by Howard Bahr
Mister Dunn picked up his watch and hefted it, letting the chain dangle. Carefully he wound it, not too tight, and held it to his ear and listened for the little ping-ping that meant a faulty mainspring. He was glad to hear that all was well among the gears and levers that moved inside the brass case on the twenty-one jewel bushings. The hands said six-oh-four and twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Time was moving right along.
His wife said, “Mister Dunn, I put the coffee in the pot. All you got to do is light off the eye.”
“I know how to do it, Nettie,” he said. “Now go back to sleep and don’t be troubling yourself.” Once upon a time, she would rise at four o’clock, or three, or midnight, and cook eggs and biscuits, and fry ham, but for a long while she had been sick, and she needed her rest. It had taken Mister Dunn a good deal of arguing to get her to stay in bed, to convince her that he could get his own breakfast—and even now he sometimes found her up before him, rattling around in the kitchen. Nothing, however, could persuade her to use his first name. It was an old way she had learned from her mother.
Mister Dunn believed in the words he spoke forty years ago, when he stood with Nettie before the pastor of the Anchor Baptist Church. He still believed in them, even if he had betrayed them once. He hoped that belief would count for something when the death angels came.
After he was dressed, Mister Dunn made his coffee. It was always Luzianne, strong and black, but not the chicory kind. He drank it at the kitchen table and had some cold biscuits and ham and a wedge of cheese. He gave some of the biscuit to his dog Missy, a little rat terrier who spent most of the winter lying under the coal-oil range. Sleet rattled against the window, and Mister Dunn wished he could stay all morning in the warm kitchen. He had wished that many times, and wished he could go to his daughter’s piano recitals and her graduation and her wedding, but the job had kept him from these things. Well, he would retire in a few years, when he had saved just a little more money, and then he could sit in the kitchen any time he wanted. Trouble was, his daughter was grown and gone now, and there was too much he couldn’t get back.
He took his coffee and went to the window. It was sleeting hard now, and the day was so dark that the houses still had their lights on. Probably it wouldn’t get much lighter until afternoon, and by then they would be down south, and it would warm up and start raining. The grab-irons and stirrups would be slippery today, and the rails slick, and it would be hard to see, and everybody would be soaking wet and chilled way down in the blood. He wouldn’t miss that, he thought. He would be glad to be shut of it.
He would get a hobby, he thought. He would take up fishing and gardening in the summertime and rabbit hunting in winter. Maybe he could make things up to Eileen, and maybe she would let him and Nettie see their grandsons. Anyway, the weight of memory alone should sustain him, he thought—and after all, Pelican Road would still be there, something he was a part of, and he could go and see it any time, for the old men were always welcome around the depot.
But not yet, thought Mister Dunn quickly, and reminded himself that he was still a locomotive engineer. Pretty soon, he would be setting his watch, reading his orders, talking about the day to come. Then he and Eddie and Sonny would mount the big steam engine that waited for them at the roundhouse, and the world would be in perfect order for a while longer. Mister Dunn didn’t have to worry about missing it yet.
A.P. Dunn had enough age on the road to keep an engine when he found one he liked. The 4512 was a Mikado with eight stubby driving wheels and a firebox that burned cleanly, with the power and air to handle a hundred cars if it had to. It was stoker-fired, which meant that Eddie Cox did not have to shovel coal. It had a melodious whistle. The cab roof was painted red, the boiler black, the gangways and drivers trimmed in white. The 4512 was a handsome machine and a testimony to Mister Dunn’s age and reputation.
The old men always talked about how locomotives were living things—that somehow, through some mysterious infusion, each took on a peculiar character that matched those of men. An engine could be weak, strong, stubborn, or eager—it could be snakebit or lucky, clumsy or full of grace, forgiving or demanding. To a civilian, all engines looked the same, and the notion of life in a machine was dismissed as romantic conceit. The fact was, you could feel the life when you laid your hand on the throttle. You could feel it in the vibration of the deck plates in the cab. You knew then that you were in the company of something immense and profound.
