Pelican Road

by Howard Bahr

  “It’s Watson, sah. Be June Watson,” said the man. He spat blood, wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve. “A stone would be nice,” he said.

  “Watson,” said the detective, and wrote it down. He moved closer to the man, trying to ignore the smell. “You any kin to Willie Wine?”

  The man’s eyes lit up. “Sweet Willie Wine!” he said. “He my baby brother! You know him, Cap’n?”

  “Yeah,” said Lucas. “Yeah, I know him.” He played the flashlight along the drawbars and couplers, then climbed the ladder and set the hand brake on the B-end car, just to be sure. Beyond that, he could do nothing. His hands were greasy now, but he pressed them to his temples anyway, pressed hard until he saw lights behind his eyes.

  “It sho’ a small world, ain’t it?” said the man. “Here I come all this way, see could I find him, first white police I come across be a friend of his.”

  “Look, you in some deep shit here.”

  “Willie, he all right,” said the man. “He done some bad things, but he ain’t no bad boy. He just need somebody—” The man stopped and drew in a deep, ragged breath. Lucas closed his eyes and waited. In a moment, the man said, “Whew! That was a long way.”

  “Aw, man,” said Lucas, and put his hand against the sill of the car and vomited in the gravel.

  “How come a mockerbird sing at night?” asked June Watson after a moment.

  “’Cause he can, I guess,” said Lucas, though he heard no mockingbird. He heard them often in the spring and summer when he couldn’t sleep, their caroling loud down the quiet streets, a lonesome sound, but not in the deep wintertime. Lucas looked down the road, hoping for headlights. He said, “How come your little brother is so no-account?”

  “He ain’t had a chance to be nothin’ else,” said June Watson.

  “You believe that?”

  “I believe I want another smoke,” June Watson said. “I wants to get in all I can while I can.”

  Lucas lit another cigarette and put it between Watson’s lips. The man sucked at the smoke, and the red tip glowed and hissed. “Mmm,” he said. “Half-and-Half. That’s a premium weed.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time yet to smoke.”

  The other laughed around the cigarette. “You know better,” he said. “Soon’s they uncouple, I’m a dead son bitch.”

  Lucas knew that was so. He had seen two other men caught up like this. One was a switchman who hadn’t paid attention; he had summoned his wife, spoke to her coolly, made her promise to get all she could from the railroad company. The other was a kid maybe fifteen years old. He cried the whole time and fainted when they opened the couplers. They never did get his name, and in seven years nobody had ever called to ask about him. Man and boy, they had lived only a few minutes after they hit the ballast. The sound of the lift lever was their death knell.

  “You gone stay with me?” asked the man in the couplers.

  “I’ll be right here,” the detective said.

  “I want you to do it,” said the man. “I want you to pull the pin.”

  “Aw, man,” said Lucas. “I—”

  “Nah, nah,” said the man. “You the only one I knows. Needs to be somebody I knows.”

  “All right,” said the detective.

  “’Less you want to shoot me first,” said the man. “I wouldn’t mind that.”

  “I ain’t going to shoot you,” said the detective.

  They were silent for a moment. The yard was like a cold slab of iron. Nothing was moving, and no sound but their breathing and the creaking of the cars. Finally, June Watson said, “You hear that mockerbird? I love to hear—”

  “Shut up about that, god dammit,” said Lucas. After a moment, he said, “Look here, you got any folks? Somebody you want us to send for?”

  The man thought a moment. “I got a mama,” he said, “but I wouldn’t want her to see me all like this. Can you find Willie Wine?”

  “Not unless he wants to be.”

  “Well, I know that’s right,” said the man. “He’ll get the news tomorrow, I ’spect.”

  “I’ll make sure he does,” said Lucas, “one way or another.” He would leave word at Wimpy’s Café in Jumpertown, but the truth was, they probably knew already, the word going around in the juke joints and ramshackle houses of the Negro district. Things came to them on the air, Lucas believed, like radio waves.

  “I wisht I had a drink,” said the man around his cigarette, squinting his eyes at the smoke. “A drink’d be a good thing ’long ’bout now. Steady my nerves.”

