If I Never Get Back

by Darryl Brock

  Our hosts showed us new frame dwellings going up by the hundreds. Single lots sold for a thousand dollars and up. Housing was at a premium.

  “Shoot,” said Allison, eyeing one tract. “Them dinky things’re crabbed so close they’d all go together in a fire!”

  Champion gave him a sour look.

  “I been counting,” Waterman informed us. “It’s a close thing, but the grog shops lay over the churches.”

  As though picking up on his cue, our guides deposited us at the Tivoli Gardens, where we hoisted schooners of lager that evening under gaslit locust trees and swatted mosquitoes the size of bees. George purchased pennyroyal leaves to rub on our skin, but it didn’t repel them.

  “Interestin’ out this way,” said Andy, examining a bite on his hand. “But I wouldn’t fancy it.”

  “Me neither.” I sat against the wall, gun in pocket, keeping watch on the entrance.

  A noise at the door. Had I dreamed it? I sat up in a sweat, eyes straining in the early light. It came again, a faint tap. Heart racing, I looked around. The others—Andy, Sweasy, and Mac—were asleep. I moved to the door, gun in hand. Would they really try it here?

  Again a tap. I pressed against the jamb and muttered, “Who is it?”

  “Sam?” came a whisper. “It’s me.”

  It was Johnny’s voice.

  Distrusting my ears, I opened the door a crack. He stood in the hallway holding a battered valise. I pulled him inside. He waited silently while I slipped into shirt and pants. We stepped into the hall.

  “How’d you find us?”

  “Followed you,” he said tentatively, as if fearing my reaction. “Got on the next train after yours. Didn’t figure to catch you till Frisco.”

  “Why’d you come? What about Helga?”

  “She took it hard, but she understood I had to make a change. I sold my wheel to buy my ticket.”

  “What about the money you won?”

  “Used most of it to settle up with Helga.” He smiled faintly. “Still have most of what’s left, since they’ll only let me ride third class. Said there ain’t special colored cars yet—but took my money quick enough. Damn near a freight car, what I been in.”

  “Johnny, why’re you doing this?”

  His amber eyes blinked. “Gonna make a new life out West.”

  I was thinking that the fairgrounds race had hurt him more deeply than I’d thought when his next words startled me.

  “And I knew you weren’t coming back, Sam.”

  I stared at him. “That’s a hell of a lot more than I know. How can you say that?”

  “I only been close to a few people,” he said. “They all went away. By now I know when it’s set to happen.”

  It gave me a funny chill. “I’m just taking a trip.”

  He shrugged and said, “Me too,” as if each of us had our little delusions.

  “Johnny, what is it you want with me?”

  “What if I said when it got down to brass tacks, I didn’t want you going off without me?”

  “I’d say that was pretty hokey,” I told him.

  “I could pass as your manservant. Hell, I’d be your servant to go first class!”

  I considered it. We were already short of space; his presence would hardly be welcome in our car.

  “I’d pay the extra fare, wouldn’t cost anybody—”

  “I don’t think you can come with us, Johnny,” I said, and felt bad when I saw his expression.

  “How about you take a different train, Sam? We go to Frisco together.”

  “But I’ve already paid for my ticket with the club.”

  He looked at me silently.

  “Damn it, Johnny, you shouldn’t have come all—”

  “Okay,” he interrupted. “I’ll be going on then. See you in Frisco.” He started down the hall, then turned. “Oh, one other thing. Remember the dark breed who got away from us, set the boat afire?”

  “Le Caron.” My blood slowed abruptly.

  “I saw him with that red-haired gambler, the one that laughs real loud when nothing’s funny.”

  “Jesus, where?”

  “A few stations out of St. Joseph, can’t recall which one. Just caught sight of ’em for a second climbing on a different train.”

  “Oh, shit. Heading this way?”

  He nodded and turned away again.

  “Wait a second.” My thoughts spun in new directions. “You know when the next westbound’s scheduled?”

  “In an hour, at seven, but it’s not an express.”

  I made up my mind. The club had no chance of departing until much later. “Meet me at the depot in forty-five minutes.”

  “Okay!”

  I dressed and packed, knocked on Champion’s door. He looked silly in a nightcap and sleeping gown. I gave him my contrived story.

