Refiner's Fire (19 page)

The coot hardly noticed his burlap bag full of ceramic and glass insulators and steel spikes and plates from the railbed. In fact, he walked the narrow rail with such a springy step that it looked like a pigeon race, his head bobbing up and down and back and forth, a silver watchchain similar to his sons clinking gently in the heat and quiet. “Every night I sit in my garden, where I have over twenty-five thousand insulators and fifty thousand spikes, and I drink two ice-cold cans of beer. I go on my expedition six days a week. I carry home fifty pounds of spikes and insulators. I been doin' it for years. Then I walk in and grab my wife and,” he clapped his hands together like a third-class Swiss acrobat,
“Salamango!”
He gave Marshall a wry look, an expression similar to that of the swan on a merry-go-round. “I guess you wouldn't know about that.”

“I'm surprised that you do,” said Marshall.

“Oh! Is that so? I'll tell you something, young whippet. I was doing salamango eighty years before you were born. I have had the privilege, to do the salamango with the wife of a king, underwater, and in a balloon. I have done the salamango in twenty-three states and four territories. I have done the salamango on hilltops, in trees, and at the base of dams. Throughout my life, I have enjoyed the reproductive process.”

After quite a while racing down the Hudson tracks (Marshall trying unsuccessfully to find out how Triggers had been a drum in the Civil War), they came to the bend. “Now,” said Triggers, “I have to go up that way. So I tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna give you my card blanch as far as this stretch of track goes.”

“It goes to Chicago,” said Marshall.

“Don't be a wise guy,” answered Triggers. “I'd say from Eagle Bay to Oscawana. As long as it don't hurt anyone, you can do anything you want, and I'll clear it with my boy. He respects his father. He's not like those Lutherans. Now if I die, you're still covered. Tonight after the salamango I'll add another clause to my will, in which I'll specify that you are invulnerable. I have one thousand four hundred and thirty-seven clauses already. The railroad is your oyster, kid. I'm the only man alive who can tell you that; 'cause I been on it since 1870.1 can walk right into Pearlman's office and sit on his desk. I ride in his private car. I smoke his cigars. I'm the spirit of the railroad. It's mine. It's as if one day I ate it and it runs inside of me, and then it ate me. I can touch the third rail, lift a locomotive, juggle freight cars over my head. I feel the tracks spread through the country like I feel the veins in the back of my hand.” He bent down and touched the steel rail with a grandfather's affection for a tender babe. Then he walked into the brush, singing “Alice Blue Gown.”

Marshall soon took advantage of his new invulnerability. Throughout that June (a month which passed with delightful lethargy until his birthday on the twenty-eighth and then melted into unconscious summer) he climbed signal towers, made heavy use of the railroad telephone system, rode crossing gates, hopped freights, and did other things which a railroad bull was pledged to eradicate. Triggers, who usually lurked behind every bush, did not appear for more than a year. The visitation had been legitimate, and Marshall was pleased. It was something in itself just to stand by a train thundering past. But to hang upside down from a signal tower while the locomotive, whistles shrieking at the sight, passed only two or three feet below, was ecstasy. Once, the Twentieth Century had slowed to a crawl at Red Barn Bridge. Marshall had jumped on and ridden on the roof until the trestle at Sisters' Beach, where he caught the girders and pulled himself up. He frequently traveled to New York on freights, and would run up to Albany for lunch, sitting happily astride the horselike sides of a tank car. By the next Fourth of July he had completely forgotten Triggers.

In fact, on Independence Day, when the population of the Hudson Valley mysteriously disappeared, Marshall was exploring lines of railroad cars which had backed up on the tracks and were waiting for maintenance at Harmon Yard. He frequently did this, climbing on boxcars, wiggling down into refrigerator cars in search of fresh coconuts (which he never found), and walking through vintage passenger coaches about to be torn up or sent to a Central American republic. Marshall would use the bathrooms, sit on the conductors' special seats, drink the rusty water, crawl along the hat racks, and spin the wooden fans. But there was little else to do. Of course, he always hoped to come across a naked girl reclining on one of the worn cane seats, her arms open to him.

