Pelican Road

by Howard Bahr

  Down the train, some hogs were grunting and squealing in a livestock car. George Watson could hear music playing downtown, and that reminded him it was Christmas Eve. He risked putting his head out the boxcar door—nobody in sight, nothing moving but a curl of smoke from the stovepipe of the caboose. Lucy Falls would be looking for him pretty soon, but by then, he’d be gone. So long, Lucy, he thought. So long, June. Then he went back into the shadows and crawled under the cardboard again, and after a little while he slept, shivering in his dreams.

  * * *

  The office of the railway police was on the second floor of the freight house, up a flight of creaking, spider-ambushed stairs illuminated at night by a single Edison bulb, and in the daytime by a pair of tall windows that looked out on the yard. A porter cleaned the stairs every Saturday, but to little purpose, for the grime on the windows was too deep, the spiders too crafty, and too many men passed that way. The detectives’ office was behind a door with a frosted glass pane. It was a landscape of littered desks, telephones, gooseneck lamps, bulletins, wanted posters, old newspapers, and overflowing ashtrays. The walls were painted the universal sickly yellow of the Southern Railway, and across one of them was a rack of pump shotguns and Thompson submachine guns left over from Prohibition days. Mister Charlie Granger, the chief special agent, kept the key to the gun rack in a locked drawer all its own, just so the Kraut couldn’t get to the Tommy guns.

  At this early hour, all the lamps in the office were still burning, and now and then a gust rattled sleet against the windows. The radiators hissed and clanged. Chief Granger—a portly man in suspenders and bow tie and scuffed shoes, with horn-rimmed glasses and a balding head over which he combed the last strands of his hair—sat at his desk and watched Hido Schreiber caress the oiled walnut stock of a Thompson chained in the rack. Shreiber’s partner, Roy Jack Lucas, slumped at his own desk, smoking, with a cup of coffee before him. Both men stunk of wet wool. Granger had just finished telling them that the day squad was off on a suspicious derailment at Livingston, Alabama, and the two night detectives would have to double over. Neither man had said a word, but Lucas began to turn his cigarette lighter in his fingers, tapping it against the desk, always a sign that he was unhappy. His face was slack, his eyes fixed on some point over the chief’s shoulder.

  The chief had a division to run, no matter that Lucas was unhappy. Still, he was not without sympathy. He knew how Lucas had pulled the pin on the colored man. People would tell that story a long time hence, even when nobody was left to remember Roy Jack’s name. But that was last night, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. Today ought to be slow, and at the end of it, the chief would go home to find his grandchildren by the Christmas tree, and his wife and daughter making supper in the warm kitchen, and his son-in-law listening to the Ole Miss–LSU game on the radio. Neither Lucas nor the Kraut would be so lucky. The chief didn’t want to forget how lucky he was.

  “Well, anyhow, it ought to be a slow day,” he said, and rose from his chair and walked across the gritty floor to the windows. “You prob’ly won’t even have to go outside,” he said. Across the yard was the Meridian Hotel; on its red brick flank were painted the words European Plan. Fireproof. For years, Granger had wondered what the European Plan was. He had always meant to walk over there and ask, but he never got around to it.

  An Alabama & Vicksburg passenger train lay at the depot, steam swirling around the cars. The windows of the hotel and the windows of the coaches were still alight, as if the day had never come. A man was coming down the yard. The chief recognized him: Frank Smith, one of the Southern freight conductors. There you are, Frank, said Granger to himself.

  “Hell, Charlie, don’t worry about it,” said Lucas. He clicked his lighter once, twice, then slipped it in his vest pocket. “Everybody’s got to be somewhere.”

  Granger watched Frank Smith pass out of sight in the yard. “Ain’t it the truth?” he said.

  Hido Schreiber rattled the lock on the gun rack. “Hey, Charlie,” he said. “C’mon. It’s Christmas Eve. Lemme have one, just for the day.”

  “Forget it,” said the chief special agent.

  Schreiber laughed. Outside the window, a switch engine chattered by, hauling a cut to the yard.

