Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  July, trying as hard as he could, was unable to keep from snorting out a little laugh.

  “And what seems to be so funny?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’ll have you know this is the first time in maybe one or two thousand years that anyone’s laughed at me. A little too sure of yourself, I’d say, for such a young snip . . . or impudent. Hey now, what’s this taped under here?”

  “That’s my pistol. It used to belong to my mother. Take it out and look at it if you want to.”

  “Heaven forbid that I’d ever touch such a thing. What ghastliness! Whatever use would you have for such a thing? It has a white handle, of all things—utterly ghastly.”

  “It’s a belly gun.”

  “What!”

  July simply couldn’t help it and began laughing again. It was like having the most perfectly naïve person imaginable right there before him, reacting in just the way you’d imagine; but at the same time (and this is where the humor came in) her unworldliness was so invulnerable that nothing could ever penetrate it very far.

  “It’s a gun for close shots—right in the gut.”

  “Someone should have taken a stick to your mother when she was your age. But come now, what is it about this room that makes you think it’s so special? It doesn’t look so hot to me. In fact, I don’t think I’d want a son of mine living in it for even one night . . . and the noise of those trolleys is awful.”

  “Ever since I came to the city I’ve lived here. It’s my home. Butch and I, we like it just fine.”

  “Probably why he’s so suspicious. It’s too damp for a cat.”

  “He doesn’t mind.”

  “He tolerates it, is what you mean. Face the facts: it’s not ideal. And anyway, what was it that fellow said about you and being a paper—”

  “He said, ‘Paper boy. Charlotte, really, a paper boy!’ ”

  “I thought it was something of that order. So if he feels like that, isn’t it a pretty good sign other people do too?”

  “Who cares what other people think?”

  “Well, in a moral sense”—the way she so seriously emphasized these two words made July want to laugh again—“of course nobody should care what anyone thinks. But there’s hardly right or wrong at stake here.”

  “Sure there is—what’s right or wrong for me.”

  “There’s nothing moral about that. Things moral always include other people, and, really, being a paper boy isn’t much.” July felt a little angry at this, and was just ready to say so, but she spoke first. “Don’t go flying off the handle. Look at it this way: it’s not the job, is it? I mean, selling papers isn’t exactly the issue, it’s this room. You’d think you’d be an insect if you left it, as if it were an old friend.”

  “Yes . . . and I would be too.”

  “Perhaps. Anyway, why not keep it and your new one as well, and take the new job?—which you know you’d like better. . . . I mean, I doubt if you could rent it out.”

  “I couldn’t justify even being gone for one night.”

  “I have it! Why not leave some of your special things here?” She became so exuberant, with gestures flashing every which way, that July had difficulty understanding. “Keep your diamond, and your cat too (so much the shame), but leave everything else. Wrap your lamp in an oiled bag so it will light when you come back for visits, leave your Bible, leave your pictures and cards and blankets—everything. That way you can have both. And think of the fun of exploring that tremendous building at night.”

  A faint scratching sounded on the cardboard door, from the outside. “Gracious,” said the old specter. “I hardly thought they’d find me so soon. I must be going. It’s been fun talking to you.” What happened then so thoroughly astonished July that for the rest of his life his memory tried to eject the event. The woman rose and at the same time stayed sitting, went to the door and passed through it and at the same time moved not at all. So there was a continuous band of image all the way from the chair to the cardboard door, perfectly vivid and clear at each place he’d care to look at it. Then it began to blur, and the repeated image of her face became only a pale band of color, rising at the chair and going to the door. Below it was a bright white line from what had been her collar, black from the fringe around her shoulders. And like a light echo the whole phenomenon began to vanish, as though being rinsed away by ripples of clear water, leaving only two deep blue lines from her eyes, then taking them as well. July went quickly to the door and opened it. Nothing.

