by Howard Bahr
The two comrades sit with their backs to the fire, warming the muscles and the fragile spines that always ache. The dark water laps softly at high tide, and now and then an L&N train, bound for New Orleans or Mobile, blows monotonously for the myriad crossings to the north. Their motorcycles gleam in starlight; automobiles hum along the glittering arc of the coast road; the old beach houses, haunted by time, draw deep into the shadows of palms and moss-drenched oaks. To the east, the Biloxi lighthouse probes with its revolving beam. Smith squints toward the blackness that lies over the sea beyond the red channel markers, clear to the rim of the world. The breeze off the Gulf ruffles his hair and whips shoreward the rank blue smoke of his cigar. After a moment, he waves his hand at the bright shaft of the lighthouse beam. He says, We come from the dark, but we always think the truth is in the light.
Lux aeterna, says Artemus Kane.
Why couldn’t it be the other way around? says Smith. The truth is in the dark maybe.
But not just any dark.
No, says Smith. Now he points his cigar at the starlit Gulf. Look how smooth the water is, like you could walk across it same as Jesus. If we could do that, maybe we’d get to where the truth is.
I tried it on a ship, says Kane. Twice.
I know, says Smith. I was there. You can’t get to it on a ship. You’d have to walk.
You saying it ain’t possible?
I’m saying you’d have to walk, says Frank Smith.
The truth was never easy, and it was never simple, and it had a way of breaking your heart. Thus men chose its imitation whenever possible and made the world fit the shape that suited them best. Smith believed man created God and Truth both in his own image, and he attached no blame to that. He had long ago decided that most people got along as best they could, trying to be brave, trying to be good, trying to subdue the terrors of life with whatever expectations lay easiest to hand.
In a little while, Artemus Kane, always restless, stands up and shakes himself and begins to pace in the sand. He lights a cigarette, his face lit momentarily by the glow of the match in his cupped hand. Finally, he walks off toward the water, the tip of his cigarette arcing up and down like a lantern signal. Smith follows and catches up with him at the water’s edge. Once, camping out on Horn Island, they had seen the phosphorous race along the wave tops, and a bright arrow pointing to the moon. Here they have the grimy water of the Sound lapping half-heartedly at the sand, and a darkness relieved only by the shrimp boats’ distant twinkle and the red blink-blink of the channel buoys.
They walk a while, a chancy business barefoot, for the wrack line is littered with broken glass, with dead catfish and stingrays who always wash up with their spines lifted, it seems. All at once Kane says, I am sorry for your troubles, Frank.
They have been avoiding the topic, and Smith would like to go on avoiding it, though he knows it is useless. He says, Don’t blame Maggie. I brought it on myself.
I don’t blame her, says Kane. And, no, you didn’t. It’s the fucking job.
In fact, Smith does not blame the job. If it was the job alone, A.P. Dunn and Ira Nussbaum and Eddie Cox would have been living in rooming houses and cooking on hot plates for years. The real fault lay somewhere else, maybe in a man’s refusal to examine himself. There was too much pain for it to be otherwise.
The pain, when it comes, is empty and still like a room someone died in. Right now, Smith feels nothing, and he is glad, for the pain draws him inside to prowl through landscapes he doesn’t want to visit. He nudges an oyster drill out of the sand, picks it up and examines it. As usual, the shell is occupied by a hermit crab who withdraws behind the armor of his legs. Smith throws the shell far out in the black water, hears it splash. He says, Let’s talk about something else.
Sure, says Kane, but he presses it anyway. He says, All I know is, freedom’s worth whatever price you have to pay to get it.
I guess you would know, Smith says. You remember that when you get tired of Anna Rose.
Smith is sorry at once, but he doesn’t take it back. He watches Kane move out into the water, hands in his pockets, a dark shape against the stars. An airplane passes high overhead, engine droning, invisible save for its running lights.
When Kane speaks again, his voice seems far away. Maybe I won’t get tired, he says.
I hope not, says Smith. I got money on you.
Kane doesn’t answer. He is way out in the salt, and Smith judges the water would be up to his waist by now. Smith can hear Artemus Kane sloshing ahead as if he meant to reach the channel.
