He tried all day to imagine what Colette had thought of Texas, the hamlets made of wavy galvanized iron, the kind that people had built garages and feed stores out of forty years ago. Colette would say they looked squashed and dull. A Mexican boy sat next to him and tried to bring in a radio station on his Walkman. For five minutes, accordion music spiked the air of the coach, and Paul tapped his foot.

The rocking, air-conditioned idleness of the train hurt his bones. He longed toward San Antonio, where, his pocket schedule told him, there was a fifteen-minute layover. When he dropped off the coach into the stovetop heat, the ground felt hard as iron, and he kept walking, wondering what Colette had thought of the ornate station, whether she had broken a sweat and come alive again. The whistle sounded and he turned back. In three minutes he was hurtling toward Macdona, on his way to Lacoste and Noonan, Quihi and Hondo, watching stretches of sand and an ear-shaped plant stippled with long spines, which the Mexican kid told him was prickly pear. He began to have a sense of how far Colette had gone—that her track could be plotted from a satellite. The train hurtled against space, through real rock, yucca, gorges, amber plateaus wavering in heat. At Del Rio he stuck his head out of the vestibule door into a gas furnace and decided that he needed a drink.

The lounge car was old, a welter of padded seats, oval tables, and broad windows. He sat at a table with a retired history professor, grave and gray-bearded, and soon they were playing knock rummy. The cards rattled for hours as the station signs flew by, proclaiming Langtry and Pumpville. On the horizon were city-sized humps of rock that he presumed were mountains.

The sun set between Watkins and Dryden. He and the professor ate in the diner as the train cracked around curves and thundered over bridges, sending their water glasses sloshing around the table. Old ladies walked drunkenly in the aisle while waiters flew around them as though skating on ice.

When the windows went black, there was nothing to do but talk, and Paul wondered if someone as smart as the professor could tell him why his wife had left him. “What kind of history did you used to teach?”

The professor did not look much like a teacher. He was tanned and wrinkled, straight in the back, with a flat stomach. The sleeves of his button-down shirt were rolled halfway to his elbows. “Just American survey and occasionally a course in French history.” He sat back in his chair and glanced up at the ceiling as if reading words there.

“You know, I was wondering the other day, what did the early guys think when they went through a place like New Orleans for the first time—I mean, before the city was made.”

The professor bobbed his head as though a circuit had connected. “De Soto didn’t think much of it. Of course, he was looking for gold and rubies.”