by Bill Bailey
"New York."
"New York?" He was surprised. "That's a mighty long way from here. What brings you to Texas?"
"Trying to find work," I explained. He took the venison steak onto the board now. With the skill of a master chef he ran the tip of the knife around its edge. He said that would stop it from curling when it was frying. In a second, the steak was on the fire. He put two cups on the table, filled them with coffee and sat down. "You'll have a good meal under your belt in a few minutes," he assured me.
"Are you a rancher?" I wondered, hoping he had a little job for me.
"Nope. I'm the local sheriff."
I almost choked on my coffee. Of all the houses to bum for something to eat! Well, I was looking for work. After this guy finished with me, I thought, I'll be working for the state of Texas for six months. Well, at least he was going to feed me before he took me to jail. That was fine. I made up my mind that whatever he fed me, I'd just sit back and enjoy it. He got up and turned the steak in the frying pan. "No," he said. "I gave up ranching ten years ago. I was jawed into taking the sheriff's job by a couple of old buddies. Ever have anyone talk and talk you into something even though your head tells you no? That's the way it happened to me. This little community used to be overrun with all kinds of crooks and varmints that were run out of Houston. They'd all come here and set up operations. Somebody had to do it, so I cleaned the place up. Made `em all leave town--except for two that didn't. I hanged `em."
He set the steak down in front of me. Then he went and got some bread and white navy beans and laid them on the table. My first bite of steak tasted funny--gamey. I rolled it around in my mouth. After the second or third piece, I set to and ate the whole thing. There's always a time to get used to new tastes.
"Yes," he was telling me, "being a sheriff ain't all it's cracked up to be. Used to be that the state would take care of burying all the darn people you'd shoot. Now them polytechnicians in Austin have changed all that. Why, every time I shoot a nigger it costs me five dollars for the box! Five dollars to bury a critter we just used to plant in the ground in the old days. How you like that?"
I was getting more nervous with each mouthful. Suppose this guy decides to shoot me? I imagined myself lying in the cold Texas ground with him standing over me, complaining that it cost him five dollars to bury me. I started gobbling my food. Whatever he had in mind for me, I decided I wasn't interested. "How's that venison?" he asked as I choked down the last piece.
"Just fine. Just plain good." I tried to whip up enthusiasm.
"Plenty deer around here. Supposed to kill `em in season. Well, when you're hungry for venison, it's always the right season! Right?"
I tried to grin, but my face felt stiff. As he was pulling back his chair to get the coffee pot off the stove, he glanced down at my feet. "Say! What in tarnation have we got here? Something wrong with your feet, boy?"
"Oh, no, sir. My shoes are worn out. I've been trying to get a new pair."
"What size are they?"
"About size nine," I told him.
"Let's see if this old pair I have in the closet will fit you." They were work shoes, fairly new. My feet would barely go into them; wow, they were tight! But once I did get my feet inside them, it sure felt good to have a whole foot enclosed. "You can wear `em. Glad they fit. Take these old things and bury `em somewhere--away from here." He was grinning.
I was assured he wasn't going to arrest me--but I didn't wait around to find out. I thanked him and lit out. By the time I reached the signal tower along the tracks, I was in abject misery. My feet were all but crying out loud in those tight shoes. I finally had to sit down and take the damn things off. I took out my knife and slit open the sides of the shoes. That gave me added width. Next I cut the fronts out of the uppers, letting my sore, imprisoned toes stick out. Then I tore my handkerchief into several long strips. I soaked them in some water and wrapped them neatly around my skinned toes. In this way I achieved a more positive frame of mind.
