Half of Paradise

by James Lee Burke

  There were just a few people in his car. He took his suitcase off the rack and went into the men’s room. A gandy-walker was sleeping on the seat by the window. He wore overalls and heavy work shoes and a trainman’s cap. There was a lunch pail by his foot. He had a faded bandanna tucked into the bib of his overalls. He slept with his mouth partly open, and his face was unshaved and sunburned. J.P. opened his suitcase and took out the bottle. He mixed a drink with water in a paper cup. The gandy-walker woke up and went to the basin to wash his face. He sat back down and took a sandwich from his lunchpail and began eating. J.P. asked him if he wanted a drink.

  “Yeah buddy,” he said.

  He unscrewed the top from his coffee thermos and held it out for J.P. to pour.

  “Have a sandwich,” he said.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Go ahead. My old lady makes up more than I can eat.”

  J.P. took the sandwich. It was a piece of cold steak between bread.

  The trainman was eating and drinking and talking at the same time.

  “You’re the fellow that got on with the guitar I seen you on the platform,” he said. “Go get it and let’s play a tune.”

  “It’ll wake up the people in the car.”

  “We can go out in the vestibule. It ain’t going to bother nobody.”

  “You want another drink?”

  He held out the red thermos top while J.P. poured.

  “Go get the guitar. I play a little bit myself.”

  “All right.” J.P. pushed aside the curtain that hung over the door of the men’s room and went back into the car. The lights were down, and the few people in the car were sleeping. He took the guitar off the rack and unzipped its cloth cover. He put the cover on the seat and went back to the men’s room.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” the trainman said. “I’d like to hear some music before I get off at the next town.”

  J.P. got his bottle, and he and the trainman went out to the vestibule. The area between the two cars swayed back and forth with the motion of the train. They could hear the wheels clicking loudly on the tracks. The door windows had no glass in them, and the wind was cool and smelled of the farmland. They could see the fields of corn and cotton in the night under the moon, and a pinewoods that stretched over the hills into the dark green of the meadows.

  “Play if you want to,” J.P. said, handing him the guitar.

  “You sure you don’t mind? Some fellows don’t like other people picking their guitar.”

  “Help yourself.”

  “You know ‘Brakeman’s Blues’?”

  “Play it.”

  The gandy-walker held the fingers of his left hand tight on the strings and frets and strummed with the thumb and index finger of his other hand. He propped his leg on the metal stool that the conductor used to help passengers off, and rested the guitar across his thigh.

  I’ll eat my breakfast heah,

  Get my dinner in New Or-leans

  (Right on down through Birmingham)

  I’m going to get me a mama

  Lord I ain’t never seen.

  I went to the depot

  And looked up on the board,

  It said there’re good times heah

  But it’s better on down the road.

  He played quite well. J.P. listened and drank out of the bottle. Through the window he could see the black-green of the pines spread over the hills and the moon low in the sky and there was a river winding out of the woods across a field and he saw the moonlight reflecting on the water.

  Where was you, mama,

  When the train left the shed?

  Standing in my front door

  Wishing to God I was dead.

  “You do all right,” J.P. said.

  “I reckon you can pick, yourself.”

  “Play another one.”

  “No, I’m getting down pretty soon.”

  “Take a drink.”

  “Much obliged,” he said. He drank out of the bottle. “Play one yourself. I’d like to hear.”

  J.P. took the guitar from him. He leaned back against the wall of the vestibule, slightly bent over the guitar, and moved the callused tips of his fingers over the frets. The trainman drank from the whiskey and listened.

  I’m going to town, honey,

  What you want me to bring you back?

  Bring a pint of booze

  And a John B. Stetson hat.

  “That’s good. You got a nice style,” the gandy-walker said. “I ain’t heard good twelve-string guitar like that in a long time.”

  J.P. set the guitar down and took a drink.

  “You must be one of them professionals,” the gandy-walker said.

  “I used to be a farmer.”

  “You from around here?”

  “A little further north. Up by Arkansas.”

  “I worked in Arkansas. I railroaded all over the country. I was all the way to California once. I heard a lot of good picking, but you’re good as any. Where did you learn?”

  “From a bum in a Salvation Army camp.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “He didn’t own nothing but a five-dollar pawnshop guitar, but Jesus he could play. He come up to the house one day and asked for a drink of water and directions to the camp. I give him some meat and biscuit, and about a week later I was walking past the camp to the store and I seen him sitting under a tree with his guitar. He called me over and said he was going to teach me to play. I didn’t pay him no mind, and then he started playing and it was like nothing I ever heard. I went down to see him every evening for almost a month, and he’d let me keep the guitar overnight to practice with. Then one day he grabbed a freight and I never seen him again. He was the best, though. I never heard nobody except Leadbelly that could play as good.”

  J.P. and the trainman both took a drink off the bottle. It was good whiskey. They were nearing a town. The train whistle blew at the crossing, and the red signal light was swinging mechanically from a wood post by the side of the road and a bell was clanging to warn the automobiles. Another train sped past them in the opposite direction, and the noise was loud in the vestibule. The gandy-walker tried to say something and had to stop. He picked up his lunch pail and pointed out the door. The other train finally went past.

