by Andy Duncan
“There’s no stew here,” he said, as if to himself. “Bananas . . . beets . . .” He pushed things around with the razor. He pinched and sniffed and opened jars. “Whew! That’s some high-smelling cheese. And what the hell is this? Fish eggs? Damn.” He started to giggle, a high-pitched sound I didn’t care for at all. “I’ll cut you for this, Pete, I swear I will, and the girl, too. I’ll pass my razor to the cripples, they got plenty of experience.” He speared the half-stick of bologna, held it up. “Bologna? This I couldn’t get in any mom-and-pop in Tucum-fucking-cari?”
“Taste it,” I repeated, because it still felt right, somehow.
The profesh stared at me, brought the bologna to his nose, sniffed. Sniffed again. He got interested, sawed off a hunk, nibbled it. Everyone strained forward. How long, I wondered, since they’d all eaten? The profesh chewed slowly, then more quickly, began to smile. He stuffed the whole wedge into his mouth, worked it while he cut another. “This isn’t bologna,” he muttered. “It tastes like . . . like . . .”
He dropped the razor, lifted the stick to his face and began to tear into it with his teeth. “The taste! Oh, my God!” He chomped and slurped and slobbered, cheeks and chin smeary with bologna grease.
His followers, excited, stood and yelled and demanded their share. What no one seemed to notice but me was that the train wasn’t rocking nearly so much, the racket outside wasn’t nearly so loud. This train was rolling to a stop.
While the profesh danced the bologna jig, the braver ones snatched up the other things, began their own slurping and gnawing. Then they danced, too, whooping and carrying on and shouting hallelujah.
“It’s true!” the profesh yelled. “It’s true!”
Now, stopping a train is a funny thing. An engine starts slowing down miles before the station, and it’s going no faster than a walk when it pulls in, but at some point, that engine has got to finally stop dead. And when it does, all those hundreds of tons of steel, in all that rolling stock strung out for miles behind, collide. A fifty-car train stopping is like fifty little train wrecks in the space of a second. And if you’re standing on board that train, not expecting the jolt, and you’re not braced. . . .
I braced—one hand on the door handle, the other arm around Dula.
Bang!
The profesh and two-thirds of the stiffs in that boxcar went flying, and I lunged forward, grabbed the razor, and cut Dula’s ropes before most of them landed. I wrenched the door open and we both rolled out. I landed on hard-packed dirt, and she landed on me, mostly. We scrambled up, and ran.
The place looked like a thousand other deserted rail yards—handcars and crates, sidings and turntables, a wooden-staved water tank with only the H still legible, and all of it gray upon gray upon gray in the hour before dawn. We would never outrun them, once they sorted themselves out, but where could we go? Someone had to be around, however early. But all we passed were closed doors and dark windows. I stumbled once, twice. I started coughing.
Behind us the profesh screamed: “We’re finally here!”
The farther I ran, the worse my coughing got. I lagged behind. I stumbled, staggered, leaned against a wall. At eye level, some hobo had chalked weird, unfamiliar signs onto the stone.
“What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t answer. My throat burned. My mouth tasted of copper. I bent double coughing. My drool was red in the dirt.
The profesh was right. I had been sick, powerful sick, when I landed in the Big Rock Country. And now that I had left it . . .
“Go on,” I said. “I’m killed already.”
I found myself staring at the hobo signs—stick men, houses, arrows, circles.
“No,” she said, and tried to pull me along.
The profesh ran around the corner, whooping and hollering and tearing off his clothes, eyeglasses and all. “I’ll beat everybody to the lemonade springs!” he yelled. At the end of a long trail of clothes, he leaped headlong into the dirt and wallowed, barking like a seal.
I could read those signs. Of course I could. I had chalked them there in the first place.
I remembered everything.
“Dula. Those eyeglasses. And his jacket. Get them. Please.”
She did. I put them on. They fit fine. For the first time, I could see the wrinkles at the corners of Dula’s eyes, and the tears welling up. I plucked the razor out of the dirt where I had dropped it. It had been mine, years ago. It still felt good in my hand.
“There they are!”
The whole pack of stiffs, the uglies in the lead, came charging around the building on both sides. They all pulled up short when they saw my new clothes, my eyes, the look in my face. Swallowing another coughing jag, chest about to split, I stepped away from the wall, braced my feet, tossed the razor from hand to hand, and tried to stare them all down.
