A Solo Song: For Doc

SO YOU WANT TO KNOW THIS BUSINESS, youngblood? So you want to be a Waiter’s Waiter? The Commissary gives you a book with all the rules and tells you to learn them. And you do, and think that is all there is to it. A big, thick black book. Poor youngblood.

Look at me. I am a Waiter’s Waiter. I know all the moves, all the pretty, fine moves that big book will never teach you. I built this railroad with my moves; and so did Sheik Beasley and Uncle T. Boone and Danny Jackson, and so did Doc Craft. That book they made you learn came from our moves and from our heads. There was a time when six of us, big men, danced at the same time in that little Pantry without touching and shouted orders to the sweating paddies in the kitchen. There was a time when they had to respect us because our sweat and our moves supported them. We knew the service and the paddies, even the green dishwashers knew that we did and didn’t give us the crap they pull on you.

Do you know how to sneak a Blackplate to a nasty cracker? Do you know how to rub asses with five other men in the Pantry getting their orders together and still know that you are a man, just like them? Do you know how to bullshit while you work and keep the paddies in their places with your bullshit? Do you know how to breathe down the back of an old lady’s dress to hustle a bigger tip?

No. You are summer stuff, youngblood. I am old, my moves are not so good any more, but I know this business. The Commissary hires you for the summer because they don’t want to let anyone get as old as me on them. I’m sixty-three, but they can’t fire me: I’m in the Union. They can’t lay me off for fucking up: I know this business too well. And so they hire you, youngblood, for the summer when the tourists come, and in September you go away with some tips in your pocket to buy pussy and they wait all winter for me to die. I am dying, youngblood, and so is this business. Both of us will die together. There’ll always be summer stuff like you, but the big men, the big trains, are dying every day and everybody can see it. And nobody but us who are dying with them gives a damn.

Look at the big picture at the end of the car, youngblood. That’s the man who built this road. He’s in your history books. He’s probably in that big black bible you read. He was a great man. He hated people. He didn’t want to feed them but the government said he had to. He didn’t want to hire me, but he needed me to feed the people. I know this, youngblood, and that is why that book is written for you and that is why I have never read it. That is why you get nervous and jump up to polish the pepper and salt shakers when the word comes down the line that an inspector is getting on at the next stop. That is why you warm the toast covers for every cheap old lady who wants to get coffee and toast and good service for sixty-five cents and a dime tip. You know that he needs you only for the summer and that hundreds of youngbloods like you want to work this summer to buy that pussy in Chicago and Portland and Seattle. The man uses you, but he doesn’t need you. But me he needs for the winter, when you are gone, and to teach you something in the summer about this business you can’t get from that big black book. He needs me and he knows it and I know it. That is why I am sitting here when there are tables to be cleaned and linen to be changed and silver to be washed and polished. He needs me to die. That is why I am taking my time. I know it. And I will take his service with me when I die, just like the Sheik did and like Percy Fields did, and like Doc.

Who are they? Why do I keep talking about them? Let me think about it. I guess it is because they were the last of the Old School, like me. We made this road. We got a million miles of walking up and down these cars under our feet. Doc Craft was the Old School, like me. He was a Waiter’s Waiter. He danced down these aisles with us and swung his tray with the roll of the train, never spilling in all his trips a single cup of coffee. He could carry his tray on two fingers, or on one and a half if he wanted, and he knew all the tricks about hustling tips there are to know. He could work anybody. The girls at the Northland in Chicago knew Doc, and the girls at the Haverville in Seattle, and the girls at the Step-Inn in Portland and all the girls in Winnipeg knew Doc Craft.

But wait. It is just 1:30 and the first call for dinner is not until 5:00. You want to kill some time; you want to hear about the Old School and how it was in my day. If you look in that black book you would see that you should be polishing silver now. Look out the window; this is North Dakota, this is Jerry’s territory. Jerry, the Unexpected Inspector. Shouldn’t you polish the shakers or clean out the Pantry or squeeze oranges, or maybe change the linen on the tables? Jerry Ewald is sly. The train may stop in the middle of this wheatfield and Jerry may get on. He lives by that book. He knows where to look for dirt and mistakes. Jerry Ewald, the Unexpected Inspector. He knows where to look; he knows how to get you. He got Doc.

Now you want to know about him, about the Old School. You have even put aside your book of rules. But see how you keep your finger in the pages as if the book was more important than what I tell you. That’s a bad move, and it tells on you. You will be a waiter. But you will never be a Waiter’s Waiter. The Old School died with Doc, and the very last of it is dying with me. What happened to Doc? Take your finger out of the pages, youngblood, and I will tell you about a kind of life these rails will never carry again.

When your father was a boy playing with himself behind the barn, Doc was already a man and knew what the thing was for. But he got tired of using it when he wasn’t much older than you, and he set his mind on making money. He had no skills. He was black. He got hungry. On Christmas Day in 1916, the story goes, he wandered into the Chicago stockyards and over to a dining car waiting to be connected up to the main train for the Chicago-to-San Francisco run. He looked up through the kitchen door at the chef storing supplies for the kitchen and said: “I’m hungry.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” the Swede chef said.

“I’ll work,” said Doc.

That Swede was Chips Magnusson, fresh off the boat and lucky to be working himself. He did not know yet that he should save all extra work for other Swedes fresh off the boat. He later learned this by living. But at that time he considered a moment, bit into one of the fresh apples stocked for apple pie, chewed considerably, spit out the seeds and then waved the black on board the big train. “You can eat all you want,” he told Doc. “But you work all I tell you.”

