John Henry Days

PART THREE. ON THE EFFECTS OF COUNTRY AIR

The assistant paymaster delivered word of the contest with the week’s wages. He walked the camp. He talked to the men. He looked down at his ledger and looked into the eyes of each man and gave him his pay. The assistant paymaster counted out coins slowly as if the men did not understand the meaning of wages. As if the men did not know how to count money and did not know what they had earned for their labor. It was payday and all the men knew he was coming. They had learned not to rush up to him and crowd him like begging dogs. He paid each man as he got to his name on the list, which did not follow any order but his own. The list was not determined by name or salary or seniority on the site. It was determined by the mind of the assistant paymaster and over time the men had learned their places in the order. John Henry was toward the back of the list and he waited in his shanty for the assistant paymaster with a dull and rigid patience. As the strongest driver he was paid the most. Most of the men did not resent his salary because they knew they could not beat him and that was a natural fact. Some did resent him. The assistant paymaster gave John Henry his wages for the week and told him that Captain Johnson wanted a contest tomorrow.

The company could not stop talk about the deaths. The men had been told not to talk about life on the mountain and had seen with their own eyes men banished from the site for complaining about the conditions, the injuries and the hours and the deaths. But neither Captain Johnson nor his bosses could keep the men from talking about the mountain at night. Camp life could not be tamed by daylight threat. Night was a release from the mountain in the shadow of the mountain, beneath the outline of the thing against dark blue night. They drank and wagered and told stories, and when they drank their tongues loosed and they dwelled on the violence. Jokes curdled quickly at night and lately the men dwelled on the cave-in at the western cut. It was like a trick, the mountain. The shale resisted hammers, steel and blasting but it gave to rain and wind. Water from Heaven melted the rock of the mountain and the rainwater was red on the ground. After rain, their boots were caked with red grit from the puddles. The first day after last week’s rain, the roof at the mouth of the western cut gave way, crashing through the timber arching, and killed five graders who stood there to get out of the sun. It was a trick. In the shade of the cut the mountain came down on them like a hammer and killed them. A cry went up. The other men mucked out the rock and pulled out the bodies. They knew the men were dead but hurried anyway. When the doctor arrived he looked at the twisted bodies and talked to Captain Johnson. They talked and Captain Johnson gestured to one of the bosses. The men buried the dead men in the fill of the western cut and no warning from the company was going to stop the talk in the camp.

John Henry held his pay and stepped out into the sun. The cheer of payday animated the men in the camp. The men who drank their wages swiftly and had gone a day or two without whiskey drank. Debts were repaid. Some men with families calculated how much money to send home. John Henry fingered coins in his hand and considered the cunning of Captain Johnson. A contest raised the spirits of the men, even if they all knew who would win. One day John Henry would be beaten. Men bet on the challenger and men bet on John Henry. The excitement, John Henry knew, would put the cave-in out of the minds of the men. Until the next accident. The contest would cure the discontent throughout the camp.

L’il Bob scampered over and wondered to his partner, who will challenge you? John Henry didn’t know. When the word came a few hours later that it was O’Shea he was not surprised. He lifted his eyebrows slightly and no more. He knew the Irishman did not like getting paid less than a nigger. Captain Johnson kept O’Shea in the western cut for that very reason. He didn’t want to know what would happen if the Irishman had to work next to John Henry every day. The black man’s hammer on steel might sound like coins to him, the sound of coins falling out of his pocket. He might decide to use his hammer for something else besides eating into the mountain. Take a swing. O’Shea had arms like stovepipes. Yet it was probably Captain Johnson’s idea that the two men compete in the steel driving contest. The winner got fifty dollars; probably O’Shea would get a bonus if he beat the black. The white men would bet on O’Shea and the black men would bet on John Henry. The contest between the races would distract them from the mountain’s vengeance all the more. If the black man won it would make the men feel good about themselves and they would forget about the mountain for a time. If the white man won it would remind them of their place in this world and the hate would drive the work. The work progressed in either event. Captain Johnson had a timetable.

That night L’il Bob said that Irishman was foolish, and John Henry shrugged. The Irish workers were a step up from the blacks, but not that much. Low competed against lower. L’il Bob on payday was a happy man. He thought up lines he could sing for tomorrow’s contest and told them to his partner. He sang, Shake the drill and turn it ’round, I’ll beat that white man down. John Henry cocked his head. L’il Bob said, Shake the drill and turn it ’round, I’ll beat that Irishman down. How’s that? It’s better, John Henry said. O’Shea and his tribe wouldn’t like it, but the bosses wouldn’t get angry and take it out on them for days. L’il Bob told jokes he thought up as he held the drill bit for John Henry. John Henry would look at the man in the darkness of the tunnel and see a slit of a smile on his lips. It was a joke he would hear later. L’il Bob on payday told his jokes over card games. He made his coworkers lose track of their cards and he took their money at the end of the hand: full house. The blacksmith named Ford asked L’il Bob if his boy were going to beat the Irishman tomorrow or should he put his money on the underdog. Ford looked at John Henry while he said this to see his reaction. The steeldriver said nothing and L’il Bob said, have you lost your sense? Must be crazy — sure playing cards like you’re crazy or maybe you just like giving your money away. Ford grunted and anted.

John Henry turned to bed early that night. He had never been beaten by another man’s hammer but pride is a sin. He took his rest. The payday carousing tried to keep him awake but he willed himself to sleep and dreamed of the contest as a fistfight between the white man and the black man over the fill of the western cut. The dead watched the contest from beneath the rock. He saw through their eyes staring up at himself as he crushed the face of the white man. He did not need his hammer for that.

Sunglasses: where are they? Sunglasses prevent arrest for reckless eye-balling.

Here they are.

So armed, thus fortified, J. traverses the hazy border between parking lot gravel and the half-tamed dirt of country road shoulder, a disputed area this, every rain betrays the ceasefire in a violent push, every car wheel in and out of the Talcott Motor Lodge shifts the balance of power, foreign aid. The frontier a gritty smudge two steps wide, two steps and he is out on the road, before noon, with a mountain to his left and a river on the right. He feels not so bad this morning, not hungover and half-mast, things seem in order, synapses fire apace, the information gets through, and the freebie sunglasses dull the rapier sunlight jabbing through the leaves. Safe in sunglasses, and his throat doesn’t hurt at all.

He looks through the haggard trees to the opposite bank of the river, where railroad tracks skirt the base of still another green mountain like an iron hem. Rounds a turn in the road and in this deviation feels the motel, his room, his stuff, drift off behind him. Just him in the woods, traveling down one of the three disobedient channels that vex the mountains: the road, the river and the tracks. The road he walks on has the worst of it, he thinks. Stuck between two troublesome neighbors and too broke to move. The road tiptoes in asphalt slippers around a mountain that is always throwing trash into its paved yard from high peaks, dirt and leaves and TV dinner containers, while the river on the other side keeps trying to sneak the boundary over, eating shore here and there, taking liberties with the survey line every spring under the guise of sprucing up the yard. Don’t mind me, chum, just pruning these hedges. He follows the easy bump of a distant ridge with his UV-protected eyes and feels sweat roll. The day is hot and cloudless. This isn’t J.’s neighborhood at all. Disputes all around him, but none of them his affair, and he likes it that way.

Just passing through, thanks. He lives in unlikely times, ambles through the valley of an unlikely Saturday morning. On the underside of his planet, or deep beneath it. Talcott, West Virginia: the world you walk on every day not knowing it’s down there. He feels good, the dirt crushed under his sneakers is a sure and accountable sound, certainly not sidewalk or hotel tile or ballroom carpet, able syncopation against the fluid strumming of the river beside him. Occasionally a bird sitting in, a horn player stepping inside this day’s establishment to see what’s shaking. He takes a deep breath and walks west. One of his comrades — Dave Brown or Frenchie — knocked on his door early that morning, shouting something about the taxi that would ferry them to breakfast. J. yelled him away and slept — five minutes or an hour, it didn’t matter and he didn’t know; he clutched the sheets to his neck as if they were flimsy lapels in a sudden and seeking rain, he got up when he was good and ready. On his own itinerary. He dressed in freebie clothes, he took his time and opened the door of his room when he felt ready. Forsaking a free meal, even, such is the magic of this morning.

He thinks it’s funny that he is walking west, into town for supplies. I’ll take a bag of flour and two yards of cloth for the missus, thanks, Clem, pay for the goods with company scrip. The railroad had a monopoly grip on all the citizens of Talcott and Hinton, it owned the town store and overcharged more than a Brooklyn bodega. Isn’t that the way it worked back then, he’d seen something along those lines on a PBS documentary. Before unions and pamphlet-waving reds. Abortive insurrection beat down by imported Pinker-ton talent who arrived on the seven o’clock locomotive in menacing slo-mo at dusk, red light swimming in the folds of their long leather coats, suspicious bulges where holsters usually hang. The troublemakers find their shacks burned down and everyone learns from the lesson, keeps quiet, and the grocer stacks toy currency. Syrup for the colicky babe. Nerve tonic for the addled lady of the house. To assuage the monthlies. The grocer gives the goods away for free, fake money with the C&O logo makes everything look like a freebie. J. decides he will pay for his own breakfast when he gets into town.

An orange butterfly stumbles from the trees on the riverbank, startling J. and activating his metropolitan crazy pigeon reflex: one hand rises to shield his head from birdshit, the other straightens to karate chop. But it is just a butterfly, a silver ball upset by invisible bumpers and flippers, and it ricochets away. This is the country, it is safe. He feels good, trying to remind himself, good, and it is best to suppress his natural inclinations and go with the flow. Immortal even. Seems to J. that if you have a near-death experience, you are invincible for a time. Unless you’re in the trenches, the chances of almost dying twice in the space of a few days are remote. Astronomical. Cars will bounce off him, drive-by gunfire perforate his body’s outline in the wall behind him. He made it through the night, he is golden. Bring on the burning barn with the family of kittens inside; J. is ready.

He finally drifted off at 4 A.M., between gulps, and slept dreamlessly. He rose from bed without his customary stiffness (that odd ratcheting-up of himself that always reminded him of a rollercoaster car clicking up to its first big fall of the day) and disorientation about where he was, what hotel and mission. His mood almost derailed when he ventured down to the front office to find out about a lift into town and the woman at the front desk looked at him as if she’d seen a ghost. (A spook.) She pulled her bathrobe to her chicken neck and asked him if he was staying in room 27. He answered in the affirmative, answered her tentative question as to how he had slept with an over-enthusiastic simile that called up the familiar image of blissful nurslings in their cribs. She seemed relieved, then concerned anew at this response, and at the collapse of her thin eyebrows J. quickly rerouted the conversation to the matter of transport. Turned out the New River Gorge Taxi wasn’t scheduled for another pickup until later that morning; J. had missed the breakfast run. He asked her how far it was to town.

There’s a car behind him, the first car since he started walking, and he fights the vision his paranoia prepares for him: the truck jags right just as it reaches him, sends his body flying into the river and his body washes up weeks later on some littoral strip downriver, wherever this river ends up once it splashes past these mountains. No one around to witness this anonymous violence and no one to identify his body, the fish have eaten his identification (pollution has given them a taste for crisp plastic and magnetic strips). But then he remembers his invincibility, and this morning’s distaste for his customary scenarios. Exhale your city self into this cool country air, this place can absorb all of you and more. It isn’t a truck, he sees as it rounds the turn, but a Chevy Nova of a perky green shade, with hubcaps of spinning rust. The driver, a middle-aged brunette who sucks a cigarette and squints through smoke as they pass; in the passenger seat a little girl with a round moon face stares at J., turning in her seat to watch him recede as they speed on to town. And perhaps her oddly sharp gaze disturbs him for a moment, but then they are gone, he is alone again in the paralyzed landscape. See, nothing to worry about here.

Walk down the road until you get to the bridge, take a left, the woman at the front desk told him, it’s about two and a half miles. He calculated that to be a forty-five minute walk, and here it is, not so bad at all even though it is something that wouldn’t normally occur to him. A receiptless span of time. What else had the stamp collector ejected from his gut last night. To make him feel like this. He makes a list of pertinent phenomena. The choking thing had sobered him up immediately, leeching booze from him as desperately as his blood wrenched oxygen from blue depleted blood. He’d forsaken the drinking session in Tiny’s room, and the ginger ale rehydrated him after a couple days of serious junketeering and its attendant effects. Although he hadn’t slept that long, he’d slept on his own schedule and not publicity’s. The facilities at the Motor Lodge, the lack of them, had forced him to leave his room for food. And finally, he is getting some air. Serious routine-breaking in the last twelve hours on all fronts. Maybe it is more than that. Thinking back, he hasn’t felt this clear in months. (Such is the bad posture of his nights, slouching always into dipso inclinations.) Grateful body. Have to give the stamp collector a proper thanks at some point.

J. comes to a spot where the shoulder widens and he spies an opening in the trees and gossiping brush that slides down to the river. People park here and go fishing, he figures, old grandpa teaching little Jimmy about bait and life. Or teenagers smoking joints and throwing beer cans into the river and making out: he sees some sun-bleached cigarette butts and what appear to be a large pair of jockey shorts at the edge of the parking area. A lark: the trail down to the river is steep and he makes his way down to the bank slowly, prodding upslope dirt to its premature retirement on the bank, trading steady poplar branch for steadying hemlock trunk until he makes it the thirty slanted yards to the semicircle stretch of mud.

Except for the railroad tracks across the river he can’t see any sign of civilization. And the silver loop of an old can’s pull-top in the sand, but nothing else. Out of the sunlight and in the shade of the trees crouched around the bank, J. feels his body cool and he slips into an even deeper silence, even though the brown river is louder than the empty road. Time out of the world. A little downstream the water blows over a sill of rocks that sends white curtains twisting and twirling. For an instant J. sees himself clinging to one of those rocks, but he can’t figure out if that momentary image is a scene of final hard-won safety or just a reprieve before the battle for the shore. He has half a mind to sit but decides instead to make an oath, some stentorian declaration of himself and purposes. Isn’t that what you do in places like this, among nature, out of the hurly-burly, no one to hear but those who won’t tattle: make an oath. Hurl one. Same thing as laying a road or nailing railroad tracks into frigid dirt, that’s making an oath too, saying I am. And if it was good enough for his hosts this weekend, it is good enough for him, he figures. He is an American, fuck it, he has his Social Security card in his pocket at that very moment.

He can’t think of anything. He gives it a full five minutes and decides to take a piss instead.

He takes one last look and clambers up the dirt. He approaches town and whistles without recognition the tune he heard at dinner the night before.

It does not take Guy Johnson long to realize that he is the bug. From beneath the creature’s russet carapace erupt segmented legs bristling with tiny spurs. Soft antennae droop from its head in a dejected parabola half as long as its body. The bug probably discovered the lemon sour with its antennae, but that is conjecture for entomology is not Guy’s field. At the university entomology is housed on the other side of campus from the humanities and he never has occasion to visit there. Guy has been watching the bug for a while now. Reconstructing likely narratives is Guy’s enterprise these days, and it extends even to his rest break, as he sits on the hard mattress staring at the floor. The bug sniffed around the room until it arrived at its present location a few feet from Guy’s bed, straddling a gritty slit between two floorboards; its movements before he first noticed it are unknowable. Nibbling and sniffing at the candy he dropped a few minutes before, the bug discovers what he discovered, that the enticing discovery is in actuality a trick, and the tongue will curdle on it. Yet it feasts.

He wonders if the proper word is mandible, not tongue. If one jumps to conclusions, one will corrupt the research. One wrong step and one is investigating an entirely incorrect avenue. He unlaces his shoe, fingers clenched around it in a traditional insect-squashing manner and he places it slowly, not without a touch of sadism, above the inquisitive creature. He stays his hand, watching. He waits for the insect to tire or grow sickened of its find. The lemon sour is too big, there is no way in God’s green earth that the insect can devour it all. But it does not tire. It nibbles, making progress imperceptible to the eye, and Guy replaces the shoe on his foot. He realizes he is the bug. They do what they must.

When he departed this morning, his papers were spread across the room according to the manner in which he had organized his vast materials, which is to say not organized at all but entirely submissive to the disorder of this project. Transcribed versions of the ballad crouched beneath correspondence received from his informants, notes tossed off in an elusive moment of inspiration secreted themselves in a sheaf of entirely unrelated sections. Amber scraps bickered in piles, contradicting each other in a crumbling din; one half of an interview skulked in one pile while the other half brooded in a pile across the room. He rode herd over crafty fugitives. If he were to die tomorrow, no one would be equipped to make sense of his investigation. He did not have a choice but to let his research roam as it pleased. If all his accumulations were organized properly in well-marked folders, in coherent groups, he would be lying, declaring that he had bested this dragon. He has not. He cannot make sense of any of it. He can savor one or two triumphs, of course. Guy has disentangled the John Henry tale from the John Hardy tale and traced their commingling in certain ballad variants. He has eliminated the false leads generated by regional versions, disentangled the Alabama State Southern and Norfolk & Western from the Chesapeake & Ohio. All those routes in a gnarl. Still he has refused to organize his material to reflect this. He is transfixed and paralyzed by the confusion, and when he returned from this morning’s interviews and saw that in addition to making his bed and sweeping the floor Mrs. Thompson had erected one looming and impenetrable stack from his strewn papers, his initial flush of anger eased into gratitude. She had reminded him that he had still not found his way into the mountain.

It had started as such a modest proposition: to trace the origin and transmission of one of the ballads he and Howard had collected for The Negro and His Songs and Negro Workaday Songs. He had done his best to preserve Negro songs for posterity; now he would concentrate on a single one, “The Ballad of John Henry,” explore the regional variants, separate the Irish and Scottish influences from the Negro derivations, and excavate deeper still, determine if the great steeldriver truly lived. If he had known the journey he was about to embark upon! It had brought him here to the very mouth of the Nile in the first true heat of summer. As the end of the academic calendar closed, a trip up here had seemed the perfect balm. It would be work, doubtless, but the prospect of remaining in North Carolina without interruption disheartened him. He had completed the advance work. The dispatches he posted to all corners of the country — from the largest metropolitan newspapers to the smallest county gazette — in appeal for any knowledge of John Henry, no matter how small or half-remembered, had resulted in hundreds of responses. Pick-and-shovel men from Mississippi replied with personal favorites, retired engineers from defunct lines related what they still retained of the old work-song, descendants of railroad men, former hoboes and dockhands, the eloquent and the illiterate alike offered up precious clues. (He looks balefully at the tower on the floor and shakes his head.) This is the method of gathering folklore, accumulating, sifting, tracking with ineffectual magnifying glass the footprints of ghosts. But he had not reckoned on the variety and plenitude of the accounts. No, he had not foreseen the true extent of this adventure at all.

One man against the mountain of contradictory evidence! He has been here three days. Three days, and Guy thinks he can see a little into John Henry’s dilemma: the farther he drives, the deeper the darkness he creates around himself. “The Ballad of John Henry” has picked up freight from every work camp, wharf and saloon in this land; its route is wherever men work and live, and now its cars brim with what the men have hoisted aboard, their passions and dreams. Whole crates full of names, the names of women they have loved and the towns in which they toiled. He sorted through that mess and what he found was Big Bend Tunnel in Talcott, West Virginia. Now that he is here, he is left with the human respondents, and they are a disappointing bunch. Each interview he conducts dodges, feints like a boxer. Whether he is following up on correspondence or randomly canvassing longtime residents and old-timers, he cannot get two stories to coincide. One informant maintains the contest never happened, another maintains her long-dead grandfather took her on his knee and related the story as a true adventure. One insists the Chesapeake & Ohio never used a steam drill in these parts, and the next claims to have helped the Burleigh salesman set up the drill for the contest but cannot remember his own name. Some have heard the ballad so many times that they manufacture their own spectatorship, stealing lines from the song and offering these in their eyewitness accounts.

Each time Guy peers into their milky eyes, observes their slow and exhausted movements as they greet him at the door, he is reminded anew of his problem. He has come too late. One by one the first-person accounts collapse under his interrogations into second-person accounts, or worse, complete falsehood. The contest (if indeed there was a contest, he corrects himself) took place over fifty years ago in 1871 or 1872. But some brain-fogged Hinton and Talcott men place the drilling contest in the 1880s, the 1890s, long after the completion of Big Bend, countering historical record and immediately casting shadow on all they say. Even more maddening, they often repudiate their written testimony altogether, remembering events differently once Guy appears on their doorstep. In one letter, a man claimed to have seen the event with his own eyes; when Guy addressed him in person, the informant admitted to have toiled on the western cut, not the eastern, and merely heard the tale repeated from another. Guy opens his satchel and presents as rebuttal their replies to his newspaper advertisements and all they can do is shrug, or shake their heads in confusion, admitting to a faulty memory at times. He adds this morning’s interviews to Mrs. Thompson’s pile. What’s another spade of dirt thrown up on a mountain?

Soon the boy will knock on the door of his room to fetch him. He would be lost without Herbert to guide him. His adventures upon his arrival assured him of that. The train ride from Chapel Hill had been routine enough, if beset by numerous delays, but once he retrieved his bags and stood on the blanched, worn planks of the Hinton Station platform, his trials began in earnest. The station manager, a stocky white man with a thick mustache and acute gaze, took one look at Guy and irritation twisted his countenance; when asked where one might find the McCreery Hotel, the man gestured vaguely over his shoulder and returned to his timetables. Guy’s overtures to other white men at the station met with similar failure. Finally, what he should have done once he got off the passenger car became clear, and he approached one of the Negro men who sat across the street from the station in the rickety chairs arranged in front of Riffs Mercantile. The man introduced himself as Al and assured Guy that the easiest thing to do, given the circumstances, would be to take him to McCreery’s himself. Guy should have wondered then what the “circumstances” were; actually, he should have already been aware. He voiced his concern that he was interrupting the man from his discussion, and the men chuckled.

