The Cordwainer

by Christopher Blankley

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Mitty Speaks Up

  Maybe Fluky was smart, getting out while the getting was good. By noon, the stream of customers from Wyatt had died to a trickle and I took the chance to buy some food and bring it to Mitty, sulking up in the cockpit of The Cordwainer.

  “Eat,” I ordered from the running board, handing a sandwich in Mitty. He took it and removed the brown paper, taking a bite, sullenly. “I think it's time to steam on,” I said, taking a bite of my own sandwich. “See what awaits us in Wyatt.”

  Mitty chewed contemplatively, “What do you think happened to Fluky?”

  “I don't know,” I answered honestly.

  “He wouldn't have left... abandoned us...”

  “No.”

  “Something must have happen.”

  “No.”

  “Then-” Mitty started then stopped, taking another bite of his sandwich. “He wouldn't have just run away...”

  “Nevertheless, here we are.”

  “He might be back,” Mitty said hopefully, “thinking we were waylaid here in Galt for the interim...”

  “No,” I replied gravely. “He took his share.”

  “He wouldn't have just run away...” Mitty repeated, dejected.

  “We're moving out in twenty minutes,” I said, dropping down off the running board. “I'll secure the load.”

  “But... Wyatt. The National Guard?” Mitty remembered, leaning out the cockpit.

  “Ordered to let us through, so I hear. We're going to take this train all the way to the Big City, Mitty. Fluky or not. There, we can see what's waiting for us – what little surprise the Concession has for us at the end of the line.”

  We were moving again and rolling out of Galt after half a dozen more transactions out of the back of the caboose. If we'd waited for a complete end to the stream of customers, we'd never have left town. One determined young man sprinted after our departing train with a wad of bills in his hand, which I grabbed as I tossed a pair of shoes back at him.

  We were out of the mountains now, into the lush open green of the foothills above the Big City. Wyatt was a sleepy farming community that looked idyllic as we wound our way down off the hills towards it. On closer inspection, however, it seemed significantly more hard done by. The looting of the Concession Store seemed to have turned into an all-out riot through town. We saw windows of houses smashed and doors pulled off their hinges as we came through the outskirts of town. The streets were abandoned. For the first time since crossing the mountains, there was no welcoming crowd of people waiting for our train.

  We saw a single National Guard trooper as we neared the center of town. He was standing guard with a rifle, and looked taken aback to see us steam by. As we crossed Wyatt's Main Street, a number of baby-faced young soldiers appeared from the surrounding buildings to watch us pass by. We didn't slow, despite some of the troopers waving for us to do so – waving money in their hands. We were out of Wyatt as quickly as we had entered, with no confrontations.

  Hammond was a different case entirely. The National Guard had been turned out here also, but a throng a people waited along the tracks, hoping to catch a glimpse of our passing. A great yell went up when we came into view, and people waved and cheered as we pulled into town. Only a line of troopers on either side of the tracks stopped the people from mobbing the train.

  These troops were focused on their duty of crowd control. Very few of the troopers even looked over their shoulders to see our train passing. They were facing a crowd that could have easily turned ugly at any moment, but the celebratory mood of the crowd remained gay as we steamed straight on through the center of town, neither stopping nor slowing down. That day, turning out and seeing The Cordwainer pass was a special event, enough for the people of Hammond. No commerce was really necessary. Mitty and I waved from the cockpit of the train, the cheers raising our spirits a little after the inexplicable loss of Fluky.

  The reception we received in Hammond, however, started me thinking about exactly what would be waiting for us in the Big City. If we were becoming so popular, if we could turn out a crowd just to see our passing, the powers-that-be in the Big City had a real problem on their hands. What would we find at the terminus of the Northern Pacific? Cheering crowds? Or a riot in progress?

