by Jim Tully
I began talking to my new-found companion. “We’d better beat it, ’Bo. The coach is in the middle of the train.”
“I know, I know,” he jerked back nervously, “let’s go.” We glided over the ground softly, stooping low, as if to take the weight from our feet. At last we stood panting between two cars opposite the coach. A lantern moved toward us.
We held our breath as it drew nearer. The swinger of it stopped within five feet of us. He held the lantern aloft and looked at the platform of the passenger coach. Had he listened close, he might have heard our hearts beat. They pounded loud in the silence.
Just at the moment, the coach was the most desired thing in my life. Years later, I delayed a journey because I could not get a Pullman berth. But here I was ready to knock a man out that I might ride on faded seats, in a dirty passenger car considered unfit for service on a third-class railroad. Of proverbs, rolling hackneyed down the ages, the truest of all is that “necessity knows no law.”
The carrier of the lantern turned halfway around, and the light threw shadows between the cars. We stood as still as the rails beneath us. We could see the outline of the man’s face and the corduroy cap on his head. He seemed nailed to the ground.
At last, whistling softly, he walked on between the cars in the direction of the caboose. After he was several car lengths from us, we darted on the platform of the coach. I looked up and down the other side of the train. A man stood near the caboose with a lantern. I watched him a moment. Presently the lantern “high-balled” a signal to the engine, and the air was applied. Two short whistles from the engine, the train jerked, and was on its way.
My companion tried the door. It held fast. He jerked out a key that grated in the lock. As the train sped by the lighted streets, he succeeded in opening the door. We crept inside.
The street lights flared across the seats. To our surprise, nearly every one of them contained a hobo. Some smoked, others talked, and some held their hands above their eyes and gazed out at the passing landscape.
My companion hurried to the other end of the car, and, saying no word, twisted himself in corkscrew fashion on an empty seat, and was soon grunting and snoring.
A hobo got up and tried the door, which we had left unlocked. He fastened it from the inside. “Them guys musta thought they has their fares paid,” he grunted aloud.
I doubled up on a seat, and fell to wondering about my companion. I had heard of the daring of dope-fiends. He had a railroad key. I soon fell asleep.
A mumble of voices awoke me. It was broad daylight. The train pounded steadily over the rails as I rubbed my eyes and looked at the life-distorted faces of the men in the car.
They belonged to vagrants of all ages. There was one boy not much older than myself. His cheeks were hollow. He looked out of the window, listless, and oblivious of the passing scenery without, or the noise of the men within.
I watched him as he rose and walked to the water tank. There was no water. He swore at his luck.
A hobo sneered, “Yer wants service, huh? You got the wrong train.”
“Shut yure head,” flashed back the boy. “The flies’ll crawl in.” He returned to his seat, and fell to coughing.
Attracted by his age, boylike, I walked over to him.
“Where are we?” he asked indifferently.
“I don’t know,” I answered, and then shouted his question through the car.
“Runnin’ into San Antone. They switched us on a faster rattler down the line. We’re luckier’n tramps with hot biscuits an’ java.”
“The grades ’re gittin’ heavier too,” said another tramp.
We stopped at a small station and remained for some time. We pulled the curtains down, and sat speechless and quiet in the dark car.
A man tried the door knob. He stamped upon the coach platform for a short time, and went away. We heard his footsteps on the ground along the car.
When they died away, we breathed easier again. The train started. “Gosh, that was a close call. I’d hate to git ditched here,” said a tramp.
After we reached the open country, the curtains were pulled up. No man had even the cheapest watch. I judged from the position of the sun that it was nearly noon. It seemed I had been a week on the train. It could not have been more than twenty hours.
“I wish I had a drink of water,” murmured the youth.
“We’ll be in San Antonio before long. They’ll put this car off there, sure,” I said.
My companion of the night before kept aloof from the rest of the bleary gathering, and contented himself by talking aloud to people of his fancy who flew along with the train.
