to drive cars. For some reason I found the idea of children driving cars particularly astonishing. In Capote's book, the nearest town was Garden City, five miles down the highway. Things had clearly changed. Now Holcomb and Garden City had more or less grown together, connected by an umbilicus of gas stations and fast-food places. Holcomb was still dusty, but no longer a hamlet. On the edge of town was a huge high school, obviously new, and all around were cheap little houses, also new, with barefooted Mexican children running around in the front yards. I found the Clutter house without too much trouble. In the book it stood apart from the town, down a shady lane. Now the lane was lined with houses. There was no sign of occupancy at the Clutter house. The curtains were drawn. I hesitated for a long time and then went and knocked at the front door, and frankly was relieved that no one answered. What could I have said? Hello, I'm a stranger passing through town with a morbid interest in sensational murders and I just wondered if you could tell me what it's like living in a house in which several people have had their brains spattered onto the walls? Do you ever think about it at mealtimes, for instance?
I got back in the car and drove around, looking for anything that was familiar from the book, but the shops and cafes all seemed to have gone or been renamed. I stopped at the high school. The main doors were locked-it was four in the afternoon-but some students from the track team were drifting about on the playing fields. I accosted two of them standing along the perimeter and asked them if I could talk to them for a minute about the Clutter murders. It was clear that they didn't know what I was talking about.
'You know,' I prompted. '7n Cold Blood. The book by Truman Capote.'
They looked at me blankly.
'You've never heard of In Cold Blood? Truman Capote?' They hadn't. I could scarcely believe it.
'Have you ever heard of the Clutter murders-a whole family killed in a house over there beyond that water tower?'
One of them brightened. 'Oh, yeah,' he said. 'Whole family just wiped out. It was, you know, weird.'
'Does anybody live in the house now?'
'Dunno,' said the student. 'Somebody used to live there, I think. But now I think maybe they don't.
Dunno really.' Talking was clearly not his strongest social skill, though compared with the second student he was a veritable Cicero. I thought I had never met two such remarkably ignorant young men, but then I stopped three others and none of them had heard of In Cold Blood either. Over by the pole-vaulting pit I found the coach, an amiable young social sciences teacher named Stan Kennedy. He was supervising three young athletes as they took turns sprinting down a runway with a long pole and then crashing with their heads and shoulders into a horizontal bar about five feet off the ground. If knocking the hell out of a horizontal bar was a sport in Kansas, these guys could be state champions. I asked Kennedy if he thought it odd that so many of the students had never heard of In Cold Blood.
'I was surprised at that myself when I first came here eight years ago,' he said. 'After all, it was the biggest thing that ever happened in the town. But you have to realize that the people here hated the book. They banned it from the public library and a lot of them even now won't talk about it.'
This surprised me. A few weeks before I had read an article in an old Life magazine about how the townspeople had taken Truman Capote to their hearts even though he was a mincing little fag who talked with a lisp and wore funny caps. In fact, it turns out, they disdained him not only as a mincing little fag, but as a meddler from the big city who had exploited their private grief for his own gain.
Most people wanted to forget the whole business and discouraged their children from developing an interest in it. Kennedy had once asked his brightest class how many of the students had read the book, and three-quarters of them had never even looked at it.
I said I thought that was surprising. If I had grown up in a place where something famous had happened I would want to read about it. 'So would I,' Kennedy said. 'So would most people from our generation. But kids these days are different.
We agreed that this was, you know, weird.
There is nothing much to be said for the far west of Kansas except that the towns are small and scattered and the highways mostly empty. Every ten miles or so there is a side road, and at every side road there is an old pickup truck stopped at a stop sign. You can see them from a long way offin Kansas you can see everything from a long way off-glinting in the sunshine. At first you think the truck must be broken down or abandoned, but just as you get within thirty or forty feet of it, it pulls out onto the highway in front of you, causing you to make an immediate downward adjustment in your speed from sixty miles an hour to about twelve miles an hour and to test the resilience of the steering wheel with your forehead. This happens to you over and over. Curious to see what sort of person could inconvenience you in this way out in the middle of nowhere, you speed up to overtake it and see that sitting at the wheel is a little old man of eighty-seven, wearing a cowboy hat three sizes too large for him, staring fixedly at the empty road as if piloting a light aircraft through a thunderstorm. He is of course quite oblivious of you. Kansas has more drivers like this than any other state in the nation, more than can be accounted for by simple demographics. Other states must send them their old people, perhaps by promising them a free cowboy hat when they get there.
CHAPTER 21
I SHOULD HAVE known better, but I had it in my mind that Colorado was nothing but mountains.
Somehow I thought that the moment I left Kansas I would find myself amid the snow-topped Rockies, in lofty meadows of waving buttercups, where the skies were blue and the air was as crisp as fresh celery. But it was nothing like that at all. It was just flat and brown and full of remote little towns with charmless names: Swink, Ordway, Manzanola. They in turn were all full of poorlooking people and mean-looking dogs nosing around on the margins of liquor stores and gas stations.
Broken bottles glittered among the stubble in the roadside ditches and the signs along the way were pocked from shotgun blasts. This sure wasn't the Colorado John Denver was forever yodeling on about.
I was imperceptibly climbing. Every town along the highway announced its elevation, and each was several hundred feet higher than the previous one, but it wasn't until I had nearly reached Pueblo, 150 miles into the interior, that I at last saw mountains. Suddenly there they were, blue and craggy and heavy with snow.