  Before he thought, Lucas had his bottle out. Now he would have to let the nigger drink. Well, fuck it. He could wash the bottle. When the man had finished his cigarette and spat it out, Lucas reached up and put the bottle to his lips. The man drank, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “Take it all,” said Lucas. He could smell the whiskey where it was dribbling out of the man’s insides and mixing with the blood on his pants legs.

  The man couldn’t drink it all. He started coughing and spitting up blood, and Lucas took the bottle away. He wiped the neck on his shirt sleeve, then tipped it up and drank it dry in one long draught that burned all the way down. Then he flung the bottle into the marsh, heard it splash in the dark water. Lucas waited until the coughing was finished. He put his flashlight on June Watson’s face. The man was grinning, his eyes crossed, the edges of his big white teeth rimmed with blood. “You a good man,” he said. “You awright.” Then his face took on a puzzled look, and he lifted a pointing finger. Lucas felt a tingle in his spine and made himself turn around.

  He thought at first it was an illusion of the uncertain light, a shifting of some vagrant shadow where the dark was rearranging itself. Then he lifted his light and saw that it was the dog. It was dragging its hind legs over the rail, slavering pink foam, the teeth bared and rimmed with blood like the man’s. In the flashlight beam, its eyes gleamed red, and its breath was harsh and wet, coming in long gasps and plumes of mist. Roy Jack Lucas took out his pistol again and emptied it into the broad head. The shots were loud in the silence, echoing off the cars, but even at that, Lucas heard the rounds strike wetly and the skull crack. The dog jerked and trembled and died at last with its muzzle an inch from Lucas’s shoe, and the black blood pooled outward over the gravel.

  “Gahd damn,” said June Watson.

  Lucas’s ears were ringing again. He stood with his pistol against his leg. Steam rose from the bloody rents in the dog as if it were smoldering deep inside like a slag pile. Down the main line, Lucas could see the headlight of the switch engine returning. Lights were turning into the road, too: a car, and another with a swirling red bubble. That would be Hido in the company car, and the ambulance from the Negro funeral home. A third car bumped over the crossing—the coroner, probably. It was unlikely they’d bring a doctor, not for this.

  “It’ll be okay,” Lucas said. “It’ll be jake in a minute.”

  “I know that’s right,” said June Watson. “It be gettin’ cold. You gone stay with me?”

  “Huh?” said Lucas. Then, “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be right here.”

  Watson laughed, then choked again. He put out his hand, the pale palm turned up. “Christmas gif’, white folks,” he said. “I got you. Gimme a penny.”

  “God almighty,” said Lucas.

  “I got you,” said Watson. “C’mon. Little somethin’ to carry across, pay the ferry man with.”

  Lucas dug in his waistcoat pocket, produced a penny, laid it in the open palm. Watson closed his hand around it. “You a good man,” he said.

  “You owe me that, now,” said Lucas.

  * * *

  That was all right, then. Everything was jake, though the cold was settling in him. Pretty soon, a whirling red light was in his eyes, and he couldn’t see a god damn thing. Heard men crunching through the slag, heard their voices, but no words. After a while, words didn’t mean anything anyhow. He tried to listen to what the white police was saying, but again it was no more words than the moc
kerbird singing.

  The switch engine coupled so gently to the east end of the cut that he didn’t feel so much as a nudge. The engine’s headlight was dimmed, but still bright enough to hide the stars above him. That was all right, too—he’d be up there soon enough. He heard the mechanical clank and breathing of the engine, then he heard some words—“I’m gone give you some morphine, boy”—but he couldn’t see the face of the man talking. He felt a little prick in his arm, and a warm feeling ran through his veins.

  The white police had his hand on the lift lever and was looking at him. “Can you hear me, June?” he said.

  “I can hear you,” said June Watson. “Go ahead—pull it.”

