Refiner's Fire (13 page)

One day Marshall decided to climb a cliff which rose about 150 feet from the river shore. He had frequently reached the top by descending Brandreth Ridge, but never had he gone directly up its face of jutting granite and loose rocks with trees rooted only here and there. He took a double lasso wrapped around his body as in pictures of climbers in the Alps or the Himalayas. He knew very well that there was no way to use the rope and that it would probably be a nuisance, but it looked good. It was a sunny day with some light breezes, and the river was choppy.

At first it was easy. Grasping projecting rocks and roots he climbed fast until he was about 75 feet off the ground. He rested and looked down. The railroad tracks were as thin as fishing line, and he could not hear the sound of the little waves. He promptly froze to the face of the cliff, sorry that he had been stupid enough to get as far as 75 feet. Imagining his dead body on the tracks below, he decided to retreat, whereupon he learned a basic anatomical lesson, that human beings do not have eyes in their feet. In ten minutes of agonizing distress he descended only a few inches. He would hang on to handholds which he knew he could grip for only a few seconds, and feel around with his feet until he found a ledge, with no way to tell if it would hold. His rope was indeed useless. He thought of lowering himself, but there was nothing onto which he could tie. The lasso was leather and smelled like a horse. He threw it down, noting that it took uncomfortably long to reach the ground. It was clear that he had to go up.

Past the halfway mark the handholds and crevices seemed to get smaller and looser as he got higher, and by the time he reached 125 feet he was soaking wet and trembling with exhaustion. He dared not look back, but the noise of a train passing directly below seemed distant and muffled.

Fifteen feet from the top he came to an outcropping which projected a foot or two from the pitch. He had to reach backward, grab the top of the ledge, and hang until he summoned strength enough to pull himself over. As he made past the jutting rock, every muscle in his body shaking violently from the exertion, he found himself face to face with an eagle which sat on an enormous nest Marshall had never seen from the top of the cliff only a few feet away. Marshall threw himself against the grass and lichen on the little plateau, and lay there breathing desperately, strengthless. The eagle was so surprised that it remained still for a long time. Marshall saw directly into its eye, in which the river and the mountains on the opposite shore were reflected in black and silver.

Then the eagle enacted all its parts and muscles into a rising so strong, slow, and furious that it seemed to Marshall as if the earth were shaking. The eagle rose into the air and swayed out over empty space, reached an apogee, and then swayed back, talons extended. Marshall began to run up the steep incline, and when the eagle made its first pass it had to veer because a gnarled tree between the rocks shielded Marshall's way. Marshall kept on, while the eagle flew up into the air, as if it wanted to clear its mind with high altitude and mastery of flight. The second time it came in, air passing through its feathers and talons made a screaming noise.

Marshall was at the top, and he turned around just in time to get knocked over. He rolled in panic, the eagle trying to hook and bite him, its wings folding and slapping the ground or beating in the air to keep balance. They were entangled in one another, and then as fast as it had swooped it took to the air and flew in a descending line downwind to the south. Marshall was intact, eyes, throat, genitals, and extremities still there, but he was scratched all over and cut in a lew places, and he could not see out of his left eye because blood from a cut just above it filled the almond cup and blinded. He limped through the woods shaken, bleeding, and stunned. From that encounter he carried a scar between his left eye and eyebrow. People sometimes asked where he had gotten it, and because they did not believe him he learned to say: “A kid hit me.” He loved the eagle, fierce and hard as it was. He loved the way it had risen and flown away. He envied its command of the air, and every time he looked at a silver dollar he felt a strange sense of pride. Having wrestled an eagle, he remembered what few would ever know, and that was the sound of its heart beating and its breathing as it fought. It sounded like a woman in love.

F
OR EACH
thirty or forty miles of mainline track the New York Central railroad had some kind of security man. Since Eagle Bay was not far from Harmon Yard, a major installation where electric changed to diesel (or steam, as the case had been), the roadbed running through it was in the charge of a full-fledged bull, a senior detective who had cased the tracks from Chicago to Boston before landing promotion to an easy berth near New York just outside the city limits so that he would not be troubled by the nests of vandals bred south of Spuyten Duyvil.