“How dare you,” I whispered. Louder: “How dare you.” With all the air my rattling bloody lungs could muster, I roared: “How dare you abandon me—for that!” I thrust my finger at the poor crazy profesh, then at the writing on the wall. “This is the place I was crowned! I am Railroad Pete, and I am the King of the Tramps!”
Dead silence.
The old alky hag was the first to drop to her knees.
A second. A third.
Then, one by one, the rest. Wails and moans went up. Many lay facedown in the dirt.
“Mercy, Pete!”
“We didn’t know you!”
“Help us!”
I felt a wave of dizziness, of weakness. My rattling breath was getting louder. It was like I was drowning inside.
Only the biggest, meanest-looking ugly was left standing. A badly stitched scar split his bald head like a one-track railroad. He stepped forward.
“You weren’t so biggedy,” he rumbled, “when I went fishing with this.” He pulled from his moldy overcoat a rusty coupling-pin.
I couldn’t hold back the coughs anymore. I hacked and spat and bent double, lost my balance, dropped to my knees myself.
The ugly showed all the gaps in his teeth and stepped forward, swinging the thick end of the pin like a club.
“Well, this will be easy,” he said. “Long live the king.”
“No!” Dula screamed.
I gurgled.
Then someone screeched, in a voice like a rusty handcar:
“Alms! Alms, gentlemen! Alms for the poor and blind!”
Coupling-Pin whirled.
Tap-tap-tapping through the crowd was Muckle, cane in one hand, tin cup in the other.
Coupling-Pin raised a hand, as if Muckle could see it through those black lenses. “Back off, you old bastard. Hit the grit, or you’ll get what he’s getting.”
“Oh, a troublemaker, eh?” Muckle said. Ignoring Coupling-Pin, he tapped over to where I lay crumpled and gasping. People in the crowd were getting up. An upside-down giant, Muckle loomed over me. He prodded me with the cane. He ratcheted himself down on one knee, joints popping, and scuttled his fingers over my face. “Oh, my goodness, yes, I know this one. He’s from my side of the tracks.” He struggled back up, leaning on his cane. No one offered to help. “Yes, he’s a bad one and a hard case, all right,” said Muckle, rubbing his hip. “One of our hardest.”
“I’ll fix him for you, Pops,” said Coupling-Pin, stepping forward.
There was a sound like a mosquito, and then Muckle’s cane was just there, in midair. The ugly stopped just shy of his neck hitting it, eyes big and breath held, like he’d nearly run up on barbed wire at night.
“One of ours, I repeat,” Muckle said. The cane in his outstretched hand didn’t waver a hair. “And he’ll be dealt with by us, by me and my kin—and not by a turd like you.”
The ugly whipped the coupling-pin around and harder than you’d hit a steer in a slaughterhouse slammed the blind man in the back of the head.
Muckle�
�s glasses flew off. He hunched forward, naked face all squinched up, so many wrinkles between hairline and nose it was hard to find the two closed eyes.
No sign of blood.
No sign of damage.
He hadn’t even let go of the cane.
The ugly looked at Muckle, at the pin in his hand, at Muckle again. The ugly’s mouth was open.
Everyone’s mouth was open.
Muckle slowly stood upright, eyes still closed but face relaxed, no longer looking hurt but just annoyed.
Everyone stepped back with a wordless sound of interest, a sort of Hmm, the sound a tramp makes when he sees the chalk for “Get out quick.”
Muckle turned to face the crowd, wrinkly eyes still closed.
I told Dula, “Don’t look.”
Muckle reached up with his free hand, dug his fingers into his face and, hauling on the skin by main force, opened his eyes.
Everyone screamed.
The screams faded away quick, like the whistle of a fast mail.
After a while I figured it was safe to open my eyes, too. The yard was empty except for Muckle and Dula and me, but there was a whole lot of dust in the air, like after a stampede.
Between the chalked wall and a rain barrel, his back to us, knelt Muckle, sliding his hands through the rubbish and weeds. His hands stopped. He grunted. He had found his glasses. He wiped them against his lapel and carefully put them on, hooked each shank over its proper ear. He stood and turned toward us, his face horribly twisted, and Dula and I held each other. His jaw clenched and dropped and clenched again and his eyebrows rode up and down and he squinched his nose.