  CRESCENT CITY

  These things Artemus Kane knew first in his waking: a streetlamp—no more than a fat, cloudy bulb under a tin shade, its halo in the fog the delicate transparency of watercolor—hanging from an iron bracket outside the window of Anna Rose’s flat. The streetlamp shone through the jalousies in yellowish slats, breaking up the shapes of the water stains on the ceiling, rippling over the slow-turning blades of the overhead fan. The flame of the gas heater made shadows dance over the mantel: books, a Chinese jar, a figurine of Pierrot. Occasionally, the headlights of an automobile, reflected in the wet stones of the street below, swept like ghostly comets over the ceiling, the wall, to burn themselves out in the mirror of the dressing table. Finally, the glass rectangle of the transom glowed dimly by the Edison bulb that had burned in the hall night and day for thirty years.

  Artemus listened to the nocturne of the city: a police siren on Canal Street, a switch engine on the batture, boats hooting on the river, the horn of a ferry and the answering moan of a ship passing down to the sea. The clatter of garbage cans. A delivery truck shoving through the fog. Voices, arguing or intimate or laughing, of strangers passing on the banquette below, their footsteps fading away into whatever world they had made for themselves out there in the night. Johnny Lozano’s dog was barking down in the courtyard, maybe fussing at the roaches, or a rat, or maybe he saw Hecate in the fog. Artemus Kane said once, when he was in a bad humor, that dogs only barked because they are stupid. Anna Rose told him they are not stupid. She told him that Hecate walked in the night, and only dogs could see her. Hecate was the Goddess of Night, she said. Artemus was silent for a while, working the muscles in his jaw. He was angry as he often was, though not at her. Never at her. Then he said he knew Hecate well enough. He saw her in the deep watches all the time, he said.

  Anna Rose’s laundry hung down there among the palms and Spanish Bayonet and the urns that, when summer came, would drip with flowers. The urns were empty now, and the walls slick with mold. Black roaches, even in December, scuttled over the bricks.

  Christmas Eve had arrived hours before on the solemn chime of the cathedral where candles burned for the dead and their light cast dancing shadows over the sorrowful faces of saints. The bell rang to no real purpose, however, for the ghosts here had outlived time, and the turning of day and night was only an illusion for the living. St. Peter Street was yet closed and shuttered against the night, the galleries draped with yesterday’s laundry and twined with the wisteria of a hundred years. The bricks and plaster were glazed with damp like the tile roofs and the chimneys that curled little plumes of smoke. The drooping telephone wires were beaded with moisture. The banquette and the stone-paved street reflected the streetlamps and the dim lights burning over the doors.

  It was still dark, but not long before the gray winter dawn. This was the hour when Artemus always woke, coming to awareness all at once as though waking were a door he stumbled through. Whenever he came out of sleep, his dreams, remembered or not, lingered like smoke around him. His head ached—he believed that pillows, no matter how arranged, cut off the flow of blood to his brain—and he was always angry, always afraid, as if something were about to happen, or already had.

  Now, in his waking, he looked at Anna Rose and felt the anger and fear pass away. She had thrown the covers off the small swelling of her breasts and flung out an arm and dangled a slim ivory leg off the bed. The sight of her stilled the anger and fear that he could never put a reason to. He wanted to touch her breasts, touch the delicate bones of her face, the ridge of her nose. He wished she would open her eyes and turn to him. But Artemus would not waken a person from sleep, no matter how restless, and especially not Anna Rose once she found it.

  * * * />
  In the line, at first, they can never sleep, or only enough to leave them bleary-eyed, stumbling phantoms of men who move as if walking in sand or water. Then, after a while, they discover they can sleep anywhere: in the mud, the rain, on the march, even in company with the dead. Finally, at the end, when they dare to believe again they might live, sleep becomes too much like death for some, and they grieve for fear of it and for the want of it.

  Gideon Kane is one of these. Just after the Armistice, when the regiment is in cantonment, Gideon goes four nights without sleep. It is the silence, Gideon says. It is too god damned quiet to sleep, he says.

