Pelican Road

by Howard Bahr

  Artemus has perceived this in Gideon’s work, how restless it is, and full of movement, but he has never understood how the effect was achieved. He looked closer, a little humbled, a little jealous, trying to see it through the girl’s eyes.

  Gideon has crowded his streets and sidewalks with people. Their faces, black and white, are animated, their garments bright splashes of color, their gestures arrested in time, but just barely, as if everything were about to shift, as if the composition itself was about to change.

  Can you hear it? asked Anna Rose. She took Artemus by the arm and guided him close to a busy street slanted on an easel. Listen, she said. Do you hear that? It’s the hardest thing to do, making sound where there should be no provenance of sound, just paint or clay or words on the page. She frowned then. That’s hard for me, writing, she said. It’s hard to make it live so you can hear it.

  One painting is different from the rest, quickly done, and loosely. In it, the sky is white, the shadows stark. A railroad boxcar in three-quarter wedge, slightly canted, sits by itself on a yard track in a pool of dark cinders. The air hoses hang correctly, the knuckle is rusty, brake chain slack, and the lettering on the car, and the chalk markings, are indistinct but exact, like the eye might catch them if the car was in motion. The light glances off the rail and the roof walk and the circle of the brake wheel, but it is a neutral light, and everything in the painting is still, and there is no sound.

  Look at this one, Artemus said. I was there when he did it. He set up his easel right in the yard and would of got run over if it wasn’t for me. What do you see?

  You tell me this time, she said.

  Artemus lit his pipe, and the cloud of rank smoke swirled across the painting like ground fog from the marshes. He said, There was a hundred cars in the yard that day, but he chose this one and cast it apart from all the others. He got it just right, but he altered the universe for it.

  Why you think he did that?

  Artemus pondered a moment, feeling a little stupid. Finally, he said, It’s what he saw, what he wanted to see.

  Yes, she said. It’s about something different. This one is about somebody. Maybe about him. Maybe you.

  What? said Artemus. I am a stranger to you, he thought. What makes you say that? he asked.

  We are the only reason to do any art at all, she said. To do anything at all.

  They left the paintings then, and Anna Rose sat on the pillows and took off her shoes and stockings, lifting each leg just a little, a simple, thoughtless, graceful act, ordinary and beautiful. You got an ashtray? she asked, and Artemus found a china cup with a smudge of dried coffee in the bottom. He gave it down to her. Thanks, she said, and lit her cigarette.

  * * *

  It is a little while before she speaks again. The only light comes from a fanciful lamp, a Nubian hermaphrodite bent gracefully backward and holding in her palms the globe of the moon. By its lumination, Anna Rose’s face, when she lifts it, is small and sharply planed, fragile even with the broken nose, the dark crescents under the eyes. The black curls of hair along the nape of her neck are damp with sweat. When she speaks, her voice is barely audible over the rain.

  I was going to stay home this afternoon, she says. I went walking instead. I didn’t know I was going anywhere until I got here.

  That often happens to people, he says.

  She smiles at that, but the smile drops quickly away. She says, Before it rained, the sun was just under the clouds, like in the paintings. Maybe that’s why I went, because it was a soft day, because it smelled like rain but I thought it wouldn’t rain. People were everywhere in the street, and all their voices were crowded together, and music—the pie lady was singing, a guy was playing a horn. You know what I mean?

  Yes, says Artemus.

  Anna Rose waves her hand. She says, The sun touched everything, all the green leaves and the buildings and the people’s faces. The light made me want to cry, it was so perfect. I thought…I looked out and I knew I had to be in it. If I could just get into the light, then it would touch me, too, I thought. I would be there in the middle of time, like all those people, and I would see everything the way they do, and I would feel something.

  Her voice is drowsy now, and she has turned her head toward the window. All those people, she says.

  She yawns then, and lies back on the pillows. Artemus is no longer pacing, the pipe has gone cold in his hand. He waits for her to speak again, but she is sleeping now, curled on her side, her legs drawn up.