It was clear that if a train did come along now, it would have to be a mighty slow freight in order for me to catch it. I was in no shape to dash for any distance alongside moving cars. I sat under the only tree around, a small oak, out of the blistering sun. What if no train came along? Should I sleep here? Perhaps a small fire against the night chill would be good. What about food? Should I try going back to that group of houses? What if I ran into the sheriff again? A craving for a cigarette began working on my nerves. I had lots of cigarette papers, but no tobacco. Toward the west, as far as the horizon, there seemed to be nothing but desert. I considered working my way back to the jungle, but a quick glance at my toes squelched that idea. I looked up at the semaphore and its arms. All showed green lights. It didn't matter, because there was no train coming from either direction. Then I noticed someone coming toward me from the west. I was happy to see him because he was puffing away on a cigarette. As he drew closer, I could see that he sported a moustache in the Zapata fashion. On his back he carried a small bundle. He wore a slightly-ragged straw hat tilted at an angle. His face was covered with a few days' growth of beard. His skin was bronzed. As he came nearer, I got up and went down the track to meet him. "Buenos días, amigo," he said.
My complete Spanish vocabulary consisted of gracias, buenos días, mucho and dame. "Buenos días," I returned his greeting, adding, "Dame cigarillo?"
He reached into his coat pocket and handed me a tobacco pouch. I took out enough to roll a cigarette. "Más, más," he urged. "Take more. Take more." I took another small amount, then thanked him. He continued his journey toward Houston.
Having made myself understood in Spanish without any previous experience in the language added to the pleasure of the cigarette. I returned to my oak tree for a moment. I dozed off in the hot sun. An hour must have passed. When I awoke two other guys were sitting near the track. "Been here long?" one queried.
"At least five hours," I informed him. "Nothing came, either way."
"My timetable show a passenger train due in Houston at four," one of them told me. "From the west. There should be a freight heading west before that."
Half an hour went by. The two talked quietly while I sat contemplating the future. A click, then a second click, came from the signal tower. I glanced up just in time to see the arms change position. The light, too, had changed; it was now red. My companions also noticed. "That's our baby," one announced. "We better get further up the track if we're going to board it."
The freight train was fairly long and many of the cars were empty. Doors were open and faces stared out from several of them. In some men sat with their legs dangling, enjoying the warm sun. In the train's center, a series of cars lay with doors wide open. We made for them. We were about to climb into the first one, but two men came to the door. "This is a family," one said calmly. Then we could see three women in the car, several men and six or seven young children. The code of the road required complete respect for this situation. We moved further back and boarded an empty car that seemed clean.
"We're seeing a lot of that lately," one of the men told me. "This is the fifth family I've seen on the road."
We were on our way west. The train rambled on. There's not much to do in a boxcar. Sometimes a guy with a needle and thread will catch up on his mending; some read books or newspapers; others sit in the doorway, taking the sun and watching the world go by. Still others just lie there, catching up on sleep. We were traveling at a fairly good speed, passing small towns with whistle wailing loudly. If luck held out, we'd be in San Antonio early in the evening.
About 25 miles from San Antonio our train sidetracked to allow an eastbound passenger train to pass. Several men came aboard. They had heard that there was a train derailment west of San Antonio and nothing was moving. The San Antonio police were said to be rounding up all vagrants caught in town. The derailment had filled the city with men and women bumming restaurants and homes. The local people were apprehensive. They had demanded that the police do something
, and the police had responded in the only way they know--by getting rough with unfortunates and throwing them in jail. They had issued a warning that anyone caught outside city limits was okay, but woe to anyone caught with so much as a foot inside the line.
No one had any idea how long it would take to clear the tracks of wreckage. Every train coming into San Antonio from all over the country brought dozens of new faces. The news of the wreck was shouted from car to car. For the last five miles into the San Antonio yard limits, the train crawled at about five miles an hour. The deeper we moved into the yard, the more tracks there were, from single to double to triple and more. We stopped behind another string of freight cars. "Where's the jungle?" someone wanted to know.
"About two miles down the track from here," was the reply.
We fell in behind the speaker; others fell back of us, and men, women and children climbed down from the cars. We were in a freight yard where being caught by railroad bulls could mean jail or a rap across the ass or legs with a club. Yet as the procession swelled no one seemed to care one way or the other about the railroad police. We just trudged on, passing engineers and other railroad workers who paid not the slightest attention to us. Some of us carried small bundles, a hard bag or grip; others had blankets tied in neat bundles across their backs. Many, like myself, had nothing but the clothes on their backs. There must have been 50 of us.
