by Andy Duncan
I got to my feet, mouth dry, and stared off toward the ridge where Dula must have gone. That wasn’t the mountain’s voice. That was the Eastbound, talking to me.
“I need to pack a bindle,” I thought, and here came the memory of what a bindle was, and how I should pack it. I snatched up my blanket and shook it out and started throwing in whatever food was lying about at the time, all B’s: Beluga, brie, bologna. Damn that Dula anyway. What other memories would I need before the night was through?
People that want to get around in the Big Rock Country, over to Cockaigne or Lubberland or Hi-Brazil, can just walk up to one of the mail trains and sit down and lift their feet up; that’s how slow those rattletraps are. Canoeing’s faster, and the river runs both ways.
But the Eastbound wasn’t one of those trains, and its tracks were off on the far side of the valley, nowhere near the lemonade springs, the crystal fountain, any of the sights. It was just a mile of gleaming rail running from tunnel to tunnel between two hills, with nothing to eat for a good hundred yards on either side.
You heard the whistle when the train was still miles underground, and for a half-hour that sound got louder and shriller and the tunnel mouth got brighter and the gravel started dancing and the rails strummed like guitar strings and yet it was a shock when Boom, out of that shotgun barrel in the hill blew a big black gleaming two-header locomotive in a thunderhead of smoke and ash and sparks that burnt your eyebrows, and Whoosh the thing seemed to leap to the next tunnel where it plunged howling back into the earth for all the world like a sea monster leaving the water long enough to spout and then rolling back into the cold and the dark.
I staggered more than ran through the no-chow zone because the ground was shaking so. The two-header had already gone down, and the cars were zooming by—blinds with one side door, open gondolas, insulated reefers locked up tight. No snatching hold of this train as it passed; only your arm would swing aboard. The only way was from above. And there was Dula just where I feared—a little white smudge in the night perched on the lip of the second tunnel, looking down on the train rushing by. I ran for her and screamed her name just as she let go and dropped into one of the gondolas and not thinking I kept running up the slope into the hanging black cloud that the two-header had vomited and I choked and plunged through to the crumbling brick edge of the mouth and here came three empty gondolas in a row, maybe the last ones I’d get. I took the last big step and couldn’t hear myself scream as I hit the moving floor, tumbled, slammed into the oncoming wall. Man hit twice by train, lives. I was crumpled and hurting but I was—what was the phrase—I was holding her down. The train hadn’t shaken me yet. I rode her, I held her down, as she rolled beneath the surface of the world.
I woke up on hot greasy metal beneath the stars, pine trees whipping past. My arms and legs and fingers and head all felt awful when I moved them, but they moved. I sat up, found my bindle, sipped water, gnawed bologna. Dula had to be twenty, thirty cars up, toward the engine. But how could I know for sure? A drop into the gondola of a speeding train is pure luck. You could drop between the cars or hit the deck of a boxcar instead. And how did I know that?
I tied my bindle around my waist, climbed the gondola’s forward wall, looked down. Good. Steel bumpers, no need to ride the coupler this time. I eased myself onto the bumper, gauged the rocking of the blind next door, then made the jump easy. Every car has its niches and platforms and handholds, for the sake of the yardmen, but between yards they have their uses, too.
I worked my way forward along the train, up and over when I could, or around the sides. My parts complained, but they did what I asked, started reaching and stepping before I asked. I had done this before, many times, and I could do it again and again.
No wonder the Eastbound was so fast. Car after car as I clambered along held no cargo at all. But the train wasn’t empty. Not by a long shot. And I recognized just about everybody I came upon—not individual faces, but I knew their types well.
One car was full of fakers, working by lantern light on their little doodads they sucker people with. One punched holes in a sheet of tin with a nail; one pounded two bricks together and scraped the dust into paper packets; the bearded one whittled. I said no to lamp brighteners and love powders and splinters from William Jennings Bryan’s church pew, but before I moved on I tossed them a couple of sinkers—as good as money when playing seven-up in a blind at night.