  “I get down here,” he said when it was quiet again. Thanks for the drink.”

  “You bet.”

  “Close the door after me. The conductor don’t like it open.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “So long, buddy.”

  “So long,” J.P. said.

  The gandy-walker swung the vestibule door inward and put his feet on the single steel step. The train was in the yard now and it was not moving very fast, but it was still dangerous to step down unless you did it right. He stood backwards on the step and held to the handrails with the handle of his lunch pail hooked over his thumb. The gravel bedding next to the track rushed by the open door. He eased one foot back and let it barely touch the ground, the rocks skipping up under his shoe, and put his weight down agilely and released his hold, and then he was gone into the dark somewhere behind the last lights of the train.

  J.P. stood alone in the vestibule and thought of the tramp that had taught him guitar, and he thought of the songs he had wanted to write which would probably never be written. He thought of Woody Guthrie, an Okie who bummed his way across the Dust Bowl to California during the depression with thousands of others to live in the Hoovervilles and tarpaper shacks and to ride the rods with never enough to eat and to get thrown in jails by town constables who feared a man with a hole in the bottom of his shoe. Guthrie wrote ballads about the Okies and America, and he drifted across the nation from the West to the East Coast and all the time he was writing and singing songs about the things he saw, and other people were singing them in the Hoovervilles and tarpaper shacks, and he never copyrighted what he wrote and his music about the diamond deserts and the redwood forests and the New York island got him almost nothing.
And there was Joe Hill, who had belonged to the I.W.W. and sung the songs of the working class that fought outside the factories with axe handles and lengths of pipe when striking was considered Red and the beginning of revolution, and Joe Hill was an I.W.W. spreading revolution and anarchy and his songs were sung by the Marxists, so he was stood against a wall in the Utah penitentiary and shot to death. J.P. thought about Jimmie Rodgers, a railroader from Meridian, Mississippi, who was the finest country guitarist of his time, and who had to quit railroading and make a living by singing when he contracted tuberculosis. But his songs were about the great trains that rolled from California to Texas and he was never able to get away from his life as a railroader. His last days were spent in a New York recording studio where he made records and became sick with fatigue and slept on a cot until he died.

  J.P. looked out the window into the dark. The train was past the station now, and he was out in the country again with the cool night air blowing in his face, the moon rising through the clouds above the green hills. He wondered at what point in his life everything had slipped loose and why he had never written the song about the train that came out of the woods in the late evening with the red sun just above the trees; and why hadn’t he written about the heat lightning flashing in the east and the rain falling slowly on the young cotton with the white and red flowers showing along the tops of the rows, and the nigger funeral marches down by the river where the dead were buried on a mud flat that was washed away once a year by the flood? He had never written anything except a campaign song for Jim Lathrop, and now with a heart condition and a cocaine habit there wasn’t much time left for writing.

  It was still dark when he arrived in town and stepped down on the platform from the train. He carried his suitcase and guitar through the waiting room and out the other door down the front walk towards the town square. The morning was cool and dark and there was just a thin ridge of blue light on the horizon. He crossed the street and walked a block to the square, and he saw the old brick courthouse set up high on the lawn and the luminous face of the clock on the steeple, and there were big shade trees in front and wood benches where the farmers came to sit on Saturdays, and around the four sides of the square there were hardware and drygoods stores and barber shops and feed suppliers, and everything was quiet now and the trees looked black on the lawn and he could hear a cat-squirrel chattering.

  He went to the hotel on the corner and took a room over the street. He lay on the bed and watched it grow light until he fell asleep. When he woke at ten o’clock, the sunlight was bright through the window and he had slept with his clothes on. The ceiling fan was turning slowly over his head, but the room was becoming hot as the sun got higher, and he changed his shirt and went out to a café to eat breakfast.

  J.P. had no family to speak of. His father had been a tenant farmer who brought his family down from Arkansas during the depression, and after he had located them on a seven-acre company farm he put his single change of clothes in a cardboard suitcase and caught a bus out of town and no one saw him again. The mother worked the fields with the children and sold eggs and butter at back doors in town, and she died two years later from cancer, for which she never had treatment. J.P. and his sister were raised by the older brother, and they continued to live on the seven acres of burnt-out land that would not yield enough cotton to come out with a profit at the end of the year, and when J.P. was almost grown the brother became involved with a Negro woman and was found dead on a country road one night with razor cuts all over his body, and although several Negroes were arrested and one was executed no one was ever sure who had done it. The sister stayed on another year, and one time J.P. caught her laying in the woods with a man, and he beat the man senseless with a stick and dragged her home and locked her in the bedroom, and she got out during the night and he called the sheriff to bring her back and this time he kept her locked in for three days and she got out again and the last he heard of her she was working in a brothel in Little Rock.

  So he had no one in town to go see and he didn’t really know why he had come, except that he was sick of his wife and vitamin tonic and nigger politics.

