Pelican Road

by Howard Bahr

  He raised his eyes to the east and considered the gray, motionless clouds over the pine tops. No star there, only a stream of blackbirds moving toward the river. Only the birds, and beyond them the unborn sun of tomorrow. For an instant, he was tempted to go back in the store, take the girl by the hand, and lead her out into this barren, bleached oyster-shell yard where the end of day was falling. Look, he would say, and turn her eyes eastward. He would tell her, There is where the new sun will come, and there ain’t many of them before you wake up and find the world has left you behind.

  Mister Dunn spat and wiped his chin and called himself an old fool. Next time, he would stay on the engine. That way, he would never—

  Never what? he thought. The question floated in sudden darkness. Mister Dunn stopped and turned once in a circle, looking around at the lot, the store, the blur of pine trees. Here was an old colored man watching him, there a freight train standing. He was sure it all had something to do with him, but he couldn’t remember. He knew he was supposed to go somewhere, but he didn’t know where. He turned another circle, his hands out for balance.

  “Mist’ Dunn?” said the black man. “Mist’ Dunn, what’s the matter?”

  The engineer stopped turning. “Who are you?” he said. “What you want?”

  “It’s Eddie, sir,” said the black man. “What’s the matter.”

  “Eddie,” he said. “Eddie.” It came back to him then, all of it, the empty places filling up with the shapes he knew. “Nothing,” he said, and went on across the yard. He was halfway to the engine when he heard his name called again, and he turned to see Frank Smith on the gallery.

  Smith put his hands in the hollow of his back and stretched. “We didn’t mean to run you off, A.P.,” he said.

  “You didn’t.”

  Smith nodded. He stood a moment more, watching out as men will do, letting his eyes move across the pines and down the main line toward the bridge. Then he was gone back into the store.

  Like Mister Dunn, Smith had been raised in logging camps deep in the Piney Woods. But Frank Smith had gone to college, then to the Great War, and so developed along a path no one would have expected, least of all Smith himself, a long-haired, compact, handsome man with a hawkish face that might have been an Indian’s. In fact, Smith claimed to be an Indian, and not only that, but one who’d been dead for a hundred years. That always troubled Mister Dunn, for he knew that Indians were pagans, and he knew that only Jesus and Lazarus had come back from the dead, and he wished Smith wouldn’t talk that way. It was even worse when he went on about how many white men he had massacred in his other life. That always made the boys testy.

  Anyway, Frank Smith missed nothing and had an opinion on nearly every subject. He was always reading books nobody else but Artemus Kane ever heard of, and always doing interesting things like flying model airplanes or taking pictures with a Kodak. At home, Mister Dunn had a picture Frank Smith took a year ago: Mister Dunn, Sonny Leeke, Artemus Kane, and Eddie Cox, in their greasy overalls and gloves and watch chains, standing solemnly by the white-trimmed driving wheels of a big Southern freight engine. It was the only time Mister Dunn, at least, had ever had his picture made on the job.

  The brakeman Artemus Kane was born to old money and had never lived in the woods; nevertheless, he seemed to be the only one who understood Frank Smith. Some believed it was because they had both gone to college and been exposed to an unusual, even dangerous, body of knowledge not available to ordinary men. Others thought it was because they had served together as Marines in the Great War, from their training all the way to the Armistice, and so were mutually insane. In any event, no one could figure why they chose to wear themselves out on Pelican Road when they could have paper-collar jobs out of the rain.

  One time, Mister Dunn and Frank Smith were taking supper in the Bon-Ton Café. Smith was sitting sideways in the booth, reading a thin book written by a Chinaman. Mister Dunn said, What is that book about, Frank?

  Smith went on reading. After a moment, he said, It is about how this fellow saw the world a long time ago.

  Mister Dunn thought a moment. He said, I am curious how that would be of much use.

  Smith closed the book, marking his place with a napkin. Well, A.P., he said, it helps me figure out why it is now.

  Why what is? asked Mister Dunn.

  Smith shrugged and waved his hand out the café window, at the lighted streets, the people, the black shapes of automobiles. Why all that is, he said.

  At the time, Smith’s answer seemed overly complicated to Mister Dunn, though the engineer didn’t pursue it, since he made it a rule never to argue theology, if that’s what it was.