  Without bothering to straighten up, or taking any precautions against water condensing inside his nearly empty lamp, he took Butch, extinguished the light and went out, closing the door carefully and fondly behind him. They waited a long time for the platforms above them and across from them to clear, and climbed up, ascended past the Crosstown and the L and climbed onto the street. Carroll’s Furniture was a long way away and it took them nearly forty-five minutes to walk it.

  They established their new living quarters to their immense satisfaction. True to his promise, Franklin Carroll had a bathtub put in one afternoon while July was sanding scratches, mars and old polish off a rocking chair. That first night he ran it full to the top, sitting on the rolled edge looking down into the clear water.

  “It’s so clear,” he said to Butch, “if it wasn’t for the waves and the sparkling, you couldn’t see it. It’s heavy air.” He had to let a little of the precious liquid down the drain before he took off his clothes and climbed in. The pleasure filled him. He felt light and brilliant. He wished for the little boats and ducks that he’d had in Sharon Center and remembered his shameless childhood in which he’d played with them without appreciation or regard.

  But even with the water he couldn’t overcome his late-night terrors and, despite the long distance, he was forced, for the first months, to return to his cement room four and five times a week to sleep. He would begin to swell with foreboding, the sounds throughout the warehouse would magnify, his stomach would wrinkle up like a raisin, he would hear his heart beating in his ears and he’d know it was time to return. The damp, chilly room and the pictures would revive him.

  Then the visits were cut back to three a week, then regular weekends, then only once, more out of duty than need.

  There were times when Franklin came to the store during the night and met with men in the basement. These meetings never lasted longer than a couple of minutes, their voices were always low and July never saw who it was that mysteriously appeared there for him to talk to. Afterward Carroll would sometimes come up to his room and knock politely.

  “Hello, I saw your light on and I thought I might stop in. Not bothering anything, I hope.”

  “Oh no. Come on in.”

  “You sure have fixed this up nice. Hello there, Butch. Anything else you need?”

  “No, we’re just fine.”

  At first, this was about all their talks would consist of, and Franklin Carroll’d leave. He respected a person’s privacy, as he wanted his own to be respected.

  As the year continued, July’s presence in the building came to be taken for granted. One might encounter him sweeping here, then up on the third floor looking for unusual pieces of furniture, then in the shop laying down layers of shellac, then outside polishing the windows, then down in the basement cleaning out the furnace, like a spirit from the building’s walls, his cat dark against the stone foundation. Carroll began to feel more comfortable with him. Coming upon him unexpectedly, he’d give a little start and then say, “Oh, July, it’s only you.” He began to drop in on July and sit in the large chair they’d dragged in from the storeroom and talk until after midnight, drinking Kool-Aid and telling him stories of his life when he was a boy living on the streets of Philadelphia, and always managing to find a way to leave four, five or six dollars behind when he left, as though keeping a strict moral solvency between the money and the time July spent listening to him.

  But these meetings were rare. Carroll was too busy for them e
xcept after those infrequent times when he’d arrive unexpectedly at night, talk to men in the basement and come up. He and his wife entertained and had many social engagements. They were interested in horse racing and owned a boat that they kept at Atlantic City. July saw Mrs. Carroll come into the store from time to time and talk to Franklin in the closed office. He was never introduced and was known to the onetime holder of the Miss New Jersey title only as the cleaning boy who lived in the room on the second floor. Frequently they were gone for weeks at a time, and once they went to Japan, leaving Bob Reed, Franklin’s most highly paid salesman, in charge of the store.

  Carroll thought July should have an education, and against his will persuaded him to attend night classes at Temple University. After two years of these classes it would be possible to take a test qualifying him, if he passed, for a high-school equivalency certificate. The classes weren’t difficult because he’d already learned to read quickly. But he resented the actual class time spent listening to the dry, underpaid voices of the student teachers from the university, especially one, whose pale face betrayed a life that had dried up at twenty-five—a deal had been made with his soul: “Listen, keep quiet and we’ll survive vicariously in the back rooms of the world.” His gray laughter was frightening. Yet, despite this, July was learning and whole highways of interest opened up around him. If nothing else, those sad teachers could hurl ideas at him thought by men and women who lived forever outdoors and on the summit of experience.