He put Doc to rolling dough for the apple pies and the train began rolling for Doc. It never stopped. He fell in love with the feel of the wheels under his feet clicking against the track and he got the rhythm of the wheels in him and learned, like all of us, how to roll with them and move with them. After that first trip Doc was never at home on the ground. He worked everything in the kitchen from putting out dough to second cook, in six years. And then, when the Commissary saw that he was good and would soon be going for one of the chef’s spots they saved for the Swedes, they put him out of the kitchen and told him to learn this waiter business; and told him to learn how to bullshit on the other side of the Pantry. He was almost thirty, youngblood, when he crossed over to the black side of the Pantry. I wasn’t there when he made his first trip as a waiter, but from what they tell me of that trip I know that he was broke in by good men. Pantryman was Sheik Beasley, who stayed high all the time and let the waiters steal anything they wanted as long as they didn’t bother his reefers. Danny Jackson, who was black and knew Shakespeare before the world said he could work with it, was second man. Len Dickey was third, Reverend Hendricks was fourth, and Uncle T. Boone, who even in those early days could not straighten his back, ran fifth. Doc started in as sixth waiter, the “mule.” They pulled some shit on him at first because they didn’t want somebody fresh out of a paddy kitchen on the crew. They messed with his orders, stole his plates, picked up his tips on the sly, and made him do all the dirty work. But when they saw that he could take the shit without getting hot and when they saw that he was set on being a waiter, even though he was older than most of them, they settled down and began to teach him this business and all the words and moves and slickness that made it a good business.

His real name was Leroy Johnson, I think, but when Danny Jackson saw how cool and neat he was in his moves, and how he handled the plates, he began to call him “the Doctor.” Then the Sheik, coming down from his high one day after missing the lunch and dinner service, saw how Doc had taken over his station and collected fat tips from his tables by telling the passengers that the Sheik had had to get off back along the line because of a heart attack. The Sheik liked that because he saw that Doc understood crackers and how they liked nothing better than knowing that a nigger had died on the job, giving them service. The Sheik was impressed. And he was not an easy man to impress because he knew too much about life and had to stay high most of the time. And when Doc would not split the tips with him, the Sheik got mad at first and called Doc a barrel of motherfuckers and some other words you would not recognize. But he was impressed. And later that night, in the crew car when the others were gambling and drinking and bullshitting about the women they had working the corners for them, the Sheik came over to Doc’s bunk and said: “You’re a crafty motherfucker.”

“Yeah?” says Doc.

“Yeah,” says the Sheik, who did not say much. “You’re a crafty motherfucker but I like you.” Then he got into the first waiter’s bunk and lit up again. But Reverend Hendricks, who always read his Bible before going to sleep and who always listened to anything the Sheik said because he knew the Sheik only said something when it was important, heard what was said and remembered it. After he put his Bible back in his locker, he walked over to Doc’s bunk and looked down at him. “Mister Doctor Craft,” the Reverend said. “Youngblood Doctor Craft.”

“Yeah?” says Doc.

“Yeah,” says Reverend Hendricks. “That’s who you are.”

And that’s who he was from then on.

II

I CAME TO THE ROAD away from the war. This was after ’41, when people at home were looking for Japs under their beds every night. I did not want to fight because there was no money in it and I didn’t want to go overseas to work in a kitchen. The big war was on and a lot of soldiers crossed the country to get to it, and as long as a black man fed them on trains he did not have to go to that war. I could have got a job in a Chicago factory, but there was more money on the road and it was safer. And after a while it got into your blood so that you couldn’t leave it for anything. The road got into my blood the way it got into everybody’s; the way going to the war got in the blood of redneck farm boys and the crazy Polacks from Chicago. It was all right for them to go to the war. They were young and stupid. And they died that way. I played it smart. I was almost thirty-five and I didn’t want to go. But I took them and fed them and gave them good times on their way to the war, and for that I did not have to go. The soldiers had plenty of money and were afraid not to spend it all before they got to the ships on the Coast. And we gave them ways to spend it on the trains.

Now in those days there was plenty of money going around and everybody stole from everybody. The kitchen stole food from the company and the company knew it and wouldn’t pay good wages. There were no rules in those days, there was no black book to go by and nobody said what you couldn’t eat or steal. The paddy cooks used to toss boxes of steaks off the train in the Chicago yards for people at the restaurants there who paid them, cash. These were the days when ordinary people had to have red stamps or blue stamps to get powdered eggs and white lard to mix with red powder to make their own butter.

The stewards stole from the company and from the waiters; the waiters stole from the stewards and the company and from each other. I stole. Doc stole. Even Reverend Hendricks put his Bible far back in his locker and stole with us. You didn’t want a man on your crew who didn’t steal. He made it bad for everybody. And if the steward saw that he was a dummy and would never get to stealing, he wrote him up for something and got him off the crew so as not to slow down the rest of us. We had a redneck cracker steward from Alabama by the name of Casper who used to say: “Jesus Christ! I ain’t got time to hate you niggers, I’m making so much money.” He used to keep all his cash at home under his bed in a cardboard box because he was afraid to put it in the bank.

