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 bindle stiff, 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 knucks, 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.
“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, nibbl
ed 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 where 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, tip 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.
“Goddamn 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!”
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