Pelican Road

by Howard Bahr

  They topped the grade, running hot and fast, and there was a headlight shimmering with speed and staring them in the face.

  Mister Dunn thought This is not right even as his hands were moving. He closed the throttle and touched the brake. If he blew out the air at this speed, the cars would pile all over them, and they would die, and the men in the back would die—but he had to try, had to slow them down. He opened the throttle again, then slammed the brake lever and heard the train dynamite behind him, a terrific explosion of air followed by the screech of brake shoes against the wheels. He reached up and pulled the whistle cord.

  “Jump, boys!” he shouted over the screaming whistle. “I can’t stop ’em!”

  Eddie Cox was staring ahead. The headlight of the Silver Star was already lighting up his face, but there was no fear in it, only a deep sorrow. He only moved to take up his Bible and press it to his chest.

  “Jump, Bobby!” cried Mister Dunn.

  Bobby Necaise looked out the window at the ground speeding past. It was too far. If it was water, he thought, I could do it. He thought, They will teach me that in boot camp. He looked ahead at the light that was no longer just a light, but the shape of a locomotive, and no longer shining at them, but illuminating the trees by the roadside. The passenger engine’s pilot trucks had left the rails, and now it was beginning to tilt and crab sideways, pushing up a little mountain of slag before it. Bobby could see the top of the boiler now, and the cab lurching upward from the pressure of the heavy cars behind. He felt his own cab shift under his feet, saw Mister Dunn cover his face with his hands. That is God sitting there, thought Necaise. Then he closed his eyes and waited.

  * * *

  On the back platform of the Silver Star, the boy collapsed, sliding down the bulkhead. Artemus caught and held him by the front of his sweater. “I ought to slap the shit out of you,” he said.

  “I don’t want to go home!” cried the boy. He began to weep then, so Artemus backhanded him twice, not hard, just as he had struck Gideon in the windmill that day. “So don’t go home,” said Artemus.

  “Where else?” said the boy, wiping at his face.

  “Stop your sniveling and listen to me,” said Artemus. “My brother—”

  The door opened, and Mister Nussbaum emerged. “Kane?” he said.

  “We’re all right,” said Artemus.

  “Your brother?” said Jeff Brown.

  “He finally learned how little difference it made,” said Artemus. He slapped the boy again. “So what?” he shouted. “So fucking what?”

  “Mister Kane,” said the conductor calmly, “why don’t we all go in and sit down?”

  “In a minute, sir, for Christ’s sake!” said Artemus. He took the boy’s cheeks in his hand, squeezing hard. “You got too much to do,” he said. “You can’t let—”

  Suddenly the brakes blew out beneath them. Artemus and Mister Nussbaum looked at one another, each one knowing. The train lurched and shuddered, squealing like a beast in pain. Foul smoke swirled across the platform, the stench of friction. Mister Nussbaum took hold of Artemus then. The old man’s grip was stronger than Artemus could ever have imagined. “It’s the 4512,” he said.

  A great noise ascended, from the ground it seemed, though not of the ground, but of steel and iron grinding. The car twisted sideways, wheels bumping along the ties. Artemus felt Mister Nussbaum fall away, but still he held tightly to the boy and went on talking, trying to tell him everything was all right. Only now his voice was gone. It seemed to be nowhere but in his own head. He lost his hold on the boy’s face, lost sight of it, and felt himself being lifted away in a sudden darkness filled with tumult. “You got too much to do!” he tried across the empty place, but he could not be sure the boy heard him before the darkness closed around them both.

  APOLLO’S ILLUSION

  Anna Rose Dangerfield woke with a start as if from a bad dream, but she had not been dreaming. She had been in that sweet blue region of half-sleep, listening to the voices on the street below, and sometime in her dozing, Artemus had come back to her. She had seen him clearly, standing at the foot of her bed in his uniform. The shoulders of his coat were damp, and he wore no cap. The light from the jalousies latticed his face with brightness and shadow, as if the sun were shining. Back so soon? she said, her heart suddenly joyful. He had smiled and spoken in return, though she could not remember what he said. Then all at once he was gone again.

  She sat up, drawing the afghan close. On the dressing table, between the candles, the corpus of Our Lord sagged on the cross, remembering, in his last moments, his nativity perhaps. The clock there said half past noon, and Anna Rose remembered vaguely the tolling of the cathedral bell. The room was silent now, save for the hiss of the gas heater, and empty.

  It was only a dream after all, she thought, and felt the disappointment that always accompanied the collapse of fond wishes and illusions.

  The hour was late for rising, even for her. She got out of bed, stretched, pulled on her robe and crossed the cold floor. She cracked the door and peered out into the hall. It was empty and still. It lay in unfamiliar darkness, too, and Anna Rose saw, with a momentary sadness and surprise, that the antique Edison bulb had burned out at last. The only lumination came from a narrow window at the end that looked out on the courtyard. She made her way quickly down the hall to the bathroom and was sick again, as she had been these several mornings past. She washed her face and considered herself in the cloudy mirror over the sink. Her hand touched her belly and felt, she believed, a little swelling there already. You have to tell him sooner or later, she thought, and she wondered if he would be glad. It will make him happy, she told herself. Maybe he knew already, and that is why he smiled at her in the vision. In any event, tomorrow night, Christmas night, she would meet the Silver Star at Basin Street, and she and Artemus would have supper, and they would go to Mass. She would tell him afterward, in the twilit nave of Immaculate Conception, among the smell of snuffed candles. Then she would not be so afraid.