His name was L. H. Triggers, and in his declining years his strength was more than matched by intelligence and skill. He was thoroughly adept at all the techniques: fingerprints, telephone tapping, stakeout, acid gravure, revelatory footbaths, microscopic alignment, stool pigeons, plaster of Paris, tying little strings all over the place, etc., etc. It is said that when on loan to a Southern railroad he solved a major theft case in Biloxi by taking a fingerprint off a bean. And like all good detectives he had that instinct—a direct wire to the Devil—which led him down the right paths until he got his man.

Marshall first encountered him in 1956, when Marshall was nine. The Livingstons were close to a family of Russian emigres called Gurkapovitch. They used to travel in the Gurkapovitches' old open car up the river to Garrison, where they spent afternoons eating and drinking at a Hungarian restaurant set between a pine wood through which rushed a fast cold stream and the New York Central tracks. The Gurkapovitches were old, given to long meals and talk of better days in different places—the kind of talk to which Marshall had dozed off half his nights. But the Gurkapovitches had two strange children born when Monsieur Gurkapovitch was past seventy: Semyon, Marshall's age, and a six-year-old named Lad, for they had wanted him to assimilate. Lad (or as his father pronounced it, Led), his brother, and Marshall could tolerate reminiscences of Petersburg and Budapest for only an hour or two, during which they stuffed themselves with pastries and (from nervousness more than anything else) drank the dregs of wine left on the table. Monsieur Gurkapovitch was a wine aficionado and always ordered three or four different vintages as well as champagne.

As their parents sat contentedly watching the stream, the children busied themselves with pouring and fiddling, moving in their chairs, playing with the table implements and matches, and draining half a dozen wine bottles. Soon the three boys arose from the table and staggered out of the restaurant into a dirt parking lot. Lad's eyes fixed upon the railroad gates, miraculous engines at the roadside.

Thirty-five feet long, the braced triangular gates were painted in black and white stripes and fitted with wire-caged red lights. Having misjudged the potential of a country lane, the railroad had put them there to protect voluminous traffic which had never arrived. Staring upward, the two Gurkapovitches and Marshall stood at the base of one of the monuments. At its tip was a red light like a melon-sized cherry. That, and the promise of a view beyond the pines into the rolling farmlands and the mountains, set off their deep-seated urge to climb. But the lead counterweight was so massive that in the upright position it prevented access. They had drunk too much and could not make a human pyramid, so they sat by the side of the road with shoots of grass in their mouths, when from the north they heard the faraway steam whistle of a freight. In due time the wheels and gears of the gate began to sound and it lowered itself with a flashing of lights and a crashing of bells.

Marshall and the older Gurkapovitch straddled the tips of both gates. The train rumbled through the junction, shaking the wooden frames on which the boys nervously perched. When the caboose cleared the crossing the wheels and gears began to sound again, but the gates refused to lift. Soon the engines and transmissions were straining so hard and making such a cacophony that Semyon despaired and jumped off. His gate arose so fast that it nearly snapped. Marshall's was still straining, and white smoke began to come from the electric motor. Not wanting to give up forever the possibility of gaining the summit, the elder Gurkapovitch grabbed his brother and hooked his lederhosen around the top light. Marshall dismounted, and the gate lifted smoothly to the perpendicular. Lad had become the conqueror, but it did little good, for his vocabulary and experience were not sufficient to describe the afforded view. He was, however, quite content to be so high, safely held by leather straps, his feet firmly planted on a crossbar.

After a few minutes, his brother called for him to descend. Lad wiggled about but was unable to disengage himself from the hook of the light. The harder he struggled the more he became fixed to the tip. He was only six, and would have begun to cry for fear of being held up there until the next freight, but the wine kept him silent and happy. The two older boys were puzzled. As they sat down in hope of arriving at a solution, an old Ford truck with the New York Central oval came chugging down the road. Marshall turned to Semyon. “Distract him,” he said, after which they began to dance the Charleston.

