by Joan Brady
‘Teeth? Is that all? Who cares about teeth? Well, I guess the answer to that question is that I care. And plainly you care. Wouldn’t you like to speak? Of course you would. Those teeth of yours really are God-awful. Frank says you made them: remarkable to make a set of teeth, incredible, an amazing feat. I never knew anybody who – But you can’t speak because of them? What about without them?’
Jonathan gestured that without them he couldn’t speak at all.
‘Why not go to a dentist? Denver’s loaded with them. You can’t work on the railroads like this. Really you can’t.’
Jonathan pulled his pockets inside out: no money.
College sighed. ‘Yeah, and you’re going to need thirty-five bucks at least. Have another drink. It’s on me. Of course it is. My grandmother has a pair of false teeth, made out of porcelain and gold. They glint when the sun catches them.’ He sighed again. ‘Buy a piggy bank this month instead. Where are you from anyhow?’
A movement of the hand: east and far away.
College frowned. ‘This the first time you’ve been away from home?’
College slammed his glass down on the bar. ‘Goddamn it, Johnny, you may be able to put up with silence but I can’t. This I mean, and mean for sure. Silence scares the – I’ve already said that, haven’t I? Never could stand it. So was it when I was a boy, so is it now – I hate it, dread it. I have nightmares about it: it swallows me up. Or I think it will. What’s it threatening me for if its intentions are honorable?’ He rifled in his pockets and thrust a wad of notes at Jonathan. ‘Take it. Fifty dollars. That’ll get you a decent set of teeth.’ Jonathan shook his head, the unreality of the situation so great that he could barely keep College in focus much less understand what he was saying. ‘Now, look here, kid, how can I tell if you’ve heard me when my back is turned? You might get killed. Take this money or I really will tell Frank I can’t work with you anymore.’
Jonathan’s dentist wore a mustache waxed into tusks that wobbled when he spoke. ‘Real teeth? They come very high and they rot, dear boy. Ivory rots, too, of course, but it’s quite reasonable. Porcelain’s best, but expensive. I wear porcelain myself. See?’ The dentist slid his own teeth out into his palm. ‘Springs may be old-fashioned, but the father of our country wore them. How about ivory teeth in a vulcanite base? With springs? Wonderful stuff, vulcanite. What do you say to forty-five dollars?’
Jonathan agreed at once.
‘Oh, dear boy, you haven’t been off the farm long, have you? We’ll make it forty.’
Two weeks later the dentures were in Jonathan’s mouth. ‘There,’ the dentist said, adjusting them. He swung the chair around so that it faced the mirror.
Once, years ago, I caught sight of my own face in a mirror and for a split second I saw in myself somebody that – well, it wasn’t me at all. It was somebody wholly alien, fine-featured, laughing – somebody who knew nothing of the sewage that runs through my veins instead of blood. I fell in love at once. It was the same for Jonathan. I’m sure of it.
4
There is a random, episodic feel to most young lives – the childhood pattern dispensed with, the adult pattern not yet established – which has a peculiar charm all its own. But not to Jonathan. As soon as he sensed it, he hated and feared it. With no childhood and no family, with his roots ripped out of him much as his teeth had been, there was no foundation to anchor him, nothing except rage and bitterness to give meaning to a youthful floating-free. Replacing the teeth was easy and from the evidence of photographs, wholly successful. The roots of a life, though: these are a different matter. Despite himself he hungered after the uncompromising ferocity, the raw passions of slavery, and found only vagaries, uncertainties, passing fancies. He worked in the Denver yards. In an exacting trade he got the reputation – which was the ultimate accolade – of a kid with the makings of a good railroadman. Two years passed. During all this time, no picture of him appeared on a Wanted poster in the Home Rule Bar or anywhere else around Denver. Of course it didn’t, but how was he to know why not?