In the corner of another car sat two cripples, one with a pinned-up jacket sleeve, one with a strapped-on peg leg. Like all cripples who meet on the rails, they were swapping tales about the day they didn’t move fast enough. They talked at once, stories sliding past each other on parallel tracks.
“I heard it go into the bucket, I did. Made a little clang like a chicken foot.”
“There was three swallows of whiskey left in the bottle, and when I woke up, the doc said I could have the rest, and he didn’t charge me any more than what I had in my pockets.”
“I lifted it, and foot and bucket and all wasn’t nearly as heavy as the foot was many a long day.”
“I still reach for things with it, and sometimes the candle or bottle falls over, so a ghost hand can do that much, anyway.”
“I buried it behind the Kansas City roundhouse where it’s soft, cause I was told otherwise it wouldn’t rest easy and would itch me forever. It don’t itch, but that big toe still aches something fierce when the weather comes up a . . .”
In mid-sentence the two cripples stopped talking and started unwrapping their clothes to compare stumps, and I headed on. Some things, even in a boxcar, are just too private to watch.
Whenever I reached a gondola, I tossed in my bindle and swung over the wall, hoping to raise Dula, but time and again I had no show. All were empty until I tossed my bindle practically on top of a half-dozen tramps sitting in a circle around a mushed candle. As I climbed in, they stared at me and didn’t move. One held a jug ready to pour into the glass bottle held by a dough-faced old gal.
“No more!” she squawked, and the whole alky gang tensed to spring.
“I’m not thirsty,” I said, quick. “Don’t study about me. Just looking for a girl who dropped from a tunnel, that’s all.”
“No girl here! Not here!”
They stared at me some more. The old gal, satisfied, broke off looking and grunted to the stiff with the jug. He sloshed a little something into her wide-neck bottle, and she swirled it about. Another little slosh and swirl, and he stoppered the jug. They all leaned forward slack-mouthed, watching the old gal take one tee-ninchy sip from the bottle and sigh and pass it on. The water jug would cut it farther and farther around the circle till they were drinking the very memory of gin, and it would be time to go into town and raise another bottle or cup or dreg-drop of the stuff.
As the bottle went round they said a verse, taking turns at that, too.
“Sweet, sweet gin.”
“Let us in.”
“Sweet, sweet white.”
“Light the night.”
“Sweet, sweet booze.”
“Tell the news.”
“Throw my feet to the barroom seat.”
“Gin is sweet.”
Between that car and the next I crouched on the coupler and took a couple of swigs from my flask, holding the water in my cheeks and letting it seep down my throat slow. I punched the stopper three times with the side of my fist to jam it in good. Many a stiff has gone alky for lack of water.
After that I got more careful about just stepping in without an invite.
Sometimes I couldn’t go over, and I couldn’t go around. So I went under. It’s a decent enough crawlspace down there, only it’s deafening loud and the sides are moving and there’s nothing to crawl on but trusses and rods. I wasn’t proud; I rode the trusses. But then I hit a car with no trusses, so I made like a veteran, and rode the rods.
Beneath the
car and running its length was a suspended iron rod, with maybe a foot and a half of space between it and the floor above. Once again, I knew this, and knew the technique. I eased myself onto the rod until I lay full length, hands gripping the rod ahead, legs locked around the rod behind. I inchwormed forward and felt I was flying, like a witch on a broom.
Lying face down, I knew the tracks whipped past a foot away. I couldn’t see them in the pitchy black, as dense and solid as a wall. Staring at that wall like a banished child made me want to reach out, to test it with my hand, so to resist the temptation I lifted my head and looked forward, into wind like a hot greasy hand covering my face.
By turning my head to the left and sticking my neck out a little I could snatch enough outside breaths to keep from smothering, but I couldn’t keep that up because it hurt my balance and because my eyes naturally focused on the most distant parts of the moonlit landscape, the parts that were moving hardly at all, as if I could just lift my topmost foot and step into them and walk away. That meant time to look down again.
