Pelican Road

by Howard Bahr

  Smith began to walk up the length of the tender, pulling Necaise along by the sleeve. He said, “Listen. I have noticed that most people would rather run and tell on a man than to confront him. That is not our style out here.”

  “No, sir,” said Necaise. “I know that. I just thought—”

  “You handled the situation as good as anybody,” said Smith. “Just do your job, and we will get through all right.”

  Now Mister Dunn was high above them, leaning out the window with his elbows on the sill and his watch in his hand. The white bandage stuck out from under his cap. “Hello, Frank,” he said, his voice light and cheerful like that of a young man. “I have seven forty-five and ten.”

  Smith drew his own watch. “All right,” he said. “And fifteen, sixteen—”

  “On the money,” said Mister Dunn, and put his watch away.

  Necaise clambered up the gangway and disappeared into the cab. Smith said, “A.P., is there anything you need to tell me?”

  “Yes, Frank, there is,” said the engineer, and smiled. “We’re late, so grab a hand hold. I mean to run and stink like a gourd vine.”

  Smith walked back to the caboose without saying more. Again he sensed the presence of the traveler in the boxcar, but the man was no longer of any interest to him. The conductor was unnerved by Mister Dunn’s behavior. It angered him, as if some blithe stranger had come among them claiming a kinship he did not deserve. Smith was considering second thoughts, weighing the safety of his crew against the protection of his engineer, knowing all the while there was only one choice. It was Christmas, and the trip should be easy. They were late. Eddie Cox could run the engine if he had to. In the end, Smith could not bring himself to humiliate A.P. Dunn by calling for a replacement.

  Tonight, however, he would gather the crew in his hotel room—even Eddie Cox, though Smith would have to sneak the Negro up the fire escape. Mister Dunn would require a special invitation, a note perhaps, for trainmen did not summon engineers without some decorum. At least, Frank Smith did not. Then, under the dim overhead bulb, among the cigarette-scarred furniture, Frank would address his engineer in the presence of them all. Mister Dunn would have to face the truth, and Frank Smith would be its instrument. If A.P. didn’t step down, if he wouldn’t admit that his running days were done, then Smith would have to call the superintendent.

  Farewell, Mister Dunn. Merry fucking Christmas. All your courage come to this, and in whatever your years remaining, you will remember that Frank Smith betrayed you.

  At the caboose, Mister Earl January stood a little distance from the steps, favoring his bad leg. “You all be careful,” he said.

  In his irritation, Smith waved the man away. Then he paused, one hand on the grab iron, his foot on the bottom step. Foolish, he thought, to let a kindness pass unnoticed. “Thanks for your good help,” he said.

  Mister Earl made no reply, but turned and set off toward the roundhouse, his shoulders slumped, his figure suddenly small against the bleak expanse of the yard.

  Smith swung aboard and waved his hand in the highball signal. The engineer, watching from the cab window, replied with two short notes on the whistle, and immediately the slack ran out and the short train eased into motion, a smooth start, the signature of Mister A.P. Dunn. Smith watched as Earl January passed away behind. I hope I am not fucking up, said Smith to himself, to the gods, to whoever might be listening.

  Sonny Leeke was standing on the narrow platform. “About goddamned time,” he said.

  Smith leaned on the rail and made no reply. Sometimes Sonny crawled on his nerves.

  “What’s the matter with Mister Earl?” asked Sonny Leeke. “He acts like somebody put a hose pipe up his ass.”

  “Somebody did,” said Smith.

  “How’s A.P. this morning?”

  “He’s all right,” said Smith.

  Out of the gray, solemn light they came, moving slow, the headlight shimmering on the rails, past the M&O freight house where a porter was sweeping the platform with a big push broom. The porter waved, and the two trainmen waved back, a timeless salute that recognized no distinction of race or class. Lines of waiting freight cars and empty passenger coaches echoed their passage, and the green and red switch targets glided beneath them, and all the while the caboose wheels of the trailing truck kept up their steady rhythm on the rail joints, click, click…click, click. The engine whistled for the crossings, tossing its melodious cry across the morning, the sound racketing off the vine-covered backs of tin-roofed warehouses and mill buildings where lights burned in the windows.