He was the boy from the city. As Al helped him with his bags and led him down Third Avenue to the hotel, he asked Guy what kind of business he had in town. “I’m looking into the legend of John Henry,” he responded, thinking in a moment of self-importance that this might impress the man, for his little work would help spread the names of Hinton and Talcott and their importance to an American legend. Al looked at him with a queer expression. He muttered, “Funny line of work,” bid the bags jump in his palms, and they did not speak again until they arrived at the establishment, when Guy offered to pay him for his trouble.

Al shook his head. “Sure you want to stay here?” the man asked. “They other places you might want—”

Guy cut him off, thanked him and was promptly refused a room by the proprietor of McCreery’s, who informed him that he was not in the habit of giving rooms to niggers. Al was still waiting outside, intently tilting a match into his corncob pipe as if this were the first time he had attempted this maneuver He took one of Guy’s bags and led him to Mrs. Thompson’s house. She let rooms, he said. Guy lugged in his wake. Of course McCreery’s had assumed he was white from the university letterhead upon which he had sent his request for a reservation. His earnestness to get to Hinton, coupled with the numerous dispatches he had posted under the whiteface of scholarly research, had caused him to forget the grip of Jim Crow, ever clenched around his people. Unlikely, yes, but there he was with sweat on his neck and dumb embarrassment on his face.

He rises from the bed, brushes aside the dusty brown curtain and watches Mrs. Thompson pin the wash to the line. He sees the shirt he left on his bed this morning; he had not asked her to clean it, but there it billowed. Guy has already enjoyed too much of her kindness. She opened up her house to him without a moment’s thought. Her price was more than fair, indeed he would save a considerable amount of money on room and board by accepting the hospitality of Mrs. Thompson. When he wasn’t pondering John Henry, his energies shifted to worry over his budget. It had been hard enough convincing the department of the worth of his research, and he is concerned the sum they eventually disbursed to him might not be sufficient. He maintains meticulous account of his expenditures, ever mindful of leaving an opening one of his more malicious colleagues might exploit. A Negro in the world of academia must be twice the scholar, and twice the tactician, of his white colleagues.

Mrs. Thompson was a rawboned woman with a quick stride and keen intensity; Guy imagined her hurrying from task to task around her house with ruthless efficiency. She rarely had the occasion to take in a boarder, she explained as she showed him up the stairs, past sepia photographs of her clan, but when she did she always enjoyed the company. Guy was to stay in her son’s room, she told him; her boy had moved to Chicago, where he had a good job on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, and had recently taken a wife. The room was bare, save for the bed and the dresser; the Thompson boy had taken all he possessed when he moved North. Once Guy was settled, he joined her in the parlor and, after employing the usual methods of setting an informant at ease, asked her about John Henry.

“That’s an old story,” she said simply, face betraying nothing.

He had established previously that her father had worked for the Chesapeake & Ohio a few years after the completion of the tunnel, and inquired if he had ever shared any information about the tale.

“Can’t live around here without hearing about ol’ John Henry,” she granted, but offered no more.

He was not advancing the heading, as it were. He pressed her, attempting to talk around the subject before broaching it anew. She told him about her husband, who had died in a railroad accident some years before, told him about how hot it got around here in the summer time, and how often the ice salesman came around, but when he tried to bring up John Henry, all she would offer was, “Can’t live around here without hearing all those old stories,” and returned to him that obscure expression. She left to prepare dinner, which turned out to be fried fish and biscuits, a delicious meal that consoled the professor after his long trip. Over this repast they talked about life in the town, and the relationship between Hinton and Talcott, which slept on the other side of the mountain, but he never did get anything out of her that related to his investigation.

His first interview the next morning resulted in similar exasperation. One of the many responses he received from his advertisement in the Hinton Independent had tantalized Guy with its possibility. “Dear sir,” it began, “I am writing on behalf of my father, who as a young boy carried water for the C&O on the Big Bend job and witnessed with his own eyes the struggle of ‘Big’ John Henry and the steam drill, to which you are inquiring. As my father is in poor health, and of weakened constitution, he urged me to write you to inform you of his knowledge, which he is willing to share with you in exchange for a small fee to help defray the bills from the doctor, as well as his medicine. He has always related to me his stories of those Big Bend days …” From there the informant wandered into a secondhand account replete with the customary details of the legend, but he redeemed himself by his residence in Hinton, as well as his direct relation to a person who had toiled on the construction, a person who, most important, was still among the living. Once Mrs. Thompson advised him that the man lived in town, a short walk away, Guy decided to make it his first stop. In retrospect, he misinterpreted the expression on her face as he departed.

It was, to say the least, a disappointing encounter, relieved only by its brevity. “You wrote me?” Mr. McLaugherty asked through the screen door. Between his heavily freckled cheeks, his nostrils widened as if confronted by a ghastly stench.

“About John Henry, yes,” Guy offered. “This is the letter you sent.”

“Let me see that.” After extending a callused hand through the door, he reviewed the contents of the letter, looking up at Guy every few lines. Finally he said, “I don’t know where you got that, but I don’t have nothing to say about that letter, boy.” He shut firm the inside door, hazarding one last appraisal of Professor Johnson before he turned away: “I see it’s been a long time since I been to North Carolina.” It later struck Guy that in addition to Mr. McLaugherty’s obvious prejudice in matters of race, appealing for money from a Negro might not have been the most pleasant prospect for the man. What bothered him the most was that when Chappell arrived, he would have access to McLaugherty and those like him.

On his return to Mrs. Thompson’s there was a young Negro boy waiting for him in the parlor. “Sir, my name is Herbert Standard,” he said with an extended hand. “Mrs. Thompson told me you needed someone to take you around.” Mrs. Thompson nodded from the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on a thin kitchen towel, and could not help but smile.

Herbert was a youth of twelve years, a student at the local colored school, Lincoln. Guy quickly gleaned that the young man possessed a quick mind and exceptional manners, not to mention a patient disposition, this latter quality being the most appropriate for their enterprise, given Guy’s apparent inability to ingratiate himself to the local populace. It was soon revealed, in addition, that the boy was well regarded in the community, among whites and Negroes alike, in Hinton as well as Talcott, and with him as pilot, Guy was able to advance his heading.

Guy looks at his watch. He has another ten minutes before they climb into the Standards’ wagon and start out to Talcott for the next scheduled interviews. He has two more days before he must return. There is still much to do; while he tells himself he should take pride in what he has accomplished so far, the customary feelings of well-being attendant to satisfaction evade him. In the journals, Cox’s John Hardy hypothesis is receiving no small measure of interest at the moment, but what Guy has collected from his informants discounts the theory that the outlaw Hardy and steeldriving Henry were the same person. Guy’s larger sample of variants reveals that while the John Hardy songs possess numerous lines common to the most popular John Henry songs, the Hardy songs have more similarities to Irish and Scottish ballads than to Negro workaday songs. From all the evidence, the Hardy songs are confined to the Appalachia area, and sung by whites, whereas the Henry songs have been disseminated all over by itinerant Negro workers, who carried the song from construction camp to construction camp; the song traveled the rails with the men who laid the rails, from state to state, accruing texture from all who came to hear and sing it. This is not to mention the problem of dates. Hardy was hanged in 1894 for his crimes; John Henry’s fateful race, however, is said to have occurred in 1871. Cox may have uncovered informants who maintain that the man who beat the steam drill and the villain hanged in Welch in 1894 were one and the same, but that would make Henry one improbably long-lived steeldriver. Most of Guy’s interviews — and he has collected far more informants than Cox — place John Henry in his thirties when he came to Big Bend; it is, at the very least, unlikely that after forty years of steeldriving the same man was able to make the kind of mischief attributed to Hardy. (One can always count on white folks to get a bit confused when it comes to describing the age of colored people.) When Guy’s book is published, it will contain, if nothing else, this contribution to the study of these songs: John Hardy is a white song and John Henry a colored song. At least that one thing! But he still feels a bit of envy for Cox, for John Hardy was, without a doubt, a real, breathing person. His colorful life, his gambling exploits, sundry criminal activities and the murder that got him hanged are a matter of public record, verifiable from newspaper accounts. Ex-Governor McCorkle, who signed the death warrant, is still alive and available. In the strange case of John Henry, however, all Guy can rely on is what people can wring from the years, hard-fought drips and drabs.

When the book is published. Guy is not the first to come here to study folk songs — two have been here before — but he is the first to devote an entire study to John Henry and his legend. Until Chappell arrives, he thinks, amending his statement. Guy won the race to get here first, but Chappell possesses the better credentials. When Guy first proposed this trip to his department, he was sure that their initial reprovals were the fault of Chappell, who has talked of his own John Henry study for years, but has yet to come down here himself. “There has already been work in the area of darky songs,” Professor Asbell told him, waving his spectacles as if shooing away a mouse. “Do you truly believe these ditties to be an appropriate avenue of scholarly research? Especially for a young professor trying to establish a reputation?” It took months of cajoling and nagging; ultimately Guy had to produce all the correspondence he received from his advertisements before he garnered what little support he has now.

Who else is there to preserve the body of Negro folklore against the march of time? White folks? He remembers hearing Milton Reed’s address at the New York conference. Guy thanks God that Reed is not planning a full-length study of John Henry; the man is apparently satisfied with his paper on the “ribald” versions of the ballad. Reed takes the tale of John Henry to be the God’s truth — it coincides with his romanticization of the Negro, his ascription to the colored people qualities Reed cannot find in his own. When Reed delivered his paper in New York, Guy cringed as Reed gloried over the more vulgar versions of the ballad — the ones containing verses attributing a voracious carnal appetite to the steeldriver and describing extravagant sexual conquests — and he did not like the look in Reed’s eyes. He resembled a carnival barker gleefully describing the nether parts of the Hottentot Venus, with his frothy thin lips and wild eyes. Reed’s research started from the veracity of the John Henry legend and proceeded from there; in the songs he found confirmation of his ideas about the bestial aspects of the Negro. For Guy, the question of whether the John Henry legend rests on a factual basis is, after all, not of much significance. No matter which way it is answered the fact is that the legend itself is a reality, a living functioning thing in the folk life of the Negro.

Then why, he asks himself as he watches Mrs. Thompson tend to her wash, does he continue to hope that each new informant will give him the affirmative, irrefutable proof?

He made much progress with Herbert’s aid. Herbert introduces Guy and his business, and it seems that having one of their own community vouch for this bespectacled colored stranger, who claims to be a college professor, makes the reluctant loose their lips, and the already-inclined to speak more volubly. Their work is cut out for them; Hinton is a town of five thousand, Talcott another two hundred. Most of them, naturally, claim to have firsthand knowledge of the event, and although the present and former C&O workers he has contacted lead them to others, the task remains monumental. If only he had arrived here sooner! Decades before. The few people he can find who lived here at the time of the construction of the tunnel and are still with us offer their fanciful and extravagant stories; the years have pulled a veil across their memories. On occasion his mind tries to convince him that he is not even in the right place, but he defeats these nefarious schemes of his intellect. He is in the right place — after all the false leads of the myriad variants naming the Cruzee Tunnel or the Alabama State Southern railroad or whatever locale was simply the closest to where the respondent resided — Big Bend is the tunnel named in three fourths of the ballads. Or 70 percent, more precisely. Yesterday Herbert took him out to the place itself, to the place where John Henry met his Waterloo. He could not help but feel a bit of disappointment. He had imagined after all this time a monstrous cavern, a gate into the pits of hell. As he stood there, looking up at the gray arching of the mouth, he might have been on the threshold of any railway tunnel in any part of this land. It was unremarkable in its surface effects, and yet it had generated out of its rich soil such an abundant crop of lore. Among the Negro workers John Henry has become a byword, a synonym for superstrength and superendurance. He is their standard of comparison, they talk him and sing him as they work and loaf. But here, he whispered to himself, I can see merely a mountain, and nothing more. I can study the legend but I cannot conceive of the man.

Here is the neat problem of weighing of evidence and the discovery of truth, the challenge he has set for himself. He understands the rules of this particular competition. When someone like Mr. Curry, an old-time Hinton resident who worked as a mechanical engineer on the site almost from start to finish, claims on paper that there was no steam drill used, but reverses himself as they sit on his porch drinking tea, Guy understands that this setback is to be expected. When one considers the abnormalities and errors to which the human memory is subject, especially when it is dealing with something far in the past and tinged with the dramatic, such occurrences are to be expected, indeed counted upon. But his heart sinks nonetheless. Herbert’s own grandfather is such a case. Guy met the colored gentleman at his home four miles east of Talcott. His cottage overlooked the Greenbrier River, and Guy thought the man truly blessed to live in such a bucolic locale, in the very embrace of nature. “John Henry,” Mr. Standard began before trailing off, “John Henry?” He seemed to address the river itself, and not his visitor. He was such a slight man that his physical body seemed to disappear beneath his clothes; his bones were like tent poles sturdying his shirt and trousers. “Which John Henry do you want to know about?” Mr. Standard murmured. “I known so many John Henrys.”

“The one who worked on the Big Bend Tunnel,” Guy offered. He waited patiently, with his pen flat against his notebook.

Whereupon Mr. Standard expounded upon how small Talcott was when he moved there fifty years before, about the day the Hinton roundhouse burned down, and what kind of fish ran in the Greenbrier at this time of year. When Guy finally met success in returning the subject to the steeldriver, Herbert’s grandfather said, “I don’t know any John Henry. Who’s that?”

On the trip back to town, Herbert apologized for his grandfather, explaining that just a few years ago he used to tell him John Henry stories all the time, but now he has trouble remembering anything at all. If only Guy had made it up here years before. Even a year might have made the difference. In terms of oral testimony, at any rate. Documents remain elusive, yesterday and today. In that tower of paper by the door, there is no evidence that a steam drill was used here. Some positive evidence, yes, from second-person accounts, but no paper trail. Captain Johnson, the contractor for the site, died years ago and left no journals or work papers of his job on Big Bend. The Chesapeake & Ohio files for this job were lost in a fire — convenient enough for the railroad company, given their deplorable safety record. It is an undisputed fact that the C&O used a steam drill on the nearby Lewis Tunnel in 1871. It is an undisputed fact that despite the unreliable nature of the machine, it was certainly cost effective — about 5.5 cents an inch versus the 11.2 cents an inch for human labor. Of the forty steam drills sold by the Burleigh Rock Drill Company, three are unaccounted for; if one takes into account that the drilling contest was arranged when a Burleigh salesman came to demonstrate its effectiveness, and that John Henry’s success resulted in a failed sale, it makes sense that there would be no paper record. And given the machine’s tendency to failure — as some versions of the ballads sneer, “Your hole’s done choke and your drill’s done broke”—it is possible that a man could have beat the machine. Again, he catches himself. The veracity of the man’s existence has no bearing on his mission here.

Herbert knocks on the door and Guy answers that he’ll be downstairs soon. He truly is a clever boy; Guy wishes there were more opportunities for him in this town. He searches the floor for the insect, but it has disappeared, abandoning the lemon sour. Too much to digest. Herbert and Guy are to return to Talcott this afternoon. Mr. Arnett, a retired conductor on the C&O, told Guy yesterday that his great-uncle was a foreman on the Big Bend job and saw the race with — what else—“his own eyes.” He gave Herbert directions; the man is a bit of hermit, from his relative’s description. “All these people talk about the day of the race around these parts, but they never seen it with their own eyes. If anybody seen it,” Mr. Arnett insisted, “it’s my uncle.” Guy is exhausted, his morale depleted, but what other course is there for him? This is my profession, he reminds himself. He puts on his coat, grabs his satchel and his hand starts for the doorknob. But he has forgotten something. He opens his billfold and removes the paper. Each morning when he leaves his house, to prepare himself for his daily battle with university intrigue, he reads what he has written there. Since he arrived in Hinton, he consults it whenever he is about to begin another foray into the field. He reads, we make our own machines and devise our own contests in which to engage them.

He shuts the door behind him, thinking, perhaps this will be the one.

Even when he doesn’t want to Bobby hears the song. Since the day he was born. Always and especially today.

He’s about to leave the house with his shirttail hanging out when his mother stops him and reminds. He can’t go out the house looking like that, not today.

When he’s not at his father’s garage handing his father his tools and putting them back on the peg when his father is done using them, sometimes Bobby goes out back to the little pond and watches the frogs leap.

Sometimes he goes to the library and looks at the snake book. He knows right where it is on the shelf. He can get a ride home usually because everybody knows him, it’s not too bad.

But today he’s not doing either of those things. The frogs don’t come out when it’s hot like this until the shade gets over the water and it’s the big fair today so the library is closed, like when Miss Fletcher is sick and the sign says closed. Today he’s going out to the tree.

And sometimes he goes into the tunnel and listens to the hammers, but he’s not doing that right now. Maybe later, even though he’s wearing his new sneakers and the tunnel is full of puddles and he’ll ruin them. There was a bit of a fuss because when he came home last night, he was so tired he just lay on his bed and fell asleep like that in his good clothes. Then when his mother came to dress him this morning she said don’t do that again.

But there were nice people last night at the big dinner and after he sang the song he got an extra piece of cake. That man liked the song so much he jumped up and fell over so Bobby kept singing because the man liked it so much. If you understand sometimes you can act funny like that. John Henry makes you do funny stuff like that sometimes. It was for the John Henry Days that everybody was waiting for and today is the day.

He finds the trail easily, it’s where it always is. You can’t see it if you don’t know where it is, it starts right there between those two trees. Two feet in, the pine trees huddle like two big men. Bobby squeezes between them and he’s in the forest. The trail winds and avoids trees. You can move branches but not trees.

He’s bigger than he was when he first started coming here. Stabbing sticks once at eye level now hit his chest; sticks that once got stuck in his hair now try to get into his belly button. Born big, his father says, and he just got bigger. When he hit thirteen he stopped growing because he was already as big as a man. That’s how his father explains it to him when Bobby sometimes borrows a T-shirt that is too small for him. He likes it when he goes to work with his father and they sit together in the truck both wearing his father’s shirts.

There are slim pine cones and big fat pine cones. There’s no grass, in other places but not here. Every Sunday Bobby has to clean the driveway and he has to sweep away the pine needles. But he doesn’t have to do that in the woods and more and more of the brown pine needles come down and make it so he can’t even see the ground. It’s all brown pine needles and pine cones that slowly lose their nut color and get gray as they go back to nature. He doesn’t have to pick those up either.

When he notices that his shoelaces are untied, flopping off his sneakers, he stops to tie them and that takes five minutes. Usually if he looks at the floor of the forest and concentrates, he can make ants and bugs come out. First one black one maybe and then maybe two black ones then there’s a whole lot of bugs around him. Today he’s kneeling for so long working on his shoelaces that they come out without him even thinking about them and concentrating. There a red one with a black butt, like its mother was a black one and its father a red one and they race-mixed. They’re going to be in trouble if they find out.

Then there is the other thing that happens when he is still. He hears the music better. His mother said she used to sing the song to him when he was in her belly and he remembers it. That’s why. But he thinks it is because it is around all of them, coming through your fingertips if you lean your hand on a tree or touch dirt. You can feel it then especially. His father shakes his head when Bobby tries to tell him this thought.

He was happy that they were happy to hear him sing John Henry last night. They always like it when he sings it, it’s the only song he knows. He first heard a recording of it when he was little, on the radio; he started singing it right along with the voice on the radio and his mother said, listen to that!

She said he had true musical ability. He had heard it before, all along, every day, but for the first time he heard the words. But when they tried to make him sing other songs he just sang the John Henry words to the music. It would be the Star Spangled Banner or Swing Low Sweet Chariot and he’d sing the John Henry words. They didn’t get mad or anything but they stopped trying to make him sing other songs. He only likes to sing John Henry. His mother said to his father, you never know about the things that occur to the boy.

This morning his father said they should pay him if they want him to sing. Bobby works with his father in his father’s garage handing him tools and getting stuff for him and gets his pay in allowance. He stopped going to school when he was thirteen. He was bigger than the other kids and his mother said God has other plans for him. Since then he goes with his father to work and everybody knows him. He’s not allowed to touch the cash register after that time when he did and his father had to drive all the way out to Mr. Beecher’s house to get the change back. His mother said to his father that night, what do you expect, things occur to the boy sometimes. Today is the festival so his father will go only if he gets a beep that someone needs a tow for their car.

He’s almost where there’s a small clearing and it’s white bark trees that are naked until high up and then they have little branches with little leaves. He passes the old tree that fell over years before and now is all green with moss. One time he stepped on it just to see what would happen and the old wood started pouring out like sand. Now there is moss in the hole he made because that was a long time ago. He told his father about it at dinner and his father said it was going back to nature. Everything goes back to nature, he said. The light from the clearing starts coming into the trail and the dark green leaves get light green. When he gets into the little clearing he walks over to the tree that has the mark he made in the bark. When the other people come they won’t even notice the mark because it looks like a scratch. He knows other people come there because sometimes he trips on a rock and there are letters on it. The other people put initials on the rocks, but he doesn’t. He was being sneaky when he made the mark. He was being sneaky when he borrowed the hammer.

He borrowed it from the Visitors Center when Miss Carmine was not around. He thought maybe she was in the bathroom. When he walked into the Visitors Center it was empty for the first time since he had decided to borrow the hammer so he walked up to the wall where it was hung with nails with a little sign under it and took it. He tried to put it under his shirt but it was too big so he ran. He ran up Temple and then down Third Street and then he started walking. He put it under his jacket and the handle stuck out but nobody looked at him funny when he walked by them. He felt like a bug with the frogs looking at him.

When he goes to the pond the frogs get scared and jump across the water making circles or go underwater. If he stands still they start to come back like magic. He’ll look into the water close to the edge and see a frog sticking its eyes and mouth about the water. It looks like leaves but it is a frog. They are the same color up there but the legs of the frog are brown and look like twigs. That way no one can see them. Then there will be a bunch of frogs there with just their heads above the water, all of them trying to act like they’re leaves. He’ll see a flying bug like maybe a dragonfly start getting close to them and Bobby will say, watch out, you’re going to get it. If the flying bug gets too close the frogs jump at it and try to put it in their mouth. They have been watching out for bugs to eat. They do that all day. Sometimes they go underwater but a lot of the time they wait for flying bugs. That’s why he felt like a bug when he carried the hammer. He could be a flying bug people were on the lookout for.

