The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (17 page)

“Wouldn’t mind eating you,” said the mate, lowering his eyes, but if Lottie heard him, as she dabbed after a crumb lost just where his glance was, his gruffness was so solemn that it couldn’t be rude. The mate, who in the car had once or twice studied Emily, perhaps to make certain whether or not those dark brows did meet or could, never glanced at her now.

And what of Emily, stuffing herself like the rest, who looked anywhere she liked—at the day, the crowd, the mate and Jim almost impartially, though perhaps not much at Lottie—occasionally raising a lazy, drugged arm from where she was lying full-length on the grass in a dress that matched it, and who now, her brows knitting once and then smooth again, leaped to her feet in one movement, as if clasping a trestle let down from the sky, and said in that caroling voice of hers—“I shall swim!”? Disappearing, she returned in the same heavy blue bathing dress, sleeved and bloomered, darkening to black in the water, that others already in were wearing, but she carried no boudoir-cap of the kind that were here and there ruffling the Otselica, nor the canvas shoes which laced most ankles—her feet were bare. She swam face down, with a boy’s stroke, her piled hair sailing the water. Jim and the mate, having brought no suits, watched her from the shore. Though the stream was only a few yards wide, when she rose, billowing in that blue-black drapery, and started for shore, she seemed to be walking toward them from a distance, and when she called out something they didn’t catch it; even when Emily spoke normally, it was always the silence Emily spoke from which one heard. A few feet away from them she stopped, the water draining down her legs, and tossed her head at them. If they could have eaten her, the taste would have been like venison.

And so all that day, as in the night to come, events dispensed themselves in the mists of natural action. In front of the hill, as twilight came on, the rounded carbarn, grouped with its flat-roofed outbuildings, glimmered like a natural farm. But then, when it came time for supper, and with the others the four entered the huge “hall” which only the committee’s helpers had glimpsed, the two men stood back, in rank silence. Stalls had been set up all along the great length of the pounded dirt floor, and among these they caught sight of the girls’ stove—but that wasn’t why. Instinctively, both men looked up, expecting to see a few chinks of sky, but here in this place the overarching girders were securely roofed. And unlike that other place where the two had met, there were rails here, domestic to the ground, of the same kind that in the center of town made a bicycle skid on its way down the avenue. If the trolley cars themselves hadn’t been removed from here, any resemblance might never—the mate spoke first.

“Is the hangar, our Jim, isna it?” he said. “Is the hangar, for fair.”

One could smell the oily rags; for certain there was that smell here; the crowd’s hubba-bubba dwindled to the sound of men—mechanics, pilots, ground-crews. There was missing only the latticed sky, dirty or shining like a mussel-shell, beneath which he and the mate had worked their rags and told each other of barges and blue glare at the top of mine-holes; all that was missing was the down-whanging whine that sent them for the ditch and the brave, incoming putt-putt that stood them up to squint—planes didn’t sound like artillery shells in those days. As if all the shell shock had been waiting there, Jim’s ears filled with these now.

They all saw how white he was, the mate said later.

Emily spoke quick, reaching out her hand. She was back in her sailordress with its middy-tie, her hair damp-dry. “Come along, Jim, and help me.” She took his limp hand in hers. “Come along and help.”

He went along, but as it came out to the mate in bits later, for some hours it was to Jim as if the war had come down and in upon him like a plane itself—“like a plane landing through the roof onto the dining-room table, mate”—it was the war-thrust, at last becoming real to him, through no longer being so. Which was the realer then, was it daily life, for all except the dead on plaques? Could it be? Nobody in the hubba-bubba here in the hall, even the lamed or the bereaved, was thinking of the war in the overmastering way it ought to be thought of—held like a major wound in the mind. For some hours, he must have tried. Of all the remaining hours, through the din of supper, until he found himself with the others being loaded into cars for the ride back—he remembers nothing else.