He toyed with the idea that George had never existed, that he – Jonathan – had simply invented George. ‘From now on, it’s Georges that got to be made up’: he’d said it himself over the prostrate figure that had seemed to him to be George’s dead body. Perhaps there had never been a prostrate figure. Perhaps there had never been a battle. Perhaps he had been born on the railways and had dreamed his terrible past. Or perhaps he was dreaming now. If there were anything at all to any of this, however little, then his claim to murder, and to victory, too, was as empty as his grasp of why College’s chicken crossed the road. Maybe Mr Finster had covered for him. It was possible. Maybe they thought he’d died himself, of exposure perhaps, and been savaged by animals.
He slept badly in his bed with sheets. It was a rare night that went by without a nightmare; one in particular frightened him more than all the rest. The first night he had it, he’d gone to sleep with his mind on a number 104 Consolidation, a thirty-eight-ton behemoth of an engine with four pairs of driver wheels. He’d watched it ease its great mass into the yard, pause, and then reverse, steam rising, back onto a siding. All that power so delicately moved left him with an oppressive calm that hung on into the night. This comes from his coded diaries. Nobody knows about it but Jonathan and me.
He saw Cathern come to milk the cow again, just as she used to. He collected the little death machine he’d made out of wood and leather, just as he used to and – just as he used to – he went out to the tobacco fields. I’ve always been fascinated by borderlands. Just when does one thing become another? At just precisely what point in my life did I become a cripple? When the tumor began to grow? When I first sat in this chair? When does a freeman become a slave? When the money changes hands? When the spirit breaks? When does truth become falsehood? The precise moment goes by so fast we can’t catch it; it’s always blurred, always subject to lies, ritual, elaborate evasion. For Jonathan, that most vegetable of things, a tobacco field, becomes suddenly, unaccountably an animal being with mouths that eat away at its own innards: there is the world of pure terror, and then the desperate fight of the little death machine to restore integrity. At just what point is a battle irrevocably lost? or won?
Coming awake with a start Jonathan found his hands moving methodically on the sheets and over the blankets, plucking at worms, picking, squashing, doing what he’d done for all the summer Wednesdays of his childhood.
‘I signed on for brakeman,’ he shouted at College the next evening over the din in the Home Rule in the half-shout, half-speak that he’d mastered along with link-and-pin couplings and such rare delicacies as how to purchase socks and a shoe-shine.
‘You what?’ There were no jobs on the rolling stock of the Hannibal & St Joe.
‘Can’t stick around any longer.’
‘Did you talk to Frank?’
Jonathan nodded. He’d been to the Home Rule Bar more times than he could remember now. After a few months of tense watching and waiting, even the Wanted posters had come to seem friendly to him, and there had been a glowing period not long after his arrival when it had seemed that life just might make sense to him, when he thought he’d like to spend the rest of it in this noisy, smelly room. No longer. After two years, the Home Rule epitomized the sham of Denver; he wanted to run from it, run now, run fast, run so hard that nothing could ever catch him. At least running was real.
‘Where?’ College asked.
‘Transcontinental.’
‘We live in restless times,’ College said. ‘The fact is, you don’t know the first thing about being a brakeman.’
‘Maybe the first thing,’ Jonathan said. He was already a better railroadman than College, at least in the yards, and both of them knew it.
‘Well, I’ll grant you that—’
‘You’d better.’
‘—but the first thing is not the last thing, and there are many things in between. The job of a brakeman has technique, artistry—’
‘Oh, will you now? Why are you so grumpy today? I’ll have you know, there’s no brakeman in all Colorado so brave, so deft, so quick as I am. May I offer you my services?’ College made a flourish of a bow. ‘Private tuition on the job. Fees modest. There are mountains out there, not just these Rockies seen from the town of Denver, but the Smokies—’
Jonathan was disconcerted. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘—the Tetons, the Ozarks, the Appalachians, great ranges that stretch from north to south, rivers running down them east to west and—’ College stopped midflight, suddenly aware that this usually quick audience really did not understand him. ‘Did you never have a friend when you were a boy, Johnny?’ he said then.
Jonathan shut his eyes.
For all his warmth, Atlas, like his father, is a man with few friends. There have been lots of women in his life, marriages, ten-minute quickies and various stages in between – more women than he can remember – but not many friends. None of us Carricks has much talent for such things. ‘I worked as a gynecologist for the Navy—’ Atlas began by way of explanation.