  On the fifth night, Artemus is making his rounds as Corporal of the Guard when he hears a hacking cough in the darkness, nothing unusual, half the men in camp have a cough, but this one he recognizes. He searches among the pyramidal tents and at last finds his brother sitting on the duckboards with a .45 service revolver in his lap. Artemus brings his rifle down to port arms. Gideon, he says. What the fuck you doing?

  Gideon hawks and spits and looks up at the shadowy figure in the dark. Fuck off, buddy, he says, and cocks the pistol and puts it to his temple.

  No, you don’t, says Artemus, and slaps his brother with the butt of the Springfield, a quick upward expert stroke, the kind they use on prisoners sometimes, that sends the boy sprawling but doesn’t kill him. Gideon lies quietly in the mud, moaning a little. Artemus says, Well, I guess you’ll sleep now, you little shit. Then he drags Gideon off to sick bay where they give him a dose of morphine. The next day, and the next, Artemus comes around to find him sleeping, still loaded up with morphine. His head is swaddled in a bandage, his mouth agape, his nose running, the pillow-ticking soaked with drool. On the morning of the third day, Gideon is sitting up but refuses to speak. Artemus sits by the cot, waiting, until, at last, Gideon points to his bandaged head and says, It’s not this, Brother.

  Well, what, then? asks Artemus.

  Brother and fool, says Gideon. It’s that I don’t want to wake up again.

  * * *

  Over the simple curve of the footboard, Artemus watched Pierrot’s shadow dance on the plaster wall with its partner, the fat shadow of the jar. Overhead, the fan wobbled on its stem, kinetic in the barred light like an old moving picture of a fan. The blades were pitched to drive the heated air down from the ceiling, and Artemus could feel the warm breath of it. He heard mice in the walls, and his Hamilton watch ticked on the bureau. Beside him, Anna Rose talked in her dreams, like she did the first night of the first day he ever saw her.

  * * *

  She comes in the midst of an early summer squall that has swept unexpectedly off the Gulf and, in a matter of minutes, left the gutters awash, overloaded the drains, and pushed up manhole covers on the streets. Artemus, in a saggy linen suit, tie loosed, a watch chain looped from his coat pocket, has been drinking whiskey and paregoric, and he cannot be sure if he is sleeping or awake. As the storm diminishes, he watches from an archway that drips rain like a beaded curtain, flanked by the heavy, lashing fronds of banana trees. The courtyard is filled with the sound of water. Gray-green light suffuses from the stippled pool in the center where bright fish live. The light creeps into the shadows of oleander and ivy, touches the face of a melancholy statue of Our Lady whose hands, black with mold, are spread in a gesture of benefaction and forgiveness, as though she were expecting a caller with bad thoughts.

  Gideon Kane’s Creole house is often the destination of such persons, including Artemus himself. The people who know Gideon, who have been drawn into his circle, come when they want to, but more when they need to. They come with their faces shining like Moses’ to spend an afternoon, a night, a week. They pass through the rooms, share the cooking, make love in curtained alcoves, smoke dope, sleep on the couches, drink and talk through the dark hours and play jazz on the Victrola. They take up collections for the gas bill and leave their toiletries in bureau drawers. They are plasterers, defrocked priests, pastry chefs, bartenders, novelists who have never sold a novel, musicians who play in back-alley clubs, painters and sculptors, Tarot tellers, horse trainers from the Fairgrounds track—people who are driven to make things, or shape or tell them, who share those compulsions and one other, the most dangerous, the one that guarantees bad thoughts: they all want to know Why.

  They believe there is an answer, though they understand that it is not to be found at Gideon Kane’s or anywhere else. God is unlikely to whisper it anytime soon. The Christ will not proclaim it from the housetops, and nature is mute. Toward these silences they are grateful, for they understand this, too: the answer, were it ever attained, would admit them, not into the ineffable light, but into a loneliness too great to bear, into a garden of stony despair worse than Gethsemane. The question, in the end, is all that matters, and the fact that they can ask it at all.