  In a corner of the studio is a still life that Gideon has set up for his students: oranges, a pomegranate, a clay pitcher laid out on an ample square of muslin. Artemus sets the arrangement aside, shakes out the cloth, and spreads it over the girl. She stirs and takes the edge of it in her hand and pulls it to her chin.

  Artemus watches for a long time. He paces to the window, to the door, around the canted easels, all quiet lest he waken her and she leave. He turns off the lamp after a while, and when his eyes adjusts, he finds Anna Rose nearly vanished in deep shadow. He sits down on an overstuffed sofa, among fringed pillows and damask throws, in company with a pair of tabby cats who reluctantly make way for him. Anna Rose snores lightly and talks now and then in her sleep: a name he does not know, a phrase he cannot decipher. He listens to the rain, listens to the oak leaves brushing the window pane, and as he drifts into sleep at last, he understands what Gideon meant in the hospital long ago.

  * * *

  Now he had known her across seven seasons. By now, he should not have been able to abide the touch of her naked foot under the covers. He should be lying in the bed rigid as a plank. Usually, he could count on three months to the moment when he discovered that the person he desired so ardently yesterday was the last one he wanted to see today, and the voice so lately musical was discord now, like the screeching of a parrot.

  He sat carefully upright and looked at the girl beside him. She was sleeping with her eyes half-open, which always made him uneasy. At such times, he listened closely to assure himself she was breathing. It was a foolish thing, but he was afraid he could lose her that way, afraid Hecate would steal her away in the dark.

  He stood up then, and suddenly there was his own shadowy self in the mirror of the dressing table. He was going a little paunchy around the middle, but he was still trim enough, he thought. For a while, Artemus had the notion that surely the Corps would take him back for the new war—he was, after all, an experienced rifleman—and he could return to the Land of France and smite the Hun all over again. Only they didn’t call them Huns now, did they? The god damned Krauts, thought Artemus. All that trouble, and they hadn’t whipped them after all.

  He moved closer to the mirror, and in the dim lumination of the streetlamp considered his face. He touched the pale scars, first one, then the other. Too old, Artemus, he told himself. The Marine recruiter had made that plain to him and Frank Smith when, not long ago, they had gone to see about reenlisting. Try the Army, the man had said. They take old guys like you. That was funny, considering the recruiter was older and fatter than either of them.

  When Anna Rose found out he had tried to reenlist, she did not bother to ask Why. She called him a god damned fool and would not speak to him for three days.

  Now Anna Rose moved restlessly and frowned. “I’m cold,” she said in her sleep, and Artemus lifted her leg back on the bed, and crossed her arms over her breasts, and pulled her grandmother’s knitted afghan to her chin. “Thanks,” she said, and murmured a name Artemus did not know. Artemus didn’t hold that against her; he had plenty of names she didn’t know either. Everyone did, he supposed, and it was nothing to worry over. He put on his robe then and turned up the gas heater. The apartment had no stove, but no matter. Anna Rose couldn’t cook anyway, or wouldn’t, which was all right with Artemus, who cared little for eating. There was a hot plate, however, and Artemus turned it on and watched the coil glow red. He started a brew of coffee in the glass percolator. When the water began to boil, Artemus m
oved quietly over the worn Turkish carpet. He eased open the jalousies, eased open a window—wincing at the sash weights clanking in their grooves—and stepped out on the gallery. The cold slapped him, and he drew the robe close. He lit a Picayune and drew on it, exhaled and watched the smoke drift away with the vapor of his breathing, watched it mingle with the heavy fog.

  He tried to fix things for Anna Rose—a leaky sink, a door that wouldn’t close, a shorted-out lamp. He had broken things, too, like the original percolator that he threw against the chimney breast, like the slats in the jalousies that he put his fist through one night. During these episodes, Anna Rose watched him without a word. Sometimes afterward, when he was calmed down and feeling foolish, she would tell him to leave, though she never made him leave. Sometimes she would ask him what he was mad at. To this, he never gave an answer. The one thing she never did was cry. In any event, Artemus had bought a new percolator and replaced the slats and oiled the hinges of the jalousies so they wouldn’t wake Anna Rose if he opened them, though she always woke anyhow.

  * * *

  In the late summer, on a night too hot for sleep, Artemus stands naked in the open window, smoking. He can feel the sweat run down his back and down the inside of his legs. The ceiling fan is useless, and no breeze comes from the river. Across the street, a door opens in a rectangle of yellow light, and a man steps out on the gallery, his black bow tie undone around his neck, his white tuxedo shirt stained dark under the arms. The man leans on the iron balustrade for a moment, then straightens and lights a cigarette. His hair is slicked and parted in the middle, and it gleams like wax in the match’s flare. His face, shiny with sweat, is pale and bloodless as a painted doll’s. He looks across the narrow space of the street, but if he sees Artemus, he gives no sign. The red tip of his cigarette raises and lowers, and the blue smoke drifts away.

  Artemus hears the whisper of the mosquito barre, hears the bedsprings squeak when Anna Rose gets up. He says, I’m sorry. You ought to be asleep.

  She comes to stand behind him. Her damp breasts brush against his back, and her arms slip around him. There is no fog this night; otherwise she would not have come near the window. Anna Rose hates the fog. It’s too hot, she says. I can’t sleep.

  He steps back a little, taking her with him. Who’s the sheik yonder? he says.

  Anna Rose peers over his shoulder. Oh, he’s a horn player out by one of the clubs on the lake, she says. He’s married, and right now he’s thinking about what a shitty life he’s got.

  Artemus laughs, a little. Across the way, the man jumps at the bark of a woman’s voice behind him. He shakes his head and arcs his cigarette out into the street, then goes back through the door and slams it shut. Anna Rose says, Be glad you ain’t him.

  I used to be him, says Artemus.

  Not any more, says Anna Rose.

  Artemus turns and pulls her close against him with his hand tight against the back of her neck. He hears himself speak, and all at once he is talking about the fog, though there is no fog. It is the bloodless man across the street, maybe, the way he moved like a marionette. Artemus tells about how the fog crawled over the wheatfields in France and shrouded the wounded, and how their cries rose out of it, and men moved through it like phantoms. He tells her how, sometimes when he is flagging in the Piney Woods, the fog creeps up over the roadbed, and the distant markers of his train gleam like the eyes of a watchful beast. Anna Rose listens, her arms tight around his neck, her cheek pressed to his breast, until he is quiet.

  * * *

  Tonight, there was a fog. When the Silver Star backed into Basin Street Station, Artemus was on the rear platform, watching for Anna Rose. He was nervous, jittery, still hearing the dog lunging against its chain in the dark. He found Anna Rose in the crowd, and when she saw his face, she said no word but only pressed herself against him, her hand closing on his lapel. They took supper in the lunchroom, then went over to Immaculate Conception and lit candles for the dead. All the while, Anna Rose kept hold of him, and all the way back to her flat on St. Peter Street. Anna Rose was built for speed, not comfort, but tonight she made love quietly, the whole time watching him, clinging fiercely to him, making small sounds. Her eyes never closed, never left his face, even as she came, and afterward she would not let him go. Don’t you leave me alone, she said, over and over. Don’t you leave me alone yet. Not yet.

  I don’t mean to leave you at all, he said.

  You will one day, she said.

  Everybody leaves one day, said Artemus. You will leave one day.

  No, I won’t, she said, and turned away from him.

  Now, hours later, Artemus stood at the window. The foggy street, the river, Anna Rose’s little flat, all were gone strangely quiet in the turning of night to day. In that moment, Artemus could hear the blood in his ears, and he thought maybe this is what death was like—silence and fog, scattered halos of light, an eternal suspended moment in which the universe, paused and breathless, waits for something to happen.

  Frank Smith believed that all of time ran together and that nothing was ever lost. The spirit was not lost, he claimed, but lived on in the shadows of tomorrow, just as it lived in the shadows of the past.