  “That anxious to see your folks, eh?” He didn’t look heartbroken at the prospect of my departing. “Well, all right, though you’d probably make swifter time waiting for the express.”

  “Thanks, sir, but I’m awfully anxious to see ’em—more so every minute.”

  I woke Andy just before I left. “You in trouble again, Sam?” “Naw, just itchy.”

  “Stay out of hot water this time, hear?” “I’ll try,” I told him. “See you on the coast.”

  The depot was not nearly so crowded; by now only parties reserving entire cars, like the Stockings, still waited. The individual fare was $133 to Sacramento, $76 due then as the UP portion, another $57 to be paid the Central Pacific at Promontory, Utah, where all passengers changed trains. We had no problem converting Johnny’s ticket to first class. I broke one of my hundred-dollar bills grudgingly, hoping I could get a partial rebate from the club.

  “Maybe I’ll strike it rich out West!” Johnny exclaimed as we put our bags on a loading cart.

  I breathed the cool air, aromas of leather and hay and coffee. “The gold rush is over.”

  “Money’s lyin’ around everywhere, so I hear.”

  “Good luck picking some up.”

  “With you familiar out there, Sam, I figure I’ll get a start.”

  Great, I thought.

  A shill shouted, “Last chance for train insurance! Spare yourself loss or injury! Reasonable rates!”

  I thought about my cash and letter of credit. How dangerous was this trip?

  “Just a dodge,” said Johnny. “Scare the suckers, then sell ’em your cure. Saw it plenty around the circus.”

  We boarded a dismal day car that converted to a sleeper by means of hinged benches folding from the walls. Imagining the Pullman awaiting the Stockings—velvet carpets, spacious berths, ventilation, suspension system that removed all but the most severe bounces—I was already envious as we sat on threadbare upholstery, breathed stale air, and were jolted as the cars lurched forward.

  “Ah, the real goods,” Johnny sighed, envying no one, stretching on the seat beside me. He pointed to an omnibus disgorging some thirty immigrants into third-class cars. “See them? That’s how it was for me all the way here.”

  “In that case you’d better shape up as my darky,” I said. “Or I won’t keep you on.”

  “Sam, don’t you start believing that stuff!”

  We left Omaha’s bluffs and chugged across a wide plain. Occasional trees or rock outcroppings crawled past. When a rotund black conductor punched our tickets I asked how fast we were going.

  “Twenty miles each hour, suh,” he said, eyeing Johnny narrowly. “Maybe twenty-five just now. Steady work.”

  But slow. Faster trains averaged in the forties on level ground, twenty-five to thirty-five on ascents.

  “How long will it take us to go on through?” Depends on the traffic, but only a few days.” He beamed at me. “A revolutionary time, suh! New York to San Francisco in ten days! Down to six when the rivers are bridged. A revolutionary time!”

  It took some four weeks, I knew, by the Isthmus route. If nothing went wrong. And just about everything could go wrong,
from storms to fatal epidemics. For overland pioneers in ox-drawn wagons it had been worse: crossing from St. Louis to California required three months. The railroad had reduced that journey to less than a week. Revolutionary, indeed.

  The passengers in our car didn’t resemble the usual first-class crowd. Most looked a bit down on their luck. There were only three women, one with a squalling baby who promised to make our lives miserable. Sheathed in heavy clothing, they already wielded fans as the day’s heat began to break upon us.

  The first dining stop, at Grand Island, was typical of those to come. Informed that we had thirty minutes, we poured into a rough dining room (the sign simply said R.R. HOUSE) where we gulped beefsteak, eggs, potatoes, and cubes of some sort of mush—all fried in thick grease. As we moved westward the steaks would become antelope and buffalo, though I suspected it was all stringy beef, accompanied by hoecakes, sweet potatoes, and boiled Indian corn soaked liberally in syrup. Any variance from this—chicken stew, for example, which might really be prairie dog—was cause for discussion. Meals were expensive, too, usually at least a dollar.

  About a hundred miles out of Omaha trees disappeared entirely. We entered a high barren prairie dotted with bluffs. Squads of antelopes raced the train—and generally won. We saw occasional elk and numerous prairie-dog villages, sights which excited the easterners in the car. But as the miles passed and no buffalo or wild Indians presented themselves, telescopes and opera glasses were put aside.