  July was growing in a physical sense as well, and although he continued to picture himself still as a small boy, in the eyes of strangers he was clearly six feet tall, rawboned and potentially dangerous. Lugging bulky furniture in and out of trucks and up and down flights of stairs had hardened his muscles, yet he retained the quickness and agility of his age.

  Those evenings when he wasn’t at night school he spent reading and studying the planets and the moon from a telescope Carroll had bought for him at an auction. Sometimes when Carroll would come up from the basement the two of them would carry the forty-power apparatus up to the roof and July would focus something in and Carroll would peer through the eyepiece and exclaim, “Magnificent.” But that would be the end of his interest and he’d settle down into one of the two chairs they had up there and, gesturing continually to the night, begin talking. July would try to talk to him about some of the things he was learning that excited him, in a way proving to him that he was actually getting all that could be expected, but Carroll would wave his hands and say, “Yes, yes, that’s all very good. Someday you’ll need that information. For every grain of knowledge you absorb the world will pay you back a thousand times.”

  From his interest in astronomy July acquired a fondness for being on the roof, and many times when his purpose would be academic, such as finally seeing the great double star in Perseus, he’d be lulled away from the telescope by the noise from the street, which seemed muted and distant from that height, and the rest of the night would find him walking pleasantly and aimlessly along the perimeter of the roof, sitting and letting the lights and noises and chilly air fill him to the very brink of contentment. But he’d hold these nights against himself: he was in an intense training period, at the end of which he intended to be rich, cultivated and thoroughly attractive to women. A hibernation of work. The time it would take was not definite—certainly longer than it would take to secure the high-school diploma, but how much longer he didn’t know. The only thing he could be sure of was that each day he spent studying and absorbing information and looking into the lives of men like Benjamin Franklin and Immanuel Kant was one day closer.

  At the age of seventeen, having ended his classes at the night school, he revisited his old room below City Hall (it was so low that he could no longer stand straight up in it) and when he left he took with him the small, thick Bible and the pictures of his parents. Doing this, he felt as though he were robbing his own tomb. The photographs were showing signs of age. This grieved him. He took them back to his apartment and with Carroll’s help laid them out and rephotographed them and had five-by-eight enlargements made of two; framed them in the shop and hung them in the master position on his walls. He made up his mind to read the Bible from cover to cover as a scholarly endeavor, as he was led to believe it was not only an account of an historical race, preserved from cracked parchment paper, but the symbolic source for all Western poetry and the basis of the Christian religion. He took up the task one evening after coming down from the roof and was immediately filled with a kind of horror which he could neither express nor understand. He put the book away and returned to the roof, thinking that his dinner might have had some influence over his emotions. After an hour he took it up again and the same ineffable feeling descended upon him, this time more intensely. I won’t be bullied in this manner, he told himself, and forced page after page into his memory. Before the end of the second book of Moses he was filled with such an inexorable dread that he had to put it down and flee to his room beneath City Hall. It was as though something else was trying to speak through the broken language, and it was something he couldn’t fathom. Later he put the book into his bookshelf and pushed the experience behind him.

  He took the equivalency examination and passed.

  He got a chauffeur’s license so he could pilot Carroll about the city, on occasion into New York, and run errands to the bank. He was responsible for keeping delivery records and handling all written correspondence.

  Late one night Carroll came upstairs and rapped anxiously on his door. July was reading and stood up with a start, wondering why there should be so much excitement.

  Franklin came in with a rush. “Quick, quick,” he exclaimed. “You must do me a favor, just this once. Hurry, get your coat. Think you can handle a truck? Hurry up, hurry—of course you can, you’re an excellent driver.”

