Pelican Road

by Howard Bahr

  They rolled into town with brakes squealing and sparks rimming the wheels, the locomotive bell tolling, tolling. The trainmen—Artemus and Mister Nussbaum, Oliver Bomar, Vernon Stanfield—watched from half-open vestibule doors, and some of the postal clerks, tired of the dim, ink-smelling grotto of the post-office car, stepped out to take the air. Miles Duvall the baggage man slid open his door and leaned against it. When the train ground to a halt, Artemus stepped down and savored the damp air and the steam swirling from beneath the coach. It felt good to stand on solid ground, away from the swaying confines of the train. It was full dark now, and the sleet had turned to rain. The platform lights reflected in the wet bricks below, and the streetlamps and Christmas lights of the town glittered on the wet streets, the roofs of automobiles.

  A red-capped porter in a voluminous overcoat pulled a baggage cart down the platform, the iron wheels grating on the bricks. The station agent, Mister Jefferson Davis Danly, walked beside. The cart bore a mahogany casket.

  Mister Nussbaum came down the steps carrying a lighted lantern. He indicated the casket as it disappeared into the baggage car. “We used to think that was bad luck,” he said.

  Danly was a short, round, baldheaded, bespectacled man whose handwriting on waybills and train orders was so elegant you could hardly read it. “I’m surprised at you, Ira,” he said. “I would have thought you above superstition at any age.”

  The conductor adjusted his cap. “I used to think of it as imagination.”

  Artemus said, “Well, call it what you will, it is bad luck for that fellow anyhow.”

  “In fact, that’s a woman,” said Mister Danly.

  “Ah, me,” said Artemus. “A young woman?”

  “Not so young,” said Mister Danly. “I knew her for a long time. She used to have a café in the old days, then—” He stopped, shrugged his shoulders and looked away.

  “What?” asked Artemus.

  Danly had the waybill for the coffin on his clipboard. He slipped it loose and folded it, then tapped it thoughtfully against his cheek. After a moment, he said, “She ran a sporting house down on Bogalusa Street for a number of years. Couple of days ago, she made all the girls leave, then soaked her bed in gasoline and burnt the house down around her. She had…a sickness, so I’m told.” He gave Mister Nussbaum the waybill. “You might have seen it in the papers.”

  The three men stood in silence, staring at the waybill in the conductor’s hand. Artemus wanted to smoke again. He felt like he was inside the coffin himself, shut away from the air and light. Finally Miles Duvall waved from his open door, signifying he was ready to go.

  “Very well, Jefferson,” said Mister Nussbaum. He lifted his lantern and was answered by two short notes from the locomotive. All at once the train was moving. Mister Nussbaum disappeared into the coach. Artemus swung aboard after his conductor and was about to raise the steps when the agent called his name.

  “I could have billed her out on the local,” said Danly, walking alongside. “I just—”

  “I know,” said Artemus. He raised the steps and closed the lower half of the vestibule door. “This is the Silver Star,” he said. “Everybody rides first class.”

  Artemus watched Mister Danly grow smaller and smaller as the depot fell behind. The agent waved a last time, and in a moment, he was gone. The town slid past, growing leaner and poorer, and then they were in the dark again, gathering speed among the pines and cypress and weeping moss toward the cold waters of Lake Ponchartrain.

  Artemus went forward to the baggage car. Miles Duvall was hunched over his desk, a lamp illuminating his face. He wore a green eye-shade, like a bank teller. Miles had a face no one would remember long, were it not for his prodigious black mustache. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and on his left forearm was a faded tattoo of an anchor and the name, nearly illegible now, of a long-forgotten ship of the line. Miles looked up at the closing of the door. “Hey,” he said, swiveling in his chair.

  Baggage jobs were bid on by trainmen, and Miles Duvall had been a trainman once. Five years previous, he was working a train that struck a car at a crossing—a big Chrysler driven by a young woman schoolteacher, carrying half a first-grade class back from their field trip to a cotton gin. Duvall and the engineer and fireman ran back down the train, arriving just in time to hear them all burn. After that, Duvall worked as a crossing guard in Hattiesburg and only lately came back to the road as a baggage man.

