“Hell,” groaned the coppers.
“Hell,” moaned the Big Rock Candy, and blew a little airish fart. A pelter of peanuts came down, skittered off Muckle’s hat brim.
“Pah! Poodle dogs,” Dula muttered. “Keep on yapping, you pissant poodle dogs.”
Muckle laughed like a cat getting cut the long way. No one had been hanged in the Big Rock country since the days of the one-page almanac, and he seemed to be having a high time reintroducing the custom. I’d heard many a tramp say, “Hang me if I ever work again,” but I never took it, you know, for law.
I had decided to roll my own, so I snatched a paper from a passing breeze, pinched some loose tobacco off the ground, and set to work. I needed to watch that no more than Muckle needed to look at his rope ties, so I regarded the prisoner with the edge of my eye. I had identified that long-gone thing in her face. It was need. Everything a human could want lying around for the taking in the Big Rock country, and there was a face full of need. Seeing it was like climbing into a boxcar halfway between Goddamn and Nowhere and being greeted in the cattle-smelling dark by a long-gone friend, or enemy.
“Got it figured full and complete, do you, Muckle?” I asked.
“I do.”
“Working is a capital offense, is it?”
“That it is, Railroad Pete.”
“Trying to work, even?”
“So it is said. So it must be.”
“Well, then, Muckle,” I said, watching the little fenced-in woman watching me, “who’ll be doing the honors next?”
Muckle’s hands stopped, but his head swiveled on its wattled neck and trained those eyeless panes at me. I fancied I saw my cigarette reflected in those black squares, but maybe that flame wasn’t on my side of the glass at all. “Whazzat?” Muckle snapped. “Honors? What honors?”
“Well, if you yourself hang this gal, then one of the coppers has to hang you next. Because all this time I’ve been sitting here in the shade taking my ease and smoking freeweed, you’ve been out there working your ass off and fixing to work even harder, hauling an easily five-stone gal, if she’s a day, completely off the ground and holding her there till she’s strangled dead. I call that work, and I say more stew for me.”
Muckle’s jaw worked away, but no sound came out. The coppers gaped, frozen in place like a prairie-dog town. I do not believe the wood in a copper stops at the hips. The Big Rock Candy heaved again, and we all got a nice dusting of powdered sugar. I knocked it off with my hat.
“But what truly gets up between my back teeth,” I went on, “is this. However much work it takes you, Muckle, to hang this woman, why, it’s going to take two or three times that much to hang you. So whichever copper does that job will just have to take his turn in the noose, and the copper after that, and the copper after that, and before you know it, Muckle, we’ll be completely out of coppers in these parts, save one. So I’ll have to do the honors on him, and then I’ll have to find a passer-by to do me, and so on and so forth, and directly, why this whole country will be put plumb out of business. No, Muckle, I’ve studied it and studied it, and I frankly see no way out, once you’ve set that hellish, inexorable vortex in motion.”
Coppers never talk much, but after a long, quiet time one of them rasped: “You could hang yourself, Muckle, after you do the gal, and break the cycle.”
“Shut up!” Muckle said.
“We’d have to work to bury him,” another copper said.
“Shut up!”
“Not if the cyclone got him,” the first copper said. “The cyclone comes through here every day about five.”
“We’d have to throw him in it, though, and we might miss.”
“I’ll do some throwing, if you don’t shut up!”
“Maybe the gal would hang her own self.”
“Hey, gal,” the first copper called out. “You ain’t feeling a mite sad, by any chance?”
Dula looked at me, and I looked back at her. “No, sir,” she said, “feeling right as rain,” and a little grape spo-de-o-dee spattered down from the sky. Some say the weather is the only thing you can do something about in the Big Rock country, just by thinking.
Well, the day got on, as days will, and those coppers jawed and hashed and gnawed the problem so long they took root where they were standing, and Dula just crawled out of the little thicket they had made. Bluebirds landed on their heads and sang a tune. Muckle had a hissy fit, threw down his rope, and stomped down the scaffold stairs, shaking his cane and cussing us both to a fare-thee-well.