  “Har har!” chortled a leather-faced, Popeye-sounding man several seats ahead. “That’s a rich ’un!” He read laboriously from a Leslie’s supplied for a fee by pain-in-the-ass vendors known as “train butches,” who paraded through the cars selling everything from tooth powder to guidebooks.

  A plump Chicago dry-goods dealer named Beard bent my ear interminably, claiming that the UP was pulling a gigantic swindle in wrangling ninety-six thousand dollars for each mile in this so-called mountain section, which was actually level. The company was already paying its backers one hundred percent dividends, and the road had barely been open four months.

  “Does sound a bit fishy,” I said, remembering that Grant’s administration was rocked by scandals. Had the transcontinental line been one? I couldn’t recall.

  “Mark me, sir,” said Beard. “When everything comes to light a foulness will rise under heaven!”

  Johnny yawned prodigiously and got up to pursue a train butch who’d passed through hawking plums.

  Beard quit his polemic as my long looks out the window grew more frequent. Actually there was little to see: tumbleweeds blowing in acres of sun-blasted gray grasses that undulated like flowing water; it was as if we weren’t moving at all, but were adrift in a hot, monotonous sea. Not even the Platte, which we’d followed for miles, was now visible.

  At length Johnny returned with plums. In a low voice he said, “I went up and down the cars. Looked in every one. There’s a passel of card games going on. I checked those especially close.”

  “And?”

  “No sign of them on this train.”

  So far, so good, I thought.

  Chapter 25

  Night was a relief. Not only from the heat, but from the constant selling. As if the train butches weren’t enough, local peddlers were out in force at each station pushing food, clothes, handmade goods. Competition made the butches more aggressive. They thrust day-old newspapers at us, magazines, postcards, dime novels, handbooks, guidebooks, maps, joke books; whispered that we might like spicier fare, flashing dog-eared copies of Police Gazette and naughty novels, Velvet Vice and Fanny Hill. They hawked apples, pears, oranges, California grapes, dried figs, fresh bread, country butter, maple sugar, cigars, razors, candy, peanuts—the last salty and followed by noisy campaigns for soda water. Peace came only when we pulled down our shelves at night, crawled into them two by two, and fastened the curtains.

  In the night we crossed the north fork of the Platte. Morning found us well on toward Cheyenne. The look of embarking passengers roughened. Open drinking increased and the number of women diminished. Turnover was frequent, and it became clear that few in our car were going all the way to California.

  The guidebooks touted Cheyenne as the largest city between Omaha and Sacramento, leading us to expect more than we got. It was a rough, dreary, filthy collection of unpainted board-and-canvas structures. There were the customary card and billiards tents, saloons, railroad sheds, government offices, and crude hotels with signs saying SQUARE MEALS & LODGINGS. I was no longer surprised at seeing a theater. Like small-town movie houses of the future, they were everywhere.

  It was a study in brown. Nothing green grew anywhere. Beyond the tracks, stirring dust against an infinity of dun plains, horsemen idled with ridge-spined, long-horned cattle. The town itself numbered about four thousand, almost all men—menacing, slouching types in boots and broad-brimmed hats, conspicuously armed with revolvers, rifles, knives. I bumped into one, a grizzled miner with wiry whiskers and mad staring eyes. “’Scuse me,” I said, provoking a double-take and a curse. Shootings and stabbings were nightly occurrences. When things got too far out of hand—that must have been something—the local Vigilance Committee sent the offenders a drawing of a tree with a man dangling from it, and the message “Clear out.”

  Sweet place. It was one thing to see quaint, rough-hewn towns in movie Westerns. Quite another to be in one of the stinking, depressing places, where every hitching area was a cesspool. I was fast getting my fill of the Old West.

  We’d all been hoping for a better-than-average breakfast, but the only attraction in Cheyenne’s dining room was a row of stuffed big-game animals staring down at us from the walls. Two Chinese waiters, the first we’d seen, worked frantically to feed everybody.

  Just as our turn came to order, the conductor shouted, “Get aboard!”

  “Steak looked tough as whipcord anyway,” Johnny said.

  We bought cheese sandwiches from a butch.

