This Side of Jordan

by Monte Schulz

  Chester shrugged as he stepped on the accelerator. “Wherever you like. I’m feeling swell today, so you two go ahead and choose. Anywhere’s fine with me.”

  Hearing that, the dwarf slipped his hand into the farm boy’s shirt and fished out the poster Alvin had torn from the telephone pole back in Allenville. Wind blowing in his hair, he told Chester, “We found a circus.”

  ICARIA, MISSOURI

  AT SUMMER’S END, the farm boy from Illinois stood with a leather trunk and a pile of suitcases under the white arc lights of a small rail station platform in southern Nebraska. It was nearly half past ten and the train was late. A warm evening wind blew through a grove of weeping willows next to the depot and a crowd of young sports from the state college collected about a pair of Ford automobiles, drinking booze from a thermos bottle and joking. Down at the end of the platform beside the ticket office, Chester Burke sat on a wooden bench with a young brunette the farm boy fancied for himself. She was awfully pretty with silver-blue eyes and a melodic laugh that stirred Alvin’s heart. She wore thin white muslin and a pink scarf she fiddled with while Chester flirted. Alvin had noticed her first while he and the dwarf were unloading their baggage from the taxicab. When she was alone, waiting by the depot with a brown valise and a hat box, lace hanky in hand and weeping unaccountably, Alvin thought to go up and comfort her, perhaps put his arm around her and listen to her troubles, but he was too shy, so he left her alone. Now all Alvin could do was watch helplessly from across the platform while Chester honeyed her up and made the farm boy feel like a lemon.

  The office door opened and the dwarf came out with the station agent, both laughing. A breeze gusted and Alvin brushed a shock of hair from his eyes. Dust kicked up in the oily roadbed. He felt for the ticket in his pants pocket and looked down the tracks again for the late train. He was anxious to leave. He had already snuck out that morning to see a doctor for his aggravating sore throat. Alvin knew he had been getting sicker day by day, but was afraid of mentioning the consumption because he didn’t want to be ordered to the hospital, so he said nothing about the persistent cough nor the recurrent night sweats he had endured since Kansas. Still, the doctor detected his anemia and prescribed a dosage of iron and arsenic and ordered him home to bed. Chester had parked the Packard in an old livery stable ten blocks from the depot, hiding it until their return from Missouri where Rascal had found Emmett J. Laswell’s Traveling Circus Giganticus in a small town called Icaria. For five weeks now, the dwarf had been hunting Laswell by newspaper and rumor. He had scoured fair bulletins and trade notices, sent off telegraphs, written letters to chambers of commerce by the dozen, encouraged by Chester who paid cash-value for the effort without question. Now, upon the dwarf’s recommendation, Chester had purchased train tickets to Missouri because a grimy wagon circus had stopped to put on a show there, though Alvin had no idea why that had him so stewed up.

  The farm boy watched Chester take one of the peachy brunette’s hands and give it a soft pat as she mooned up at him from the shadows beside the office. Rascal hopped down off the platform to place a nickel on one of the iron rails. The station agent went back indoors to the information desk. In the dark distance, a train whistle sounded. While Chester Burke slipped his arm around the young girl’s shoulder and lightly nuzzled her ear, the dwarf hurried from the tracks toward Alvin and the baggage. Clouds of dust moths swarmed the arc light. A family of six dragged suitcases and stuffed burlap sacks up onto the rail platform. Three traveling salesmen in overcoats and felt hats walked up out of the willow shadows past Alvin. A sleepy woman with a small boy holding a hot-water bottle to his ear appeared nearby. The train whistle echoed again, and the blazing electric headlight of the great locomotive flashed down the tracks. The dwarf scrambled back up onto the station platform. Inhaling dust aggravated Alvin’s cough and made his head swim. He felt his fever rising and needed to lie down, worrying now that he might not be long for this world.

  “I’ve just spoken with a most remarkable fellow,” said Rascal, wiping dirt from the roadbed off his short pants. His blue suspenders were dusty and his white cotton shirt stained by perspiration.

  “I ain’t carrying your bags no more,” Alvin replied, his attention still focused on Chester and the brunette. Seeing them together like that gave him a peculiar bellyache. “It ain’t fair.”

