PASSING THROUGH AMBRIDGE

THEY GAVE ME a track lantern, but I had to buy the mattress-ticking cap. I asked Katy to pick me up a metal dinner bucket. “One of those that look like a silver-dome mobile home.” The railroaders all carried them.

I’d been anxious to get into the man’s game for some time. When I stepped off the bus in Mahoningtown at dusk, about a mile’s walk from the Baltimore & Ohio roundhouse, a kerchief knotted about my neck and sporting a new pair of steel-toed clodhoppers, it smelled and felt like the real thing. The couple nights a week at the archaic weight room in the local YMCA had begun to pay off, too.

Railroad tracks—one sure way out of town—held a special romance for me. The tracks were the primary source of the strange men who camped out at the brickyards near our house, nesting down alongside the ovens during the cold months. A week wouldn’t pass that one of these “vagrants” didn’t show up at our backdoor begging for food or coins in exchange for some odd job. Unkempt and smelling bad, they’d settle for a bologna sandwich and an orange in a paper sack that Katy would dangle outside the screen door like it was a dead mouse.

The tracks carried the circus and carnival into town, too. And once near Christmas, our old man took my brother, Westley, and me to Radio City Music Hall by rail. The first time the three of us had ever been out of Hebron. When we passed through the outskirts of Ambridge, Pap told us that all the bridges in America were built there. From the railcar we could see story-high AMBRIDGE letters on a factory building.

“Even the Golden Gate Bridge?” I asked.

“All of them, Son,” he said.

“The Brooklyn Bridge, too?” Westley asked.

“That, too,” Pap replied.

I had a difficult time imagining this small Pennsylvania town fabricating those mighty dream bridges over a piddley-ass river that ran in front of the plant. But when we got to New York City and I saw all those tall skyscrapers stacked up next to each other, their marble and gold lobbies tall as Hebron’s Masonic Temple, I was ready to believe anything.

Pap was the eye-opener of our family. Been up to our mother, Westley and me would’ve kept our eyes shut. Even later on in her life, Katy’d said, “I’ve seen enough.” But Pap, when he died, I specifically ordered Mr. Nolde, the mortician, to leave Pap’s eyes open. When we found him lying cold on the kitchen floor one morning, they were wide awake. Maybe he’d pass through Ambridge, I thought.

Dexter Connaughton, my track boss, handed me a janitor’s broom and pointed me to the supply depot just outside the roundhouse. My shift ran from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. Weren’t quite an hour passed before Cannaughton showed up to check on me. Katy had taught me good work habits. She’d walked every lawn I’d ever mowed. If it wasn’t done to her satisfaction, she’d drag me back, apologize to the Mrs., and then the two of us would mow and trim until it suited her. But Connaughton wore a look of disapproval across his pudding face.

“What is it, sir?” I said.

“You aimin’ to keep this job for the whole summer, boy?”

“Yessir,” I said. “I like it here, sir.” They paid good union wages.

“Then you’d better brighten up—fast.”

He was eluding me.

“You watch anybody else work around here?”

“My second day, sir. Ain’t had much chance to observe.”

“How long you think this here job should take, Daugherty?”

“I guess I should have been done by now, huh?”

“Done?” he laughed, surveying the storage depot floor. “One week, Daugherty. This job should take you at least one damn week.”

“One week! I’ll be done in a half hour, sir.”

“Then pick up your paycheck. And don’t bother coming back tomorrow, ’cause there won’t be a goddamn thing for you to do.”

Katy would have shit. This was contrary to everything I knew about giving an honest day’s work in return for an honest dollar. Connaughton standing there ordering me to loaf, but pretend I was working. I wasn’t hired to work on the railroad; I was hired for summer stock, evening shift. And after I began observing my fellow workers, damn if they weren’t all actors, too. A crew would spend all night hauling supplies from the storage depot to the roundhouse. The next evening they’d trestle them back to the supply depot again. All these grown men working the night railyards, lanterns swinging from their sides, moving around like fireflies. Not one damn honest night’s labor occurring.

The fifth day of my employment, Connaughton directed me to an unhitched caboose out in the railyard, saying I’d find my crew inside. “Report to the caboose for the remainder of the summer, Daugherty,” he wheezed. Smoke rose out of its stovepipe chimney and as I got closer, I could hear chortling inside.

“C&O, go see who’s at our door,” a gruff voice ordered.