Doc and Sheik Beasley and me were on the same crew together all during the war. Even in those days, as young as we were, we knew how to be Old Heads. We organized for the soldiers. We had to wear skullcaps all the time because the crackers said our hair was poison and didn’t want any of it to fall in their food. The Sheik didn’t mind wearing one. He kept reefers in his and used to sell them to the soldiers for double what he paid for them in Chicago and three times what he paid the Chinamen in Seattle. That’s why we called him the Sheik. After every meal the Sheik would get in the linen closet and light up. Sometimes he wouldn’t come out for days. Nobody gave a damn, though; we were all too busy stealing and working. And there was more for us to get as long as he didn’t come out.

Doc used to sell bootlegged booze to the soldiers; that was his specialty. He had redcaps in the Chicago stations telling the soldiers who to ask for on the train. He was an open operator and had to give the steward a cut, but he still made a pile of money. That’s why that old cracker always kept us together on his crew. We were the three best moneymakers he ever had. That’s something you should learn, youngblood. They can’t love you for being you. They only love you if you make money for them. All that talk these days about integration and brotherhood, that’s a lot of bullshit. The man will love you as long as he can make money with you. I made money. And old Casper had to love me in the open although I knew he called me a nigger at home when he had put that money in his big cardboard box. I know he loved me on the road in the wartime because I used to bring in the biggest moneymakers. I used to handle the girls.

Look out that window. See all that grass and wheat? Look at that big farm boy cutting it. Look at that burnt cracker on that tractor. He probably has a wife who married him because she didn’t know what else to do. Back during wartime the girls in this part of the country knew what to do. They got on the trains at night.

You can look out that window all day and run around all the stations when we stop, but you’ll never see a black man in any of these towns. You know why, youngblood? These farmers hate you. They still remember when their girls came out of these towns and got on the trains at night. They’ve been running black men and dark Indians out of these towns for years. They hate anything dark that’s not that way because of the sun. Right now there are big farm girls with hair under their arms on the corners in San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Minneapolis who got started on these cars back during wartime. The farmers still remember that and they hate you and me for it. But it wasn’t for me they got on. Nobody wants a stiff, smelly farm girl when there are sporting women to be got for a dollar in the cities. It was for the soldiers they got on. It was just business to me. But they hate you and me anyway.

I got off in one of these towns once, a long time after the war, just to get a drink while the train changed engines. Everybody looked at me and by the time I got to a bar there were ten people on my trail. I was drinking a fast one when the sheriff came in the bar.

“What are you doing here?” he asks me.

“Just getting a shot,” I say.

He spit on the floor. “How long you plan to be here?”

“I don’t know,” I say, just to be nasty.

“There ain’t no jobs here,” he says.

“I wasn’t looking,” I say.

“We don’t want you here.”

“I don’t give a good goddamn,” I say.

He pulled his gun on me. “All right, coon, back on the train,” he says.

“Wait a minute,” I tell him. “Let me finish my drink.”

He knocked my glass over with his gun. “You’re finished now,” he says. “Pull your ass out of here now!”

I didn’t argue.

I was the night man. After dinner it was my job to pull the cloths off the tables and put paddings on. Then I cut out the lights and locked both doors. There was a big farm girl from Minot named Hilda who could take on eight or ten soldiers in one night, white soldiers. These white boys don’t know how to last. I would stand by the door and when the soldiers came back from the club car they would pay me and I would let them in. Some of the girls could make as much as one hundred dollars in one night. And I always made twice as much. Soldiers don’t care what they do with their money. They just have to spend it.

We never bothered with the girls ourselves. It was just business as far as we were concerned. But there was one dummy we had with us once, a boy from the South named Willie Joe something who handled the dice. He was really hot for one of these farm girls. He used to buy her good whiskey and he hated to see her go in the car at night to wait for the soldiers. He was a real dummy. One time I heard her tell him: “It’s all right. They can have my body. I know I’m black inside. Jesus, I’m so black inside I wisht I was black all over!”

And this dummy Willie Joe said: “Baby, don’t you ever change!

I knew we had to get rid of him before he started trouble. So we had the steward bump him off the crew as soon as we could find a good man to handle the gambling. That old redneck Casper was glad to do it. He saw what was going on.

But you want to hear about Doc, you say, so you can get back to your reading. What can I tell you? The road got into his blood? He liked being a waiter? You won’t understand this, but he did. There were no Civil Rights or marches or riots for something better in those days. In those days a man found something he liked to do and liked it from then on because he couldn’t help himself. What did he like about the road? He liked what I liked: the money, owning the car, running it, telling the soldiers what to do, hustling a bigger tip from some old maid by looking under her dress and laughing at her, having all the girls at the Haverville Hotel waiting for us to come in for stopover, the power we had to beat them up or lay them if we wanted. He liked running free and not being married to some bitch who would spend his money when he was out of town or give it to some stud. He liked getting drunk with the boys up at Andy’s, setting up the house and then passing out from drinking too much, knowing that the boys would get him home.

I ran with that one crew all during wartime and they, Doc, the Sheik and Reverend Hendricks, had taken me under their wings. I was still a youngblood then, and Doc liked me a lot. But he never said that much to me; he was not a talker. The Sheik had taught him the value of silence in things that really matter. We roomed together in Chicago at Mrs. Wright’s place in those days. Mrs. Wright didn’t allow women in the rooms and Doc liked that, because after being out for a week and after stopping over in those hotels along the way, you get tired of women and bullshit and need your privacy. We weren’t like you. We didn’t need a woman every time we got hard. We knew when we had to have it and when we didn’t. And we didn’t spend all our money on it, either. You youngbloods think the way to get a woman is to let her see how you handle your money. That’s stupid. The way to get a woman is to let her see how you handle other women. But you’ll never believe that until it’s too late to do you any good.