That Fourth of July, after drinking a lot of rusty water and crawling over yards and yards of hat racks, he hit the jackpot. It was the finest moment he ever had on the railroad, and could beat even the thrill of riding the roofs of a fast-moving thunderous freight on a clear blue day. At the end of a long line of musty coaches, Marshall opened a reluctant door and came upon, of all things, Pearlmans private car. Almost as good as a naked girl, it was sitting on the track completely unprotected and alone, a rich Byzantine city to be sacked.

He was slight enough to climb in through the bathroom window. He could not believe that the bathroom of a railroad car could be made of alabaster and gold, and, in a false analogy with pearl, he scratched the gold faucet with his teeth to see if it were real. It seemed genuine, although he did not know what would have happened had it been a fraud. There was even a sauna, which he thought was an empty closet. The medicine chest was filled with bottles on which were unfamiliar French and Scandinavian names. Towels as soft as velvet puffed from golden rings. Then he left the bathroom and went into the living room. The carpet appeared to him to be a Shabooz of the highest quality. A Renoir hung on a partition. Mahogany and fruitwood desks, furniture and paneling, brass fixtures as shiny as the day they had left the factory, and Chinese vases were spread throughout in lean opulence.

Marshall threw himself down on a velvet-covered divan and stretched. But he could not rest. He saw a player piano in the corner. After a while he managed to turn it on, and wonderful, sad, palm waltzes came from it. The bedroom closet was stuffed with tailored clothing. He took out a three-piece white linen suit, and the most beautiful beaver hat he had ever seen, which didn't mean much because he had never seen a beaver hat. It was three feet across and its fur glistened like the river bay. Struggling into this costume (over his own clothes) he added a few diamond stickpins and some silver cufflinks. He was thin enough, small enough, and young enough, so that his face fit in the expanse of the rakish and beautiful hat as if he were a lamb some children had dressed in a baby bonnet.

He went to the kitchen and opened the ice box. Twenty bottles of Dom Perignon lay at attention. He took one out and read the label, pronouncing the
G.
“Dom Perignon,” he said, “a good year. It will do. Oh, I feel so
blasé.”
Grabbing a glass and a package of English biscuits, he tripped over his pants through the main salon and walked out to the speakers platform—an open porch at the rear vestibule. There, he popped the champagne and sat with his feet on the rail, drinking, surveying underneath the brim of the beaver several miles of tracks from which heat was rising in undulating waves. The cattails and oaks were green and young. A very slight breeze came off the river.

Deep into the champagne (for the first time in his life), he began to imagine that he was an American President early in the century, crossing the continent by whistle stops, running to preserve his presidency and the bold policies he had created and carried out. He rose, the bottle in his hand. Standing against the rail, with the palm waltzes in the background, he addressed a rally of reeds and ties.

“My fellow men,” he screamed in a squeaky adolescent voice, “and my fellow women, naked women, or clothed, however you may be.” He swayed back and forth, posturing, posing, thrusting out his hand. “I want to tell you of the power in this new land. We have white battle fleets, transcendental philosophers, deep silver mines, music halls, and millions of acres of waving winter wheat. Let us take these mechanical things, the reapers, gins, sling hygrometers, Gading guns, and steam plows, and let us thrust them throughout the world as if the world were a naked woman! Thank you. Thank you. This is a great country. Let us ride it like a horse! Let us enjoy it. If I'm your President we will move so far forward, so fast, that we will be like oats shot from a gun!” And then he waved his hat to the cheering crowd and sank back on the wicker chair in complete satisfaction—just in time to feel two strong hands, like the steel-clad hands of a knight and as thick as boxing gloves, throttle him by the throat dangerously close to the diamond stickpin. It was L. H. Triggers. He nearly snapped Marshalls neck.

“This is Pearlmans private car!” he screamed in rage and desperation. “He
owns
the railroad.”

Marshall looked at him and said, “My people...!”

Triggers was dumfounded. He had collared Marshall for the first time. Even though Triggers looked like he had pillows stuffing his middle, he could run like a gazelle, but he had never caught Marshall. Now that he had him, Marshall didn't care.