C&O, short for Chesapeake & Ohio, welcomed me in. Four bandanna-necked men sat around a potbelly stove drinking out of their tin lunch pail cups and playing poker on the caboose lunch table. Each was comfortably seated on upholstered railcar seat cushions with illuminated red caution bulbs on their rail lanterns alongside, creating a seasonal atmosphere. It was damn hot in the caboose. All of the men except C&O had stripped down to their undershirts. The temperature outside wasn’t below 70⁰. One man—I presume the crew foreman—motioned me to sit down alongside C&O, who was sitting out the game. Along the inside walls of the caboose were seat rails appointed by these mohair seat cushions.

“Why’s it so damn hot?” I asked C&O, staring at the cheesecake calendars tacked above the players’ heads.

“Sal likes it that way.”

“Why? It’s summer outside.”

“Sal says he got to work up a sweat somehow.”

I started to laugh. C&O didn’t.

It must have been 90⁰ in the caboose. I stripped down, but didn’t have any undershirt on. Finally the game was over. Sal rose.

“What’s your name?”

“Daugherty. Jimmy Daugherty.”

“Your old man a railroader?”

“No, sir.”

“How’d the fuck you get in here?”

“State Unemployment Office.”

“You’re a liar, Daugherty.”

“Honest to God,” I said. The three at the poker table looked like they were about to jump me. C&O held his head down. I knew about rites of initiation.

“You got to know somebody to work on the fucking Baltimore and Ohio railroad, Daugherty. Who in the hell is it? Don’t give us any shit, boy.” Sal wasn’t letting up.

“Maybe it’s his mother,” a heavyset, mustachioed worker drawled.

They all laughed. C&O tried to suppress his, clearly embarrassed by this confrontation.

“Your mother a gandy dancer?” another heckled. “You know Daugherty’s mother, C&O?”

C&O began to blush. Then giggle. Like somebody was fingering him under his armpits, jukin’ his ribs. He began to writhe in laughter, and his skeletal frame fell to the caboose floor, spittle seeping out the sides of his mouth. At first the men watched him bemusedly, then they, too, began to laugh. Soon, all of the men were laughing uproariously and emitting loud gas noises. I stood shirtless in the corner of the caboose, humorless. When the spell petered out, Sal addressed me.

“Well?”

“I’m here for the summer. Connaughton said you were short a man.”

“Short a man!” Sal croaked. He ran out of the caboose and pissed up against its side, caught in the paroxysm of laughter that once again had gripped the crew.

A factory whistle shattered the gaiety.

“Chow time!” C&O yelled.

We gathered around the caboose card table and opened our metal buckets.

“Welcome, Daugherty,” Sal said. “We don’t like pricks working with us. But a schoolboy needs help. When the summer job is over, put a fucking lid on it, boy. Don’t ever come back. Look at us.”

They did look like a sorry bunch. Sal was the only one who looked intelligent. He had the upper body of a boxer. And straight black hair Brilliantined to his head. Clean-shaven, with a Clorox-white undershirt. He wore a spotless pair of khaki pants that he or his wife had sewn a crease in. The other men, excluding C&O, were nondescript types. Reuben affected a mustache and a two-day-old beard, always. He also wore a navy pea coat even in the hottest weather. Except in the hot caboose, when it hung on a hook behind him. Reuben was grossly overweight—his undershirts all had a yellowish cast with a hole at the midriff, and an industrial-weight belt cinched so severely he looked like a knockwurst.

Otto and Sydney were older, bespectacled types. Like two vagrants who spent their time in libraries reading week-old newspapers. Each was always arguing with the other about politics. I sensed they were some kind of washed-up Party sympathizers. Sal would get impatient with their wrangling and tell them Stalin was a Sicilian who was jerkin’ them both off. But Otto and Sydney dismissed Sal, since they were intellectuals and he wasn’t. Each huddled about him like he were the caboose stove, however, even in the middle of July.

And C&O was a simpleton.

He couldn’t read, spell, or count and was dropped off to work each evening, then met at the guard’s gate at 4 a.m. by his emaciated mother, Rose Calucca. Carrying or sweeping he could do, tasks that had to be closely monitored by Sal—who was paternal toward him (sometimes sadistic). Both had Italian ancestry, and lived a few short streets from each other in Mahoningtown, close to the roundhouse. C&O’s brother, Junior Calucca, was a Baltimore & Ohio switch foreman on day shift—had been for nearly two decades—and when mother Rose Calucca grew too old and feeble to handle C&O, Junior finagled him a permanent job on the evening shift with Sal’s supply crew. (Sal was getting some vigorish on the side, we suspected.)

If you asked C&O to carry a carton of wiping rags, say, a hundred yards to the pumping station, after fifty he’d forget where he was going and return to the beginning, asking for fresh directions. He was perfect for the railroad play-acting job. My first night with the crew, watching the four play cards until 1 a.m., I was startled to hear Sal announce it was time to work. The fire had died out. We dressed to go outside the caboose, where Sal directed us to hand-truck thirty five-gallon cans of lubrication to the roundhouse for the steam engines. The following evening we carted them all back to the supply depot, short six—what the roundhouse requisitioned in the first place.