  “Smile?” a burly man in buckskins said, taking a seat in front of us.

  “What?”

  “He’s askin’ if you want a drink,” said Johnny.“Oh,” I said. “No, thanks.”

  He snorted and spat a fountain of tobacco juice that missed the nearest spittoon by a yard.

  “How’d you know what he meant?”

  “Circus,” Johnny said. “You run into all kinds.”

  “Here, too.”

  As we chuffed upward toward Sherman Summit, the man in buckskins began a discourse on buffalo hunting, an art he’d practiced with single-minded dedication.

  “We was droppin’ ’em so fast the skinners ’n scrapers couldn’t keep up. Get upwind of ’em, you know, and they’re so thick brained they just stand there with their mates falling all around. Three . . . four thousand. Don’t know how many I kilt. The barrel got hot enough some days to set the grass afire just touchin’ it. That was when I worked for the Goddard brothers feedin’ the Kansas Pacific crews.” He took a pull from his bottle and belched. “Hell, I knowed them days was doomed even then. Too sweet a thing to keep others away from. Got so there was a thousand hide-hunters out there a-stalkin’ our buffaler. Soon after, weren’t nobody makin’ money. Price dropped from five dollars a hide to less ’n one. How you gonna kill a animal for one measly buck? Got so’s the skinners’d slit the buffalers’ bellies and rip their hides off with teams of horses. Left the carcasses to rot.” He took another long pull. “Yep, I saw the end a-comin’.”

  A black-and-white image: bones heaped on the prairie, gathered by scavengers to sell to soap makers; the pathetic remains of the endless herds. I'd seen the photograph somewhere; now, in my imagination, rotting hulks in the prairie grasses were interspersed with the corpses of Indians killed in their villages—the vast West, a killing ground.

  “Don’t look like my story’s settin’ too good with you,” Buckskin said, spitting.

  “I don’t like slaughter.”

  “Eat meat?”

  I nodded.
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  “Wearing shoes, ain’t you?” he said, pointing at my feet. “Leather shoes?”

  “You’re right, I’m part of it.”

  “You sure as damnation are!” He snorted and looked around triumphantly, laughing. “What’s your line?” he asked at length.

  “Newspaperman.”

  His face changed with comical abruptness. “Why’nt you say so? Shoot, I wouldn’t’ve been so ornery. You looking for action yarns?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “You got some?”

  “Listen, I’ll feed you stories nobody ever thought of. I’ve outshot, outdrunk, outlied, and outscrewed the worst of ’em!” He leaned close, his breath reminiscent of a zoo’s elephant house. “Just last night,” he said significantly, “after I’d taken my medicinal quart of whiskey, me’n this feller went out to shoot the heads off’n rattlers. He wuz pie-eyed ‘n’ ‘most blasted his toes off. But me, I jus’ kept knockin’ them critters down, thinkin’ ahead to the real guzzlin’ to come.” His laugh turned into a phlegmy hack; he spat and said, “That’s the sort of stuff you’d want, ain’t it?”

  “Uh, maybe.”

  “Name’s Bruce Hobbs,” he said. “How’s about us teamin’ up on one of them dime novels? Call the first one Nebraska Bruce, Prairie Detective.”

  I fought back a smile. “A detective named Bruce?”

  “Well, my uncle’s Ralph. How about Ralph Hobbs?”

  “Doesn’t quite make it.””

  “Earl?”

  “Keep coming.”

  “Ray?”

  “Nebraska Ray Hobbs, Prairie Detective,” I mused aloud. “Tell you what, look me up in San Francisco in a couple months. Maybe we can work something out.”

  “Jus’ might do that, pardner!”

  “But you won’t be there,” Johnny said to me later.“No kidding.”

  At Sherman Summit we stopped longer than usual for water. Johnny and I climbed down stiffly from the car along with the rest. We gazed at snow-crowned mountains rising from dark purple depths to peaks of glistening pearl. Somebody pointed out Pike’s Peak, clearly visible some hundred miles distant. Granite slopes nearby held strands of stunted pine and cedar. For the easterners especially, who’d never seen true mountains, this panorama of the Rockies was breathtaking. We stood for long minutes shivering in the thin air. Already we had traveled nearly half of the UP’s long stretch between Omaha and Promontory.