by David Rowell
“What in the hell?” he said.
Buster Hayes finished delivering the cards, and his mouth twisted downward.
The rest of the men turned around, and they gazed at Lionel as if he were wearing some costume they couldn’t discern.
“I got into a little trouble,” Lionel said, and tossed his bag on what appeared to be an available bed.
Buster Hayes pushed back his chair and walked over. He was in his T-shirt and work pants, his suspenders down by his knees, and as he walked he made a clicking sound in his jaw.
“You got into a hell of a lot more than a little trouble,” he said. He took hold of Lionel’s head as if it were a piece of produce, turning it from side to side. “Just wanted to stroll around,” he called back to the other men. “Young buck said on his first time in the city he just wanted to walk around and maybe see the sights. Now look at this shit. Did you get mugged?”
“Not exactly,” Lionel said.
“Did a white man do it?”
Lionel shook his head.
“Uh-huh. Just fighting, then.” He released him and began to walk back to the game, but stopped and approached him once more. “I know your father raised you better than that. Your father the only reason you have the damn job, and you want to be out brawlin’?”
The men moaned in unison.
“This is one damn mess,” Buster Hayes said.
Lionel was trembling slightly—out of pain, out of nervousness, fatigue. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hayes,” he said in too weak a voice to please Buster Hayes. “All I wanted to do was get a little bite to eat, call my girl, and get some sleep. That was all I wanted to do. But I got caught up in something, and it got physical.”
Now Big Brass came over for an inspection of his own. He was puffing on a cigar, and made sure Lionel could hear the sound of him chomping on the bit.
“‘It got physical.’ That’s a damn shame,” Big Brass said. “Let me ask you this: How you think you going to show up for work tomorrow and work like that? Passengers don’t want to be served by someone look like he been sparring with Joe Frazier. With a face like raw meat. Good God Almighty. Mr. Chalmers, can you make any sense out of this?”
Mr. Chalmers put his cards down and blew out cigar smoke in a big gust. He looked at Lionel carefully, stroking his chin for effect. “All the young man had to do was come back here and surrender some of that first day’s pay in a friendly round of cards. I don’t rightly see how we can bring him aboard tomorrow, lessen the Lord plan to work a miracle on that face between now and six A.M. And maybe He will. But I wouldn’t bet my hand on it.”
Buster Hayes scanned his face once more, in case he had missed something earlier. “Nothing to do but go to sleep, young buck. In the morning I’ll talk to the office and see what they want to do. We’ll tell them some damn shit. Say you got hit by a policeman’s stick, but of course, if I tell them that, they’re going to think you were trying to burn some other building down, so I can’t do that. Let me think on it. We’ll figure something out. I don’t know what.”
“Thank you,” Lionel whispered, and turned to consider the rows of bunk beds.
“Take the last one, there,” Buster Hayes said. “Up top. Mr. Chalmers is below you, and Mr. Chalmers don’t sleep on top of nobody.”
“Except Mrs. Chalmers,” another porter from the cards table called out to gut-busting laughter.
Lionel unzipped his bag with the intention of washing up, and when he turned to look for the bathroom, the men went back to studying their unpromising hands of cards. He stepped into the small bathroom, where a single bulb cast a dull light over the scratched-up tile floor and two shower stalls and two toilets. The bulb might as well have been a power plant for as loudly as it hummed.
Lionel glanced in the mirror and quickly turned away, not yet ready to confront just how rough his face was. If he couldn’t work the return leg of the trip, would someone in the main office let him heal up and give him a second chance? There was no guarantee of that. Even so, his parents would be ashamed that he hadn’t shown the good sense to walk away from those two thugs. He could hear his father’s voice now: That’s my name you carrying around with you, and you fixed it so that you couldn’t even work your second day on the job? Because you had to fight some hoodlums over a girl you didn’t even know? When you got a steady girl? Boy, you showing us we’ve done nothing but fail with you.
