The Gandy Dancer

The heat rose into the clearest dawn I’d ever seen. A corridor of one hundred men extended a quarter mile, their yellow hardhats bobbing against the gray terrain, the ring of their spike malls, the clang of their shovels quickly swallowed up by an endless flatland of dust, sagebrush, and rattlesnakes.

I’d been given an anchor bar—iron, an inch thick, five feet long, easily fifty pounds. When properly put to task, it curled up under the rail and with a click secured an anchor tight against the tie. With each new click, I swear, it gained another pound.

“Ever do a virgin?”

“What?”

“Everything they say is true, like doing it with a vise grip, only softer”—then the laugh, the guttural, Dracula laugh that I would come to know so well by summer’s end.

This was Lenny. Tall, Nordic Prussian, green eyes, blond, Romeo of the Railroad. He was from some little town in Idaho, but that was all I knew. Like most of the others, when it came to the past, you couldn’t wrench a word out of them.

Snap!

“No, dumb shit. Hold it this way, then muscle into it.” Click. Click. Click. Smooth as a pirouette.

Snap!

“Jesus. Where do they find you guys?” He showed me again, but the bar had become so heavy I could barely lift it into position much less produce the desired click.

For the next three hours, we worked on, Lenny clicking away, me hauling my bar from tie to tie, the thought of finishing out the day becoming unbearable.

At 9:30, the call came from up the tracks—“Break! Brreakkk”—and a hundred guys dropped their tools and headed for the water cart. Time for a cigarette, a cup of mud (only the new guys like me fretted about picking out the little green bugs), and a quick review of last night’s brawls, boozings, and beddings. (The detailed account would come at lunch.)
“You make it last night?”

“What do you think?”

“C’mon.”

“Ask the Spic. He held her down. Hey Spic! Show ’em where she bit ya.” The stocky Hispanic raised his forearm to a round of raucous applause.

I failed to see the humor.

That night, I hitched a ride into town to call my father, but when the operator asked if he’d accept the charges, he declined and we were disconnected. Figuring there’d been a mix-up on the line, I tried again, but still his answer was no. I changed a five into quarters, made a paid call and there he was, simple and direct as always:

“Your call. You pay.”

“But—I’m at a pay booth. In Gillette. I didn’t think you’d mind if I—”

“So how was your first day?”

“Terrible. The work’s a killer, just like you said it’d be, and this place—nothing but flat and ugly as far as you can see. I swear, if the moon could grow sagebrush, it’d be Wyoming.”

“You’ll get used to it.” He sounded amused.

“Thanks. I’ll remember that next time you’re stranded on the moon. Man, was this a mistake coming out here to this god-awful job. I don’t know what I was thinking.” Then, with a desperate laugh, “Get me outta here!”

Silence.

I pressed ahead, cautiously, first suggesting, then coming right out and asking to come home, but at each new turn, a brick wall. I recounted the exchange at break, certain it would have some shock value for him, but nothing.

He listened, courteously, yet unmoved and strangely preoccupied, as though he was working one of his coveted crossword puzzles in the comfort of our sunroom. I could almost see him eased back on his Stratolounger, a splash of Chivas at his side, his gold pen lettering in a word or two as I popped another couple of quarters into the phone.

“You still there?”

“Yes.”

“I figure I need about two hundred bucks to get back.”

“What about your college loans? I thought you wanted to graduate debt-free. Wasn’t that the point of all of this? That you couldn’t make nearly this much money with any other job. Isn’t that what you said?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Isn’t that why you took this ‘god-awful’ job?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Stick to your plan.”

“But I could still pay off—”

“Listen to me. You need to do us both a favor, okay?”

“What?”

“You need to start honoring your commitments, especially the ones you make to yourself.”

“I know that, I really do, but this is different, this is—”

“And you have to quit running from life’s little challenges.”

“Hey, man, this is no little challenge. If you could see this place, these people. I could be killed out here, and for what? To pay off a few college loans before I graduate?” Surely there was something he could arrange for me back home.

And then the shocker. “You’d do well to stop thinking of this as your home.” He wasn’t mean about it, or the least bit distant, just matter-of-fact. Then, almost cordially, “Uncle Henry’ll be here next week from San Diego. Maybe you could call Sunday when the rates are low. I’m sure he’d like to visit with you. Have a good week.”

Dial tone.

Dial tone? I had felt certain that I would spend this night in the comfort of a motel, that in the morning, a ticket would be waiting for me to return to the lush summer in Minneapolis, with its many lakes encircled by bathing beauties.