In the second week of my employment, I had the routine down. We’d meet in the caboose, I’d ignite a small fire in the potbelly stove, pour booze Sal had purloined from the B&O boardroom into each thermos, lay the cards out—and a game would ensue. I didn’t play, choosing instead to read books in the caboose’s corner.

“Do what you want, Daugherty,” the men obliged.

Occasionally one of them would ask what I was reading. Sydney would pull some political material he wanted me to read out of his lunch bucket. But it never went much further than that—my education on class warfare. I didn’t ask enough questions for Sydney, and after a time, he wrote me off. Hart Crane and Nathaniel West held my interest.

C&O, cradling a small battery-operated portable radio, would often sit next to me listening to any music he could find on the bands. When he played it too loud, Sal would bark at him. Like a chastised dog, C&O’d bow his head down to his knees, then after several moments, draw the radio up close to his ear. He and I seldom exchanged words. Curious to see what I had in my lunch each day, he’d set his bucket next to mine on the cushions. (I think the whole south side of Hebron had several of these cushions in their houses; Sal kept requisitioning more from the central depot in Akron.)

One night, Salvatore greeted us in the caboose wearing a suit jacket and tie. He stood solemnly in front of the cold stove.

“Boys, tonight I got something special to announce.”

C&O, normally the most curious, bowed his head and began to tremble.

“Do you tell them, C&O—or do I?”

C&O shook his head determinedly.

“OK,” Sal said. “C&O’s getting married in two weeks.”

It had to be one of DiCenza’s demonic jokes.

Sydney stared angrily at Sal, like he’d gone too far in taking advantage of C&O’s simple wit.

“C&O’s wife-to-be arrives in Mahoningtown two weeks from Friday. The wedding ceremony will take place at St. Vitus’s Church that Saturday morning. Sunday, C&O and . . .” Sal paused, then looked over at C&O, who by now had cradled his head in his hands and shook in a kind of rapturous trance, half laughing, half crying. Sal cracked him alert with a command:

“C&O, tell them her name!”

C&O stood at attention. “Bernadette,” he replied.

“Bernadette!” we shouted.

C&O shook his head, echoing our disbelief. Then started to chortle again; the saliva began to gather at the corners of his spectral mouth. Spasms. Sal grabbed him, again chastising him: “Get a hold of yourself! Do you think she wants to crawl in bed with some blathering idiot?”

We couldn’t suppress our laughter. C&O couldn’t either. He was the butt of our outrageous humor. He felt he belonged when we laughed at him. Gestures he thought obscene, he’d nervously flash. Popping his cheek with his index finger made us roar the hardest. But Sal chastised us for pushing C&O over the line. “This is serious shit,” he reprimanded. “The poor fuck is getting married, and we got to help him pull it off.”

Every one of us drew inward. Even C&O, as if he were trying to fathom the mysteries that lay ahead. C&O with a wife? A house? Pens of chickens and rabbits? Children? It was a miracle, a testament to families helping families and the corrupt B&O management and its union that C&O was even on a payroll. The Catholic Church couldn’t have accomplished such goodness.

“Sal, where is this saint coming from?” Reuben asked, looking around at us.

“Italy,” came Sal’s terse response.

“She ever see C&O?”

“Nope.”

“He see her?” Sydney was incredulous.

“Pictures her mother sent Rose Calucca. Bernadette’s mother and Rose went to school together in Calabria,” Sal said.

“What’s she gonna say when she gets off the boat and sees C&O?” I asked.

“She’s gonna take the train to Mahoningtown,” Sal said. “We’re all gonna meet the train. Mrs. Calucca, brother Junior, me and C&O. Ain’t nobody gonna say a damn word. Bernadette’s gonna step off the train, I’m gonna step forward, kiss her on the cheek, and walk her back to the family leaning up against the station house. We’re all gonna get in the undertaker’s car and go to the Sons of Italy club and have a big meal, drinking and dancing and speeches—stuff like that. Me, Bernadette, Rose Calucca, Junior and C&O all at the head table. Be like that all night! Bernadette dances with Junior, dances with me, and maybe even dances with C&O.”

“You going to snooker her, Sal? On the poor woman’s wedding night, you gonna snooker her?” Reuben asked.

