Tobacco Railroad

by Edward Morris

for Joe R. Lansdale

 

"Erskine Caldwell," my father-in-law Jeter Lannigan always harps at me, "Your trouble is that you think no one will watch the world while you're sleeping. Time you found out the sun don't shine out your ass. Man can't live a selfish life with this Dee-pression on. Other people got rights, too."
Then he'd spit tobacco juice in the dirt of the dooryard, or the diner cuspidor, or wherever'n hell we were, wipe it out of his old moth-eaten Santa Claus beard and launch on one tirade or the other. I had them numbered. "When You Gonna Learn A Trade" usually preceded "Writing Is For Sissies, Buckle Down and Look After My Daughter."
Jeter has a yard of heart, and his only time clock is the sun. I still don't like him much.
But it's him I'll probably see first, where I'm going. I brought the old bastard this sack of winter turnips nobody at my house will eat. Some of his kids have got kids and still haven't left home. Produce is scarce at his wonderful one-acre farm, and propitiation is due. That is, if his good wife is about.
Dust to dust, low down, kicked up with every step through the aching swelter shimmering up from every rock of this godforsaken town road somewhere long off Route 85. I haven't hooked a ride since Newnan.
I've been roughing it for a day or two, and no one seems to want to pick me up. Until just recently, and still technically, I've only been two steps from the breadline myself. I haven't shaved in a day and a half, and the road-dirt on my clothes is thick and gray. I must look like a hoe-boy. No wonder the rides have dwindled down to naught.
Back home in Hot-lanta, I was writing sports columns for ten bucks a throw, selling a story every once in a while, and barely keeping my baby boy in diapers. Once in a while, I'd get a good story out that someone liked, and that kept me in booze long enough to sit at my typer for hours and pretend like I was that hotshot Wilkie Collins. When, that was, Helen let up aggravating me long enough to let me skulk off to my cave and brood.
In college, they always told me to write what I know. In my bag (crammed in betwixt a few clothes, some food, and two big bottles of home-made wine) are some notebooks full of family horror stories no one in his right mind would ever publish. Some of them are about Jeter and his tribe. Write what you know. What a death wish. Maybe Jeter's right and I should just go work on a farm.
But since I was a schoolboy, all I ever wanted to do was tell stories to the best of my ability. Not just any stories, but the stories of the folks in my father's congregation, the ones we ministered to when I was a boy in short pants. The ones we brought fresh produce to (as I, humble supplicant with tail between his legs, am doing now.) The ones whose marriages Pa baling-wired back together, whose shanties we repaired, whose kids we minded while they were out looking for work, whose drunken messes we cleaned up, whose every success was likewise an exaltation for each to each…
What I knew in college was football, political humor and chasing tail. What I know now is different. I'm out of college now, and trying to figure out where I'm going by looking back.
What I know now squalls off the page like the sea. One of my very favorite new poets, Mr. Stephen Vincent Benét, calls it a great and gilded ship with manacles for the crew and rich food for the few.
It is our godawful behind-closed-doors Jacobean drama-for-your-mama, and our strength and courage in the face of every overwhelming Despite. It is the South. And no matter who reads it, even if I never make another dime at it… I cannot stop writing it.
Ahh, damn it all, my family. Both sides. My snarled and twisted roots. The family I have now, the union whose issue misses me now, no doubt, and where my good boy and his Ma and Pa came from.
Helen got away from her twisted roots. But sometimes, the weeds come back. What we know of 'family', no matter how wrong the word applies, is all we know. Our relationships get broken when we make it out into the world missing so many tools and having to spend our whole lives like old soldiers still hypervigilantly waiting for that monogrammed bullet to come whistling over the next hill.
While we spend all our time snapping at the ones we love in fear of that, the worst news never makes the papers. It just whops us upside the head from backstage, and then we wonder what in the hell happened.
Sometimes, all you can do is pack a bag and take a good, long step back. If you're lucky, you remember to travel armed. When you get back from the odyssey, well… who's to say? Not me. Yet. Hopefully, I won't return home to a lecture from my Trojan beauty and wonder why I even tried to cool off.
That's how it goes, though. None of that is ever a reason not to strive to rise above. Maybe Ma Lannigan will have some answers. She did the last time.
What the hell was I thinking when I set out on this road in my old shoes, though? These brogans are sprung, and there's a hole in the right sole. I'm too proud to beg my bread, let alone some clod-hopper's castoff boots. But I won't be gone long.
I had to go and do it the hard way. Just like everything. But something tells me this'll be worth it. Soon enough, I'll have a pair or two of gently-used shoes foisted off on me, anyway, if Jeter hasn't burned all the latest castoffs in the stove.
I have more than most folks, I guess. Who am I to bemoan a roof and a few meals every once in a while, after that madness up North last year? At least I'm not a stockbroker. That bum Hoover'll be out on his big old do-nothing ass tereckly. The unions will take over, and those shithouse rats in Chicago will go broke when they repeal that stupid Volstead Act. Then I can get good liquor again. The South Shall Rise.
"Better hope it rises soon." I concentrate on the crow-songs from every telephone wire and not the hungry mouth opening in the leather of my sole. I realize how lost I've been, and for how long. But I still can't stop looking over my shoulder.
Long in the distance is another crossroads, bisecting acres and acres of wet, breathing sorghum fields with its gray line of shimmer in the early day. I can hear the fieldhands out there singing. It gets to me.
As bad as anything ever gets, as much as I've ever had to run from, there are worse things than unemployment. Things that never get called by their right name since Reconstruction. Things that are much worse than getting paid ten bucks a pop for stories. I could be one of those Negro boys out there behind a hoe or a spade. But by God, they're all singing so loud I have no trouble hearing them from the road.
It reminds me of Papa's church, all those bright golden mornings in that little one-room ray of light back in White Oak, long gone down the line. I remember how frail Papa looked last month. Maybe I'll sit the whole way through service next time I come out to see him, and not shame his tender love, and stay. Yeah. Heard that one before.
In any case, the fieldhands' song lifts me out of myself, in a way upon which I can't quite hang a name. Those boys don't have a pot to piss in nor a ditch to dump it out, but they're there and they have them a song. So they're making the most joyful noise they can.
Then I have to laugh like hell when I hear the words. It's a popular song, from the radio. Those boys manage to make even Jimmie Rodgers sound like full custom gospel, a hundred yards away in another world where the only clock punched is the one that goes sun to sun, like Jeter's.

