Pelican Road

by Howard Bahr

  * * *

  Ira Nussbaum, seventeen years old, has been on the extra board for a week, and this is his first trip without supervision. The train, a local, has been on the road fourteen hours, longer than the boy had ever done anything at one stretch. The engineer, John Marquette, is a sturdy, blockish man with a face that seems carved out of some workable but impervious stone. In all that time, Marquette has not spoken a word to his brakeman nor glanced in his direction. The Negro fireman might as well have had no tongue at all; the whole trip, he has moved about his tasks like a shadow, his fear of John Marquette filling the cab with a smell like sour sweat. Ira has never learned his name.

  At midnight, Ira lines them into the hole at Nicholson for a southbound train. The engine winds slowly into the passing track, and Ira, waiting on the ground, makes a mistake. When the engine reaches him, Ira steps onto the narrow footboard beside the pilot, an awkward perch with no good hand hold, not meant for riding, especially on a forward movement. But Ira is tired and confused and angry. The sweat is burning in his eyes, and he is half-blind from the headlight. Now he is bent half-double, balancing himself, holding on with one hand, trying to keep his coal-oil switch lantern steady in the other. He can see the engineer leaning from the cab window, watching him. Ira tries to signal for a stop, but Marquette won’t stop. Instead, he reaches for the throttle and gives it a jerk. The engine coughs and leaps forward.

  When the boy falls, his overall strap catches in the footboard. He cries out. His dropped lantern passes under the engineer’s window, but still the engine does not stop. The boy is dragged along the roadbed that cuts him, along the ends of the ties that dig into his back. He can feel the rail under his shoulder, and the white-rimmed wheels of the leading truck are squealing on the rail beside him. Then he is free, lying on the slag, looking at his hand. He feels no pain yet where the fingers were, only astonishment that they are gone. When he holds his hand up, the blood seems black in the starlight. It soaks down his sleeve as the train passes, looming over him, shaking the ground.

  He does not hear the air hissing in the brake line as the train stops, nor the men coming back, nor any of their voices but one. Mister John Marquette bends over the boy, his mouth against his ear. How you like that, Jew? he asks, and then he is gone, and the pain and the darkness take his place.

  * * *

  Artemus turned away from the thought of the conductor’s hurt; there was nothing for it anyhow but to make fatuous remarks and accept the rebuke such remarks deserved. Instead, he thought of Anna Rose, thin and small, who burned the gas heater even on warm nights in winter, who shivered in the fog of all seasons. Most likely, she went asleep again after he left, and likely she would not have wakened yet. When she did, she would do her matins. Artemus imagined her crossing the room, barefoot, in her pale gown, with a lighted taper in her hand. She knelt before the crucifix on her dressing table and lifted the candle. Artemus imagined himself standing behind, watching her face in the mirror, her thin shoulders, her slim, hipless boy’s buttocks under the dressing gown, her long legs. Nymph, he thought, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered—

  Suddenly, the conductor shouted “All aboard!” with such vehemence that Artemus jumped. “We have to move this train,” said Mister Nussbaum. “We need to get up the road.”

  Miles Duvall waved from the baggage car. The engineer was watching from the cab, and Mister Danly was strolling back down the platform. “You’re late, Ira,” said Mister Danly.

  “I’ve heard enough of that,” snapped the conductor. He turned to Artemus. “Now get this train moving,” he said. “Hurry up.” Then he was gone into the coach.

  Artemus watched his conductor go, and after a moment waved his hand and got the whistle signal in response. The train began to glide into motion, and Artemus stepped aboard the moving coach.

  Once again, Mister Danly hurried alongside. “What’s the matter with your captain? He seems awful prickly.”

  “He’s late,” said Artemus.

  “Well, ain’t we all,” said Danly.

  Artemus watched from the open vestibule window as the agent dropped farther and farther behind. When the train outran him at last, Mister Danly stopped, winded, bending over with his hands on his knees. Yet the pale oval of his face was still lifted toward them, watching as they fled away into time. Artemus had seen this same thing before, a hundred times, but now the growing distance seemed unimaginable, like that which lay between the stars.