  Then, not long after that, they were switching a wood yard south of Hattiesburg when a big thunderstorm came up so quick the men hadn’t the chance to fetch their rain gear. The pines were thrashing in the wind, and the thunder pealed in one unbroken crash over the woods, and lightning was everywhere at once, filling the air with the sharp odor of electricity. Mister Dunn had to stop the engine, for the world was white with rain, and he could no longer see the brakemen nor even the cars they were switching. Then, with the storm at its worst, Frank Smith appeared out of the blinding curtain of rain. He was wet all through, his long hair tangled and his shirt and pants covered with mud where he must have fallen down, but he turned his streaming face to the sky and raised his gloved fists and shouted Fuck you! over and over at the top of his voice. The lightning split a pine tree not fifty yards away, and the thunder cracked and rolled, but Smith just laughed, and turned, and disappeared into the rain again, waving his arms and dancing.

  In that moment, Mister Dunn feared for Frank Smith and expected never to see him again in this life or the next. Yet, when the storm passed, there was the conductor, looking a little tired, leaning on the coupler of a wood rack. He signaled impatiently for Mister Dunn to come ahead as if nothing at all had happened.

  Now Mister Dunn climbed into the cab of his engine, wiping off the grab irons with a rag as he did so—an old habit, for some of the boys were a little careless when they took a leak off the gangway. In a moment, he was in his seat surrounded by the elements of his trade: the throttle and Johnson bar, the whistle and bell cords, the brake lever, sight-glasses and gauges and valves of polished brass, fusees and a box of torpedoes and a red flag. As usual, Eddie Cox had left his tattered King James Bible on his seat, a ritual he observed whenever he got off the engine. In one corner leaned the spike and brush Eddie used to clear the stoker, in another, an umbrella belonging to the head brakeman, Sonny Leeke. On Sonny’s seat cushion lay his greasy White Mule gloves and a Times-Picayune folded to the crossword puzzle. Affixed to the cabin wall was a rack with Mister Dunn’s engraved oil can, a birthday gift from his daughter long ago. In the same rack was Mister Dunn’s medical kit, a box of japanned tin he carried from job to job, since the company didn’t provide one. It held a tube of hemorrhoid ointment, a jar of Vicks VapoRub, Sloan’s liniment, some Mercurochrome, adhesive tape, gauze bandages, a bottle of milk of magnesia, another of Bayer aspirin. These would fix anything short of decapitation or dismemberment. For these last, Artemus Kane had once added to the box a little red paperbacked volume, Catholic Prayer Book for the Marine Corps.

  Eternal rest grant them, O Lord, and let perpetual light

  shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen.

  Mister Dunn did not approve of the Romish book, with its masses and litanies and appeals to the saints, but the dead, he had learned, were ecumenical, and more than once, standing by the roadbed among the smell of overheated brakes, he had read from the little book unashamed while men who claimed no religion at all bowed their heads and were silent.

  Eddie Cox came halfway up the ladder. “Pass me down that fine oil can, would you, sir?” he said.

  Cox was the only fireman, black or white, who was allowed to use Mister Dunn’s personal oil can. Mister Dunn took it from the rack and handed it down. Cox looked at him. “It’s just the winter t
ime,” he said. “Seem like—”

  “Never mind,” said Mister Dunn sharply. “I was thinking about something back there. I guess you never done that?”

  “Well, no, sir,” said Cox, and disappeared down the ladder. He would oil around and check on things. He had a good eye for trouble.

  Mister Dunn settled into his seat again and drew his aching leg up under him. It was getting harder to sit now, for his back hurt all the time. Fifty years ago, A.P. Dunn hired out as a fireman for the Newberry Lumber Company, stoking the wood-burning Shays that crawled back and forth through the plundered woods of Lauderdale County, Mississippi. For the last forty years, he had been an engineer on the New Orleans Northeastern, lately renamed for the Southern Railway, and for all that time he had been sitting—ten, twelve, sixteen hours or more at a time—watching ahead, watching for signals, straining into the dark or the rain for any of the numberless disasters that might lie in his path.