  Pat Murphy’s track gang had moved aside for the local to pass. Murphy carried a slapjack and pistol and worked his men, summer and winter, like a chain gang. Mister Dunn greeted them with two notes on the whistle, then in a moment they appeared to Smith and Sonny. Swaddled in wet, ragged coats, black faces turned up grinning, they leaned on their steel lining bars and lifted their wet, gloved hands. Old Pat himself sat under the sleet-bouncing canvas top of a yellow handcar a track away. The black men waved, but Pat Murphy made no sign, his red face dull and disinterested under the broad felt brim of his hat.

  The train jerked a little as Mister Dunn grabbed another notch and the speed picked up, the click of the rail joints faster, click-click, click-click. They were past the yard limit now, rolling ever a little faster past the gray houses and backyards of Jumpertown where laundry stiffened in the cold, and dogs barked at them, and last summer’s gardens stood in weedy ruin.

  Dutch Ladner came out on the back porch then and breathed deep of the sweet coal-scented air. Frank Smith, leaning on the rail with the old X-630 swaying gently beneath him, saw once again, as he often did in dreams or at odd moments of the day, the muddy streets and raw, unpainted houses of the lumber company town where he grew up. Strange it was, how such images arrived unbidden out of the air.

  Time was passing, and old men like Mister Dunn and Earl January were passing with it, and the old camp days, and the days of youth. Soon enough his turn would come, Smith thought, and Artemus’s, and Sonny’s, and all of them who were now quick and boastful, who believed they owned the world. Smith supposed they did own it for a while, but not for a long while, not even as long as the old men had, for the world was changing, twisting, beyond anything they could grasp or imagine. In France, in Poland, in Russia, the Krauts had dropped a big rock in the water, and the ripples were crossing the pond, and soon all this fine, familiar world would be washed away, and no one of them could say what might take its place.

  The train jerked again, leapt forward, and the three men grabbed the rail as the cab began to rock and bounce. Sonny Leeke laughed and pulled on the pigtail whistle and made it shriek. Mister Dunn, true to his word, was rolling fast on Pelican Road, making the ties and ballast flick beneath in a blur, making the fencerow trees and telegraph poles jump past and fall away behind in stately procession, bringing the wheels on the rail joints down to a steady hammer. Smith peered careful around the flank of the cab as the train went into a gentle curve. He saw the drive rods work, back-and-forth, back-and-forth, the black engine making smoke and raining cinders as Mister Dunn opened the throttle and teased out a little more speed, as much as he could without beating his train to death. Mister Dunn himself leaned far out the window with his cap turned backward and his goggles on, the white bandage fluttering behind like an aviator’s scarf. Smith thought, By God, but he is a first-class engineer, and he will make the time. Smith took out his watch and gauged their passage by the white mile markers flicking past: they were doing almost a mile every minute now, the boxcars swaying and rocking. Smith thought of the hogs huddling in the frigid wind, shifting their weight, each one accepting whatever the moment brought. The traveling man in the boxcar would shiver too, but at least he was there by choice.

  Ladner and Leeke had done the sensible thing and gone inside, but Smith stayed a moment longer, clinging hard to the rail. They were out amid the flat, fallow cotton fields, passing bare patches of woods an
d scattered tenant houses with smoke rising from the chimneys, passing unpainted barns, fencerows covered in dead honeysuckle vine. The urgent whistle blew for the little lost and unnamed crossings, and the sound of it echoed across the empty land as whistles like it had for years, and all one sound, one voice crying out of time.

  Smith was about to turn away when he noticed a sudden change in the light. To the southeast, the pale disc of the sun appeared ghostlike and fleeting, its broad rays slanting down through the riven sky to touch the earth, as if to remind them all that it was still there. Then, just as quick, it was gone again, hidden by the driving clouds.

  Maybe that is a good sign for us, thought Frank Smith, who believed in signs. He prayed again, Don’t let me fuck up. Don’t let me fuck up. Then he turned and went inside to the warmth and light.