“Well, ma’am,” I told her. “I’m afraid it’s the jailhouse for both of us.”
We had a nice get-acquainted visit, she and I, as we led Muckle to the jailhouse, him being blind and all. We got the history out of the way early, since we couldn’t remember peaturkey about our lives before we landed in the Big Rock country, and of course by definition nothing had happened since—just eating and sleeping and screwing around, and what is that to talk about? So we helped Muckle over the alky streams and the chocolate rocks and yessired him when he told us we should meditate on our sins, but we otherwise just goofed around. We laughed and laughed when we flushed a little covey of quail with bacon and fennel and buttermilk mashed potatoes, and later I blew her a smoke ring that turned into a spinning pineapple slice. She caught it on her index finger, and when she bit, the juice went everywhere.
It was a nice tin jailhouse, shining in the sun. Muckle shoved us in and slammed the door and felt around for the latch and locked it and threw away the key, which I caught and handed back to him as we came out the other door. “Much obliged,” he muttered. “And you can just hush that laughing, Railroad Pete!” he called after us, as we strolled off nudging hips and elbows and meditating on sins yet to come. “Think you’re so damn smart. Well, this troublemaker here is your lookout now!” Like I didn’t know that already.
Sex in the Big Rock country, like all the other good things in life, is just plumb great, and we’ll leave it at that. And when it’s done and you roll over, right there at your elbow is a frosty mug of beer or a Cuban cigar or a straight-from-the-oven doughnut with the hot glaze sliding down. The system ain’t noways Christian, but it’s pretty damn workable all the same, and for a few weeks there Dula and I worked it for all it was worth.
But Dula wouldn’t stop talking about the Eastbound and how to catch it, and about that fabulous land we couldn’t even remember, but where—if you believed the tales—everything worth having had to be earned, was so hard to get, in fact, that no two people had everything the same.
“But, Dula, if that’s how those poor suckers have it, why, we’re living the life they dream of, right here.”
“How do you know what they dream of? Do you remember what you dreamed of, when you were there? I don’t know about you, Pete, but I damn sure wasn’t dreaming about a talking mountain that strolls around firing off cherry jawbreakers.”
“Woof!” huffed the Big Rock Candy.
When I woke up at night, Dula might be sitting beside me, framed by stars, stroking my face, or she might be halfway up a licorice tree, hoping to glimpse the Eastbound as it screamed by in the distance.
We fought some.
One night I woke up and sat up at the same time, all a-sweat and chilled. I’d had my first nightmare, maybe the first nightmare ever in the Big Rock country. I turned to tell Dula about it, but she was gone, and so was the memory of the dream. Only it wasn’t a dream, I knew; it was my past. It was me.
“Who am I?” I said aloud.
“Who!” said the Big Rock Candy. “Whooo! Whoooooooooo!”
I got to my feet, mouth dry, and stared off toward the ridge where Dula must have gone. That wasn’t the mountain’s voice. That was the Eastbound, talking to me.
“I need to pack a bindle,” I thought, and here came the memory of what a bindle was, and how I should pack it. I snatched up my blanket and shook it out and started throwing in whatever food was lying about at the time, all Bs: beluga, brie, bologn
a. Damn that Dula anyway. What other memories would I need before the night was through?
People that want to get around in the Big Rock country, over to Cockaigne or Lubberland or Hi-Brazil, can just walk up to one of the mail trains and sit down and lift their feet up; that’s how slow those rattletraps are. Canoeing’s faster, and the river runs both ways.
But the Eastbound wasn’t one of those trains, and its tracks were off on the far side of the valley, nowhere near the lemonade springs, the crystal fountain, any of the sights. It was just a mile of gleaming rail running from tunnel to tunnel between two hills, with nothing to eat for a good hundred yards on either side.
You heard the whistle when the train was still miles underground, and for a half hour that sound got louder and shriller and the tunnel mouth got brighter and the gravel started dancing and the rails strummed like guitar strings and yet it was a shock when Boom, out of that shotgun barrel in the hill blew a big black gleaming two-header locomotive in a thunderhead of smoke and ash and sparks that burnt your eyebrows, and Whoosh the thing seemed to leap to the next tunnel where it plunged howling back into the earth for all the world like a sea monster leaving the water long enough to spout and then rolling back into the cold and the dark.