  * * *

  Though the sun was hidden, the Silver Star made a faint shadow in its passage over the land. Artemus Kane stood in the vestibule and watched the shadow of his coach racing along beside. It leapt over fencerows and grade crossings, flickered over the trunks of trees. The shadow kept the shape of the car, but it was distorted, too, as the features of the land pulled at it.

  Artemus found himself suspended in the deafening noise of the space between cars. Such a racket—the drumming of the wheels, the rattle of the steel buffer plates—was hypnotic if you gave in to it. Beyond the window, the shadow fled along. White clouds of egrets lifted from the fields, and flocks of blackbirds. Rabbits ran from the shadow, or seemed to, though Artemus knew it was the train itself that frightened them. Cattle only lifted their heads, unafraid, curious. In one broad pasture, a horse, tail and mane streaming, galloped alongside and was quickly left behind. For years, Artemus had known this horse to race the trains in all seasons. In fact, Artemus had never seen him do anything else, as though his sole purpose, the reason his people fed and doctored and curried him, were this futile pursuit.

  He was about to proceed when he noticed a slip of paper tucked behind the sign on the bulkhead that said Passengers May Not Stand in Vestibule. The cleaning crews rarely missed such a detail. Artemus plucked it out, unfolded it. Scrawled in pencil were the words

  T.J.—Dont forget see Agt Ch’ville about s.o. 905.

  K.S.

  That was yesterday, probably, long hours before Artemus climbed aboard the southbound Silver Star at Meridian. Away up in Virginia, where it was no doubt bitter cold, where dirty snow caked on the wheel trucks, one trainman had reminded another about setting out coach 905 at Charlottesville. Artemus had no idea who these men were, of course, but the note made them real and alive, as if they had spoken to him. One of them had stood in this vestibule, right where Artemus Kane was standing, hearing the same sounds and perhaps watching his train’s shadow pass along beside. If Artemus cared to make the calculation, he could guess if they were off duty right now, or riding the southbound version of the Silver Star as it rambled through the Blue Ridge.

  Sometimes it was easy to forget that other men worked these same cars in climes and landscapes far removed from Pelican Road. A long-haul passenger train was passed along from division to division, and only at the crew-change points did the men know one another. Within the theoretically inflexible limits of the timetable, the Silver Star was mutable as its own shadow. Cars were added or dropped off, engines were swapped out, the road grime dulled the flanks and streaked the windows of the hurrying coaches. Along the way, the train was given to the care of strangers with their own personalities and squabbles and folklore, their own Mister Nussbaums and Sonny Leekes. Their own Anna Roses and Arabellas too, and their own rivers they liked to cross. Artemus found comfort in the thought that if he ever met T.J. or K.S., they would not be strangers. He would be bound to them by mutual experience and a common language, and if they asked Artemus Kane to set out coach 905 at Charlottesville, he would know how to do it.

  Men got fired, or they got laid off in hard times. Maybe a girlfriend was in the family way, a wife was clamoring for divorce, or the law was closing in. For numberless reasons, or for none at all, a man sometimes grew restless, needed a little travel, some room to think, a landscape where fresh possibilities might present themselves and old sins be forgotten. Then the railroad, like the vanished frontier, offered opportunities for escape. With no more than a union card and the practical knowle
dge of his craft, a man could seek out other roads that needed extra crews in boom times: a grain harvest on the Milwaukee, a big run of West Virginia coal on the Norfolk & Western, a lumber boom on the Great Northern. Such men were known as Boomers, and rare was the trainmaster or superintendent who was not glad to see them when the yards were crowded and the trains couldn’t move.

  A man who went out on the boomer trail might find himself on some remote railroad he had never even heard of, with only a few varying details—home-grown signals, for example, or the different names of stations and grades—and these quickly gotten used to. Usually it took an experienced man no more than two trips to settle in, to learn that such-and-such a place was always switched with air, that here you worked from one end of the siding, there another, that a caboose was called a way-car here and a van there, and you might find Chinamen or Mexicans or Indians where, at home, you would expect to see only Negroes.