  HOW THINGS ARE MADE OF TIME

  June Watson was laid out in a casket of soft pine, the new wood neither stained nor painted, but rubbed down with linseed oil by the carpenter’s smooth palm. June Watson’s head, empty of thoughts, rested on a baby-blue sateen pillow, his body covered to the chest with a baby-blue cotton blanket. He was dressed in a suit coat that a few hours before had been hanging on a rack in the Jew store. His long-fingered hands were crossed on his breast, his face peaceful, if a little puzzled, as though, even with a brain pumped full of formaldehyde, he were trying to remember where he was.

  His mother Nandina did not know that only half her son lay in the casket; nothing under the blanket but old pillows where his legs used to be, the legs themselves burned to ash in the funeral home furnace. She did not know how it had been unnecessary to purchase the trousers to the suit. Her daughters knew, but they kept the knowledge to themselves. Three o’clock that morning, Nandina’s minister, roused from bed, had rapped softly on her door. Miz Watson had not seen her boy in ten years, and now she was looking at him dead, and that was enough for her to bear right now, her daughters thought. Maybe enough to bear forever, though she had one son yet, somewhere down in the cribs and whorehouses around Wimpy’s Café. The minister had gone hunting George Watson in the dead of night, but George was vanished and no one to tell where. Now the mother’s wails could be heard on the street outside the funeral home in Jumpertown, whence many a woman’s lamentations, raised for her lost children, had drifted out over the mud of winter, the dust of summer.

  Miz Watson, a birdlike woman with a tight knot of white hair under a black pillbox hat, stood before the casket invisible in the midst of her daughters, her cousins, sisters, aunts, and nieces. The women were a blur of hats and fur collars in a cloud of Blue Waltz perfume, an island of mourning from which the men, all but the minister, kept their distance. The people, scattered in the pews, blinked away sleep and talked softly in their weariness, their disbelief. Only, they did believe, really. They were not surprised. This was the end that men from Jumpertown always came to, and the women left to mourn.

  The funeral home parlor where June Watson lay, and where he would lay for a week to come until distant kinsmen could arrive from Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland, was illumined by dim electric bulbs dangling from the ceiling. A cold draft made the cords sway so that the shadows of the people danced back and forth on the puncheon floor. The windows gave a little light, but not much on this gray Christmas Eve. The bier was surrounded by pine and cedar boughs cut hastily before dawn, and the scent of these, and the heavy scent of the women’s perfume, masked the odor of formaldehyde and linseed oil.

  A slim woman, the mahogany skin of her face stretched tight over her cheekbones, sat at a pump organ in the corner. The pedals wheezed and thumped. She was playing “How Sweet the Name of Jesus,” though with difficulty, for some of the keys no longer worked. The neighbor women in the dark pews hummed in company to the song, finding harmonies written in no book, and other women made the words, softly, deferent as the light itself.

  The undertaker, who had worked all night snipping and draining and sewing, stood stiffly by the door in his worn black suit with the silk mourning band sewn permanently to the sleeve. He was lulled by the women’s voices. Many was the time, in days-long mourning, he had gone to sleep on his feet. He was drifting away now into a realm of angels and tombstones and dark cedar trees—nowhere, he believed, could there be more peace—when a presence stirred him, a newcomer who brought with him the smell of damp and the unaccustomed reek of whiskey. Thus the undertaker was the first to see the white man who stood just inside the door in a cheap raincoat, sleet melting on the shoulders. He held his fedora in one hand; under his arm was a round-faced smiling doll.

  “Sir,” said the undertaker in surprise. White people often came here to bid farewell to maids, butlers, yardmen, nannies, but the undertaker did not expect any white people would come to see June Watson. “Sir,” he said again, shaking off sleep.

  The man made no reply, nor any sign that he had heard. Now the people had sensed him, and their faces turned, and their glances fell. The organ wheezed into silence, and the voices, all but the wailing of the women. In a moment, that too died away, and the women turned together toward the door. Nandina Watson, her hands twisting a lace handkerchief, stepped forward expectantly as if some messenger had come. Her daughters, handsome yellow women with angry faces, held her back. The oldest, Dicey, said, “What you mean, comin’ here.”