“But it would take a Christ to do it,” he told the mate later, and they both recall that they even solemnly discussed whether this was a reason for them to take harder to religion or give it up altogether. For you must understand that many of these bits being pieced together for you here and now, came out during a lifetime of friendship, and relationship too; half the time even you young fry don’t stop to think which of the two Jims’ grandchildren you really are. What if the main and most of what happened that day didn’t come out in words between those two until a cold winter’s day forty years later, when one said to the other, “Want to drive along and look at something; got something to show you, Jim,” and two old men sat talking together, nonstop except to ease themselves once or twice, against a hill? The trip back, the ride back; that’s when things really happen, even in memory. Though—even if nothing so secret had ever come out in such plain words before—all those forty years, both of them knew.

“Emily sat you down in a chair next to the fritter-stall,” the mate said—that much later. “She managed you. You were cashier. Can’t believe you don’t remember, even
now?
And I was the barker, why I yelled myself purple, we must have sold more of those things that evening than the girls had sold in a year. Funny how, though I’m not much any more for even the best bread and cake—always begging your and Emily’s pardon, and knowing what you’ve done with them—I can taste those crazy little snippets now.”

“Recipe’s lost,” said Jim. “She always said.”

“Sure is,” said the mate.

And after a while and some further conversation, the two old men got up, brushed the loam from their trousers, got in the mate’s Cadillac, and drove off.

But back to that day much earlier, when, after the commissary car had been reloaded, the two men and two girls left all that gear to the old hens who preferred to stay with it in the rear car, and made for the front one. As they climbed into the best seat of all, the last ones of each row, next to the back platform—where they could sit two by two and across the aisle from each other, the mate clapped Jim’s shoulder hard.

“She bowl you over?” he whispered. “Or was it the heat?”

(Have I said it was getting sultrier and sultrier?)

Jim didn’t answer, except with his shoulder, which took the blow unmoving.

“He’s all right,” said the mate out loud to all and sundry. “We knew you were O.K., Jim. Once you started making change.”

And so he, was O.K., for forty years, but still, those forty years later, going back in the Cadillac, and still being of the sort he is, and not too much shakier, he asked the old mate, “—and do
you
remember what you came up close over my shoulder and said to me while I was making change? Now I
remember.
About Lottie?”

“Yes, I remember it,” answered the old mate, his voice final. And neither of them said another word about it, all the rest of the way home. Some things even memory is too late for, once they come out all of a piece. But we both remember it now. The crowd was full of faces; the body-heat in the carbarn, and the storm coloring the air sullen, made them appear mazy and on fire all at the same time. Behind in the stall the girls were busy but not forgotten, the one sister who was heard loudest in her silences and the other who was only something to see, but so much of it. The mate’s hand was hard on the shoulder, the shoulder steady. “She’s as solid a woman as anybody would want to stand by him. She’s a dream.”

“You mean—
her
…” said Jim.

“You know who I mean,” said the mate.

Then, at least in that part of the world and its wars, it was time for the last trolley ride.

Lottie even said it out loud, in the tone of one who reads articles. “It’s the last of the old Batavia. We must remember it.”

“Remember what old Bert said?” said the mate—who was now sitting next to her—to Jim. “He never could get it, the true trolley smell.”

Think he never notices—that’s what people often think of the mate. And then, months after, or forty years on—out with it. Anyway, it was the last anybody there spoke of Riefel.

And now to the night. Will you be shocked at the story from now on, and if so,
which part of it?
That’s what I’m wondering. But even if we held hands in a circle, a seance, and tried, your generation could never tell us; you’re not shockable yet, you think; you wouldn’t know. And now to that night.

