Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  “I guess they found that place in Chelsea. They know about the thieves. They didn’t say anything about the truck. They said you were trying to quit. Is that true? Want something else to eat?”

  “No, no, this was fine, just fine . . . . Well, I was thinking I’d better take it kind of easy. I told the kids to lay off the household stuff—but, see, the thing was, they could break into a house and get a clean sweep of any change around and stuff like that, and sometimes they could make a nice bit that way, with less risk, and then stick me with the appliances—which wasn’t so bad except hitting homes is a poor idea because it makes everybody mad at the police. So I told them to lay off and keep to the stores and equipment, and even paid them a higher percentage on those. But it was still too easy to get a house now and then, and I had a couple of boys who were real cocky—had never done any time or had any real close calls, you know—and I figured I was going to get into trouble there. So, anyway, I decided I better get out. Not only that, insurance companies aren’t paying out the way they used to and it’s costing too much for coverage, so security’s getting better. And I had a good offer on the building in Chelsea, and the truck. Did they go through the safe?”

  “No.”

  “Good. But no doubt about it, they’ve got somebody outside. Must be an old trick. They’d never leave an unopened safe unguarded.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Well, I’ve got to get some checks down there from a bank in Germantown, and I’ll make one out to you and you can cash it in the morning. And we’ll have some money to leave on—not much, but the account’s in another name, so we won’t have any trouble getting it. They’ve got everything else all tied up. At least, that’s what Rose says.”

  “I hope she’s not too upset,” said July, feeling stupid.

  “No, I don’t think so. But, anyway, we’ll have almost a thousand dollars to start on, after we get an old car in your name, and that’s more than most people ever have to start out.” He stood up and went to the door.

  “Let me go first,” protested July.

  “No, no, there’s nobody down there. I just got to get those checks from the safe”—as though he were talking to himself. “I’ll be right back.” But he stopped at the door. July forced himself to look him in the eyes, but when he did he found Franklin’s were staring at the door, as though he were looking into the grain. “I was wondering,” he said, “if you wanted to go out to Wyoming with me . . . or if we didn’t like the climate we could go to Colorado. I’ve got a lot of friends there.”

  “Sure,” said July. “Sure. But wait—let me go down first.”

  “We’ll get on just fine. Start out slow, of course, so as not to attract any attention. Maybe a restaurant or something. Before long we’ll be right back on top. It’s the fun of the game. Fifty-fifty. I’ve got a lot of friends in Colorado. . . . I’ll be right back.” Then he left, closing the door behind him. July could hear him walking across the bare wooden floor and begin descending the stairs, stepping heavily and slowly. Then he must have stopped and stood for almost a minute before continuing down. As soon as he reached the carpet below, all traces of his progress ended.

  The silence was oppressive, and sucked at the very edges of July’s nerves. Across the room Butch yawned inaudibly and continued staring at the legs of the table. A blanket of dark softness filled the windows. From nervous habit, July took out his diamond and turned it quietly before him. At a certain angle it acted like a mirror and he could direct a small spot of orange light onto the table from the lamp behind him. He heard the hinges on the heavy iron door make one thin, horrible screech.

  He tried to picture himself and Carroll driving together out to Wyoming in an old Buick, smoking cigarettes, sleeping on the seats in parking lots and rest areas, drying their hands on the fronts of their shirts and eating grocery-store cold food—but the vision languished. There seemed too much to think at once.

  He thought of Franklin and the dark softness seemed to come in farther at him from outside. Perhaps there’d been somebody downstairs all along, hiding in the corners, waiting. They’d get Franklin and they’d get him too. They’d know. He shuddered. Franklin. They’d said he couldn’t stay hidden long. It was ghastly, how they could say something like that with such authority, as if it were a common, easily observable phenomenon—a man being unable to change even though his life was at stake. It’s not like that, thought July. It’s not like that. A person’s pushed to his limit and he’ll go to it. There’s no other choice. Franklin, without family now, without position and respectability, would simply learn to live all over again, and at nearly fifty would light out for the unexplored West. This had to be—otherwise there’d be nothing more to life than those two things, family and respectability. Great as these things were, there had to be something greater, a reason—

  At this point the discharge of a gun downstairs filled the building. July ran to his door. Crossing to the stairs, he heard glass shatter and the banging of the door. He took the flight of stairs in three long bounds, hit the first floor and arrived at the office at just the time he saw Bailey, still in uniform, crossing the showroom from the front. Inside, Carroll lay across the top of the desk, dark blood running from beneath his ear, the safe behind him opened and a pistol in his hand. July glanced once at the policeman and without a thought leaped for the gun.

  “Wait!” yelled Bailey, jumping behind a sofa and pulling out his revolver, aiming it directly at the middle of the office doorway. July, waving the pistol, looking wildly about for him, filled the space.

  “Wait!” yelled Bailey again, having July’s heart in his sights knowing that it was to be decided in the next tenth of a second, before he could say another word. The couch that partially hid him would be like holding up a piece of paper in front of the .38. After July’s first shot he’d have to kill him. He was scared. He saw July’s eyes find him, burning with uncontrollable passion: the gun came over.