The effect was never so great as when an engine was coming along by itself. From a distance, it might seem elephantine, clumping and swaying down a yard track, its mass reduced by perspective. Then it was on you, and it was no longer a machine but a living creature whose single eye never closed, joints leaking steam, drive rods moving in solemn articulation, tall as a two-story building, dark and implacable, with a purpose and destiny all its own. When it passed, trembling the earth, it hissed at you, and you could hear the workings of its heart, the deep drawing of its lungs, and the man up there in the cab window seemed no more than an inconsequential organ, something easily removed and forgotten like a polyp or a bad tooth. Then, when it gave voice—
No sound on earth was like that of a steam engine crying, though the sound was so common that the ordinary civilian rarely paid it any mind save at a grade crossing—and not even then, perhaps, if his mind was on other things, and the windows of the motorcar were rolled up, and the radio playing, children squabbling, wife nagging. But it came to every person—in a pause of stillness, on a shadowed porch maybe, or in some anonymous hotel room high above the city—that moment when he did listen, for he could do no else. Then the sound plumbed deep inside him to the place where every unborn dream still lived, where the oldest memory of all understood that life was passing, and no hand could stay it. The sound echoed off the dark fronts of buildings, or drifted over the fields and wood, and in that moment it became the soul’s own voice, crying all that was ever lost or dreamed of.
In the early days of the Depression, when he was laid off in spite of all his seniority, Mister Dunn took a chance and went out west to work a lumber boom on the D&RGW. He found himself a member of a vast fraternity of jobless men riding the rails in those days. Near the end of the journey, he fell in with some other travelers, and they made a camp one evening on a high ridge north of Durango, Colorado, in the San Juan range. The Río de los Animas Perdidos lay serpentine in the valley below, and as far as they could see, clear to the silver, snow-topped mountains, the air was a crystal globe of silence. Nothing—not wind, not the creak of a branch nor the rustle of needles in the tall junipers—broke that momentary stillness, and after a while, Mister Dunn felt it down inside him, deep in the secret country of his heart, as if it were silence, not air, that he breathed. Then, as they listened, there arose from far down the valley the mournful cry of a steam engine on the narrow-gauge railroad. They could see no smoke, no movement; there was only the disembodied voice, as if the lost souls of the river were calling out in the twilight. The sound hung in the air like a drifting hawk, then died out in echoes among the far ranges, leaving the stillness again. In a while, the falling sun lit the distant, eternal snow and creased it with blue shadows, and the long fingers of coming night crept across the valley until only the coils of the river held the memory of day, and the boys marveled at how all that could happen in silence. The weight of time beyond measure settled on them, and they could feel the mountain breathe and stir itself, pushing a little closer to the darkening sky, lifting their tiny palmful of days closer to the mystery that dwelt above them, closer to the stars that spread in their myriads across the sky like fireflies rising in the dooryard of heaven. Only when the moon rose and the wolves began howling from the valley below—only then did they make a fire, and when Mister Dunn slept at last beside the dying coals, he heard the whistle again, and dreamed of silence, of moonlight, of the river when it had no name, shining in a distant age with a light no man had ever seen.
Mister Dunn turned away from the windo
w, shut off the stove, and washed the coffeepot and his few dishes. He thought about going in to sit with Nettie a while and watch her sleep. Only she wouldn’t sleep; she would know he was there, and wake, and trouble herself. Anyway, time had caught up with him, and it would be a brisk walk to the roundhouse. He left by the back door, closing it softly behind him.
* * *
The consist for Extra 4512 South was four empty boxes and a car of hogs. The switch engine had coupled the cars to caboose X-630 just before five o’clock that morning, then shoved the cut in the clear, rattling the caboose where Frank Smith lay awake on the hard bench cushions. In the half-dark, he listened to the voices of the switchmen, the air groaning in the brake line, the click of the wheels beneath him, the huffing and chattering of the switch engine, and at last the pop of the air hoses separating when the engine was cut off. Then it was quiet but for the sleet bouncing off the stovepipe and pattering on the windows. He felt around on the floor until he found the watch in the breast pocket of his overalls: five thirty-two, it read, and no use lying down again, for he knew his train was listed soon.
The X-630 was a relic of the last century, a grimy wooden box with side and end doors and a tiny cupola. Its platforms fore and aft were just wide enough for a man to stand on. It was a shack most conductors scorned—a reject, rough to ride in, unlovely and unloved—and for that reason, and with little difficulty, Frank Smith had made it his own.