  Frank Smith made his first trip with Mister Dunn just after the war. Some people would let a new man get run over before they offered a syllable of warning or advice. That was not Mister Dunn’s way. He told Smith then, as he told every new man, You can’t be afraid, but you got to be careful. You can’t ever quit paying attention. It ain’t a game, you don’t get a second chance. Smith had listened. So had Kane, who made his first trip with Mister Dunn a few years later. Smith and Kane were different from anyone Mister Dunn had ever known, but they were all right. They were smart. They were brave but careful, and they never quit paying attention.

  The door slammed across the way. Mister Dunn watched the boys walk across the yard: Frank Smith, with a bag of ham and cheese and French bread and canned beans under his arm; Sonny in his lucky red jacket; Dutch Ladner the swing man. Ladner’s nephew Bobby Necaise, the flagman, who was going in the Navy next month, carried the Coca-Colas and a Thermos jug the size of an artillery shell. Young Necaise looked up at a blue jay flying over, and Sonny said something that made the boys laugh. They were all hunched up, for it was sleeting hard now. Mister Dunn heard the pellets sift against the roof of the cab.

  It made Mister Dunn feel better to see his crew approaching, these men he had known and journeyed with, on one job or another, for so long. But the feeling brought a sadness with it, too. They seemed fragile and temporary in the gray light, as if who they were and all they had done could be swept away forever by a word, a gesture, an errant thought. Frank Smith would understand that, and Kane would understand it, surely. But they were all good boys, and every one of them approached mortality in his own way. Some, like Artemus Kane, scoffed at it. The Jews, like Ira Nussbaum, believed it was all they had. Others still relied on God’s design to explain the mystery, and they seemed satisfied even when there was no explanation at all. That was all right if it brought them comfort. For himself, Mister Dunn could no longer see any design except what people themselves made out of the pure clay of time. Most of them did pretty well in the balance, which was surprising, given what they had to work with, and God still watched from somewhere over the pines, grieving for them all, and loving them. In all his years, Mister Dunn had not seen anything to make him quit believing that, at least. That was the value of remembering, Mister Dunn supposed. It was what the soul was made of.

  Mister Dunn pulled his watch. The fifteen minutes were gone, fallen away toward evening with all the other moments of his life. He was not surprised to hear southbound Number 5, the Silver Star, right on time, racketing over the Pearl River bridge. Mister Dunn saw that the girl Allison had come out on the porch to watch the passenger train go by, perhaps to dream that she was on it. He thought, It is too cold for her out here. Then he rose and moved across the deck plates. He knelt in Eddie’s seat and leaned out the window, his knees against the Bible. Eddie came up and joined him in the window; the others stood down by the pilot, drawing together against the cold. Mister Dunn rolled down the rain curtain, and he and Eddie rested their arms on the window cushion and watched the Silver Star make her appearance up Pelican Road.

  Like her namesake, she was first a light glittering against the pines, a moving tremor of light on the rails. Then she was on them, blowing for the crossing. The handsome locomotive, shining like green glass, seemed to lean forward in her haste, rocking on her springs, with a clean hot fire and no smoke from her stack, just a pigtail of steam whirling from the pop-off valve, whipped away by the speed of her going, then another from the whistle as she spoke two short notes in greeting. Mister Dunn lifted his hand.

  That close, and at such a speed, a passing train is not seen so much as remembered: a blur of images that the mind retains, though the eye is too slow to follow. Mister Dunn caught the fireman Jean Chauvin’s gloved hand thrust out the cab window in greeting. He saw the streak of the long, lighted coach windows and the blurred faces of strangers behind them; the baggage man, Miles Duvall, at his open door; and Artemus Kane. The brakeman Kane, in his blue overcoat, collar turned up, leaned far out the opened top half of a vestibule door. Artemus shouted something at the boys, his arm extended. The train was gone in an instant, pulling its own sound swirling behind it, and the twin marker lamps were gone down the gray afternoon, all gone but for the image of Artemus Kane’s face, his hand reaching toward Mister Dunn through the sleet as if sleet meant no more to him than the dust that swirled in their summer passage.

  Then silence, a moment when there was no sound at all; then the breathing of the locomotive again and the voice of Frank Smith as he passed under the window: “When you’re ready, Mister Dunn.”