  The police jiggled the lever, then turned his head, spoke to a switchman with a lantern. “I need some slack,” he said quietly. The switchman moved his lantern up and down, and the engine gave a little push. The couplers tightened, but it was still all right—no pain, just a squeezing—it felt pretty good, in fact, like an embrace, and June Watson drifted out a long way. When he returned, a mockerbird was perched on the drawbar, little gray and white fellow, flicking his tail, cocking his eye at June Watson. He smiled at the bird, then at the police man. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Goodbye, June,” said the white police.

  “I’ll see you over yonder,” he said.

  The police man nodded. He turned to the switchman. “Back ’em up,” he said, and lifted the lever.

  CHRISTMAS EVE, 1940

  When Mister A.P. Dunn awoke, he had no idea where he was. He knew he had been sleeping, for a vast empty space lay behind him, but he could not say where he slept, nor what dreams he’d had.

  The windows were gray with daylight, the room crowded with the indeterminate shapes of furniture. A telephone rang insistently. Mister Dunn closed his eyes, and a collection of images came to mind like photographs in an album: a radiator with a rope tied to it (“Fire Excape” read the hand-lettered sign) under a window pale with the first light of morning; a threadbare rug, an iron bed, a naked lightbulb dangling from its wire; a gallery overlooking a street. He believed he heard a radiator clanging, and outside, the clash of couplers and the chatter of a switch engine backing under a load. He had seen and heard these things somewhere, evidently, for they seemed a part of him. Then the pictures went away, and the sounds with them. He opened his eyes again and found himself in a different room, a different time, and somewhere a telephone ringing. He sat up and looked around. Here was a sewing machine heaped with cloth, there a chiffarobe, a rocking chair, a wash stand, a green plant on a table by the window. In the fireplace, a gas heater burned with blue flame. The bed where he lay was of wood and fancifully carved, and someone besides Mister Dunn was in it: a woman whose back was turned to him, her gray hair spread across the pillow.

  Mister Dunn rose carefully lest he wake her, and while he sat on the edge of the bed, he thought how he must have been dreaming after all, for it was just last night he met the girl in the café. He tried to think of her name, but could not grasp it. He and the girl took a walk in the late summer night—it was Slidell; he remembered that—and the room must be a hotel room. He searched his mind in vain for a reason why he might be in a hotel. Ah—he had brought the girl here. With that, the shame chilled him. He had dreamt of a long time passing since then, but it was a dream only, for the shame was fresh, and the knowledge of what he had done pressed on him like a stone.

  Then he thought, But her hair was black last night. It was bobbed, too, and that had shocked him even more than her sudden nakedness—he had never felt a girl’s hair like that. He glanced at the woman beside him, thinking it was only a trick of the light, but her hair was gray and grown long. He looked at his hands, translucent and spotted, the knuckles swollen, an old man’s. The summer night was gone, too, and winter was at the window pane. How many seasons had he slept in company with a sin so great it would rob him of life? It’s not fair, he thought, shivering. I didn’t mean to do it.

  Then he understood. Deep in the house behind him, the telephone went on ringing. Mister Dunn knew it was ringing for him. Neither sleep nor sin had robbed him—not of time, at least. He had been living, and now he was old and changed forever. He was not in a hotel, and the woman beside him seemed to belong here. Still the shame pressed on him, heavy as on that distant morning when he woke to find that a girl—whose name he had long since forgotten—had left him in the night and taken all his money with her. It wasn’t fair, he thought. Time should have healed him by now.

  God won’t let you forget, he thought. When A.P. Dunn stood at the final Gate, he would have to answer for it.

  He found a robe and drew it on, and moved across the cold floor, touching the furniture to ensure he was in the right time, whatever it might be. He went to the window and looked out on a blue-gray sky and a silver curtain of sleet. Beyond a privet hedge rose the shape of a white house, windows ablaze with electric light. The smoke from its chimneys was thin and gray and lay flat against the roofline.

  He needed to answer the telephone, but he found it hard to leave the window. He saw an overturned wheelbarrow in the yard and a concrete birdbath glazed with ice. The dull leaves of the hedge were growing heavy with ice, their limbs bowing, and a white powder was collecting among the drifted leaves. It was peaceful, and he thought how he could go out and lie down in the yard and sleep under the ice. Then the woman’s voice rose drowsily behind him.