  “Wait,” Bailey yelled, “I didn’t do it! For God’s sake, kid, I didn’t do it! Feel the gun! Feel the gun!” He watched the struggle go on in July’s eyes, like the smaller child on a seesaw, kicking his legs and rocking back and forth to get the heavier end up in the air. At first it looked as though he couldn’t do it and Bailey tightened down on the trigger. Then he saw him begin to think. All of this in a period of about a second, as it began to come to July what it meant. What a fool, thought Bailey, I should’ve said it more clearly. “He shot himself!” he yelled. There was not the slightest hint of fear in July’s expression. He felt the barrel with his left hand, and stood there holding it in this awkward fashion. He turned back to look at Carroll and at the same time he lowered the weapon. Bailey stood up and came quickly forward, sensing this to be a critical time to get hold of the gun, before he changed his mind again. He gently took it away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, left July and went over to the desk. He took up the phone and dialed a number. “This is Bailey. Better send some people over here. Carroll just shot himself. . . . No, nobody was hurt. . . . He’s dead.”

  He replaced the receiver. July came farther into the room. Bailey picked up the checkbook on the desk, opened it up, refolded it and put it in his shirt pocket.

  “Sorry,” he said again. “You’d be surprised how often it’d happen this way . . . or how many times they’ll try to outshoot you, which is all the same. Seems odd, doesn’t it?”

  July turned and went upstairs.

  “We’ll want to ask you some questions,” said Bailey, but July didn’t stop and walked all the way to his room and shut the door. He sat and waited for them to come and get him. Cars arrived and more men came in. Talking. More cars. More talking. An hour went by. Then two. Finally he heard someone coming up, but it was just a policeman to take down his full name.

  Then everything was quiet for a long time; then the sun filled the windows with light and then Murphy, this time in uniform, knocked on the door and let himself in. The clock above the television s
et said eleven fifteen.

  “I was wondering what you were doing up here,” he said, and sat down. “Thinking, I suppose. Say, you’re the kid who used to sell papers down near City Hall, aren’t you? Mrs. Carroll said that and we sort of remembered then.”

  July nodded.

  “It’s funny,” Murphy continued. “In some ways that seems like a long time ago—I mean, that was before I was even on the city’s payroll, and worked over at Westinghouse. Boy, that seems like a long time ago. I can remember going to work on the trolley at night—I worked the eleven-to-seven shift, and coming home Sunday mornings if I worked Saturday, when there’d be nobody on the streets, and I’d feel especially smug about being up and around then, like it was just me and the pigeons. But in some ways it wasn’t so long ago. I mean, what was that—five years? Must be. At the same time you’d think five years’d be longer than that. I was twenty-nine then—almost thirty. What do you think of that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, I don’t suppose. Look, we don’t have anything on you, and as far as we can tell, you’ve never been in any trouble before, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So you’re free, white and twenty-one, as the old saying goes. Jesus, you do have a lot of books here.” He stood up and went to the door. “And, personally, I think you’d be an idiot to let something like this ruin even another day of your life.” He left, and closed the door behind him.

  Franklin’s death confronted July in many ways. It seemed factually final on one hand; yet there was also an unresolved character to it as if it were still happening—as though something was expected from him. At the same time it tried to make him infer certain larger things he didn’t want to. It’s a cold, hard world, it dictated to him, it’s a terrible place where something like this can happen. It’s a hateful place that would cause him to do that. But July didn’t want to think that. It could just as easily be, he would try to argue, that the world is what you make it and there are those who will make theirs wrongly.

  Life is worth nothing if Franklin could so easily reject it in favor of whatever else might come.

  No, he argued, there are some who choose foolishly; mistakes are made every day.

  No one could make a mistake of such magnitude.

  Someone has.

  The police killed Franklin. Society’s laws killed him.

  No, he did it himself.

  He was forced into it. Things get so bad, then you break. You can’t be responsible for what you do. Finally you snap out.

  Then it’s weakness.

  We’re all weak. Accept it. Sooner or later—

  It doesn’t have to be so.

  Pain and time are the same. You’ll never escape from them. Madness is here too. Go ahead, pretend you’re sane. All is vanity.

  Obscure things don’t impress me or frighten me.

  God as a loving being doesn’t exist. It’s only chaos.

  Then Franklin killing himself obviously has no meaning, so why should it concern me?

  Everything he believed in was taken from him. Have pity!

  He believed in nothing. That was his trouble. Pity I have, but at the same time I kind of resent his killing himself.

  You heartless ingrate. It was your fault!

  No it wasn’t. No it wasn’t.

  Here he broke into tears and, sobbing shamefully, fell asleep. Six hours later he woke up, washed his hands and face in cold water from the sink and resolved never to cry again as long as he lived or feel any emotion whatsoever. He looked at himself through the mirror in a very determined manner and admired the strong, angular lines of his face. I simply didn’t care about him that much anyway, he told himself, and packing all of his belongings in a suitcase, and, walking with his cat, he went down the stairs and out the front door, never to return.

  The doorbell rang and Rose Carroll answered it, letting the door swing back until the heavy chain held it fast.

  “Hello,” said July.