The men moved back and forth in restless manner. Some read old newspapers over and over again. Four men played poker with a dirty deck of cards, with matches and toothpicks for stakes. Another amused himself by cutting his moniker on the window sill. When he had finished, he stood up and admired it like an artist. An arrow was cut through the letters of his name. It pointed west, and denoted the direction in which he was travelling. The month and the year of the trip were cut beneath the name. These monikers are cut, written, or printed on water tanks and other places where hoboes gather. They form a crude directory for other tramps who might be interested in the itinerary of their comrades. Once in a while a tramp sees such a moniker of a friend and starts in the direction of the owner.
Growing tired of the youth, I walked back to my companion of the night before. He looked displeased, like a decrepit fanatic disturbed in prayer. He became more friendly after he had finished talking to an imaginary person who perched above him.
Late in the afternoon we reached San Antonio, and scampered out of the car as it came to the edge of the yards.
I hurried away across the tracks with the man of visions.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE MAN OF VISIONS
CHAPTER XXVI
THE MAN OF VISIONS
WE hurried through the sleepy streets of San Antonio as though our lives depended on our arriving at a certain destination in a given length of time. I had no idea what the hurry was all about, but asked no questions.
My companion mumbled several times, “Student, ain’t you, Kid?” People stared at us as we passed them, and no wonder. My companion walked in a peculiar manner, jerking and jumping as he stepped with frenzied feet.
He was in the middle thirties, a thin and wasted figure of a man, with yellow skin on his bones. His trousers were torn in zigzag fashion in many places, through which hairy skin showed. A large safety pin fastened his blue shirt over his breast. On one foot he had a button shoe, and on the other a shoe which laced. It was fastened with a white cord. His hair had once been black, but it was now streaked grey and straggled.
We came to a cheap drug store. “I know a guy here,” he said, then tersely aside to me, “Wait.”
I walked down to the next corner and waited. Presently he came toward me, the back of his right hand rubbing his left nostril. I noticed his face had a keener expression on it. He walked along with me as before, and still mumbled the same sentence, this time adding another word, “Hungry! Student, ain’t you, Kid!” The youngster on the road is called a student by many of the older tramps. This is an appropriate name. For he attends a hard and ever changing school.
Feeling that the tramp had money, and that I might be saved the necessity of begging at back doors for food, I remained with him, and hopefully waited.
We passed one restaurant, and then another, but the man apparently did not see them. We stopped in an alley while he nervously twitched his muscles and contracted his right hand until the fingers were closed and the thumb stuck out rigid, forming a hole between it and the first finger. With incredible speed, he put a preparation in the hole and breathed it into his nostrils with frenzy, his eyes rolling as his head circled around.
Never having spoken more than a mumbled sentence at a time, he now began talking more fluently.
We passed another restaurant, but food was not considered
by the man whose mind was rolling through infinite space. I stopped and said, “Listen, I’d like to get a feed.” The man looked alarmed for a minute and hesitated. In desperation, I clutched his forearm. He yelled, “Ouch! Don’t do that,” and rubbed the arm beneath his sleeve. It was purple and festered and full of holes made by a hypodermic needle.
We entered the restaurant where I ordered food. The man looked on, mumbling, “My name’s Peter. I am one o’ the twelve. Student, ain’t you, Kid?”
He rattled a dollar on the counter, and I picked up the change. The waiter busied himself with some tables in the rear, and I, well fed, was in the mood to talk.
I asked the man several questions, and received disjointed answers. Finally, I said, “Have you got any folks living!”
He answered tersely, “Nope,—wife dead, all dead,—hope dead.”
Then suddenly, placing his head near me, he said, “Listen, shh! shh! I’ll tell you somethin’ if you don’t tell no one. I’m St. Peter. I betrayed Him. I denied Him. I stay on the road so’s He won’t find me. When I hear roosters crowin’, it makes me think of Him. I did Him a dirty trick, an’ He was a good guy. They tell you I was the first Pope. That’s the bunk. The first Pope was a Jew. He run a hock shop in Rome. Be quiet though. If they knew I told you, they’d ditch me off every train goin’.”