Instead, dial tone, my own father leaving me to face the dusty streets of Gillette, Wyoming, and a nine-mile trek over a gravel road to a string of boxcars, revamped as sleeping quarters, on a side rail in the middle of nowhere.

I pulled an army blanket over my head—inadequate to shield me from the cold night air—and swore never to speak to the bastard again.

Next morning, I was teamed with Fitzman, a spiker—short, brawny, with mean eyes. He bummed me a cigarette.

“Thanks. Got a match?”

“Yeah,” he scoffed. “Your breath and a buffalo fart.” He tossed me his matches, but that was it. Not another word the rest of the morning. At lunch, Lenny answered all my questions about Fitzman with a simple statement:

“He hates you.”

“Why?”

Then came that laugh of his and, yelling across the crowd, “Hey, Fitz! The new guy wants to know why you hate ’im.”

The gang busted up as Fitzman looked our way and smiled his sick, intimidating smile. Back on the tracks, he told me he’d killed someone, someone just like me.

“You kidding?”

He stared right through me.

“Why?”

“He was wearing one of those green sweaters. Wimp green, with an alligator on it, and I just hate those fucking sweaters with those alligators on ’em and the fucking cocksuckers who wear ’em!”

He held his point for an instant, then laughed in my face.

“How many of those sweaters do you own?” he asked, his gray eyes growing psychotic. “Well? How many?”

“Eight dozen.”

He raised his spike mall.

“Three dozen yellow, a dozen pink, and four dozen wimp green.”

For a moment, I thought I was dead. Then the glare in his eyes softened.

“Not bad, Alligator. I might not have to off ya after all.”

I asked about Fitzman at dinner, whether he’d really killed anyone, but the guys just smirked and shook their heads as if I were too naive to be alive.

After dinner, I set out for town, figuring my father’d have to listen to me now, if he’d believe me at all. I was approaching a curve in the road, thinking how he wouldn’t want his only son working with a fugitive murderer, how I could appeal to his sense of family; then, suddenly, my confidence shrank.

There, lying ahead in the rocks and dust, were several long, narrow sticks. “Rule is,” Lenny had told me, “if it looks like a stick, it’s a snake, cuz there ain’t no trees that big out here to make a stick long enough to be a snake.”

There they lay, soaking up the last rays of sunlight. Bull snakes. Harmless. A handful of gravel and they sprang to life, slithering over each other with a frenetic whisss into the grass. I took a step forward, but thought, Suppose they come back, come back when you’re right up there beside them?

Sure enough, a couple had already slipped out of the grass. And now, a few more. I reached for another handful of gravel.

Suppose they get pissed? Turn on you? Start squirming down the road after you?

But—snakes don’t chase people.

Says who?

Says … Besides, they’re bull snakes. Harmless.

Harmless, hell! A snake’s a snake!

I froze. Then—and I know this sounds crazy, and I knew it was crazy at the time—I tore out of there like a kid running up the stairs in the middle of the night with the biggest, scariest bogeyman fast on his heels.

I’d never felt so thoroughly ashamed, diminished, and defeated. I stared into the vast, desolate twilight and began a letter to my father:

“This may mean you never let me live in ‘your home’ again, but it’s time I got some things off my chest.

“Ever since high school, you’ve been riding me, always on my back, a little harder every year. It’s like you resent me for being alive. And the way you are around mother and the girls, all sweetness and light, so happy to see them, gave Sherry a free ride through nursing school and popping for Martie’s wedding next year. But me, I have to pay for every cent of every shitty little thing I do and even some stuff I don’t do, like that time you handed me the water bill and said it was time I started learning how much it costs to run a household. What is that? None of the other dads do crap like that. And even after I paid the damn $14.63, you still, still look at me all disappointed, like I’m some three-foot putt you just missed on the goddamned golf course!

“Well, listen up, you mean old son of a bitch. You’re not the only one who’s disappointed.”

Sons stand up to their fathers in many ways. Some have that one great argument that breaks into a fist fight. Some wage cold war right to the end. Some get higher-paying jobs.
Me, I did it with a letter. Paragraph after paragraph, heaping every contemptuous thought I had harbored since childhood, and even coming up with a few I hadn’t just for good measure.

More than a bitch list, it was a relentless diatribe that sought to hurt him to the core, and concluded with the declaration: “Your whole life, all sixty-three years of it, adds up to nothing but one big piece of shit.”

I felt relieved, if a little anxious, but then there was nothing to do. The foreman would mail it from town that night and before the week was out, my father would have a taste of his own medicine.