“Should I let her see the goat before dinner?” Sal shot back. “The whole goddamn thing stinks. But what are you gonna do? His old lady wants it before she dies. She wants C&O to be off with a family like me and Junior. You, Reuben. Sydney, Otto, the rest of us—even boy-Daugherty. Don’t C&O deserve it?”

Sal was getting lathered up.

“Ain’t Bernadette’s fault either, is it, Sal?” Sydney said.

“Hey, she wants to come to America, don’t she?”

“When you gonna let her know C&O’s the one?” Otto asked.

“Bedtime.”

“Bedtime?” we chorused.

“She’s been quaffing the bubbly and dancing, huh? Too shy to ask is it Junior or me. ‘Who’s the one?’ Before midnight, we push C&O up the steps to the nuptial bedroom they got over the Sons of Italy dining hall. The goat’s lying up there stretched out between starched sheets waiting for the fair Bernadette . . . and she’s a beauty, man. Show ’em the pictures, C&O.”

C&O, who had been listening raptly, not understanding a word, pulled the photographs out of his shirt pocket. Tobacco juice stains mar Bernadette’s face, and the shots are dog-eared like old playing cards. But the bride-to-be was just how Sal described her. A real tomato. They had her attired in a black mourning dress with a white doily covering her head. But she was wearing this demure “Going-to-America” smile.

“Looks gullible,” sniffed Sydney.

“At midnight Junior or me coaxes her up the nuptial stairs, we open the goat’s door, shove her in, and padlock it. She knows what she got to do. Mrs. Calucca and her church cronies be waiting sentinel downstairs, drinking black coffee until morning to ascertain the consummation transpired.

“No blood, no America. Only shame. Bernadette’s shipped back home Sunday night.”

At first, we were confused. Not only was Bernadette marrying an imbecile, but she had to be a virgin, too? When I looked at Sal for some kind of explanation, he just shrugged, and sat down with the other crew members at the card table. He pulled his shirt and tie off and dealt the cards.

C&O developed a nervous twitch near his wedding day. Sal periodically gave him a whack on his back, trying to break the habit. Sal claimed it was stress. That, like a goat being led out of his pen at night alone, C&O knew he was going to get garroted. Sal had butchered enough pigs and sheep in his sheds in Mahoningtown, so he spoke with authority.

“Those poor bastards always know when they are about to be slaughtered.”

“What’s Bernadette going to do when she sees C&O lying like a fruitcake in her wedding bed?” Otto asked.

Sal thought for a moment.

“Take pity on the poor cocksucker? How do I know?

“You think she wants to go back to Calabria, stain her feet in the grape juice? So she bleeds a few drops for the goat. Christ, she’s slept in the manger! She’s a Calabrian. Those dames ain’t no Neapolitans, are they Reuben?”

Reuben agreed.

“You melancholic bastards. Just hope she’s a virgin. Rose Calucca and her harpies will take their fists to her if she ain’t. Her bringing disgrace to C&O, Father Vignale and the entire St. Vitus parish. Those old ladies all want their daughters to marry a fool. The Christ child. No malingerers and philanderers like most of us here. Us good-for-nothings. C&O’s a good-for-something. You got it? He’s the innocent. The bitch just better play it right.”

“Do you think Bernadette’s old lady is in on the scam?” I asked.

“America’s the scam! So what if he can’t read or write? He got a job, huh?” C&O smiled proudly. “Maybe he gives her a bambino. What more could she ask?”

First, my home education about the morality of working, putting in an honest day’s labor for an honest dollar in return, had shit the bed. Now the institution of marriage was being fiddled with big time. And two days before C&O’s big wedding, he took off sick. Sal said it was the hives, then became uptight about the subject, refusing to discuss it. The wedding day came and passed without any of us—except Sal of course—being invited. The next week he didn’t mention it. When Reuben boldly broached the subject, Sal went outside in a snit and pissed up against our red caboose.

It weren’t until one week after the “honeymoon” C&O appeared. Christ, he looked different. He weren’t so silly anymore. “Of more serious mien” is how I’d describe him. He weren’t so quick to snicker anymore either. Kind of like the rest of the men. Except now instead of sitting alone while they played cards and listening to music, he read religious tracts.

Well, “read” is too strong of a term.

Each day in his dinner bucket he brought new booklets he’d picked up in the anteroom of St. Vitus, tracts on marriage and the like. I asked him the second day if he wanted me to read them aloud. Shyly, he said yes. So while Sal and the crew played twenty-one, I read these homilies on marriage, fealty, and parenting to C&O. He sat next to me piously in the caboose like a novice monk. I felt like Thomas Merton.