He ran his claw-like hands through his grey streaked hair, and then pointed at the ceiling. “See them stars up there. I fixed them where they are. It was some job. I knew God when He was a kid. We went to school together. He was all right till He bought the world,—then He got the swell head. I worked with Him ’leven hundred years gittin’ the sky fixed up. We raised the world up on big derricks. It sunk in one place and God got His foot caught under it. Hurt it bad. He swore like hell. We used two oceans of glue stickin’ the stars in. We had an airplane longer’n a railroad. We shot the stars out of the airplane with a big cannon eighty-eight miles long. We sailed a thousand miles a minute, and God sure could whiz that ship around. Once His whiskers caught in the propeller. It darn near fixed us.
“We had a good time when we wasn’t workin’, though. We knew a lot of girl angels that come sailin’ over to us on clouds. We lived in a peach of a house. Red lilies and purple grass an’ everything around it.
“I got sore at God one time. I wanted to draw a million dollars to get a pint of booze with. He turned me down after I’d worked a whole day for it. So I quit Him cold and started to get even by buildin’ a big bowl out of lumber right inside the sky. I wanted to shut out the light from His little old earth, just to show Him He couldn’t bamboozle me that way. I sure got a bunch of lumber for the job. I started to shut out the sun and moon too.
“We sure had a time gettin’ the sun up there. We kept it in cakes of ice bigger’n Texas, an’ she’d sizzle ’em right up.
“I talked to God when I was half through, an’ He said, ‘All right, old boy, I’ll let you go to it, but just remember, I’m God. I’ve built a lot of little old worlds like this one, and you can’t slip nothing over on me. I can roll the mountains under you like little balls. I can make them shrivel like a kid’s marble, and go whirlin’ around like specks of dirt. I don’t bother about plannin’ things. I just get world started and turn people loose in them, hatched out of monkey eggs. Then I watch them for the fun of the thing. I’ve seen a million worlds go to hell in my time. They had generals and poets and statesmen that thought they were the whole works. I snapped my fingers—Bingo!—Zooey!—Where’s the big men of fifty thousand years ago? Go to it, old kid. You won’t get far.’
“I had Him worried though, for I kept pluggin’ along, and was about all done. Everywhere you looked, you could see boards, and the sun peekin’ through the cracks. She was gettin’ darker down below, and I was sure workin’ up high.
“The people kept shriekin’ for light, but God couldn’t give ’em none. I even saw Him laughin’ at them.
“Finely, they sent big airships up after me, but I’d watch the men freeze, and the ships turn white with cold and go shootin’ down like snowflakes. A lot of other airplanes followed till it looked like a snowstorm, and God comes bumpin’ over to me on a green cloud trimmed in pink, and said, ‘Good God! What the devil are you doin’?’ You’ve got to figger it would take a thousand years to get up to me. Big eagles flew at me with wings longer’n a train, and beaks that twisted around, big as a ship. They was afraid of my hammer. Lots of men a hundred feet long flew around without heads too. And comets! Say! you never saw no fireworks like them. The stars whizzed aroun’ like lightnin’ bugs. One time two of them bumped into each other and sparks flew bigger’n houses on fire.
“When I had the sky about all nailed up, God was almost cryin’. His beard was blowin’ in the breeze a mile long. Then He bumped into me on a cloud, and I rapped my thumb with the hammer and started to fall—and all the way down, for a hundred years, I saw little pieces of whitelike frozen airplanes sailin’ all aroun’ me.”
An engine whistled. “Well, so long,” yelled the man who worked with God, as he dashed out of the place, and ran like a madman toward the yards.
CHAPTER XXVII
A WOMAN REMEMBERED
CHAPTER XXVII
A WOMAN REMEMBERED
MISERY crawls to misery for the reason that it can crawl nowhere else… . That it gains solace thereby is rather an uneven possibility.