The men around the table were still complaining about or chuckling at the problem rookie who had just joined their ranks. Lionel wanted nothing more than to have Adanya cradle him right now, to hear her say “Hush” in a voice as soothing as a soft blanket. Maybe he was going to have to go down there and marry her, come back to campus that fall as husband and wife. He would do that; he would do anything for her. Having a baby didn’t mean he couldn’t still study or work on his comic books. Adanya wouldn’t let him stop, anyway. But everything felt so unfamiliar and unsteady right then, surreal. It was like a comic he’d been working on he called the Night Avenger, about a night watchman in Harlem who fell asleep during every shift, and when he woke up he was someone else—and always in peril: an escaped prisoner being chased by guards; a messenger fighting off a gang of kung fu assailants. And just at the moment he was about to be killed, he would wake up again in the dark and quiet bank. Only, when he returned home each morning, he would bear the scars from each violent outing. In his fog, that was all Lionel could hope for now—to wake up and find himself having drifted off while on break on the train.
Lionel’s wants in life were relatively few, but leaning over the sink, trying to clear his head, they felt remarkable and unrealistic: He wanted to be back in Winston-Salem with Adanya. He wanted to make it through college and make his parents proud. He wanted to stay as far away from Vietnam as possible, and he wanted to go his whole life and never again be called nigger, to never have any man—white or black—put his hands on him. And he wanted to bring out his own drawings and characters to an audience of readers who had never seen black superheroes before, never even imagined that in a white world they could exist. But with so much evil in the world, why couldn’t Black Justice and Dark Matter and The Boulder help with the fight? Didn’t the world, now more than ever, need all the help it could get?
Washington
Mr. Hinton reached into his pants pocket, his fingers running over a row of jagged metal edges, and picked out his house key. When he stepped in, he flipped on the porch light and was dismayed to see so many new dead bugs inside the light fixture over the door, the bodies like smudged fingerprints.
He lived in Anacostia, where he was born and raised. At eighty-seven, his mother still lived on her own in the house that he grew up in, five blocks away. He often stopped by to see her on his way home from work, but tonight he had dropped by Hank’s Bar for a couple of beers. He and Hank had been friends for half his life or more, and on Saturday night, Hank was always glad to see his old friend.
“My man,” Hank shouted out at the sight of Mr. Hinton. “Now I know it’s Saturday night.” The bar was only half full, and almost no one there was under forty, and most of them men. But you didn’t go to Hank’s to pick up a woman. And Mr. Hinton hadn’t done that in more years than he cared to count.
He let Hank pour him exactly two beers, and when he declined a third, Mr. Hinton said, “Not that my gut agrees with me on that.” At Hank’s you could count on hearing Ray Charles and the Cadillacs and Ruth Brown and Louis Jordan, but nothing on his jukebox had been recorded after 1960. This was nothing any customer had ever thought to complain about.
Now that he was home, it wasn’t too late to call his mother, since she didn’t go to bed until well after the evening news. She had no doubt watched the funeral that morning on television, and she would be eager to know if there were other tidbits he had learned about the service or the funeral train while at work.
“Hello, Robinson,” he said to his fifteen-year-old cat, who waited until the man sat in his recliner to greet him. He stroked
the cat around the ears for several minutes until his fingers tired, and this helped the cat forgive him for being gone for so many hours at a time. Robinson leaped up into his lap, sputtering like an old generator. “Uh-huh, I know you’ve missed me,” he said to the cat. “I know that much.”
