“It’s a little hick town south of the Arkansas line, and you’d be ready to leave five minutes after you was there.”
He wrapped the bottle of bourbon in a soft shirt and put it in the suitcase. He phoned the desk clerk and told him to send up the porter. The Negro came in and took the suitcase out.
“I got to go now,” J.P. said.
“Don’t you want to stay and do something nice?”
“Goodbye.”
He carried his guitar with him in its gray felt cover and caught the nine o’clock train at the depot. It was an old train that pulled mostly freight to a few towns along the state line; it carried only two passenger cars hitched to the rear before the caboose. He sat in the front car in one of the leather seats, and felt the train jolt under him and the couplings bang as it moved out of the station past the lighted platform and baggage wagons and into the yards through the maze of tracks and the green and red signal lamps on the switches, and on past where other trains were pulled off on the sidings and the water tower and the board shacks with their roofs blackened by the passing locomotives. He looked out the window into the dark and saw the lighted glow of the city against the sky far behind him.
There were just a few people in his car. He took his suitcase off the rack and went into the men’s room. A gandy-walker was sleeping on the seat by the window. He wore overalls and heavy work shoes and a trainman’s cap. There was a lunch pail by his foot. He had a faded bandanna tucked into the bib of his overalls. He slept with his mouth partly open, and his face was unshaved and sunburned. J.P. opened his suitcase and took out the bottle. He mixed a drink with water in a paper cup. The gandy-walker woke up and went to the basin to wash his face. He sat back down and took a sandwich from his lunchpail and began eating. J.P. asked him if he wanted a drink.
“Yeah buddy,” he said.
He unscrewed the top from his coffee thermos and held it out for J.P. to pour.
“Have a sandwich,” he said.
“No, thanks.”
“Go ahead. My old lady makes up more than I can eat.”
J.P. took the sandwich. It was a piece of cold steak between bread.
The trainman was eating and drinking and talking at the same time.
“You’re the fellow that got on with the guitar I seen you on the platform,” he said. “Go get it and let’s play a tune.”
“It’ll wake up the people in the car.”
“We can go out in the vestibule. It ain’t going to bother nobody.”
“You want another drink?”
He held out the red thermos top while J.P. poured.
“Go get the guitar. I play a little bit myself.”
“All right.” J.P. pushed aside the curtain that hung over the door of the men’s room and went back into the car. The lights were down, and the few people in the car were sleeping. He took the guitar off the rack and unzipped its cloth cover. He put the cover on the seat and went back to the men’s room.
“You don’t mind, do you?” the trainman said. “I’d like to hear some music before I get off at the next town.”
J.P. got his bottle, and he and the trainman went out to the vestibule. The area between the two cars swayed back and forth with the motion of the train. They could hear the wheels clicking loudly on the tracks. The door windows had no glass in them, and the wind was cool and smelled of the farmland. They could see the fields of corn and cotton in the night under the moon, and a pinewoods that stretched over the hills into the dark green of the meadows.
“Play if you want to,” J.P. said, handing him the guitar.
“You sure you don’t mind? Some fellows don’t like other people picking their guitar.”
“Help yourself.”
“You know ‘Brakeman’s Blues’?”
“Play it.”
The gandy-walker held the fingers of his left hand tight on the strings and frets and strummed with the thumb and index finger of his other hand. He propped his leg on the metal stool that the conductor used to help passengers off, and rested the guitar across his thigh.
He played quite well. J.P. listened and drank out of the bottle. Through the window he could see the black-green of the pines spread over the hills and the moon low in the sky and there was a river winding out of the woods across a field and he saw the moonlight reflecting on the water.
“You do all right,” J.P. said.
“I reckon you can pick, yourself.”
“Play another one.”
“No, I’m getting down pretty soon.”
“Take a drink.”
“Much obliged,” he said. He drank out of the bottle. “Play one yourself. I’d like to hear.”
J.P. took the guitar from him. He leaned back against the wall of the vestibule, slightly bent over the guitar, and moved the callused tips of his fingers over the frets. The trainman drank from the whiskey and listened.
“That’s good. You got a nice style,” the gandy-walker said. “I ain’t heard good twelve-string guitar like that in a long time.”
J.P. set the guitar down and took a drink.
“You must be one of them professionals,” the gandy-walker said.
“I used to be a farmer.”
“You from around here?”
“A little further north. Up by Arkansas.”
“I worked in Arkansas. I railroaded all over the country. I was all the way to California once. I heard a lot of good picking, but you’re good as any. Where did you learn?”
“From a bum in a Salvation Army camp.”
“Is that a fact?”
“He didn’t own nothing but a five-dollar pawnshop guitar, but Jesus he could play. He come up to the house one day and asked for a drink of water and directions to the camp. I give him some meat and biscuit, and about a week later I was walking past the camp to the store and I seen him sitting under a tree with his guitar. He called me over and said he was going to teach me to play. I didn’t pay him no mind, and then he started playing and it was like nothing I ever heard. I went down to see him every evening for almost a month, and he’d let me keep the guitar overnight to practice with. Then one day he grabbed a freight and I never seen him again. He was the best, though. I never heard nobody except Leadbelly that could play as good.”
J.P. and the trainman both took a drink off the bottle. It was good whiskey. They were nearing a town. The train whistle blew at the crossing, and the red signal light was swinging mechanically from a wood post by the side of the road and a bell was clanging to warn the automobiles. Another train sped past them in the opposite direction, and the noise was loud in the vestibule. The gandy-walker tried to say something and had to stop. He picked up his lunch pail and pointed out the door. The other train finally went past.
“I get down here,” he said when it was quiet again. Thanks for the drink.”
“You bet.”
“Close the door after me. The conductor don’t like it open.”