  Artemus had never gone booming himself, but he heard traveling men talk about working narrow-gauge lines in Colorado and how odd the three-foot gauge looked, the delicate rail and miniature switches. In Alaska, they said, there was a rifle in every caboose in case a bear decided to climb aboard. They spoke of crossing the barren deserts of Texas and Arizona and even Mexico, told what it was like to pound through the snow sheds on the Union Pacific, or ride the Great Northern in the shadow of the Rockies, or pass under the Royal Gorge on the swaying, ice-caked roof of a boxcar. Old Hoot Gibson never forgot the approach out of the mountains above Denver on the D&RGW, circling down to the clean, glittering nighttime city with fire rimming the wheels. Others spoke of gloomier cities far to the north—Utica and Albany and Buffalo—and of short lines in Maine and New Hampshire where grass grew between the rails. They waxed astonished on the bewildering array of tracks in New York or Gary or East St. Louis and told how these places made Meridian look like a Lionel train set. Up there, everything was blackened by coal soot, they said, and sometimes people shot at you for amusement. Up there, they said, every transfer caboose had bars on the windows, and an armed special agent was part of every crew.

  In Chicago, the Polacks who crewed the electric South Shore trains rarely made jokes and never made friends with strangers. The Irishmen on the B&O carried guns as a matter of course, not in their bags, but in holsters on their belts. East St. Louis was the worst place of all. There, the Terminal Railroad Company supplied every interlocking tower with a .45 automatic and a hundred rounds of ammunition. Jean Chauvin once fired a switch engine in East St. Louis, in the Q yards under the Eades Bridge. He told how, for lunchtime fun, the Polack switchmen liked to build a scrap-lumber fire under an empty oil drum and toss in a stray cat.

  In the Southwest, on the other hand, everybody was friendly. A train crew might stop in the middle of a run to negotiate with a Mexican farmer for a brace of hens, or entice a comely senorita to sweep out the cab. Across the Mississippi River, boomers on the L&A encountered descendents of Haitian and Santa Domingo slaves who spoke island French and perfect English, and whose dignity was intractable. In California, American Indian track gangs could not be induced to smile or wave by any means, while the Chinese bowed solemnly to the passing trains.

  Among all these landscapes and races and cultures, the railroad man spoke his own language and knew the truths peculiar to his trade. He leaned out his cab window, watched from his cupola or vestibule, listened to the click of wheels on the rail joints and the echo of his engine’s whistle in the dark. His peril was universal and familiar. Night was still night and cold still cold—hot still hot, too, though the bugs might be different—and a man coupled an air hose in Utah or Iowa or Vermont the same way he did in Louisiana. Cabooses came in all colors, but they all smelled the same. Order forms might be green or yellow, timetables red or white, but they all told the same story and carried the same message: be safe, look out, pay attention. Meanwhile, the trains, long or short, never ceased. They crawled over the vast continent night and day, and on their steel axles they carried the American dream of plentitude and freedom.

  One of these was the Silver Star, running sixty miles an hour now through the Louisiana winter morning. Pretty soon, Rufus Payne the engineer and Jean Chauvin the fireman, making up time, would have them at seventy, at eighty on the straightways, at a hundred if they thought the train could stand it. And the Silver Star would stand it in this flat country, the heavy cars gliding over the heavy rail, all eager for speed, ready to race time as surely as the galloping horse raced their passing. Artemus knew that somewhere along the train, Mister Nussbaum was taking tickets, Stanfield beside him, each swaying to the train’s movement. Whatever Mister Nussbaum was feeling right now, he would see to his duty because that was the kind of man he was. Meanwhile, villages and depots, boatyards and sawmills, telegraph poles, houses, fences all fled past in a blur of color and form and registered in the trainmen’s minds, each detail important, each one fixing their moment in time.

  They were to pass the northbound freight drag at Gant’s siding. Artemus held on to his cap and leaned far out the vestibule window, and in a moment, sure enough, he saw the marker lights of the caboose tucked safely away in the passing track. As the trains grew closer together, Artemus saw the rear-end crew of the freight gathered on the roadbed—Bruce Butler, Will Prescott, Kenny Speed, all men he knew and had worked with. The freight men lifted their hands and hollered a greeting to Artemus, their words snatched away by the wind and noise. The Silver Star sped along down the length of the long drag, the clatter of its wheels echoing off the cars. Across an empty flat car, Artemus caught a glimpse of Gant’s store, but no girl on the porch. Surely, though, old Demeter Gant was in there, gripping his knees with his little withered claws. The thought filled Artemus with disgust, but he offered a quick prayer for the old man’s peace just in case somebody might be watching over them.