Soon gray light would spill down from the cupola and fill the square windows and illumine the stove, its blackened coffeepot and coal pile; the rack of fusees and red flags and torpedoes, hot box powder and journal box hook; the conductor’s desk with its spoked chair and a coal-oil lamp suspended on gimbals. The crew’s rain gear hung like shabby, penitent ghosts from pegs on the washroom bulkhead. Smith had built bookshelves with a chicken-wire door: on the shelves were Faulkner and Twain and Hemingway, a dictionary, the current Old Farmer’s Almanac, Leaves of Grass, Drake’s Indians of North America, Sonny Leeke’s collection of detective comics, and a half-dozen pulp westerns. On the bulkheads, secured by thumbtacks, were photographs Smith had made: group photos of the boys, a swamp at daybreak, family pictures, a photo taken from the back door of the caboose of rails receding between walls of pine trees. There was a portrait of Red Cloud, a copy of the famous Busch lithograph of Custer’s massacre, pictures cut from magazines, a chart of world history, and a pinup calendar from Bergeron’s Auto Repair on Camp Street. The girl for December 1940 was lounging before a fireplace in a white peignoir and Santa hat, smiling.
The caboose was freezing cold, which might explain the prominence of the calendar girl’s nipples on this Christmas Eve. It smelled of kerosene and coal smoke and rubber slickers and the wax on the fusees. Under that layer of smells were those of coffee and red beans and generations of fried meat, sweat and old piss, the acrid perfume of Octagon soap, and the ephemeral odor of dark nights, weariness, movement, and of men who had come and gone—ghosts that no amount of Pine-Sol or paint could banish.
The coal fire was banked in the stove. Smith threw off his Navy blanket, and barefoot, shivering in his long drawers, went over and stoked the fire under the granite coffeepot he had filled with grounds and water the night before. When the coffee was made, he pulled the blanket over his shoulders and sat cross-legged on the cushions again, the tin cup of coffee steaming in his hand, and waited for the shack to warm up. It was good to drink morning coffee in solitude with the world coming awake outside—a little suspension of time when your mind was clear and you could think about the day ahead, though it rarely turned out the way you supposed. In that moment, familiar things seemed new and fresh again, and Smith took pleasure in looking around him. The gods gave you a new chance every day, he thought. Trouble was, you pulled the old days behind you like a long freight train.
He had lived in the caboose for nine weeks now, ever since Maggie suggested strongly that he leave. Sixty-three days, each one crossed off in ink on the Bergeron calendar. It was not uncommon for men to live in their cabooses for a day or two—on a work train, for example, or in a place where there was no hotel. But two months was way beyond anything the rules allowed, and Smith felt like a fugitive. He bathed in depot washrooms and did his laundry in the sink and ate in cafés or cooked for himself on the caboose stove. So far, he had escaped the attention of the railroad police, except for Roy Jack Lucas and Hido Schreiber, the night men, who did not give a shit anyhow; who, in fact, stopped by to visit and warm up on occasion, or listen to a ball game on Smith’s battery-powered radio.
On his off days, Smith went by the house and picked up his girls, Iris and Dahlia. They were ten and eight, and had red hair like their mother’s, and such a temper and a sweetness about them, and a Celtic imagination that thrived on fairies and ghosts and shadows. They had their names from two old-maid aunts of Maggie’s who had gone to New York in the ’80s and lived out vivid, often scandalous, careers as actresses. Frank Smith suspected that the “old maid” was merely honorary, a family title conferred on two beloved souls so that they might be spoken of and not forgotten. But no matter. Smith was glad to have such peregrine blood in his children, and he hoped they would blossom like the flowers in their names, like the two aunts who had not been afraid of anything.
