100 Malicious Little Mysteries

Sweet Fever by Bill Pronzini

Quarter before midnight, like on every evening except the Sabbath or when it’s storming or when my rheumatism gets to paining too bad, me and Billy Bob went down to the Chigger Mountain railroad tunnel to wait for the night freight from St. Louis. This here was a fine summer evening, with a big old fat yellow moon hung above the pines on Hankers Ridge and mockingbirds and cicadas and toads making a soft ruckus. Nights like this, I have me a good feeling, and I know Billy Bob does too.

They’s a bog hollow on the near side of the tunnel opening, and beside it a woody slope, not too steep. Halfway down the slope is a big catalpa tree and that was where we always set, side by side with our backs up against the trunk.

So we come on down to there, me hobbling some with my cane and Billy Bob holding onto my arm. That moon was so bright you could see the melons lying in Ferdie Johnson’s patch over on the left, and the rail tracks had a sleek oiled look coming out of the tunnel mouth and leading off towards the Sabreville yards a mile up the line. On the far side of the tracks, the woods and the run-down shacks that used to be a hobo jungle before the county sheriff closed it off thirty years back had them a silvery cast, like they was all coated in winter frost.

We set down under the catalpa tree and I leaned my head back to catch my wind. Billy Bob said, “Granpa, you feeling right?”

“Fine, boy.”

“Rheumatism ain’t started paining you?”

“Not a bit.”

He give me a grin. “Got a little surprise for you.”

“The hell you do.”

“Fresh plug of blackstrap,” he said. He come out of his pocket with it. “Mr. Cotter got him in a shipment just today down at his store.”

I was some pleased. But I said, “Now you hadn’t ought to go spending your money on me, Billy Bob.”

“Got nobody else I’d rather spend it on.”

I took the plug and unwrapped it and had me a chew. Old man like me ain’t got many pleasures left, but fresh blackstrap’s one; good corn’s another. Billy Bob gets us all the corn we need from Ben Logan’s boys. They got a pretty good-sized still up on Hankers Ridge, and their corn is the best in this part of the hills. Not that either of us is a drinking man, now. A little touch after supper and on special days is all. I never did hold with drinking too much, or doing anything too much, and I taught Billy Bob the same.

He’s a good boy. Man couldn’t ask for a better grandson. But I raised him that way — in my own image, you might say — after both my own son Rufus and Billy Bob’s ma got taken from us in 1947. I reckon I done a right job of it, and I couldn’t be less proud of him than I was of his pa, or love him no less either.

Well, we set there and I worked on the chew of blackstrap and had a spit every now and then, and neither of us said much. Pretty soon the first whistle come, way off on the other side of Chigger Mountain. Billy Bob cocked his head and said, “She’s right on schedule.”

“Mostly is,” I said, “this time of year.”

That sad lonesome hungry ache started up in me again — what my daddy used to call the “sweet fever.” He was a railroad man, and I grew up around trains and spent a goodly part of my early years at the roundhouse in the Sabreville yards. Once, when I was ten, he let me take the throttle of the big 2-8-0 Mogul steam locomotive on his highballing run to Eulalia, and I can’t recollect no more finer experience in my whole life.

Later on I worked as a callboy, and then as a fireman on a 2-10-4, and put in some time as a yard-tender engineer, and I expect I’d have gone on in railroading if it hadn’t been for the Depression and getting myself married and having Rufus. My daddy’s short-line company folded up in 1931, and half a dozen others too, and wasn’t no work for either of us in Sabreville or Eulalia or anywheres else on the iron.

That squeezed the will right out of my daddy, and he took to ailing, and I had to accept a job on Mr. John Barnett’s truck farm to support him and the rest of my family. Was my intention to go back into railroading, but the Depression dragged on, and my daddy died, and a year later my wife Amanda took sick and passed on, and by the time the war come it was just too late.

But my son Rufus got him the sweet fever too, and took a switchman’s job in the Sabreville yards, and worked there right up until the night he died. Billy Bob was only three then; his own sweet fever comes most purely from me and what I taught him. Ain’t no doubt trains been a major part of all our lives, good and bad, and ain’t no doubt neither they get into a man’s blood and maybe change him, too, in one way and another. I reckon they do.

The whistle come again, closer now, and I judged the St. Louis freight was just about to enter the tunnel on the other side of the mountain. You could hear the big wheels singing on the track, and if you listened close you could just about hear the banging of couplings and the hiss of air brakes as the engineer throttled down for the curve. The tunnel don’t run straight through Chigger Mountain; she comes in from the north and angles to the east, so that a big freight like the St. Louis got to cut back to quarter speed coming through.

When she entered the tunnel, the tracks down below seemed to shimmy and you could feel the vibration clear up where we was sitting under the catalpa tree. Billy Bob stood himself up and peered down towards the black tunnel mouth like a bird dog on a point. The whistle come again, and once more, from inside the tunnel, sounding hollow and miseried now. Every time I heard it like that, I thought of a body trapped and hurting and crying out for help that wouldn’t come in the empty hours of the night. I shifted the cud of blackstrap and worked up a spit to keep my mouth from drying. The sweet fever feeling was strong in my stomach.