  The bomb in the pass now made so much more sense to me. If The Cordwainer had simply vanished in the mountains, lost in the crossing, attacked by Polypigs, it would have been so much easier to explain. But now we were in the lowlands, only hours from the Big City, the eyes of the whole region watching. It would have been best to stop us before we triumphantly rolled our stock into the abandoned freight yards of the old railroad. But to attack our train now would reverberate up and down the tracks like a shock wave. Everyone we had dealt with, sold a pair of boots to, knew we were not criminals. Flouting the law, yes, but not criminals. We were a genie the government could never put back into the bottle. Better we had vanished in the mountains never to be found. But we had survived, and we had made it through the pass, and now we were at their very doorstep. What could they do when we rolled into the Big City with our train load of boots?

  Mulligan gave me a glimpse of exactly what would be waiting for us at the end of the line.

  They had time to prepare. They had made banners.

  Passing through Mulligan was, perhaps, as close to riding on a float in Mardi Gras as I will ever come. As the late afternoon light was fading, the town of Mulligan was in full parade spirit. There was yelling and whistles and a brass band playing in the town square. Confetti came tumbling down out of the upper windows of the building facing onto the tracks. The same thin khaki line of National Guard troopers stood between the merriment and the tracks, but they did little to dampen the spirits of the partygoers.

  If, in Hammond, we had been a spectacle, in Mulligan we were out-and-out heroes. Word of The Cordwainer was traveling down the tracks faster than our real engine could carry us. The story was picking up more stream than our turbine could produce. The whole enterprise had left the land of actual events and entered into the realm of mythic folk law. Mitty and I waved to the screaming crowds as we steamed through Mulligan, but didn't slow The Cordwainer down in the slightest.

  We had a date in the Big City.

  Outside of Mulligan, the terrain bottomed out, flattening for the approach to the big lake that edged the Big City. I caught my first glimpse of the skyscrapers of the Big City there, as the sun was setting behind them. We'd be running the last twenty miles of our journey, around the south end of the big lake, in darkness. I moved up from the caboose to the running board beside the cockpit, where Mitty was crouched behind the controls. I took in the beautiful view, with our goal finally in sight, and smiled up at Mitty.

  “There she is!” I yelled over the whir of the engine.

  Mitty pulled himself halfway out of the cockpit to get a better view, sitting on the edge. He laughed a belly laugh as he saw the city for the first time – for the first time in his life. “Bully!” he yelled.

  “An hour and this will all be over!”

  “For good or ill.”

  “Yes.”

  “What's the final take?” Mitty asked, not taking his eyes off the view.

  “A quarter of a million each, you and I,” I replied.

  “Bully,” he said, with a deep and abiding appreciation. “What do you think they're going to do?” Mitty asked after a pause. “When we get to the city?”

  “I don't know, if the reception is anything like Mulligan...”

  “We'll be heroes!”

  “Heroes for a day...”

  “But still... heroes...”

  “I didn't think we would strike such a nerve. Shadrach, Marmont, the Polypigs, Galt...”

  “A ray of light, in a gray world...” Mitty said thoughtfully. He took his cigarette holder out of his pocket and put it into his mouth. He'd long ago smoked the last of his cigarettes, but he sucked on the empty holder, contentedly. r />
  “I still don't see exactly what we did...” I said, more to myself than to Mitty.

  “I think,” Mitty began, not looking away from the sunset. “For a decade, the President has been telling us all that we're still a Nation of Big Ideas. Well, I think we've shown them all, somehow with this train, that we're a nation still capable of small ones, too.”

  I looked up at Mitty in disbelief. Shock. For once, I didn't interrupt.

  “Incremental changes. Each fellow working to make things better. All the global overheating has got us thinking of things backwards. Big solutions to big problems. But that isn't how you solve big problems. No sir. Even a dummy like me knows that. Break it down into its component parts, like this train, and deal with each part independently. Fix the things you can fix and mitigate the impact of the rest. Start worrying about the whole big problem and you lose perspective, try and bite off too much. But if you can make the problems small enough, and numerous enough, you can solve them each in turn. And before you know it, you've solved the bigger problem, too.

