Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  Collis had never seen a town so dilapidated and discouraging as Aspinwall. Front Street, along which they followed the rusting tracks the of the trans-Panama railroad, faced out across the misty harbour, where small sailboats glided like ghosts. On the east side of the street, towards the town itself, there was a white stone freight depot, a couple of derelict wooden houses, one of which sported a fading sign that read ‘Café du Chemin de Fer’, an icehouse, two tired-looking saloons, a railroad office, and further along, the Hotel Colón, a run-down three-storey balconied building.

  The street was unpaved, and thick with oozing, blue-black mud. It was littered with empty bottles, dead dogs, broken chairbacks, and garbage. On the front verandahs of the buildings opposite, idle Jamaicans watched the slow, slippery progress of the Virginia’s small cavalcade with glazed indifference. The population of Aspinwall was almost all black, and almost all poverty-stricken. They were the remnants of the Caribbean work force that the founders of the Panama Railroad Company had brought over, along with Chinese and Irish, to lay the tracks across the isthmus; and now they rotted, along with the town in which they lived, in a swampish miasma of disease, heat, and hopelessness. All that the founders had left behind of themselves was a red-granite memorial, streaked with rain, which was dedicated to the vision and fortitude of John Lloyd Stephens, Henry Chauncey, and William Henry Aspinwall.

  Collis took a long look at the memorial as he rode past it. Then he raised his eyes upward, above the wet red rooftops, where huge black buzzards wheeled tirelessly around and around and around, as if the town itself were a corpse from which they could pick; and the rain fell as if it were going to fall for ever.

  Chapter 4

  It was still raining during the night as Collis lay in the Hotel Colón trying to sleep. He tossed around in his narrow iron-framed bed, tousled and sweating, and at last he sat up with the crumbly old mosquito netting draped around his head as if he were a new bride, or a man playing the ghost of himself. The heat seemed to be even worse at night, but he had heard that the night air carried fever, and so he had kept his shutters closed. He lifted the netting, groped to find his matches on the bedside table, and awkwardly lit his oil lamp. The yellowish light swelled to fill the room.

  The Hotel Colón, when they had arrived, had turned out to possess a decaying French grandeur, with half-collapsed chandeliers and muddied carpets, although the rooms themselves were bare-boarded and rudimentary. Collis wouldn’t have minded if they had been strewn with rushes. He had been so exhausted by the time a young pockmarked Spanish boy had shown him up to his balconied room on the second floor that he had closed the door and fallen back on his bed with a greater feeling of relief and luxury than he had ever been afforded by the St Nicholas Hotel or the Union Club or even one of the plushest bawdy houses on Mercer Street. After lying motionless for five minutes, he had kicked off his wet boots, stripped off his rain-darkened coat, and then lain back again and closed his eyes.

  He had slept, he supposed, for about two hours. He picked up his watch from the table, but it had stopped at ten o’clock. He looked around the room. There was a cream-painted closet, a battered bureau with a china jug and a basin, and a reproduction of the Madonna of the Rocks. His trunk must have been brought up while he slept, because it lay upended next to the bureau. There was a close smell of tropical mould and camphor, and it made him sneeze, twice.

  He got out of bed, squatted down by his trunk, and unlocked it. Underneath his linen coat, securely wrapped up in a towel, was a bottle of red burgundy, which he had purchased on the steamer. He took it out, sat on the bed, and dug the cork out of it with his penknife. He swilled out with wine the cloudy tumbler that the management had left by his bed, and then poured himself a large glassful. The water, Andrew Jackson Hunt had warned him, was as dangerous as the night air.

  He was sitting there drinking and wiping the sweat from his forehead with the towel when he heard a hoarse whistling sound. He frowned and listened. There was another sound, too. A monotonous pssshh-clank, pssshh-clank, followed by a long sharp exhalation of steam. He got up and went across to the window that gave out on to the balcony. Through the slats of the shutters, he could see orange lights flickering and hear loud voices talking in Spanish, and laughter. Collis unfastened the latch, opened the balcony door, and stepped out into the hot night air.