From the clusters of heads I saw when we reached the jungle, I estimated about 150. Our little parade raised the jungle population to over 200--men, women and children. Fires were burning; the odor of cooking was in the air. Around the water tower close by people were dipping water into tin cans. Two hundred feet from our jungle another one was developing. I spotted a small fire with three people standing around it. I headed in their direction. A gallon paint can steamed away atop a metal screen set up on three stones above the fire. I smelled coffee. "Okay if I hang around here?" I inquired.
"All right with me," one man agreed.
"You can do your share of hauling wood," suggested another.
Twenty minutes later I brought back an armful of wood. More people had moved into the new jungle. A man and woman with three boys lit another fire and stretched a piece of canvas out on the ground. "Get a can and help yourself to some Mississippi mud," joked one guy, waving us toward a steaming gallon can of coffee. It did taste like mud. With so many fires burning, the air in the camp stayed warm that night. I woke up at three in the morning, hungry. Stars twinkled in the sky. I got up and made my way to the water tower. After a quick face wash, I started slowly toward the roundhouse, a half a mile toward San Antonio. I stopped a man entering the roundhouse. "Where can a guy get something to eat?" I asked.
"City's full of restaurants," he told me.
"I mean for nothing. I'm broke."
"That holds for most of us," he said. "Look. Here's something you might try. Get to the other side of the roundhouse. It will take you out to Fort Sam Houston. If you hurry you can get there before the troopers eat."
Fort Sam Houston was a cavalry post. I didn't know the troop or horse population it maintained at the time, but I could smell the place three blocks before I saw it. When I reached the mess hall door it was still dark. Pots and pans, dishes and silverware rattled as the mess hall staff prepared the place for breakfast. "Yeah? You here to join up or to bum something to eat?" asked a trooper who met me at the kitchen door.
"Something to eat," I admitted.
"Hey, sarge," he shouted. "See that heavy-set guy over there? See him? He's in charge. I only cook the stuff; he gives it away."
Tables and chairs to feed several hundred troopers were set up. I struggled halfway across the large mess hall through the tangle. He saw me coming. "Hungry, son?" he greeted me.
"Yes, sir."
"Then come with me." He led me back across the hall toward the kitchen. "Sit at this table. You have 25 minutes to stuff yourself sick. Be out of here before the bugler sounds mess call." He beckoned to a soldier close by.
Within 20 minutes I had eaten my fill, stuffed my pockets with bread, thanked the mess sergeant and departed. The sky lightened in the east. A block away I heard the bugler blowing reveille. I had to get back to the railroad tracks and into the jungle quickly before every policeman in town woke up and started hunting down vagrants. With a full stomach and a pocket full of bread, I felt good. Maybe I ought to join the cavalry! No, I didn't feel like playing nursemaid to a horse. Not now, at any rate.
Chapter XVI: A Dinner on the House
At noon two powerful Mallet engines hooked onto the lead car. A railroad detective came into the jungle. "We got word it's all clear up ahead. We're going to pull three trains out of here, one every 25 minutes. The first one's getting ready to leave now. Get aboard while you have a chance," he advised, adding, "If anyone's going to Abilene or Wichita, there's a train making up that should leave around five or thereabouts." He turned and went back toward the yard.
The women with kids were on their feet, picking up odds and ends, getting prepared to move on. I hopped into the first car that looked clean. Not all the jungle inhabitants left right away. Why two-thirds preferred to stay behind hoping to catch other trains, I'll never know. Maybe they didn't fancy riding with women and kids.
I was aboard, a whole car to myself, and the train was moving west. My stomach was full, yet I mechanically took out a slice of the good home-baked bread and slowly munched away as the world passed by my door; those army cooks and bakers knew their business. I thought about the railroad bull, playing conductor so meekly when perhaps only a little while before he'd been putting people in the slammer and kicking them in the ass when he found them on railroad property. I wondered how he felt about his new role: had he sincerely enjoyed passing on information to people less fortunate than he?