Sal permitted none of us in his presence to question C&O about the wedding night or its aftermath. C&O’s brother, Junior, told somebody in the switch house that Rose and her neighbors did awaken the betrothed that Sunday morning before dawn to impatiently examine the wedding sheets for blood; then crowed when they spotted it, pushing the betrothed aside as they ran back down the nuptial steps into the streets singing.

But it wasn’t until about a month later, a Saturday morning just before winding up the work week, that Sal, after a full evening of cards and drinking, turned and asked C&O how he liked poontang.

The old paroxysms ensued.

“Tell us, C&O, is it nice and juicy like Otto said it would be?”

C&O nodded vigorously.

“You see her naked yet?” Sal asked. Reuben surveyed the leg art.

What the hell was this about, I wondered.

“Tell us, C&O, you see her naked? And has she got big ones, C&O?”

C&O knew what Sal was asking. He ceased snickering. Like he was embarrassed. Sal had overstepped his bounds. C&O never acted like this before. But DiCenza kept pressing.

“C&O, what’s her pussy look like in the daylight?”

Pulling his engineer’s hat down over his ears, C&O stood up, spat in his right hand and flung it straight at Sal’s face. Then stomped out of the caboose. The room remained quiet for a full minute. Sal was chagrined. We’d never seen C&O take offense at his friend and “brother.”

“He’s seen her naked, ain’t he?” Sal asked accusingly. “The sonofabitch. She’s stood before him in the morning light, ain’t she? Well, speak up you assholes!”

Otto shuffled the deck with one hand, nervously eyeing Sydney.

“She’s stood before the idiot without a stitch of clothes on, ain’t she? Naked as the Mediterranean by the bedside lamp. Her raven hair running down to the pit of her ass and those god-almighty, sun-blessed, peach tits he’s eyeballed. And the dimple in her belly, the grove of navel hairs—the vineyard, the berry farm, the black forest, the labial grave. The tongue cozy. Sonofabitch. Old C&O’s seen it all! Ain’t he?”

Sal, in a jealous rage, tossed the card table against the wall, and jumped up. The caboose shook. We clustered over by the benches. Sal kicked the stove and smacked against it with his bare hands like a wounded animal.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you, Sal?” Reuben cried.

Sal gathered himself, poured some liquor from the thermos into his cup.

“Twenty years. Count them.” His angry hands, he opened and clenched them mechanically. “Twenty. And not once, even in the moonlight—for the shades are always drawn—have I ever got to see my Donna naked. Even in the measly crack under our doorway when the hall light is creeping in, she covers it up with a towel. Our bedroom—black as the woods.

“Not once has Salvatore got to see how her tits hang off her mighty chest. How her ass curves in the morning light. What the tongue cozy looks like in the sun. All in my imagination. My hands see, my fucking thighs see, my dick sees . . . BUT SAL DON’T SEE!”

He jabbed at these parts of his anatomy.

“With this finger I could fucking draw her navel on paper for each of you, but I ain’t ever seen it with these!” He jabbed his eyes. “Or the crack of her ass. Or the CRYING VIRGIN.

“Where’s the Justice, I ask?”

Sydney vainly gestured to Sal to take a seat.

“Bernadette gets off the Queen Mary and unveils, huh? Snow slides off her temple. The gown slides off her coppery bosom straight into the New York Harbor, and our fool drops to his knees, trembling. All the cocksuckers in Battery Park run to rattle their windows. The Staten Island Ferries steam-whistle. And the fucking Stature of Liberty shimmers naked?

“Right in Manhattan harbor, for Chrissake! Rose and her widowed crows run through Battery Park shouting—Blood on the sheets! There’s blood on the sheets!—bed linens flagging their clothesline poles. And Gotham’s fire boats spray jets of water up against Liberty’s bare ass? Good Lady Liberty’s getting the old morning-after douche?

“But where’s the fucking justice, I ask? Answer me, Sydney!”

Sal leapt up on the bench, punting C&O’s lunch bucket against the caboose door.

“And Donna DiCenza’s still keeping ME—Her Sal—in the dark? What am I? A fucking dago married to Helen Keller? What is it with the goose worship in this land?

“Why do they always get the breaks?”

The four of us, chastened, sat hunched over the card table. Several minutes passed before Sal quietly pulled up a chair.

“Sydney, go outside and let C&O in,” he said.

“But I don’t know where he went, Sal. Christ, he could be anywhere out there in the dark.”

“He ain’t,” Sal said, shuffling the deck like a Nevada croupier. “He’s pissing up against the caboose.”

I looked out the window. In the blackness, white steam rose off a Silver Phantom that shot triumphantly out of Chesapeake & Ohio—his parabolic dream—arcing the rails, to hit then splash-die against our deserted car.

We are passing through Ambridge, I thought.