All the time they had been loading, that sulphur-green quiet before a summer storm had been building, so that children cried out, peevish against the invisible weight in their breasts. The night grew glassier. Outside the waiting line of cars—a whole arkful, racked up tidy with their bundles—the moon was high over the hilltop, struggling with a barrage of clouds. A
ring around it last night—
clustered up in all the front seats, as old women do, the hens were telling over the almanac of their bones. The head motorman, their cossetted pet whom they had fed and nagged and now looked up to trustfully, up in front with his back to them, now suddenly got down again, and was anxiously observed in consultation with the other two drivers. Meanwhile, in the car at first so welcomedly anonymous to the two men and the two girls, character once more began willy-nilly to surface to the faces and to peer from unexpected corners: veterans, librarians, other stall-keepers met tonight. In answer, their own town faces surfaced, and they sat with their eyes lowered: the two buddies, and the two Pardees. Nobody spoke. In the yellow gloom of the trolley car, it was the familiar moment, the one before take-off, before—lurch and away!—the gathering clop-clop of the post chaise. The motor-man climbed back in, and waited. Then thunder was heard, bringing the hills in closer, as it does in these parts. Then they were all lively at the windows, pulling them down as the storm broke, and the spell with it, or so it at first seemed. Inside the sealed car, while the rain swept white over the windows, the chatter softened almost to dove-talk, the tender, fraternal talk of the safe. Then it was over, and—they had started! Who had noticed it, the spark and the start, except maybe a child? What a success even the storm had been! It was a real cloudburst, the hens said.

Then they were swaying through the trees again. For the party in the rear, the spell had just begun.

The trees were a dark aisle of plumes now, as if the train of four trolley cars was running a gauntlet which never closed in. The trees held the night up for them, out to them, and there was only twenty-nine miles of it—unbearable not to crush it around someone and to one’s breast. A waitress would not have been safe here. How locked and stoppered all their mouths were, in the moonlight that leafed their faces, through open windows that poured their first ride together back at them, cool summer balm. There was a zest in the air no sweater could slake, only arms. If the silence went on like this, or back into chatter, this ride would be their last anywhere; all felt sure of it but could do nothing. Only twenty-nine, eight, seven—back to autumn, to Oriskany—and out of mind. At what mile of it the current in the overhead wire went out—and stayed that way for two hours by hen-watches—I wouldn’t be able to say. But I shall be able to describe it to the inch, to the nerve, as a man’s tongue does, touching it. If you laugh at it, I’ll smile with you; if you shock at the wrong moment of this account, I’ll slap your faces.

Well … a few motormen’s lamps were lit, of course, one glassed-in red oil-glow to a car, just the right light for the old to nod by, or the mothers to cradle their lot with a
put your head down,
but nothing to what the moon did for all the other restless ones. Two by two or in bunches, all the young folk, except for two pair of them, slipped to the back of the platform, then down. All had to pass the two men and two girls sitting in the seats chosen as the most anonymous, the best. As the others went by they would see the mate and Lottie stiffly figured in the lurid light, her bust, his forelock. Across from them, the other sister and the buddy sat rigid too, but like those garden statues which have the beginning of a stone smile. And after a while, if any hen was watching, she could have seen only the one pair, in the red light still unclasped. Opposite them, that other pair had gone.

Just outside the car, the trees flung themselves in dark fountains, like Versailles. Then came a meadow, shimmering like parkland and as vast, then more trees. Through the window, and a round break in the trees like the bright end of a kaleidoscope, the mate watched that other couple disappear until they were gone. Though their story might take years to be made into words, as he sat there beside Lottie he knew it already, and forever.

Out there, where it looked so mysterious—“Oh it was,” said Jim forty years later, “and I don’t mind telling you of it; indeed don’t we almost
have
to, now?”—out there, Jim walked along beside Emily, slow through the wet grasses and in rhythm too, though they had not yet touched even hands. A paragraph from one of Riefel’s manuals, he said, kept blotting in and out across his sight—“For simplicity of operation the overhead system is best … supply of power is not interfered with by heavy rains or snow … duplicate conductors are used and repairs rapidly executed.” He hadn’t known until now that he learned things so profoundly, and wondered that she couldn’t hear these words
duplicate, execute
attached like a hissing refrain to his steps. Then he thought of what the motorman here had called out: “Take two hours at the outside to fix things, two and a half at the outside; things are that wet!”—and exulting life over miniatures, he laughed aloud on that black air—and was heard.

It was silver air that the mate saw, though he could no longer see them.