  In a little while, the passing track was empty. No movement, only the cold steel rails and the gray slag, the lamp of the switch target glowing brighter as the daylight failed. The gallery was empty, too, for the girl had gone inside again. The sleet pattered for a while longer, then stopped, leaving a fine powder on the needles of the pines and in the folds of the newspaper. From far away, the shrieking whistle of Mister Dunn’s train drifted across the pines, carrying a long way as such a sound would in the wintertime.

  CROSSING OF THE WATERS

  The Silver Star hurried southward, tunneling through the sleet. Artemus Kane lingered in the vestibule of the coach James River, though he had no official reason for staying where he was. He had come out here to observe Frank Smith’s train in the siding at Gant’s. Now the train and all the men with it were far behind, and nothing remained for Artemus to see but the roadbed racing by and the Piney Woods—oaks among them this far south, and cypress in the marshy places—marching past on either side, intersticed by deep and mysterious shadow.

  Artemus gripped the door ledge with both hands, the steel like a blade of ice under his thin leather dress gloves. Beneath him, the coach swayed elegantly, and the wheels hammered over the rail joints. Artemus was forty-five years old; his hair was beginning to gray and was, at the moment, too long for regulation. The polished visor of his pillbox cap—navy blue, piped in gold—was pulled low over eyes that girls could never tell the color of: sometimes hazel, sometimes brown, depending on the light. He had an angular face that absorbed the shadows and was sculpted by them. It was wrinkled around the eyes from too much squinting, too much laughing, and was marred by a glazed star-like scar on each cheek, the result of an unusual wounding early in the battle for the Bois de Belleau. Artemus, a rifle squad leader, was walking along, shouting at somebody, or giving an order, or maybe just yawning—he could never remember—when a German private, helmetless, coatless, rose up from a shell hole and fired at him with a .22 revolver. The ball passed tidily through his cheeks, leaving his tongue and teeth intact, a lucky shot for Artemus, but not for the German boy, who must have been terrified or crazy. In any event, he made no move to surrender and was taking aim again when Artemus’s brother, Gideon, blew him apart with a Winchester Model 12 pump shotgun.

  On that long-vanished day, Artemus had worn a khaki blouse—Marines in the line were forbidden their distinctive forest-green tunics—and khaki wool pants, puttees, a steel helmet, clu
msy hob-nailed shoes, and all his accouterments, including an M-1903 Springfield rifle and a 1911 Colt .45. Today, Artemus wore a different uniform. The Southern Railway company had issued him a long, tailored navy blue overcoat to protect him from the bitter cold of the Louisiana winter; he wore it now with the collar turned up, buttoned to the neck by nine fire-gilt buttons, each bearing the name of the railway company. Under this fine garment, he wore a navy blue uniform jacket with smaller buttons, collar insignia, and gilt service marks on the sleeve; a waistcoat with his watch chain draped across the front; and trousers hung correctly over his polished black high-topped shoes. His accouterments today were a greasy timetable, a company lock key, a box of matches, a pack of Picayune cigarettes, and a pearl-handled Mexican switchblade presented to him by his friend Roy Jack Lucas, a railroad policeman. Lucas had taken the knife from the body of a murderous rider called Jubela after Hido Schreiber, Roy Jack’s partner, had removed Jubela from company property, and thence from life, with a shotgun of the exact model Gideon used in France.

  In short, Artemus Kane cut a swell figure in the darkening vestibule, though no one was around at the moment to remark upon the fact. This was an empty stretch of country, unrelieved by field or cabin, and the evening was fast closing over it, pulling it away into night so that it might have been any place, or no place at all. Still Artemus, who had ridden Pelican Road for eighteen years, knew where he was by the shape of the land around him. He did not have to look at the mile markers that slipped past like little tombstones, or the tin numbers nailed to the telegraph poles, to know where he was.

  The remainder of the universe, however, was less certain in his mind. Though he believed in them, he was sometimes unsure of the spaces that lay beyond what he could see. Once he had thought of them as silent and still, suspended in a blue-gray twilight like the one that was closing around him now. Lately, he saw them as a vast arena of activity where nothing was ever lost, where present and past were happening all at once, a confusion of events that spilled over now and then into whatever place he happened to be standing at the moment. Such was the case now as he thought of the meet below Pearl River. He believed that what he had seen there might only be grasped if he remained in the vestibule amid the cold and sleet that was its context and continuum.