  Through the sparkling rain, only a hundred feet away across the muddy street, he saw a railroad train. It was obviously waiting for boxcars to be rolled out of the main yard before it went into the terminus itself. The locomotive was steely grey, with a tall bell-shaped smokestack, a green-painted cab with Gothic windows as elaborate as a gazebo, four huge driving wheels, and a red-painted cowcatcher. Behind it was a tender, piled with wood, as decorative and bright as a New York saloon on wheels. Behind that were four US Mail boxcars and six passenger cars with varnished sides and curtained windows.

  In that dark, glittering night, with Limón Bay suffused in mist behind it, the locomotive and its train looked like a carnival. All its windows were alight, and from the lantern in front of the smokestack shone a wide beam that caught the falling rain in a whirl of gold. Showers of tiny red sparks flew into the night, while steam sizzled from the safety valve and dissolved around the wheels. An aroma of grease and woodsmoke mingled with the damp tropical putrefaction of Front Street.

  Collis went back into his room to find a cigar, but he came back out again to light it, and to stare, while he smoked, at the shining train. He could see the engineer in his peaked calico cap and ticking-striped shirt, his back dark with sweat, and the fireman, stripped to the waist, tossing logs into the furnace. All along the length of the train, boxcar doors were being slid open and slammed shut, tappers were hammering and ringing at the wheels, and shunters stood in the rain waiting to marshal the train into the yard and disconnect it. They called and whooped in Jamaican patois and Spanish, and one of them blew persistently at a railroad whistle.

  It was a carnival, but it was more. It was a carnival that rode through the jungle and the mountain passes, from one wide ocean to the other, and carried people of all kinds, people with ambitions and people with fears, cheap people and expensive people, liars and missionaries, to fresh and unknown destinies. It seemed to Collis like a strange decorated vehicle of human fate, a challenging and almost unmanageable apparatus which swept you out of your past and into your future whether you wanted to go or not. Right out there on Front Street, breathing and sniffling to itself in the equatorial heat, gilded and enamelled and enticingly bright, it was the sideshow that was going to bear Collis away to the rest of his life.

  He left his hotel room and walked along the corridor until he came to the stairs. Although it was well past midnight, the bar down below was still open, and someone was playing a slow and sentimental tune on the piano. The hotel lobby must have been lavish once, in the days when the railroad was being constructed, but now it looked more like a barn that someone had perversely painted with dim murals of naked nymphs and Doric temples. Under the sagging chandelier, twenty or thirty men sat at scratched and drink-stained tables with their hats firmly on their heads, drinking bourbon and smoking pipes, talking too loudly and wishing to God they were someplace else. Three fans revolved uselessly, making no impression on the sodden heat or the dense tobacco smoke. By the desk was a black-framed list of the hotel rules – no smoking in the bath, no spitting off the balconies, no more than three to the bed. There were no palms in the hotel foyer, as in the hotels in New York; the management’s policy was that if a guest wanted to look at a palm, he could step outside the door and see enough damned palms to last him for the rest of his life.

  Collis went down the creaking stairs and across to the bar, where the Spanish barkeep was polishing glasses on the sleeve of his baggy shirt. Collis asked for a stone fence, but the barkeep only stared at him, so he made do with three fingers of Old Carstairs Authentic. Then he leaned back against the bar and looked around, still feeling tired, but someho
w more excited with the way his life was turning out than he had been for days. Maybe now he was in Panama he’d begun to recognise that there was no turning back, and that whatever was going to come next, he was going to have to bite the bullet and make the best of it.

  At the grand piano, by the light of a tarnished candelabrum, an elderly man in a soiled straw hat and whiskers as sparse as a tomcat was playing an emotional French tune, a tune of lost loves and heartbreaks and Sunday walks on the banks of the Seine, with an unerring instinct for hitting the wrong note at the peak of each bar; meanwhile a tall man in a yellow vest was singing some other song altogether. Nobody seemed to mind, or care; here in Aspinwall on a rainy summer night, everybody had his mind on other things. There were occasional sallies of laughter, but they were short-lived and strained.