  “Hey, Miles,” said Artemus. He took off his overcoat, for the baggage car was warm after the brisk night. The car was lit by electric bulbs, each in a little wire cage, that ran along the ceiling. By these lights the casket, still wet with rain, was illumined. It seemed to glow among the boxes, trunks, and luggage. Artemus thought of a Mark Twain story, the one with a coffin in a baggage car, a hot stove, a box of Limburger cheese. The story did not seem so funny now. Artemus knelt and touched the smooth, rounded top of the casket.

  Duvall said, “I was just fixing to wipe it off.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Artemus. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the beads of rain away.

  The swivel chair creaked. “Did you know this person?” asked Duvall.

  “Oh, no,” Artemus said. “She was a friend of Danly’s.” He took off his coat and gloves, and sat down on a steamer trunk. He was not about to tell Miles Duvall that the woman in there was burned up. He said, “I ain’t talked to you in a while. How you like being back on the road?”

  “It’s all right,” said Duvall, “so long as I can’t see what’s going on up ahead.”

  “Well, good,” said Artemus. He dropped the subject then, but he thought about what the man had said. There was no real safety in the baggage car, and Miles Duvall knew it. He could still die any number of ways—by derailment, telescoping, boiler explosion, crossing accident, what have you—and the matter was out of his hands. A man could be careful, pay attention, do everything right, but some things were still out of his hands. In all his years on the road, Artemus had never, not once, known an engineer not to blow for a crossing, no matter how lost and insignificant the road might be, no matter if anyone was watching or not. When a whistle post went by, the engineer reached for his whistle cord, and he or the fireman rang the bell, and there was an end on it. Yet time after time, gravel trucks and tanker trucks and cars full of schoolchildren—cars driven by the old and the young, stake bodies loaded with corn or bananas or sugarcane, cement mixers and buses and taxis and cotton wagons—insisted on ignoring the shriek of doom. Artemus wondered why they did that, and if it was better for the train crew to see it coming, or better not to. In the end, he thought Duvall was right. It was better not to.

  Duvall rose and stood beside the coffin. The train swayed into a curve, and he took hold of one of the leather loops suspended from the ceiling of the car. He nodded at the coffin and said, “The porter told me about her. He didn’t much like putting his hand on the box.”

  Artemus made no reply.

  “Your church won’t bury her,” said Duvall.

  “Somebody will,” said Artemus.

  After a moment, Miles asked, “Do you remember the barber?”

  “Indeed,” said Artemus.

  It was a long train that day, and Artemus, the swing man, was riding up front to help Miles Duvall with the switching: a cotton compress, a wood yard, a pickle plant in Enterprise, Mississippi. They were drifting into town, bell ringing steadily, whistle blowing for the crossings, and Miles and Artemus were pulling on their gloves when all at once the engineer stood up and said, Look out—what’s this? and dynamited the brakes. The fireman hit the boiler backhead and was knocked cold. The wheels squealed in protest, and the train bucked hard. The men in the caboose were knocked flat, and the flagman broke his arm. Artemus caught himself and leaned out the cab window, peering down the long boiler of the engine in time to see a man standing in the middle of the rails, head bowed, hands clasped before him, but only just in time. The train would take a long time to stop, a
nd all Artemus could do was watch as the man disappeared under the lead truck. There was no jolt, no bump, only the inexorable and indifferent progress of the heavy freight engine over the place where the man had been.

  The main line was tied up for three hours while the ambulance came and took the injured away, and the coroner collected all the pieces of the man from under the engine—a barber, they learned, whose shop was just down the street, whose wife had left him two days before.

  Now, in the baggage car, Miles said, “I wonder how in God’s name he thought that would fix anything. And this woman—”

  “Yeah,” said Artemus.