  * * *

  At first, there was no pain, nor anything to harm, and no longer any fear that something bad must happen. There was only the darkness, vast and still, all empty of sound and movement like the dark before time must have been. So this is death, he thought, and it was all right. He was glad to know what death was, after so long wondering.

  He would have liked to remain, but after a season, the darkness began to shift, as if it had weight and substance. He felt it glide across him, passing away, and for a moment he was filled with regret. Then a globe of light appeared, and he was drawn into it, and soon he found himself in a landscape of shadows. This is better, he thought, for the light was soft, like the full moon walking over the woods, and he was no longer alone; others were there with him, moving among the shadows. He could not see their faces, but he knew them just the same, and knew their voices. All is well, he thought, and believed it for a time.

  Then a coldness touched him, and with it came a deep sorrow, for he understood it was not death after all, but life that held him. The light grew, and by it he saw the others moving away, following the shadows. He called to them, but they would not stay, and he could not follow. Soon they were gone, and he knew they would not return. He watched them pass away until only the light remained, then he turned back reluctantly into the world.

  “Get up, Frank,” said Sonny Leeke.

  He tried to obey, but a bright lance of pain struck him in the spine, and he fell back again. His knees were bent, and he saw that he was jammed against the forward door of the caboose. “I can’t,” he said.

  Pale sunlight slanted through the windows of the X-630. The air was bitter with the smell of dust and burning brakes, and dense with coal smoke. “Get your ass up,” said Leeke.

  “Goddamn it,” said Smith.

  Leeke took him by the arms and lifted him to his feet. He stood unsteadily, the spasmed muscles around his spine pulling him sideways. He put his arm around the brakeman’s neck, and together
they moved toward the open back door. It seemed a long journey. Leeke kicked the overturned desk chair from their path. They crunched over broken glass, among a shambles of strewn cushions and Christmas presents, scattered books and papers, coal spilled from the bunker, dislodged raingear and fusees and torpedoes. The stove was hot when they passed it, boiling smoke where the stovepipe had broken loose.

  “Wait a minute,” said Leeke. “I got to fix that.” He hunted around and found his gloves, and with his gloved hands forced the stovepipe back in place. “We might want a stove directly,” he said, and shucked the gloves, and took Smith’s arm again. Finally they passed through the door and into the cold, into a terrible silence where the snow fell swiftly, urgently, as if it wanted to hurry and cover up what had been done. Smith had no idea what that might be, for he could remember nothing beyond the dark.

  “Something bad has happened,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Leeke. “I think we hit the Silver Star.”

  * * *

  It was the worst dream George Watson ever had, of a big bird like an owl that swept down out of the snow and covered him with its wings. They had a terrible struggle, and George Watson was flung against the walls of the boxcar, and dragged across the splintered floor, and smashed against the bulkhead, and all the while the bird screamed with a sound like nothing of the earth or of hell even. Then everything was quiet, the bird gone limp and soft, weightless as if only its feathers remained. Watson pushed the thing off him, the light returned, and he saw that it was not a bird at all, but only the sheet of cardboard.

  Still, there had been a fight of some kind, for he was hurting all over, and there was blood on the front of his silk shirt. Watson lay still for a moment, trying to gather himself. He found that the blood was leaking from his nose, and he had to blow hard to clear his nostrils so he could breathe. Then he noticed other things that were wrong. The train was not moving. He was lying, not on the floor, but on the side of the car, and the door yawned above him. Snow was falling straight down through it, and he could see the sky.

  He sat up and looked around. The air was thick with dust. He had lost one of his shoes, and his pistol was gone. Then he began to shiver, and he had to crawl back under the cardboard and hug himself until the shivering stopped. While he was under there, the car gave a groan and shifted, and Watson was on the floor again. When he emerged at last, he found that, if he wanted to, he could step right out the boxcar door and onto the ground. He wondered how that could be, so he decided to get up and see for himself. Getting up was hard, for he was stiff and aching with cold, but he managed it in time. He crossed the floor and stepped out, and fell flat on his face in a tangle of vines. He lay still a moment, then rose stiffly to his feet again. He was way up in a stand of pine trees. It came to him that someone, Mister Leeke probably, had played a joke on him, took the wheels from under the car and slid the whole god damn thing into the woods.

  “That just ain’t right,” said George, and all at once he was madder than he had ever been. He went back into the car and found his pistol and the lost shoe, then folded some of the cardboard around him so that he resembled a great brown moth. He went out again and started around the boxcar, thinking to find Mister Frank Smith and raise hell. Even if George Watson was only a nigger, and a bad one at that, and riding for free, he ought not to be treated in such a way when he had done no harm to anybody, at least not lately.