  Collis had almost finished his whisky when Andrew Jackson Hunt came downstairs and walked across to the bar.

  ‘How do you do?’ he said, raising his hat.

  ‘Much better, thank you for asking,’ Collis told him. ‘I managed to get in a couple of hours’ sleep, at least.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Andrew Hunt, ‘I wish I could. The problem is, my room is right next to the goddam water closet, and every time I’m right on the edge of nodding off, somebody decides to do their party imitation of Niagara Falls.’

  ‘Have you seen the train outside?’ said Collis. ‘I was thinking of going across to take a closer look.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever seen a train before?’

  ‘Of course. But not this close. I always kept away from the railroad tracks in New York to keep from frightening the horses.’

  Andrew beckoned the barkeep over and asked for a bourbon and a refill for Collis. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he said, leaning his elbows on the bar and taking a good hard swig, which he swilled around his teeth. ‘The railroad train is where the money is, and that’s for sure. One day, somebody’s going to be smart enough to lay down a railroad all the way from San Francisco to St Louis, and that somebody’s going to make himself richer than Crease-ass.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘What’s the matter with you society people? Don’t they give you a decent education? King Crease-ass, that’s who I’m taking about, and that’s who you and me could be like if we had the brains, and the backing. Look at this goddam Panama Railroad. How long does it take you to get to Panama? Six hours at the worst. And how much do the bastards charge for it? Twenty-five dollars in gold. By my reckoning, that’s better than four dollars an hour, per person, in gold. Think what the hell you could charge for a straight railroad ride across to California, or back again, without ever having to set foot on a steamer, or come anywhere near this goddam jungle.’

  The barkeep set down their drinks. ‘I’ve already drunk half a bottle of wine,’ Collis said. ‘I don’t want to get paralytic.’

  ‘Drink it,’ said Andrew. ‘Bourbon is the best preventive for yellow fever there is, that and a little mustard. Barman, do you have some mustard? Mootard?’

  The barkeep shook his head.

  ‘They’re all the damned same,’ complained Andrew. ‘They’d like to see you catch sick, and wind up with your legs sticking up in the air; that’s what they’d like. And they get the pleasure of it often enough. There’s consumption and smallpox and cholera and malaria and yellow jack around here, just about enough of it to wipe out half of Carolina, and a good piece of Virginia besides.’

  ‘Don’t they get sick themselves, living in this pesthole?’

  ‘Sure they do. But you only get the yellow fever once. Usually, you die. But if you don’t die, then you never get it again. Mind you, immunity to yellow fever don’t protect you from cholera, or anything else.’

  Collis drank his bourbon as if it were medicine. It made him feel more lightheaded than he wanted to be, and nauseated, but anything was better than catching some fatal tropical disease.

  ‘They had so many labourers die when they were building this railroad, they didn’t know what to do with all the bodies,’ Andrew said cheerfully. ‘So what they did in the end was, they pickled the dead men in barrels, and they sold them to hospitals and medical schools, for doctors to cut up. I heard the railroad company made a real decent profit out of that.’

  ‘You’re making it up,’ said Collis.

  ‘You think so? You ask anyone around here.’

  Collis looked around the room again. A raddled man in a soiled velvet suit raised his glass to him and gave a gappy, suggestive grin.

  ‘I think I’d rather go take a look at the train,’ he told Andrew.

  They stepped outside. The rain was so fine now that they could scarcely feel it. They made their way in silence across the muddy street, trying to dodge the thickest ooze and the widest puddles. Soon they were right up by the front of the locomotive, by the wide, splayed cowcatcher, and Collis looked up at the bright headlight as if it were the hypnotic eye of a huge Cyclopean monster.

  They walked along beside the wheels, inhaling the smell of oil and steam, admiring the lavish giltwork and the shining brass. On the side of the cab was a scenic painting of Panama City, surrounded by cherubs and zephyrs and rosy clouds, as if it were a paradise on earth. The frames of the cab windows and the edging of the cab roof were picked out with gold Gothic patterns. Out of the rear window, his shirt-sleeved arms folded, a black cigar in his mouth, leaned the engineer.