  * * *

  Frank Smith finds Kane drawing ammo in the CP. Come with me, he says. Kane gathers up his bandoliers and follows the platoon sergeant. They pass down the line in a fog so dense it swirls like smoke around them. The company has been here for twelve hours, dug into the mud, waiting for orders to move. A light rain is falling, and through it, the Marines can hear the weakening cries of German soldiers wounded last night and left behind by their comrades. The Marines have already killed a German medic caught by the dawn in open ground. They will shoot all Kraut aid-men now, in retaliation for a Marine corpsman shot by a sniper yesterday.

  This morning, the weather is unsuitable for snipers, but they are out there just the same, watching for movement in the fog. Kane and Smith keep their distance from each other. They move quickly, silently, bent over to make poor targets.

  A half mile to their front is the tangled patch of woods from which the Krauts must be driven soon. Orders have arrived at last, and Smith has come to pass the word: over the top in thirty minutes, fog or no fog. Most of the men are watching the line, their rifles propped on the parapets of their holes, bayonets fixed. In one hole, a boy is praying, his rosary wrapped in his hands. Get ready, says Smith, and the boy nods and goes on moving the beads through his fingers.

  At Kane’s squad position, they are beckoned by Squarehead, the Marine from Illinois. Listen to this, says Squarehead, and waves them down. Smith and Kane lower themselves to the mud and listen. Somewhere out front, invisible in the fog, a man is talking. The voice rises and falls in the liquid syllables of the German tongue, as if the speaker were delivering a lecture.

  What? says Smith, straining to hear.

  This guy, the Marine says, shaking his head. This asshole—apparently, he came back to get his buddy last night and got shot himself. Ever since, he’s been cussing the other one, blaming him for making orphans of his children, making his wife a widow, shit like that. He won’t shut up.

  What does the other one have to say? Kane asks.

  Nothing, says the Marine. He ain’t said a word. Hell—what would you say?

  Well, says Smith, we go over in thirty minutes. Somebody will shut him up then, I guess.

  I’ll shut him up, says the Marine from Illinois.

  Kane leaves the bandoliers of ammunition with his squad and follows the sergeant. Presently, they come to a hole where the young Marine they call the Scholar is cutting up his face with a straight razor. The boy is a graduate of the state university of California, well-spoken, of good family, a philosopher. He has always been brave. Now he sits in a filthy pool of water, his helmet and rifle and all his 782 gear thrown every which way, drawing the blade of the razor down one smooth cheek, then the other, cutting deep enough to spring out little curls of fat. He has fouled his pants, and the blood and rain run down his face and stain the collar of his tunic. While Kane gathers up the cartridge belt and haversack and helmet and rifle, Smith kneels in the foul cold water and takes the boy’s razor away, carefully, and tries to wipe the blood off, though it keeps running, for the cuts are deep. What you doing, Winstead? demands Frank Smith, who never uses nicknames and does not have one himself. What the fuck you doing? he says.

  The Scholar looks at Smith as if had made a stupid joke. Why, it is the rules of hell, Staff Sergeant, he says. You ought to know that.

  The corpsmen are summoned to take the Scholar away. He makes a good deal of noise and attracts a burst of machine gun fire from the wood. Smith and Kane squat in the Scholar’s hole, rifles across their knees, while the rounds snap over their heads. They have one cigarette remaining between them, and they light it under a poncho and pass it back and forth, savoring the smoke.

  How you feelin? asks Smith.

  Kane touches the scabs crusted on his cheeks. He says, The corpsman took the stitches out. I’ll be all right long as I keep my mouth shut.

  Fat chance, says Smith. Away off in the wood, they can hear the Maxim gun running through its slow cycle of fire, a leisurely Tat-tat-tat, tat-tat-tat, and far behind them, the rumble of French 75s firing by battery. The sky is low enough that the guns flash yellow on the bellies of the clouds. Smith says, Winstead was right. It makes sense when you put it the way he did.

  Kane nods in agreement. When you are in hell, you play by the rules of hell.

  Smith appears ready to say more, but time has run out. The artillery rounds are sighing overhead, making bright splashes off in the fog when they land. The Marines can hear the growling and clanking of the hinky-dinky French tanks that will support them in the attack.

