The Girl in the White Coat on the Delta Eagle

The Girl in the White Coat on the Delta Eagle is a 1979 novel written by Arkansas City (Desha County) native Gary Youree and published by W. W. Norton & Company. Author Don DeLillo described it as a “funny, love-crazed book about the search for a lost dream,” one suffused with “prayer and poetry.” Although the story takes place in New York, the plot revolves around an event that occurred in Arkansas thirty-three years earlier.

The book opens in New York City with narrator Bud Hanks, a cordwood cutter (as well as an amateur poet and former minister), at the office of Dr. Anna Karenina Kochbaum, a psychotherapist. Hanks has promised his live-in girlfriend, Tamara, that he would try therapy if she tried prayer to fix their problems as a couple. However, Tamara soon breaks up with him, having discovered, among Bud’s fragments of poetry, a piece reading, “A girl in a white coat on the Delta Eagle / Sped by in the lonesome night, / And I loved her at once and forever; / Delta Eagle tore the heart from in me out / And down the tracks.”

When Bud was twelve during World War II, he lived in Arkansas, and his family drove to McGehee (Desha County) to see a movie, The Bluebird. On the return trip, his father nearly collided with the Delta Eagle, the first diesel train “on the Missouri Pacific passenger run through east Arkansas.” Bud saw a girl in a white coat, instantly falling in love with her, on the train near Arkansas City. Though he never saw her again, the memory stayed with him.

One day, Bud’s therapist (now letting him call her Anna) shows up at his apartment and then travels with him out to Long Island, where he cuts wood, and they have sex at a squash court deeded to him by the father of an ex-wife, Mary James (a childhood sweetheart from his days in Arkansas). When next he sees Dr. Kochbaum in therapy (with her insisting upon the title and refusing to reference the assignation, leaving Bud to refer to Dr. Kochbaum and Anna as two separate people), he says of the girl in the white coat that she “was pure, serene, and sublimely aloof on that train, going around in my head, and now I’ve soiled her, letting her get into other people’s heads.”

Bud writes home to his parents, asking if they remember the Delta Eagle, and then to the theater in McGehee, the railroad, and others, hoping to track down the girl in the white coat. He learns from the McGehee Times that The Bluebird was playing at the Ritz in McGehee on November 11, 1943, at 7:26 p.m., with the Delta Eagle, which “was almost always late during the war years,” leaving the station at 9:06 p.m. He places a personal advertisement in newspapers along the railroad line and does hear back from a woman named Kim, who claims to be the woman in the white coat, adding enough detail that Bud believes her. She, however, turns out to be a “transsexual” patient of Dr. Kochbaum who had stolen Bud’s file, intending to seduce him. Their encounter is interrupted by a man claiming to be J. Edgar Hoover, who tells Bud that he killed a Japanese woman wearing a white coat on the Delta Eagle back in 1943. He believes that Bud’s personal ad in the newspapers was some kind of code and demands from Bud a box that the woman supposedly had on her. Bud manages to flee, and he, Mary James, and Marsha (the daughter of her current lover) escape in Bud’s truck, driving to the nearby two-story treehouse where Anna lives on the weekends.

Anna soon arrives and reveals that she had contacted the McGehee Times herself for more information, discovering that, on the southbound Delta Eagle, an escapee from the Rohwer Relocation Center, Aiko Abe, had boarded the train with only a white coat and a shoebox full of haiku poetry before reportedly being killed by U.S. soldiers as the train headed for Lake Village (Chicot County); a man identifying himself as an FBI agent had ordered everyone to evacuate the train but then disappeared himself.

When the Box Hunter shows up with a chainsaw to cut down the tree and treehouse, Bud fires at him with Anna’s revolver, stopping him momentarily, and afterward they all read poetry together, at which point Mary James reminds Bud that his family had given Mary James a ride to the railroad depot that evening they went to see The Bluebird, as the James family was leaving town, but that Bud did not stay with her, preferring the movie. She had been on the train when the Japanese girl was killed, wearing her mother’s white coat. The Box Hunter starts again with the chainsaw, and Marsha pours boiling mixture of water and soap upon him, leading him to fire blindly upward, killing her. When he invades the treehouse, they dump him down the trash chute, killing him.

The book ends with Anna quitting her practice. Bud decides to “catch the first flight to wherever it was warm the year round, polish up the story of my life,” and on the train away from his squash court in the country seats himself next to a woman in a white coat, who introduces herself as “Naomi Ruth,” saying that she “switched to Anna Karenina somewhere along the way and off the track.”

For additional information:
Youree, Gary. The Girl in the White Coat on the Delta Eagle. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas