Pelican Road

by Howard Bahr

  Just this one trip, begged Necaise. It’s Christmas Eve, ain’t nothing going to happen.

  C’mon, Frank, argued Sonny Leeke. It’s an easy day, and you got to let the boy break his cherry sooner or later.

  You always have an elegant way of putting things, said Smith. He looked at Necaise. You better get your ass moving, he said. It’s a long walk to the roundhouse.

  So here was Bobby Necaise, crunching over the cinders of the roundhouse floor, nodding to the sooty drones whose lives were spent among the grease. When Necaise worked the back end of the local, Frank Smith always looked out for him, teaching by example, hovering and watchful. Now Bobby was on his own. He would be the man who rode the footboard of the engine, who made the cuts on the head end, who would read and interpret train orders and switch lists and watch for danger lurking past the long black boiler of the engine. It was a school of responsibility shaping him for his own future, and he was fully conscious of the trust placed in him. The thought made young Necaise glow with pride and left him unprepared for the sight that greeted him beyond the washroom’s rusty screen door.

  * * *

  Once Frank Smith had made up his mind about Necaise, he had no second thoughts. A train conductor was not allowed second thoughts; he was supposed to be right the first time. When he made a mistake, he had to stand by his own judgment and take the rap. That was the hard part of the job. So far, Smith had not found the easy part, except that he got to be in charge.

  The rear-end crew had returned to the X-630. On the desk of the caboose, under the white glare of the Aladdin desk lamp, lay the train’s brief consist and three waybills. Sure enough, the hogs were on a U.S. Army waybill and were to be set out at the packing plant in south Hattiesburg. The second bill was for the empty boxes, all going to New Orleans, and the third was for a single car of logs they must pick up at Pachuta. With so little work, Smith wondered why they were running the extra at all, why they had not annulled it. He considered ignoring the log car, but knew that, if he did, he would be nagged by the unresolved task all night. Anyway, it would only take a few minutes to pick up the car at the saw mill.

  On a clipboard over the desk were the orders Smith had been given at the crews’ washroom. They were stapled together with a pink clearance slip listing the number of each order and that of the train to which they were addressed. This morning, they had three slow orders, copies of which were given to every train to indicate sections of the road where speed was currently restricted:

  TRAINS WILL NOT EXCEED 15 MPH BETWEEN

  X TOWER AND LITTLE WOODS.

  And so on. The particular order that governed the movement of Smith’s train read

  ENG 4512 RUN EXTRA SOUTH YARD MERIDIAN TO

  L&N JCT 730 AM TO 1130 PM.

  By this means, Smith’s southbound local would be subject to the demands of the dispatcher between their departure point and the yard limit in New Orleans, and this for sixteen hours, the maximum time a crew could work. After that, they were due eight hours rest and an hour-and-a-half call before reporting again. This was the Hours of Service Law, which the men called the Hog Law, though no one knew why. It was a rule strictly observed. If a crew’s sixteen hours were up, they stopped, no matter if they were a hundred feet from the yard limit or ten miles out in the swamp. If the Hog Law caught them, they shut down, put out the flags, and waited for a relief crew to come and get them. For obvious reasons, the dispatcher always tried to get the men in under the law, but it was not uncommon for a train to go dead after accidents or delays.

  This rule, which often seemed absurd to the common citizen, grew out of the days when men were unprotected by unions and had to work as long as the company demanded. Smith had heard old men like Mister Dunn tell of working two or three or four days straight, catching a little sleep when they could on the steel deck plates of a locomotive cab or the cushions of a caboose. Men so used would reach a point when they could hardly walk or see. They could not judge distances nor decipher orders nor remember the rules. They missed signals, or misread them. Their minds wandered, and they ceased to care what happened to them. Trainmen were run over, losing fingers and legs, more often losing their lives. Firemen no longer heeded the water level in their boilers and kept on shoveling coal until everybody on the engine was blown to kingdom come. Enginemen ran too fast or too slow. They sideswiped cars and jerked out drawbars and collided with other trains.

  Once, when he was new to the job, Smith asked Mister Dunn if such an attitude on the company’s part was not only cruel but counterproductive. Mister Dunn merely smiled and left his brakeman to discover for himself that greed always trumped kindness and reason, a lesson Smith should have learned in the Great War but missed somehow amid the confusion.

  Frank Smith was glad he did not belong to that fraternity who worked in the days when the companies fought every safety device and treated their employees like chattel. He was glad to have missed a time when a man’s experience could be judged by the number of fingers he had lost to the link-and-pin. The job was hard enough without all that, and sixteen hours on the cholly was long enough for anybody.

  Some of the old men, in the way of old men, spoke fondly of a time and circumstance they no longer had to deal with. They held their experience up as a test of character which the younger, softer, more pampered generation could only fail. Not Mister Dunn, however. He might get confused, but he was never fooled by the softened edges of memory. He taught his young charges to fall on their knees every day and thank God for Westinghouse brakes and safety couplers and electric headlights. He taught them to be loyal to the unions that had forced these changes, sometimes with violence, always with difficulty. He told them, Boys, it ain’t no romance in widows and orphans.

  Their train had another running order this morning—an unusual one:

  EXTRA 4512 WILL NOT REGISTER OR

  REQUIRE CLEARANCE AT TALOWAH IF THE

  TRAIN ORDER SIGNAL INDICATES PROCEED.

  Ordinarily, conductors were required to sign the register at Talowah, or throw off a register ticket if their trains did not stop. Thus Smith felt uncomfortable with the order; he preferred that everyone know where his train was all the time. Still, it was Christmas Eve, and things were slow, and there should be no problem. At least they had cleaned out the log yard at Talowah last night and would not have to bother with it today.

  Talowah was a strange place. Not only was it hard to switch, but Smith always felt uncomfortable there, as if someone were looking over his shoulder or walking just behind. Last night, standing in the circle of light from his lantern, he felt it especially strong in the whispers and stirrings of the barren woods. He never told anyone about the feeling, not even Artemus Kane. It seemed an oddly private thing. On the other hand, Smith had come to like the young operator there. He hoped Donny Luttrell was relieved for Christmas; in fact, Smith would be glad to take him down to New Orleans on the caboose. Such a thing was unlikely, however, for the boy was at the stony bottom of the extra board. Christmas in godforsaken Talowah would be solitary and lonesome, but maybe it was something the lad needed, something he might profit by in time to come. Smith felt himself qualified to make such a judgment, having been sufficiently lonesome himself on a good many occasions.

  Pretty soon, Mister Dunn and Cox and Necaise would bring the engine down. In the meantime, Ladner lit the marker lanterns and hung them out, red to the rear. He and Sonny argued about baseball for a while, offering to include Mister Earl January in their debate, but the carman ignored them. Sleet pecked at the stovepipe, and now and then a cold gust pushed against the windows. The caboose was warm and smelled of coffee and coal and damp clothes. And hogs. The boys had found a great deal to say about the hogs.

  Smith looked up from his work and considered the scene being played out in the narrow, lamplit aisle of the X-630. Mister January went on staring at the hot stove as if it were about to speak, or dance maybe. Sonny was lounging on a bench, and Ladner was doing pull-ups on the handrail that
ran along the ceiling. Smith could see the shiny red and green paper of his children’s Christmas presents under the rack of fusees. It was one of those moments when lonesomeness stepped back a little and a person could feel comfortable in the world, when common experience and hardship clad each man in the robe of kinsman, when every detail seemed in its proper place. Such moments came but rarely, and they never lasted long, but they were sufficient to remind Frank Smith of how fortunate he was. The others, if pressed, would agree, though they might not be able to articulate the feeling, or even want to. In any event, they would not mistake it for cheap sentimentality. Every man knew that harmony on the job was a matter of chance and luck, for one rarely got to choose those he worked with. A great many assholes found their places on the railroad, and sooner or later, every crew ended up with one or two.