  On the north end, the passing ritual was repeated with the men on the engine—Richard Whiddon, Johnny Hadden, Marion Wigley. Then the freight train was behind them, and the men with it, down the long corridor of time. Farewell, boys, Artemus thought, and in a little while, the Silver Star was rattling over the Pearl River bridge.

  * * *

  In spite of the clearance, the Silver Star couldn’t seem to make up time. They found the snow at Picayune: wet, sloppy flakes that didn’t stick but made the streets wet and the town lights shine brighter. Motorcars crawled along the main street, feeling their way, and the citizens stepped gingerly on the sidewalks.

  The agent had two typed copies of a message for them:

  Extra 4512 South delayed Pachuta acct. derailment. Main

  line not effected. Extra 4512 will wait at Purvis for No. 6.

  Artemus, standing under the train shed, puzzled over the message. First, he wondered why people simply could not understand the distinction between “effected” and “affected.” Second, it seemed unnecessary to hold Frank Smith’s train at Purvis when they could clearly make Talowah, even Lumberton farther south. Mister Nussbaum and the other trainmen were of the same opinion.

  Mister Nussbaum had left the cars without his overcoat, but the cold didn’t seem to bother him. “We will be their first opposing train out of Hattiesburg,” the conductor pointed out. “Why not let them run?”

  “What if he meant Lumberton instead of Purvis?” said Bomar.

  “It’s happened before,” Stanfield said.

  The agent, a new man who had come here from another division, had been annoying everyone with his talk about the weather. He went on and on as if it were something entirely new and unexpected, as if it had never been cold in December in all the history of man. Now the agent said, “I called him up, asked him the same thing. He said the 4512 has an order to be in the hole at Purvis.” The agent hunched in his overcoat. “He was short with me,” he added.

  “I would like a copy of that order,” said Mister Nussbaum. The agent went into the depot and returned a few minutes later with a new order and clearance card specifically for N
umber 6:

  NO. 6 HAS RIGHTS OVER ALL TRAINS PICAYUNE

  TO MERIDIAN.

  Mister Nussbaum shook the new order at the agent. “I asked for the local’s wait order,” he said. “What is this nonsense?”

  The agent shrugged. “Man said to ask you how many more orders you needed today. Said to get your train moving.”

  “Well, no shit,” said Stanfield.

  “Sure is cold, ain’t it?” said the agent.

  The color rose in Mister Nussbaum’s face. “All right,” he said. Then, to the flagman: “Oliver, take the engineer his copies. But tell him I said to run Lumberton to Purvis as if he had a yellow board, and tell him to watch out for the 4512. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Oliver Bomar, and stood uncomfortably for a moment, holding the message and the order between his fingers like a soiled napkin. “Mister Nussbaum—” he began, but the conductor cut him off.

  “Do as I say, Oliver. Be quick.”

  The flagman looked at Artemus, then at Mister Nussbaum again. Finally, he moved off toward the engine, walking fast. The conductor watched him go, then walked off himself without another word. He paced up and down the platform through the steam that rose in warm billows from the coaches, and every few minutes, he would look at his watch.

  Stanfield said, “Something is eating the captain.”

  “He don’t like to be late,” said Artemus.

  “He don’t like engineers, either,” said Stanfield, though the comment was pointless since everybody knew it. Many of the old trainmen and enginemen—the really old ones like Mister Nussbaum and Rufus Payne, the engineer of the Silver Star—had spent their working lives in contempt for each others’ craft, a dark element of their pride and experience that worked against them sometimes. A.P. Dunn was an exception, as he was in most things, and Artemus wished Mister Nussbaum could be an exception, too, but, beyond the demands of the job, Artemus had never known Mister Nussbaum to speak with anybody in engine service, neither engineer nor fireman nor hostler, not even the mechanics and lowly engine wipers at the roundhouse.