‘How’d you weasel your way into a job like that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, come on. Even servicemen have wives. And besides, there are lots of women in the Navy.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘I loved it. But at the time—’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘How come you loved it?’
Atlas laughed. ‘The smell—’
‘The what?’
He laughed again. ‘I love the way women smell. But the point is, I did some work with transsexuals on the side. It’s the damndest thing. You make them a vagina, see, but they can’t keep the thing open. It’s like piercing ears. If you don’t wear earrings, the ear lobe closes over. Because the vagina doesn’t belong there, it closes over unless they wear a plug in it.’
‘Atlas, what are you trying to tell me?’
‘Getting too fancy, am I?’
‘In a word—’
‘Hang on a minute. Hatred, anger, bitterness: these were the things that held dad together. They were his flesh and blood, practically his genetic structure. And here he’d been transported into a world where there had to be a measure of trust and camaraderie; he couldn’t function without them. What was the poor bastard to do? Well, the way I see it is this: he carved a place for human warmth in that forbidding flesh of his. Not easy. Very painful in fact. Surgical. And once the surgery was done – this is where my fancy image comes in – he had to keep his nature prised apart much like a transsexual keeps his man’s body prised apart to accommodate a vagina. The artifice of it didn’t always work (doesn’t always with transsexuals, either). He knew he was smart; he knew he was quick; he even knew he was a good-looking guy. But friendship? He didn’t understand the first thing about it. It never occurred to him that in those two years College might actually have come to like him. See what I’m getting at?’
So when College said to him, ‘Did you never have a friend when you were a boy?’ all my grandfather came back with was, ‘Leave me alone.’
But he was by no means always unlucky: College was not so easily put off. ‘My dear Carrick,’ he said, ‘it would be a pleasure for me to go where you go. Maybe not for good, but for awhile anyway. Would you be agreeable?’
Jonathan frowned, started to say something, looked at College, frowned again. With infinite care, he put down his glass. ‘Excuse me,’ he said – or at least he tried to say it, but the words got caught somewhere. He had learned that he could almost control the sudden spasms of anxiety that he’d suffered ever since his emancipation if he took in his breath at just precisely the right moment and held it. It was the only method he had. So he inhaled, walked out into the street, held on, coughed, inhaled again. After a few minutes, he made his way back into the bar, where he offered an almost steady hand to College and said, ‘Shake on it?’
Transcontinental assigned its new pair of brakemen to a Mogul engine going west.
5
Years ago, in Alabama at Christmas, the radio played ‘Holy Night’, the most glorious of carols – that soaring high note (especially sung full force by a pure, clean soprano) and gooseflesh all over: it’s one of the few places left where you can sense the mystery and beauty of the idea that it’s possible to save mankind. Alabama radio modulated the note into a sweet meaninglessness: a remarkable feat, the melody intact but no shiver for the listener to feel, no disturbance of spirit, nothing at all. Other countries left the power of their steam engines raw. Not us, not the people who rob even Christmas carols of their intensity. The Mogul that College and Jonathan got assigned to was dressed up for this peacetime circus of Jonathan’s like a circus bear in tutu and ribbons, red, orange, maroon, green paint, a different color for every section – pilot, sand box, steam chest, gilt and fretwork domes and lights – and on both sides of the cab full-color pictures of bears skulking about on the range. The conductor, as ringmaster, had come to resemble his beast: a joke of a bear himself, with a bear’s shoulders, a bear’s furry body, and a bear’s glassy eyes. He’d conducted this Mogul – it was already outdated at the time but a beautiful thing even so beneath its paint – he’d conducted it for twenty years and he had no thought of serving or being served by anything less.