I was face down when the roaring changed tone and the stars came out below me. I gasped and was nearly gone, but my hands and feet remembered. The train was crossing a river, and as the ties of the trestle whipped past I saw through them to the water below. Then all was black and close again.
Halfway down the rod. So far, so good. We plowed through an awful smell, gone before I could gag. Something dead on the tracks. Why in the world, people reading the paper always asked, would even a drunk lie down on the tracks?
My legs and arms ached. The vibration of the rod had roiled my stomach. My teeth hurt from chattering. Not much farther.
Then I heard a new sound up ahead, against the roar of the underside. Nothing regular, just a higgledy-piggledy pinging and clanking, like a youngun tossing pennies into a train.
I had no idea what it was, but it scared me to death. I couldn’t move forward, toward that noise. I lay frozen, twined around the rod, staring into the blackness ahead.
The sound getting louder, closer. Pang, ping, thonk. No rhythm at all. It was the sound of someone going mad.
Up ahead, little flickers, like fireflies. No, sparks. Flashing up first here, then there—
Then I remembered.
Back! Back!
I shinnied backward along the rod as fast as I could go. It wasn’t very fast.
Someone perched at the front of the car was playing out beneath it a length of rope with a five-pound coupling-pin at the end. The sounds, the sparks—those were the pin ricocheting off the wheels, the ties, the bottom of the car. A one-bullet crossfire. An old brakeman’s trick to clear the undercarriage of tramps, if you can call murder a trick.
The pin lunged forward a foot at a time. Backward I inched, and inched, along a rod that was endless, beneath a car that lengthened above me like a telescope.
I inched, gasping. I tasted dust and metal filings. Kicked-up gravel cut my face.
Which would it be?
Wait for the coupling-pin in the teeth?
Or just let go, and let the railbed carry me away?
My foot hit the plate at the end of the rod.
I grabbed the corner strut, one hand at a time. I brought the legs over, one at a time. I squirmed around, got head and shoulders out, grabbed the bottommost outside handhold, hauled myself out and up and onto the bumper. It wasn’t easy. I sat on the bumper, worn out, shaking, happy for now to be rocked between the cars. I wasn’t alone. Someone sat on the opposite bumper, facing me, rocking left when I rocked right, like a reflection. That car was a gondola, and I now saw there was a light inside it, a glow that got brighter above the wall until it crested, blinding, like the sunrise. Someone holding a lantern. I saw now the figure opposite was Dula, bound and gagged and trussed to the braces. She squirmed and kicked her feet. The man holding the lantern shouted:
“Well, butter my ass and call me a biscuit! It’s the one that got away. Swam right off the hook again, eh, Railroad Pete? Proud of you, son. You’ve proven yourself, you’ve passed the test. You’re home.”
They clambered in till the boxcar was packed slam full of stiffs—alkys, fakers, tramps of every shape and description, jostling one another as they rocked with the walls and floor. Even the cripples, who don’t do a lot of traveling between cars, were swung down from the deck in a sort of bucket. They lurched straight to the corner and picked up their conversation. Only a few of the stiffs sat near enough the lantern to be seen, but I sure hoped they were the worst of the lot. Each was big and mean and looked like he’d taken a few coupling-pins in the face. They stared at the boss-man like dogs waiting for scraps to fall. I figured that scrap was me.
The boss-man was the highest class of stiff. He was a profesh. He wore a shiny black suit and a black shirt and a black tie and sharp black shoes and a snap-brim black hat with a black band and black horn-rimmed eyeglasses held together with black tape. Instead of sitting directly on the filthy floor, he sat on crumpled newspaper, and the edges floated up and down like slow wings in the gusts from beneath the boxcar door.
“Why, Pete,” he said. “Don’t tell me you don’t know your old pal, your helper in time of trouble. You taught me all the rules of the road, how to ride at the top of the heap.”
I sat across the lantern from him. Next to me was Dula, still bound and gagged and watching me like I was supposed to do something. I still had my bindle at my waist, so I could have a snack, I reckon, but I didn’t see how that would help.
“I don’t know you, mister,” I said, just stalling for time. And it was true, though he did look kind of familiar, in the same vague way the others had.