Doc knew how to handle women. I can remember a time in a Winnipeg hotel how he ran a bitch out of his room because he had had enough of it and did not need her any more. I was in the next room and heard everything.

“Come on, Doc,” the bitch said. “Come on honey, let’s do it one more time.”

“Hell no,” Doc said. “I’m tired and I don’t want to any more.”

“How can you say you’re tired?” the bitch said. “How can you say you’re tired when you didn’t go but two times?”

“I’m tired of it,” Doc said, “because I’m tired of you. And I’m tired of you because I’m tired of it and bitches like you in all the towns I been in. You drain a man. And I know if I beat you, you’ll still come back when I hit you again. That’s why I’m tired. I’m tired of having things around I don’t care about.”

“What do you care about, Doc?” the bitch said.

“I don’t know,” Doc said. “I guess I care about moving and being somewhere else when I want to be. I guess I care about going out, and coming in to wait for the time to go out again.”

“You crazy, Doc,” the bitch said.

“Yeah?” Doc said. “I guess I’m crazy all right.”

Later that bitch knocked on my door and I did it for her because she was just a bitch and I knew Doc wouldn’t want her again. I don’t think he ever wanted a bitch again. I never saw him with one after that time. He was just a little over fifty then and could have still done whatever he wanted with women.

The war ended. The farm boys who got back from the war did not spend money on their way home. They did not want to spend any more money on women, and the girls did not get on at night any more. Some of them went into the cities and turned pro. Some of them stayed in the towns and married the farm boys who got back from the war. Things changed on the road. The Commissary started putting that book of rules together and told us to stop stealing. They were losing money on passengers now because of the airplanes and they began to really tighten up and started sending inspectors down along the line to check on us. They started sending in spotters, too. One of them caught that redneck Casper writing out a check for two dollars less than he had charged the spotter. The Commissary got him in on the rug for it. I wasn’t there, but they told me he said to the General Superintendent: “Why are you getting on me, a white man, for a lousy son-of-a-bitching two bucks? There’s niggers out there been stealing for years!

“Who?” the General Superintendent asked.

And Casper couldn’t say anything because he had that cardboard box full of money still under his bed and knew he would have to tell how he got it if any of us was brought in. So he said nothing.

“Who?” the General Superintendent asked him again.

“Why, all them nigger waiters steal, everybody knows that!

“And the cooks, what about them?” the Superintendent said.

“They’re white,” said Casper.

They never got the story out of him and he was fired. He used the money to open a restaurant someplace in Indiana and I heard later that he started a branch of the Klan in his town. One day he showed up at the station and told Doc, Reverend Hendricks and me: “I’ll see you boys get yours. Damn if I’m takin’ the rap for you niggers.”

We just laughed in his face because we knew he could do nothing to us through the Commissary. But just to be safe we stopped stealing so much. But they did get the Sheik, though. One day an inspector got on in the mountains just outside of Whitefish and grabbed him right out of that linen closet. The Sheik had been smoking in there all day and he was high and laughing when they pulled him off the train.

That was the year we got in the Union. The crackers and Swedes finally let us in after we paid off. We really stopped stealing and got organized and there wasn’t a damn thing the company could do about it, although it tried like hell to buy us out. And to get back at us, they put their heads together and began to make up that big book of rules you keep your finger in. Still, we knew the service and they had to write the book the way we gave the service and at first there was nothing for the Old School men to learn. We got seniority through the Union, and as long as we gave the service and didn’t steal, they couldn’t touch us. So they began changing the rules, and sending us notes about the service. Little changes at first, like how the initials on the doily should always face the customer, and how the silver should be taken off the tables between meals. But we were getting old and set in our old service, and it got harder and harder learning all those little changes. And we had to learn new stuff all the time because there was no telling when an inspector would get on and catch us giving bad service. It was hard as hell. It was hard because we knew that the company was out to break up the Old School. The Sheik was gone, and we knew that Reverend Hendricks or Uncle T. or Danny Jackson would go soon because they stood for the Old School, just like the Sheik. But what bothered us most was knowing that they would go for Doc first, before anyone else, because he loved the road so much.

Doc was over sixty-five then and had taken to drinking hard when we were off. But he never touched a drop when we were on the road. I used to wonder whether he drank because being a Waiter’s Waiter was getting hard or because he had to do something until his next trip. I could never figure it. When we had our layovers he would spend all his time in Andy’s, setting up the house. He had no wife, no relatives, not even a hobby. He just drank. Pretty soon the slicksters at Andy’s got to using him for a good thing. They commenced putting the touch on him because they saw he was getting old and knew he didn’t have far to go, and they would never have to pay him back. Those of us who were close to him tried to pull his coat, but it didn’t help. He didn’t talk about himself much, he didn’t talk much about anything that wasn’t related to the road; but when I tried to hip him once about the hustlers and how they were closing in on him, he just took another shot and said:

“I don’t need no money. Nobody’s jiving me. I’m jiving them. You know I can still pull in a hundred in tips in one trip. I know this business.”