"Nobody …done want me… or lend they helping hand…"

I set down the turnips and slide the half-full wine bottle from my pack on the opposite shoulder. Today's too hot to take anything seriously, let alone ruminate about the interrupted ass-reaming that still waits back home.

"Comin' home from Frisco, gone back to Dixieland…"

I smell water close by, and farther away a weird brimstone stench on the wind. Factory, maybe, or a rendering plant. The woodsy smell and the dust of the fields don't quite quench it out.

"My billfold… all empty… My heart fulla pain…"

Papa told me once that the real Gehenna was a burning-ground for trash. Maybe that smell's a dump, or a garbage fire left to smolder out. But I have never smelled anything like it in my entire life. It turns my stomach, but after a bit more of this terrible wine I probably won't notice. I'll drink to that. These days, I'll drink to it being The Day After Yesterday and Before Tomorrow.

"Thousand miles from home now, jus' waitin' on that train…"

I keep telling myself that I'm hitching to Hogansville to fill my palette and gather notes. Maybe I'll even start to believe it. Maybe if I pretend hard enough, Helen will take me back. Sure she will. This is just research.
Sure.
I catch sight of the boll of dust way before I see the truck. It looks like a damn army on the march, some rag-tag horde of an unknown and unremembered Mongol khan come to raise the devil. I put the bottle down for a second, and wonder, watch and wait---
No. Nothing so grand. Just an old black Model A panel job, rocking low on its springs. Up in the cab, something big has the wheel. Something small and skinny has its arm out the window on the shotgun side, smoking a big see-gar and moving around a lot. True to custom, Small-n-Skinny is, indeed, holding some sort of sawed-off.
I know where I'm going. I'll be damned if I let anything stop me. I duck back in the puckies.
That shoe of mine is starting to tell on me, enough to make me revert back to a trick I learned on the road once, in the hand-to-mouth days when I still believed in my own ingenuity, tying my lot in life together with shoestrings to make marionettes out of nothing. Long before Helen and the baby, long before I began giving my own power away to the world, letting Jeter tell me what I was, letting Life live me.
All humans have blind spots. We're two-leggers that look straight ahead. Get us off our own two legs and behind the wheel of an automobile, we got a lot more blind spots than most. This German doctor I read about calls that sort of thing ein gestalt. I don't know the literal translation, but it comes to the same. A way of seeing. Or of not seeing.
Them sorry sons of bitches don't see me laying in the weeds and laughing at them. When God was handing out the brains, those two thought He said 'pains' and answered 'Lord, I can't take no more.'
I see them, though. The big bubba behind the wheel has on a flat black cap and a mean look, and maybe enough teeth to chew with. His aide-de-camp with the stogie and the sawed-off doesn't look much brighter, only he has a pillow-tick hat on, and galluses over his undershirt.
They can't be doing more than twenty. I sneak out of the tall grass and goldenrod just as soon as I can, creep down low, catch the running-board on Flat Cap's side and climb up onto the back bumper. From there, the rest is just as easy as uncorking my wine again, finishing it and starting in on t'other.
Hell, I even roll a cigarette when we get going good. The wind carries the smoke away. With the stench of that big brown turd Pillow-Tick's a-smoking, it's small wonder they don't notice.
So I set and congratulate myself on my own ingenuity for a few miles. The sorghum becomes peanuts after some rows of fencepost and bobwire and no more singing. Those fools have the radio on, only instead of Jimmie Rodgers, it's some fool preacher.

