Green River Train

by VINCENT McHUGH

THE eastbound from Utah came down between the promontories of gray rock and ran slowly into the town. There was a tall wedge of rock, like the battered stem of a ship, jutting from the hill behind the town, with a formation at the top that resembled a gun platform; and the correspondent had a glimpse of a street of old-fashioned red-brick Western fronts block-lettered ENGINE HOUSE and STORE and OFFICE in gray stone. Then the black westbound train slid alongside, making two motions of the world in the fading sun, and the railroad girls in bright blue denim swarmed between the trains, raising a clatter of covers on the journal boxes. He did not notice for a moment what the train was, until all the soldiers’ heads began to come out of the open windows and doors.

The correspondent and his wife got off and stood in the new ballast between the tracks. The sun had just gone behind the mountains, and the thin, blue, lighted air was like a vast warm trance. The voices of the girls calling to each other came clearly down the long trains, and the delicate faded colors of their printed cotton headcloths bobbed in and out under the cars. The soldiers had fastened back the upper halves of the vestibule doors, and five or six of them shouldered into each opening. They were talking to each other in quick, subdued voices; one of them played stopped chords on a four-string guitar.

A tall Private First Class with rumpled dark hair leaned out. “They got women working,” he said, aside, to no one, in a tone of such faint surprise that the correspondent thought it a very funny remark.

The Pfc did not smile. None of them smiled. They talked in short, hard bursts and their restless movements were full of a burning, caged energy.

A stocky blond soldier asked, “What’s the name of this town?”

“Green River, Wyoming,” said the thin, stooping one.

“Who says?”

“The conductor. He works on this train. He sees it ever’ day.”

“Not every day,” the guitar player said. He was standing with his head back against the open door and he sounded muley. He tried out the chords, assembling each chord from its component tones. “Green River train,” he said.

“Red River Train,“ the stooping soldier said.

“Don’t bother me,” the guitarist said. “ Pick your own color.”

“Play Sentimental Journey,” the stocky one said.

“I played it,” said the guitarist.

He went on fingering the instrument in the chatter all about him and only the stooping one listened. The guitarist played the first line of a song that might have been This Train Is Bound for Glory, but slower. It sounded like an old hymn tune. He glanced at the stooping soldier, who nodded gently and sang the second line in a soft nasal voice: —

“We will ride on that Green River train.“

The stocky soldier pushed in again. “How about that Sentimental Journey? That’s got a nice tune.”

“Go away,” the guitarist said.

Some of the other people from the eastbound got out and stood with their backs to the troop train. There was a quiet, tall girl in black net, with the Air Force wings over her left breast, A pleasant, dark, bony young woman, who looked Slavic-American, rested her hand on the head of a blonde girl of four. The child stood dutifully quiet, her plump backsides stuck out in the red skirt. A boy of six or so in khaki shirt and shorts wandered off between the cars, his hands behind his back. He put each foot down with a scrunch in the gravel. A fat girl in pale blue and a smaller, nervous girl stood chatting with the porter. He was young and big-boned, dark brown in his white jacket, and he had a way of doing intelligent things without seeming to notice the passenger he was helping. The soldiers talked only among themselves, and no one spoke to them; but all of them, civilians and soldiers, were as intimately conscious of one another as members of the same family.

The correspondent’s wife was a small, neat-boned, handsome woman of thirty-five, tanned dark as a Paiute, in a percale shirtmaker dress. The darkening sky did not look strange to her; she was a Westerner from another part of the cattle country. She gazed at the soldiers for a moment and spoke gently at the correspondent’s ear.

“They sure look wore out and high.”

“They came straight through,” the correspondent said.

He did not need the long chalk scrawls on the cars to tell him that: NORMANDY TO NAGASAKI and ONE MORE RIVER TO CROSS; TOKYO ROSE, WE LOVE YOU and the bitter JUST PASSING THROUGH. He saw the pink-and-black shoulder patch of a famous European division. All the soldiers had the same tousled, sweaty look, and a curious, intimate furtiveness, as if they had gone moist and slack thinking about women when women were denied them. The correspondent felt this in the remarks passed over their shoulders, the snickering laughter; and he sensed their shy strangeness in the American world they could not touch again.

He looked up at the tall ship of rock behind the town, standing toward him in the afterglow, and thought that he did not wish to see any more battered ships. He considered the rumors of surrender that morning in Ogden. They might be true this time. He had a sudden, intense impulse to tell the soldiers that it would be all right, that it would not be bad. He was surprised that he could not think of anything to say. All he could think of was the thing he had read in a book somebody had brought aboard at Ulithi, or at that place in the Palaus where the Navy held little more than the harbor and the small boats patroled all night to keep the enemy from swimming out and blasting the ships.

“The true peace of God,” the book had said, “begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.”

2

THE correspondent was a thin, medium-sized man of forty-two, in a gray seersucker suit. He was thankful that he had not been asked to wear a uniform. He had a silly horror of being caught in a uniform in which he would not be allowed to fight. At the same time, he felt a certain measure of civilian guilt, and despised himself for it. He regarded this as one more civilian idiocy. The sense of guilt had been very strong just before he signed up to go. It faded out of sight with the coast. Out there, death and wounds were the simple occupational risks common to all. No one stood upon the degree of risk, except that the people who had the more dangerous jobs were entitled to special sympathy.

Two or three weeks after he got back, the correspondent discovered with surprise that the guilt had reappeared. He was aware of a continual mild need to justify himself, to present his credentials; and he began to understand that this might be the civilian counterpart of that feeling of resentment and outrage, the sense of having been unfairly trapped and cruelly used, that troubled many of the men in uniform.