  Most of the men Smith worked with were not assholes. True, they were deeply flawed. They drank too much, they argued and bickered, they got into fights, they were run off by their wives, they sought the company of lewd women. But they were not mean or hateful. They were not interested in power, and while some of them, like Smith himself, preferred to be in charge, they used authority only so far as the job demanded. Their confrontations burned with the bright incandescence of fireworks, and faded just as quick, as when Sonny and Artemus Kane got into a fistfight and tore up the Purvis depot and terrorized the waiting passengers. Next day, Artemus and Sonny stood together before the trainmaster, hats in hands, and received their week’s suspension. Then they went home and packed their bags and caught the next train for New Orleans where they spent the whole week laid up at Artemus’s brother’s house. Neither one ever mentioned the fight again, though they enjoyed hearing others tell about it.

  Sonny Leeke was out on the rear platform, peering into the sleet and gray morning. In a moment, he returned and demanded to know where the engine was. “We ought to be coupled up by now,” he said. “Ought to be leaving town.”

  Smith leaned back in his chair. “I told you, goddammit, to stay on the head end, but you wouldn’t have it, so don’t be complaining to me.”

  “That’s right, Sonny,” said Ladner. “Because of your lazy ass, Necaise and A.P. are prob’ly halfway to Tuscaloosa by now.”

  “Well, fuck alla you,” said Sonny.

  In truth, Frank Smith, now that he thought about it, was a little peeved himself. He pulled his watch and studied it as though the white face might reveal some answer. All it told him was that they were five minutes late. That was not a good sign.

  * * *

  Smith would have been irritated indeed if he knew how, at that moment, Mister A.P. Dunn was sitting on the floor of the roundhouse washroom with a dozen men, including Eddie Cox, gathered around him. Someone had bandaged Mister Dunn’s head, but he had torn the bandage off, and now he was bleeding again. Moreover, Mister Dunn, who never swore, was swearing. All the bad words he had heard in fifty years of railroading were suddenly boiling out of him like a volcano, and Bobby Necaise was stopped cold.

  Since he came out on the railroad, Necaise had grown accustomed to foul language. Lately, he had been practicing it on his own, for he knew that sailors used colorful speech, and he wanted to be up on it. In addition, Artemus Kane had instructed him that cursing was a useful language all its own and, in its pure form, had nothing to do with good or evil. Artemus was the best at it that Necaise ever heard, and Sonny Leeke was second, but they rarely ever swore around Mister Dunn. Now to hear that gentleman rain obscenities and curses himself was beyond imagination. The roundhouse men stood about in shock. With anyone else, it might have been funny, but no one was laughing now. This was too much. This was like hearing Jesus tell the Pharisees to fuck off.

  “What’s the matter?” said Necaise. No one paid him any mind except Eddie Cox, who looked surprised to see him. Necaise said, “I’m the head brakeman on the job. What’s the matter with Mister Dunn?”

  The engineer said, “God damn it to hell, I will whip all your goat-fucking asses!”

  “Lord!” said Necaise.

  “It ain’t nothin’ to it, Mister Bobby,” said Eddie Cox. “He just feeling bad this morning.”

  “Shut up, Eddie,” growled a big man in a brown suit and bowler hat. Necaise knew this man to be Tom Brody, the roundhouse foreman. Brody shoved forward and punched a finger in the boy’s chest. “Where is Sonny Leeke?” he demanded.

  “Working swing today,” said Necaise. “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, this is a hell of a thing,” said Brody, looking Necaise up and down. “Sending a goddamned cub up here.”

  Necaise pushed through the men and knelt down and took hold of Mister Dunn’s shoulder. The old man knocked his hand away, but Necaise took hold again and shook hard.

  “A.P.,” he said. “Look at me. We got to go. We’re late. Look at me!”

  “He ain’t goin’ nowhere,” said Brody.

  “Yes, sir, he is,” said Necaise, standing to face the man. “He’s got more sense right now than you ever had.”

  “Sonny boy,” said the foreman and was about to step forward when Mister Dunn got to his feet.

  “Now, hold on there, Tom,” said Mister Dunn, stepping between the two. He turned to Necaise. “Hello, Bobby,” he said. “Are you on the head end today?”

  After that, Mister Dunn appeared to pull himself together as if nothing at all had happened. He allowed Necaise to bandage him up again while he read his orders and had a cup of the roundhouse’s foul coffee. Necaise was chafing, but Mister Dunn seemed to think they had all the time in the world. He explained to Necaise that he had slipped on the ice and hit his head, but he had been hurt lots worse than this any number of times.