Lulled by the sound of the fast-moving wheels and full of bread, I slid the door two-thirds shut against the cold and stretched out on deck. Some hours later, when the chill night air woke me, the train was barely moving. The night was black. We seemed to be working our way through valleys and around mountains across creaky trestles. I felt lonely. Now I wished that I'd boarded a car with people in it. Another living creature, even a cat or dog, would have been better than the black emptiness of the frigid boxcar. I sat glumly, listening as the wheels telegraphed clickety-clack for every tiny separation in the tracks over which they rolled.
When dawn broke, a sprinkle of white on the desert shrubs advertised that light snow had fallen during the night. When the sun rose it would all melt away. Across the plains mountains on the Mexican side of the landscape were visible, but neither color nor line in the barren, forlorn desert marked any border. Three times that day we pulled to a stop under a water tower in the desert. There were no houses from which to bum food, no restaurants in which to exchange dishwashing for a meal. During the fifteen minutes needed to get water aboard and allow the engineer to oil some locomotive parts, it was possible to change cars or race to the water tower for a drink. I was satisfied with the car I was in. It was clean, and the cleanliness outweighed the loneliness.
I'd heard a guy in a Florida jail tell about a time when he'd been in a car with ten other men. As the train had slowed on a hill, two men came out of the brush and climbed aboard. They took out 45-caliber guns and forced everyone in the cars to empty their pockets. I had thought about this a few times and never could quite understand how a man could stoop so low that he would rifle the pockets of people as poor as freight train hoboes. At the same time, I had heard that some men on the road did carry a few dollars tucked away on themselves. Not me, though. They could hold me up; they'd find nothing.
At three o'clock the train began to slow down. A mile ahead there was a fair-sized town, Alpine. I knew my train was heading for El Paso, but my stomach told me to get off and find something to eat. I could catch the next train to El Paso. It never occurred to me that a few other guys riding the train would have the same idea. When most of us disembarked, we to
ok the side away from town. We stood there as the train slowly worked its way out. We waited for the caboose to go by so we could cross the tracks into town. My mind harbored but one thought: hurry up and fill that stomach!
When the caboose finally passed, we got a shock. Standing before us, one foot on the running board of an old automobile and one arm cradling a shotgun, was the sheriff of Alpine. At the wheel sat his deputy. "You men stand right where you are! " he ordered. "No need for you to come into town; you're not welcome. You can sit right down there on the track if you like; another train will be along here in about four hours."
What else could we do? With all homes and businesses on the other side of the tracks, we were stymied. The sheriff produced a chair and made himself comfortable where he could keep an eye on us.The deputy backed the car up and headed back toward town. I kept my eyes on the more experienced heads. From the looks on their faces, I could see that they were seriously pondering the situation. One old guy motioned to the sheriff that he wanted to talk. To everything he said, the sheriff shook his head no. "Cow-punching creep," the old guy pronounced quietly as he returned to us. "All I asked was for him to allow a few of us who could afford to buy some bread and baloney to walk to the grocer's. He said no."
Later in the afternoon the wind picked up. A cold breeze swept in from the prairie. We buttoned our coats and pulled up our collars. The sun was sinking fast. Lights appeared in windows in town. The townspeople walked up to the tracks to peer across at us, as if we were on display. It grew dark. Where the hell was that train? I felt like I was starving to death. I'd had enough of this two-bit burg and wanted out. I saw well enough that this demeaning law enforcer expressed the moods and feelings of Alpine's population. I felt like spitting on the whole town.
At last the sound of a train whistle came through the cold night. A few minutes later it chugged into town and stopped. It was a local, going from town to town and picking up cattle cars. Right now 20 open-slatted cars were coupled to the small engine. "Get aboard!" the sheriff shouted. We opened a door and climbed in. The car had been used recently; dung and urine-soaked straw lay three inches deep. The stench was almost unbearable. With every move my arm rubbed against the side of the car where traces of dung still adhered. The train moved slowly out of town, maintaining that slow pace for the next three hours. It stopped once along the way to pick up one car. We huddled together for warmth. The person in the center was best protected. A cigarette, once lighted, quickly went the rounds, its original owner never seeing it again. If there ever was a common bond, this situation surely created it.