Then something had happened to the correspondent that put all this out of his mind. He had walked up Taylor Street one evening to the top of Nob Hill. It was quiet as Sunday morning and the late pure light touched the pale fronts of the houses and widened out over the Gate. Halfway through the block at the top, his heart began to weaken and slow down. He sat down on the curb. The beat became fainter and fainter until he thought that it had stopped. Then his heart flushed, there was an instant like fright, and it began to beat slowly and thickly again. The muscles in his arm jerked, then his jaw and his whole body. He tried to stop a cab but the driver took him for a drunk and drove slowly past.

When he got home, the correspondent did not mention this incident to his wife. He believed that he had had his first heart attack. After that, remembering an old joke, he began to think of himself as a slightly cracked egg. There was no such thing as a slightly cracked egg. But he did not care any more about guilt or resentment. He cared about human kindness and he wished to tell these soldiers that the other war would not be too bad.

Nobody spoke to them; but a small, redheaded soldier leaned on the door and watched the boy stamping in the gravel.

“Hey, Freddy,” he called softly, as if to no one.

“Jimmy!” another said behind him, in the same tone, and they all took it up: “Hey, Jack!" “Hey! Bill!” “Hello Dick!” “Hey, Richard!”

The boy’s mother smiled. The boy pretended that he did not hear them. He stamped slowly halfway down the next car, turned, and came stamping back, head bent.

The stooping soldier and the guitarist were trying out the middle part of the song. Another soldier came out the door, listened, and tried to swing it, bunching his shoulders in a slow crawling motion: —

“Naw,” the stocky blond one said. “That means something else.” He bawled suddenly:

How’s that?” he said cheerfully.

The red-haired soldier said, as if to nobody, out the car door, “Whaddaya wanta be? A fireman? A boat captain?” They called, “A pilot?” “ An engineer on a train?”

“That’s what I want to be — a pilot,” said the tall Pfc at the other door. He was gazing down at the girl with the wings on her breast. “What am I doing in the Infantry? I want to be in the Air Force. They get all the best girls.” He seemed to be talking to himself. The girl smiled faintly.

The redheaded soldier said to the boy, “A sailor in a submarine? A cowboy?”

The boy stopped suddenly beside his mother, looked up and smiled. Everyone smiled but the soldiers. The porter’s lips came apart over his good teeth and the fat girl in blue laughed.

A soldier in a window behind her said, “ I could go for somethin’ blue. I just could.”

She laughed at him. “You’re going the wrong way.”

“That’s nothin’, honey,” he said. “That’s nothin’ at all. I’ll come all the way round an’ meet you.”

The red-haired soldier looked down at the boy and said, “That did it. So you want to be a cowboy?”

The boy nodded up at him.

“All right,” the redhead said. “I’m coming back and get me a ranch. I’ll hire you for one of my hands. How’s that?”

The boy nodded. His mother looked up and said in a matter-of-fact tone, “His daddy is a sailor. He’s going to meet him.”

The little girl danced out from under her hand and looked pleased.

“That’s fine,” the redheaded one said. “A sailor is fine. Anything but a soldier.”

The guitarist was playing the tune slowly behind him.

“Soldier’s no good,” somebody else said.

“ I still want to be a pilot,” the Pfc said at the next door. A corporal leaned over his shoulder, looked, and said, “Uh-huh. Me too.”

“Where you want me to meet you? New York or Philadelphia?” the soldier at the window said to the girl in blue. “ Ah’ll make it anywhere you say. Man, when I see somethin’ in blue I just can’t hold onto myself.”

The girls in denim were gone now, and the white arms of the porters from the eastbound train were waving down the long perspective of dusk. The people between the cars stirred.

A soldier called, “How far we got to go to Frisco, porter?”

“Day and a night,” the porter said. He was helping the girl in blue up the steps. “Full day. You got a long way to go after that.” His voice was deep and slow.

“You been out?”

“New Guinea,” the porter said. “Got malaria.” He considered. “Maybe you won’t get to go now.”

“That’s fine,” the soldier said.

The tall Pfc spoke directly to the girl with the wings. “Where is he now?”

She looked up and said in a tone of simple statement, “He’s missing.”

The correspondent saw him stand there a moment in the doorway. Then he put his left hand in the hand of the man behind him and sw’ung his body far out, the right arm coming out and down in a movement like the movement of a bullfighter the correspondent had seen in Juarez, placing his sword between the horns of the bull. He touched the girl’s shoulder and nodded. His lips set. Then he swung back, in a reverse of the same movement, and the train began to pull out.

“Here comes Tokyo Rose,” the stocky blond soldier said to the correspondent.

“I used to hear her out there,” the correspondent called. His voice sounded harsh to him. “She puts on a good show. You won’t have any trouble now.”

The soldiers were jostling each other to get back into the cars. The correspondent went up the steps behind his wife, and as the porter got on, the eastbound train stirred. All the soldiers were waving from the windows.

“The little sons of bitches,” the correspondent’s wife said.

He looked at her and saw that she was crying with a smiling face, crying and waving at the heads hung out of the windows. Then the eastbound was going and he could hear the guitar going away and the soft high voice of the slouching soldier singing: —

The galley slid past with the ghostly white coats of the waiters and chefs. The trains were making two motions of the world in the darkness; and looking up, the correspondent saw the last faint light on the wedge of rock behind the town, like the ship of the Republic, oncoming and tall in the immense solitude of the mountains.