I staggered more than ran through the no-chow zone because the ground was shaking so. The two-header had already gone down, and the cars were zooming by—blinds with one side door, open gondolas, insulated reefers locked up tight. No snatching hold of this train as it passed; only your arm would swing aboard. The only way was from above. And there was Dula just where I feared—a little white smudge in the night perched on the lip of the second tunnel, looking down on the train rushing by. I ran for her and screamed her name just as she let go and dropped into one of the gondolas and not thinking I kept running up the slope into the hanging black cloud that the two-header had vomited and I choked and plunged through to the crumbling brick edge of the mouth and here came three empty gondolas in a row, maybe the last ones I’d get. I took the last big step and couldn’t hear myself scream as I hit the moving floor, tumbled, slammed into the oncoming wall. Man hit twice by train, lives. I was crumpled and hurting but I was—what was the phrase—I was holding her down. The train hadn’t shaken me yet. I rode her, I held her down, as she rolled beneath the surface of the world.
I woke up on hot greasy metal beneath the stars, pine trees whipping past. My arms and legs and fingers and head all felt awful when I moved them, but they moved. I sat up, found my bindle, sipped water, gnawed bologna. Dula had to be twenty, thirty cars up, toward the engine. But how could I know for sure? A drop into the gondola of a speeding train is pure luck. You could drop between the cars or hit the deck of a boxcar instead. And how did I know that?
I tied my bindle around my waist, climbed the gondola’s forward wall, looked down. Good. Steel bumpers, no need to ride the coupler this time. I eased myself onto the bumper, gauged the rocking of the blind next door, then made the jump easy. Every car has its niches and platforms and handholds, for the sake of the yardmen, but between yards they have their uses, too.
I worked my way forward along the train, up and over when I could, or around the sides. My parts complained, but they did what I asked, started reaching and stepping before I asked. I had done this before, many times, and I could do it again and again.
No wonder the Eastbound was so fast. Car after car as I clambered along held no cargo at all. But the train wasn’t empty. Not by a long shot. And I recognized just about everybody I came upon—not individual faces, but I knew their types well.
One car was full of fakers, working by lantern light on their little doodads they sucker people with. One punched holes in a sheet of tin with a nail; one pounded two bricks together and scraped the dust into paper packets; the bearded one whittled. I said no to lamp brighteners and love powders and splinters from William Jennings Bryan’s church pew, but before I moved on I tossed them a couple of sinkers—as good as money when playing seven-up in a blind at night.
In the corner of another car sat two cripples, one with a pinned-up jacket sleeve, one with a strapped-on peg leg. Like all cripples who meet on the rails, they were swapping tales about the day they didn’t move fast enough. They talked at once, stories sliding past each other on parallel tracks.
“I heard it go into the bucket, I did. Made a little clang like a chicken foot.”
“There was three swallows of whiskey left in the bottle, and when I woke up, the doc said I could have the rest, and he didn’t charge me any more than what I had in my pockets.”
“I lifted it, and foot and bucket and all wasn’t nearly as heavy as the foot was many a long day.”
“I still reach for things with it, and sometimes the candle or bottle falls over, so a ghost hand can do that much, anyway.”
“I buried it behind the Kansas City roundhouse where it’s soft, ’cause I was told otherwise it wouldn’t rest easy and would itch me forever. It don’t itch, but that big toe still aches something fierce when the weather comes up a …”
In midsentence the two cripples stopped talking and started unwrapping their clothes to compare stumps, and I headed on. Some things, even in a boxcar, are just too private to watch.
Whenever I reached a gondola, I tossed in my bindle and swung over the wall, hoping to raise Dula, but time and again I had no show. All were empty until I tossed my bindle practically on top of a half dozen tramps sitting in a circle around a mushed candle. As I climbed in, they stared at me and didn’t move. One held a jug ready to pour into the glass bottle held by a dough-faced old gal.