‘Wait a minute,’ Atlas said, sending the tape recorder flying over the edge of his desk in his enthusiasm, ‘I got here – it’s somewhere here, goddamnit, I know it is.’ The tape recorder in its mechanical prowess (shaken but not broken by this attack) continued to record him while he dumped out the contents of one of the boxes he’d got down from the attic for me, shuffled through some of the pictures, mumbled, knocked over his coffee, swore and at last pulled out an old drawing, about half a standard typing sheet in size, pretty good condition (not counting the coffee, that is). ‘Aha, what did I tell you?’ he said in triumph. He patted at the picture with an embroidered handkerchief, soon coffee-stained like the picture itself. ‘Here’s an old drawing of that Mogul. See?’ But if the Mogul is there at all, it isn’t visible. Only the body of the train itself shows, climbing up into the Rockies after an engine that seems to be hidden behind an outcropping of rock. On one side of the track, the cars scrape the mountain face; the other side is a sheer drop. On the roof of one car stands a brakeman, arms akimbo, legs apart, while the train lurches around a bend in this uncambered stretch. ‘Well, what the hell, maybe it isn’t the Mogul. But that just could be dad.’ Atlas tilted the picture to study it from a new angle. ‘Who’s to deny it?’
Certainly not I, I said to myself, staring down at the picture. Certainly not I.
On this trip, the Mogul carried supplies for the building of the Great Northern extension. So here’s not only the illusion of freedom, power, control, and friendship, but the illusion of sex, too – sex allegorical, sex theatrical – one railroad, one man-made miracle, in the very process of generating another with rhythmic, heavy clack of metal on metal and relentless surge forward toward the twin illusions of future and progress. For a day and a half the track looped and twisted up into the wall of the mountains, past craggy rock, through forests of pines, by niches of wild flowers. Jonathan leapt from car to car, setting brakes for every change in grade and every sag in the roadbed. High in the mountains the climb leveled off. Granite outcroppings appeared and erupted sideways into layers of color. The pine forests thinned. The stone became a rocky plain. Lakes glinted in the distance. The sky opened up.
Two days later they hit California.
As soon as the train berthed, Jonathan ran to the harbor. There were ships everywhere. He hadn’t reckoned on ships. There was no wind; the scene was entirely still. But as he watched, the slender, elegant masts picked up the motion of a tramp ship that wove its way through the moorings. The masts swung and banked, crisscrossing, but gently, while the battered tramp almost bounced across the harbor (no doubts there at all) and entranced Jonatha
n every foot of its way.
‘What kind is that one?’ he asked an old man standing nearby.
‘Hermaphrodite schooner,’ the old man answered at once. ‘See how she’s rigged? Square on the foremast, fore and aft on the main? Not so good as she used to be, I can tell you that. Where you from?’
Jonathan gestured that he had just come across the mountains.
‘Mountains ain’t nothing,’ the old man said. ‘It’s the sea that counts. She used to be a clipper, a real clipper. Refitted her, they did.’ The old man snorted. ‘Don’t take more than twenty to work her. Lost her looks, poor bitch – used to be a beauty once.’
A gust of wind caught the ship’s sails.
‘Lost her speed, too.’
They stared after her, and through the swath she left behind her Jonathan caught his first unimpeded view of the Pacific. ‘Where would you go to look for a man?’ he said suddenly.
‘I wouldn’t.’
Jonathan bridled. ‘I would,’ he said, voice cold.
‘Would you now? What’s a boy like you—’
‘I didn’t ask your advice on that.’
The old man sighed. ‘How old a man?’ he said.
‘Forty. Maybe forty-five.’ All Jonathan remembered of the man he thought of as his father was a beard, a pair of tattered army boots and the callused feel of one hand. ‘Gone west, I suspect,’ Benbow Wikin had said. ‘California probably.’
‘Boarding houses. Mining camps. Farm directories,’ the old man said. ‘People move around a lot.’
‘He was a soldier, a Union soldier – an Irishman—’
‘Dosshouses. Whorehouses. Jails. Graveyards.’
Jonathan worked his way up one San Francisco street and down another. He asked his questions and as he did, he found the picture of his father taking on more detail. The beard was black. Of course it was. One of the eyes had no lashes. There had been a limp. Well, hadn’t there?
‘I never saw anybody like that,’ people said.