Smith gave his children what he could. He bought them books of fairies and butterflies, he read to them, he told them stories. In return, they brought to him the tales they wrote in their childish hand, and the pictures they drew, and the things they made of clay. They liked to go to the picture show and, after, on a scavenger hunt in the trash behind the Temple Theater where they could always find old movie posters. If the weather was good, and if he could borrow a car, they would go to Highland Park. The children loved to ride the carousel out there, and Smith liked watching them go around and around on the bright-painted, cheerful horses plunging to nowhere. Sometimes he brought them down to the yard to watch the trains. Whatever they did, the time always came when he had to take them home. At first, they asked why he couldn’t stay, but lately they had quit asking. They had their own ways of understanding.
But Frank Smith couldn’t live on company property forever. Pretty soon he would have to get a boarding house room, which would put him right back where he started. That was funny, he thought. A capital joke.
On the other hand, he could move in with Artemus Kane, who had offered a room in the house he owned on 7th Street. Smith had most of his things over there already, though he had little outside his married life save the Harley-Davidson motorcycle which he kept in the shed next to Kane’s Indian Chief. Artemus Kane had been born and raised up in the 7th Street house; it was almost paintless now, ramshackle and drafty and comfortable, full of books and worn furniture, with a broad front porch shaded by oak trees. Moreover, it was close to downtown—you could hit the Kress’s store with a mortar round, if you had a mortar—and it was a short walk down through the Catholic church playground to the Southern yards, and maybe it wouldn’t be a bad place to hide out for a while, Smith thought.
Kane stayed married for eighteen months to Arabella Foster, a match no one ever understood. Arabella was a childless divorcée when she met Artemus in New Orleans—a beautiful, elegant, well-educated woman who should never have been expected to adjust to the railroad life or to a place like Meridian, Mississippi, and especially not to Artemus Kane. Arabella refused to live in the old house, so her daddy bought them a place out in the new Lakemont subdivision. She hired a designer to “do” the house and refused Artemus permission to smoke inside or take a leak off the porch, not even the back one. Arabella had ambition. She got in with all the right people, making her way by sheer force of will into the closed ranks of Meridian society, who did not approve of her but who could not, apparently, resist or dissuade her. Finally, she began to worry at Artemus to get off Pelican Road and start a respectable business. Everybody else thought the idea of Artemus Kane running any kind of business, much less while living in a lake subdivision,
too grotesque for words, but Arabella insisted on seeing in Artemus something that was not there. When she surrendered that notion at last, Artemus crawled away from his marriage as gratefully as he would from an opera.
So Artemus was back on 7th Street again, and for two years he had been with Anna Rose Dangerfield, another New Orleans divorcée who was not so beautiful as Arabella, but prettier and smarter. Anna Rose was a novelist. She was calm, mostly, and had a sense of humor. Best of all, she was not the kind of person who would aspire to live in a lake house. Kane’s romance with her proved a record of endurance more remarkable than the Key Brothers’ flight; nevertheless, the boys had a betting pool on how long the affair would last. To Kane’s credit, he had so far cost his detractors, as well as his friends, a lot of money. In fact, Smith himself had lost ten dollars at a year and a half.
In the car ahead, the crowded hogs grunted and squealed. Coupling a livestock car to the caboose was ill-mannered in Frank’s view; the shack was already beginning to smell like a hog lot, and the sensation would only increase when the train began to move. Wrapped in his coarse blanket, Smith wondered how the animals must feel, what they talked about, if they reassured one another. Perhaps the wisest among them knew they were going down to death and so would calm the rest, speaking of unfenced cornfields and troughs of turnips at the journey’s end, all the while their hearts breaking with the truth.
* * *
In the summer, when the trouble with Maggie is just starting, Frank Smith and Artemus Kane take a trip to the Gulf Coast on their motorcycles. They make camp on the beach, go out on a long hotel pier and drop some crab nets and fish for croakers and speckled trout, then build a driftwood fire below the seawall and fry their fish and boil their crabs. While they eat, the night grows around them in a way Smith would never forget, as if it could stand for all nights’ coming. The orange disc of the sun falls slowly at first, then drops all at once when it touches the horizon, leaving the sky empty but for the black shapes of pelicans beating homeward. Little by little, the water drains the color from the sky, calms and smoothes itself until it seems a vast, polished floor, the distant barrier islands hovering like airships. Soon the evening star burns bright and for a little while solitary until the night is accomplished. Then the last reluctant purple slips from the sky, and the stars straw themselves like silver dust across the darkness.