I lived much among the women of looser sex in my youth because I was able to obtain a certain amount of understanding from them, and as understanding is near to sympathy, the latter also.
Rabbit Town was that section of St. Marys where men only went at night. It consisted of some frame houses furnished with tawdry attempts at finery. Edna lived in one of these houses.
Edna was not quite eighteen. She had been seduced by her own father at fourteen and then an older brother carried on the work. She had a very low opinion of men.
Edna was beautiful. Her hair shone like yellow corn silk in the sun. Her eyes were a deep and vivid brown and they contrasted strangely with her yellow hair which she often wore unbraided down her back. She was slender, and moved with the grace of a fawn. She had a strong sex appeal, the only extenuating circumstance for the degenerate father and brother. When men enter the bawdy houses of the middle west, a bell is rung, and the girl inhabitants file in that the male may have his choice. Edna appealed so strongly to many men that the landlady, not wishing to work a faithful animal to death, as it were, would often keep her back, or, in many cases charge two dollars for her services instead of one.
Edna had shot her father and wounded her brother in a state bounding Ohio. Neither is Edna her first name, as I still like her, and would do no one thing to injure her getting along in a social system that is full of prudes and prudence.
Edna had never read a book that I know of, though I read paper-bound copies of Sappho and Camille to her, and later, From the Ballroom to Hell, by some hell of a writer.
But Edna had a certain gift. It was the gift of wonder. She wondered about everything—about the sun and the moon and why the world was round, and how we happened to be here and who God’s father was, and if he worked for a living. She was a sophisticated and charming young person, and was one of the few underworld women I ever met who was not a sentimentalist.
She kept me in affluence for some months, such as it was. She earned about one hundred and fifty dollars a week, but the landlady took half of that amount. Then Edna had other expenses, the heaviest among them being a thousand dollars which she owed to the lawyer who had secured her acquittal on the charge of murder. She sent twenty five dollars to this man every week. Edna was soft spoken. Her voice was well modulated, and she never became angry. Her mother was dead, and Edna had kept house for the father and brother. She was naturally kindly and responded to kindness from the vilest sinner. She seemed to have taken the men’s sex desire for fatherly and brotherly affection.
At fifteen she ran away to——in a delicate condition. She went to
a hospital and told the head nurse of her condition, as she wanted to talk to a person of her own sex. That woman heard the story and said tersely, “I’d shoot ’em both if it was me!”
Edna replied, “I think I will!”
She worked in the hospital until it was time for her confinement. The baby came, opened its eyes two or three times, and went away again. Edna was nearly strangled with grief.
The great-hearted head nurse held the broken young mother in her arms and said, “Shoot them, God damn them!”
Edna left the hospital in five weeks. The head nurse loaned her twenty-five dollars, which she paid back. She bought a little blue revolver and returned to her father’s house.
She walked alone, a worn and tired little blonde girl to the grave of her mother at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Over that grave the child knelt while the sun turned the green of the mountains brown.
“Mother,” she said, “I hope you can see me, I’m going to kill your man!” She sat there among the ragweeds and withered geraniums that covered the grave until the sun rolled behind the mountains. Her father would be home from work at six. It was time to go.
As everybody knew her in the town her walk homeward was somewhat retarded. “Gee, you’ve been away off to Cincinnati, hain’t you, Edna!” “Yes,” replied Edna, “I’ve been much farther than that!”
“My, it must be great to travel,” said the woman all unknowing, as Edna walked on.
An ancient cat met her at the gate, and rubbed against her well-shaped ankles, remembering. She entered the house without knocking. Her father was preparing the evening meal. He leaned over the kitchen stove with a skillet in his hand. Her brother sat peeling potatoes on a stool nearby.
She looked about the kitchen. The father turned, in surprise at seeing her, and died the next moment. Two bullets ripped through his brain, and he fell across the hot stove and rolled on the floor.