“Okay,” he said, “I'm taking you in. Keep on wearing those clothes. Bring that bottle. Move.” He made Marshall walk in front of him up the tracks toward Harmon Yard. Marshall staggered and tripped over the too-long pants, and the beaver hat obscured his vision. In the distance the palm waltzes continued because Triggers didn't know how to turn them off. Somewhat sobered by the march in July heat, Marshall addressed his captor.

“My good sir man,” he said, chin falling to his chest. Then he looked up and continued. “This is all foolish. Don't you know that I am invulnerable? Don't you know that your own father, the old fellow, granted me invulnerability in his wind, in his will?”

“You're full of creasap,” said Triggers. “No one ever read it. It was ten thousand pages long in beer handwriting. We had to burn it. Besides, how could he give you invulnerability?”

“His decades on the railroad. He was the spirit of the railroad. He...”

“He was the spirit of creasap,” interrupted Triggers. “He spent his life running a hardware store in Amsterdam, New York.”

“He did?”

“Yes, he did. All right, he denuded the railroad of insulators and spikes. How could I arrest him? He was my father. We had to keep a repair crew on this section day and night. We juggled the books.”

Marshall turned around, tripped on his heels, fell flat on his back against the ties, and said, “You juggled the books.”

“What's it your business?”

“Say it to me again.”

“We juggled the books.”

“Again.”

“Okay, we juggled the books.”

“You can't arrest
me,”
said Marshall, still so drunk that he couldn't lie down straight.

Triggers slapped his pistol and said, “Damn.” He made Marshall give him the clothes, and Marshall vanished onto the shallow tidal flats where the Croton River empties into the Hudson. He spent that afternoon running after herons and gulls, trying to kiss them. When finally the running made him sober, he swore never to touch alcohol again.

 

A
S THEY
flew over the Bahamas the steward brought steaming tea in silver pots. Looking down, Marshall saw a green sea such as he had never seen in his life, filled with blue and white isle crescents shaped like a lash or the inward curve of an almond. The water looked warm and inviting. That green tropical color was a sign to him, and he left his old life behind.

A
T
K
INGSTON
the air was humid and thick. High mountains enshrouded in mother-of-pearl clouds and rain flanked the rear of the city, throwing out their chests. It was hot, and most of the people were black. In a corner of the dazzling white field, military transport planes were disgorging British soldiers and their equipment. Half a dozen pipers played songs which gripped Marshall so strongly that his eyes filled and his muscles tightened. Never had he felt such rich full heat. Never had he seen such green mountains. The soldiers came to attention, their weapons laid out for inspection. They were young and they looked like Marshall, who wanted to be one of them. He was shaken by the sight of the mountains, the palms, the sand-colored airstrip, and soldiers stiff to the sound of pipes. This was a new world, and he wanted with all his heart never to be the same—and he would not ever be the same. One sight of Kingston against the blue-green, and the Imperial soldiers rigid and fair, had changed him forever in just the way Livingston had known. For the first time, his history began to gallop up close.

Livingston had purchased a small blue Anglia, into which they stuffed themselves and their baggage. They started the drive across the island to High View, their estate on the northern shore, a lord's demesne Livingston had usurped by measure of wartime friendship and some semilegal deal closing. To shut the door on his proposition and convince Livingston to buy, the friendly lord had invited him to reside on his Jamaican estate for as long as he wished, “to show the boy a bit of the world, and holiday in the tropics.” Unknown to the lord, the deal was so far weighted in Livingston's favor that Livingston had made a concealed troutlike leap and closed mightily upon multiple advantages.

Livingston was a sharp dealer and a good navigator, helped by Marshall, who could read maps with celestial perfection. So keen was his sense of direction and so lucid his feeling for terrain that Marshall preferred maps to pornography. On the outskirts of Eagle Bay was a disused quarry into which the state dumped illegal Danish pornographic mailings and sunbathing magazines. Marshall used to wait at the bottom as dump trucks chartered by sober courts discharged their lascivious cargoes. At an early age he received full exposure to colorful images of copulation on bright beaches rimming the upward coasts of Helsingor. He preferred maps.