It wasn’t heavy. He wasn’t John Henry but he carried the hammer without trouble. He walked in the woods. When he got it to the clearing he moved the brown pine needles apart with his sneakers and then he dug with his hands until the hole was big enough. Then he put the hammer in it and put dirt and pine needles on top of it. When his mother said what have you been doing, he said, nothing. If someone had said to him, did you take the hammer, he would have said yes. But no one did.

He moves the dirt off the hammer. It is a hammer like John Henry had. Since it has been in the ground the wood of the handle has gotten wet and it is damp and cool when he touches it. The wood of the handle was already split in the middle when he borrowed it. In the woods the handle will get old and crumbly like the other trees and branches that fall. Maybe it will get termites. The head of the hammer has little dents and many scratches on it. Maybe it will rust in the woods like the metal in the cars in the back of his father’s garage. If the hammer is out here it can get old and older and go back into the ground. It can be part of the forest and the mountain again. It will take a long time but already if he sticks his fingernail into the wood he can scratch it because it is soft. He covers up the hammer. He starts back down the trail. The John Henry Days is today and everybody is going to be there. His mother said there will be a lot of fun stuff to do.

If you ask him why he took the hammer, he would say because it wants to go back to nature. And his mother would tell you, you never know what occurs to the boy.

Every day in that place reduced his notions. Reduced the first day by the serried fluorescent rods in the ceiling panels; diminished by the pallid green light on the neutral prefab sections of the cubicles; made entirely small by the rectitude of the scratchproof desks, which were not alive with the artifacts of fabled counterculture, like maybe vermilion-tinted bongs encrusted with resinous murk, or rainbow posters detailing the famous gigs of the psychedelic dead, not even an errant roach, a little something to lubricate the old brainstem under deadline. Downright corporate, J. thought when he first walked into the offices of the Downtown News, the oldest and largest alternative weekly in the U.S. of A., consulted each week by J. as the supreme hipster tipsheet. No bumper stickers preaching common sense about big issues like whales or unionized grapes — they were forbidden, he learned later— nowhere was there tacked up a funny cartoon with a clever pun about Uncle Sam. Notions reduced apace as he discovered the intelligence behind the height and placement of the flimsy cubicle walls, which fostered the illusion of privacy but at all angles abetted intrusion, random observation by those at the top of the masthead. That first day when his boss, Metro editor Winslow Kramer, left for lunch, J. hazarded a call to Freddie, to find out which one of the bars that tolerated, indeed relied upon, underage drinkers, they would meet at later. And if any girls were coming. Turned out, Freddie remembered, that Monday at The Blue and Gold was Greta’s night, and she was a capricious old bat who might let you buy one beer, get comfortable, and then card the whole table on the second round, kicking them out after everyone, it seemed, had left their driver’s licenses at home. They were about to decide on another amenable establishment when he felt the man’s eyes upon him. He was a short white guy with slick black hair, dressed in neatly pressed khakis and a light blue oxford pinned down by red suspenders. The man looked into J. and of course knew he was sneaking a personal phone call when there were a million stories in the naked city waiting to be told. He walked on, nodding slightly to himself, and of course making a note to berate Winslow Kramer about the necessity of sedulous and go-get-’em interns. J. hurried off the phone and thought, it’s just like Big Brother. They were living in the year of the book and if you looked around you could see it was all true.

Was the prim buttoned-down man the publisher? J. wondered. The liquor magnate Reinhart Becker, who had purchased the ailing News out of financial boredom, fiscal inertia, in order to expand his empire into the realm of the printed word. According to the paper’s vigilant media columnist, who regularly railed at the man in the name of free speech and an independent press, Becker wanted to sit on his acquisition for a few years and sell it at a nice profit when the market was right. Or was the man who made the rounds of the cubicles the new editor in chief, Jimmy Banks? Jimmy Banks, who had been one of the early editors of the News during its famous fifties era, gone on to various big-name dailies in all the big markets, even soldiered through a stint at Time magazine, before coming home to his first love, you never truly leave your first love, the Downtown News. J., staggering through a dizzy bout of rookie paranoia, walked over to the candy machines for a Snickers. In the first scenario the circumspect air of the man marked him as a farmer patrolling the hen house, counting the eggs he’ll take to market soon. In the second scenario his weary, distracted calm said that he’d seen it all before, interns will slack off, it’s part of the business, and it doesn’t really matter as long as they put the paper to bed on time. In either case, J. still felt like he fucked up, and he returned to collecting phone numbers for the factchecker of the exposé of the parking meter scandal.

“It’s not what I thought it would be like,” J. told Winslow Kramer on Tuesday, and Kramer told him that’s what everybody said: They think everybody’s smoking Humbolt joints in the bathroom. He explained that these were the new offices. The News had recently moved into this space after thirty years on Fourteenth Street and things were different. Becker Distilleries owned the property and had forced the paper into the building because they had trouble finding tenants, despite the recent blossoming of the economy. Now they were finally collecting rent on the place.

“He’s a real bastard,” Kramer said, “but he leaves us alone.” J. remembered the boycott two years earlier, called by the staff on the eve of the sale. At the tail inches of the columns and reviews, the writers urged the readers not to buy the paper the following week if the sale went through, to show Management that they didn’t want to read a paper published by a liquor manufacturer who engineered ad campaigns to urge underage drinking and put up big billboards in minority neighborhoods, just bad vibes any way you looked at it, who knew what kind of changes this supporter of various conservative groups might impose on this vanguard of the left. The sale went through, and newsstand sales dropped the next week, but nothing major, comparable to certain heatstroke weeks in the summer when the folks still in town were too weak to read, or when January blizzards kept the citizens indoors and uninformed about city hall’s sundry machinations.

J. had noticed no change in the paper over the last few years. He was a diligent reader of the News; he rushed out to buy the paper every Wednesday, turning first to the music reviews in the early days of his education, then to the movie reviews, and then after a time finding himself with a flashlight in the subterrain of the front of the book, discovering in bits and pieces the covert scheme of democracy and how it kept the people in check, in ignorance, in obeisance, etc. This was stuff he didn’t find in the papers his parents read: puppet governments below the equator, kickbacks to the mayor’s pals, lead paint potato chips for the kids in the projects. Stuff in the drinking water, a chemical whose name J. always forgot, the News reporter had discovered secret documents. Journalists were getting assassinated in Central America and the intellectuals of Pan-Africanism died in plane “accidents.” His parents were in on it, J. had come to realize, by their deep middle-class sin. They were complacent and a fascist government needed people to be complacent, to turn a blind eye. So he read.

He listened. He was on the inside now. Word around the office, murmured along the labyrinthine cubicles, held that Reagan was sure to be re-elected next week; the paper had done all they could for Mondale, but it was a lost cause, the country overflowed with simpletons who refused to see. But that wasn’t going to stop J.; he was turning eighteen on the very day of the election, and he was going to vote for the first time. J. had read with deep anger the statistics of voter turnout among young adults and minorities in an article published by the organization he was now a part of, he clucked at the sorry numbers, recognizing that apathy was a major tool of the oppressors down in Washington, he said amen to the condemnatory tone of the article, he shook his head solemnly when the writer pointed out that the numbers were caused, surely and sadly, by the effects of disenfranchisement, institutional racism, the sheer failure of the country’s education system. Amen.

The writer’s name was Andy Halloran and J. hoped to meet him in the coming months. There was no telling who he might be. No one in the office looked like what he thought they would. Winslow Kramer, for example, did not wear the black leather jacket and dirty jeans in which J. had attired him after reading the man’s music reviews for years. J. had clipped the article Kramer wrote about a crazy night in CBGBs with the Ramones, when Dee Dee was too fucked up to play, passed out in the middle of a song, and Kramer climbed on up, grabbed the man’s bass from the tacky stage, and filled in for the rest of the set. The News had the best music section of any mag he’d read, and Kramer had a byline J. always searched for on the contents page. Or used to. He hadn’t written for a while. When Kramer called to tell him he got the internship, he was surprised that the rocker was covering the Metro desk, the post J. had requested, where the real battles lay. More surprised when Kramer asked him not to wear aftershave or cologne; since his overdose a year and a half before he was sensitive to chemicals, he explained, the bouquet of modern life left him faint and panting and grasping for his inhaler. In person that first day, Kramer sported the bowl haircut of a penitent, and wore new dark blue jeans and a faded green T-shirt without a slogan or a band’s name. Brown freckles dotted his sunken cheeks, a swarm of bugs eating their way out from within. On the desk there was a picture of Kramer and a bleary Patti Smith, taken in some downtown alley, but nothing else to link the man with J.’s notions.

The first day J. said, “I liked that piece you did about the Gang of Four show a while back. I thought you really got it. The atmosphere.”

Kramer looked at J. distantly, a bit fearfully. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“I was there, at Danceteria that night.” The age limit was eighteen, but J. and Freddie followed in the wake of some beautiful older girls in platinum Warhol wigs and got through the front door. They weaseled up to the front of the stage, in the front of the jaded crowd, and rescued the song list taped to the microphone stand when the band finished playing. J. and Freddie fought over who deserved the night’s distilled essence more, who was the bigger fan, but J. walked home with it.

Kramer said, “Yeah?” and took some papers to the Xerox room.

Still, the place was pretty fucking cool. There was a little chair next to Kramer’s desk, and they sat close together in the tiny cubicle. Kramer talked in low, mellow tones, and had an appointment outside the office every afternoon, with the acupuncturist, with his analyst, with Narcotics Anonymous, which left J. alone with the daily papers to mine for promising stories, or to find holes in the mainstream version of events that they might excavate. He answered the phones and told writers and sources that Kramer had stepped out but would be back soon. People stopped by the cubicle to look for Kramer and J. wondered, was that Lynn Fields, was that Ron K. C. Speath, was that skinny guy Billy Pagels, who had written the excellent piece about Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. J. was a lucky man, so he believed, and so his friends seconded, telling him as much from their college dormitories between keg parties. The Downtown News was the only paper that covered rap music in any way, reviewed Whodini and Run DMC singles. James Baldwin had editorialized in these pages, Lorraine Hansberry had essayed a few words about the direction of black theater. J.’s parents were glad he was doing something beyond working at that electronics store; they wanted him to become a lawyer and didn’t like the fact that he had deferred from college for a year. They thought he would never go and get a degree, follow the plan, that he’d lay around their house and watch television until he was thirty, never get beyond working the record counter at Crazy Eddie’s. The internship showed them that he wasn’t just fucking around, even though he did go out every night with friends; sometimes forgot his keys and woke his parents up at two in the morning with Budweiser on his breath. Or he hoped it would show them.

He put on a song and dance for them Tuesday night at dinner. “Have you heard about Eleanor Bumpurs?” he challenged his parents, in between mouthfuls of Lake Tung-Ting Shrimp, which had been delivered to their door just minutes earlier from their local favorite. Free fortune cookies and an orange.

“Of course,” his father said, “it was in the Times today.”

“It’s another example of a larger pattern of police attacks against the black community,” J. said.

“I thought she was mentally ill,” J.’s mother said, tearing the corner of a plastic packet of soy sauce.

J. had discovered the article when Kramer disappeared early in the morning to go to the allergist. Eleanor Bumpurs was a sixty-nine-year-old Afro-American woman who had been killed by the Emergency Services Unit as they tried to evict her from her city-owned apartment. The piece was a few pages into the Metro section of the Times, a small and terse square of type. Six cops had gone in, warned in advance that the woman had mental problems. According to the police, after they broke down the door, the three-hundred-pound Mrs. Bumpurs came at them with a knife, and the men who had received certificates from a program that taught them how to deal with the mentally ill killed her. Officer Sullivan shot her twice with a shotgun.

“Yeah, she was sick, but the cops knew that when they went in,” J. pointed out. “They were Emergency Services, that’s their job to handle this stuff.”

“That’s terrible,” J.’s mother said, as a ball of gray meat rolled out of dumpling sheath. “Can you pass the salt, Andrew?” J.’s mother said, gesturing toward her husband.

“Eighty-nine dollars a month. That was her rent. Is that worth a human life? There’s a pattern here,” J. insisted. He clipped the article and showed it to Kramer when he returned, sniffing, pharmacy bag in his claw, from the allergist. Kramer called Noah Blumenthal, his point man on such matters, and by the end of the day, after negotiations in the editor in chief’s office (somewhere down the hall out there), the piece was out of the Metro section and into the feature well. J. felt he had discovered the outrage for the paper, he had contributed his first thing to the Downtown News. At dinner, he reiterated some of the dialogue from Kramer’s and Blumenthal’s conversations, to demonstrate to his parents the justice of his deferred education. “The cops are taking their cues from Koch and Reagan that black people don’t matter,” J. informed his parents. “Can you imagine what it will be like if Reagan gets reelected next week? It’s going to be a field day on black people.”

“Too bad that Mondale’s such a wimp,” J.’s father said.

“That’s going to be the message we send to the cops: That it’s okay. Eleanor Bumpurs killed in her own home! Michael Stewart choked to death by subway cops — anyone could be next,” J. protested, attacking the broccoli on his plate, saving the shrimp for last, his strategy with this particular dish.

“That’s why we always say save money for cabs home. It’s not safe on the subways at night,” J.’s father said.

“Right. But still — this is a police state we’re living in!” Cab fare cut into his bar money. He always took the subway home. Simple economics.

On Friday, Kramer looked pale and didn’t say much all morning. Less than usual. He spent a long time in the bathroom and when he came back he said that he had to visit the doctor immediately. (J. later recalled he had used an antifungal aerosal spray that morning.) There was a headline meeting at noon, so J. would have to go in his place. Jimmy Banks had seen the Bumpurs piece, but there might be some unforeseen questions, and if that happened J. was to give whatever information he could. Kramer rubbed his throat. “These meetings are pretty simple,” he wheezed. “You’ll probably not have to do anything, don’t worry about it. Just sit there.”

J. was going to enter the inner sanctum of the paper. On Thursday he had walked to the editor in chief’s office to deliver a reimbursement form for one of Kramer’s writers but the door was closed, and the secretary said she’d take the form, it was all right. J. had read the Noah Blumenthal piece; as in all the man’s work, righteous anger reverberated between the quotes and facts, as if meticulous research and the journalistic method were all that kept the man from becoming a homicidal vigilante. With disregard for department policies, with seemingly premeditated intent. Blumenthal in person, when he came in to drop off some factchecking material, was quite and nervous. Kramer told J. later that he lived with his mother in Queens and had only recently conquered a phobia about the subway. J. read the piece again before the headline meeting to make sure he could answer any question that might come up, perhaps regarding the one or two missing quotes Blumenthal was supposed to insert on Monday, or the missing sentence that started the third paragraph, which Kramer and Blumenthal were still arguing about. Who knew what they might ask. He wanted to be prepared.

This was the kind of work he wanted to do, J. thought, squinting at the printout and underlining with his finger dot matrix outrage. These were real stories. He had been raised in a cocoon, programmed for achievement, but there was a whole city out there that was unruly and didn’t give a shit about plans. And he wanted to take his place in it. He wanted to know where reporters got their statistics about rates of crime, and how they requested secret files the government and big business didn’t want the public to know. The clandestine order that made things go. Blumenthal had read Emergency Services’ protocols on the use of deadly physical force and had interviewed Eleanor Bumpurs’s case counselor. The reporter had looked up Officer Sullivan’s record of nineteen years on the police force and had seen a pattern there. He found things that converged in one place and time from different parts of the city, like people on a subway car, and violence was the result. J. felt a part of the Bumpurs piece, he had turned Kramer on to it, and though it was a small step it was his first, and that’s how you learn to walk, he thought.

A few minutes before noon, Freddie called J. from his dorm room at NYU to give him the lowdown on the night. Sophie’s was the ticket: they’d spend the night on Avenue A, and Julia was going to bring some of her friends maybe, they were still negotiating, and then J. looked at the clock and saw he was late for the meeting.

He ran between the cubicles, left and right, skidded down the blue tile floor. The door to the editor in chief’s office was closed. He was too late. Kramer was going to kill him. The secretary looked up at him, and raised her eyebrows to say, yes? “I’m supposed to be in the meeting,” J. said.

“So go right in,” she said, and pawed the in-box.

He turned the handle slowly.

It turned out that the white guy with suspenders was Jimmy Banks, the editor in chief, and he sat behind a desk of black metal with his hands clasped together. Behind him on the wall, framed covers of the Downtown News’s first few issues hung in parallel authority, to remind the people in the room of tradition in solid black and white ink beyond reproach, reiterating quaint outrages of a simpler city. There were ten others in the room, those whom J. had seen designated by bylines and their editorial maneuverings over the years, but he did not know whose face belonged to which riveting personal essay, which exposé, which descent into the downtown after-hours abyss in search of the first piece about the new raging drug. They slouched indolently in chairs, drooped on the floor, in the stiff gray cushions of the couch along the back wall, drinking coffee and diet soda, notebooks agape. They looked at J. but did not say anything. He sat along the back wall, on the floor, next to a thin woman with black fingernails, black dress and oily, glinting dyed black hair. He did not intend to speak unless addressed. He listened to the old hands of the Downtown News to see how it worked.

“Bumpurs — I’m trying to riff on that.”

“Cops and Bumpurs. Do the Bump. Bump me in the morning and didn’t just walk away.”

“Bump, jump, lump, stump …”

“The cops knock on the door and—”

“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

“Maybe we should focus on the cops.”

“Knock knock. Who’s there? Cop. Cop who? Cop come to kill ya.”

“How about Shooting Range in High Bridge? You know, because they have those rooms in the basement of the precinct for target practice.”

“Did anyone besides the cops see that she had a knife, or just them? Because that’s something. That’s an angle.”

“High Bridge Target Range. Target Practice.”

“Bumpurs, Bumpurs, Bumpurs …”

“Permanent Eviction.”

“Her family says there’s no way she could have attacked them because she had a heart condition. And arthritis.”

“Shotgun, High Bridge: The Blankety Blank of Blankety Blank.”

“Are NYC Cops the City’s Secret Police?”

“Go Nazi — secret police, Gestapo, something along those lines.”

“Are NYC Cops the City’s Gestapo?”

“Gestapo on 174th Street.”

“This isn’t a Sidney Lumet film.”

“Hump, mump, dump, pump … I’m thinking.”

“Jackboots on 174th Street.”

“Franklin, you’re barred from the rest of the meeting. The rest of you focus on the race thing. I think that’s it.”

“It’s not a very riffable name.”

“What’s wrong with Permanent Eviction?”

“Race and Rent. Of Race and Rent.”

“The Devil and Officer Sullivan.”

“The Case of Officer Sullivan.”

“Are You Next?”

“How about a Tale of Two Cities? You see, High Bridge is one city, and Chelsea is the other, then we can bring the Raymond case and compare the different responses to—”

“I thought we killed that piece. I thought we agreed to kill that piece.”

“But now we have a peg again. It’s fresh again. Uptown, Downtown, the two different standards—”

“Forget it. Blumenthal doesn’t mention it. Where’s the cop from?”

“Italian, from somewhere in Queens. Forest Hills.”

“The Italian Stallion Meets the Great Black Something.”

“Isn’t Sullivan an Irish name?”

“Bumpurs Bumpurs Bumpurs …”

“Focus on the victim.”

“Deadly Physical Force.”

“Anyone see Cheers last night?”

“Have Gun, Will Evict.”

“Ah ha.”

“Law of the Landlord.”

“New Lease on Life.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Settling Arrears.”

“Arrears of Death.”

“Why is this so much fucking trouble? Maybe we should skip it for now and come back to it.”

“Past Due. In for Arrears. Are NYC Cops the New Debt Collectors?”

“Will you get off the fucking interrogatory hed? Save it for the subhed, Christ.”

“No one saw Cheers last night?”

“Thinking, I’m thinking.”

“High Noon in High Bridge. Showdown on 174th Street. Was Eleanor Bumpurs Gunned Down in Cold Blood?”

“The Executioner’s Song.”

“In Cold Blood.”

“We used that last week. And you — you’re back on the goddamned interrogatory hed again.”

“Black and Blue! She’s black, they’re blue!

“We get it.”

“Bumpurs Bumpurs Bumpurs.”

“The Fire This Time, go for the Baldwin thing. They threw garbage at the cops the next day, right, from the rooftops — The Fire This Time.”

“But it wasn’t flaming garbage.”

“I heard it was molotov cocktails.”

“It was a bag of trash.”

“Whatever. I still think The Fire This Time works.”

“Maybe they’ll riot.”

“A Shooting on 174th Street.”

“A Killing on 174th Street.”

“Maybe we should get someone to write a sidebar over the weekend. To get the black angle.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, what about our boy Malefi?”

“He hasn’t been returning my phone calls lately.”

“Why not?”

“Too busy?”

“What, busy changing his name again? What about the guy who wrote the graffiti piece two weeks ago. We put it on the cover. Is he …”

“You mean is he …”

“Yeah, is he black, Afro-American, what do you think I mean?”

“No. He’s a professor at NYU.”

Jimmy Banks looked over at J. J. had his arms drawn around his knees in a cannonball position. “You,” Banks pointed. “What’s your name?”

“J. Sutter,” he answered. “I’m the intern, I’m Winslow Kramer’s intern.”

He embraced his legs tighter. “He asked me to come in case you needed to know anything. About the piece.”

“Intern,” Banks said, nodding and looking down at his desk. “It’s probably too late for a sidebar anyway.” He nodded some more and then abandoned his thought. “Everybody put your thinking caps on or else it’s Bloodbath on 174th Street.”

“I still like Of Race and Rent.”

“Maybe we should just go with Bloodbath on 174th Street.”

“Anyone else? Okay, Bloodbath on 174th Street it is.”

“Bumpurs Bumpurs Bumpurs.”