“God damn things never sit right, once they get bent,” Muckle said, and made another adjustment with the side of his mouth.
Next I remember, I hung off a deck, coughing red onto the gravel far below. Something was wrong with the gravel. I could see every little piece of it. It wasn’t moving.
Muckle was holding me over the edge while I got it all out. We were on top of a train in the deserted yard. What little air I could squeeze into my curdled liver and lights was being cut off by my collar, knotted like a noose in long bony fingers.
“He’ll be all right, won’t he?” Dula called up from the yard below.
“Don’t you start worrying about him now,” Muckle said, “after all the trouble you caused him and the Big Rock Country too. Ever since he hopped the Eastbound. Streams running vinegar. Potatoes you got to dig up. Hens laying eggs what ain’t even cooked. Biggest mess I ever heard tell of, on our side of the tracks. Last straw, the Big Rock Candy itself shut down. Wouldn’t do nothing but peep like a chicken. Turns out it was saying, ‘Pete! Pete!’ Why you think we’ve all been out beating the bushes? Humph! But don’t you fret none, he’ll be fit as a fiddlehead soon as he gets back to where there ain’t no Mycobacterium tuberculosis running around. Spit it out, son! There you go. But as for you, little missy—you are banished from the Big Rock Country for good!”
“Well, la-de-da,” Dula hollered. “That’s hard news, considering I just about killed myself getting shut of the place.”
I reached down a hand. “I’ll miss you, Dula,” I croaked out. “I’d stay here with you, really I would, if it wasn’t fatal.”
She stood on tiptoe and laced her fingers into mine. “Take it easy, Railroad Pete, King of the No-Count Bums. You found out who you are. Now it’s my turn.” She tugged away her hand. “No, Pete, I ain’t gonna watch you go. It’s bad luck. Go to hell, Muckle.”
“You, too, honey,” Muckle said with a wave of his cane.
I plucked at the edge of the roof for purchase, but the slipping was all in my mind. My view of Dula walking away was going black from the outside in, like the last picture in a Chaplin movie, right before “The End.”
Muckle hocked and spat a big looey past my head. Where it splatted sprang up a purple orchid. Then Muckle snatched me from the brink and flung me to the middle of the deck like I was made of shucks.
The train jerked forward with a rusty screech. As the couplers pulled taut, a series of slams vibrated along the cars and through my sprawled body on the way to the caboose.
“You’re off and rolling now, Pete,” Muckle said, as we crawled beneath the water tank. He reached up, grabbed the long spout, and lifted his feet. As the groaning spout slowly swung him away, he called out: “I’ll see you later, when you ain’t such a mess. Right now, you’re a damn sight too much like work.”
Nothing special, this train, just a rattletrap old local, cars all mismatched, big letters on the sides that might spell something if hooked up right. I never saw a train you could actually read. The cars screeched and banged, and I held her down, sprawled on top, watching as the yard disappeared. It had been deserted, but as the train picked up speed, tramps sprouted from everywhere, in ones and twos and threes, scrambled from rain barrels and woodpiles and dropped from the water tank and slid down the side of the cut and ran silently alongside, tossing their bindles aboard and then making the leap and clambering on wherever they could. As we went into the cut and around the bend, three dozen shirttail-flapping tramps hung on to the boxes, every one of them my people. Up ahead, against the rising sun, was a pyramid better than 50 feet high, a sight known to every tramp in the West. It was the Ames Monument, the highest point on the U.P., all downhill from here.
Three months, two weeks, and four days after my return—for it was high time someone counted the days in the Big Rock country—I was sitting halfway up the slope of the mountain, taking the air and making plans, when a cinnamon-smelling westerly wind sprang up and the photograph sailed into me, flap!
I peeled it off my chest. Beneath a neon sign that said “Automat,” Dula stood on the corner, hands on hips, dressed like a four-alarmer, from the red silk fascinator with silver webbing that wrapped her head, to the single-seam stockings that must have cost $2.50—look out!—$2.75 a leg. On the back of the picture were a dried, wiped-sideways stain that smelled like spaghetti and a few lines of chicken scratch with a penny pencil.
Hi Pete The wind seems right today so Im throwing this off the Brooklyn Bridge hoping you get it I hope so Hows the weather Just kidding This aint no Paradise but it’s still amazing what you can find just walking around Do you know the trains here got windows and seats too What will they think of next Take it easy Railroad Pete but take it—Dula—New York street New York town New York state New York everything N.Y., N.Y., N.Y., N.Y.