“Yeah, I know, Doc,” I said. “But how many more trips can you make before you have to stop?”

“I ain’t never gonna stop. Trips are all I know and I’ll be making them as long as these trains haul people.”

“That’s just it,” I said. “They don’t want to haul people any more. The planes do that. The big roads want freight now. Look how they hire youngbloods just for the busy seasons just so they won’t get any seniority in the winter. Look how all the Old School waiters are dropping out. They got the Sheik; Percy Fields just lucked up and died before they got to him; they almost got Reverend Hendricks. Even Uncle T. is going to retire! And they’ll get us too.”

“Not me,” said Doc. “I know my moves. This old fox can still dance with a tray and handle four tables at the same time. I can still bait a queer and make the old ladies tip big. There’s no waiter better than me and I know it.”

“Sure, Doc,” I said. “I know it too. But please save your money. Don’t be a dummy. There’ll come a day when you just can’t get up to go out and they’ll put you on the ground for good.”

Doc looked at me like he had been shot. “Who taught you the moves when you were just a raggedy-ass waiter?”

“You did, Doc,” I said.

“Who’s always the first man down in the yard at train-time?” He threw down another shot. “Who’s there sitting in the car every tenth morning while you other old heads are still at home pulling on your longjohns?”

I couldn’t say anything. He was right and we both knew it.

“I have to go out,” he told me. “Going out is my whole life, I wait for that tenth morning. I ain’t never missed a trip and I don’t mean to.”

What could I say to him, youngblood? What can I say to you? He had to go out, not for the money; it was in his blood. You have to go out too, but it’s for the money you go. You hate going out and you love coming in. He loved going out and he hated coming in. Would you listen if I told you to stop spending your money on pussy in Chicago? Would he listen if I told him to save his money? To stop setting up the bar at Andy’s? No. Old men are just as bad as young men when it comes to money. They can’t think. They always try to buy what they should have for free. And what they buy, after they have it, is nothing.

They called Doc into the Commissary and the doctors told him he had lumbago and a bad heart and was weak from drinking too much, and they wanted him to get down for his own good. He wouldn’t do it. Tesdale, the General Superintendent, called him in and told him that he had enough years in the service to pull down a big pension and that the company would pay for a retirement party for him, since he was the oldest waiter working, and invite all the Old School waiters to see him off, if he would come down. Doc said no. He knew that the Union had to back him. He knew that he could ride as long as he made the trains on time and as long as he knew the service. And he knew that he could not leave the road.

The company called in its lawyers to go over the Union contract. I wasn’t there, but Len Dickey was in on the meeting because of his office in the Union. He told me about it later. Those fat company lawyers took the contract apart and went through all their books. They took the seniority clause apart word by word, trying to figure a way to get at Doc. But they had written it airtight back in the days when the company needed waiters, and there was nothing in it about compulsory retirement. Not a word. The paddies in the Union must have figured that waiters didn’t need a new contract when they let us in, and they had let us come in under the old one thinking that all waiters would die on the job, or drink themselves to death when they were still young, or die from buying too much pussy, or just quit when they had put in enough time to draw a pension. But nothing in the whole contract could help them get rid of Doc Craft. They were sweating, they were working so hard. And all the time Tesdale, the General Superintendent, was calling them sons-of-bitches for not earning their money. But there was nothing the company lawyers could do but turn the pages of their big books and sweat and promise Tesdale that they would find some way if he gave them more time.

The word went out from the Commissary: “Get Doc.” The stewards got it from the assistant superintendents: “Get Doc.” Since they could not get him to retire, they were determined to catch him giving bad service. He had more seniority than most other waiters, so they couldn’t bump him off our crew. In fact, all the waiters with more seniority than Doc were on the crew with him. There were four of us from the Old School: me, Doc, Uncle T. Boone, and Danny Jackson. Reverend Hendricks wasn’t running regular any more; he was spending all his Sundays preaching in his Church on the South Side because he knew what was coming and wanted to have something steady going for him in Chicago when his time came. Fifth and sixth men on that crew were two hardheads who had read the book. The steward was Crouse, and he really didn’t want to put the screws to Doc but he couldn’t help himself. Everybody wants to work. So Crouse started in to riding Doc, sometimes about moving too fast, sometimes about not moving fast enough. I was on the crew, I saw it all. Crouse would seat four singles at the same table, on Doc’s station, and Doc had to take care of all four different orders at the same time. He was seventy-three, but that didn’t stop him, knowing this business the way he did. It just slowed him down some. But Crouse got on him even for that and would chew him out in front of the passengers, hoping that he’d start cursing and bother the passengers so that they would complain to the company. It never worked, though. Doc just played it cool. He’d look into Crouse’s eyes and know what was going on. And then he’d lay on his good service, the only service he knew, and the passengers would see how good he was with all that age on his back and they would get mad at the steward, and leave Doc a bigger tip when they left.

The Commissary sent out spotters to catch him giving bad service. These were pale-white little men in glasses who never looked you in the eye, but who always felt the plate to see if it was warm. And there were the old maids, who like that kind of work, who would order shrimp or crabmeat cocktails or celery and olive plates because they knew how the rules said these things had to be made. And when they came, when Doc brought them out, they would look to see if the oyster fork was stuck into the thing, and look out the window a long time.

“Ain’t no use trying to fight it,” Uncle T. Boone told Doc in the crew car one night, “the black waiter is doomed. Look at all the good restaurants, the class restaurants in Chicago. You can’t work in them. Them white waiters got those jobs sewed up fine.”