  A man and a woman in evening dress walked toward the station, the man carrying a leather valise and a burning quarter cigar, the woman a longstem red rose.

  The dwarf stared intently at the college fellows roughhousing beside their automobiles. Farther down the platform, a baby’s fitful squalling was half-drowned out by the station agent announcing the arrival of Union Pacific passenger service to Kearney, Columbus and Omaha. More people crowded the platform, a few casting curious glances at the dwarf in his odd clothing.

  Rascal said, “Did I tell you how my Uncle Augustus helped drive the golden spike for the Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah?”

  Alvin frowned. “Not yet.”

  “Well, Dr. Thomas Durant, vice-president of the railroad, had been commissioned to drive the last spike at the grand ceremony, but having been enfeebled the night before by a spoiled bite of mince pie, he directed Uncle Augustus to take his part. I’m told the best engineers were quite impressed by Uncle Augustus’ strength and prowess.”

  “Did he get a medal?”

  The dwarf thought for a second. “Why, yes, I believe so.”

  “Hot diggety.”

  At last the locomotive arrived in a huge cloud of steam. A conductor and six Negro porters stepped off close to the station agent’s office. Alvin looked for Chester through the crowds to get his help with the luggage. A group of college fellows with slicked-back hair and polished spats came onto the platform, reeking of gin.

  “I’m very excited,” Rascal remarked, watching people getting on and off the train. “Oh, it’s been years since I’ve traveled by Pullman car. Of course, Auntie steadfastly refused to hear of it since Uncle Augustus died, claiming my constitution was entirely too frail for railroad transportation. As often as we fought over this, I was unable to persuade her otherwise. She can be quite stubborn. Did I ever tell you I once operated a locomotive?”

  Across the busy platform, Alvin saw Chester draw the brunette toward him and kiss her hard on the lips. When they broke, she was grinning like a spaniel puppy. The farm boy felt ill from fever and nerves. Truth was, he hadn’t been on a train since riding back from the sanitarium, another of the reasons he had run off with Chester: to get away from the farm, maybe live it up for once. Frenchy had taken a day-coach to Chicago the day after he graduated Normal School and gotten drunk on Canadian ale at a blind tiger in Cicero and woke up along the windy Lake Michigan shore with only his hat on. When he came home, he told Alvin he’d never had such a high time. Fellows they both knew in Farrington got stewed on hard cider and blackstrap and every so often attended the Odeon picture show after supper or church fairs on Sunday and some got buried in the same old clothes they had worn on their wedding day without ever having left the farmlands of Illinois. Work and pray, live on hay. Well, nobody could say that of Alvin, any longer. He had seen a lot of the world this summer, and it wasn’t anything to snicker at: roadside stands and barley fields hiding a thousand barrels of hootch, bed-bugs in tourist camps, motor-speeding by moonlight, suitcases full of orangeback bills, girls and killings. Cold-blooded murder. He had seen plenty, all right. Lately, though, he found himself in the middle of the night thinking about Aunt Hattie’s hermit cookies and the mullen weeds that grew under his bedroom window.

  Two pretty co-eds dressed in chic wool-velour coats and Clara Bow hats stepped off the train into the over-smiling welcome of the college fellows, one of whom planted a wet kiss onto the cheek of the first co-ed. The conductor directed a redcap to help the family of six with their baggage. Chester boarded the train two cars down at a compartment sleeper with the smiling young brunette on his arm. Alvin tugged at the steamer trunk,
pulling it upright. He told the dwarf, “Like I said, I ain’t fetchin’ yours no more. It ain’t fair.” The conductor called out “All aboard,” and after another few minutes the train whistle shrieked and sparks flew out of the engine compartment as the fireman, black-faced with coal grime, stoked the furnace. Smoke billowed high into the dark.

  “I wouldn’t think to ask,” the dwarf replied, grabbing two of the smaller suitcases and dragging them toward the train and the nearest redcap. Alvin followed the dwarf through a crowded vestibule on a second-class Pullman sleeper whose berths were already drawn with curtains. The narrow aisle was hectic with people shoving past in both directions. Odors of disinfectant mixed with stale tobacco fumes and sweat. A white-jacketed porter hustled by with dust cloths and fresh bed linen and a portable vacuum cleaner.