  “Can you run the engine all right?” asked Necaise. “Because you don’t have to if you don’t want.”

  “Nonsense,” said Mister Dunn.

  Eddie Cox eased up to Necaise and whispered, “Maybe we best get on. I’ll carry his grip.”

  As Necaise was leaving the shack, the foreman stepped out of his office and caught him hard by the arm. He said, “You ever speak to me like that again, I will haul your freight.”

  Necaise shook off the man’s hand and followed Cox and Mister Dunn across the cinders to the pit where the 4512 was being turned.

  For all his bravado, Bobby Necaise was not feeling well at all. In fact, he was scared shitless and wanted to be gone. He wished he were waiting on the caboose with Frank Smith. He would never have suspected that an engineer could lose control of himself like Mister Dunn had. Certainly, Necaise never thought he would lay a hand on an engineer, much less call one by his first name, much less give him advice on what he might do. Furthermore, he had sassed the foreman in a way contrary to all his raising, and on top of all that, they were running late. Bobby Necaise had collected a good deal of experience and made the first enemy of his life, and he was not even out of the roundhouse yet.

  The hostler was moving the 4512 off the table. The rails groaned and creaked under the weight, and the drivers turned with a stately slowness. The engine, white flags hanging limp on the pilot, was clean and elegant and beautiful. It seemed small under the shed, and Necaise realized for the first time how cavernous and forbidding the roundhouse was.

  In a moment, the engine was off the table with the tender pointed toward the big doors that led to the yard. Eddie Cox was already in his seat, having satisfied himself that the fire was laid correctly. Meanwhile, Mister Dunn had paused at the foot of the gangway. When Necaise approached, the engineer turned on him, his face so clouded with sudden anger that Necaise pulled up short.

  “Did Smith say you and Sonny could swap out?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Necaise. “I asked him because—”

  “Never mind why you asked him,” snapped the engineer. “I don’t want to hear any god damned excuses. Did he ask me if I wanted a new man up here? Did he?”

  “Well, no, sir,” said Necaise. “I guess he thought—”

  “I don’t give a da
mn what he thought!” shouted Mister Dunn. “Fucking trainmen think they run the show. Did you come up here to spy on me? Smith thinks I can’t do the job—is that it?”

  For an instant, Necaise thought the old man was going to strike him, and the boy cocked his arm reflexively. Then he caught himself. No, I won’t do it, Necaise told himself. If he hits me, I will take it. He came to attention then, as the recruiter had taught him to do. He was ready to accept the curses, the blow even, without complaint. This is like training, he thought. This is a test.

  Then Eddie Cox appeared in the gangway. “Mist’ A.P. Dunn,” he said. His voice managed to be firm and deferent at the same time. “Miss Nettie be waiting to hear your whistle in the yard,” said Cox. “You ain’t going to be late, is you?”

  All at once, Mister Dunn’s face changed as though he had taken off a mask. He smiled at Necaise. “Well, Bobby, you’re on the head end today?”

  Necaise nodded in a tentative way.

  “Have you met my wife Nettie?” asked the engineer.

  “Well, no, sir,” said Necaise, finding his voice.

  Mister Dunn narrowed his eyes and looked about, puzzled. “Well, she was here just a minute ago,” he said. Then he smiled. “Maybe another time,” he said.

  * * *

  Frank Smith was waiting at the head end of the cut when the engine backed down. He stood with arms folded and watched Necaise make the joint, watched him couple the air hoses and turn the angle cock slowly so the air would flow smoothly into the brake line. He remained silent while Mister Earl made his brake test and Necaise stood waiting with cap in hand. Finally, when all was done and engine and cars were officially a train, Smith said, “What happened to you all, Bobby?”

  Necaise lowered his eyes. “Well—” he began.

  “Don’t talk to the cinders,” said the conductor. “Talk to me.”

  Necaise looked up and put his cap back on. He told all that had transpired in the roundhouse, leaving nothing out. When the story was finished, Necaise said, “I guess you have to tell somebody now.”