  “No, the whole global overheating thing has everyone thinking there aren't any solutions to people's problems 'cause there aren't solutions to the problems that are big enough. Summers just keep getting hotter and hotter, no matter what folks do. They suffer, they sacrifice, they do without, but nothing helps the temperature at all. But instead of a million different people attacking the problem in a million different ways we got one fellow, right at the top, trying to solve it all at once. Can't be done, no sir, no matter how smart you are, no matter how many strings you can pull.

  “So, when people see a problem being solved, even a small one, like putting boots on people's feet, they applaud it. They applaud us, you and I, Beanie, for solving that problem. That it is, perhaps, inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, doesn't really matter. After so many years, after so many setbacks, it's a gain – it's a win. It's something people can get behind and cheer. And cheer they are, Beanie, for what we've done. For this train.”

  I hung to the running board in silence as The Cordwainer steamed toward the Big City. Mitty removed his empty cigarette holder and returned it to his pocket, slipping back into the cockpit and looking over the gauges.

  I made my way back along the length of the train, past the bullet-ridden hopper cars, now mostly empty, and dropped back into the caboose. I dug the hemp bang containing our profits from underneath the seat and opened it up. I took a look at the stacks of crisp $100 bills inside. $500,000. More money than I could have ever dreamed of seeing in my life. Right there in my hands. I pulled the tie closed on the sack and climbed out of the caboose again, working along the running board back towards the engine.

  “Here,” I said, handing the bag through the window of the cockpit.

  “What?” Mitty took the sack, looking at me cross-eyed.

  “Take it,” I said.

  “Put it back in the caboose,” Mitty tried to hand the bag back.

  “No,” I corrected. “Take it all. All the money, the whole half million.”

  “What?”

  “You're getting off.”

  “What?!”

  “Off the train, before we get to the Big City. There's Hoovervilles all along the track to the south of the city, I'll drop you off there. You're half way to looking like a hobo already, you'll blend right in.”

  “No!” Mitty protested.

  “No,” I insisted and poked the sack. “They're not going to take this away from us. Not what we've rightfully earned. Someone has to take this train right to the end of the line, but two of us don't have to. You're getting off, before we reach the terminus. You can hold on to my share, I'll find you later, then we can split it up.

  “But take it and run, Mitty. Get off this train before we reach the station. We might be heroes today, Mitty, but today's heroes are tomorrow's villains. Mitchell was right, the Concession aims to make us pay the full price for the cargo we've hauled. Not just the boots, but all the troubles we've caused along the way. They'll need their patsy, their villain to parade before the public, but they won't need two. I'm volunteering for this Mitty. The whole thing – this whole train – it was your idea. It was Fluky who built it. What did I do? Realize I was too stupid to build the engine I said I thought I could build? That was my whole contribution to this enterprise, Mitty, until right now. This I can do, I can bring this train home and I can stand by it. I can stand by what we built and let them vilify me for it.”

  “We can both-” Mitty began.

  “You're no dummy, Mitty,” I interrupted. “But you and I both know this is no job for you. They'd twist your words, Mitty, use them against you. You can take the money and you can hide. That you can do. I'll take this train to the end of the line and we'll meet up later, after it's all blown over. I know I can trust you with my share of the profits, Mitty, just as you would trust me. You're getting off the train, Mitty, with all of the cash.”

  “I-” Mitty started and stopped. He looked at me and I stared back as The Cordwainer rattled along down the tracks. The big lake was now fully in view, shimmering off to our right in the moonlight. Here and there amongst the trees, small housing developments showed themselves – clutches of well wishers beside the tracks waving flags, cheering. Here, the rails must have been in use by the local trolley cars, as small neighborhood stations facing onto the tracks. It wouldn't be long now, and we'd been on the outskirts of the Big City. Almost to the end of the line.

  Mitty pulled his bulk out of the cockpit of The Cordwainer, slinging the hemp bag of hundred dollar bills over his shoulder.