Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America Read online

  The car was filling quickly. I glanced back at the cavalrymen, who had begun to approach the train at a steady gallop. Sam waved our credentials like a flag in the air. “Come on, then!” the Agent said, and we were lofted aboard like so many sacks of mail. Then the Travel Agent fired his rifle at the sky and announced that the next unticketed man within three feet of him would be shot dead.

  The cavalry rode down on us at a gallop, closing the distance. Just then the train gave a lurch and began to move, and the Agent turned to the nearest of his passengers and said, “Secure that door!”

  The ticketless mob shrieked to see their hopes thus extinguished, and the door as it slid closed encountered many scrabbling hands and fingers. I was able to catch a last glimpse of the horsemen under the command of One-Leg Willy Bass as they charged through the tents and shacks of Bad Jump, the cavalrymen shouting and gesticulating in an attempt to delay the train’s departure. Then the door clanged fully shut; and only by putting my eye to a crack in the boards could I see blue sky, a few pearly clouds, and the prairie seeming to move with ponderous grace as the Caribou-Horn Train began to gather speed.

  10

  A book could be written about the events that transpired aboard the Phantom Car, but it would a sad and often obscene volume. I mean to chronicle only the adventures that affected us most directly.

  The car was a converted freight-box that ought to have been retired from service years ago. It was essentially a single room, long and narrow, with loose straw scattered at one end of it, and a few bound bales on which passengers might sit or lie, and at the other end a stove, vented through the roof, and a chair on which the Travel Agent sat vigilantly, his rifle in his lap. Of other furniture there was a water barrel, a whiskey barrel, and a barrel of salt meat, probably horse. The walls of the car were poorly-joined planks through which the wind came rushing in. The skimpy daylight admitted by these cracked boards was supplemented by the glow of the stove and glimmer of three or four hanging lamps.

  Our fellow passengers were among the best and worst men I have ever met, the latter outnumbering the former by a fair throw.

  We introduced ourselves to a few of them as Bad Jump receded behind us. I “kept my mouth shut,” for the most part, as Sam had suggested, speaking only the polite minimum; but I was tempted to curiosity now and then. I had never seen such folks as these. There were a dozen indentured men from a cruelly-managed California Estate, for instance, who spoke the Spanish language, and wore tattoos in the shape of weeping roses on their arms. There were cattle-herders and shepherds who were evasive about their origins. There were manual laborers aiming for work in the East, and many single sullen men who growled insults when spoken to, or confined their sociability to the card games that sprang up as soon as the train left Bad Jump.

  There was at least one well-spoken and literate man aboard. His name was Langers, and he described himself as a “colporteur,” that is, a salesman of religious tracts. As soon as the train was in motion Langers opened the large sample case he carried and began to offer his wares at what he called “discount prices.” At first I was astonished that he would bother attempting such sales, since the great majority of the passengers was almost certainly illiterate. But on closer examination his pamphlets proved to be little more than picture-books got up to resemble sacred literature.* These were offensive, and I put a distance between myself and the colporteur; but he did a brisk trade among the laborers and refugees, whose appetite for religious instruction seemed nearly insatiable.

  Many of the men had been wage-workers, and during the afternoon we were treated to massed choruses of Piston, Loom, and Anvil, the popular anthem of the industrial laborer. This was the first time I had heard the chorus of that song:

  By Piston, Loom, and Anvil, boys,

  We clothe and arm the nation,

  And sweat all day for a pauper’s pay,

  And half a soldier’s ration. . . .

  (though I have heard it many times since), and it struck me as awkwardly rhymed and, in its later verses, seditious. I asked Julian about the bellicosity of the song, and he explained that the ongoing War in Labrador had engendered new industries that employed mechanics and wage-laborers in large number. The complaints of that emerging class had lately become vocal; and these discontents, Julian said, might eventually transform the traditional rural economy of Estate and Indenture.