Maybe I’d send a reply one day. Lace it into a shoe and drop it into the Eastbound at the tunnel, then wait for a how-dee-doo back to bubble up out of the stew.
I yanked a leg off a turkey bush and said aloud, by way of grace: “The day I do that will be a no-fooling strange day.”
If it was easy to send word back from the Rock Candy country, why, everyone would do it, wouldn’t they? And if I could send word, who says it wouldn’t get all messed up on the way to N.Y., N.Y., N.Y., N.Y.? Just hobo signs on a wall. She wouldn’t know what she was reading, what she had.
Mmm. Juicy. With a little cornbread dressing in the middle.
No, there’s plenty to keep me busy right here. Got to get this place organized. Many an opportunity in the Rock Candy country, I see now, for a profesh who knows who he is.
Looky there on the ground—cranberry sauce. In a little shivery puddle with a spoon in it, Betty Boop on the handle of the spoon. All I have to do is reach out my hand.
“Boop!” said the Big Rock Candy, and peppermints peckled from the barber-striped sky.
Daddy Mention and the Monday Skull
When old Wilmer guarded Block Twelve, there was no radio, because old Wilmer mistrusted people sitting around a box harking at nothing. But one summer the warden made old Wilmer use a month of his hoarded vacation time, for fear he’d cash it all in at retirement and turn out the lights of Tallahassee as he went. The first thing the guards did once old
Wilmer was dragged onto the Trailways bus to his mama’s in Pensacola was plunk a long-hidden radio onto old Wilmer’s desk and get that thing cranking.
Daddy Mention, in Cell A for obvious reasons, was so near the guardroom that he got to listen to the radio, too, whether he wanted to or not. With one part of his mind, though both wood and blade were denied him, he whittled, without medium or tool or external motion, and with the other he listened, at first with resignation and then with sluggish interest, beginning to study how he might put this racket to use.
“And for all you folks who requested it, here’s that hot new song from the Prison Airs, ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain.’”
Prison Airs?
“Hey, Narvel,” called the desk guard to the corridor guard. “It’s those jailbirds from Tennessee.”
Daddy Mention jerked a little, and in his mind his whittling knife jumped the grain and sliced his thumb. In his cell Daddy Mention sucked his bloodless thumb and listened to the Prison Airs, which sounded to him like a half-dozen colored men trying to sing white.
“They good, ain’t they?” Narvel said. “When the governor brought ’em to the mansion to sing for Truman, Truman said, ‘Governor, you ought to pardon every damn one of ’em.’”
Now Daddy Mention was two big ears and nothing more.
“Did he pardon ’em?” the desk guard asked.
“Hell, no,” Narvel said. “You don’t earn no votes in Tennessee by pardoning niggers—just by dressing ’em up and waxing their hair and putting them on the radio.”
Amid their laughter, another song started, something about a tiger man who was king of the jungle. Daddy Mention planned never to see a jungle outside a Tarzan movie, but he thought he’d be loose in good honest swampland again before long. If these Prison Airs could go through the wall by singing to white people, Daddy Mention figured he could do that, too. He stopped listening to the radio or to anything except the reasoning inside his head, and an hour past lights-out, he achieved the perfect ironclad silver-dollar plan. For the next hour he turned the plan every which way and saw it shone from all sides, was in fact a plan without flaw, excusing only the technicality, the barely visible chink in the gleaming surface, that Daddy Mention could not sing one blessed lick, sang so bad from the cradle in fact that the mothers of the church had come to the house when Daddy Mention was seven and told his aunt she’d be doing a boon to the Lord if she yanked Daddy Mention out of the children’s choir and gave the children a chance. “Well, Daddy Mention,” Aunt Ruth said after the mothers left, though she called him not Daddy Mention but his true name, “Well, Daddy Mention, I reckon you and the Lord got to drum you up some other skills.” The Lord had been so generous on that score that Daddy Mention, by using only a few of his God-given talents, had earned permanent room and board from the taxpayers of Florida. He knew he had improved his whittling by just thinking about it all this time in Cell A, because whittling was that kind of skill, like robbery and book learning and laying down a woman, but he knew singing was different, like carpentry and conjuring and marriage, a thing you needed a talent for.