The individual who wishes to purchase a gun in the state of Maryland must endure a seven-day waiting period, and for some this may be the most difficult part of the application process. The ten-dollar application fee, which is forwarded to the Superintendent of the Maryland State Police, should be no hassle; excavation in the living room couch may cover the deficit if the applicant is a few coppers short. Scribbling in the lines and scratching the X’s across the boxes regarding name, address, occupation, place and date of birth, height, weight, race, eye and hair color and signature will be a small hurdle, but most of this information has probably been memorized over time, and the gun dealer may be able to provide aid without breaking any laws. The section regarding a history of crimes of violence (the usual: abduction; arson; burglary in the first, second and third degree; escape; kidnapping; manslaughter, excepting involuntary manslaughter; mayhem; murder; rape; robbery; robbery with a deadly weapon; carjacking or armed carjacking; sexual offense in the first degree; and sodomy; or an attempt to commit any of the aforesaid offenses; or assault with intent to commit any other offense punishable by imprisonment for more than a year) may knock out a few. Checking the wrong box next to questions regarding one’s status as a habitual drunkard; addict or a habitual user of narcotics, barbiturates or amphetamines; and spending more than thirty consecutive days in any medical institution for treatment of a mental disorder or disorders (unless there is attached to the application a physician’s certificate, issued within thirty days prior to the date of application, certifying that the applicant is capable of possessing a pistol or revolver without undue danger to himself or herself, or to others), may cause the individual to be turned down, unless fate intervenes and the application is reviewed by the State Police around quitting time or just before an office party celebrating the retirement of a valued member of the department, someone perhaps named Sal. The individual must be twenty-one or older, no excuses, and fugitives from justice will be denied permits for obvious reasons. This is all laid out in Article 27, Subsection 442 of Maryland’s gun legislation. The application does not include Rorschach tests, questions about whether the glass is half-full or half-empty, or the proclivity to hold mock trials, while dressed in one’s underpants, in which the worthiness of the human race is weighed by a jury of the individual’s stuffed animal collection. There are a lot of questions that are not asked in the gun dealerships of the state of Maryland, but for some the hardest part of the application may be the seven-day waiting period. It may be hell for some.

Once the individual has the new gun in possession, he/she may maintain it for use in his/her residence or business. The new gun owner may feel an urge to walk around town packing heat, but this is a real no-no. The individual can’t just walk around with a gun in his or her pocket; there are laws against that. It may be transported to a gun shop for repairs, from place of legal purchase, to a formal or informal target shoot, sport shooting event, for hunting and trapping, to dog obedience training class or show, or organized military activity, and the weapon must be unloaded and placed in an enclosed case or holster, with the ammunition maintained in a separate, closed container. But walking around with a gun? That’s reserved for officers of the peace, and employees of security or detective firms, and requires a permit. The application for a carry permit is a bit tougher, at times a head-scratcher.

West Virginia is a popular gun-running state, on a per-capita basis, in the top five, based on how many guns bought in the state are traced to out-of-state crimes per one hundred thousand population in the originating state. Eventually people who want to buy guns in West Virginia for export get to know the shortcuts and just jet over the state line, slap down the cash and cross back over the state line. The number of out-of-state guns used in crimes within the borders of West Virginia is comparably small. And yet it does happen from time to time. At the most unlikeliest of times, at the hands of the most unlikeliest of people, it happens.

Learned people keep track of the numbers, draw up studies, make arguments. In this landmass of numbers, riven by valleys of rarity and tormented by summits of likelihood, there are landmarks. An out-of-state gun used at a public event in a lethal fashion, unclassifiable as a crime of passion or monetary gain, by an individual who does not fit the standard profile of a perpetrator of a violent crime. Such events skew. They draw more media attention than the routine gas station robbery or umpteenth depredation against the dignity of the humble convenience store. The public is inured against such mundane crimes. They yawn. But in the case of the spectacular crime, soul-searching may be initiated, becalmed dinner conversations snap sail at the mention, suspicious appraisal of one’s neighbors occurs up and down the rows of the planned community. Such a case will be a landmark in a stream of statistics and stand apart for a time. A blip on the graph. But once the names have been removed, the particularities expunged in the name of scientific method, such a case may indeed skew, but be consumed into the mean nonetheless. Statistics will swallow the aberration, if the aberration can endure the seven-day waiting period.

The place mats of Herb’s Country Style aspire to the perspectives of mountain divinities, bought in bulk and fixing a century of scrabbling human achievement in its just form on the diaphanous paper. The map is rough drawn, poorly reproduced, wholly sketch. Squiggly indecisive lines worm among straight, rivers contend against manmade roads and routes. Pamela can easily pick out the friends of this establishment. Their names are bold on the map, two buildings down from Herb’s the Coast to Coast Offers Free Continental Breakfast In-Room Coffee 25” Remote TV Pool; Magnificent Bluestone Dam Tours Available a little south of here, past where two rivers diverge. The edificial advertisements of local big-guns row along the bottom of the paper, landmarks on the avenue, granite enticements distinctly detailed. Appealing to the practical and fit and promising all sorts of adventures in the New River Gorge National Park, Lowell Hardware in the Historic District Carries All Your Camping Needs (And Some You Don’t Know About), while the McKeever Lodge in Pipestem whispers luxury into the ears of the less rugged, announcing All Sorts of Special Themes and Menus, such as Seafood, Italian and Western, to be digested in the 25 Fully Equipped, Deluxe Cottages. The final advertisement perches on the right corner, oldestyle letters urging her to visit John Henry Monument and Big Bend Tunnels. A Summers County Favorite.

In the upper left adjacent to a brown coffee cup eclipse a harpoon called N jabs away from her. She doesn’t see her motel. Route 3 trudges east and off the map into mottled formica terrain. She moved her plate because she didn’t want to look at it. She cleaned her plate except for two hashbrown kernels at the edge of a pool of ketchup. Pamela can’t eat them because they remind her of the fight outside her apartment building the week before and look like knocked-out teeth. No point trying to figure out the cause of it: two crack-heads fighting over God knows what, and once the puncher saw the damage he’d inflicted on the punchee, he helped his friend to his feet to hoof it out of there before the cops arrived. When she left her apartment to come to Tal-cott, the dried blood was still visible on the pavement.

Herb’s Country Style is situated in a locale more peaceful than her neighborhood — no ambulance wails, no crack vials or needles glinting, no homeless living or dead to step over — but despite those leagues the universal coffeeshop protocols are still enforced, even out here in international waters. The waitress keeps her java refills coming as they settle into tacit exchanges of cupfuls and murmured gratitude, and when J. sits down in Pamela’s booth the waitress follows standard operating procedure. She asks, “Separate checks?”

Pamela becomes one of the locals when J. opens the door; the chime dispatches all heads to the entrance to check the identity of the latest arrival, and Pamela joins in enthusiastically, avoiding herself in this game. J. looks more energetic than he did last night outside the motel, his step no longer uneasy. He’s regained the swagger he and his comrades had the previous evening. The locals take gauge of him to see where they can place him, if they know him, then they return back to their food, nodding or squinting to their companions in shared appraisal. Pamela feels a tinge of envy: it must be nice to know where everything lays. He isn’t from around here, not in that shirt and not with those sunglasses. In that skin. She considers inviting him to sit with her, deciding before the thought is finished she doesn’t feel like talking. She needs to prepare herself for her discussion with Mayor Cliff. She fishes another cigarette out of her pack for cover activity but then J. is at her table asking if he can join her. “Help yourself,” her mouth moves.

He slides into the red vinyl across from her and she glances out of the glass. Pamela has not been into the town proper yet; so far she’s seen the same view since she’s arrived. It seems that every place she’s seen so is precarious. The back of Herb’s looks out on the river, but here in the front her view is the familiar sight of mountain creeping on the road, a slope of green and gray that pushes up out of vision. Kind of like skyscrapers, she thinks; the sky is up there somewhere.

“I missed the taxi,” J. says, his hand darting for the plastic menu behind the napkin dispenser.

“Your friends just left,” she answers. She shared the van with them over here and they entered the place together. All the faces turned to them and looked away again. Ritual of the chime. Pamela diverged from the journalists and sat alone in a booth by the window. She asked the waitress if they sold cigarettes and was referred to the gas station next door. When she returned with packs to spare, her food was already on the table, like that. Her bill, too, upside down and waiting. “Feeling better today?” Pamela asks. He looks better.

“Oh I’m up and at ’em.”

Perhaps his sunglasses hide dark circles, but his voice isn’t as low and raspy as his friends’ were this morning in the van. He’s the only one of them who doesn’t look hungover. “This kid,” Pamela starts, “when I was in third grade, this kid in my class choked on a hot dog. The teacher came over and gave him the Heimlich and a little piece of hot dog shot out of his mouth. It looked like a cigar.”

“Was his name Frank?”

She tries to remember. Is this another one of those it’s a small world moments? “I forget his name.” She doesn’t get it until an hour later.

The waitress fills her cup and takes J.’s order. Pamela lights a cigarette, sees she has one going and tamps out the surplus. She catches J. watching this and thinks, he should be the last one to judge, after his and his friends’ antics. Compulsive drinkers, compulsive smokers. Everyone on hair-trigger behavior. He asks her if it is her first time in West Virginia.

“My father used to come here a lot to find stuff for his collection, but he never brought us down.” Now she may be bringing it all back to where it came from. Two hours to kill before her meeting with the mayor. The mayor seemed pretty mellow, judging from his speech last night. “What about you?” she asks.

“First time,” he answers. “This isn’t my usual beat. I’m down here doing a travel piece for a new website.”

“On the internet.”

“We prefer the term Information Superhighway. What do you do?” he says, and they could be back in New York.

“I’m a temp.”

“How do you like it?”

“Have you ever temped?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t ask that if you had. Typing and filing, usually. They call you up and you head out.”

“Just like me.”

“The agency doesn’t send me to places like this. They have a strict policy.”

“You should have them look into it. This place could use a good proofreader,” tapping the menu, “unless ‘Pried Fish’ is some Southern delicacy I’m unaware of.”

She asks him how long he’s been a journalist and thinks, gay? The way he talks reminds her of Royce. Whenever she and Royce went out he’d look around the room and pick out the waffling straight boys. The curious or closeted. Or so he claimed with some authority. Not that there wasn’t proof of his abilities; she’d forgiven him for what happened when she introduced him to the new fellow she’d started seeing. Forgiven him and him: it was her luck. J.’s not that bad-looking. That Hawaiian shirt is pretty loud, makes him stick out more than he does already. Black people around here are pretty country from what she’s seen so far. What room is he staying in? Not on her floor: upstairs somewhere. Leaving tomorrow. Haven’t been laid in— He does live in New York though. She shakes her head. That kind of thinking leads nowhere. Also a drinking problem, probably. Blond girls or he’s gay. Maybe introduce him to Royce when they get back to New York so he can do his trick.

(It takes her about four seconds to concoct this narrative.)

THE WAITRESS DROPSJ.’s plate on his place mat with one hand and refills Pamela’s coffee with the other. Her greasy spoon movements are honed, delicate, and were it not for the refutations of every single object in his field of vision he could be at the ballet, observing a master. The place mat features a crudely drawn map of Hinton. He studied it when he sat down, glad to be out of the heat and glad to be done with his exercise. A giant star marked Herb’s location; the restaurant tottered on the bank of the New River. North a bit (this thing drawn to scale?) a bridge crossed the river and ended up at the foot of the town. Six, seven, eight blocks long and five “avenues” wide. He is far from home. Then south of the main part of town is a little strip of streets on the bank of the river. Not as many historic locations marked there, must be the newer part of town; when he got close to Herb’s and could see across the river he spotted a large supermarket over there. Then there are all these corny ads at the bottom, tourist traps. He can’t see his motel on the map. He isn’t tired exactly but wouldn’t mind a ride back. Sees the ad for the John Henry Monument and asks, “You going to the steeldriving thing this afternoon?”

“Think so.”

“It’s going to be a re-creation of the John Henry race, right?” Gloomy Gus only opens her mouth to stick a cigarette in it. “Two guys banging nails into the ground to see who can go faster?”

Pamela executes with practiced ease an expression of sublime boredom. She exhales smoke through her nose and says, “Actually John Henry didn’t lay track. That’s what everybody pictures, but that wasn’t his actual job. He worked in the tunnel. One guy would hold a drill bit horizontal like this and the steeldriver would hammer it into the rock to make a hole. Then they’d put dynamite in the hole when it was deep enough and blow it up to advance the tunnel. Then they’d start over again.”

“I thought John Henry was made up but these people really take him seriously.” Sticking a piece of bacon into his mouth.

“That is the question. Big Bend Tunnel is the place named in most of the ballads, and that’s over in Talcott. The songs identify the C&O Railroad and they’re the ones who put the line in. So it fits that it comes from a true story.”

“But that doesn’t mean it actually happened — the race itself. He has, what, a heart attack once he beats the drill? Or he’s struck down from above.”

“Want to rain on the parade, don’t you?” she says, starting to grin. “There are two books about it. My father had the first editions, he would … Two folklorists — Louis Chappell and Guy Johnson — came down in the twenties or thirties to interview people around here and find out if he really lived or not. They found some people who said he did and some who said he didn’t,” nodding to the locals in other booths of the restaurant, the representative natives. “Some of the people who worked on the tunnel said they’d witnessed the contest and some said no way it ever happened. Their granddad had told them John Henry worked in Big Bend, or he didn’t. Most of the people were dead by the time they got down here, so a lot of it was secondhand anyway.”

“So what was the upshot?”

“One of the writers, the white man, Chappell, believed that the contest happened, and the other guy, Guy Johnson — who was black — thought there wasn’t enough proof. They interviewed the same people, a year or two apart and got different stories from them. Talcott and Hinton obviously think he existed. My father did.”

The white guy believes but the black guy doesn’t. He knocks some morsels around on his plate. The eggs aren’t that bad but you’d think she’d put out her cigarette while he’s eating. Just courtesy. Or maybe she’s telling him she didn’t want him to sit there. “He was an academic?” J. asks. Was that tense right? She’s using the past tense for her father.

“John Henry was just his hobby,” she says. “He owned a hardware store. But he started this hobby of collecting whatever he could find about it. Just whatever he could dig up. Memorabilia.”

“And what’s your take on it? Think he existed?”

“Are you working now? Are you interviewing me?”

“If you want to look at it that way.”

“You’re not writing any of this down.”

“I have a good memory. If you want I can pretend to write it down. Do you have a pen?”

The door chimes. They turn to look at a ponytailed man roll his wheelchair through the front with practiced fluidity. Pamela says, “I’m not a good person to interview. I just came here to get rid of my father’s stuff.”

“How much did he have — how big is his collection?”

“Boxes and boxes.”

“You’re not the sentimental sort.”

“It’s not doing me any good. It’s taking up space and I’m paying for it.”

Masterstroke here is to change the subject. He’s been watching her tear off the scalloped edges of the place mat and fold them into little balls. Doing that when she’s not puffing away. Pretty good-looking though, regardless. He’ll change the subject here. “Can a man actually beat a steam drill?”

“Am I your main source for this piece?”

“This is all terribly helpful background. You’re an expert.”

She squints. “The first mechanical drills weren’t that well put together. The bits wore out quickly, they kept breaking down. And in rock like this— all these mountains are soft shale — they’d get stuck in all the dust.”

“A geologist and a historian.”

“You have no idea,” she says. The left corner of her mouth tilts ambiguously but declines to commit to an interpretable expression. Certainly seems to have some issues, J. thinks. “The drills were so unreliable,” Pamela continues, “that a really strong steeldriver probably could beat one of them under the right conditions — comparing the speeds of great steeldrivers and the speed of the first drills. If the contest wasn’t too long. It was a timed contest. It’s within the realm of physical possibility.”

“The power of positive thinking.”

“It’s all speculation. But no proof he didn’t do it.”

“Or that he did.”

“Not sure if you want to say that too loud around here, if you know what I mean.”

J. looks over her shoulder seeking rabblerousers and rednecks, someone to make him feel ill at ease, discovers mere men in plaid shirts sawing at chicken fried. When he returns to her face, Pamela is smiling; she says, “I don’t think you have to worry about anything. Those two professors — Chappell and Johnson — tried to find the employment records for the C&O in this region but they were told they’d been burned in a fire. A lot of men died here and the railroad didn’t want the bad publicity. It was a company town so the newspapers didn’t keep a record of the accidents — they might have been lost in a fire or burned up on purpose — there were a lot of reasons why they wouldn’t have kept records. And if they did keep track of their black workers, well, John and Henry were the most common names for freed slaves, so if there was a record of him, it wouldn’t mean that he was the John Henry.”

“John Henry is Bob Smith.”

“John Doe.”

She had released her hair from the bun she had last night and the light through the windows livens the ends of the strands to a glowing copper. Her father had a John Henry fixation. Some sixties guy catching that nationalist fever, getting radicalized by Frantz Fanon, save up for a dashiki, revolutionary consciousness. Latches on to the steeldriver as an ideal of black masculinity in a castrating country. Issues, daddy issues. The last event for John Henry Days is tomorrow afternoon, so that leaves a day and a half to make any possible move. Knock on the door of her room: I saw the light on. (Hide that smirk, she’s sitting right across from you.) But she also lives in New York, so maybe he could just lay the groundwork over the next day. He has a legit excuse, he’s working on a story. And then what in New York. Is she just depressed over her father’s death — no telling how long ago he died — or depressed in general. Every waking day, a history of it, John Henry. Definitely issues of some sort, inevitably they bleed over into the bedroom. She’s good-looking and all that but he didn’t have time for another New York City nutjob. Is he even her type? He doesn’t have time for a relationship anyway, beyond his and Monica’s arrangement. I’m no prize, I’m going for the record.

(It takes him about five seconds to concoct this narrative.)

She’s a thin broth but let’s say there’s a story here, J. says to himself. She has a strange manner and is currently surrounded by rolled-up bits of paper and is disappearing behind a blue haze but let’s say there’s a story here. He starts thinking up follow-up questions he can ask her later.

There is a peaceful listlessness in the way the towncar glides through these valleys that makes Lucien think this is the way things were meant to be all along. That in the shrinking dregs of the Ice Age glaciers retreated and scraped through mountains in order to facilitate these modern highways; the final and supreme use of accumulated eons of pulverized stone is gravel for highway shoulders; the succession of rivers they pass merely affirms their progress like milestones, and the water cycle is just a little something on the side. He has come to believe that the intent of geological dynamism is modern convenience. Everything, in fact, all these ancient mechanisms. Somehow four fingers becomes the most practical arrangement, the opposable thumb and that whole mess, and on this day the driver steers the luxury automobile across tempered asphalt with accomplished digits. Is there a liquid that makes the air conditioner work, the way there is Freon in refrigerators? This substance biding its time through humdrum epochs for its ultimate deployment against Southern humidity, the prevention of perspiration stains on Lucien’s suit. The inexorable tending towardness of all things.

Heady thoughts of a p.r. flack on a Saturday morning.

Lawrence Flittings, his right-hand man, dependable lieutenant, sits to his left and answers Lucien’s questions with care. Lucien gazes at the passing hills and inquires about the preparations without listening to Lawrence’s rehearsed answers. He knows Lawrence has taken care of every grubby detail but understands that the man needs to prove his efficiency, and hence this game. Lawrence is as close as Lucien has ever come to having an efficient gay assistant without having a bona fide efficient gay assistant. Lucien asks, How is the hotel, how was the dinner last night, which junketeers have made the trip?

What Lucien really wants to know is if Lawrence can name those trees. Crawling along the mountainside, all the way up to the cracked peaks, the trees march unperturbed by the incline, stand up straight despite the insinuations of gravity. They must have strong roots, all intertwined underground.

They work together to keep from rolling down the slope, to provide for Lu-cien’s delectation a calming introduction to the natural beauty of West Virginia. The hotel is small but comfortable, Lawrence says, the dinner last night was enjoyed by all, the usual suspects from the media pool are in attendance, and now Lucien lobs a poser: Do you know the names of those trees, Lawrence?

There is nothing in his laptop or in his post-it festooned clipboard to aid him. Lawrence says swiftly, “I don’t know,” and Lucien nods, looking out the window all the while. If the driver can help them out with a little native lore, he does not say. Lucien has to keep Lawrence on his toes. He looks into the future: Next time they have an out-of-town event, Lawrence will research all the local flora and fauna, just in case. But Lucien will not ask the next time. Lawrence will wait for the question but it will not come, then he’ll try to slip his new knowledge into the conversation somehow. Listen to that red-breasted robin, Lucien, it’s their mating season and that is their mating call.

These trees do not dissemble. They are true to their natures, like Lucien. Lawrence his first day on the job probably imagined he was coming to work for a Mike Ovitz, or a fashioner of summer blockbusters. A postmodern Bar-num in a slimming Italian suit. All who meet Lucien expect such, such is his reputation, misearned. Certainly he surprised Lawrence immediately, in those first few days (he must have) with his humility and soft, careful speech. Oh, he thunders now and again, but only at those who understand thunder and will listen to nothing else. Certainly he surprised Lawrence with his sincerity over time. (Ticking off here his favorite attributes.) Lucien is not, as many believe him to be, fake. Such a label implies premeditation, that the inner man does not match the outer man and fakery is involved. But he is no counterfeiter. From time to time, after the lights have been turned out and the surly emanations of the streetlights fill his bedroom or in odd moments at well-attended events when he is in between greetings and small talk and alone in a crowd before he has decided on his next strategic interaction, Lucien will find himself lost in his landscape. How he stumbled there is not important, which sign he misinterpreted that led him into this introspective cul-de-sac, what is important is that he is face to face with his character and must account for what he has become, and in those moments he will not flinch. He can describe the man he sees with merciless acuity, recognize the hunched and shriveled creature before him and there, it happens, he extends his arms without reluctance or disgust to embrace his true self. And there is no disagreement between Lucien at that moment of sudden confrontation and Lucien at this very moment, on the job, timecard perforated, en route to his latest assignment. No false front, he does not dissemble, he is exactly as he appears to be.

