The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (15 page)

If so, the two young men, as they walked toward the Riefel house one evening, bearing the town’s invitation, handwritten by one of the librarians—knew nothing about it. Still, they were troubled to be carrying such an elegy with them, for so they considered it, on a night when they felt themselves so essentially alive.

The mate, whose hands were always cleaner than Jim’s factory job allowed his to be, had the letter in a fist, but put it in a pocket as they approached the portico of the house. In the black-green dark, the big place with its several apartments all lighted looked solid enough, if not festival, and the porte-cochere still possible to carriages. Were they taking advantage of their friend, to bring such a request out of the blue, not an
up
blue, but fairly a down one, the mate wondered? Or, Jim wondered, was it an act of friendship to do it at all? And as was so often their custom, they wondered these things aloud. The Riefel lions, gloomy as usual, gave no hint. The basement door, ivory black and with a thin gold knocker, snooted them, but this was usual. There remained for Riefel himself to help them with what advice could be given—and it was Riefel who gave it. Their problem was merely to think over what it was he gave them—for forty years after, if necessary.

When he let them in they saw that he had his smoking-jacket on, as always when he had been working on the system, plus the foulard neckerchief which he wore when taking “infusions” for his “catarrh.” If things went as usual, he would apologize politely for the latter, the only apology he was ever heard to make. Shortly he did so, and as per custom, took them into the other room where, stripping his cuffs, he prepared to entertain them with a brief display of one or other of the elaborately worked-out schedules in the system’s repertoire. This was the moment, ordinarily, when either of the pair would bring out whatever they invariably had for him. “Look here, this lightbulb I found, think it’s small enough?” Jim might say, hauling out a pocketflash bulb that might just screw into a streetlight, or the mate would bring out a battery, the size of four sugar loaves, that he had made himself. Today they brought nothing, and he didn’t wait for it.

Next, usually had come a moment when he offered them a choice of the schedule to be run off; you understand that in a run of a hundred miles, or even twenty-nine of them, and in thirty years, there could be a good many variations, mock breakdowns, accidents, full and partial runs, which could be evolved, a favorite run of the two partners being:
Let’s see you run as far as Pell’s bridge in sixteen minutes
(one minute of ours being five of the system’s),
run into trouble
(the least being to have some foreign object strike the vertical gate of the lifeguard, the worst being to have a “passenger” struck by the axle-boxes of the rear bogie truck, when leaving the car),
then change cars and return.
Riefel didn’t wait for a choice here either, but without preamble gave them the full hour program which they had seen only once before—that first time—in which all the powers of system, landscape and the hand at the helm of all of it were to the fullest vaudeville displayed. It ought to have brought down the house, as it had then, but this time they all sat silent. Then Riefel did something he’d never done before—made a criticism. “One thing I’ve never been able to add to it,” he said.

“What’s that, Bert?” the mate said quickly—no
mister
or pulled forelock for him, for which Riefel, who always winced with pleasure at this style of address, may well have picked him up in the beginning.

And: “Maybe
we
—” said Jim.

But Riefel shook his head, tapping his fingertips to a rhythm, making and unmaking a finger cage. “Oh—I suppose I could burn some oil, make some sort of blower. But it’s really not tenable. Nor should it be.”

“What’s that, Mr. Riefel,” asked Jim. “What
is
it?”

He was turning his beautiful cuffs down again, and linking them. “Just the true trolley-smell,” he said. “Just—the smell.” He quirked at them, to show he shared their amusement, which however hadn’t yet appeared. “Just as well,” he added, linking the second cuff. “A line has to be drawn somewhere. Just as well.” What with the unintentional rhyme, it sounded, curiously enough, like an elegy. Then he stood up.

“Boys,” he said, though often he called them “gentlemen”—“You might as well hand over what you have for me.” He even held out his hand toward the mate’s pocket. It was the town again, though they never knew via which part of it. He had known about the letter all the time.

He read it in their presence, no excuses and no comment, only in his narrowed lips and raised nostril a glimpse of how once, when he had wanted to be, he could have been rude. It may even have been that he wanted them to see this, to see him too, in full vaudeville. But they hadn’t the experience for it, to enlarge on any further suggestions or displays he might have given them—what did that pair know of tickertapes and board rooms? So, in the end he had to tell them his answer, straight out. “No, boys,” he said. “No. But I’ll give you an answer to take back with you.”