  I was feeling homesick, however, and I didn’t much relish the company of militant mechanics anxious to overturn the existing order. Williams Ford, for all its inequities, had been a less raucous place than Bad Jump or the Phantom Car, and I wished I had not been forced to leave it.

  That feeling deepened as the afternoon passed into evening. Passengers lined up to take a hot meal from the bubbling pot atop the stove, while the Travel Agent doled out rations from the whiskey barrel* to anyone who could pay. I sat at the rear of the car sipping snowmelt water from a canteen and nursing my unhappiness.

  After a time Julian came to sit with me.

  Much of his Eupatridian softness had been worked out of him over the last few days, and he was beginning to grow the sparse beard that would eventually become his trademark. His hands and face were dirty—shockingly so, given his fondness for bathing. He had endured all the same trials I had lately endured; and yet he was able to smile and ask what it was that had got the worse of me.

  “Do you have to ask?” I waved my hand at the raucous passengers, the smoky stove, the grim Travel Agent, and the noisome hole in the floor that served as a privy. “We’re in a terrible place, among terrible men.”

  “Temporary companions,” Julian said carelessly, “all bound for a better life.”†

  “It wouldn’t be so bad if they would conduct themselves like Christians.”

  “Perhaps it would or perhaps it wouldn’t. My father served among men just like these, and led them into battle, where their manners mattered less than their courage. And that’s a quality not apportioned by one’s station in life—it exists or not, to the same proportion, among all men, regardless of origin. In Panama my father’s life was often enough saved by men who used to be called beggars or thieves, and he took that lesson to heart.”

  It was a sentiment I had also encountered in the literary works of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, where (admittedly) I had liked it better. “Do I have to tolerate vulgarity, though, on the chance that a hooligan might save my life?”

  “True vulgarity is obviously not to be tolerated. But the point, Adam, is that the standards by which we judge these things are pliable, or ought to be, and they expand or contract from place to place and time to time.”

  “I suppose they evolve,” I said, grimly.

  “In fact they do, and if you want to make a success of your travels you’d do well to remember that fact.”

  I said I would try, though my heart wasn’t in it. But an incident that evening served as a painful illustration of the truth of Julian’s lesson. The Caribou-Horn Train stopped at a coaling station, and two more Travel Agents came aboard to relieve the one who had guarded us through the day’s journey. During that exchange I caught a glimpse of the world outside, which in the darkness looked just like Bad Jump: tin-roofed shacks and a prairie horizon. A few flakes of snow swirled into the Phantom Car along with the two Agents in hide coats, who carried battered rifles and wore ammunition belts over their shoulders. Then the door was closed again, and the stove stoked up to a simmering redness. Our new overseers took their place at the front of the car, and we were docile under their surveillance, until it became obvious that the Agents had no especial interest in our behavior beyond preventing a full-scale riot. Then the revelries resumed.

  Sam and Julian called me forward to join a circle of men around the stove. I did so reluctantly. There was a song in progress, which Julian accompanied on the choruses. Perhaps I should have joined in, too, just to be companionable. But it wasn’t a suitable song. It was about a young woman who lost her shawl on the way to church—but that
was only the beginning of her misfortune, for on each succeeding day the unlucky female lost yet another article of clothing, culminating on a Saturday night on which she lost “that which a virtuous woman values above all else,” her downfall being minutely described. The song provoked much laughter and gaiety, but I failed to find the humor in it.

  Then a flask was passed around the circle. It came eventually to the person on my left, who swilled from it enthusiastically and offered it to me.

  “No thank you,” I said.

  The man who made the offer wasn’t much older than myself. He was tall, and raggedly dressed, and he wore a threadbare woolen cap pulled down around his ears. His face was ruddy, and he had seemed genial enough during the singing, but my refusal of the liquor caused him to squint in bewilderment. “What’s that mean, no thank you?”

  “Pass your bottle to the next man; I’m not a drinker.”

  “Not a drinker!”

  “Nor ever have been.”

  “You won’t drink! Why not?”