“Why, I’m a profesh, now, Pete, just like you. Aren’t you proud?”
“I’m no profesh.”
“Not on this train, no,” he said. “Only one profesh per train, and that’s me.”
He made a move with his hand like shooing a fly, and everyone in the boxcar, from the up-front uglies to the shadows in the corners, moved closer, knives and chains and brass knucks clicking and clacking like money, or better than money. A profesh never travels alone; that’s how you know he’s profesh.
“Meet the guys,” he said. “Meet the gals. They climb aboard, they find their way to me, and the survivors, they join up. You know how it is, Pete. Why, it’s the best job available on a moving train at night, for a man who knows the score, who knows who he is. The best opportunity and, indeed, the last.”
“What sort of job?” I asked. “What do they do?”
The profesh tilted his head, slowly. His voice was velvet. “They mow the lawn,” he said. “They park the cars when the Astors come to tea. They do things.” He made a two-handed chopping motion in the air.
“Must be hard to get good help,” I said.
“Oh, there’s no shortage, Pete. Didn’t this train strike you as sort of, well, crowded?” He stood and paced in the lantern light. “That’s how it is on a train, Pete, when people keep getting on, month after month, every stop on every line, and no one—practically no one, Pete—ever escapes. Think of it, Pete. Every bindlestiff, boomchaser, team-skinner, shovel bum and tong bucker, every last ring-tail tooter the whole long rusty length of the Southern P., the Central P., the U.P., the U.T.L., the C.F.T., the C.F.X., everybody and his dog from every blown-away greasewood sagebrush town thinks El Dorado and Hollywood and Daylong Screw, Nevada, are just a toot-toot train ride away.” He stopped, too close, looking down at me. “And the Big Rock Candy Mountain is further, even, than those. But not quite out of reach. Is it, Pete?” When I didn’t answer, he kept walking. “Last time I saw you, Pete, it was somewhere past midnight, on a fast freight from Ogden to Carson City, and we shared a boxcar, just the two of us. You’d been pretty sick, and when you finally got to sleep, I sat against the door, for fear you’d wake up wild in the night, and step out. I did not sleep, Pete. Instead, I sharpened your brass knu
cks, hoping to please you when you awoke. I did not sleep, the door did not open, and no one and nothing passed me. Yet when I looked up from my razor and file, I was alone in that boxcar. And I never saw you or heard tell of you again—until tonight.”
I didn’t remember any of that, but so what? It was no crazier than the truth of where I’d been. I didn’t like the way Dula was looking at me. I said nothing.
“All these years since, Pete, I have been riding the rails, holding her down in your absence, without your help, sucking smoke and eating skeeter stew, and I have watched. And waited. And studied the scraps of newspaper that blew in during a full moon, and the chalk marks on fences and walls that no one recognizes, and squeezed old-timers for stories of ghost trains and forgotten railways and phantoms on the tracks and crowded boxcars that were empty on arrival. I’ve done all that, Pete, all that and worse, and never got one station, one division, one rod closer to the Big Rock Candy—until tonight.” He crouched, just in the edge of the lantern light. “Now, tell me something, Pete. Tell me one thing—no, two things—and we’ll let you both off at the next stop, no hard feelings, no more questions asked. Where have you been? And how did you get there?”
“Suppose I don’t know?” I asked.
“Then you get out and get under. And she joins us all for the rest of the night, and repeatedly, until we’re done. Sort of an employee benefit.” He pulled a barber’s razor from his jacket, toyed with it in his fingers. “So,” he asked, brightly, “how’s the Big Rock stew? Good as they say? Cure what ails you?”
I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I was just stalling some more. But in the same way it felt right, somehow, to go up and over that first gondola car, it felt right to pull out my bindle, toss it onto the floor, and kick it toward him.
“Taste for yourself,” I said.
He sat motionless for so long that I got worried and thought Pete, your time has come. Then he shot out a hand and snatched up the bindle, slit it with one pass of the razor, and dumped everything onto the floor. His face fell.