When L. H. Triggers pulled up to the crossing he stopped his truck, according to the rules, and stared at the two frenzied dancers. It seemed as if they were drunk, and yet it was afternoon and they were children. He turned off the engine and got out to investigate. Marshall and Semyon kept on dancing until they got a full view of the detective. He was six feet four and weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds. He was dressed in a black three-piece suit with a black bow tie and an enormous black hat with a brim as wide as a buzz saw. On the vest was a badge of silver which shone so bright and big that it was blinding. Across his middle a gold chain, almost as if of office, proceeded from Spain to Hawaii, where a gold railroad watch was half visible setting into the black Pacific. He had a great leather belt filled with bullets. A large pistol hung from it professionally, the wooden grip oiled from many years of handling. He smelled of tobacco and he walked regally.

Marshall felt like a dance-hall drunk staring down the barrel of a gun. But L. H. Triggers was only curious, and asked, “What are you boys doin', dancin' by the side of the tracks?”

Marshall answered, “Oh, we're just happy, sir.”

L. H. Triggers leaned against the crossing gate and patted it with his detectives hand, saying, “You boys wouldn't try to swing birch this gate, would you?”

“No sir.”

“You better not. The gears are delicately aligned. Any weight knocks them off kilter. Why, in the winter with all that ice, we have mechanics out day and night. It costs the railroad about a hundred dollars each time a gate needs fixing.” Looking satisfied, he paused and started to turn, when Lad suddenly hiccuped. L. H. Triggers looked up. “Do you know him?” he said to Marshall and his friend.

Semyon Gurkapovitch answered, “He's my brother and his name is Lad. We were walking by. He got caught. Then the gate lifted and he went with it.”

L. H. Triggers looked at Lad, a mass of blond curls, and at Semyon, as dark as mahogany with perfectly straight black hair and almond eyes because he had been born while his parents were in Singapore. “You say he's your brother? That's funny. You look like a colored boy. He's not.”

“I was born in Singapore,” said Semyon. L. H. Triggers went over to a telephone box, unlocked it, and rang up Harmon asking them to lower the gate. They did, and Lad was lifted off. He was so little that he paid no attention to Triggers, and just staggered down the road to the restaurant.

That was the beginning. L. H. Triggers warned Marshall and Semyon never to be caught again on railroad property. Semyon went away to boarding school and was not seen by anyone ever again, but Marshall remained in Eagle Bay, where the railroad was his playground. Not only was he fond of climbing signal towers and riding crossing gates, but he got hold of a key to the telephones and used to talk to trackmen all around the country. “Patch me over to Utah,” he would command, and it would be done. But it was only when he was older and started to hop freight trains that he ran into L. H. Triggers enough to hurt. Until then it sufficed Triggers to chase him through the woods, firing the woodenhandled pistol in the air. Marshall always escaped.

I
N THE
town of Eagle Bay every other grown man called himself by his former military rank; that is, everyone down through sergeant. One man was left from the Civil War. Too old to talk, he sat in a blanket-covered wheelchair at the Methodist home and watched over the river. On Memorial Days they put a Union cap on his head and wheeled him in the parade. The poor old man drooled and trembled, and Marshall was saddened to think of the meadows in his memory, to imagine his recollections of a hundred years of hot days and quiet snows in Eagle Bay and in Virginia, where he had fought—only to grow old in the snap of two fingers while the world passed by in mercantile frenzy, the Brooklyn Bridge was built, roads came through the Hudson Valley farmlands, and the ones he loved died and were buried in the ground.

Marshall's nearest neighbor was the Colonel. He raised trotters and was a dangerous old fool who owned an enormous printing combine. When he discovered that he had outranked Livingston he tried to order him around, and received in return not obedience, but a famous gesture of Italian origin. In an Eisenhower jacket bedecked with half a dozen store-bought medals, the Colonel rode several times daily in a sulky from his estate to the town and back, the way paved with music from a portable radio tied to the graceful chariotlike frame. The horse left an astounding trail of manure, and the old man spit and gasped for air. Witnessing this pageant from behind a bush, Marshall once heard the Colonel bark like a dog and say: “Sit right here honey. Let me reach in your dress. Oh Jehoshaphat!” After that, Marshall tried to stay out of the Colonel's sight, but he was not always successful.