Heave about, fool, says Smith. You gonna fall in a hole out there, or step on something.
The sloshing stops. Smith can just make out his comrade’s shape in the starlight. Kane says, I’m just following your advice. Trouble is, I don’t know what to look for in the dark.
They are silent for a while, each man standing in his own narrow portion of night. Finally, Kane begins to move shoreward again. In a moment, he is on the hard sand, bending over, his hands on his knees. Christ, he says. You can get lost out there.
* * *
Now it was Christmas Eve, and the hot summertime journey was like a half-remembered dream. Smith got dressed—yesterday’s greasy overalls and shirt, a flannel-lined jacket, his old striped cap—and went out to the back rail of the caboose with a fresh cup of coffee.
The yard was bleak and solemn, little pellets of sleet bouncing off the rails. Full daylight would be late coming, and then only a mockery of day. Lights were on in the stores and cafés and second-story offices along Front Street, and the switch targets burned brightly in the gloom. Christmas carols crooned from a loudspeaker at the Webb Funeral Home. Many of the buildings downtown were draped in fat colored bulbs, and the windows of the stores shone with tinsel. In the caboose, Smith had some presents for his children, wrapped in green and red paper by lithe and impossibly beautiful high school girls hired by the department store for that purpose. He would deliver them tomorrow after his train got in, whenever that might be. Right now, it was pleasant to look out on the quiet yard and listen to the sleet pattering down.
Mister Earl January came limping up the train. A long time ago, when Earl was a brakeman, he somehow let the wheel of a hopper car roll over his foot. Earl jerked away too late and pulled off the flesh of his toes like taking off a glove. The rest of the crew came looking for him, following his voice. They found him sitting in the gravel, the five white bones of his toes plucked clean and gleaming in the lantern light. Now Earl was a carman in the shops where his job, among other things, was to inspect all outbound trains and give each one its air brake test. He kept his toes in a jar of formaldehyde on the table beside his bed, or so he told anyhow, whenever he felt compelled to explain why his wife went to the grocery one day years ago and was still gone. Mister Earl had raised their daughter, Pearl River, by himself. Now Pearl was thirty years old, a trim woman with fading auburn hair and a tired face, who still lived at home and waitressed at the Bon-Ton Café. She had never married, and she never stayed with a suitor for long before she ran him off. She was a cold one, they said. Then one man admitted what the others in their shame would not. She ain’t cold, he said, but she bleeds twenty-five days a month. Then he, too, ducked his head in the shame of telling, and not he nor any man spoke of it again.
The carman pulled himself up on the bottom step of the platform. “You got any more that ’ere coffee?” he asked.
Inside the caboose, Earl sat on one of the cushions, drinking his coffee. “This here’s a bad time,” he said. “Too many things goin’ on.”
Smith leaned back in his chair. “It ain’t so bad,” he said.
“Huh,” said the other, and waved his arm at the caboose. “Look at you, livin’ like this.”
“I been in worse,” said Smith. “What else is happening?”
“Well, maybe you didn’t hear about that nigger in the south yard last night,” replied the carman, with the satisfaction of one about to deliver catastrophic n
ews.
“No,” said Smith. “Something bad, I reckon?”
“Bad? I guess it was bad!” The old man sipped his coffee, watching Smith over the rim of his cup.
“Aw, it was bad,” Earl said at last.
“God dammit,” said Smith.
“All right,” said the carman, “I’ll tell you since you want to know. Carlton Wigley’s job is makin’ up a cut, way late. What you think happens? Nigger’s crossin’ over, gets squeezed in the joint.” Earl laced his hands together to signify the couplers coupling. “Didn’t nobody know he was there ’til Roy Jack and Hido come along.”
“Well, shit,” said Smith. “That’s bad, all right.”
“Goddamn right,” said Earl. “Tell you who it was. It’s Willie Wine’s brother, June.” He took another sip. “I’ll tell you somethin’ else, too.”
“What?”