  “I’ll need the lower berth, of course,” said the dwarf, stopping at number eight. He tossed his suitcase onto the bed and immediately crawled inside. Alvin frowned as a plump woman with a small child shoved past, grumbling about ill-mannered people crowding the aisles. He looked up at the upper berth and decided it was too cramped. The train whistle screeched.

  “I ain’t climbing up there,” the farm boy said, setting his own leather suitcase down. “You take it. I’ll give you a boost.”

  “No, thank you. I prefer where I am.” The dwarf pushed a buzzer next to the window as the Pullman car lurched into motion. The whistle blew again and the locomotive chugged slowly forward along the tracks. Down at one end of the car, the washroom door opened and a fellow in a waistline suit and gray fedora exited, a folded newspaper tucked under one arm.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Alvin found the Negro porter at his elbow, holding a small stepladder. Rascal stuck his head out of the lower berth to watch. The farm boy said, “I ain’t getting up there. I want this one down here.”

  The porter said, “Looks to me like it already been spoken for.” He picked up Alvin’s luggage to be stowed away.

  Just down the corridor, a young woman wearing a flamingo pink silk tea gown stepped out into the aisle from number four. “Oh, porter, could you help me, please?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He turned to the farm boy. “Be right back, sir.”

  Leaving the stepladder at Alvin’s berth, the porter moved off down the aisle while the sleeper car swayed gently side to side. One of the conductors entered the Pullman from the front vestibule. Through the window, the last lights of the factory town flickered out of the dark. Rascal rolled over on the bed and closed the curtain.

  “May I help you, sir?” the conductor asked Alvin, as he arrived at the berth.

  “I ain’t sleeping up there,” replied the farm boy, coughing into his fist. “It ain’t room enough.”

  “Your ticket, please?”

  Alvin handed it over to the conductor who took one quick look and gave the ticket back again. He told the farm boy, “Well, I’m sorry, but there are no other accommodations available on this train tonight. I’m afraid you’ll have to make do. Your porter’ll help you up. Goodnight.”

  Tipping his cap, the conductor walked off toward the drawing rooms at the rear of the car.

  Rascal stuck his head out through a fold in the curtain. “These berths really are quite comfortable.”

  “Aw, choke it,” Alvin growled, climbing up into his berth.

  Soon the electric lights were extinguished and the Pullman car was dark. Across the aisle, Alvin heard a salesman in the upper berth snoring like a sick bear. Half a dozen times, the porter passed by. Twice, the girl in number four summoned his attention. Another short dumpy fellow waddled back from the washroom, stinking of gin and cigars. In his cramped upper berth, Alvin watched the night countryside fly past, lights of scattered farmhouses glowing like tiny stars on the black prairie. He wondered how far east the other passengers were going. St. Louis? Cleveland? Pittsburgh? Washington? All those places he’d likely never live long enough to see. Trains ran all night in America. He wondered what it would be like to get off one in Boston or New York, walk around under a giant skyscraper, eat in a swank restaurant somewhere, attend a movie show with a big crowd, ride a subway car to the waterfront and watch the big ships come in from China, all the ladies of joy flocking to sailors and other young strangers like himself.

  Rascal tapped on the underside of the bed. Alvin ignored him. The dwarf tapped again. Somebody passed by in the aisle, scent of bay rum trailing behind. Two men were conversing in low voices at the front of the car with the porter. Rascal tapped again and Alvin stuck his head through his curtain and leaned over the side and pulled open the dwarf’s berth. “What’re you doing that for?”

  The dwarf’s smiling face thrust out from the dark. “Shall we play a game of Hearts?”

  “Go roll your hoop.”

  Rascal ducked back into his berth and rang for the porter. The whistle from the locomotive screeched and a few seconds later the clanging of klaxon bells at an empty crossroads echoed briefly through the Pullman car. The porter came down the aisle to Rascal’s berth. “Yes, sir?”

  “Is there a toilet?”

  “At the front of this car.”

  “Much obliged.”

  The porter left.

  Rascal crawled out of his berth, fully dressed. Peeking out from his own berth, Alvin saw a woman’s face and enormous bosom emerge from behind the curtain in number three, curlpapers in her hair. “Good heavens!” She gave a tug on the curtain to the berth above her. “Harold?”