  For a long time, Artemus disagreed, arguing that everything died. Values and manners and ways of life would die. Love died, and youth. Churches and religions must pass away—Christianity must die, and Islam, and every other creed—and one day the earth itself would turn dark and icy and roll away toward the disc of the perished sun. Meanwhile the spirit, if there was a spirit, was lost.

  Not so, argued Frank Smith. Something essential would remain always, he said, even in the final emptiness. He looked at Artemus. Why else would you light candles in a church? he said.

  Because Anna Rose believes in it, replied Artemus.

  They were sitting on a flat car waiting for the engine to return, sitting in the glow of their bug-swirled lanterns in the heat of a Louisiana midnight. Smith said, All right, try to imagine the universe without you in it.

  I can do that, said Artemus.

  No, you can’t, said Smith.

  So Artemus thought about it. He pictured in his mind a street, people in a picture show, cows grazing in a pasture, all in the future. I can do it, he said.

  No, you can’t, said Smith. You are seeing everything through your own eyes, in a way that nobody but you sees them. You are there right along. You are a spirit, you see.

  Now, looking out at the quiet street, Artemus could easily imagine the darkness active with striving shadows. No one ever finished his business, he thought. No one ever got it right. Certainly Artemus Kane had never got it right, nor ever would. No wonder the spirit remained. No wonder he saw apparitions.

  “Who you talking to?” said Anna Rose in a sleepy voice harsh from the night’s cigarettes. Artemus winced again. He hadn’t meant to be speaking aloud.

  “Frank Smith,” he said, and backed inside and closed the jalousies quickly.

  She pulled the afghan up to her chin. “Do you always talk to Frank when he’s not around?”

  “That’s the only time I can get a word in edgewise,” he said. He sat on the bed. The room smelled of coffee now.

  She backed up against the headboard, drawing the afghan with her. Artemus shook out a Picayune, tapped it on his thumbnail, and put it between her lips. In the flare of the match, her face was lined with shadow. Artemus brushed a curl of hair from her forehead. “What were you dreaming about just now?” he asked.

  “I dreamt I was cold,” she said. She drew on the cigarette and exhaled. “Don’t talk about leaving any more.”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  “People do too much of that,” she said.

  They sat quietly for a while, smoking, watching the daylight creep into the corners of the flat, listening to the sounds grow again. Things were always better by daylight, as if it were another country, one you could travel in without looking over your shoulder.

  Artemus poured a cup of coffee
for each of them. While they drank, he brushed his shoes and got into his uniform and wound his watch carefully. In a little while, the call boy knocked on the door. All the call boys knew to find him at Anna Rose’s now.

  “Call for brakeman Artemus Kane,” said the boy through the closed door. He rapped again, and Artemus opened it to find a stout lad swathed in an overcoat and muffler, wearing a checkered cap the size of home plate. “Nine o’clock list for Number Six, Mister Kane,” squeaked the boy, craning his head to peer into the room.

  “Thank you, Elmer,” said Artemus. He put a quarter in the boy’s hand. “Now beat it,” he said.

  “Mornin’, Miss Anna,” said the boy around the closing door.

  “Mornin’, Elmer,” said Anna Rose, who was hiding beneath the afghan.

  When the boy was gone, Artemus picked up his grip. “These god damn swains,” he said. “They never give up.”

  “I should give the poor lad a glimpse one day,” said Anna Rose, sliding from the bed.

  “Elmer?” said Artemus, and laughed. “It would blow all his fuses.”

  Anna Rose pulled on her thin dressing gown and robe. She crossed the room and stood before him with one bare foot atop the other. “This is not the same as leaving,” she said. “I know that.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said. “I get double time for Christmas Day. I’ll buy you something pretty.”

  She looked slantwise at him, in that way she had. She kissed him once, deeply.

  “You are not false to me,” she said.

  “Until the sun don’t rise, baby,” he said, and then he was gone.

  PINEY WOODS

  Frank Smith was having breakfast at the counter in the depot restaurant. That is, he was looking at the fried eggs, the sausage, the grits. So far, he had not been able to eat any of it.