by Howard Bahr
It seemed a long time before the cars glided into motion once more. In a moment, Artemus would drop to the ground and line the switch for the back-up movement. He would be vulnerable and alone, but it would be over in an instant. Shortly after, they would see the lights of Basin Street and the train shed where Anna Rose would be waiting.
Artemus pulled on his gray cotton gloves and popped the fusee. The flare sputtered, then spread its hellish red smoking light over the rails, over the vacant lots, gleaming in the windows of an abandoned house. “Fuck alla you,” said Artemus. He leaned out and signaled for a stop while the switch target slid beneath him like a lizard’s eye.
COPPERS BY MIDNIGHT
He felt no pain—that was good. Lucky it was dark, too; that way, he didn’t have to see what was going on, though he could hear it—smack, smack, smack—and that was bad enough. Really, though, all he had to do now was rest his elbows on the drawbars and wait to die. If he hung on long enough, of course, it would start to hurt—the nerves would wake up, look around, realize what was happening, say Whoa, man, we in some deep shit here!—but he wasn’t going to stick around for that. Before that happened, he would be dead. He was already drifting in and out, his soul pulling against the cord that bound it to life. Pretty soon the cord would break, and he would float off toward the stars, toward Orion and the Seven Sisters walking overhead.
If he looked straight up, he could see plenty of stars in the open space between the tall black ends of the boxcars. That was funny, because a while ago it hadn’t been any stars, just the low gray clouds and the mist. But he could see the stars now. They had moved in the time he had been here, shifting in the heavens, going on about their business. He didn’t know many, but he knew the ones in Orion that his grandpappy had taught him, and he thought he would travel toward those when the time came. Now and then, when his soul assayed out into the dark, he could see the stars get bigger, brighter—could see that they were blue, not white, and could feel the heat from them. They were not cold, as he had always imagined. That was an important discovery, he thought, and he wished somebody was around to tell it to, but he was alone except for the dog.
Beyond the railroad yard was a screen of willows and cypress, a marsh, and beyond that the lights of houses; his own house, too, where his mother lived. The dog had come from somewhere over there. He hadn’t got a good look at the animal but knew its kind well enough: a nigger dog, bony, short-haired, with a broad head and big muzzle, eat up with fleas, bare patches on his ass where he’d gnawed at himself. He had seen a thousand such dogs in his day and hated them all, worse than white people’s dogs. Now this one had found some of his guts that were looping down under the couplers and chewed them loose and was eating them—he could hear it, even if he couldn’t see or feel it.
“Go on, you son bitch,” he said. “Be enjoyin’ yourself, fuckhead dog.” Then he forgot about the dog and found himself listening to the spring peepers in the marsh. That was a good sound. He heard whippoorwills, and now and then an owl up in a cypress tree, and some-where a mockerbird singing. A long time since he paid any attention to sounds like that. He could smell a sweetness—dewberry vines blooming in the yard, and privet on the edge of the marsh. That was funny, too—it was late December, almost Christmas, and who had ever smelled such things and heard such things in the deep wintertime?
Way off among the houses, voices and laughter, maybe a joint over there, people having fun. He wondered how much time had passed since the switch engine left the yard. The locomotive had steamed right past on the next track, lighting up the rails long before the engine passed. Switchmen were riding the footboards—he called out, but nobody heard over the noise, and pretty soon they were blowing for the crossings in town, and he was alone for a time until the dog came.
He closed his eyes and felt his soul drift out into the blackness; it was gone a long season, tugging at the cord. Or maybe it was just the dog pulling out some more of his guts. He supposed it didn’t make much difference either way. In a little while, he opened his eyes again and saw the headlights of a motorcar on the road.
* * *
The motorcar, a Chevrolet, belonged to the police department of the Southern Railway. One night last August, all the side windows had been broken out by some mischievous person with a crowbar, right under the noses of a half-dozen detectives on stakeout. The chief special agent, annoyed beyond measure, refused to order any new windows until the perpetrator was caught. Nobody looked very hard—in fact, no one looked at all—with the result that now, in December, the two detectives in the car were freezing their asses off, even with the heater going full blast.