He went to a typewriter which must always have been there but they had never before noted, under one of the nudes they so often had. To the town-committee’s letter to him—handwritten in the best Spencerian for courtesy, he rattled off a reply at sixty words a minute—for modernity? Who knew, after all, what was this man’s cultivation? He slipped the sheet into an envelope which he left unsealed, and handed it over, back to the mate. “Read it if you like,” he said indifferently. Then he smiled, with that nimbus which might still have caught him a million, if not a woman, even then. “But not here.”

They understood then that they were dismissed; though the pair acted so often in unison, each was still as sensitive a young man as any to be found acting on his own anywhere.

Jim spoke up this time, the mate after all having had the letter to present. “Then, Mr. Riefel—” he said—it was curious how this “Mr. Riefel” sounded more intimate than the mate’s “Bert”—“Then you’re not—”

“Going?” said Riefel. He glanced down at the letter he had just answered. “A last trolley ride?” he said. “And a medal?” He looked down again, as if to check what hadn’t been important enough to remember precisely, or else didn’t cater to his brand of recall. “For a past pioneer?” At a jerk of his head, quickly gentled though he didn’t smile again, the ascot fell back from his throat. He didn’t look ruined any more than he looked eighty. The ruin, if anywhere, was in the minds that looked at him; it can be wondered if for lots of follyists it isn’t the same.

“Oh no, gentlemen,” he said. “That isn’t for me.”

He was telling us what the world is, for a man of risks—not that we heard him.

“No,” he said, gentler with us than we had ever heard him. “No, you two go. It’s for you.” He gave us a searching look; it could even be said he bowed, to what he found. “Yes, you two go,” he repeated. “It’s for you.”

Then the pair went out of there, never to see him again or thank him, or curse him, for what it took two weeks—and forty years after that—to understand.

Outside, the two walked along with Riefel’s reply. Should they read it, they asked each other; did he mean them to? From street lamp to street lamp they pondered, in separate silence, and aloud. In their ears that alternating voice echoed, offering them advice they couldn’t see, calling them gentlemen, then boys.

“What did he mean!” The mate’s voice was angry. “About the trolley doings. That it was for
us.
”

Jim was silent. “I dreamed,” he said then. He turned excitedly. “I just remembered. That he shot himself. Tomorrow morning.”

They both saw him according to their joint experience, his chin at that certain ghastly angle, blood all over the olive-green foulard—which was a color quite suitable to combat—alone on a foreign field all his own.

“No,” said the mate judiciously. “That’s
your
dream.”

They walked on. The mate reared up his forelock. “It’s a cinch he doesn’t see us the way the town does. Or only. Reason I always liked going there.” There was an implication that they wouldn’t go, again.

Jim thought it over a few paces. “He sees us,” said Jim.

Finally, one of them—it doesn’t matter which—opened the note and read it to the other. It contained absolutely nothing the librarian couldn’t have read out in the children’s reading-room—nothing beyond a formal thanks and a formal refusal, saying that he would always have an interest in transportation, but expected not to be in town for the ceremonies.

“He just wanted to get us out of there,” said the mate disgustedly. But a few steps onward, he stopped again. “‘No, gentlemen,’” he said, in a falsetto that certainly wasn’t Riefel’s. “‘No, that isn’t for me. It’s for you.’” He turned to his companion. “You suppose he meant we shouldn’t go for the town; we should get out of here?” He paused. “Or—Oriskany.” They had spoken to Riefel of it. The mate considered. Then he shrugged, drawing himself up with a pomp that was a little growing on him; after all, there has to be some answer to the terrors of the world. “I suppose he only meant—we were young.”

“And simple,” said Jim. He looked down at the note. “We did the wrong thing. That the town asked us to do it isn’t any excuse.”

“They only wanted to honor him.”

“For what? For being—passé?”

That was a word much in the newspapers, those days.

“For being self-made, that’s what.”

Jim already knew the mate’s aspirations, of course; his own were harder to explain, though he had tried. He wasn’t sure he was a man for risks, though he might be one for responsibilities. What worried him uniquely was the thought of so many men returned from the war with twenty-twenty vision, but still, if they weren’t careful, going to live it out in the dark, not knowing which of the two choices was happening to them. What he wanted—almost as good as a religion it would be, mate—was just to understand what happened to him, as he went along. Was that so enormous?

He tramped on awhile. “Maybe they don’t know why either,” he said. “Why they asked him.”

“Who?”

“The town.”

The mate trudged along, hands in pockets. “Passé, eh? Then why should those hijinks be for
us?
” He gave an angry laugh; how mystery always angered him! “What’s he preaching?”