  “Hello,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “Well, I came to see about something that was sort of worked out between Franklin and me.”

  Butch had stuck his paw through the opening of the door at the bottom, and reached around.

  “Here, now,” shouted Mrs. Carroll. “Get back there. Go on, get back.” And she shook the door back and forth, being careful though not to catch his paw in a pinch. “What’s this about?”

  “Well, for quite a while now he’d been putting twenty dollars a week away for me—because I wanted to save it. I mean . . . and so I was wondering—”

  “No. I don’t know anything about it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I thought he might have said something at one time or another about—”

  “No, he never mentioned it. Sorry.”

  “Then I was wondering if maybe in his will, if he—”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry.” She saw July’s face fall. “Look,” she said. “Look, what did you expect? You think someone who’d do something like that cares about anyone else? You think before he did it he thought, ‘Now, that boy, I promised that boy—’? If he was that kind of man, you think he’d do something like that? He gave this house to his brother, whom he hasn’t seen for fifteen years, and the store to a neighbor who moved to Miami, a Jew.”

  “That’s a pretty hard attitude,” said July.

  “Well, you think about it, sonny. Now, about how much did you add up that he owed you?”

  “Eighteen hundred dollars.”

  “Well, you just think about that, and how all these years he didn’t get around to making sure you’d get what was coming to you, and believe me, there’s a hundred five-minute ways he could’ve chosen, if only he would have thought, once, ‘Say, I better make sure nothing happens to the money July’s got coming—that I’m saving for him.’ You just think about that. Hey, get back there!” She shook the door again and nudged Butch’s two paws out with her foot. “Now, go away with your cat, I’ve got to take a shower now.”

  July and his angry cat walked toward downtown and caught a train to 30th Street Station with Butch in the suitcase. From there they walked all the way to City Hall and were very tired.

  Things had changed since he’d last been there. Now instead of token booths on just the first and second landings, there was one on all three. The drivers didn’t collect money anywhere at 14th Street. This presented a problem, but none too serious. It would simply cost him fifteen cents to get down to his room. He bought a token, went through a turnstile, seized the right moment and slipped down.

  But as soon as he was in his old room, he knew that this one night would be all he’d want to spend there. It seemed like such a dismal little hole in the ground, damp and smelly with fumes and grease from the trolleys. And for the first several hours, every time one would rattle by he’d wake up.

  At eight thirty he crawled stiffly out of the pallet, surprised that the alarm clock still worked, and lit the kerosene lamp. Again he marveled at how dismal and small the room seemed. How miserable I must have been then, he judged, to have lived here and actually liked it, even if I thought I was happy. Butch, he noticed, was out of place as well. July put his old ring of keys and the automatic from under the tiny table into his jacket pocket, though some of the keys had melted together with rust.

  That day he rented a room in a boardinghouse, leaving him only $5.46, and took a civil-service examination at the post office. Later that week he got a job sorting mail.

  NINE

  July had renounced, or had tried to renounce, everything in his life that he associated with being in the furniture store. He despised all learning. He renounced all ambition to do anything other than be alive. He receded into himself so far that his own thoughts became an objective entertainment to him and he spent whole evenings sitting and accompanying himself with substanceless daydreams. He made no attempt to fix up his room. He took it as it’d come—bare walls, one overhead light, a dresser and a small table with two mismatc
hed chairs. An iron bed sat in the corner next to a white refrigerator that ran continuously. Butch and the green walls were his friends. He’d given up all hope of ever having a human companion, and all desire to try. If people were meant to be together, he thought, they’d be born in bunches. He used the kitchen in the house only late at night, when the others weren’t likely to come upon him there, carrying his utensils down with him and judiciously cleaning up when he left. With a small heating coil which he kept on the windowsill next to his bed he heated water for coffee in the morning before leaving for work. He drank it in his underwear without cream or sugar, sometimes two cups. He shaved only when the whiskers under his chin began to irritate him, and was careful not to make any noise in the halls. At work he sorted letters and talked to nobody. When he would come close to one of his fellow employees, he’d look away. The supervisor said hello to him every morning, told him anything that he had to know, and was always forgetting his name and covering up by introducing himself with, “Hey there, we have a tracer here on a ...” instead of beginning, “Say, July, we have . . .” July never noticed.

  But in spite of himself and all his intentions to live in the most miserable of ways, he found that he truly missed (or needed) several pleasures that he’d acquired a taste for while in the furniture store, and after denying them to himself for many months they began to gnaw at him, so that each day he would crave them more. It’s only a habit I acquired, he thought. A stupid habit I was fool enough to fall into. A bottle of beer is better than any habit. “Three weeks,” he told Butch (because twenty-one days was a magical time for changes). “In three weeks, if the desire isn’t gone yet, I’m going to give in to it . . . in a small way.”

  After twenty-one days he still had the craving, so he went to the library and asked to be given another borrower’s card. The librarian, an old woman whose cold gray hair looked as though it hadn’t moved a smidgin since he’d last seen it and remained packed tightly to her head in little furrows, recognized him. They exchanged a silent greeting. He allowed himself only a book a week, but chose with great deliberation.