The wipers, clicking and clacking, smeared the mist on the cracked windshield. The interior of the car was clammy and littered with brittle leaves of the autumn past, together with fusees, red and blue and white lanterns, a jug of coal oil, empty root beer bottles, yellowed sports pages from the Times-Picayune and Meridian Star—cheap novels, train manifests, and switch lists of freight and passenger cars long since dispatched into the dark of other nights. For weeks, a mildewed, round-faced doll had been propped in the back seat, smiling faintly, her glassy eyes gazing at her strange chauffeurs, or beyond them, or at nothing at all, just as the doll’s little girl had been when they found her dead in an abandoned house by the right-of-way. Around the doll, like opened birthday presents, lay dozens of green .22 long-rifle boxes, some faded to the color of spring foliage, all discarded by Special Agent Hermann Schreiber, called Hido, who burned up two boxes a night shooting any living thing in the lower orders of creation that showed itself on railroad property. Schreiber was engaged in an experiment to determine whether God could produce vermin faster than the Remington Arms Company could produce ammunition. So far, God was winning.
Tonight, as usual, Schreiber was behind the steering wheel. He loved to drive a motorcar, for it was always a novelty, always a challenge, and he always made the thing go fast. Until he became an American, Schreiber had never driven a car or even sat in one. In another life, he had been a gamekeeper on the forest preserve of a Bavarian nobleman. His business was the hunt, and he was a first-class marksman over iron sights. When the army conscripted him for the Western front, he was thirty-eight years old, but his eye was still sharp. The army gave him a K-98 with a weighted barrel and a telescopic sight, and he put his old skill to good use: French, British, Americans, who knew how many? God perhaps. He felt no weight from those years, though sometimes in a dream he perceived an intermittent shadow moving across a narrow window—the arms, dripping rain, of a windmill—and heard machinery creak and groan far beneath him. Eventually, he was captured by murderous, wild-eyed United States Marines in the last days of the war. Schreiber, who was scared shitless of the Marines, dropped his scoped rifle down a well and stepped forward with his hands empty. His captors, who were in a hurry, never knew he was a sniper, or they would have put him against a tree and shot him. In fact, Schreiber had never told anyone about his adventures, not even his partner, Roy Jack Lucas, who had not been in the war, and who, right now, was slumped against the passenger door, rubbing his forehead as the car banged and jolted over the muddy track that ran along the south yard in Meridian, Mississippi.
Hido Schreiber carried an old .45 revolver, a cheap owl-head .22 throw-down, and a set of brass knuckles. He wore a gray wool overcoat, gray suit and vest, gray spats over black shoes, and a gray fedora. He carried three cigars, a Hamilton 992 pocket watch on the end of a gold chain, a folding wallet with twelve dollars, and a wrinkled photograph of his wife and two infant daughters who died of influenza while he was cooling his heels in a PW camp in Belgium.
Roy Jack Lucas wore a brown fedora, wire eyeglasses, a cheap raincoat, a brown tweed suit and vest, a Hamilton 992 pocket watch on the end of a gold chain, and, in a shoulder holster, his .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. He carried a pack of Half-and-Half cigarettes. Some matches from the Bon-Ton Café. A Case clasp knife. A pint bottle of bootleg whiskey and an invitation t
o his son’s wedding at St. Patrick’s Church, which he did not attend. The back of the invitation’s creamy cardstock was scribbled with notes regarding the theft of three hundred pounds of U.S. Government cheese from reefer IC 5909 on a moonless night in November. The two detectives knew very well who had done the deed—a common thief, George “Sweet Willie Wine” Watson—but they were not about to tell anybody, for it would mean a Federal rap and endless paperwork. Instead, they chose to be patient, thinking that one night Sweet Willie Wine would wander into the sights of Hido Schreiber’s .45 while committing a felony.
Lucas liked old Willie. He hoped the man would keep out of sight so Schreiber wouldn’t have to drill him.
Roy Jack Lucas was sixty years old. At nineteen, he was hired as a patrolman on the Mobile & Ohio. Before that, he could not remember much. He might if he thought about it, but he didn’t think about it. Now he was a detective on the Southern. Had he been asked, he would be hard-pressed to tell how such a thing had come to be. He was married once, but he wasn’t married now. He didn’t remember much about that, either, except that his wife had not spoken to him in the thirty years since their divorce; she would, in fact, cross the street when she saw him coming, even after all this time.