  Thus comes Anna Rose Dangerfield through the gate with its iron scrolls and pineapples. The rain has caught her on the street, evidently; she is not dressed for foul weather, but in a cotton jacket and knickers and cotton stockings and a broad snap-brim hat that makes her look like a newsboy, all soaked through and through. In fact, Artemus supposes at first that she is a boy. Then she steps to her ankles in a cold puddle and curses and slams the gate shut with an awkwardness that betrays her. Artemus wakes from his drowse then. He jabs a finger at her and says, Stay right there, and turns away. The girl follows him under the arch and waits. In a moment, Artemus returns with an umbrella. He frowns out into the courtyard, puzzled, then sees her standing beside him. A cigarette dangles from his mouth, and around it he says, I thought you were going to wait.

  I was standing in the rain, she points out.

  Ah, says Artemus. It’s just as well, for I am a man who does not approve of umbrellas as a general thing. If you have come to see Gideon, you should know that he is inside wearing a gas mask.

  Why is he doing that? says the strange girl, and steps forward, watching his face. Now that she is close, Artemus can tell that she, too, has been drinking. It is Sunday, after all, the day appointed for bad thoughts.

  Well, he was gassed one time, Artemus says. He claims he can still smell it, more on rainy days.

  Who are you? she says. The rain is coming harder now, hammering on the courtyard bricks, overflowing the gutters. Artemus is swaying a little, and he takes the girl’s arm to steady himself. The girl frowns. What happened to your face? she asks, and raises her hand and touches Artemus on the cheek.

  He says, First, let me tell you about this one time. It was late October of ’18. You think this is rain? Think again! We were in the yard of a big old church, but no dry place in it, you see, nor in the church either, of course, because the god damn roof was gone and the walls knocked down by our own artillery. Imagine that!

  Who are you? she says, but he goes on talking, and the rain beating down. He says, Oh, you wouldn’t of known Gideon then. He was a fair-haired, delicate boy, but a good Marine just the same, one of the best, next to myself. The day I’m telling—I remember like it was yesterday, he was in his garrison cap and overcoat with a Winchester twelve-gauge slung muzzle-down over his shoulder—he always carried a shotgun, wouldn’t have a thing to do with a rifle. Mud everywhere, in big clumps on his shoes and puttees. His weapons squad was in the church making coffee. They had a brace of these half-ass French machine guns, I forget what you call ’em, chambered .30 caliber U.S. and prone to jamming. They were called—

  We need to go inside, she says.

  —Chauchat guns, says Artemus. They were no good. They… He falters then. He has forgotten the point of his story. He says, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bore you. Did I mention the windmill?

  You are Gideon’s brother, she says. I know about you.

  The windmill is important, he says.

  I don’t want to hear about it, she says.

  All right, he says. But first—see here, are you a girl or a boy?

  She laughs. I am a girl, trust me.

  Well, thank God fo
r that, he says, and pulls her close and kisses her full on the mouth. She lets him get all the way done before she slaps him.

  * * *

  At midnight, they are alone in the studio amid the smells of oil paints and turpentine. Artemus has not taken a drink in hours and is almost sober, and now he paces the pine floor among his brother’s canvases, smoking a pipe filled with the cheap drugstore tobacco he prefers.

  Meanwhile, Anna Rose watches from a pile of silk pillows where she sits with her legs drawn up. She has removed her wet shoes and stockings and her feet, bare now, are crossed at the ankles. She is smoking a cigarette, a china cup in her hand to catch the ashes lest they fall on the pillows. Behind her is an ancient Japanese screen brushed delicately of egrets and a mist-shrouded river, all fading yellow with time. The jalousies are open; the rain streaks the windows and patters through the leaves of a live oak outside. Voices rise from the house below, and someone is playing a guitar.

  * * *

  When they first came into the studio, Artemus showed her his brother’s recent art: streetscapes mostly, leaning about on canvas stretchers, unframed. They are not of the Quarter but of downriver neighborhoods and the Irish Channel, Magazine Street, Algiers. The paintings have little negative space, not even the sky; they are solid with houses, with buildings and complicated galleries and windows, rooflines and ironwork, jutting dormers, laundry on the line, finials and urns and swags, automobiles and streetcars. Everything is touched by low sunlight, the tilting of day to evening, and a dark play of shadow. Kinesthesia, Anna Rose called it. Look here, she said. Look how the light and shadow make the buildings live and how they make the people move.