  On the way down the stairs to the basement Carroll shoved a piece of paper into July’s pocket, explaining that there was an address on it, somewhere in Chelsea, Mass. He opened the door for him and escorted him onto the loading ramp in the basement. A cold blast of air met them. The doors were open and an enormous trailer truck stretched out into the back lot, alley lights reflecting through the windshield and side wings of the cab, looking like a gray twenty-ton silverfish.

  “I can’t drive that,” July complained. As he spoke he noticed they were not alone. Two men were crouching on the ground alongside the truck, one of them leaning against a black tire. All the lights were out. The back end of the trailer was locked with a padlock, the motor was idling and diesel fumes filled the air. From what he could make out, the two men were young, early twenties, dressed in heavy, dark pea jackets. One of them—the one on the ground against the tire—looked as though something might be wrong with him. His chest heaved as if he were breathing hard. The other walked about nervously, up to the door, back to his companion, talking in low, unintelligible words.

  “Sure you can,” said Carroll. “There can’t be anything to it. Drivers don’t know anything. Don’t you see, you have to.” There was a frantic note in Carroll’s voice—a sound July had never heard there before.

  “What’s this all about? Why aren’t the lights on? What’s in this truck?”

  “Don’t ask questions. Quick, you have to get this thing out of here. Hey, you—you, Sonny!” he shouted to the pacing man, who came back to them. “There’s nothing to driving this, is there?”

  “We got to get Murf out of here,” he complained.

  “Shut up. Murf can freeze in hell for all I care now. We’ve got to get this truck out of here. Is there anything to it?”

  “Naw, anybody can drive one.”

  “There, you see, now get going.”

  “Those things have a thousand gears,” protested July.

  “Hurry, please get out of here. Take this.” Carroll shoved some bills into his coat pocket and practically dragged him up past the heaving young man to the cab. “Come back as quick as you can. Don’t talk to anyone. Y
ou’ve got to! Christ, get this thing out of here. Hey, you idiot”—to Sonny—“get him out, take ’im to a hospital if you want.” The man turned to help his companion up. “Wait! What about these gears?”

  “There’s a plate on the dashboard shows where they are. Careful going through the city. Be easy on the brakes till you get the feel. Be careful going through New York.”

  “OK, that’s enough, now get him out of here.”

  It wasn’t difficult for July to tell that at the present moment Carroll and the young man had no high regard for each other. And as a testimony to the kind of loyalty he had, he climbed into the truck and closed the door, eager to help out in the best way he could.

  “If you’re stopped,” said Carroll through the window, “say nothing and we’ll get you out—but don’t call here.” That was all.

  July depressed the clutch, put the shift lever in the first position, as nearly as he could figure, and rolled out of the loading dock and into the lot. The motor screamed and the tires inched ahead. Boy, is that a low gear, he thought and shifted into second, double-clutching in neutral as he’d once heard you should do. He got onto the Schuylkill Expressway and headed toward New York City.

  Once on the open road, his anxiety over handling the big, roaring monster settled back, and bits of conversation, like phantoms, formed dream pictures in his imagination, moved about by his own fearful expectations: If they stop you—If they get you—Don’t call . . . Be careful going through the city. How could one be careful in a semi? Careful of what? Every car he saw, he was suspicious of. He prayed there would be enough gasoline in the tank to last the whole way, because he was afraid of any encounters. His headlights on the road seemed miles underneath him.

  Because it was so late at night a certain comradeship seemed to exist between him and the other truck drivers on the facing lanes, and they winked their overhead lights at him. He imagined them making long hauls across the country against a strict deadline, and driving long into the morning because of stopping off in some wayside town and being taken for a ride by a long-legged hooker from a crosstown bar, their money gone but left with pictures to turn in their heads through New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado and into Salt Lake City. He thought of how these red and orange winking lights brought him such comfort and were such a jolly expression of good will, yet how awesome and terrible were the gigantic trucks themselves, and he was filled momentarily with warmth for the American people.