Lucas did not hate her in return. Years had passed since he had the energy to hate anything except the way his partner drove. Schreiber knew only two speeds: all ahead and dead stop. “Jesus Christ, Hido,” said Jack, cradling his head in both hands. “You missed a hole back yonder.”
“Jackie, Jackie,” said the other. “You ought to get your brains looked at. Hurting all the time, I think you got a tumor.”
“Good,” said Roy Jack, then had to put one hand out to catch himself when his partner stomped suddenly on the brake.
“What the fuck?” said Schreiber. He ground the gears, searching for reverse. The car lurched backward, then slewed back down the road, the transmission whining. When it stopped, Schreiber reached over and shone his flashlight across the main line. “My God,” he said.
A man was shielding his eyes from the mist-swirled stab of the light. For an instant, Lucas thought the man was floating between the cars. Then he understood. He pushed open the door and stepped out into the mud. He had his own flashlight now, and saw the dog crouching, saw the black blood on his muzzle, saw what he was guarding between his paws. The dog looked up and snarled at him, his eyes flashing red in the torch beam.
“Be careful of the shit-eater,” said Schreiber. He called all dogs shit-eaters.
“I will,” said Lucas.
“Hold on, Jackie, I’ll get him,” said the other, struggling to reach his delicate, almost toylike doubled-barreled sporting rifle in the back seat. “Don’t look him in the eye.”
“I won’t.” Lucas pulled himself onto the raised ballast. The dog snarled again and stood up, bristling. He drew the Smith and looked the dog in the eye and shot him six times.
“Well, shit,” said Schreiber from the car. “You never give me a chance even.”
Lucas stepped over the trembling body of the dog and put his flashlight on the man dangling in the couplers: a light-skinned Negro, perhaps forty, in an old barn coat and wool trousers and brogan shoes. The pants and shoes were soaked in blood and glistened wetly in the torchlight. The man’s face was lean and bristly, and he still wore his hat. The couplers had caught him just under his diaphragm, and his shoes were dangling a inch from the slag.
“Gahd damn, Cap’n,” said the man, laughing. “You ain’t fool around with no dog, does you.”
The detective had a ringing in his ears from all the shooting. He shook his head. “What?”
Schreiber was there, breathing hard. He looked at the dog, then at Lucas, then at the man. “What the fuck happen here?” he said.
The man shrugged. “I be crossin’ through the cut, be stoppin’ to light a weed. Now here I is.”
“Shit,” said Schreiber. He looked to the west where the yard was swallowed in darkness, no lights but the eerie red and green of switch targets, blurry in the mist. “They must’ve kicked in on the cut,” he said.
“What?” said Lucas. His breath made a cloud, like the others, like the dog had made when it was still breathing.
Schreiber didn’t reply. He went away, and in a moment returned with a blue lantern from the car. He knelt and lit the wick with a match, then handed it to Lucas. He did not look at the man in the couplers. “You go flag the head end. I’ll get to a telephone. Jesus.”
Lucas took the lantern and walked up the cut, past the black maws of boxcar doors, past a string of greasy black oil tanks and a half-dozen loaded gravel hoppers, their flanks silver with moisture. Now he realized what Schreiber meant. The cars in the track weren’t coupled up when the switch engine shoved the hoppers down. The impact drove the two boxcars together just as the man was standing between them lighting his cigarette. Bad luck and stupidity. Colored people traveled up and down the yards all the time. The railroad was their path to town and back to home; it was where they picked dewberries in the spring; it was where they set out from when they left for Detroit or Chicago, huddled in an empty box or gondola, or underneath on the hog rods. They knew about switching cars. They knew the rules as well as the railroad men themselves, and they knew what could happen if the rules were forgotten.