The blackness around the tunnel opening commenced to lighten, and got brighter and brighter until the long white glow from the locomotive’s headlamp spilled out onto the tracks beyond. Then she come through into my sight, her light shining like a giant’s eye, and the engineer give another tug on the whistle, and the sound of her was a clattering rumble as loud to my ears as a mountain rockslide. But she wasn’t moving fast, just kind of easing along, pulling herself out of that tunnel like a night crawler out of a mound of earth.

The locomotive clacked on past, and me and Billy Bob watched her string slide along in front of us. Flats, boxcars, three tankers in a row, more flats loaded down with pine logs big around as a privy, a refrigerator car, five coal gondolas, another link of boxcars. Fifty in the string already, I thought. She won’t be dragging more than sixty, sixty-five.

Billy Bob said suddenly, “Granpa, look yonder!”

He had his arm up, pointing. My eyes ain’t so good no more and it took me a couple of seconds to follow his point, over on our left and down at the door of the third boxcar in the last link. It was sliding open, and clear in the moonlight I saw a man’s head come out, then his shoulders.

“It’s a floater, Granpa,” Billy Bob said, excited. “He’s gonna jump. Look at him holding there, he’s gonna jump.”

I spit into the grass. “Help me up, boy.”

He got a hand under my arm and lifted me up and held me until I was steady on my cane. Down there at the door of the boxcar, the floater was looking both ways along the string of cars and down at the ground beside the tracks. That ground was soft loam and the train was going slow enough and there wasn’t much chance he would hurt himself jumping off.

He come to that same idea, and as soon as he did he flung himself off the car with his arms spread out and his hair and coattails flying in the slipstream. I saw him land solid and go down and roll over once. Then he knelt there, shaking his head a little, looking around.

Well, he was the first floater we’d seen in seven months. The yard crews seal up the cars nowadays and they ain’t many ride the rails anyhow, even down in our part of the country. But every now and then a floater wants to ride bad enough to break a seal, or hides himself in a gondola or on a loaded flat. Kids, oldtime hoboes, wanted men. They’s still a few.

And some of ’em get off right down where this one had, because they know the St. Louis freight stops in Sabreville and they’s yardmen there that check the string, or because they see the run-down shacks of the old hobo jungle or Ferdie Johnson’s melon patch. Man rides a freight long enough, no provisions, he gets mighty hungry. The sight of a melon patch like Ferdie’s is plenty enough to make him jump off.

“Billy Bob,” I said.

“Yes, Granpa. You wait easy now.”

He went off along the slope, running. I watched the floater, and he come up on his feet and got himself into a clump of bushes alongside the tracks to wait for the caboose to pass so’s he wouldn’t be seen. Pretty soon the last of the cars left the tunnel, and then the caboose with a signalman holding a red-eye lantern out on the platform. When she was down the tracks and just about beyond my sight, the floater showed himself again and had him another look around. Then, sure enough, he made straight for the melon patch.

Once he got into it I couldn’t see him because he was in close to the woods at the edge of the slope. I couldn’t see Billy Bob neither. The whistle sounded one final time, mournful, as the lights of the caboose disappeared, and a chill come to my neck and set there like a cold dead hand. I closed my eyes and listened to the last singing of the wheels fade away.

It weren’t long before I heard footfalls on the slope coming near, then the angry sound of a stranger’s voice, but I kept my eyes shut until they walked up close and Billy Bob said, “Granpa.” When I opened ’em the floater was standing three feet in front of me, white face shining — scared face, angry face, evil face.

“What the hell is this?” he said. “What you want with me?”

“Give me your gun, Billy Bob,” I said.

He did it, and I held her tight and lifted the barrel. The ache in my stomach was so strong my knees felt weak and I could scarcely breathe. But my hand was steady.

The floater’s eyes come wide-open and he backed off a step. “Hey,” he said, “hey, you can’t—”

I shot him twice.

He fell over and rolled some and come up on his back. They wasn’t no doubt he was dead, so I give the gun back to Billy Bob and he put it away in his belt. “All right, boy,” I said.

Billy Bob nodded and went over and hoisted the dead floater onto his shoulder. I watched him trudge off towards the bog hollow, and in my mind I could hear the train whistle as she’d sounded from inside the tunnel. I thought again, as I had so many times, that it was the way my boy Rufus and Billy Bob’s ma must have sounded that night in 1947, when the two floaters from the hobo jungle broke into their home and raped her and shot Rufus to death. She lived just long enough to tell us about the floaters, but they was never caught. So it was up to me, and then up to me and Billy Bob when he come of age.

Well, it ain’t like it once was and that saddens me. But they’s still a few that ride the rails, still a few take it into their heads to jump off down there when the St. Louis freight slows coming through the Chigger Mountain tunnel.

Oh my yes, they’ll always be a few for me and Billy Bob and the sweet fever inside us both.