The wind kicked up as it can only in eastern Wyoming. The work, the crew, the snakes, the wind, the vicious letter to my erstwhile friend … it was all too much to take. I lay still in my bunk, lonely and afraid that I would never get out of this terrible, terrible place.

Those first two weeks, everything ached: arms, legs, back, even fingers. Each day began with a gutful of the grease they called breakfast and ended with the delusion that tomorrow would bring a plan of escape.

I declined Lenny’s nightly offers to tear up the town, preferring instead to turn in early, physically drained and emotionally weak, although I’d never admit it. Mostly, though, it was just exhaustion. This was not work. It was hard labor, chain-gang-style, complete with ex-cons, illegal aliens, and straw bosses everywhere, crowned with white hardhats in contrast to our yellow.

Spikin’: Me, Fitzman, Lenny, and a guy named Eric who’d been transferred down the rails to us for mixin’ it up with the steel gang. The tracks of a woman’s fingernails ran from his brow to the stubble on his chin—battle scars, he told us, of a successful conquest the night before.

Fitzman laughed. He liked Eric’s take-what- you-want approach, while Lenny preferred the more subtle strategy of his “Fifth Night Advent.”

“First night, you don’t even kiss her. Don’t even try. Instead you pretend to listen to all that crap they talk about, then end the night with your sweetest little-boy face, saying, ‘This has been one of the most special evenings of my life.’

“Second night, you let her touch you—and they always do the second night—but instead of grabbing her, you make your voice as sappy as you can: ‘When you touch my arm like that, you touch my heart,’ then just kick back, and let her keep touchin’ you.

“Third night, you kiss her. You’ll know she’s ready by that stupid look they all get on their face, then give her a peck, mouth closed, very tender like you’re tasting a Dairy Queen that you want to make last the whole day. She’s gonna look surprised at first, but later, maybe ten minutes, maybe half an hour, she makes that stupid face again, and you take another taste of the curlicue.

“Fourth night, you do it, but all in slow motion, little steps that last five minutes, maybe more.”

Fitzman was fidgety; Eric picked up a spike and looked like he was going back to work; I’m Catholic, and I stood there disgusted, all ears.

“You start by just playing with her hair a little, and touching your lips against her cheek—not kissing, just touching—in little circles up to her eyes then over to her ears. If she’s a virgin, she’ll love it, and if she’s not, she’ll go wild. Before you know it, you’re home, Jerome.”

“Suppose she tries to stop you?”

“That’s when you play your ace, Alligator.”

“What ace?”

“You look at her with a little surprise and a little hurt and a little whimper, ‘Don’t you know I love you?’ ”

“Fuuuu-cckk,” Fitzman scoffed, going back to work. “At that rate, you probably don’t get laid twice in a lifetime.”

“Never fails,” Lenny said, his green eyes dreamlike. “Yep. The old Fifth Night Advent,” he mused.

“What happens the fifth night?”

“You tell her to fuck off,” and Fitzman and Eric busted up.

“Hey . . . what’re you girls doing back there?” one of the straw bosses yelled.

“Just teachin’ Alligator how to drive them spikes home, boss, how to drive them spikes home.”

I decided to go home, not home-home, but back to Minneapolis. I arrived at the decision a couple of weeks later in the dinner car where we sat, fifty guys on either side of a dozen picnic tables, and ate something the cook proudly referred to as “corn steak.”

It was nothing, really. Not the wind burn on my face, not the creosote in my pores, not the handfuls of salt tablets that rotted away at my gut, not even the bright-red ranch dressing that now dribbled from Eric’s chin as he sat across from me, mumbling something with his mouth full of the slop they called food.

And yet it was everything.

Maybe I wouldn’t finish college, maybe I would. All I knew was I couldn’t take another day with Sled Gang #2. So without telling anyone, I took only the things I needed, not even a second set of clothes, and headed for town.

Whatever happens, you’ll come out all right. Hell, you’ve been through tougher than this … or have you? Just don’t forget to look out for the—Snakes!

Maybe you can go around through the grass, but wait!—isn’t that where the rattlers are?

“Damn snakes. Get out of here.” I threw fistful after fistful of gravel, until the whole entangled mess tumbled off into the ditch.

You just gotta keep throwing that gravel, Alligator, just gotta keep throwin’ it, just gotta keep throwin’ it!

But as I did, I could feel those snakes filling in behind me, ahead of me, their numbers multiplying, a few even daring to rear their heads from right there beside me in the dwindling twilight.

They’re coming closer, crisscrossing, reeling, hissing: listen!