  He seemed genuinely curious, and I cast about for a suitable answer. Unfortunately what came to mind was the Dominion Reader for Young Persons, a volume from which my mother used to read aloud on Sundays. That book was filled with proverbs and commonplace wisdom, and I had learned much of it by heart. In the past, when I particularly wanted to irritate Julian (or when his arguments about Moon-Visiting began to pall), I would cite one of the quotations from it: To discuss the nature and position of the Earth does not help us in our hope of the life to come.* That would send him into paroxysms of indignation—an entertaining spectacle, if you were in the mood for it.

  To night, however, the quotation that came to mind was from the chapter on Temperance. I turned to the man with the flask and said, “I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.”

  He blinked at me. “Say that again.”

  I had assumed this homily about the evils of drink was universally familiar, and I began to repeat it: “I would not put a thief in my mouth—”

  But I was interrupted by his fist.

  What I didn’t understand was that Lymon Pugh (as he called himself) was a simple man, not accustomed to metaphor or simile, and he thought I had accused him of being a thief, or made an implication about what he might be willing to put in his mouth.

  “I’ll fight the man who says that twice,” he declared. “Stand up!”

  It was a fight from which I couldn’t honorably back away. But Mr. Pugh was a daunting opponent. He squared his shoulders and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to reveal muscular forearms crossed with numerous scars. His big hands, clenched into rocklike fists, were similarly scarred, and he possessed only a stump where his right-hand pinkie finger ought to have been.

  I had been trained in fighting by Sam Godwin, however, so I raised my own fists, and set one foot ahead of the other, and made clear my determination not to back down.

  The crowd moved back to give us room. The card players abandoned their games, and some began to place bets on the impending combat. “Go on,” my assailant jeered, “strike a blow, or try to!”

  He had had no formal training and took a loose-limbed approach to the battle. My cheek was still smarting from his first blow, and I meant to erase his smugness, and I did this by feigning a punch with my left hand and striking him squarely with the right. The blow was telling, and his eyes widened as the breath went out of him, and the crowd murmured its appreciation.

  “Good one!” I heard Julian cry.

  Lymon Pugh was surprised but not deterred. As soon as he recovered he swung into me with a will, his big arms flailing.

  Had he fought decently, with a sense of style and grace, as I did, I’m sure I would have defeated him. But Lymon Pugh wasn’t educated in the art, and he used his scarred hands and arms as if they were clubs. I had countered only a few of these windmill punches before my own arms began to numb with the impacts. Pugh’s arms were as insensible as salted hams, however, and he used them to advantage, getting through my guard twice and finally rendering a blow so ferocious that my head filled with fireworks and my legs lost all direction.

  Before I could regain my senses the fight was declared a victory for Mr. Pugh, who danced in circles, and waved his hat, and hooted like an ape in his triumph.

  Sam and Julian helped me to a haybale at the rear of the car, where Sam applied a handkerchief to my bleeding face.

  “I let my guard down,” I said thickly. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “On the contrary,” Sam said. “Whether you know it or not, you did exactly the right thing. As far as these people are concerned, the haughtiness has been knocked out of you—you’re no better or worse than any of them now.”

  That was a bitter consolation, however, and it provided little comfort as the raucous night roared on.

  * The Song of Solomon, Frankly Illustrated, was one title; another was Acts Condemned by Leviticus, Explained and Described, with Diagrams. They did not bear the Dominion Stamp of Approval.

  * Whiskey was the word he used, but experienced drinkers, of whom there were many in the crowd, expressed the opinion that the fiery fluid was in fact “Idaho Velvet,” or Potato-Jack.

  † A statement too optimistic by half, as it turned out.

  * Attributed to Saint Ambrose by some scholars, by others to Timothy LeHaye.

  11

  The reveling stopped at last, once the liquor began to tell on the revelers, who slumped and dozed under the indifferent gaze of the Travel Agents. I was eventually able to sleep, although my injuries, and the cold air keening through the cracks in the car, woke me from time to time.