  ‘How do you do?’ Collis called.

  The engineer spat out into the night.

  ‘Maybe,’ Andrew said, after a lengthy silence, ‘if you had to spend your life in a locomotive cab in Panama, then you wouldn’t feel too happy about life, either.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t speak English,’ suggested Collis.

  They walked a little further along the length of the train, past the mail cars, until they reached the passenger cars. These were far less lavishly decorated than the locomotive, although they were built of solid heart pine, and two of them had ladies’ apartments. Their seats were narrow and covered in plain broadcloth, but anything was better than the back of a mule. There were engraved-glass oil lamps burning at every seat.

  After climbing up on the drop step and peering in at the windows, Collis and Andrew went slowly back to the Hotel Colón. Collis was feeling hungry now, and he could have done with a couple of thick chops and a tomato salad. Andrew took a couple of pinches of snuff, emitted two explosive bellows, and then blew his nose into his tobacco-stained handkerchief. The night was noisy with the rustle of rain on the rooftops, the gurgling of the sea by the harbour wall, the whirr of insects, and the ceaseless pssshhh-clank of the locomotive.

  ‘What would it take to build a railroad from San Francisco to St Louis?’ Collis asked.

  Andrew folded away his handkerchief and looked at Collis sagely. ‘Millions of dollars, to kick off with.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘Expertise, I guess. Although expertise can always be rented.’

  ‘So where would we find millions of dollars?’

  Andrew gave a northward sweep of his arm, encompassing the whole of the United States and its territories, somewhere out there in the rainy darkness. ‘There’s the government,’ he said. ‘They’re willing to finance a railroad if someone comes up with a route to run it over, and they’ll throw in more land than you could gallop across in a week.’

  Collis nodded. ‘That’s right. And there’s all those people you told me abut earlier. All those people who live up on Rincon Hill in San Francisco. Wouldn’t they be ready to put money into a railroad? Think how rich San Francisco would become, and how much richer they would become, if they were only connected to the East by a railroad.’

  Andrew stopped walking and held Collis’s arm. He frowned at him. ‘Collis,’ he said. ‘You’re not seriously thinking of building a railroad, are you?’

  Collis smiled. ‘I doubt if I could do it. But look back at that locomotive, and then tell me if you can think of anything more exciting than that.’

  That nigh
t, when Collis returned to his room, something at least equally exciting to that was waiting for him. On his bed, in a wrinkled but clean pale-blue dress, with her hair washed and her skin shining, was Maria-Mamuska. Still wiping his mouth from a heavy meal of bacon and beans, he pressed the door closed behind him and leaned against it for a while, looking at her in the shadowy lamplight.

  ‘I didn’t expect you,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘When it’s unexpected, it’s better, huh?’

  He pulled a face. ‘I don’t know. My mother always told me that predictability was a virtue.’

  ‘You don’t want to be virtuous, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know about that, either. It might make a change.’

  She lay back on the bed and smiled at him. ‘I can’t trap you now. You know that I’m having a baby. So whatever we do, it can only be for love. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Love? I don’t love you. And I don’t see how you can possibly love me.’

  ‘By the morning I might.’

  He grunted, amused. Then he walked across the room to the balcony and closed the shutters. It was stifling with the windows shut like that, but Collis preferred to sweat than be sent home pickled in a tub. Maria-Mamuska watched him, with the same provocative smile fixed on her face, as he approached the end of the bed and stood there unbuttoning his shirt.

  ‘What happened to Andrew Hunt?’ he asked her. ‘I thought I saw him making eyes at you.’

  ‘I don’t like him,’ she said. ‘He looks too much like that crazy man.’

  ‘I see. So you chose me instead. Well, I’m glad you cleaned yourself up.’

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and pried off his boots. They were crusted with black mud, which he knocked off against the bed’s iron leg. Then he loosened his cuffs and tugged his shirt over his head. Maria-Mamuska watched him, her eyes dark in the unsteady light from the frosted-glass oil lamp.