I swear they were closing in, certain I wasn’t imagining it, encircled, trapped, heart pulsing, no way to fend them off, my body too rigid to stoop for more gravel, the gray strands taunting, squirming toward my boots, every one of them winding, twisting, thrashing in the frenzy.

Then gone. Like that! Scattered. All of them. Back into the grass.

Lenny laughed the loudest, though Fitzman and Eric ran a close second. Lenny slammed the car door and walked over to me.

“Alligator, look at you, you’re shakin’ like a leaf. What happened?”

“Shit, he’s scared to fuckin’ death. Alligator, them’re bull snakes. They don’t bite. C’mon, get in the car. You need a drink.”

The Gaslight was the antithesis of everything its name implied. Walls covered with cowboy bric-a-brac, linoleum floors, blond paneling, Formica tables, the stale stench of spilled beer hitting hard as we walked into the place, four conspicuous railroaders in an obvious ranchers’ watering hole.

“The usual,” Eric said with a smile as the waitress, looking a little worried, nodded and walked off.

“What’s the usual?”

“What do you care, Alligator?” He wasn’t looking for an answer.

A bottle of Wild Turkey, four glasses, popcorn. Two drinks later, and somebody yelled a toast to us from across the room: “To the faggot gandy dancers,” to which Fitzman raised his own glass: “To the skanky whores the ranchers call their women.”

That did it. A hard woman, one who’d seen more than a few mornings face down in the dirt of the corral, got up, headed in our direction, and thinking I’d said it, slugged me square in the mouth—bam!—and I’m down on the floor sure as I just wised off to my paternal grandmother.

Incredibly, Fitzman decked her, knocking her cold. Then, like someone called a cue, the place burst into upheaval, chairs and tables flying, bottles and glasses missiling through the air, guys gruntin’ and wailin’ and bleedin’ and spittin’ and me, a dumb, scared-to-death college kid right in the middle of an honest to Jesus barroom brawl.

On my hands and knees, I was making for the door when I heard Lenny yell—“Alligator”—and I knew I had no choice but to get into it.

The first guy I caught totally off guard, hitting him so hard I nearly threw my shoulder out. A second punch and he was finished. As the fight went on, I became aware of the strength I had gained in my arms and shoulders and back. Big guys, 6 ‘ 4″ and 210 pounds, were throwing their best shots at me, and although their punches were like bricks in my face, mine must have been like freight trains in theirs. Same for Lenny and Eric and Fitzman. They just kept coming and we just kept taking them on.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun. It was goddamned exhilarating! Before, I’d always been the sissy getting beat up on the way home from school. All of a sudden I was a tough guy, ruthless, busting heads in a dingy saloon in the Wild West, just as God intended!

We did the town that night, the four of us, hitting every bar on the strip, our bludgeoned faces, bloodied shirts, and puffed-up lips like battle scars and challenges to anyone who dared mess with us. No one did.

“Hey,” Eric laughed, “you see Alligator flat-fuck fall when that cowboy kicked him?”

“Yeah, but he got up again,” said Fitzman in my defense.

“Sure, he got up. Spread that bastard’s nose clear across his face. Oooo. Then all that fucking blood! I never woulda believed it.”

“Here’s to you, Alligator, you faggot,” and all at once, they’re holding their glasses up to me, they’re toasting Me!

For the next two months, the four of us were invincible. Nobody crossed us, not even the straw bosses. Hell, we were the Defenders of the Railroad.

We worked the hardest part of the gang, the tail end, spikin’ and anchorin’, daring the 110-degree days to drop us sure as they would half a dozen guys before the whistle blew. This was home, I decided. The harsh terrain, the ungodly work, the searing heat reflecting off the ballast onto our blistered lips, the grit in our teeth, the sweat rolling off our noses—all of it bearable precisely because it was so unbearable.

Muscles bulged, backs bowed, lungs filled with the aroma of creosote and manhood.

August was full of noises, sharp and piercing, made louder by the sudden stillness of the wind. The shrill of the killdeer, the crack and crunch of ballast beneath our boots, the whine of the locust, the screech and grind of heavy machinery, the hiss and flutter of the snakes just yards away, restless and shedding their skins in anticipation of winter, and everywhere, the rrringgg of spike malls falling hard, and all the more piercing on hungover ears.

I was showing some new guy how to spike the day it happened. Lenny, who’d been working his Fifth Night Advent on last year’s homecoming queen—“a real looker,” he assured us, “and best of all, a virgin”—dragged himself up to the tracks, still half-drunk, looking like shit with a smile.

“It worked,” he said, and we all busted up. The details, as always, would come at lunch. But lunch never came for Lenny.