Earl peered into the cup, blew on the coffee, took another sip. Grimaced. Shook his head. Frank Smith tapped his fingers on the desk. Finally he leaned forward. “Damn you, Earl,” he said.
“Roy Jack was the one pulled the pin on him,” said the carman.
Smith leaned back again and considered that for a moment. He said, “I thought June was still in Parchman.”
“If he was, son bitch wouldn’t be dead,” said the carman. He rubbed his foot. “Man, it hurts in the cold,” he said.
Smith said, “You ought to quit, Earl.” He had said it a thousand times before, and he was tired of saying it.
“I can’t yet,” said the carman. “I got somebody else to look out for.”
Smith had nothing to say to that. He moved toward the door. “I got to go uptown,” he said.
“No!” said the other, in a way that made Smith turn and look at the man. Earl January wasn’t looking at him, though. He was staring at the stove, scratching the bristles on his chin with his thick yellow nails.
“What is it now, Earl?” asked Smith.
“Nothin’” said Mister Earl, waving his hand. “Just…nothin’. You go on.”
“Earl, I swear to God—”
“It’s nothin’, I tell you,” said the carman. “Go on.”
Smith was too tired to press it. He passed out the door and into the cold morning. He shoved his hands deep in his pockets and made his way up the train, past the grunting hogs and the mute boxcars, noting the numbers as he passed. One empty Southern car and three round-topped boxes from the Western Maryland, the kind they called covered wagons. No military freight this time—although the hogs might be going to Camp Shelby down below Hattiesburg, now that he thought about it. Shelby was an old training post from the Great War, and it was a busy place again since the Germans had rolled into Poland, and the Japanese were swarming over the Pacific Rim, and National Guard outfits all over the country were being called to active duty.
Smith hunched his shoulders against the sleet and pushed through the gravel, through the smell of coal smoke and rotting fishmeal. A war come again, the whole world choosing sides. Not long ago, Smith and Kane took a notion to join up again just to get away from things. They agreed that it would be useful to do something different, kill some people, tear up some shit, call in some artillery on a medieval farmstead—reduce it to piles of god damn bricks and then pound the bricks to powder because a twenty-year-old Kraut machine gunner was holding up the company’s advance. They could do that again, they thought. They were still in good shape, and they were smarter now—smart enough to pay attention this time, maybe even write a book about it. Smith would pay attention and see the truth, and Kane would write it down, and people would listen.
When they called on the Marine recruiting sergeant at the post office, the man had listened, leaning back in his chair, his fingers steepled together. He was older than either Smith or Kane, and fatter than both of them together. When they had finished their appeal, the sergeant said, So you boys was in the Great War together, huh?
Seventy-three Company, First of the Fifth, said Kane.
Well, that’s real good, said the sergeant. I got your names and numbers. Fuckin’ Japs land in Palm Springs, we’ll call you.
Neither Artemus Kane nor E. Franklin Smith would be running away to war this time. Too bad, really, for it made everything so simple and solved all immediate problems. For them, there would be no killing of Japs or Krauts, and if Kane wrote about it, he would have to make it up. When you got old, you couldn’t run away from anything anymore, and killing was for the young.
Walking along the train, Smith thought about the man who had died last night, June Watson, who hadn’t paid attention. The railroad would take you like the war would take you. You fucked up, it would snatch your ass away to the spirit world, and goodbye. You didn’t fuck up, it would take you anyway, sooner or later, one way or another—break your back, cut your leg off, wear you out.
He thought about Roy Jack Lucas and wondered if he had really pulled the pin. Whatever the truth, somebody had done it, had held a man’s life through the cold iron of the lift lever until the slack ran in. I’m glad it wasn’t me, Smith thought.
He thought about Earl January’s troubled daughter, wishing he didn’t know the truth about her. She wasn’t a girl anymore, but Smith always thought of her that way. Mister Earl had always loved the beautiful shady reach of the river Pearl down in Louisiana, and he had named his child for it. He had named her rightly, for when you didn’t know the truth, she made you think of shade and green light and slow water. Now she was in a jam, probably, and the old man wanted to tell about it and couldn’t, and Smith had given him no chance.