“I can be a waiter anywhere,” says Doc. “I know the business and I like it and I can do it anywhere.”

“The black waiter is doomed,” Uncle T. says again. “The whites is taking over the service in the good places. And when they run you off of here, you won’t have no place to go.”

“They won’t run me off of here,” says Doc. “As long as I give the right service they can’t touch me.”

“You’re a goddamn fool!” says Uncle T. “You’re a nigger and you ain’t got no rights except what the Union says you have. And that ain’t worth a damn because when the Commissary finally gets you, those niggers won’t lift a finger to help you.”

“Leave off him,” I say to Boone. “If anybody ought to be put off it’s you. You ain’t had your back straight for thirty years. You even make the crackers sick the way you keep bowing and folding your hands and saying, ‘Thank you, Mr. Boss.’ Fifty years ago that would of got you a bigger tip,” I say, “but now it ain’t worth a shit. And every time you do it the crackers hate you. And every time I see you serving with that skullcap on I hate you. The Union said we didn’t have to wear them eighteen years ago! Why can’t you take it off?”

Boone just sat on his bunk with his skullcap in his lap, leaning against his big belly. He knew I was telling the truth and he knew he wouldn’t change. But he said: “That’s the trouble with the Negro waiter today. He ain’t got no humility. And as long as he don’t have humility, he keeps losing the good jobs.”

Doc had climbed into the first waiter’s bunk in his longjohns and I got in the second waiter’s bunk under him and lay there. I could hear him breathing. It had a hard sound. He wasn’t well and all of us knew it.

“Doc?” I said in the dark.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t mind Boone, Doc. He’s a dead man. He just don’t know it.”

“We all are,” Doc said.

“Not you,” I said.

“What’s the use? He’s right. They’ll get me in the end.”

“But they ain’t done it yet.”

“They’ll get me. And they know it and I know it. I can even see it in old Crouse’s eyes. He knows they’re gonna get me.”

“Why don’t you get a woman?”

He was quiet. “What can I do with a woman now, that I ain’t already done too much?”

I thought for a while. “If you’re on the ground, being with one might not make it so bad.”

“I hate women,” he said.

“You ever try fishing?”

“No.”

“You want to?”

“No,” he said.

“You can’t keep drinking.”

He did not answer.

“Maybe you could work in town. In the Commissary.”

I could hear the big wheels rolling and clicking along the tracks and I knew by the smooth way we were moving that we were almost out of the Dakota flatlands. Doc wasn’t talking. “Would you like that?” I thought he was asleep. “Doc, would you like that?”

“Hell no,” he said.

“You have to try something!

He was quiet again. “I know,” he finally said.

III

JERRY EWALD, THE UNEXPECTED INSPECTOR, got on in Winachee that next day after lunch and we knew that he had the word from the Commissary. He was cool about it: he laughed with the steward and the waiters about the old days and his hard gray eyes and shining glasses kept looking over our faces as if to see if we knew why he had got on. The two hardheads were in the crew car stealing a nap on company time. Jerry noticed this and could have caught them, but he was after bigger game. We all knew that, and we kept talking to him about the days of the big trains and looking at his white hair and not into the eyes behind his glasses because we knew what was there. Jerry sat down on the first waiter’s station and said to Crouse: “Now I’ll have some lunch. Steward, let the headwaiter bring me a menu.”

Crouse stood next to the table where Jerry sat, and looked at Doc, who had been waiting between the tables with his tray under his arm. The way the rules say. Crouse looked sad because he knew what was coming. Then Jerry looked directly at Doc and said: “Headwaiter Doctor Craft, bring me a menu.”

Doc said nothing and he did not smile. He brought the menu. Danny Jackson and I moved back into the hall to watch. There was nothing we could do to help Doc and we knew it. He was the Waiter’s Waiter, out there by himself, hustling the biggest tip he would ever get in his life. Or losing it.

“Goddamn,” Danny said to me. “Now let’s sit on the ground and talk about how kings are gonna get fucked.”

“Maybe not,” I said. But I did not believe it myself because Jerry is the kind of man who lies in bed all night, scheming. I knew he had a plan.

Doc passed us on his way to the kitchen for water and I wanted to say something to him. But what was the use? He brought the water to Jerry. Jerry looked him in the eye. “Now, Headwaiter,” he said. “I’ll have a bowl of onion soup, a cold roast beef sandwich on white, rare, and a glass of iced tea.”

“Write it down,” said Doc. He was playing it right. He knew that the new rules had stopped waiters from taking verbal orders.

“Don’t be so professional, Doc,” Jerry said. “It’s me, one of the boys.”

“You have to write it out,” said Doc, “it’s in the black book.”

Jerry clicked his pen and wrote the order out on the check. And handed it to Doc. Uncle T. followed Doc back into the Pantry.

“He’s gonna get you, Doc,” Uncle T. said. “I knew it all along. You know why? The Negro waiter ain’t got no more humility.”

“Shut the fuck up, Boone!” I told him.

“You’ll see,” Boone went on. “You’ll see I’m right. There ain’t a thing Doc can do about it, either. We’re gonna lose all the good jobs.”