  The people drew a breath and waited, uncertain and afraid. A moment ago, they had been in their own world, but the white man changed everything. He brought the other world into the parlor, and it was that world, not the man himself, that Dicey was bold to challenge. Still, the man said nothing, only drew back his raincoat and jacket so they could see the badge pinned to his waistcoat and the butt of the pistol in his shoulder holster. The gesture did not threaten. The people understood that it was made only to establish once and for all the relationship that existed between them.

  “We don’t need no po-lice,” said Dicey. “Not no more.”

  “Let it be, Dicey,” said her mother. She stepped away until she was alone in the aisle, between the rows of people watching. She said, “You come about George, ain’t you, Mister.”

  “No,” said the white man.

  Nandina Watson closed her eyes. The sisters made to close around her, but the old woman waved them back. She looked at the policeman again. “Maybe you can find him for me,” she said. “Tell him what happened. Tell him to come home.”

  “I will do that,” said the man. He was looking past Nandina to the casket. “I promise.”

  They watched as the white man walked down the aisle. He passed Miz Watson without a glance, nor seemed to pay any mind to the people nor to the women whose eyes followed him like the eyes of wolves beyond a fire, menacing but helpless in the presence of a power they could fear and despise but never comprehend.

  The white man came to the casket where June Watson lay. There he stood a long moment with the silence heavy around him. They saw him take up the doll as he might a living child and lay it in the casket where June Watson slept. They watched him turn. They looked away when his eyes swept across them. At last, they watched him go, down the aisle past Miz Watson again, and out the door. They felt the cold wind as he went out to the street and heard, in the same instant, a freight train’s whistle as it left the yard southerly bound. They had heard train whistles countless times before, but this one made them shiver all together as if spirits had come among them.

  * * *

  On the passing train, George Watson sat with his legs dangling over the sill of the open boxcar door and watched the gray houses of Jumpertown pass by. He no longer had any mind for Lucy Falls; instead, he was remembering the dream that had visited him. The dream had told George Watson that his brother was dead.

  Perhaps one day he would find out how it happened. Probably he wouldn’t. News didn’t carry far about somebody like June, and George Watson did not plan to return to Meridian nor anywhere else in reach of a woman who carried an ice pick. He wanted to leave all that to the gray morning fallin
g behind, and he wanted to bury Sweet Willie Wine. From now on, he would be only George Watson, for better or worse. Probably worse, for the time was long past when he could have changed even George Watson from what he was.

  He saw the backyard of his mother’s house. It was all mud and dead weeds, and the fence leaned over nearly to the ground. He thought of a little brown dog he kept in the yard for a while. June hated that dog, but George used to play with it all the time until it bit him once. He killed it with a brick and had no more dogs after that.

  Nobody was stirring at the house. The windows were dark, and no smoke curled from the chimney. That was a strange thing, for his mother always got up before daylight. George wondered if his brother had got home before death came for him. Goodbye, June.

  George thought that when he got to wherever he was going, he would find somebody to write his mother. He would tell her farewell and not to mourn. He would ask her to think of him as already dead, far away in a place where she could not reach. It would not be a lie. George Watson had learned long ago that the world was full of people still walking around, still talking, who were dead just the same. Goodbye, Mama.

  The sleet was gone now, and a flurry of snow was falling, tentative flakes that melted when they struck the ground. It was getting colder, though, and pretty soon the ground would be white. George had not seen snow for a long time, and where he was going, he would never see it again.

  The train rambled on, picking up speed, and the snow slanted past the boxcar door. George scooted back from the sill and clasped his arms around his knees and watched the country of his youth pass by, and he knew it was the last time for that, too. He tried to fix it in his mind in case he ever wanted to recall it, but the snow was like a curtain between him and the world. He saw lights burning in corner groceries where he used to steal apples, and in Hung Fat the Chinaman’s garage where he learned about motorcars. The lights were clear beacons in the morning, but the buildings themselves, the houses, even the telephone poles, were so gray and indistinct that they might already be nothing more than memory. The streets were empty, not a soul in sight, no one to wave goodbye to as he passed.