  Time to go, Smith says, while, in the wood line, the Maxim gun opens up again: Tat-tat-tat, tat-tat-tat.

  * * *

  Now Artemus looked at the baggage man in the dim, rocking car. He said, “When you are in hell, Miles, you play by the rules of hell. You cannot expect them to be the same as ours.”

  Miles Duvall took off his visor and laid it on his desk. “Tell that to the church,” he said. “You want some coffee?”

  “Sure,” said Artemus. “Coffee would be good.”

  When the Silver Star began to slow for the span over Lake Ponchartrain, Artemus put on his overcoat and moved back through the train. The people’s faces were reflected in the windows as they watched for the glow of the city. Artemus passed through the club car. The girl was there at a table by the Christmas tree, but she did not look up.

  Artemus emerged onto the rear platform. A cold mist rose off the lake. On the platform rail was a lighted drum sign with the train’s name. Out on the water, Artemus could see the lonely winking lights of buoys, the running lights of a tug, the dark shoreline where the houses were like distant candles.

  On the crossings over and homeward from the Land of France, Artemus had discovered that the one darkness which could not frighten him was the profound, ancient darkness of the sea. He would stand alone at the rail as the transport plowed into solid blackness, her bow wave churning constellations of phosphorous to mimic the stars. When the shrouds and stays creaked in the wind, when the stars danced and whirled with color and the sea lights took the faces of men he had known, or of girls, or of strangers, Artemus felt only a deep reverence, as though he were on the brink of the Great Mystery itself. It was a darkness like no other, and Artemus came to believe that if he could only reach the heart of it, he would find there the answers to love and Possibility, to why you lived and what happened when you died. Artemus Kane relished the crossing of Lake Ponchartrain as he had the crossing of the sea.

  On the south shore, it was different. The Silver Star crept through the ragged edges of the city: junkyards, boatyards, warehouses, dark streets lined with ramshackle bungalows and shotgun houses. Dogs howled like the sentinels of barbarian tribes. In an empty lot, men had built a fire in an oil drum, and their shadows leapt over the rubble, over the brittle grass, while the smoke, stinking of old rags, curled over the train. Ancient cemeteries drifted by, crumbling tombs and angels brown with moss and feathered with resurrection plant. A flare danced at the lip of a tall factory chimney, and boxcars and tanks and gondolas lay in sidings, their flanks scrawled with the mysterious chalkings of switchmen, yard clerks, hoboes, all the faceless minions of a thousand train yards spread across the night—all strangers to Artemus, like the souls in the warm, lighted coaches whom he would never see again.

  Rain streaked the red glow of
the marker lanterns. The drum sign cast a pale light over the rails behind. Artemus saw a possum they had run over. The wheels had sliced it neatly in half. The train slowed, then groaned to a halt so Vernon Stanfield could line the switch onto the terminal tracks. When the train was still, Artemus felt the dangerous night close around him like a damp garment. A house stood by the track side, windows darkened, with a barren yard and a dog that Artemus hated. This creature was chained, and every time they stopped here, the dog lunged at the train in silence, fell back at the end of his tether, rose from the mud to lunge again. A devil dog. Artemus always snarled and cursed at him, which only maddened the dog. One of these nights, Artemus thought, he was going to take the pistol from his Gladstone bag and send him to the Valhalla of mean dogs. And if the people came out, maybe he would shoot them, too, for being the kind who would make an animal like that.

  Tonight, Artemus ignored the dog, though he could hear him slathering out there in the dark. He pressed against the bulkhead and lit a cigarette, feeling a prickle at the base of his skull. He took a fusee from the rack and twisted off the cap. Next to the entrenching tool and the bayonet, Artemus knew no better close-quarter weapon than a fusee dripping phosphorous. He held the flare ready to defend himself, not against the futile sorties of the dog, but against a vision he often had at such moments: hands reaching for him through the stanchions; dark, helmeted figures clambering aboard, their uniforms caked in mud, faces slashed by the wire.