Vacant Graves

by Christopher Beats

  “Why’d you ask?”

  “Oh, you know,” she said. “We gotta shoot varmints where I’m from. You get many varmints in New York City?”

  “Too damn many. Most go on two legs.”

  She gave me a significant look. If she knew anything about the city, she knew that this kind of hardware was banned. The Magnates couldn’t risk it falling into the hands of radicals. For the first time that night, I think she realized I might be serious. I guess pistols weren’t in the trumped-up nanny toolkit.

  “What do you think is going on? Do you think you’ll need that?”

  I was impressed despite myself. There wasn’t a hint of fear in her voice, just a serious-minded inquiry.

  “I like to have a bit more firepower when I’m in the boonies,” I explained. The revolver wasn’t a heavier caliber than the derringer, but it got four more shots and had a much longer reach. A derringer’s usefulness was generally limited to back-alley sorties and card games that went wrong.

  Phoebe considered me doubtfully. “What are you expecting, Mr. Schist? Injuns? This is West Pennsylvania, not the Oregon territory.”

  I checked the wheel and stuffed it in my trouser pocket. I kept my musings about a CSA invasion to myself.

  The girl frowned. “Is that safe? You might blow off your man-parts.”

  “Let me worry about my man-parts.” This wasn’t an issue. I’d only loaded five rounds that morning. Unless I was planning to start a fight, I left the firing chamber empty, out of deference for my balls.

  Her expression lightened as I fumbled with the chain.

  “Here.” Her nimble hands took the key and helped me. “What happened to your hand?”

  The fingers on my right hand were gnarled and bent. I could still pull a trigger, but detail work was difficult. “Industrial accident.”

  “What happened?” Phoebe slipped the cuff off my wrist and handed it to me.

  “Got it caught in a machine.” I took the end of the chain which had previously been attached to my wrist and locked it to the seat.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “I can’t have you wandering.”

  “What if that fire spreads? I’ll burn!”

  “I’ll be back soon,” I said, turning to the door.

  “What if I’m set upon by bad men? Leave me the Colt...”

  “That’ll be the day.” I slid the door shut behind me.

  The corridor was thick with inquisitive passengers. A collective silence came over us as our bellies felt the sudden tug of inertia.

  The train was braking.

  “Any word, friend?” I asked the man beside me.

  He shrugged. “Looks like a fire...”

  “The river’s burning,” a salesman with a blue topper said.

  Somewhere, a man laughed. I sure didn’t, though. The traveling salesman was deadly earnest. In most parts of the world, water doesn’t burn, but this was the Magnocracy. What’s more, we were at the heart of the Magnocracy’s coal supply. The rivers here were probably more volatile than kerosene.

  The man who laughed wasn’t alone. Most of the travelers didn’t seem to think the salesman was serious. I wasn’t surprised. People don’t think about this stuff, which is exactly why the Magnates get away with it. The bulls have a hard enough time policing the streets. How were they going to police the rivers, too? The Hudson probably had more sewage in it than water, yet people got surprised every time cholera killed one of their brats.

  I kept a wary eye on the cabin door as I waited for more news. Phoebe didn’t seem to be trying to escape. Not yet, anyway.

  The train came to a stop and a conductor came back, telling people to return to their seats. No one moved. He refused to answer our questions, but after a while, the train started moving again.

  Only it was going backward.

  I went back in the cabin. Phoebe had tried to escape after all, only she hadn’t gotten very far. The seat cushions were thrown around and the armrest was bent where she tried to pry my chain off. I didn’t bother to comment on the damage. I was half tempted to join in the destruction. My customer loyalty was on the wane, to say the least.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” I kept my voice level. My initial fear had been replaced by irritation. Johnny Reb wouldn’t set the river alight. More than likely, this was an accident, though it could also have been anarchic mischief or labor strife. Coal miners ain’t exactly saints. When you’ve got the black lung and your friends suffocate to death under a mountain of debris, human life starts to have a different value.

  “Are we going back to New York?” She tried not to sound hopeful. She failed.

  I looked at the bulge of the revolver and thought of Stanislaus. He had his own sort of investigators, two-legged pavement hounds with skills like mine. They might have already picked up our trail. It would be dangerous to return now. Once the girl was home, I could keep my head down and weather the storm unnoticed. If his men saw me with Phoebe, though, there’d be no denying what I’d done. I wasn’t sure how many more men like Stanny I could cross before exile became necessary. Not for the first time, I wondered if I would have to switch professions soon. Or locales.

  Phoebe was staring at me, expecting an answer.

  “Doubtful.” My mind clicked crisply through the possibilities. “If it’s a river fire, the engineer is probably worried about the integrity of the bridge. Steel won’t burn, but it gets soft. I bet we’ll go back to the last whistle stop and wait till they’ve determined it’s safe.”

  “What if the bridge collapses?”

  I tried to look confident. “It won’t.”

