John Henry Days (27 page)

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 DROPS
J.’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.

T
here 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.