On July 4 we stopped at a small town in western Kansas that Norman Rockwell could have painted. The streets were brick, lined with Chinese elm trees, and the limestone courthouse on the square rose out of the hardware and feed and farm equipment stores like a medieval castle against a hard blue porcelain sky. Next to our motel was a stucco 3.2 beer tavern that looked like a wedding cake, shaded by an enormous willow that crowned over the eaves. At the end of the street you could see an ocean of green wheat that rippled in the wind as far as the eye could see. The rain that fell that afternoon on the hot sidewalks was the sweetest smell I ever experienced. What's the point? For years I thought of this place as an island untouched by the war in Indochina and disconnected from the cities burning at home. When I was a patrolman in uniform in the New Orleans welfare projects, I used to remember the hot, clean airy smell of the rain falling on those sidewalks in 1965. Then an ex-Kansas cop we picked up drunk on an interstate fugitive warrant told me the town that existed in my fond recollection was the site of Truman Capote's novel In Cold Blood, the story of two pathological killers who murdered a whole family for thirty-nine dollars and a radio.