  “Mister Dunn, the telephone is a-ringing.”

  The words opened a door in his mind. He had heard those same words, in that same voice, almost every day he was home, in all weathers and seasons, since the call boys in Meridian began to use the telephone. They still came to the hotels out on the road, lads in knickers and caps and coats too thin, barging into sleep with their brisk young voices, A.P. Dunn! Call for Engineer A.P. Dunn! Call for 4:30 list on Number fifty-two! Rise up, rise up! But in Meridian they used the telephone now.

  So he was home, he thought, and with that knowledge, all the empty places began to fill up. He was not in Slidell, but in the house he bought before he married, and the wife Nettie he’d lived with for forty years—who never knew he had betrayed her once, and once only—was speaking to him from the dim margins of sleep, and he was a locomotive engineer on the Southern Railway, and the insistent telephone was for him.

  He left the window then, and went out through the door and down the long hall. The telephone was squat and black and sat upon a table under a painting of flowers his daughter Eileen had made. He picked up the horn. “Hello,” he said. “This is A.P. Dunn.”

  In the gray parlor, a Christmas tree sat by the window, looking forlorn with all its lights turned off. Eileen used to love the Christmas tree. She was in Gulfport now, married to a lawyer, and she never wrote nor called on the telephone.

  The call boy’s voice was clear and plain, as if he were standing in the door. Mister Dunn was called for Extra 4512 South at 7:30.

  “Thank you,” said Mister Dunn, and hung up.

  The job was designated an extra so that it might work along the road at will. It appeared on no timetable, and every train had rights over it. Mister Dunn could not have said why he preferred such a job when he could have had almost any on the road. Maybe it was the waiting that appealed to him, though he chafed at times, as he had yesterday at the Pearl River bridge. Waiting made time stretch out longer, and sometimes, when you were old, that seemed to be a good thing, as if you could put off the final call, the one you had to answer no matter what. But you couldn’t put it off. We live way too long anyhow, thought Mister Dunn.

  Shuffling in his robe and worn slippers, he returned to the bedroom. He was all right now. He was in the right time, and he remembered where he was. Anybody could be confused at waking, he thought.

  A set of clean, starched overalls and a clean shirt and cap and neckerchief were laid out on a chair where Nettie had put them the night before, like she always did. Sometimes he wished she wouldn’t, just once. Sometimes he
got weary of the familiar and the predictable.

  On the chiffarobe was his Hamilton watch, the gold worn thin, the porcelain face cobwebbed with tiny cracks. The hands were blue and delicate. It was a model 992, the only watch he ever owned, and for half a century it had never failed him, never lost a minute. The inside back cover was crowded with inspection marks from crotchety old shade-wearing jewelers, some of whom had been dead for three decades.

  The girl in Slidell had taken his money but left him his watch, though it was in plain sight on the bedside table. He had always been grateful to her for that, at least, for he would have been hard-pressed to explain its loss to Nettie. In fact, he would have told her the truth—he had never been able to lie to her. As it was, he didn’t have to say anything at all, which was worse than a lie, or the same thing, he supposed. He had almost told her a hundred times, but he never did, and now he knew he never would.

  Like most people, Mister Dunn had been ruled by time all his grown life. The difference was, citizens structured their days around the mill whistle, the posting of mail, the clock on the office wall, the movement of the sun over the cotton or corn—they painted time in broad strokes, by the hour, by the passage of morning, afternoon, night. For them, a minute more or less had no meaning, the deviation of a man’s watch with his neighbor’s of no consequence. For the railroad men, however, tiny increments of time were the stuff of life and death.

  Men died for a moment lost, or because they were tired and misread a train order in the dark. Time was everything, and trust was everything. You had to pay attention, not only for yourself, but for the other fellow. Graveyards were full of men who were there because they hadn’t paid attention, or because somebody else hadn’t. That’s why you had to do right, for every man had the lives of others in his hands. Still, they were only men, flawed, sometimes hungover, usually tired, often distracted, and the wonder was that someone was not killed every day.