  “But you just said...”

  “It’s a precaution,” I said tersely. “We’ll be on our way in no time.”

  “But what if it isn’t safe when they let us through?”

  It was an unsettling thought, to say the least. I tried to have faith that even if Pennsy’s management didn’t care what happened to their passengers, they would never let an expensive locomotive drop into a flaming river. That was just plain wasteful.

  When I came out of my reverie, the chit was smirking.

  “Stop trying to rattle my cage,” I said.

  “Stop making it so easy.”

  The last whistle stop was called Juniper Junction. It didn’t look very promising. The platform was open to the cold mountain winds and had only a small ticket booth. The town—I use the term loosely—consisted of several plank buildings. All the windows were dark except for a lively saloon. I wasn’t sure how the saloon could be so busy, since you could probably fit the town’s entire population in an outhouse.

  Its chief purpose appeared to be its switchways. A tangled mess of rail circled the town. One large spur ran north into the valley and a freight line joined the Akronite’s passenger line before turning south. Rusted boxcars and flatbeds collected snow on forgotten staging tracks.

  Phoebe leaned forward so she could see the passenger platform through the window. A number of travelers disembarked and lit cigars. “Can we go outside?”

  “No.”

  “It’s stuffy in here.”

  I slouched back and covered my face with my bowler. “Stop that.” The metal frame of the demolished seat was whining every time she shifted. “Hard to get comfortable when you wreck the cushions,” I observed.

  She balled up some of the seat-stuffing underneath her and sat down.

  I was about to doze off again when I
felt a draft.

  The conductor was in the doorway, awestruck at Phoebe’s mess.

  “How much longer?” I asked.

  “You’ll have to pay for that,” he said, voice quivering with suppressed rage.

  “How much longer?”

  “You gotta get off,” he said. “The train’s going nowhere.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Those seats aren’t cheap. You better have cash on you. I won’t take a cheque.”

  I got up and stood in the cabin between him and the wrecked chair. “When are we leaving?”

  “I just told you—we aren’t. You’re supposed to get off now.”

  I glanced out the window. “And do what?” I could hardly take the girl to a saloon.

  He scowled at me. “That isn’t my problem.”

  “I paid for a trip to Akron, not some godforsaken hicksville. When do we get moving?”

  “You’ll get to Akron,” he said. “Keep your tickets on you.”

  I’d keep my tickets on me, all right. I stuffed them down my trousers and into the money belt I kept next to my unmentionables. Phoebe blushed and looked away. The conductor glared at me as if I’d belched in his face.

  “Don’t want to lose them,” I explained. The money belt was the safest place for them. It wasn’t just a matter of re-boarding the train. If the trip was cancelled, I’d visit my accountant and get a judgment against Pennsy Rail for the ticket costs. I unlocked Phoebe, gathered our things, and motioned for him to get out of our way.

  “What about this chair?” the conductor demanded.

  “Take it out of your bribe.”

  “You—”

  “I can always wire your super and let him know how scrupulous you were about my detention permit.”

  His fury bubbled out in a torrent of curse words, none which were appropriate for Phoebe’s tender ears.

  “Don’t tell your mother about that,” I said when we stood in the cold Pennsylvania night.

  “About what?”

  “Those words he said,” I told her absently. I looked around. The town was even more dismal up close.

  She shrugged.

  “Of course, you would’ve heard worse if I hadn’t saved you. And seen worse, too.” I shook my head. And felt worse.

  “What now?”

  I barely heard her. This was supposed to be an easy case.

  The looming Akronite’s metal cooled audibly, like lazy rain drops on a tin roof.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  I glanced up.

  Phoebe was accosting a gentleman beside us. He saw her chain, glanced in my direction, and quickly showed her his back. I could tell from his expression that he took me for a Pinkerton. I still had the air about me, which was good. The fewer questions, the better.

  We waited with the rest of the herd until the engineer came out and apologized. There was trouble with the tracks going east. No one asked about the river. The western sky was still smeared with ocher.

  It became apparent that we couldn’t stay here all night. It was an open-air platform. The benches were coated in filthy gray frost and the wind cut into our flesh like a scalpel. The ticket booth was dark—evidently Juniper Junction didn’t have any midnight runs.

  I was vacillating about our next course of action when Phoebe let out a cry.

  “Look! Somebody’s coming down the tracks to help us.”

  I turned and saw a crowd of torches a mile down the tracks. When I turned back to the train, I saw that the engineer had fetched a shotgun. He was hastily loading it.

  “Where are we going now?”

  “Away.”

  We dismounted the platform at a jog and looked around. Every window was dark but for the saloon and a hotel. A few minutes after the train arrived, the proprietors of the hotel had sparked their lantern and beckoned us toward them. Before we’d gone five steps, though, a black boy in an apron came out and hung up a No Vacancy sign.

  The crowd began cursing loudly as the boy retreated.