There were lots of rules: Don’t stand in the middle of the rail. When you get off, face in the direction of movement. Always grab a long ladder. Don’t wear rings—you could pull your finger off. Listen for the rollout. Watch out. Pay attention. Check the oil in your lantern. Never shine your lantern in someone’s face. Always pass signals just like they are given to you. Don’t put a placarded car or a car of poles next to the caboose. Don’t leave a knuckle closed on the head end of a cut. Pay attention. You can’t see a flatcar rolling at night. Don’t put your foot in a switch frog. Turn the angle-cock easy. Make sure the engineer can see you. Stay in sight. Stay out from between cars. Don’t couple air hoses in a cut that’s not blue-flagged. Don’t be afraid. Don’t hesitate. Pay attention. Watch out. Watch out. Death is always there—in the slick grass, in the moment when you think of your girlfriend, in the great wheels turning—waiting for you to forget. So don’t forget.
A brake cylinder was moaning air, and the cars were groaning; Lucas paused long enough to set a hand brake so the cut wouldn’t roll out on them. His ears were still ringing, but he could hear Schreiber grind the company car into reverse, then heard it whining backward down the road. Lucas hung the blue lantern on the first knuckle and started back again. He could see the car’s headlights bobbing and blinking. He could hear the windshield wipers, click-clack. By the time he returned to the man, Schreiber had reached the lower crossing and was gone.
“I be breakin’ the rules,” said the man. “Ought not to been crossin’ through, and them workin’ up there. I know better’n that. Say, you ain’t got a weed, has you? I can’t get to mine right now.”
Lucas shook out two cigarettes, lit them both, put one between the lips of the dangling man. “Smoking ain’t good for you, what they say,” said the detective.
The man nodded. “I know that’s right,” he said. “Done killed me once already. Ain’t it a bitch.”
Lucas was sliding fresh cartridges into the cylinder of his revolver. “What’s your name?” he asked around the cigarette.
“Is you rai’road police?” said the man.
“Naw, we the god damned Red Cross,” said Lucas. “What you think?”
“Well, I think you might’s well shoot me, too,” said the man.
“Naw,” said Lucas. “We’ll get a ambulance up here, fix you up.”
“Huh—I know that’s right,” said the man, laughing. “What we gone do in the meantime? We could play catch.”
“I ain’t got a ball,” said Lucas. He slipped the pistol back in its holster, tight under his shoulder, under the tweed coat. “What’s your name. I ain’t seen you around here.”
“Naw, Cap’n. I been off in
Parchman ten years. They ’cuse me of killin’ a nigger with a screwdriver, but it wasn’t me.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t,” said Lucas, though he was sure it was.
Parchman prison farm was up north of Jackson in the strange, flat, lonesome Delta country. The man must have ridden down to Jackson on the IC, then over to Meridian on the A&V. Only God knew why he ended up in the Southern yard. It was no easy trick, that traveling, and it left a man filthy and exhausted and maybe a little insane. Lucas had rousted many a ’bo, and they were all crazy.
The man in the couplers waved his arm at the sky. “Hey, you know them stars ain’t cold, like you think they is.”
Lucas did not have to look up to know there were no stars out, just the gray scudding clouds and the mist. “I didn’t know that,” he said.
The man looked up at the stars and began to sing:
Gimme copper penny, boss, lay it on the rail,
Little copper penny, boss, lay it on the rail,
Jes’ a little copper penny,
Tha’s enough to go my bail.
While the man sang, Lucas took hold of the dog’s hind legs and dragged the body across the cinders, laid it out between the rails of the main line. He would have thrown it into the water, but he lacked the energy, and anyway, the thing was coming to pieces. He stood a moment, smoking, and looked out into the marsh, at the black water and the cypress, all smelling of decay. The town lights made a dirty yellow stain on the clouds. Lucas could smell the dog’s blood and the man’s, and the bile soaking the man’s trousers. He flicked the cigarette away. He looked at his watch, then took out his notebook and wrote down 1201 AM and Cut in #1—negro male caught in couplers. He turned and shone his light on the boxcar numbers, then wrote, L&N 4139—B end—L&N 4250—A end. “What’s your name?” he asked.
The man stopped singing. Lucas tapped his pencil on the pad. “You’ll get a stone from the county,” he said. “They’ll put a name on it or not, it’s up to you.”