Somebody was hunkered down in one of the empty boxcars. Smith couldn’t see him, but he could feel him in there, hiding in the shadows—a soul, a body, a sorry bundle of aspiration looking to get out of town. Frank Smith had never been mean to the riders, and every day he asked the gods to give him the same consideration.
He pushed on toward the depot where he would have time for a quick breakfast in the lunchroom, where he would buy a New Orleans paper and a half-dozen White Owl cigars at the newsstand. Then, when Ladner and Necaise came, he would sign the register and set his watch and get his orders, and they would all wait for Mister Dunn and Eddie Cox and Sonny Leeke to bring the engine down. Ladner and Necaise would be grateful for the hot fire in the caboose stove. They might comment on the hogs, or they might not. Either way, life was good, mostly, if you didn’t fuck up.
* * *
George Watson had been in the boxcar most of the night, sleeping warm and comfortable under a big sheet of cardboard until the carman passed and woke him up. He didn’t want to leave Meridian, but things were getting too hot for Sweet Willie. He knew Roy Jack Lucas was looking for him. That hurt some, for he and Lucas had been friends for years. He heard, too, that the city police were hunting him for the Club Moondog robbery, where all he did was drive the car.
These were the least of his problems, however. Last night, Sweet Willie Wine looked up from shooting pool and there was Lucy Falls watching him through the curtain of smoke. She was a small light-skinned woman with tight bobbed hair, and because she was light-skinned, she could paint her mouth and not look like a bluegum on a syrup can. A few months before, in a grocery in Jumpertown, George gave her the eye. She smiled at him, then passed him by and went up to a man named John Price.
Hey, baby, she said. What’s this I been hearin’?
Aw, baby, said John Price, I didn’t mean nothin’. I was just messin’ ’round.
It’s all right, baby, she said, and gave him a big hug and rubbed up against him. The man was getting into it, almost smiling, his face slack with relief, when Willie saw his face change. The couple turned as if dancing, and Willie saw the back of Price’s white shirt blooming in little red flowers where she was stabbing him with an ice pick. He dropped to his knees, and she let him go. When she left, she passed Sweet Willie with a smile. Hey, baby, she said.
This was the woman who told Sweet Willie last night, in the smoky back room of Wimpy’s
Café, that he had knocked her up. She leaned hip-shot against a pool table and pointed a long red fingernail at him. What you mean to do about it, Willie? she said. Sweet Willie Wine knew that marrying was not what she meant. She wanted him to carry her to Orleans or Memphis where some doctor in a back alley could fix her problem with a coat hanger. God damn Lucy Falls. Sweet Willie said, Let me just get you a nice drink, baby, and we’ll talk about it. His coat was hanging right there, but he dared not take it. He slipped out front, and when he got out there, George Watson just kept on slipping down the road, house to house, until he came to the Southern freight yards, then over the fence and the rails and through the slag and into the first empty boxcar he came to.
New Orleans was looking good, or Miami, or Cuba, maybe, if he could get there. South America would be even better. Sweet Willie Wine knew he was bound for an early death; he just didn’t want it to come from an ice pick.
He was dressed in a wool snap-brim cap and checkered wool suit and brown and white two-tone shoes. He had a linoleum knife in his pants pocket, a .38 pistol in his jacket, and five dollars. His warm raccoon coat was, so far as he knew, still hanging on a hook in the pool room. Everything else was left behind in his crib across the alley from Wimpy’s Café. It was easy to leave, for Sweet Willie Wine had never left anything he could not steal over again.
Sooner or later, time would move past the place where they knew he’d be back, and somebody would push open the door, gather up the bedsheets and his few clothes and burn them out back—they would keep the raccoon coat, of course, when they found that—and sweep the dead roaches into the alley. They would find his cut from the Moondog job, two hundred dollars stuck behind the drawer in his chiffarobe, and whoever found it would spend it quick. Then nothing would remain to show that anybody had passed there. They would find the letter from his brother, and if they chanced to read it, maybe they would hunt up June and tell him not to bother calling on Sweet Willie Wine, for he was gone and took George Watson with him.