The pair mulled the rest of the way home without talking, like two apprentices leaving the house of a master who had never quite seen fit to declare openly the nature of the subject under study.

At their door, the mate gave a snort, then a swagger. “Sunday week, that junket is—You for going?”

“Why not?” said Jim. “Nobody’s going to shoot himself over it in the morning.”

Going up the stairs, the mate yawned and stretched. “Transportation interests, huh. Maybe we ought to sell him a car.”

But a few days later, they learned what these interests had been. Riefel had sold the house, as the good income property it was, for a crackerjack sum (the town’s phrase) only to reinvest it promptly in some crackpot scheme (its phrase also) for motor coaches to go down the very highway which was to supersede the Batavia-Sand Spring. The housekeeper was retiring on her annuity, only waiting for the new owners to take formal possession—and for the Smithsonian. As for the basement, except for the art work and the books, which Mr. Riefel had taken with him where he was going, the rest of the stuff there was left to her also. Apparently he had already everything else necessary where he was going—in New York.

“Sonufa gun,” said Jim. “So
that’s
what he was saying!”

“What—buses?” said the mate. “That was his interest, huh?” He wasn’t stupid, only not reflective—or unable to wait to be. And Jim, to give him credit, always understood this, just as the mate gave Jim credit for being such a thinking chap, if slow.

“O.K., buses, New York City, what does it matter. Can’t you see what he was saying to us?” Jim had to walk twice around the table, he was so excited.

“What?” said the mate, much used to these dialogues, which he thoroughly enjoyed. “What’s the revelation?”

“I’ll tell you what he was saying.” Jim whipped a napkin from the table, folded it around his own neck, ascot-style, and raised his chin, Riefel-style.
“See my dust,”
he said. “That’s what he was saying.” Then he pulled the napkin off again, and sat down to his meal.

The mate made no reply for a bit, as often when he was stumped, or slowed.
See my dust.
It was a transportational interest all right; it could be the supreme one.

The two of them could see it underwriting—or overriding—all others, a little searing tail-light disappearing round the bend.

“Going away
permanently,
” said the mate after a while. Such had been the message to the housekeeper. “At eighty.” He shook his head, the prime of life not being connected in his mind, with age. “Old
men—
” he said.

That’s a chorus for you. For
you,
hot-rods.

Old men, old men, old men. And young.

And so there we have it all now—the war, the town, the Pardees, Oriskany, and Riefel—and the two Jims. And all entirely natural.

We need only a ride on the Batavia line, to make it all clear.

P
EOPLE CAME WHO WANTED
picnics. The August day at the start was one of those gray, limp ones which make bunting look weak, but the powerful trees of the region would have done this anyhow. Even at the edge of town, at the siding where the four long, striped cars waited, the trees were as thick as if only they held the year up; once past it, and the green billowing would go on for miles. Nobody minded that it wasn’t a day when colors flew; a couple of the mothers were heard to say tranquilly that the children would be the quieter, for not having to match their doings to a broad sun.

“Local adage?” whispered the mate, digging Jim with his elbow. Usually, he never went at the town for any of its doings—as was sometimes Jim’s privilege. For months at a time, the mate’s very speech would be as Sand Springish as if he had been born there; in matters like these, his control, then and later, was scarcely to be believed. Today he looked marvelous, with life, if not top good looks. He had as much as said so to the mirror himself, while shaving with a razor stropped to a murder-edge and singing over and over a little catch that Jim had never heard him on before. Talcum was delicate on his jowl, and he had on the tweed jacket he’d got in London on their way home and had stored since, but the bow tie he sometimes wore for the waitresses was supplanted by a proper four-in-hand tie. Jim, though not as rakishly clean, looked all right alongside; he was never a dresser. He was a worrier though, or some would call his bent by that name, and now he didn’t answer, scanning the crowd, his hands squirming a bit in their pockets. Bunting had its own way of theatering up a crowd, as if the parts to be played were already evident; within its framing ribands and below its fluttering pennants, grannies jostled what used to be called sparking couples and drugstore cowboys; family circles were storming the cars to set up two seats facing one another, then tonguelashing the juniors for slapping back the seats too roughly; everybody looked distinctly himself as long as he stayed away from the trees; the trees could do nothing just now but wait. A group of black-cloth notables clung together, speeches in hand; the ceremonial part of this jaunt would take place at Otselica, or so everybody supposed.