“No more!” she squawked, and the whole alky gang tensed to spring.
“I’m not thirsty,” I said, quick. “Don’t study about me. Just looking for a girl who dropped from a tunnel, that’s all.”
“No girl here! Not here!”
They stared at me some more. The old gal, satisfied, broke off looking and grunted to the stiff with the jug. He sloshed a little something into her wide-neck bottle, and she swirled it about. Another little slosh and swirl, and he stoppered the jug. They all leaned forward slack-mouthed, watching the old gal take one teeninchy sip from the bottle and sigh and pass it on. The water jug would cut it farther and farther around the circle till they were drinking the very memory of gin, and it would be time to go into town and raise another bottle or cup or dreg-drop of the stuff.
As the bottle went round they said a verse, taking turns at that, too.
“Sweet, sweet gin.”
“Let us in.”
“Sweet, sweet white.”
“Light the night.”
“Sweet, sweet booze.”
“Tell the news.”
“Throw my feet to the barroom seat.”
“Gin is sweet.”
Between that car and the next I crouched on the coupler and took a couple of swigs from my flask, holding the water in my cheeks and letting it seep down my throat slow. I punched the stopper three times with the side of my fist to jam it in good. Many a stiff has gone alky for lack of water.
After that I got more careful about just stepping in without an invite.
Sometimes I couldn’t go over, and I couldn’t go around. So I went under. It’s a decent enough crawl space down there, only it’s deafening loud and the sides are moving and there’s nothing to crawl on but trusses and rods. I wasn’t proud; I rode the trusses. But then I hit a car with no trusses, so I made like a veteran, and rode the rods.
Beneath the car and running its length was a suspended iron rod, with maybe a foot and a half of space between it and the floor above. Once again, I knew this, and knew the technique. I eased myself onto the rod until I lay full length, hands gripping the rod ahead, legs locked around the rod behind. I inchwormed forward and felt I was flying, like a witch on a broom.
Lying facedown, I knew the tracks whipped past a foot away. I couldn’t see them in the pitchy black, as dense and solid as a wall. Staring at that wall like a banished child made me want
to reach out, to test it with my hand, so to resist the temptation I lifted my head and looked forward, into wind like a hot greasy hand covering my face.
By turning my head to the left and sticking my neck out a little I could snatch enough outside breaths to keep from smothering, but I couldn’t keep that up because it hurt my balance and because my eyes naturally focused on the most distant parts of the moonlit landscape, the parts that were moving hardly at all, as if I could just lift my topmost foot and step into them and walk away. That meant time to look down again.
I was facedown when the roaring changed tone and the stars came out below me. I gasped and was nearly gone, but my hands and feet remembered. The train was crossing a river, and as the ties of the trestle whipped past I saw through them to the water below. Then all was black and close again.
Halfway down the rod. So far, so good. We plowed through an awful smell, gone before I could gag. Something dead on the tracks. Why in the world, people reading the paper always asked, would even a drunk lie down on the tracks?
My legs and arms ached. The vibration of the rod had roiled my stomach. My teeth hurt from chattering. Not much farther.
Then I heard a new sound up ahead, against the roar of the underside. Nothing regular, just a higgledy-piggledy pinging and clanking, like a youngun tossing pennies into a train.
I had no idea what it was, but it scared me to death. I couldn’t move forward, toward that noise. I lay frozen, twined around the rod, staring into the blackness ahead.
The sound getting louder, closer. Pang, ping, thonk. No rhythm at all. It was the sound of someone going mad.
Up ahead, little flickers, like fireflies. No, sparks. Flashing up first here, then there—
Then I remembered.
Back! Back!
I shinnied backward along the rod as fast as I could go. It wasn’t very fast.
Someone perched at the front of the car was playing out beneath it a length of rope with a five-pound coupling pin at the end. The sounds, the sparks—those were the pin ricocheting off the wheels, the ties, the bottom of the car. A one-bullet crossfire. An old brakeman’s trick to clear the undercarriage of tramps, if you can call murder a trick.
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