We watched Jerry at the table. He saw us watching and smiled with his gray eyes. Then he poured some of the water from the glass on the linen cloth and picked up the silver sugar bowl and placed it right on the wet spot. Doc was still in the Pantry. Jerry turned the silver sugar bowl around and around on the linen. He pressed down on it some as he turned. But when he picked it up again, there was no dark ring on the wet cloth. We had polished the silver early that morning, according to the book, and there was not a dirty piece of silver to be found in the whole car. Jerry was drinking the rest of the water when Doc brought out the polished silver soup tureen, underlined with a doily and a breakfast plate, with a shining soup bowl underlined with a doily and a breakfast plate, and a bread-and-butter plate with six crackers; not four or five or seven, but six, the number the Commissary had written in the black book. He swung down the aisle of the car between the two rows of white tables and you could not help but be proud of the way he moved with the roll of the train and the way that tray was like a part of his arm. It was good service. He placed everything neat, with all company initials showing, right where things should go.

“Shall I serve up the soup?” he asked Jerry.

“Please,” said Jerry.

Doc handled that silver soup ladle like one of those Chicago Jew tailors handles a needle. He ladled up three good-sized spoonfuls from the tureen and then laid the wet spoon on an extra bread-and-butter plate on the side of the table, so he would not stain the cloth. Then he put a napkin over the wet spot Jerry had made and changed the ashtray for a prayer-card because every good waiter knows that nobody wants to eat a good meal looking at an ashtray.

“You know about the spoon plate, I see,” Jerry said to Doc.

“I’m a waiter,” said Doc. “I know.”

“You’re a damn good waiter,” said Jerry.

Doc looked Jerry square in the eye. “I know,” he said slowly.

Jerry ate a little of the soup and opened all six of the cracker packages. Then he stopped eating and began to look out the window. We were passing through his territory, Washington State, the country he loved because he was the only company inspector in the state and knew that once we got through Montana he would be the only man the waiters feared. He smiled and then waved for Doc to bring out the roast beef sandwich.

But Doc was into his service now and cleared the table completely. Then he got the silver crumb knife from the Pantry and gathered all the cracker crumbs, even the ones Jerry had managed to get in between the salt and pepper shakers.

“You want the tea with your sandwich, or later?” he asked Jerry.

“Now is fine,” said Jerry, smiling.

“You’re going good,” I said to Doc when he passed us on his way to the Pantry. “He can’t touch you or nothing.”

He did not say anything.

Uncle T. Boone looked at Doc like he wanted to say something too, but he just frowned and shuffled out to stand next to Jerry. You could see that Jerry hated him. But Jerry knew how to smile at everybody, and so he smiled at Uncle T. while Uncle T. bent over the table with his hands together like he was praying, and moved his head up and bowed it down.

Doc brought out the roast beef, proper service. The crock of mustard was on a breakfast plate, underlined with a doily, initials facing Jerry. The lid was on the mustard and it was clean, like it says in the book, and the little silver service spoon was clean and polished on a bread-and-butter plate. He set it down. And then he served the tea. You think you know the service, youngblood, all of you do. But you don’t. Anybody can serve, but not everybody can become a part of the service. When Doc poured that pot of hot tea into that glass of crushed ice, it was like he was pouring it through his own fingers; it was like he and the tray and the pot and the glass and all of it was the same body. It was a beautiful move. It was fine service. The iced tea glass sat in a shell dish, and the iced tea spoon lay straight in front of Jerry. The lemon wedge Doc put in a shell dish half-full of crushed ice with an oyster fork stuck into its skin. Not in the meat, mind you, but squarely under the skin of that lemon, and the whole thing lay in a pretty curve on top of that crushed ice.

Doc stood back and waited. Jerry had been watching his service and was impressed. He mixed the sugar in his glass and sipped. Danny Jackson and I were down the aisle in the hall. Uncle T. stood behind Jerry, bending over, his arms folded, waiting. And Doc stood next to the table, his tray under his arm, looking straight ahead and calm because he had given good service and knew it. Jerry sipped again.

“Good tea,” he said. “Very good tea.”

Doc was silent.

Jerry took the lemon wedge off the oyster fork and squeezed it into the glass, and stirred, and sipped again. “Very good,” he said. Then he drained the glass. Doc reached over to pick it up for more ice but Jerry kept his hand on the glass. “Very good service, Doc,” he said. “But you served the lemon wrong.”

Everybody was quiet. Uncle T. folded his hands in the praying position.

“How’s that?” said Doc.

“The service was wrong,” Jerry said. He was not smiling now.

“How could it be? I been giving that same service for years, right down to the crushed ice for the lemon wedge.”

“That’s just it, Doc,” Jerry said. “The lemon wedge. You served it wrong.”

“Yeah?” said Doc.

“Yes,” said Jerry, his jaws tight. “Haven’t you seen the new rule?”

Doc’s face went loose. He knew now that they had got him.

“Haven’t you seen it?” Jerry asked again.

Doc shook his head.

Jerry smiled that hard, gray smile of his, the kind of smile that says: “I have always been the boss and I am smiling this way because I know it and can afford to give you something.” “Steward Crouse,” he said. “Steward Crouse, go get the black bible for the headwaiter.”

Crouse looked beaten too. He was sixty-three and waiting for his pension. He got the bible.