  A man’s voice answered. “Yes, dear?”

  “It’s that strange little man again!”

  “Close your eyes, honey, he’ll go away.”

  Rascal gave her a polite bow.

  The woman shrieked, “Harold!”

  Another man stuck his head out of a lower berth. “For crying out loud, would you folks please keep quiet!”

  The dwarf closed his curtain and rushed off toward the front of the Pullman. Alvin stretched out. He closed his eyes and tried to forget his bellyache. After a while the salesman in the upper berth across the aisle quit snoring. Alvin listened to the occasional train whistle and thought of the trestle across the Mississippi where he used to fish and swim. Fact was, nobody knew where he’d gone. Maybe they thought he’d gotten on a truck and ridden to California, or else jumped in the river and drowned. Probably Joe Mitchell would organize a pack of men to drag the current below the trestle and ol’ Stewball would throw a couple sticks of dynamite into the water to try and get the body to come up out of the muck, after which they’d go home and eat a chicken dinner and get drunk and probably forget about him in a week or so. Maybe Frenchy would nail up some notices down river and drive Uncle Cy’s Chevrolet south to Quincy, but it wouldn’t be more than a month before most of them would give up and figure he just bumped off from his consumption somewhere. Poor old Alvin was dead and gone to Jesus. Someone else’ll have to feed the cows now and water the chickens. Maybe Mary Ann. She doesn’t hardly do nothing around the house but read drugstore magazines and chalk up her face for snooty Jimmy McFarland. If Daddy wasn’t feeling stingy, he might order up a nifty stone for the gravesite and maybe Frenchy would get a haircut and wear a suit of black broadcloth and everyone’d come and bawl their eyes out for a couple hours and say a sorrowing word or two about what a fine kid good old Alvin had been when he was alive for tolerating his illness and all, and how much they were going to miss him, and how nobody could ever weed and water a garden as good, and who could forget how he fixed Mrs. Wilkie’s worm fence in a day and a half for nothing more’n a jar of watermelon pickles and a glass of cider, and how after hearing that, the preacher might even tell everybody that poor dear departed Alvin Frederick Pendergast was a saint and a credit to his grieving family, after all.

  The train roared past a blackened junction town without stopping.

  Alvin had finally drifted off to sleep when a woman’s voice down the aisle called from the dark, “Good heavens, Harold! He’s back!” Alvin felt the stepladder scrape a
gainst the lower berth. The double curtain rustled, and parted briefly, allowing somebody to struggle up onto his bed, nearly pulling the bedlinen off in the process.

  “Hey!”

  “Shhhh!”

  The berth light flashed on and Alvin saw the dwarf propped up near the window-fastenings at the foot of the berth. Rascal held a fistful of bills. “We’re rich!”

  Feeling wobbly and lightheaded, the farm boy leaned out through the curtain to look down the aisle where the woman from berth three was talking to the porter: “I tell you, he’s deliberately spoiling my sleep.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “My husband owns fourteen chain stores and I want something done.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Harold!”

  Alvin ducked back into his berth. The dwarf had curled up next to the window and spread the bills out on the blanket. The farm boy switched off the berth light, then shushed the dwarf. Somebody grabbed the stepladder. The porter’s face thrust into the upper berth. Seeing the two of them together, he smiled. “Why, ain’t that something. Looky here.”

  “Yeah?” Alvin coughed hoarsely. Now he wasn’t sure he could get back to sleep.

  “I s’pose y’all ain’t needing this ladder no more.”

  “I guess I will tomorrow morning,” the farm boy said, rubbing his eyes. He noticed his bedclothes were damp and smelled moldy. “When’s breakfast? I’m so hungry I could eat a rubber boot.”

  “Well, sir, I’d say you’re still a few hours shy of a cup of coffee and a doughnut, but I’ll come get you, don’t you worry. Yes, sir.” Then the porter turned to Rascal who was hiding in the corner of the berth at Alvin’s feet. “And if I was you, little fellow, I’d keep my eyes peeled. There’s a lady we both know who’d like her husband to give you a good old-fashioned lickin’.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Rascal protested. “I haven’t done a thing.”

  “Well, she’s awful cranky.”