Six years into his job at the Churchill, in 1937, Mr. Hinton was listening to one of the bellmen describe the strange guest in room 445 when a radio report announced that the Hindenburg had become completely engulfed in flames while landing at an air station in New Jersey. Four years later he was fixing a leaky staff toilet when word reached the lobby that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. He had just finished pushing a cart of ten bags on a Sunday morning twenty-two years later when a fellow bellhop told him a church in Alabama had been bombed, and that four little girls were dead. That same year, Mr. Hinton was standing just outside the kitchen on his fifteen-minute break, chatting with one of the dishwashers, Miguel, when over the radio it was announced that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. In his first week on the job as concierge, he watched through the front windows of the hotel as a long parade of protesters marched through the streets, their arms stiff and raised to the heavens, demanding that President Johnson pull American troops out of Vietnam. A middle-aged father and his two sons from Chicago watched from the next window over, and finally the man said, “All those hippies want is to be free, but you think they’d be willing to fight for that freedom?” The sons assured him that they wouldn’t.
And it was just two months earlier when Mr. Hinton had stepped out into the night air and fell into a harsh coughing spell as the dark smoke of a city being burned poured above. As he tried to make sense of what was happening, a group of young black men ran past him, one of them holding his arm as pools of blood trailed behind. June, from the front desk, quickly pulled Mr. Hinton back in and convinced him it was too dangerous to get into his car. That night he slept at the hotel for the very first time.
There was almost nothing in his life that he hadn’t experienced through the filter of the Churchill, and he sometimes wondered what he would do if something of national consequence happened while he was sitting in his home.
He needed to feed the hungry Robinson, but getting back up anytime soon seemed unimaginable, so sore were his hips, his knees, his ankles and feet. He could have fallen asleep in a matter of seconds, but he needed to check in on his mother. Otherwise, on Sunday morning, after he drove over to pick her up for church, the first thing she would say would be, “Well, hello, stranger.” She would not say it unkindly, but neither could she pass up the opportunity to let him know that a day without hearing from him was unsettling. What if she had needed a prescription refilled? What if she had fallen? Or needed orange juice? She would even manage a half-smile when she said it. But her son knew about the difficulties of living alone all too well. What if he had fallen? How would she know? How long before anyone would find him? They needed to stay in constant communication; they were all each other had.
His mother believed that his never getting married was a fate worse than disease. How she had ached for grandchildren. He was an only child, and she had held out hope that he would still marry even at fifty, but fifty came, and then sixty came, and there was her boy, Earl, still on his own, no companions he ever spoke of, no dinner dates that she ever heard about. He was married to his job, he sometimes said to end her prying.
“Well, don’t bring it over to dinner,” she said. “It’s too big to sit at the table.” She could be clever like that, even now.
Finally he reached over for the telephone, much to Robinson’s frustration, since he was dislodged in the process, and stuck his finger into the holes and dialed. Her phone would ring once, maybe twice, but never more than that before she picked up.
“Hey, Ma,” he said.
“Hello yourself,” she said. Her voice was sharp for this time of night. “You just got in?”
“Just now,” he said, his voice so low and tired that he repeated himself to be sure he was heard.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Well, I know you work hard.” Then there was a pause. There was always a pause before her first question, which was always the same. “So,” she said. “How was the day?”
Back from Vietnam, Hometown Hero Finding His Step Again
By Roy Murphy
Special to the Gazette
Jamie West is back home after a tour of Vietnam that lasted two years. But coming home has required more than the usual adjustments for a soldier. Four months ago, just east of the village of Than Khe, Private West had finished cleaning his gun, which he was known to use with more precision than any other soldier in his company. But he never had a chance to train it on the enemy on the morning of February 5, when Vietcong artillery fire filled the sky where Alpha Company awaited further instructions from command in Saigon.
West’s best friend was just a few feet away when a missile struck, setting him ablaze. West immediately ran to tackle him and smother the flames when another missile struck the foxhole West had just jumped out of. He could not save his friend, despite his valiant effort. Nor could he avoid being struck by the shrapnel that shredded his lower leg. It was amputated at an Army aid hospital a few miles from Than Khe, and after receiving many weeks of physical therapy at the 8th Field Hospital in Nha Trang, he was discharged and on his way home.
“He lost his leg trying to save someone else,” says his mother, Ellie West. “If that’s not a hero, I don’t know what is.”