The miles retreat. Lawrence says it’s not that much farther, and Lucien thinks, all these trees are for me. To delight his eye. He wonders if the natural drift of his thoughts makes him a narcissist, but then reassures himself that he is only substituting the concept of Lucien for the larger family of man. For simplicity’s sake. He’s thinking about all humanity, not just himself. That business about the jungle shaping four fingers and a thumb and thus their smooth ride this morning: all three of them, Lucien, Lawrence and the driver, enjoy the monkey’s good fortune. And everyone on the road ahead and behind him, on all the roads leading to and shunting off this highway. Lu-cien’s I is a democratic beast, many-headed, fork-tongued. Neolithic tool-makers shaped arrowheads, these skills developed over time and now the chrome doorhandle of this vehicle is shaped just so. The magnitude of chrome doorhandles disproves his narcissism once and for all. There are millions and millions of chrome doorhandles in use around the globe, turned by peasant and king alike, facilitated by perfected manufacturing process, millions, allowing swift and easy egress from vehicles, nooked betwixt palm and metacarpals. He is not alone in receipt of the neolithic toolmakers’ gifts. Heck, people are opening doors everywhere.

The miles retreat and Lawrence says again, it is not much farther. Soon they will be in Talcott. Lucien has a patchwork idea of the town stitched by pop culture. He has borrowed elements of that idea on more than one occasion, to underscore the home-style virtues of a new home-style lemonade or to reconfigure a dull-witted celebrity’s platitudes into a front-porch wisdom that journalists will pick up on and in turn deliver to the people. To present things just so. Folks pick up on these flourishes very quickly. When he first started in this business and was coming to understand his facility for making people believe things and was much taken with the language of his therapist, Lucien thought he was tapping into the collective unconscious. But now he thinks it’s simply the atmosphere. That air is an admixture of nitrogen, oxygen, trace gases, and one of these trace gases is American cliché and we breathe it in with our first breath. Peering past miles they have yet to travel, Lucien pictures Talcott and sees the tall spire of the town church, a crowd of parishioners glad-handing with the pastor on Sunday morning, a blond child in a bright striped shirt waving a sparkler on July Fourth and a glass pitcher of lemonade pimpled by condensation. We know that the lemonade is homemade because there are seeds swirling in the bottom of the pitcher and that detail is what makes it true. Talcott is an American small town and contains virtues.

Lucien thinks, maybe the trick about doing a town is making the thing into the idea. He has never done a town before.

Thinks back. He treated Mayor Cliff as he would any other client. He did not talk down to the man just because he was from another neck of the woods and knew nothing about being seated at the best table. No one client is dumber than another; they are all merely clients. Mayor Cliff had just departed the matinee of a popular Broadway show and had sunset plans for the observation deck of the Empire State Building. He had rolled the Playbill into a grubby tube and from time to time during the discussion it unfurled and he rolled it anew. The mayor explained that the wife had never been to the Big Apple and this trip was a perfect opportunity to mix business with pleasure. The wife was out shopping, he said as he unzipped his purple track jacket to reveal a joke T-shirt. The joke was lost on Lucien. Something about woodchucks. Lucien did not allow this miscommunication, this symbol of their cultural difference, to alter his prepared remarks although perhaps he was a little sad that Mrs. Cliff had not come along as well, so that afterward the couple could discuss his words, and an hour or two hours from then, Lucien would feel his ears burn.

Lucien said to the mayor, “This is my office and that is my guest chair. We have a process we have to do now and I want you to be comfortable. This is what I do in the getting to know the client stage, you have questions and want to be reassured. Your time is valuable so I’ll be honest with you: I sell light bulbs. Yes. It generally takes time for the appropriateness of this analogy to settle in so I will ask you, do you know how fragile light bulbs are? It’s always the filament that breaks before the glass. You’ve knocked over lamps, I’ve knocked over lamps, knocking over lamps is the side racket of every American. They’re very fragile. It’s the filament. Fil-a-ment. Sounds like a word you’d use to describe a god. ‘A thousand lovely filaments falling down her divine shoulders.’ Fragile and yet they light up the whole world. These tiny crimps of metal. Hit the switch and a million electrons jump off the filament into darkness and light up the room. These are tiny electrons that are full of energy.

“My point takes a bit to get around to. I go, and what are we? We are energy too. This is Einstein talking here, not me. Just then. Now I’m back. Look at my hand. Yours will do just as well of course, but look at my hand. The knuckles here say that’s where the bones meet, so I have bones. The tendons stretch here and so I have muscles beneath my skin. If I pinch my fingertip like this it goes white because I cut off the blood flow. I have capillaries and veins and inside them blood. You understand my point. There are smaller and smaller systems, down to blood cells and the specialized tiny bits inside them and we can go smaller still into atoms. Blood cells and tiny atoms that you and I need to live and that’s energy. Split the atom and that’s energy. Energy to destroy a city or light it up or power a sun. These are natural processes. The windows of my office are tinted to cut out the UV — too much of that will give you cancer, but the point is that the sun is a giant light bulb. I’m reinforcing my opening gambit. It is a series of atomic explosions, a billion splitting atoms. The light of the sun takes a day or two to reach us, there is universal constant involved, but there it is. The sun is a big ball of splitting atoms that allows life on earth and in my hand I have atoms, I have a sun. We all have suns in our hands, inner light, every object, and all they need are a little something to initiate the reaction. That’s why I say I’m in the light bulb business. I’m just trying to let a little something out.

“I handle celebrities. I handle shiny new cars from Europe. These cars have a power in their names, these European imports, because to American ears they sound exotic and so they want them straight out the gate and this makes my job a little easier. They are already leaking light before I ever get my hands on them. Look into my eyes. Then some things come to me dull and I have to get to work. Otherwise they remain dim. The duller something is the duller you feel and that’s where the elbow grease comes in. I have handled paperweights and toasters and politicians. Organized events for them that are like setting up mirrors to reflect their inner radiance to best effect. No, I can’t name any of my political clients, I have signed nondisclosure agreements and such things are the holy word, but rest assured you have seen the light glinting off the teeth of my political clients and have pulled the lever for them, chum. A company that produces lawn sprinklers once approached me, and now I feel the satisfaction of a job well done when I drive through upstate suburbs to visit friends or clients and see rainbows caught in the spray of sprinklers I have helped out. This is missionary work. I’ve helped TV pilots get along. Some are still in syndication as we speak. I have never done a hubcap, but I hope with all my heart that one day I will. I’ve had my eye on a few and now it’s a matter of contacting the manufacturers. Pro bono. It sounds ridiculous but love is often ridiculous to those on the outside. Take the elevator down to the street and wait five minutes for a ridiculous couple to walk by, what are they wearing, something ridiculous, mismatched socks, you might have a little chuckle but you will envy with all your heart the inarguable adoration in their smiles. I am coming around to my point: I have never done a town before, sir, and I would love to. To give the world your light.

“What I want to do is establish the brand superiority of Talcott for all things Talcott-related. The name of your town, Talcott, Tallll-cott, it rolls off the tongue and that’s half the battle. The sound of things is half my job. Egon. ‘A coffee table is not a coffee table unless it is an Egon coffee table.’ How many times have you heard this phrase? Sounds so good and right you might think it’s Solomon that said it, it’s something from the Bible and handed down. I didn’t make it up, wish I had, but this is not an advertising agency I run here, those offices and cubicles you passed out there are not the offices and cubicles of an advertising agency, but I helped to get out the truth of Egon coffee tables to the people and now you know this simple truth about coffee tables as well as you know your wife’s maiden name. Her maiden name is what she was before. Now she is something else. Do you ever think about that? I’m talking about the lines that divide you from one stage to another. The natural image is the cocoon. Light bulbs, cocoons, I’m coming back to light bulbs, don’t fret. What I’m really talking about is the exact moment between the cocoon and the butterfly, the moment of change, the exact instant when the potential is released into light because that is what we are discussing at the moment. This is where we are now with your town. Would you like some water?

“A coffee table is not a coffee table … I didn’t make that up. I’m not that clever. But I did my humble effort to urge Egon coffee tables into deserving living rooms across the country. They are stark and scratchproof and fit easily into any preexisting design motif or lack thereof, they do not stick out, are unobtrusive, but they have their own subtle radiance. They shine in their own right. I don’t know you. I can’t describe your life, but I know the world. The world is full of undiscovered treasures waiting to reveal their true light. Are you a kind man? Are you a forgiving man? I don’t know, I’ve just met you, sir. I have picked up on a few things. You cross your legs and uncross your legs and you have that thing you do with your chin. I have learned that you are an attentive listener, but if I said I knew you I would be lying so I’m not going to insult you by saying that I do. But I know the world, and it is full of light.

Here and there, it leaks out, and this is where I come in. Lumens and lumens. Talcott is full of light. It is a silent star. It is a superheated solar furnace that is dark and waiting to become light. You have plans and ideas. I will give them to the world. All I ever do is release radiance. This is light bulbs, sir, and this is why I say I am in the light bulb business. This is light bulbs.”

It’s like living in a bum’s tin cup; one thing rattles and they all rattle together. Right now he hears everything except the words he strains to remember, all his neighbors’ livid faces horde around him, but he cannot make out the shrouded face he seeks back there in the snow when he shivered with a broken face. Stick a baboon in front of a piano and that’s what this building sounds like at all hours. Before Mickey it was the Mailers arguing, and their cheap things falling on firetrap floors as he knocked her around. The fight lasted an hour and he didn’t get a single word down all the while. Tomorrow what blood she cannot remove from her housedress will be seen on the wash line outside, pinned to those looping linen grins across the facade of every tenement, one every story, dangling ropes bearing dun-tending sheets, underwear, pajamas. Love and hate and gossip hung out there. Fistfights and puberty. If the damned yelping doesn’t tell you, all you have to do is look for baby clothes on the wash lines to see who just delivered. The familiar clothes of the dead disappear suddenly. The Mailers’ fight finally stops and then it’s Mickey, because it is Saturday night, crashing wide the front door and making his rot-gut stumble up the stairwell, finally thrown out of the last basement dive of the night and mistaking every door for his. He lives on the top floor, so floor after floor of mistakes. When he tries his keys in their locks, one by one they say, move along, Mickey, and he fumbles along to the next apartment. Jake thinks “Move along, Mickey” might make a good saloon song; he’ll try after he gets the John Henry ballad out of him and on paper. When Mickey finally gets inside his place, it’s a gang of drunks yelping down Essex, then a baby, or a gang of babies, or those wretches who live in the basement. If all other distractions cease, there are always the rheumy bitches in the basement, who cough up things from their lungs at remarkable volume, things that must be chairs or wardrobes from the sound of it. He has never seen them, only heard the heavy basement door scrape behind their scurrying, so he is left to imagine what they look like from their harrowing coughing fits. Ruth says they’re gypsies. Everything’s cramped. In the heaving tenement, in their two rooms, Jake looks down at his music-paper, hands stoppers at his ears, pressing hard until all he hears is his own heart bass-drum in his skull. But he can’t remember the words. A song is just words on paper until it is sung, that’s what they say at the office, but he can’t even get that far. Every minute he spends struggling against the disharmony of his world is money out of pocket; in his line Saturday is the biggest night. The dance halls and beer joints and vaudeville houses are overflowing at this hour, this is the time he waits for all week. After a year of Saturday nights his blood naturally jumps at this hour, and he thinks of all the people spilling in and out of establishments, fumbling through gaudy signs for the key into this evening. But Mr. Yellen is off to the Philadelphia office on Monday morning and if Jake doesn’t get the manuscript to him before his departure, he has to wait another week. That won’t do. Uptown at Cunningham’s Rosie Clifford is beginning the first set of her week-long engagement, and he should be there plugging. Buying beer for Handsome Boy Morton and his band, seeding the gallery with chorus slips. Instead Slim is probably there in his place, plugging the latest song from Ames Bros., probably a drinking song, knowing them, another attempt at the next “Down Where the Wurzburger Flows.” They can try as much as they want but Ames Bros. hasn’t had the stuff since Dolzier and Finch moved over to Patriot, and everybody knows it. Songs like that don’t just happen, million-sellers. Yes, Jake should be there tonight, plugging for old man Yellen, going song for song with his rivals, but he’s here, with stillborn sheet-music on his lap and lyrics that have picked up stakes, nowhere to be found. Now it sounds like somebody’s getting killed out there. The coppers playing dice when they should be out protecting the citizens. It would be quieter at the office on Twenty-eighth, but some of the real contract men, as opposed to aspiring tune-smiths like Jake, might be there, filling up the warren of little rooms with cigar smoke, and they’ll crack wise with him. What are you doing at that piano, song-plugger? Particularly if they’re playing whist and tipping elbows. He’ll take a lot of ribbing. He’s just an errand boy to them, even after a year. They are the artists and he might as well be one of the Negroes who drop off the boxes of sheet music at the novelty stores. As if their scribbled songs sell themselves. As if with dozens of music publishers hustling every day and night at the same joints, trying to get the attention of the same talent, trying to get the ear of the public, their songs just sell themselves. Most of them are hacks anyway, rhyming sandwiches with languages and Doherty with majority, the dumbest stuff, trying to copy whatever song made it big last week. If this week it’s tot songs, those hacks are thinking about Little Sally and her red balloon, temperance songs this week if that’s what the papers are talking about, beer-drinking songs the next week. Stealing wholesale the melody of the latest saloon favorite, trading Molly for Dolly, but they’ll stuff newspaper into their pianos to stifle the sound because they think their fellow songsters in the next rooms are going to steal from them. A gang of thieves. One step above rag-pickers, the way they root around looking for some scrap to sell. They have the gall to look down on him. Least with this John Henry song, if he can remember it, he’s trying to do something unexpected, bring back a ballad after all this hopped-up ragtime stuff everybody’s doing today. The two-step is big so they got to make up songs to two-step to. It’s a merry-go-round. He looks at the upright in the corner. Maybe if he could play around on its yellowed keys, the night he heard the John Henry song would come back. But he can’t touch it if Victoria is in the house, he’s learned that. His baby sleeps through every aggravation the street and tenement assails her with, but let Jake play one note on the upright and open go her eyes and wide goes her mouth and out comes the wailing. Even if he sticks newspaper on the strings to muffle like they do at the office and plays as softly as possible, she’s crying. Cacophony upon cacophony in this ramshackle, and his baby girl can’t bear a note of actual music. It could be a million-seller, it could be what everyone in every saloon needs if only they heard it once, and his baby will scream like a banshee. Smart thing to do would be to sell the damned thing anyway. Big Danny ain’t coming back. Back when the police closed down McGinty’s, on account Man McGinty wasn’t giving the syndicate their proper take of the back room stuss game, Big Danny broke into the saloon the next day in broad daylight and rolled the rickety upright straight out the front door. For wages earned and owed — Big Danny had been knocking the keys for four months and only got paid for two. He stayed on for the free liquor, but it gets to a point. Once he got the piano out on the sidewalk, he had nowhere to put it, because the house rules at the flop he called home said that every one of his possessions was to be stolen the minute he left the premises, and he was tired of combing the shelves of the corner pawn to buy back his pilfered stuff. So he called up from the street, Jake looked down into the Essex hustle, and a few hours later Jake was explaining to Ruth why this beaten-up piano was taking up precious space in their tiny two rooms. Victoria wasn’t born yet, but once she arrived they’d need all the space they could get, and that hunk of junk was out of tune and out of place. Smart thing to do would be to sell it. He saw Big Danny one more time after he brought the piano over. Looked like he’d been dragged out of the Hudson. Big Danny said, I’ve placed songs with every top-notcher at Tony Pastor’s and now look at me. Jake gave him some bills. McGinty might have been tight with the cash, but no one else was going to hire Big Danny, no legit place, not with those opium eyes of his. Word was Big Danny had disappeared into a Pell Street hop den, disappeared down with the Orientals, and that was months ago. Best to sell it and buy things for Victoria, pay off the doctor. Makes him feel awful bad to think about Big Danny like that, Big Danny’s the one who broke him in after Old Man Yellen recruited him. “You got the lungs,” Yellen told Jake the day he picked him out of the choir, “you got working papers?” He had working papers, he had a valise full of neckties. Jake’s first job had been selling neckties for a friend of his father, but after Yellen came that day, he hadn’t set foot in his father’s friend’s necktie shop since, or his father’s synagogue now that he thinks about it. Getting a chance to sing was the only reason he went there anyway at that point. Guy walks in says he can get paid to sing, what does he need to go back to synagogue for? Singing for free. Jake was entering into a long-standing Tin Pan Alley tradition, he later discovered. All the publishers come down and canvass the Lower East Side synagogues in search of strong pipes to steal from the choirs. You need a new plugger, you come downtown. Jake noticed Yellen’s suit right off, it wasn’t none of that cheap Orchard Street stuff; see a guy in a nice suit like that and no way he was going to go for one of Jake’s cheap neckties, it was a skill he had learned from doors shut in his face. The guy had made something of himself. Of course one of those doors not shut in his face revealed Ruth (who said her father was not home but of course he saw her father plenty once Jake started courting her) so he has to thank the job for that at least. “Can you read music?” Yellen asked him when they stepped outside. Yes, he could read music, was he a blind man? It was also the last time he wore his threadbare Sabbath suit, too; first thing he got paid, one of the contract composers tipped him to a tailor on Thirty-fourth Street where all the guys went. Sure Jake could read music. He got the job and that night was his introduction to New York City at night. Big Danny his guide inside. They met up in front of the Alhambra, at eight o’clock as Yellen instructed. Jake was early, watched the couples swagger arm in arm through the beautiful doors to be devoured by globed light. The night was young and the couples made their way up to Fourteenth Street seeking any available mischief, a promising joint, the men in tilted brown derbies and tight checked suits, the women in pinching corsets that unclenched into long dresses, faces painted to coquettish blush beneath hats plucked completely except for one long feather. He had never been inside the famous Alhambra, or any of the other places on that bustling row. A gorilla tapped his shoulder and introduced himself — Big Danny. Big Danny said he’d been playing a game of spot the rube, and look it, he’d won. He was still big then, could have been mistaken for a strong-arm man, and talk about lungs. He was a boomer, no fooling, and when he started in on the plug, he got the song heard above all the saloon racket. Could be a full orchestra playing a march and you’d still hear Danny. Big Danny, Jake’s guide for the night, showed him the ropes and only talked down to him occasionally, when he asked a stupid question or spent one moment too many wide-eyed at one of the chorus girls. (They kicked so high.) Big Danny said, Staff notes into bank notes, that’s the word, and we’re the men who get the songs out there. You got to know what kind of place you’re working. If it’s a dance hall, and you got couples trying to have a good time, you plug the rag, something that will get them all two-stepping. If you know the bandleader and your firm has a reputation, maybe all you got to do is buy him a drink and he’ll play the song next thing. Maybe you got to buy drinks for the whole band, so remember what everybody drinks, do they got a taste for beer or do they got a taste for whiskey. Dance hall, it’s a rag so it’s an instrumental and you don’t have to pay stooges to sing the chorus, just clap your hands in time to get them dancing. But a saloon, once you get the song in the hands of the bandleader or the singer, you got to get the chorus slips out there into people’s hands, lay some coin on a beer-bummer so they’ll join the refrain. Once again you got to remember if they want money or drinks. Some of these rummies’ll do it for a shot. Once the band gets to the refrain, that’s when you start booming. You start singing loud. Louder than the singer if you have to but you got to get the crowd on your side. The people you gave the slips to, they’re joining in, too. What do you think the rest of the crowd’s going to do? Join in and remember. Could be the first time the song’s been played in public, just got back from the printer’s that morning, but they see you and a bunch of stooges singing it and they think it’s already a hit. Everybody knows the song but them. You have to believe that too — that the song is a hit. It might be “Lost Little Child” with a couple of words changed, or maybe one of the boys slowed it down, or maybe it’s the tenth coon song you tried to plug that day. But you gotta believe it’s a hit or else they’re never gonna believe it. That’s what’s going to get them into the music stores and five-and-dimes looking to buy the sheet music. This is the way we do it now. Got million-sellers all the time now, and this is how they start, with us, boy. We plug ’em, we get ’em in the hands of the right people to play ’em, and people buy ’em. He blew out a tart cloud of cigar smoke. Jake was dizzy, felt he’d been on the dance floor ten numbers in a row. He figured if he could sell neckties he could sell songs. Big Danny nodded to the bouncer and they went inside. Jacob watched and played stooge. At the Alhambra, Big Danny waited for the tearjerker to end (it was the summer’s hit, “No Flowers for Amelia,” with the melody reworked and an extra chorus, another Whitman Bros. hack-job) and approached the bandleader with professional copies of Yellen’s latest drinking song, and ten minutes later Big Danny was singing the refrain, with Jacob backing him up from the other side of the room, winking, reading words from the chorus slip. At Cunningham’s half an hour later, Big Danny took the headliner in a bear hug between her sets — she looked like a limp daisy grabbed by a gorilla (they went way back together he said later) — and she sang the song first thing when she got back onstage, a rags-to-riches yarn with an easy chorus that the crowd would have picked up on even if Big Danny and Jake hadn’t been booming it out. But they were booming and Jake couldn’t stop laughing. It was a new kind of singing; he felt like a newspaper boy hawking a gory headline, or one of those chest cases holding sandwich boards for the latest remedy that he couldn’t afford. At the Arabian Nights Jake got swept up in the final chorus and bumped into a Bowery boy and got a face full of stale beer and peanut shells. Lucky that’s all he got. They got thrown out of Leary’s, the first but not that last time Jake would be tossed out like a slop bucket by management for no good reason. At Bob Preston’s Variety, Big Danny bought the entire band beer, and they cheated him, tucking the professional copies (stark, no frills, without the fetching cover art that attracted the civilians, back sides bereft of the usual cheap advertisements for nerve tonic and rocking horses) underneath the music of their scheduled set and never got around to Yellen’s song. Big Danny bunched the chorus slips into balls and threw them around the room as the people danced to competitors’ songs. It happens. They’re at the mercy of the musicians. Place after place, from saloon to burlesque house and back again, bribing and cajoling, failing or not, they moved the music in the modern way, the little guys in the new industry. The next morning Jacob had become Jake, pruned his surname too, to a simple Rose. His parents didn’t cotton to that, no sir, but this is America, this is the twentieth century. A guy’s got to get ahead. His father still gives him grief about it, but Jake gives grief back when he catches his father crouching over his kid, speaking that dead language to Victoria even though he’s told the man he doesn’t want him speaking that around her. Old man’s hovering over his baby girl like an old world ghost. This is the twentieth century and there’s his gloomy father trying to import a Lithuanian village into Jake’s two tiny rooms. Victoria’s a classy name, a royal name, and royalty doesn’t need any peasant stuff dragging her back. His father makes a vague old world grunt whenever Jake says this is the twentieth century, and the sound isn’t musical at all. To heck with it all, Jake hasn’t the time. Barely enough time for the sun, some days. He started sleeping past noon once the rhythm came in. He learned the flow of the New York City evening, which joints hit their peak at what time, distinguished the drinking joints from the dancing joints, memorized the bouncers’ names and the tactics of competing pluggers. He made the rounds, wore down shoes that his cousin resoled for free if Jake told him stories about bawdy houses and what went on inside them. He got the songs out there in a good percentage. He’d pick up the new batch from the office on Twenty-eighth Street every night and hear the contract men in their cubicles attempting alchemy on their battered pianos and thought to himself, they shouldn’t call it Tin Pan Alley because all their racket sounds like tin pans clanging together, but because more often than not what they conjure up is just tin and not the gold of a bona fide hit. It didn’t take him long to figure out that if you became a contract man, a composer or a lyricist, you got a decent salary plus royalties. Knock out a few popular songs and you’re set up on Easy Street. He looks at those drunks at the office banging away at their plagiarized ditties and thinks, half these guys started out pluggers like him and they got nothing on him. But he’s the littlest cog in the machine. The women work in the daytime, demonstrating numbers in music shops and department stores, and the men work at night, plugging the dance halls. The songwriters knock them out, then above them the hit-makers spend their royalties. And above them the publisher got the best of it. The walls of Yellen’s office are crammed with framed copies of hits and above the names of the songwriters is his name, bigger than everything. Big Danny, before he got on the hop, before he got fired, said the minute he figures out the system it changes, a guy can hardly keep up. Some places got music machines, player pianos that play songs that are already set, and there’s no use for a plugger when they got a machine to do it. No need for a musician that breathes and bleeds when you got a machine to do it. Some places now got kinetoscopes showing motion pictures of what the lyrics say, so you don’t have to imagine what a song’s about, it’s up there on the wall in a picture. First it was slide shows and now it’s kinetoscopes. From where we are, out there hoofing it from place to place, we can’t see the whole thing. You ask Yellen about the distribution and he’ll tell you about how this new printer can cut up thousands of copies a day, and how long it takes for the train to get it from here to Chicago and Philadelphia, and how much he makes off the ads on the back, and how when Harper’s prints a song, how many of their readers will buy it the next week. We’re just two guys, Jake. They got more than twenty music publishers on the Alley alone, and that’s not including the big guys like Von Tilzer moving uptown. We’re just two pluggers and they got a whole system over us. Jake said, this is the twentieth century. Big Danny said, no fooling. Now outside some man is beating his horse. How is a man supposed to get ahead with all this noise. He doesn’t know how Ruth and Victoria can sleep through this night after night. They slept through him being beaten, it was only two blocks away. He rubs his bent nose and drags a finger across the groove in his cheek. With his bashed-up face he looks like any Bowery brawler. No longer the choirboy. This is what the street has done to him. What gang they were from there was no way of telling, but they beat him good, came out from beneath one of the El struts and knocked him down with a brick. It was the first heavy snow of winter and he cut his plugging short because no one was out, but short meant it was still late. With his face pushed down into the piled snow he could still smell the horse manure beneath it. They cut his pockets straight out of his trousers and grabbed his meager bills. Sent that night’s songs soaring on a gust. But maybe his wife and child didn’t hear him because the snow swallowed all his screams. They left him in the snow, with a different face, a different nose and exploded cheeks that now testify to violence before uninterested juries of passersby, and only the people who knew him before say his kid looks just like him. This city is a crime. He pulled himself from the snow and leaned against the El, on one of the odd bluffs the wind made because it didn’t know what to make of elevated trains, he rested on halfhearted dunes and cutoff cliffs of snow. The mayor gets himself elected on a reform platform and still the gangs own the streets and the coppers turn a blind eye. Stephen Foster got paid ten dollars for “Oh! Susanna” and made millions for his publisher and died broke of drink at a Bowery flophouse just over there. He tried to lift himself up. You can fall into the city and no one will ever find you. When the snow melts they will find his body and a bunch of frozen drunks no one missed. He scraped frozen blood from his eyes and peered into the snow. He felt like he was at the bottom of an hourglass, it was coming down so hard. The man came up the street singing. Jake never saw his face. He had to have seen Jake, or at least the dark wings of blood around him. But he didn’t stop. No one cares about their fellow man. He walked by singing that John Henry song, coming up the street right in between the tracks above. It was only when Jake finally marshaled himself out of the blizzard and Ruth had cleaned his face and he was falling into bed like it was a chute that he was able to think, that was a pretty good song. To a guy like him, you hear a melody like that and think it will be a tough plug. It doesn’t have the syncopated push of a rag, the rollicking swagger of a saloon song. It does not describe the orphan girl’s escape from the sinful life when the millionaire falls in love with her and then they take tea with Carnegie. But it has a power. The song of the horse getting beat reminds him of him getting beat, and some of the lyrics start coming back. He’s got to get them down on paper before they go away again, even if they were pounded into him that night. He touches his scar, and remembers how he hauled himself up from out of the snow. John Henry went home to his good little woman, Said, Polly Ann, fix my bed, I want to lay down and get some rest, I’ve an awful roaring in my head, Lord, Lord, I’ve an awful roaring in my head. Ruth’s tiny hands wrung the rag into the basin and turned the clean water pink. What the man was doing out in that kind of weather, who knows. Why he was singing that particular song, who knows. Walking into the wind, beneath the elevated, maybe it was the tracks that made him think of the song. Jake looked it up and no one had published a version of the ballad. Asked one of the contract men about it, the guy said, yeah I know that old song, what do you care about that slow stuff for? Jake thought with everybody chasing after the latest fashion, a ballad was going to sneak through. Yellen has coon songs coming out of his ears, and there is no way Jake is going to be the millionth guy to rhyme mother with love her, no matter how misty-eyed it makes the room. Him and Ruth and the kid moved into these two rooms and it was better than living with the airshaft blowing God knows what sickness into Victoria’s lungs. With all the garbage they throw down there it’s no wonder the gypsies in the basement are sick, but that isn’t going to happen to his little girl. Now they have a front room and their bedroom looks out on the street and when it gets warmer they can sit on the fire escape. They got air now, but it costs money. This John Henry isn’t going to be a million-seller, but it’ll show the old man he has initiative. A fellow’s got to start somewhere. This is the twentieth century and you got to make your own luck.