Instead, a dusty red pickup came. It roared off the road, right through the snakes and sagebrush, then ground to a stop a few feet from the railbed. The face of the little man who got out was so flushed with anger and rage that it looked like he’d dipped his head in a blueberry pie.

Lenny played it smart, letting the guy plant one right on his lip, then fell back onto the ties.

“You ever so much as look at my little girl again, and I’ll kill you.”

I stood there, deeply saddened, slowly growing conscious of the fact that there was nothing funny, never had been, about Lenny’s little schemes.

Before the guy was even back in his truck, Straw Boss #1 was coming down the line, his belly barely able to keep pace with his fat little legs.

“Outta here,” he was yelling and pointing at Lenny. “You! Outta here! Now!”

But next day, there was Lenny, packing a letter from the union attorney, back on the tracks, cocky as ever.

It was hard for me to make conversation with him that day, but I felt obliged. Aside from my contempt, there was gratitude. He had, after all, been a mentor of sorts. And there was a kind of nostalgia, too, as though something I had been clinging to was finally slipping away and in its wake there’s a lukewarm chill that comes when you suspect your life is changing, changing again.

A day or two passed and I still felt the same. I hadn’t talked much to Lenny or to any of the guys for that matter. I didn’t feel like a Defender of the Railroad anymore, but I didn’t feel like a dumb college kid, either. My whole life to that point seemed to have been made up of a series of random events that happened around me, to me, when all along I could have changed them somehow, worked things to my advantage if I had only tried.

I was turning this over in my head, feeling it gnaw at my gut, when I noticed Fitzman slacking off—the only sure way to get canned on the railroad.

“Hey, Fitz, what’re ya doin’?” I said. “Get to work, girl.” But he just leaned back on one leg, rested his spike mall on his shoulder and stared up the tracks.

A gray sedan, very official looking, had left the road and was rolling slowly toward the head of the line. It disappeared into its own trailing dust, then a minute later, Straw Boss #1 and these two suits came through the cloud and were heading our way. I figured they were brass come to haul Lenny off, but Fitzman knew better.

“What?” someone said. “Who are those guys?”

He didn’t blink an eye.

“Richard Fitzman? You’re under arrest for the murder of John Shane. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say …”

Our mouths dropped open. Everyone’s. Even Straw Boss #1’s.

Fitzman had actually done it. He wasn’t lying. All those times we teased him, taunted him, turned our backs on him as that crazy glaze veiled his eyes and he trained his spike mall on us—Jesus, he’d done it!

I don’t remember the FBI cuffing him or what anybody said or what we worked on that afternoon or even if we worked at all. All I remember was straining to see the license plate of that gray sedan, trying to make out the letters and numbers as though by knowing them I could somehow bring Fitzman back and undo some past action that I couldn’t begin to fathom.

Dinner was quiet that night. No threats. No lies. No bold proposals to trash some new saloon. Just the clink of army-issue forks and knives on army-issue plates and saucers, just the smack and chomp of a bunch of gandy dancers sloppin’ it down.

I took a bottle up the track a ways and sat on the rails. Way off in the distance, a diesel chugged, a horn blared, and I got to thinking how things sometimes happen for no good reason you can figure, how life just rolls on and on, like that coal train out there moving into the cool, silent night. And there goes Fitzman, like he’s waving from the caboose, the only guy who’d ever given me a nickname I actually grew to like.

Last week of August, we got word that the stretch was finished. Day after tomorrow, we’d be laid off. The news had no effect on me. I wasn’t happy or sad or anything. For me it was just another day on the railroad except for the little surprise waiting for me on my bunk: a letter from my father. No apologies. No query as to my well-being. Not even a mention of the philippic I’d written a hundred years ago. Just news of the family and the old neighborhood. It was signed, simply: The Mean Old Son of a Bitch.

I read it again and again, noticing finally that it was dated nearly two months before the postmark. I never asked why. Didn’t need to. I just stuffed it in my back pocket that last day as I gathered up my gear, said good-bye to Lenny and Eric and the guys, and headed down that gravel road for the final time.

Those snakes, I didn’t even see ’em. If you just keep moving, steady as she goes, they don’t bother you. Hell, they don’t even know you’re passing through.

That night, on the step deck of the last car, in the open air, rolling over the very track I’d given my tears and toil to, I felt a deep and lasting sense of accomplishment. No concerns about how hard my last semester might be, where I would find a job, whether I could pay a water bill or even how much a water bill was. Only the glide over the ribbon rail, the vastness of the sunset, and the roar of the ride.

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