  He ate an order of eggs and bacon and drank a second cup of coffee. He paid the check and walked down the street to the barbershop. He looked at the courthouse and the trees and the green lawn in the sunlight. The barbershop had a candystriped pole in front of it and an awning that stretched out over the sidewalk. Two men sat in the shade on wicker chairs. The cement by their feet was stained with tobacco juice. J.P. went into the shop and sat in one of the chairs along the wall and picked up a newspaper. There was only one barber, and he was shaving a large fat man in the chair. There were some other men sitting in the chairs farther down the wall.

  Look, it’s J.P., someone said. It sure is. I didn’t recognize you. Hey boys, it’s J.P. How are you all doing? We didn’t figure to see you back here no more. I’m just visiting a couple of days. Hey, fellows, come on in and see J.P. You don’t look like the same fellow. He’s been running with them rich women. We been hearing about you. You gone right up to the top. Me and the old lady listen to you every Saturday night. There was a piece about you in the town paper a while back. I was saying to my old lady we used to shoot pool together down at the billiard hall. You fellows look like you’re working hard. Farming ain’t no good no more, J.P. A man does just as good setting in the barbershop. You sure done all right for yourself. Tell us about some of them rich women. I’m married now. Did you hear that? Old J.P. has got hisself a woman. I bet that don’t keep him out of trouble. Let’s go down to the billiard hall and I’ll buy the beers. Come with us, Sam. I got to keep the shop open for these loafers to set in. Ain’t one of them got six bits in his pocket for a haircut. Sam ain’t changed none, has he, J.P.? Let’s get a beer. He’s a buying.

  The six of them went to the billiard hall two doors down from the barbershop. There were four pool tables inside and one billiard table, and a long bar with a foot rail ran the length of the room, and there were places to play checkers and dominoes. The room was dimly lighted except for the electric bulbs in the tin shades over the tables, and the fans attached to the walls oscillated back and forth and cleared the smoke from the air. They stood at the bar and J.P. ordered the beers and paid for them. The bottles were sweating and cold, and the beer tasted good. They had another round and J.P. paid. The men he was with were farmers who seldom farmed; they spent their time in the billiard hall or in the barbershop or sitting in front of the courthouse and sometimes in jail. He didn’t remember all of their names and there was a couple of them who had recently come over from a pool table and were now drinking that he didn’t know at all.

  “You remember when we used to go see Ella across the river?” a man named Clois asked. There was a stubble of beard on his face and he wore overalls; he had never worked since he had learned how to switch a pair of dice in a game and not get caught. “We was inside with her and her old man come home and we had to crawl out the back window and hide in the cotton field because he was looking for us with a horse quirt.”

  “I reckon J.P. is getting his share now,” another man said.

  “Didn’t you hear him say he was married?”

  “That don’t keep a good man from tomcatting.”

  “Is you going to be in the movies, J.P.?”

  “I ain’t figuring on it,” he said.

  “He’s got plenty of what he needs right here.”

  “You fellows have another beer. I got to run along.” He put two dollars for the next round on the bar and finished his beer.

  “He’s a going to see old Ella, I bet,” a man said.

  “She’s still out there. A dollar a throw,” Clois said.

  “Come on back later. We’re going to have a game in back.”

  “You all are too sharp for me,” J.P. said.

  “Listen to that. He used to roll sevens like there wasn’t no other numbers.”

  “See you later,” J.P. said.

&nbs
p; “Tell Ella we’re coming out to see her,” Clois said.

  J.P. left the billiard hall and walked down the street towards the hardware store. The sun was above the courthouse now, and the day was getting hot. The shade trees across the street shadowed the lawn, and some old men sat on the benches out of the heat whittling shavings on the grass and spitting tobacco juice and watching the people move along the sidewalk. He went into the hardware store and bought some light fishing tackle—a detachable cane pole that came in three sections, twenty feet of six-pound test line, a wood float, some number four hooks, a piece of gut leader, and several small weights. The clerk wrapped the cane pole up and put the rest of the tackle in a paper bag.

  J.P. hired one of the town’s two taxis and rode down to the river where it made a bend by a deserted sawmill and the logs were jammed up along the shore under the overhanging trees. He walked down the green slope of the bank and looked out over the water, red from the clay and swirling in eddies around the logs across the river there were more trees and some Negro shacks and a pirogue was tied by its painter to a willow tree and pulling in the current. He laid his tackle down in the grass and found a piece of board to dig worms with. He squatted on the ground and dug in the soft dirt around the roots of a tree, sifting the dirt through his hands and picking out the worms one by one and putting them in a tin can. The worms were small, not like the big night crawlers he used to look for with a flashlight behind the barn at home. He scooped some dirt and leaves into the can and sat down under a tree on the bank and inserted the joints of the detachable pole into each other. Letting out the twenty feet of line, he tied a knot one foot from the end of the pole and another right at the tip to even out the pull of a fish along the whole cane. He slipped his float up the line and plugged the wood stick in the hole to keep it secure, and put on two small weights and mashed them tight on the line with his teeth, and tied the gut leader and the hook with a slip knot at the end. He threaded a worm carefully over the hook, not exposing the barb, and dropped the line into the water between the logs where the catfish nested.