  There is something mournful and uneasy about waking up late at night on a moving train. The wheels clicked a bony rhythm, the engine growled like a distant Leviathan, and from time to time the whistle sounded a cry so lonesome it seemed to speak for the whole wide moonless night.

  But there was an exception to this monotony of sound, and I should have paid greater attention to it. I was dreaming in a disjointed fashion of Williams Ford, and of Flaxie playing by the stream on a summer afternoon, when I felt the Phantom Car lurch to a slow stop.

  There followed a clanking and a rumbling, and a silence, and more clanking, until the train started up again. I wondered if I should wake Sam, who was snoring nearby, and tell him about these events. But I was afraid of seeming naive. Sam had ridden trains often before in his career, and this was probably only another coaling stop or a pause in some switching yard where a branch road intersected the main line. The Travel Agents huddling in the glow of the stove seemed unalarmed, so I put the matter out of my mind.

  The next day passed as the previous one had, though the men were sullen after their indulgence of the night before, and the smell of sickness hung about the privy hole and interfered with everyone’s appetite.

  I was still smarting from yesterday’s battle. I spent the morning by myself, perched on a haybale and composing a letter to my parents, though the jarring of the railroad car made my handwriting childish.

  I worked at it without interruption until Lymon Pugh came and stood in front of me, his legs planted like trees in the scattered straw. I didn’t like to see him there—I feared some fresh confrontation—but all he said was, “What are you doing?”

  “Writing a letter,” I said.

  He lifted his hat and smoothed the unruly knot of black hair beneath it. “Well, then,” he said. “A letter.”

  This wasn’t much of a conversation, and I returned my attention to the page.

  Lymon Pugh cleared his throat. “Listen here … do you take back what you said last night?”

  I considered my response carefully, for I was not anxious to provoke him into another battle. “I meant no insult by it.”

  “You called me a thief, though.”

  “No—you misunderstood me. I only meant to explain my abstinence. The ‘thief’ is liquor, do you see? I don’t drink liquor, because it steals my sensibility.”


  “Your sensibility!”

  “My capacity for reason. It makes me drunk, in other words.”

  “That’s all you were trying to say—that liquor makes you drunk?”

  “That’s it exactly.”

  He gave me a scornful look. “Of course liquor makes you drunk! I learned that at an early age. You don’t need to tell me anything about it, much less make a riddle of it. What’s your name?”

  “Adam Hazzard.”

  “Lymon Pugh,” he said, and put out his big scarred hand, which I cautiously shook. “Where are you from, Adam Hazzard?”

  “Athabaska.”

  “Cascadia, me,” he said. A true Westerner—Cascadia is as far west as you can go without wetting your feet in the ocean. “What do you call that hat you’re wearing?”

  “A packle hat.” (A packle hat, for readers who haven’t seen one, has a disk of stiffened wool or hemp for the crown, attached to a tube of the same fabric, the tube being rolled up to form a brim, tied in place with threads.)

  “That’s a strange kind of hat,” he said, though his own hat, which resembled a sailor’s watch-cap picked over by moths, was nothing to brag about. “I guess it keeps you warm?”

  “Warm enough. How did you come by all those scars on your arms?”

  “I was a boner,” he said; and to my blank expression he added, “In a packing plant, in the Valley—the Willamette Valley. I boned beeves. That was my job—haven’t you ever worked in a slaughterhouse?”

  “No; I missed that opportunity, somehow.”

  “The beeves come along a line on hooks, and the boner cuts the muscle from the bone. You have to work close and fast, for a dozen other men are doing the same job on all sides of you, and the overseer brooks no slacking. But it gets hot in the boning room, and on wet days the air fogs, and the blood slicks your grip, so the knife is bound to go wrong sooner or later. Nobody lasts too long in that trade. Blood poisoning takes ’em, or they whittle themselves down so far they can’t hold a haft any longer.”