Sneaky Petes, both of them, aware of being in plain sight, sans excuses, without a hall pass, up the stairs from One Eye’s room, on tiptoe past the mastications of the ice machine and in front of room 29 of the Talcott Motor Lodge.

J.

This is stupid.

ONE EYE

(squinting with socket and eye alike, over a loop of keys)

You’re fucking up my movie.

J.

We didn’t synchronize our watches.

ONE EYE

(two keys down in failure and on to the next)

I got enough time for both of us. Time it takes them to get back and forth from Charleston we still have plenty of time. Man!

J.

(looking over his shoulder)

I thought you said you could open it.

ONE EYE

(with John Henry-like hubris)

I can open any lock made of man. With what I got here. Just be glad they don’t have those electric card things here yet.

J.

Who’d you write the piece for?

ONE EYE

Locksmith Today. I met the editor at a conference. We were — fuck— digging at this lobster salad they had laid out. He said he’d throw some work my way, then a month later he calls me and says the oldest practicing locksmith in the world is retiring and they want an interview. The IRS was on me for some delinquencies, I don’t even know how I got back on the grid in the first place, how they tracked me down I still don’t know, so I needed the money. Went out to Jersey and talked to the guy. Man!

J.

(in halfhearted sarcasm halfheartedly delivered)

Have all day apparently.

ONE EYE

I’m getting it. He was liquidating his shop, we were drinking and he gives me a set of his master keys. Said he had a one-eyed friend in the army, back in dubya dubya two.

J.

The big one. Wait — there’s a car coming.

ONE EYE

Who is it?

J.

(recognizing the logo of a leading package-delivery service)

Just Federal Express. Strangely, I don’t know, I’ve changed my mind about this mission for some reason.

ONE EYE

(pushing against the palace gate in the manner of Hercules)

Here it is.

J.

(stepping into the den of Ali Baba)

Close it.

ONE EYE

(remarking, not for the last time, on the repetitive nature of existence and the disquieting universality of modern human experience)

I think this room is exactly identical to mine.

J.

(a grammarian)

That’s redundant. If it’s identical it’s exactly.

ONE EYE

(very like a sailor)

Will you just shut the f—

J.

(with a practical air)

I don’t see it. What if he took it with him?

ONE EYE

(not too proud)

Didn’t think of that. How do you like that?

J.

(pensively, index finger tapping chin)

Knowing Lawrence, you’re in a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere, and you have this computer, so—

ONE EYE

(recalling adolescent pornography-concealment procedures)

It’s under the bed.

J.

(ditto)

It’s probably under the bed.

ONE EYE

(brandishing)

Okay.

J.

Don’t look at me, I’m a Mac guy.

ONE EYE

(even as human endeavor is simplified by the advances of technology, some dilemmas yet await the intrepid inventor)

That’s not the problem. Gotta wait.

J.

(still capable of colorful imagery despite the rigors of prodigious journalistic output)

See how long it takes to boot up? They got like hamsters running around in there to power the thing.

ONE EYE

(lobbyist for the free enterprise system)

Spare me. All you artistic types and your precious Macintoshes. You gotta face reality. Even I can see that and I only got—

J.

Yeah, yeah, you only got one eye. We’re still waiting though.

ONE EYE

(with the casual aplomb of a jack of all trades)

Okay. Just gotta find the file. C drive …

J.

(examining)

What’s all these jars?

ONE EYE

What’s all this — Hey, looks like Lawrence is working on a book.

J.

(in a flash of horror over years wasted, all that lost time)

Yeah?

ONE EYE

I think it’s a memoir. Here: “I was a sickly child …”

J.

(as if lost in wonder among the capacious aisles of a glamorous new pharmacy) Got tons of hair gel here.

ONE EYE

(drawn once again to the disquieting universality of modern human experience) “Oftentimes I would go to the window and watch some of the neighborhood boys engaged in the activities typical to that stage of childhood. Oh! How I would long to join in their games.”

J.

He’s got some serious NASA-type black ops hair gel here.

ONE EYE

(contemplating class differences)

Here’s something about an erotic attachment to his governess.

J.

Will you just find the file?

ONE EYE

No, yeah. You be the lookout.

(charitably)

Still, it’s not that bad if you like that sort of thing. Hmm. Okay here are his work files. Organized little fucker.

J.

Well.

ONE EYE

I’m sure it’s in here. Just have to find the file name …

J.

(looking between curtain and frame)

Try Bottom Feeders, Moochers …

ONE EYE

Looking through this stuff…

J.

(as Linnaeus might) Barnacles, Pilot Fish, Leeches …

ONE EYE

Try this …

J.

(what is there about looking outward through a window that engenders in susceptible natures the contemplation of inward mysteries)

Layabouts … You know I felt so good this morning when I woke up this morning. It was revelation. Almost. Just woke up—

ONE EYE

(with help from the trade winds, discovering the route to the Indies)

This is it! We’re all here, look at it. All of us — Hey, me and Dave have the same middle name—

J.

(a skeptic)

Let me see.

ONE EYE

(for the benefit of the audience)

Watch the window, man. Says it was last updated yesterday. Man, they got everybody in here. I didn’t know Abe was one of us, I mean yeah he’s always around but I thought he was just tagging along. He’s totally undercover. This is crazy. What kind of diabolical…

J.

(alas)

Shit! It’s them!

ONE EYE

(allaying)

What are they doing? Are they coming up here or are they checking Lucien in?

J.

(unallayed)

They’re … Man, they’re splitting up. Lawrence is coming up here. Can’t get out now, you damn idiot.

ONE EYE

(forgoing an exclamation of Eureka)

We’ll hide.

J.

Lock the door!

ONE EYE

(with an ontological aside)

Was the door locked when we came in?

J.

I don’t know. You’re the one that opened it.

ONE EYE

(and yet a return to the womb impossible at this juncture)

Put everything back the way it was.

J.

(with a keen eye for symmetry)

I think that was little more to the left.

ONE EYE

You do it then, I wasn’t even the one that touched it.

J.

Go out the bathroom window.

ONE EYE

(on the nature of a paint-gummed window crank)

It’s one of those things that only open like two inches.

J.

’sus Christ. I’m not gonna hide in there, you crazy?

ONE EYE

(stepping into the tub)

Pull the curtain back, pull it back.

J.

Shh! Move over, I can’t— What if—

ONE EYE

Probably takes like five showers a day …

J.

Shut up, he’s at the door.

(sotto voce, to himself, glum tones)

And I felt so good when I got up this morning.

Excerpts from Hamms Stamp Gossip, “The Year in Review.”

Lick ’em if you got ’em, folks! It’s that time of year again when Good Old Hamm the Stamp Man looks back on the last twelve months, takes out the tongs and says, was 1996 Fine or Very Fine? Well, the experts all agree—1996 was darn Near Mint! I don’t know about you, my philatelic friends, but I’m still trying to catch my breath over the totally fab new record set when the Sweden Three Skilling color error went up for auction. Can anyone say 2.2 million dollars? That’s the kind of moolah that says, this ain’t no self-adhesive duck stamp you’re talking about here. It was the proverbial “shot heard around the world” of stamp collecting! Certainly the high mark (or should I say watermark?) in a year when many rare stamps traded hands at record prices. Hey, anyone out there have 2.2 million they can lend me? I’m good for it!

Frolicking Philately! Did the USPS go crazy this year or what? What’s Marvin Runyon smoking over there — old cut squares? Just kidding, Marv! But he sure has kept us all busy — this year the post office issued 89 commemorative stamps, 22 definitives, 13 special stamps and 1 Priority Mail issue. How’s a guy supposed to keep up with that? The most popular issue turned out to be (drum roll, please!) the James Dean commemorative. This will be no surprise to the lovely ladies of stampdom, who have been cooing over this particular issue since the day it was first announced (you know who you are!). Just another example of the genius behind the Postal Service’s new “open” selection process. Guess James Dean is a “Rebel with a Cause”—to celebrate!

And what about Stampgate? The world of collectors is still reeling over the so-called “Nixon Error,” in which 160 stamps of the RichardNixon issue were discovered with the red intaglio printing of the former President’s name upside down. Oops! When the stamps in question were later revealed to be just printer’s waste, Tricky Dick had to admit, “I am not a genuine error.” I’m still a McGovern man myself.

But it wasn’t all fun and games. There has been some speculation that the sad events of July 14 in the town of Hinton, West Virginia, at the unveiling of the John Henry stamp, may affect the price of the issue. Everyone knows a stamp with “a story” tends to bring out the worst traits in the philatelic community, but you’ve heard me go on about “the ghouls” before, so I’ll spare the sermon. In the end, only time will tell if the morbid history of General Issue 3083–3086 inflates the value of the John Henry stamp by itself, or the entire Folk Heroes set.

Adventure as she steps on the bridge. Sneaking out of the potluck dinner of the left bank, those tenacious houses a spyglass away from the main settlement, the grub and gasoline and trinket salesmen who drum their fingers waiting for tourists, that varied fare. Across the riveted threshold of the bridge is the banquet of civilization, she can see it, the town of Hinton, laid out before her. The bridge is a couple a hundred yards of concrete fast over impelled water. She looks over the guardrail and below. Looks around for witnesses, spits, sees her water dwindle and disappear before it joins that other water. She is stationary over things running away.

Quaint is always the word. Up a ways she sees the American spiral of a barbershop pole. The first building to greet her as she crosses the street is the First Baptist Church and she sees the sign: Temple Street. None of the buildings are over five or six stories — why push your luck when you’ve already chosen godforsaken land. There are a few level blocks of stores and other establishments before the town eases up the mountain and becomes residences until incline disallows. She doesn’t see any cigarette butts on the sidewalk or gutters, notes this, fingers her pack. The streets are busy. The few traffic lights earn their keep, herd. Toddlers extend chubby fingers to parental assurance and at intersections the young are kept from cars. Dawdlers point into shops and all shops are open and she can sense that this activity is unusual. The town bristles with the promise of John Henry Days.

She looks at her map as others do, just another tourist, unfolding and squinting, fixing what she sees in the sunlight into what the Chamber of Commerce says. It turns out she is right in front of where she has been told to go.

The sign says closed but the doors of the bank swing wide on stiff hinges. Where’s the bulletproof glass? It looks like an outlaw’s easy score, a still life of trust. Only wooden slats keep the patrons from the tellers, wide enough to stick a hand through. She can’t help it. Pamela is no thief but the vigilance and paranoia bred into her from generations of city dwelling often produce this inverse appreciation of opportunities; years of keeping her purse close by, her bags locked between her feet on the subway, have opened her eyes to the unattended.

“You must be Miss Street,” a voice declares. Padding up the marble comes a thin old white lady in a John Henry T-shirt and khaki shorts, sunglasses dangling on her bosom. “I’m Janet,” she says, extending a browned arm. “Jack will be out in a jiff. We’re just going crazy around here today.”

Janet leads her to one of the desks at the back of the bank, and Pamela sits in the customer’s seat like she has to beg them not to foreclose. Janet departs behind teller windows and says hurriedly, in tailgating syllables, “We’re just going crazy around here today, I’m like a chicken with its head cut off.”

Pamela doesn’t see an ashtray.

She wonders if she is early. She checks her watch against the slim black hands of the clock on the wall, finds they are in concordance. If you can’t trust the clock of a bank.

The plaque says President. The door opens inward, releasing the dull letters to the sunlight inside the office until they blaze and burn off. “I’ll be down there soon,” goes the mayor’s voice as he comes into view, in light blue pants and short-sleeved oxford shirt, striped blue tie, holding the door open for his visitor, a chubby man dressed in a pinching railroad engineer’s overalls, “just some things to take care of.” Cliff smiles at Pamela and says, “You’re here.”

The man in the overalls, obviously not a real engineer even in Pamela’s citified eyes, lifts his cap to her as he passes, summoning a fan of brown hair from the back of his scalp.

Cliff makes a quick call after he directs Pamela to a brown leather chair, “just a sec.” Lyndon B. Johnson’s hangdog visage pulls her eyes to a wall of pictures in Cliff’s office. Next to Lyndon is a photograph containing evanescent grays that fade into white mist as they near the frame. The caption tells her it is the C&O passenger station, Hinton, ca. 1900; six men in dark coats loiter and pose beneath the canopy of the plank building. Cliff says, “Tell them we’re not going to pay for it if it doesn’t get here by three.” Pamela’s eyes drop to a picture of an old locomotive, a C&O track gang, the C&O cafeteria. “What do you mean only two gross?” Mayor Cliff and his wife probably, his son probably, on a white porch, Cliff holding up a certificate she can’t read. His son in a football uniform, arm flexed Charles Atlas style. Mayor Cliff and his wife, and his son in a wheelchair, the porch now equipped with a ramp. “Thanks for coming down,” Cliff says to Pamela.

“This is a nice town. It’s nice to get out of the city.”

“I was up in New York City just recently. Heckuva time, me and the wife. Greatest city in the world. But there’s no way I could live there, if you pardon me.”

Pamela nods.

“Well then, I take it you had a nice time at dinner last night? Sorry I didn’t get to say hi in person, but I was just on the run the entire time. Would’ve liked to have held it here of course, but we just don’t have the uh appropriate venue at the moment. Arlene took care of you all right?”

“About my father’s collection—”

“I’m sure you’ll see this afternoon what a great addition it will make to our community. There’s the monument, of course, overlooking the tunnel for about twenty-five years, they put it up for the centennial, the Ruritan have had a little stand up there, but for what we’re thinking about the museum, your father’s collection would be a real plus. I read that inventory you faxed Arlene, it’s pretty impressive, what he acquired over the years. Had his own museum up there in New York?”

“He ran it out of his apartment. Had a little sign up and people were supposed to just walk in off the street.”

The phone rings. Cliff looks at it, looks at Pamela, lets it ring, drips hands onto his thighs. “Sure. We’d give it a great home down here. I could show you the plans we had drawn up, but we sent them back to — this architect we hired hadn’t seen our proposed site, got the shape of the lot all wrong, but he’s working on it. Maybe I’ll have a copy sent over to the motel anyway so you can see. It’s the old A.M.E. church, it burned down a couple years ago and the plot has just been sitting there. It’s town land now and it’s not too far from here. Talcott’s just too small, unincorporated, that’s why we’re stepping in here, Hinton is.” The ring is the ring of eighties office phones, and sounds ancient to Pamela, almost prehistoric. The row of buttons along the bottom of the phone are translucent squares and fill and blink with yellow light when a call comes in. The ringing stops. “No way they have the resources over there,” Cliff continues, “and we have Route 20 right there and the traffic from the national park. Figure it’s just like turning on a light bulb. Flick that switch and we’ll have all sorts of visitors coming through here. Arlene talked to you about the money?”

“I think the money is great. It’s very generous.”

“But you, what’s the saying, you can’t put a price on memories, right?”

Janet pops her head in. “Sorry, Jack, that was Bob, he says he’ll see you there.”

Cliff frowns at the interruption. “Of course I’ll see him there, if I wanted to take the call I would have picked up …” He smiles quickly at Pamela and remembers something from his to-do list, asks, “Hey, Janet, is this okay?” He glances down at his clothes, pulling at seams.

“It’s fine, look great,” Janet says, ducking out.