Private West is more modest about his wartime efforts and maintains that any soldier in his company would have attempted the same rescue of Private Allan Landreaux. He was just the closest to him at that moment, West says. But he doesn’t deny that the loss of a leg is requiring an adjustment.
“There’s no choice but to get used to it,” he says. “But there are still some times in the day when, for a split second, my mind forgets, or my body [forgets].”
Before being drafted, West worked as a mechanic at Jurrel’s Garage after helping lead the E. E. Burton Panthers to first place in their division as wide receiver on the football team. West says he still thinks about his days playing football, of what it was to run like a gazelle across the field and into the end zone. But neither does he fall into pity when he talks about his injury. His parents avoid that thinking, too, he says.
“They don’t treat me like a cripple, and I don’t think that’s how they see me in their eyes,” West says.
Currently he is entertaining a standing offer from Mack Jurrel to rejoin the crew at the garage. But right now, the young man is still learning how to get around and to maneuver in new ways. As an expert marksman, West was eager to get back to his passion for archery. Now he sits down when he’s ready to shoot his arrows, but he seems to have lost nothing of his skills. For this reporter, he demonstrated his steely technique by hitting bull’s-eye after bull’s-eye from 30 yards. It’s a hobby that his mother says gives him a sense of comfort, and it’s a reminder that though he has lost a leg, he is still capable of a great many things.
West knows that he’s not the only soldier to have suffered such extensive injuries in Vietnam, a war that shows no signs of ending anytime soon and which is increasingly seeing more wide-scale protests in Washington. One man who wanted to end that war, Senator Robert Kennedy, was shot and killed Wednesday night in a California hotel after winning the state’s Democratic primary. As it turned out, the Wests’ backyard sits right in front of the train tracks that carried Kennedy’s body en route to Arlington National Cemetery on Saturday. Despite the four-hour delay caused by the tragedies in New Jersey (see “Funeral Train Causes Deaths in New Jersey” on 2A), the Wests were pleased to have the chance to observe the train passing by. When the 21-car train sailed past, emotions were running high in the West family, and Miriam West, 17, who will be a senior at E. E. Burton High School, was given to many tears as the family caught a glimpse of the senator’s casket. Private West gave a salute of a different kind. He raised his crutch
in midair. When asked why, the reserved private shrugged. Not everything, he said, could be explained.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
The Train of Small Mercies is a work of fiction based on actual events. The details that relate to Robert Kennedy’s funeral, the funeral train, and the burial are true. My primary sources included accounts from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Time magazine. I also interviewed reporter David Broder, who was on the train for the Post. Thurston Clarke’s The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America (Henry Holt and Company, 2008) was very helpful to me for understanding the spirit of Kennedy’s brief presidential bid—and also the effect it had on Americans of all persuasions.
The novel was inspired by the extraordinary photographs in Paul Fusco’s RFK Funeral Train (Umbrage Editions, 2000). Fusco worked for Look magazine at the time of Kennedy’s assassination, and he was assigned to shoot the senator’s burial at Arlington National Cemetery. After the train left New York’s Penn Station, Fusco was moved by the lines of mourners—sometimes unbroken for miles—gathered along the tracks, and he kept his camera trained on them until the arrival at Union Station in Washington. He had shot well over a thousand pictures before stepping out onto the platform.
Leaving Penn Station a few minutes after one p.m. on Saturday, June 8—and already late by then—a doleful journey turned even more tragic. In Elizabeth, New Jersey, a man and a woman who was holding her granddaughter were killed by another train named the Admiral, headed to New York from Chicago, as it plowed through an overflow of mourners waiting for the Kennedy train. The granddaughter was thrown into the air and not seriously injured. Soon after, a man in Trenton, New Jersey, was critically wounded while standing on top of a boxcar for a better view and touching an 11,000-volt wire. Later that day, a Kennedy press officer announced that the man was dead, but in fact he survived and gave an interview to The New York Times in 2009, in which he revealed the Kennedy family had helped him with his extensive medical bills.