  I surveyed the peeling paint of the hotel and scratched my mustache with my free hand. It had five rooms, maybe six. Of course it had filled up.

  Phoebe said nothing. She glared up at me with her fierce brown eyes, shawl wrapped tightly over her shoulders.

  There were shouts on the train platform. The torches had reached the back of the long caravan. It appeared as if the mob were going car to car, searching for something.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Do you think they’re going to fix it?”

  “Railway workers carry lanterns, not torches.” I listened to the angry yells for a moment.

  “Then what’re they doing?”

  “Don’t know.”

  The Magnocracy wasn’t known for strict laws, but outright violence was frowned upon. Perhaps I should say independent violence was frowned upon. Institutional violence by the Magnates or their agents was perfectly acceptable. Train robbery, therefore, was pretty rare. Every once in a while, you heard about this train or that getting held up out west, but that never happened east of St. Louis. The railway companies had toughs on their payroll to keep it that way.

  I wasn’t the only one meditating on violence. Travelers were hastily leaving the platform. Some loitered by the darkened carriage depot while others began walking west into the shadows of the forest.

  We trotted after the people leaving and caught an old man with a beard like a biblical patriarch. “Where you going, friend?”

  “There’s a couple towns about a mile or so up this road.” He indicated a muddy track which followed a lonely-looking spur off the main rail. Forlorn shanties lined the shoulder. “There’s lodging there.” He gave our chain a curious look.

  “I’m her guardian,” I explained.

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Temporary,” I elaborated. “I’m returning her to her mother in Ohio.”

  The old man nodded as if this made sense.

  Several women watched us go by from the doorways of a lean-to.

  “Don’t look at them, dear,” the old man whispered. “Common as a barber’s chair.”

  The women in the lean-to were perfumed cats for sure. Despite the chill, they wore nothing but petticoats and bad rouge. These were the lowest form of prostitute, lower even than a parlor nymph. This covey of wretches waited by the roadside and charged two quarters a poke.

  I wondered who their customers were. Juniper Junction wasn’t very big. It seemed odd they would set up shop so far away.

  “That looks...homey,” my captive said, frowning at the hovels.

  “Shut up and mind your skirt,” I told her as we approached a stretch of mud.

  Phoebe worked her skirt elevator so the hem skimmed over the mucky slush untouched. Her eyes widened as we passed another street nymph in a rocking chair. This one had no legs.

  “Fancy a discounted grind, good sir?” the whore called out. “Or a game of backgammon? I’m quite good at backgammon.” She emphasized the word with a licentious grin.

  “Why is she asking about backgammon?”

  “She’s had time to practice,” I pretended to speculate. “Since she can’t walk.”

  “Oh. But why would she advertise that? Do folks normally pay money to play backgammon?”

  The old man tugged at his beard in frustration.

  “Some men like backg
ammon.” I turned to the straitlaced old man. “You were saying something about lodging, sir?”

  “Oh yes,” he agreed with relief. “There’s Liuttsville and Liuttsburg.” The old goat glanced at Phoebe’s exposed ankles with a rheumy eye. He turned back to me. “I’d take Liuttsburg if I were you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Liuttsville is a mining town,” he whispered. “Liuttsburg has a factory.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Phoebe insisted.

  We ignored her. The shanties gave way to forest. The old man was relieved, but I looked at the grim, cold trees with apprehension. I preferred whores and shanties, no matter how sad-looking. The countryside made me nervous.

  “It just keeps getting better,” I said.

  The codger didn’t need to paint me a picture. Liuttsburg would have to do. Factory workers could be rough fellows, but they didn’t hold a candle to miners. Ma Mosey wasn’t paying me to drag her precious daughter through a nest of horny roughnecks.

  The presence of a factory complex explained the spur we were walking next to. Liuttsburg needed tracks to dispense their product.

  “What’s that?” Phoebe cut into my ruminations. She pointed a gloved finger into the forest.

  The old man spat. “A Sherman tie.”

  I looked at the tree she indicated. An iron rail wound around it in a bow, as if some malicious ogre felt the tree needed class.

  We passed a few more shanties and a grove of trees gussied up by Sherman’s men. The old codger lost pace and we were alone on the trail. It was slow-going, given the muddy gashes of carriage rut that scarred its surface.

  “I don’t get it,” Phoebe said. “Are they called Sherman ties for the general?”

  “Ayep.” I was staring forward, nervously thumbing the hammer on my revolver. I thought I saw something along the bend.

  “Why did that old man spit? General Sherman was a hero.”

  I didn’t bother to answer. Torches were coming up the track. I counted almost a dozen, which meant my revolver was little more than a deterrent. Deterrents can be pretty useful, though, so I brandished it openly. I dragged Phoebe close enough to feel my whiskers and wrapped my arm over hers in a warm embrace that hid the chain. My carpetbag lay in the mud by my foot.