Cliff nods to himself. The motion passed, the ratification of his ensemble spurs his heart. He says, “Sorry. So … It’ll all have a nice home here, you can be sure of that. We have a lot of stuff already, this is after all the true home of John Henry and we have a lot of stuff passed down through the generations. We’re all railroad people here and the father passes it to the son. It belongs here. You should have seen what we said to the Post Office when they wanted to bring out the stamp in Pittsburgh. We wrote them, boy, this is John Henry’s home. And when we heard about your father’s collection and how we were thinking of making this an annual thing every July, we looked at that inventory you sent and we just knew. It was like a light bulb going on in our heads. Light bulbs. Haven’t had any other offers on it, have you?”

“You’re the first to take an interest in it, that’s why I came down here. I’m just paying the storage space on it now, to tell you the truth.”

“So you closed up the museum when your father passed on?”

“Couldn’t, just don’t have the time to run it.”

“I understand perfectly, you’re a young lady, have your life to live in New York. Pardon me — hotline, got to take this … Hello, honey. No just put whatever doesn’t fit in the fridge and we can take it out later … did you call Arm and see if he needed a ride over?”

Pamela’s attention drifts to the wall of photographs again, to its constellation of affection. Her eyes dart between the faces of the father and the son. The nose and ears passed down between generations. What else is passed down. Resemblance is only the start of it. Most of it happens under the skin. There are other things, you squander them, use up what is good not knowing it is good before it is all used up. Then what are you left with? Nose and ears.

Convenient interruption to this line of thought, Cliff moves over and sits on the edge of his desk, closer to Pamela and now partition between her and the photographs. He says, “Sorry about that. Where … yes, your father. That’s why we’re so glad you came down. We’re trying to do the same thing. Teach the people about John Henry, educate the people about the history of the region and the history of Hinton and Talcott. When you see what we have organized today, you’re gonna have a kick. We have two men from town going to have a steeldriving race, all sorts of music and things, we hired this band from Charleston, I haven’t heard them but they sure come highly recommended, play a lot of music from the region from what I understand.”

Is she staring perhaps a bit too blankly? Cliff purses his lips and shifts his tone. “But we don’t want to rush you,” he says, smiling. “You just have a good time this weekend and enjoy yourself with all that’s going on. Didn’t expect you to hand it over right now, did we? That’s why we brought you down here, so you can see for yourself what we’re doing down here. Think of it as us carrying on your father’s good work, what he was trying to do with his own museum before he passed on. No universities or anything contact you about his collection?”

“It’s not exactly like people are clamoring me.”

“Heh. It’s kind of specialized.”

“What are you going to charge?”

“I thought Arlene already discussed the figure,” Cliff murmurs, rearing back with a where did I put my glasses expression. “We’ve gone over the number quite a bit, I think—”

“Not pay, I mean charge.” Something new to her in her voice. What did she care? Here she is asking. “For the museum. What kind of admission are you going to charge people to see John Henry.”

He relaxes. “Oh that. It’s kind of early, but if you’re worried about that, don’t worry about that, it won’t be cheap I mean it won’t be expensive. Most of the people come through here, it’s families on vacation, families with kids and that kind of thing. Most of the admission would go to upkeep. The physical plant, the, preserve the physical condition of the exhibits themselves. Want to put a first-rate burglar alarm in there, too. Don’t know if Arlene told you had a break-in at the Visitors Center and someone made off with one of the sledges we had on display. Probably just some kids having fun and I can understand that, I have a son of my own and he was a bit of a hell-raiser but it was the property of a private citizen who let us put it out there for the visitors to see, so we’re very concerned about the security issue. So one thing we’re going to put our fees to is protecting the displays, make sure nothing happens to the items your father went to such great lengths … Is that a real huge concern, the fee? I mean is that a deal-breaker?”

“No, I — just wondering. My father didn’t charge. I think he just wanted the company, to tell you the truth. But the sign he put up, you almost had to be already looking for it to see it.” Her head darts toward the photographs on the wall. “Is that your son right there?”

“That’s Armand.” The collapse of his eyebrows and emergence of fault lines in his brow mark an emotion swiftly put into check before his smile asserts itself broadly, victorious over turbulence. “Quite a football player before the accident. You should have seen him play.”

“They’re here!” Janet aslant in the door, doorknob absorbing her weight.

“About time. Why don’t you bring a box in here, take a look at them.” He returns to Pamela. “There’s going to be a taxi to take you to the grounds, right?”

“Yes.”

The box is ungainly but Janet does not struggle despite her shallow physicality. A box of feathers. Cliff takes the box to his desk and slits the top with an engraved letter opener. They dig around in the packing peanuts, the bank president and his assistant, treasure hunters over cardboard flaps. “Oh, they’re beautiful,” Janet sighs.

“Pretty smart if you ask my opinion.” He tosses a cellophane package into Pamela’s lap. “What do you think?”

It is a hammer, a green hammer formed from mealy green foam. She bends it through the package and it obediently oozes back into its original shape. She looks up at the duo and nods.

“Keep it,” Cliff says, pleased. “We’re gonna be tossing them out, to the kids. It’s a keepsake.”

Out on the sidewalk and out in the sunlight, Pamela bites the cellophane and removes the hammer. She doesn’t see a garbage can and tucks the plastic into her back pocket. She grips the handle in her hand and it collapses on its pores. Thinks, ten-pound sledge, twenty-pound sledge. She takes it between her hands and compresses it into a ball, releases it and watches it wiggle like larvae. Two little white kids speed past her to catch up with their parents. In the minutes she has been inside the number of people on this slim street has doubled. She thinks back to the map in Herb’s Family Style and in her head unfurls a weird image of ant specks skittering along a tiny grid designated Hinton. People move past her in every direction. She is stationary in the rushing people. She is jostled and wonders where she is supposed to be right now.

The town is lousy with John Henry Days.

J and Monica the Publicist were fucking biweekly, or not. Sometimes biweekly they fell asleep in a soaked tangle on Monica the Publicist’s bed, in their event clothes, shoes hooked on sheets. They had an arrangement. More than one morning they discovered house keys dangling in the front door, out there all night, daring someone to rob or kill them while they dozed in boozy prostration. Whoever was annoyed most by the morning sunlight on their faces got out of bed to pull the blinds. After a time the alarm clock by the bed waked them with traffic reports of highways they never traveled on. Monica the Publicist had to be at work at nine and did not allow J. to stay in her apartment. Nor did he wish to. She took a shower and dressed for work while J. tried to wring as much sleep as he could from the morning, waking for a few seconds as Monica opened a drawer in search for the correct underwear or turned on a faucet, and then falling back to sleep again. When Monica finished her preparations for another day of publicity, she slapped J., he slipped into his shoes and they left the apartment. At the newsstand in the subway Monica bought a medium coffee and J. bought the dailies. There they separated with a terse kiss. The train Monica took to work was the same one that provided J. with the most direct route home, but they wanted to be free of each other as soon as possible, so J. caught a train on the platform below that forced him to transfer two times before he arrived at his station. It was easier, this tacit arrangement.

The next time they saw one another after these biweekly sessions, a night or a week later at an event, when it was made apparent once again that they were part of something larger, cog and flywheel, they did not speak to each other. Monica made her rounds, talking to the key players in attendance that night, her boss, the client, the journalists, avoiding J., who talked to his fellow junketeers and drank heartily and filled his stomach, disdaining Monica. It took time to build, their need. The second time they saw each other at an event, one of them would say hello; they took turns so neither felt the other had the upper hand. The second time after their biweekly session, they talked for whole minutes to catch up on what had happened in their lives since they were last in bed. J. made a deadline, or broke a deadline, had a run-in with the copy department, got a big assignment. Monica planned an event that came off well, failed to engineer some nice press, got a big client. They were glad to see each other, and often linked eyes from opposite sides of the room, communicating much in those glances. But it was the second time. They went home separately. The third time after their biweekly session, when two weeks had gone by, when they had reset, they spent as much time together as possible, holding hands, this was warmth, they danced if it was appropriate at that particular event. They made jokes about the other people in the room, kissed if no one was looking, it felt daring, they got reacquainted with the smell of their bodies. It was nice to see each other again. At the end of the night they went uptown, invariably uptown to Monica the Publicist’s apartment on the Upper West Side, and fell into her bed.

It was not a love nest; she lived there. She lived in a new building of dark glass and steel, in a one-bedroom apartment with beige walls and beige carpeting. She never had anything inside the refrigerator except wilted vegetables and takeout Chinese containers full of moldering things. She owned a water purifier that bulged like a malignancy on the kitchen sink faucet. The blinds had come with the apartment; the cleaning lady kept them gleaming and white. Monica still had the glasses she bought when she got her first apartment a few years before, and they comforted her, artifacts of soothing continuity. J. used them to drink water sometimes, in the middle of the night to ward off hangover. A year after their pattern had insinuated its simple rules, he noticed the pictures on the table next to the bed. She identified the members of her family for him. Periodically he would notice them for the first time and ask her about them. She’d tell him that she already told him who they were months ago, and he’d say he remembered even though he didn’t. Occasionally, suddenly upset anew by something her boss had said that morning or irritated by the inflection in J.’s voice, she exiled him to the couch, and sometimes he sulked there for his own obscure reasons. He lay down on the segmented couch, sheetless and prey to the circulated air.

After the first few times J. entered Monica the Publicist’s apartment building, the doorman began to say hi to him. Hey, my man, he said, winking, white gloves quick to tug the burnished handles of the doors. He had witnessed J.’s arrival and probably had a few theories; he had seen the other men Monica brought home, he saw her on the many nights she came home alone and he probably had a few theories. Then he was replaced by a man who knew nothing of J.’s arrival to the complex, and this new doorman said nothing. There was a gym on the second floor, and a sign-up sheet for the jacuzzi on the third.

Of course they despised each other. Other lovers appeared, were wined and dined, escorted them to events, retreated back into the city. These brief romances with the scavengers and anglers of the city intersected with but did not perturb J. and Monica the Publicist’s arrangement. It was not a hush thing, it was not a keep quiet thing, but neither mentioned their biweekly partner to their new lovers; there was no need, two nights a month was not a particularly large section of time, suspect only after months and months, and the relationships never lasted long enough to force them to the juncture of revelation. Nor were these would-be rescuers from the arrangement worth discussing during the biweekly assignations. There was the stockbroker who desperately wanted to meet celebrities and left Monica standing, vodka gimlet in her hand, as he tried to woo the Nigerian lingerie model by the bathroom door; there was the time J. showed up with the calculating new conscript in the factchecking department who was transformed horribly after a cosmopolitan and had to be cut loose, bad news, colleagues made jokes for weeks. Sometimes, at an event, J. or Monica would see these new arrivals, and they resisted the urge to interrupt the deep conversation by the canapés (did his face ever seem that alive when she talked to him, did her face ever seem that illuminated from within when he told her a story, no not at all, they had an arrangement), resisted the impulse to swoop down with drink tickets and spirit away the engaged biweekly partner with a lascivious come-on. There was no need. The events came and went, and so did the new people.

Once in a while one of them said I love you, to flat sonant agreement from the other pillow, and it always took them a while to fall asleep when that happened.

Passion at first when it appeared as if their relationship might one day accord with conventional ideals. J. saw Monica first, as she handed out press packets by the coat-check room one night. He thought she was pretty. Monica met him a few events later, when she came over to massage a junketeer who was conversing with him. She introduced herself, as was her custom at events, because she never knew where a stranger might fall in the scheme of things. They ended up kissing a few events later, a friendly good night peck on the cheek that quickened sweetly. As they would never do again once the arrangement asserted itself, they did the normal things, saw movies and ate at restaurants. Monica put the dinners on her corporate credit card because J. was a writer and expensible. He bought her flowers. Their comrades in the business, on both sides of the events game, thought they made a nice couple. They were a good-looking couple, and besides how are you going to meet anyone real in this business. The cab rides back to Monica the Publicist’s home often embarrassed the drivers in those first months, but J. tipped well, and there were worse things that could happen in a cab.

One of them wanted to end it, and the other did not put up a fight. Neither could recall exactly who brought it up; they each had their own motives. Apart from their individual reasons, there was one common to many citizens in the metropolis: They believed there was something more in this city waiting to be discovered, something just for them. They parted as friends. J. had never left any item in the dark building and that simplified matters. It had curdled, things like that curdled and there was nothing that could be done about it except move on. The city was big. Two weeks later they were back in Monica’s bed, and two weeks after that, too.

Of course they loved each other. The ceiling above the bed twinkled with a universe of events, they picked out and named the familiar constellations to make sense of their lot in life. Whole mythologies up there, sundry pantheons. There blazed the Doughnut, right there, the loose ring of stars named after a certain kind of event held in formerly hip establishments groaning through the final days of their decline, where the salsa was tepid and deracinated, the greens inevitably soggy and depressed. There, a quadrant below, was the Greenstein Belt, named after the Park Avenue plastic surgeon whose clients booked large banquet halls in the fancier hotels to hawk eponymous perfume, where the sick lighting livened the scars of designer surgery into ugly relief. There, spinning there, was Ursus, whose distant, serried stars signified publishing events where the literary heavyweights who had done their best work in the fifties smoked cigars, got into fights over who would be remembered sixty years from now and puzzled over feminist attacks on their hirsute corpus. They came quickly, in silence always, and disengaged and chatted about their private constellations, arid boredom drying their secretions swiftly, they picked out stars until one realized that the other had not said anything for some time, and they were alone.

Biweekly and biweekly through years. They had squabbles like any couple. One spring Monica adopted a distracted air, nibbled petulantly at crackers, arrived late and departed early at events. She waited for J. to comment on the change in her behavior, for she felt it was obvious that inside her something was shifting and so she exaggerated the symptoms to get his attention, and when he did not remark upon it she told him one night in her bed that she wanted to leave the publicity racket. She had a friend who had a farm and had been invited to spend a few months there, to clear her mind, rearrange her priorities, whatever, it was a healthy and nurturing environment with fresh air and farm animals. J. chuckled and said he’d like to see that. He slept on the couch the rest of that night, found his advances disdained two weeks later, and did not accompany Monica to her apartment. Their arrangement resumed two weeks after that, but various precedents had been set. Half a year later, when J. lamented what he perceived to be a certain hollowness within him and confessed to revisiting the old book proposal, Monica scoffed and said that would be the day. He rebuffed her two weeks later, they resumed two weeks after that and then they were even.

Certainly in a city of contracts and bargains, of pacts and compromises, theirs was not the most decrepit. It made sense. Certainly the city had produced unions more unholy than theirs, brokered alliances more profane and withering. They endured, they held each other, plummeting through fads and flavors of the month, through a universe of events and beyond, in fevered biweekly embrace, deep into cold pop.

In a different world perhaps. If he were a soldier instead of a mercenary, and she a healer instead of a handler. Circumstances had thrown them together, life under pop had forced them to find solace wherever they could. He was a soldier in the French village, he brought her chocolates and stockings, real treasures in these times of scarcity. She was a nurse tending the wounds of our boys, she taught him that it is enough to make it alive to the end of the day, that it was okay for a man to cry. Always the sound of the shelling to remind them of what the world had come to. After the Armistice, they’d go their separate ways, return to their former lives. But this war was peculiar. It would not end, it discovered new markets every day, the fighting spilled over into new demographics each day, none could remain neutral in this conflict, and no side could ever win. So it continued, and the soldier and the nurse comforted each other. In a different world perhaps.

Look, there’s Paul Robeson on Broadway, in his dressing room backstage at the 44th Street Theatre, winter of 1940. He is John Henry. For one more performance, anyway, because they’ve closed the show. Everybody hates it. Word is it’s a real stinker. And word is getting around. They had a short run in Philly a couple of weeks ago, and the critics hated it. Normal people, too. They reworked it, stuck chewing gum in the breaches, cast off here in New York last week, but they’re still waist-deep in bilge, good intentions bobbing around them along with other buoyant sundries. So the money guys are strapping on life jackets aboard the good ship John Henry. Every man for himself!

Blame, point the finger: The scrivener responsible is one Roark Bradford, who adapted the musical from his 1931 novel. A best-seller, that. Standing there deliberating in the bookstore, one look at the author bio and they knew they were in good hands. “Roark Bradford is amply qualified to write about the Negro,” it read. “He had a Negro for a nurse and Negroes for playmates when he was growing up. He has seen them at work in the fields, in the levee camps, and on the river. He knows them in their homes, in church, at their picnics and their funerals.” Very impressive credentials indeed. Especially that bit about the picnics. He might as well have a Ph.D. in Negroes. His mastery of the Negro idiom is quite startling. The reader is invited along as big bad John Henry swaggers through a series of picaresque adventures, such as picking cotton (“Hold yo’ fingers a little bent and let yo’ hands pass by de bolls. Efn they’s nigger blood in yo’ fingers de cotton will stick an follow.”), loading cotton on to a steamship (“You’s a cotton-rollin’ man on the Big Jim White, so wrassle dat cotton down. Hit’s cotton and you’s a nigger. So wrassle hit down, son!”), and rousting hogs (“Line up, you bullies, and make yo’ shoulders bare! ’Cause when I h’ists dese hogs outn de pen, you gonter think hit’s rainin’ hogs on yo’ weary back.”). The pages, they turn themselves.

Romance as well as action between the thick blue covers. Transplanted to the colorful world of Louisiana river life, John Henry’s big test here is his relationship with Julie Ann. It is love at first sight and they have much in common. “I’s six feet tall, too,” she purrs, “and I got blue gums and gray eyes.” Hearty recommendations all. If only Julie Ann could keep her hands off that nigger Sam, that good for nothin’ specimen of N’awlins lowlife. They hang around the wharf, snort coke, sip whiskey. At the end of the chronicle, John Henry, upset by Julie Ann’s latest dalliance with Sam, stalks the dock and discovers that his captain has retained the services of a steam winch that loads “cotton like ten niggers.” It is ambiguous whether it is John Henry’s romantic woes or the steam winch’s affront to his prowess that causes him to call for a race with the machine, such is de ’nigmatic ’fect of Bradford’s prose. At any rate, he croaks in the middle. Julie Ann rushes to finish the race herself, she croaks, and the star-crossed lovers are united in death. The book flew off the shelves. Of course it would make a lovely musical.

Paul Robeson sits in his dressing room. Soon he’ll walk onstage. Out there the audience doublechecks seat numbers and squints at the programs. The next day boxes and boxes of unused programs will fill the alley behind the theater. In these moments before the performance he holds all the words tight. The people out there, the tilted heads arrayed from orchestra to balcony, are not his first audience. Twenty years in the business, he’s had some experience. In a debating contest in high school he stood before his teachers and recited some Toussaint-L’Ouverture. As Napoleon dispatched thirty thousand troops to Haiti to squash insurrection, L’Ouverture told his people, “My children, France comes to make us slaves. God gave us liberty; France has no right to take it away. Burn the cities, destroy the harvests, tear up the roads with cannon, poison the wells, show the white man the hell he comes to make!” The Haitians kicked the French’s butts; Paul Robeson came in third place in the debating contest. He said he didn’t understand the meaning of the words, what it was to say those words to white people, he just thought it was a good speech. This was before he came to make his own speeches. Around this period he also played Othello for the first time, his comet role, returning and returning to him throughout his days. The performance was a fundraiser for a class trip to Washington, D.C. He was a hit. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t join the field trip because the hotel didn’t allow black people to touch their sheets. Later on when he had some juice he’d cancel shows in segregated theaters, but this was before.

What are bad notices, critics’ snipes, when you’ve been pulverized and punished bodily. At Rutgers he played football. The man was big, what can you say? At his first practice they jumped him, piled on him, broke bones. He got up. These were his own teammates. Next practice one of them drove cleats through his hand. He kept playing. They laid off him once the season started and it was the opposing team’s turn to bloody him, when they weren’t forfeiting, preferring to lose rather than share the field with the black man. He knocked them around. He scored. He won games for them but what exactly is his expression out there on the grass, it’s hard to make out, let alone interpret. What is he thinking.

They thought he was going to be the next Booker T Washington. Smart colored fellow like him. He dropped his law career to perform. Made his mark working with Eugene O’Neill, in All God’s Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones. In God’s Chillun the races mix. A white actress touches his hand in one scene and they thought there might be rioting. There was no rioting. That would come later. Good reviews mostly, although there were naysayers; some white critics thought the play was an insult to the white race, some black critics thought it was an insult to the black race. Around this time segments of the black press started to get on his back for playing the “shiftless moron” and the “lazy, good-natured, lolling darkey.” Not the last time they’d make this point. His singing career got into full swing around this time, too; performing bills mixing black spirituals with secular songs, he hit upon a new formula. In Show Boat he sang “Ol’ Man River,” drawing deep OOOs from deep black wells. Sang around this country and then in other countries. Visited Africa, Europe. Sold out the Albert Hall in Merry Olde. Stayed away as much as he could from the U.S. of A. for ten years.

It was when he traveled that he began to change.

Outside his dressing room, the bustle of preparations, location of props.

In Moscow he dined with the Prime Minister. Eisenstein had invited him over; turned out he was into Touissant, too, and wanted to make a film about the man. Small world. They probably discussed this by a samovar. He dug the Soviets and they dug him. One night at the theater, a little Russian kid ran up to Paul Robeson, encircled his tiny arms around the big man’s legs and implored him to stay, saying he’ll be happy if he stays in the bosom of Mother Russia. Little moppet. Pretty moving. He moved on. Hung out with the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. The soldiers adored him. It wasn’t every day an international celebrity toured the front lines. He made the rounds, waved out the window of the Buick. Occasionally shells passed over his head. There was something changing in the world and in him, too. He said, “I belong to an oppressed race, discriminated against, one that could not live if fascism triumphed in the world.” All those people dying over there were dying here, in him. He said, “I have found that where forces have been the same, whether people weave, build, pick cotton, or dig in the mines, they understand the common language of work, suffering and protest.” The Negro sharecropper, the Welsh miner, the Slavic farmer. He said, “Folk music is as much a creation of a mass of people as a language. One person throws in a phrase. Then another — and when, as a singer, I walk from among the people, onto the platform, to sing back to the people the songs they have created, I can feel a great unity.” We are our songs. He said, “I am sick of playing Stepin Fetchit comics and savages with leopard skin and spear.”

He came back to America a new man.