  He came out in the middle of a sandy road, and stopped. His breathing stopped, and even his heart perhaps, long enough to make him dizzy. He tried to make himself believe what he was seeing, but his mind was shook up and confused.

  He was surrounded by a mountain of boxcars, all piled on top of one another, spread from woods to woods on either side of the main line. Or where the main line used to be, for now, where it showed at all, there was only torn-up ties, and mounds of slag, and rails twisted and bent. One of the cars sat on the very top of the pile, slanted toward the sky, and as George watched, it creaked and groaned and settled itself. The whole pile creaked and groaned, in fact, and air hissed from the cylinders, and there was a ticking from the overheated brakes. A journal box had caught fire and was leaking oily smoke.

  George Watson looked, and believed, and as soon as he believed, all feeling left him. He did not own a feeling that could touch what he saw, only a numbness that left him curiously at peace. Time had ceased, and everything he had worried about no longer mattered. It was freedom, in a way—the most freedom he had ever known, and the most peace.

  He had to go through the woods to get around the wreckage. It was quiet in there, except for the sifting of the snow, and he liked the smell of the pines and the softness of the needles under his feet. Presently, he glimpsed the freight engine through the trees. The locomotive lay on its side, leaking steam at every joint and groaning like a dying beast. He could see the top of the boiler and the crushed roof of the cab. The tender had turned over, too, and was lying at an angle, all the coal spilled out. He knew there were men in there, and he knew he should go over, but he was afraid of what he would see. Not the dead—he had seen plenty of dead men—but those who might be alive, all torn up and begging him for help when he had none to give.

  In fact, he didn’t know what to do. He had no idea where he was, though it was clear that he was still in the Piney Woods. He could hear automobiles passing to the east, tires thump-thumping over pavement joints: the New Orleans highway, most likely. He could go over there, stand by the road, and hope some colored people came along to give him a ride. But what if the highway police came by, or a truckload of white boys looking for sport? Maybe he should just keep walking until he got to a house. But there would be dogs at a house. He knew that out in the country even the colored people had dogs, and nigger dogs were the worst of all. Or maybe he should go back and find the caboose, only there might be injured men there, too. Watson touched the tobacco can in his pocket. Aw man, he thought. He was trying to make up his mind what to do when he got tangled up in a thicket of briars and had to push out onto the sandy road. There, he was made to stop again and reach for an understanding of what he saw.

  A second locomotive, northbound, lay on its side, coal spilled out, steam rising in a cloud, the boiler buried for half its length under a great mound of slag. Behind it sprawled the ruins of a long passenger train. Some of the cars remained upright, jackknifed across the main. Most were turned over, and these seemed longer, bigger, than they ought to be. They were streaked and dented as though they had been flailed with chains. A coach had telescoped the baggage car so that the two occupied a single space where nothing could live. Dismounted wheels and trucks lay everywhere. Rails were twisted; ties were pushed up; broken window glass sparkled in the gray light.

  George Watson walked south along the wreck, clutching the cardboard tight around him. His shoes and socks were soaked through, and his feet were freezing, but it was not the cold that troubled him. He was afraid that he had fallen into another dream where all the world he had known was come to an end in a haze of snow. He had been alone most of his life, but he had never felt more alone than he did now. A profound silence settled around him, as if the violence of the world’s end had made an empty place in the air and sucked away all the possibility of sound.

  But this was no dream, and he was not alone. Those were not empty boxcars out there, but fine green Pullman coaches where hundreds of people were trapped. Some of them, maybe most, were dead, their souls rising even now into the gray afternoon. But others were stirring into movement again, groping for the light, trying to understand what had happened to them. He could sense them struggling behind the darkened windows, and pretty soon they would begin to emerge. What would George Watson do then?

  He realized that it wasn’t quiet, either. Some part of him, for a little while, and without his will, had simply refused to listen. He listened now, and heard the same groaning of air and ticking of brakes—and then something else, more terrible than the shrieking of the dream bird had been.


  It started softly, a whimpering no louder than the snow sifting in the pines. George Watson knew it was coming from the passenger coaches, but the sound was elusive, rising from everywhere, but nowhere in particular. It was like when the people began to sing in church, soft at first, and only a few, so you couldn’t tell who was singing and who wasn’t. But then it began to swell, like the voices of the people as the song took hold, and in a moment it was a mourning and a crying, a wailing, a jumble of words pleading, a tangle of questions that no one could answer, least of all George Watson.

  Now the fear enclosed him, and he dropped his cardboard wings and knelt in the road. Maybe Sweet Willie Wine would have liked to go over there and see what he could find—jewelry, money, fat watches—but all George Watson wanted to do was clap his hands over his ears. He felt like he had come upon a door to hell left open, and he knew there would be no closing of it again; he knew he would hear these sounds for all his life remaining.

  His numbness deserted him, and his peace, and in their place came a great sorrow for the strangers who needed so much help. They seemed to be crying to him; nobody else was around for them to cry to, after all. The thought came to him that he should pray, but he had no words for praying, nor any notion of what praying was. All he could do was kneel in the road and be afraid. He shut his eyes tight, trying to clear his mind, but that only made him dizzy again. When he opened his eyes, he saw the girl.