Jerry took it and turned directly to the very last page. He knew where to look. “Now, Headwaiter,” he said, “listen to this.” And he read aloud. “Memorandum Number 22416. From: Douglass A. Tesdale, General Superintendent of Dining Cars. To: Waiters, Stewards, Chefs of Dining Cars. Attention: As of 7/9/65 the proper service for iced tea will be (a) Fresh brewed tea in teapot, poured over crushed ice at table; iced tea glass set in shell dish (b) Additional ice to be immediately available upon request after first glass of tea (c) Fresh lemon wedge will be served on bread-and-butter plate, no doily, with tines of oyster fork stuck into meat of lemon.” Jerry paused.

“Now you know, Headwaiter,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Doc.

“But why didn’t you know before?”

No answer.

“This notice came out last week.”

“I didn’t check the book yet,” said Doc.

“But that’s a rule. Always check the book before each trip. You know that, Headwaiter.”

“Yeah,” said Doc.

“Then that’s two rules you missed.”

Doc was quiet.

“Two rules you didn’t read,” Jerry said. “You’re slowing down, Doc.”

“I know,” Doc mumbled.

“You want some time off to rest?”

Again Doc said nothing.

“I think you need some time on the ground to rest up, don’t you?”

Doc put his tray on the table and sat down in the seat across from Jerry. This was the first time we had ever seen a waiter sit down with a customer, even an inspector. Uncle T., behind Jerry’s back, began waving his hands, trying to tell Doc to get up. Doc did not look at him.

“You are tired, aren’t you?” said Jerry.

“I’m just resting my feet,” Doc said.

“Get up, Headwaiter,” Jerry said. “You’ll have plenty of time to do that. I’m writing you up.”

But Doc did not move and just continued to sit there.

And all Danny and I could do was watch him from the back of the car. For the first time I saw that his hair was almost gone and his legs were skinny in the baggy white uniform. I don’t think Jerry expected Doc to move. I don’t think he really cared. But then Uncle T. moved around the table and stood next to Doc, trying to apologize for him to Jerry with his eyes and bowed head. Doc looked at Uncle T. and then got up and went back to the crew car. He left his tray on the table. It stayed there all that evening because none of us, not even Crouse or Jerry or Uncle T., would touch it. And Jerry didn’t try to make any of us take it back to the Pantry. He understood at least that much. The steward closed down Doc’s tables during dinner service, all three settings of it. And Jerry got off the train someplace along the way, quiet, like he had got on.

After closing down the car we went back to the crew quarters and Doc was lying on his bunk with his hands behind his head and his eyes open. He looked old. No one knew what to say until Boone went over to his bunk and said: “I feel bad for you, Doc, but all of us are gonna get it in the end. The railroad waiter is doomed.”

Doc did not even notice Boone.

“I could of told you about the lemon but he would of got you on something else. It wasn’t no use. Any of it.”

“Shut the fuck up, Boone!” Danny said. “The one thing that really hurts is that a crawling son-of-a-bitch like you will be riding when all the good men are gone. Dummies like you and these two hardheads will be working your asses off reading that damn bible and never know a goddamn thing about being a waiter. That hurts like a motherfucker!

“It ain’t my fault if the colored waiter is doomed,” said Boone. “It’s your fault for letting go your humility and letting the whites take over the good jobs.”

Danny grabbed the skullcap off Boone’s head and took it into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet. In a minute it was half a mile away and soaked in old piss on the tracks. Boone did not try to fight, he just sat on his bunk and mumbled. He had other skullcaps. No one said anything to Doc, because that’s the way real men show that they care. You don’t talk. Talking makes it worse.

IV

WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO TELL YOU, youngblood? They made him retire. He didn’t try to fight it. He was beaten and he knew it; not by the service, but by a book. That book, that bible you keep your finger stuck in. That’s not a good way for a man to go. He should die in service. He should die doing the things he likes. But not by a book.

All of us Old School men will be beaten by it. Danny Jackson is gone now, and Reverend Hendricks put in for his pension and took up preaching, full-time. But Uncle T. Boone is still riding. They’ll get me soon enough, with that book. But it will never get you because you’ll never be a waiter, or at least a Waiter’s Waiter. You read too much.

Doc got a good pension and he took it directly to Andy’s. And none of the boys who knew about it knew how to refuse a drink on Doc. But none of us knew how to drink with him knowing that we would be going out again in a few days, and he was on the ground. So a lot of us, even the drunks and hustlers who usually hang around Andy’s, avoided him whenever we could. There was nothing to talk about any more.

He died five months after he was put on the ground. He was seventy-three and it was winter. He froze to death wandering around the Chicago yards early one morning. He had been drunk, and was still steaming when the yard crew found him. Only the few of us left in the Old School know what he was doing there.

I am sixty-three now. And I haven’t decided if I should take my pension when they ask me to go or continue to ride. I want to keep riding, but I know that if I do, Jerry Ewald or Harry Silk or Jack Tate will get me one of these days. I could get down if I wanted: I have a hobby and I am too old to get drunk by myself. I couldn’t drink with you, youngblood. We have nothing to talk about. And after a while you would get mad at me for talking anyway, and keeping you from your pussy. You are tired already. I can see it in your eyes and in the way you play with the pages of your rule book.

I know it. And I wonder why I should keep talking to you when you could never see what I see or understand what I understand or know the real difference between my school and yours. I wonder why I have kept talking this long when all the time I have seen that you can hardly wait to hit the city to get off this thing and spend your money. You have a good story. But you will never remember it. Because all this time you have had pussy in your mind, and your fingers in the pages of that black bible.