Tonight he’s John Henry. Already in costume. Dark blue dungarees held up by a broad brown leather belt. Sleeveless T-shirt, brown cowboy hat. The dialogue is terrible, the characters racist, the situation appalling, but in John Henry, a man of the land, Paul Robeson sees the folk. The masses. He wants to represent the experiences of the common man. Out of this folktale, even if diverted down ruined streams, flows the truth of men and women. They sacrifice and give. It didn’t turn out the way he wanted it to. Some guy in the press said even Robeson “could not carry on his back 800 pounds of bad play.” Ouch. But he is trying. He’ll be back on Broadway and knock ’em dead in “Othello.”

Someone knocks on his door, hey it’s five minutes to curtain, Mr. Robeson.

This is a turning point. No thunderbolts from the sky or neuron-zapping epiphany, nothing flashy, but there was something going on inside him. Where was America when the blood of the Loyalists spilled in rivers? Where was America when the blood of the lynched spilled in rivers? He performed at rallies for the Communist Party, benefits for socialist causes. No card-carrying member, but still. Brushes are made for tarring. Down in D.C. Hoover opened a file. He was always opening files. Open a file on a box of cherries for being too red. The file got fat, that’s what FBI files do. Still performing, making movies, making the scene on Broadway again in “Othello” but Paul Robeson’s making speeches, too. Defending the Soviet Union, watch out. In Paris ’49, he said, “It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.” Actually, he didn’t say that, but the Associated Press attributed the remarks to him and there you have it. Who is this Negro to speak this way? Here we are trying to get this Cold War thing off the ground, and there’s this guy talking our heads off about human dignity. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he did not denounce himself. The paper of record said, “We want him to keep singing and being Paul Robeson.” They cannot recognize this man.

Boy, it’s cold outside. Pitiless New York winters get inside the bones. Inside the dressing room the steam heat clangs.

A few months later they rioted in Peekskill. New Jersey, that is. An anti-Paul Robeson riot. This lefty arts group asks him to do a benefit and all heck breaks loose. Not in our town. Goon squads roved, red-blooded Americans of multiple epithets and a single hue. Dirty Commie, Dirty Nigger, Dirty Jew. The mob smashed the stage to kindling, which came in handy when an individual or individuals later burned a cross. They sent Robeson fans, assorted fellow travelers to the hospital. The cops stood by with their arms crossed: Do you hear anything? Nope. You? Nope.

After that, it just ain’t the same. Concert tours cancelled. Theater owners hated pinkos or feared repercussions. Sympathetic venues couldn’t book him because of threats. You get a phone call in the middle of the night, you have a family, what choice do you have. He couldn’t make a living. He became the first American banned from television when an appearance on Eleanor Roosevelt’s NBC show was called off. If his country had gone mad, maybe overseas would be better. They loved him overseas. But get this — the State Department pulled his passport. It would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States Government” for him to go abroad and speak on black rights. He’s “one of the most dangerous men in the world.” If he signed a paper saying he wouldn’t make any speeches, everything would be copacetic. But he wouldn’t do it.

Stuck here. Exiled to his own country, he started to fall apart. Got more and more broke. A man with a voice like that, and he can’t even open his mouth. He began to talk about the pentatonic scale. He had a theory about the pentatonic scale. The ubiquity and universality of the pentatonic scale in folk music around the globe proved the brotherhood of man. By studying the pentatonic scale we can peer into human truths. The commonality of the folk. Pentatonic scale this, pentatonic scale that. Trip on the rug and it was the pentatonic scale. Beset by mental as well as physical problems, he slid. After a couple of years, things loosened up but the years of confinement had taken their toll. When the withdrawal of his passport was finally declared illegal in ’58, he settled in England, where successive breakdowns finished his career. Suicide attempts, electroshock treatments, overmedication. He was a plate of scrambled eggs. As the civil rights movement reached fruition, as he sat across the ocean, far from the front lines, and few remembered his name. When he returned to New York in ’64, the newspapers gloried over his reduced capabilities. Look at Goliath, hobbled now. DISILLUSIONED NATIVE SON, went one headline. A reader wrote a letter back. It said, “That’s John Henry himself you’re insulting.”

Maybe he should have been a baker. His great-great-grandfather was born into slavery, purchased his freedom and became a baker. He baked bread for the Revolutionary Army, and the story goes that George Washington himself thanked him personally for his patriotic contribution. So maybe he should have been a baker.

Hey, Mr. Robeson. Hey, Mr. Robeson, goes a voice outside the dressing room door. It’s time. The people are waiting.

He is John Henry tonight.

It’s me. Calling to see if you’re back in town. Give me a call. I’m at work. This is Gene in factchecking calling about your piece. Just have one or two queries, if you could call me back today that would be great.

Hey, J., this is Marshall, calling on Friday around three-thirty. Hey, man, hate to bug you again about that contract, you have to send that in before you can get paid, so … send it in! Have a nice weekend.

This is your Aunt Jennifer calling about your father’s birthday. I’ll be home all night.

Gene in fact-checking again. Guess you didn’t have time to get back to me yesterday. Legal has a few queries about your piece, that last section where you say “it’s so easy even a dimwit can do it.” Do you have a source on that, that dimwit thing? Is that in their press material or did you just, where did you get that from is what I’m asking. Thanks.

HE ERASES EVERYTHING.The answering machine company had prominently advertised the salient feature of its new product — Keep Track of Your Messages from a Remote Location — and he can’t, by his sights, get more remote than he is now. He presses a button and is free. This is modern technology. One time he forgot his ATM number and he became less than human, see-through, he waved his hands in the faces of other people but they could not see or hear him. This was how he felt. He wandered the streets for a few hours without currency or an identity until his ATM number returned to his recall as suddenly as it had disappeared. It had been something of an existential dilemma and troubling but it hadn’t happened since.

This is Herb in Accounts Payable at Saturn Publishing. I’m still waiting on that Social Security number, sir, we can’t pay you unless we get a Social Security number for you. I assume you have one.

Checking his messages reminds him of the record so he starts thinking about how he’ll fill the requirements next week. There’s that paperweight thing on Tuesday so that’s taken care of. He can probably skip lunch that day, probably breakfast too because Sharp always puts out a nice spread for their products, and if this new paperweight is half as good as the buzz maintains, they’ll really go all out… He catches himself salivating at the idea and blames One Eye. One Eye’s crackpot mission to get himself off the List had undone all the good work J. had put in this morning. He had shaken off his conditioning for a few hours and it had required much effort, renunciation, reserve-tapping struggle. Real hair-shirt stuff, this morning. Then, like that, corralled into that dumbass business and he stood in the bathtub waiting for Lawrence to leave. They were lucky they didn’t get caught. He slid back into custom too easily.

Hello, J., it’s Elaine. The piece looks great. There were just one or two things I changed so I’m going to fax you the new version and tell me what you think. We’re closing the issue in half an hour, so if you can get back to me before then, great.

He walks over to the bathroom and urinates. Feels so at home in this place he forgets to tend to his fly. He has half an hour until the taxi comes back for another run to the festival site. Pamela will be there. He opens up the press packet so that he’ll be able carry on a conversation.

This is Margaret at Legend returning your call. About that check, I’m going to have to check with someone in processing to check out what happened to your check. My assistant says she remembers seeing the check request form so it should have gone in and the check should have gone out, so I don’t know what happened.

He reads, “The C&O railroad provided a great opportunity for the slaves freed by Mr. Lincoln’s Proclamation. The C&O paid the passage to West Virginia for any freed black willing to work and provided the first salary some of those men had ever seen. The laborers came from all over, from as far north as New Jersey and as far south as the Florida panhandle. When work on the Big Bend Tunnel finished many stayed with the railroad for the rest of their lives. They were proud to join the C&O family.”

It’s me again. I don’t know if you’re mad or what or I don’t even know. When you get this message call me.

He stops. But what if he doesn’t go to the paperweight event on Tuesday or skips whatever event (he’ll have to look it up) is going on Monday? It isn’t as if he bet anyone any money that he could do it. Go for the record. It is a competition between him and himself. Or him and the List. Depended on how you looked at it. He had bet himself he could do it. Hadn’t he? Looking back it seems to him that he just started doing it and it made a certain kind of sense so he kept going. It wasn’t even particularly hard, going for it. If he deposits that check that should have arrived by now it will take five days for it to clear. The company is based in New York, is in fact one of the biggest magazine concerns in New York, but their bank is in Idaho and it takes five days for their checks to clear. (How quickly his cars jump the tracks, are derailed.)

J., long time no see, it’s Jane Almond from Hotshot Media calling you again about that event at Haze on Tuesday, it’s for that new paperweight Sharp is launching. I’m going to put you on the list plus-one, but you should get there early because I know a lot of people are coming. Love ya!

He checks the digital clock, faithful ally through an infinity of hotel rooms, and reads on. “While it was hazardous work, the C&O utilized all the best safety procedures of the day to provide the healthiest working conditions for its men.”

J., it’s Mark. Someone on the business side put a red flag on some of your reimbursements for the L.A. trip. Got it right here on my desk, see you put down lunch one column, but then the receipt you put in there lists three margaritas. You know if it was up to me, but they’re really cracking down on that sort of thing here since we got bought, so.

He skips ahead. “Those who say that John Henry is a mere legend will risk the ire of local residents. Many of the older residents recall being told the story of the great competition by grandparents or uncles who were employees on the C&O and witnessed the race with their own eyes.” Lucky he didn’t get beat up in that diner this morning.

J. — good news. This is Victor. We’re finally going to run that luxury doorknob piece it looks like. Turns out we have some space in the section because one of our writers went AWOL. I know it’s been a while but do you have any factchecking material you can send me on that? I hope this is still the right number.

“The foreman and the drill salesman ran to get the results of the race. By the time the referee fired his shot signaling the end of the competition, John Henry had drilled a total of fourteen feet. The poor steam drill, however, had only drilled nine feet. John Henry had triumphed over the nefarious machine!”

Hey, J. — hey, that rhymes. Umm it’s Evelyn and I’m going to send out that kill fee today, but I don’t think I said it was for the whole thing. If you look at the contract, it’s a twenty-five percent kill fee for things now ever since we got that new editor in chief. Sorry about that. Gimme a call.

He realizes that he hadn’t thought of the record for whole hours, not until he got back into his room. Seeing the room, being back in the room reminded him that he was only a temporary guest here. He is one in a series of people who are given the key and this is only one in an uninterrupted series of assignments. Best to keep thinking of it as such, not expect too much from whatever kinds of encounters he has with Pamela, and plan for next week’s streak of junketeering.

This is Gene in factchecking again. Just… give me a call when you get in.

“Some say that the great steeldriver was laid to rest with his beloved hammer in the fill near the eastern portal of the tunnel. There are others who insist that John Henry sleeps on top of Big Bend mountain, where a log church once stood. But if you ask the old-timers of the area, they’ll tell you that the bones of the legendary hero lie in the old Negro cemetery that still stands in the northern slope.”

Hey, it’s Jane from Hotshot. I can’t remember if I called you back about that paperweight thing, but it’s still on for Tuesday and you’re plus-one. Love ya!

He sees himself holding cotton candy at the festival and telling Pamela, “You know, there’s no doubt that the great John Henry lies on the northern slope. At the old Negro cemetery, you know the one,” dispensing this like some metropolitan cocktail party tidbit. He’ll probably get some ribbing from the others if he’s hanging there talking to Pamela with his nose all open. One Eye will say something. Best to avoid his friend for now. Immediately following their escapade, when they were safe in the parking lot, once they were out of the bathtub, his monocular comrade tried to enlist him in the next mission: to break into Lucien’s room and hit the master. He smelled the asphalt bake as One Eye cried, “It’s Lucien that bastard! I knew it was him. We go in there, we’ll just take our names off, click click, that’ll show ’em.”

“It’s one thing if you want to know who runs the List. Fine,” J. said. “It’s an elegant idea in its way, a machine to keep the media-saturated society up and running. Deserves a patent, or at least a franchise agreement so that other cities can get in on the action. Now you know who thought it up. Here’s a lollipop. But it’s one, stupid to try that trick again and think you won’t get caught and two, if you don’t want to go to events just don’t go. No one is forcing you. There’s no gun at your back. Lucien walks in and pals or no pals he’ll probably call the cops to teach you a lesson.” Thinking, these white boys think they can do anything mighty-whitey style. Like there are no consequences.

“I’m talking symbolism here. Symbolism is important. Many important events in human history have happened because of symbolism. You got your Boston Tea Party, dump the shit in the harbor, love that dirty water, you got all kinds of shit, giving blankets full of smallpox to the Indians. Our country is built on symbolism. Look, answer me a question. Why are you going for the record?”

“How are smallpox blankets symbolic?”

“Of contempt, contempt. We come in peace and we try to kill ’em off with courtesy. ‘Oh, snuggle up in these innocent-looking blankets, Chief, no one’s going to suspect these lovely quilted jobbies.’ Why don’t you just answer the question?”

“To see if I can. To prove I can.”

“Prove what to who?”

“It’s a circular argument, but yeah, to prove I can to myself.”

“It’s a symbol of something to yourself even if you don’t know what it is. So who are you to deny me my own private symbolism, not matter how silly it may seem to you when you’re doing the same thing? You’re like the symbolism referee trying to throw me out the game.”

“Delete yourself. But leave me out of it.”

“You have your machine to beat and I have mine.”

They left it at that.

J., got a quick copy query for you. Do you want it dimwit with a hyphen like dim hyphen wit or do you want it one word dimwit? I’ve been going back and forth with the copy department about this and we’re stumped. Give me a ring when you get this.

Perhaps going for the record had been inevitable ever since he found himself on the List. Those years before. Like this competition had been waiting for him the whole time and he hadn’t known it.

This is a message for J. Sutter. This is Mr. Ardin in Accounts Payable. I received your message of the sixth about your check for the May issue and I’m not sure who you talked to in the office before, but they were incorrect about the procedure. If you were paid the incorrect amount for an article, you have to ask us to send you a Form 199, send that back to us, care of me, along with the check, and we will cut a check for the correct amount. It should take about sixty to ninety days to process.

He still has a few minutes and decides to wait outside for his ride. There’s a lot more traffic on the road, all of it heading west and that’s where he figures he’s headed. Recreational vehicles and compact cars, maps splayed out on the dashboard, fast food drinks snug in plastic popout holders, antiradar devices plugged into cigarette lighters and bouncing invisible waves off ranges and peaks. A red Range Rover speeds by, trailing multicolored kids’ balloons that are whipped and impelled by velocity. The mountain is in front of him. Maybe it is Big Bend. He thinks about what it must have been like before the road made it just another hill, to look at it and think, I’m going through this mountain. Then this line of thought evaporates and he half wishes he had a beer.

We’re going with dimwit one word. One word dimwit. Call if there’s a problem.

Under the word heroic draw a line and list all the meanings. He doesn’t have a single one in him.

It is odd because it is just him and L’il Bob working the tunnel. John Henry and his partner always work with a second team. It keeps the productivity up. Two pairs of men boring twin holes into the mountain and singing to their work. The sound of the hammer is percussion, each blow a footfall into the mountain to the other side. But today he does not know why they are alone in the darkness and why they do not sing. He cannot see L’il Bob’s face and cannot move his mouth to talk to him. To find out what is happening. It is as if neither can stop. Their labor pulls them like a stream and it is all they can do to stay afloat. It seems they have been at this hole forever. He cannot seem to get the bit deeper. The mountain has grown harder. They have hit the mountain’s heart and the mountain is using all of its ancient will to prevent their violence against its self. It works against them. Then with one blow John Henry feels something give and with the next blow the bit sinks in deep, deeper than he has ever driven before. John Henry thinks, we’ve hit the western cut. The two ends of the tunnel have met. He is about to cheer. They have won Captain Johnson’s bonus. Then the blood comes.

The blood is black until the candlelight hits it and it turns deep red. He can see then that it is blood. It should have been light from the western cut that came through the hole but it is blood. The black then red spray erupts from around the drill. He steps back. He still cannot speak. He looks at L’il Bob and sees his partner’s head turn. L’il Bob blinks through the blood on his face and then he grins. John Henry cannot stop him from what he is about to do. L’il Bob’s fingers open and the bit flies from the hole and the spray of blood becomes a geyser. The force of the blood pushes John Henry backward. He falls on the timber planks and when he wipes his eyes free L’il Bob is gone. The blood of the mountain pours into the cut. Out east. He thinks the planks are bobbing in it beneath him, and then he looks and sees that the rock around him is now flesh. The red shale glistens like animal meat. Ridges formed by the blasting are now tracings of sinew. Veins and arteries. It is a living breathing mountain and he is in its angry guts. The heart of the mountain pours itself over him. The blood is up to his neck. Then the blood spray blinds him again and he is awake.

When he wakened he was grateful for a moment and then he realized it was still dark. He had traveled through a series of fever dreams all night. They were coupled together like train cars. He knew that the caboose contained morning and each time he fell asleep he hoped that this time he would step into it. But he opened the door to the next car and stepped again into nightmare. He did not know what time it was. The camp was quiet. Every one else slept off their labor. He had lost two days’ wages laid up in bed. It was all he could do to crawl to the outhouse and the outhouse stank with his stink. He shivered and his blanket was damp with fever sweat. John Henry could not get warm no matter what he did and the blanket chilled him even more. He was laid up with fever. It was the longest night he could remember. He prayed for morning.

He wakened to the bustle of the other men getting ready to go back into the mountain. L’il Bob came into his shanty looking worried. He carried a bucket of water and his blanket for John Henry to use while he was working. L’il Bob asked his friend was he coming back to work that day and John Henry tried to sit up. His head exploded with worms and he was too dizzy, he fell back to the bed like a felled tree. L’il Bob put the blanket on his friend and told him that he’d tell the boss John Henry is sick again. The shaker complained about Jesse, John Henry’s replacement. He’s slow and stupid, L’il Bob told his friend. You’re twice as fast as him, he said. John Henry closed his eyes and his eyes rolled beneath their lids and when he woke up again he could tell from the sunlight it was about noon. He was grateful he did not dream again.

He got sick the day after Tommy died. The sun had just slipped behind the mountain. The smoke from the latest blasting had stopped sneaking out the tunnel and it was time to go back in to see how much the blast had advanced the heading. John Henry sat on a crate and rubbed tallow into the handle of his sledge. He waited for the sheen that said he had put enough oil in. That morning he had felt the blows travel up his arms and rock his shoulders and knew that the handle was getting stiff. He had to limber it up or else he’d be sore when he sat down that night, the pain would creep on him like floodwater over a bank. When Tommy said he was heading back in to start mucking out the rock from the blast, John Henry looked down at the handle of his hammer. He had not finished and Tommy went ahead. John Henry saw his friend walk into the heading and felt the first chill of his fever. The old man led a mule cart into the tunnel and that was the last John Henry saw of him alive. He rubbed the sheep fat into the wood while both the mule and the man were killed by the loose, falling rock. When John Henry went inside to see where it happened, he was not surprised to see that it was near the crag that haunted him. The beak of shale was still there, snickering, telling him something. They buried Tommy and the mule together in the fill of the eastern cut. That night after midnight John Henry’s chill had become a fever.

He was sick and afraid. The fever will pass but the mountain will not. He pulled the blankets over his head. John Henry heard the clink of hammers on drills, he was too far away from them to hear them for real but he heard them anyway. Sometimes the clinking matched the beat of his heart for a whole minute and then they fell away from each other. The rhythms met again when he least expected it and it was like he was one with the labor. The doctor came in and said Captain Johnson wanted him to check on John Henry. The doctor opened a packet and dropped the white dust into water and gave it to the fevered man. The doctor said, you should be able to work tomorrow. The company can’t afford to keep on men who won’t work, he said. Then he disappeared into the afternoon light. John Henry’s big body shivered.

He knew the mountain was going to kill him the first time he saw it. The railroad put out word it needed men to dig a tunnel and hitched a flatcar for Negro workers to a westbound train. The men filed into the old car and sat on seats fashioned from nail kegs. In the Negro workers’ car the men sized each other up and talked about the ride. It was the first time any of them had been on a train. They spat tobacco to the floor. The train took them as far as the tracks went and a wagon took them the rest of the way to the mountain. The wagon arrived at the grading camp and John Henry saw the mountain heaped up to Heaven and knew right then that he had lied. He had told Abby that when he returned they would get married. John Henry would save his wages and come back a rich man. Or rich enough to start a life with her. He had carried water in the mines when he was a slave. The mining company leased him from Reynolds when he reached the age of six. By that time a slaveowner could not get insurance on his slaves any more because too many died in the mines and the insurance companies were no longer going to insure slaves. Reynolds didn’t want to lose his investment so he only leased children to the mining company, with the order that his slaves were not allowed to do anything dangerous. They could carry water or learn a blacksmith’s trade but no more. John Henry carried water to miners before the Proclamation and when he heard about the work on the tunnel he knew he was going.

He knew about being inside mountains, the coolness inside rock. But that first day, he saw the mountain and knew that this one was different. It will kill him.

He fell asleep again and woke again. He might have slept for two minutes or two hours. If his hammer had not needed some tallow he would have walked in with Tommy. They would have stood side by side and John Henry would have been killed too. Tommy’s death was a message. God was telling him to prepare. The mountain will take him. Sooner or later. Tomorrow he would go back to work.

After the shift L’il Bob came to see John Henry. He brought food and water. For the first time since Tommy died he felt like eating and he wolfed it down. L’il Bob complained about Jesse. The fool nearly hit him today. Not once but twice. L’il Bob had to tell him to watch what he was doing. John Henry said he’d be back in the mountain again tomorrow and not to worry about Jesse no more. L’il Bob said this city man in city clothes came into Captain Johnson’s office today. They talked for a long time and then the city man left. L’il Bob said he was from a mechanical company trying to sell Captain Johnson on one of their steam drills. One of the bosses said them steam drills can do the work of a whole team of drivers and they’re cheaper too. The steam drill is better and faster and cheaper. Pretty soon they’re going to replace all the men, L’il Bob said, do you believe that? Do you think Captain Johnson is going to get one of those things? L’il Bob asked.