"BEWARE OF PRACTICING YOUR PIETY BEFORE MEN SO AS TO BE SEEN BY THEM! FOR YE SHALL RECEIVE NO REWARD FROM YOUR FATHER IN HEAVEN!"

Boy, is that Bible-thumper a-screaming. Mercy. He sounds all of about fifteen. The quote makes it even funnier. He's quoting Matthew 6:1 on the radio? I feel like laughing fit to bust. If the Man Jesus saw half these radio preachers nowadays, I have the feeling He'd get pretty Old Testament on them pretty quick.
There is a roaring in my ears, and things blur out for a little while. I've had this happen before, a time or two. Just the heat. A little more wine might level it off. Just a little. And---
I look around. We're in the woods now, and they're getting dark and deep. We've taken a different fork than I intended.
We're picking up speed. Looking down, the stones in the road just look like streaks. My second bottle appears to be over a third gone. I wonder how that happened. Overhead, the sun is a white-hot branding iron twinkling down in fits and starts through the dense canopy.
Iron…I will my blurry eyes to focus on the tire-iron stuck in the little holdall welded to the back right fender. I might get to it first if I hollered Stop. Once upon a time, I played some football, and didn't spend too much time on the bench, either. I know how to clip and hold and take-down, even with no weapon.
But while stick-boy in the shotgun seat looks like I might could get that shotgun from him, the driver looks like the tire iron might do no more than make him mad.

"But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye shut up the kingdom of Heaven against men: For ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in!"

I'm not suffering to go where we're going. It looks like a strip mine. The woods have been clear-cut away in a big wide swath, leaving all these holes in the ground long outside town that go so far down no sounding-line could touch them.
I smell that brimstone, the trash-dumps of Gehenna, raw human sweat and need. It's all I can do not to retch up all that wine now. The panel-truck rumbles and jounces down and around a fire road which snakes in a strange corkscrew toward a dry creekbed, close to a foothill whose name I curse myself for forgetting.
The heat makes the whole scene stand out. Though there are fewer trees, the red clay hills seem darker here. A trench has been dug in the earth of the creekbed, widening it, following the natural bend out and around to a perspective-point far away. Not quite as far is some sort of compound, Quonset huts and long tin shacks, and boxcars on sidings, waiting to be shipped.
There are no fields out here. Their harvest is being trundled into the plant as well, from the opposite side. Far back and to the west is a dry patch of ground that appears to be a landing strip for aeroplanes. I see two parked at the end, as close as they can get to the hub of activity without clipping their big snubby wings.
The aeroplanes are dull black Beechcrafts, not that old but battered from use. They are being unloaded, relieved of what appear to be bales of hay. But hay doesn't dry to that color, nor does it have those leaves that look like tiny bamboo.

"Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them ye shall scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city: That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth... "

This is some kind of big operation. And it has the feel of Chicago Shithouse Rat all over it, for some reason, some kind of bootlegging different than the back-country kind I grew up seeing everywhere.
I could have sworn the nearest spur of the railroad was two miles back. But I'm drunk. And it looks as if they're bringing the mountain to Mohammed. A different crew than the sorghum planters are out in the blistering heat, laying down railroad ties and driving spikes. Making a new spur. As if…
Wait. Bootleggers don't build onto the railroad to ship their wares. My vision keeps blurring.
More of the crew, out by the outbuildings, are trundling different bales out into the boxcars, big white bricks wrapped in Visqueen. They troop slowly, too slowly, up the ladders, and stack them in, moving like broken marionettes.
That chemical smell is coming from the outbuildings. Part of it is gasoline. Part of it is ether. And part of it I don't even want to know about. Even from a distance, something about every man jack on this detail seems wrong.
As we draw near, the truck hits a big old rock and bounces me off the back. I roll, corking the bottle and shoving it back in my bag. It is saved, but my pack hits me in the ribs when I hit the hardpan. The world spins. For a little while, there is only the blessed dark.

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