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| Saint Sebastian River Bridge [Click image to call up all published instalments] |
June 1922, continued
Red was standing on the open platform, staring down the tracks to the south like some rube waiting for the circus. He was immediately disgusted with himself. That God-damned train hadn’t never been on time before, and nobody but a fool would expect anything differ’nt now, just because he was a nervous fool.
He sat down across the street on the east side of the market square, in the shade of the big oaks and bay trees which threw their shadows across 14th Avenue. Right here by the station, 14th boasted a crushed shell and marl paving, but it petered out to sandy dirt tracks a block or two both north and south. He reckoned, upon reflection, he couldn’t hardly miss a train just by sittin’ across the street.
He wasn’t disappointed in either expectation. The train was not on time, and he didn’t miss it. He’d hoped one of the men he knew would be on the train, either Dexter Kluppelberg, who folks called The Swede, or, in a pinch, Finny Frankenreiter.
Seemed like there was a lot of German fellas runnin’ the trains. Hell, even Dexter said he was no Swede but Prussian, whatever that was. Some damn kind of German, anyway.
They could talk away from prying eyes and ears |
Looking up and down the platform, Dex twisted the key in a fat padlock and let them in. The car was relatively empty on the northern run, and smelled of mold, dust, and rat pee. No payrolls went north, it was the freight cars that carried the load on this leg. Skins from alligators, otter, deer, fox and bear sold dearly in cities of the North. Feathers of the Great Blue Heron, the White Ibis, the Snowy Egret and the Roseate Spoonbill joined the hides, disappearing into the great greedy maw of the North’s rich elite, to become hats and coats and capes and fur collars. Citrus filled open cars with chutes that could be opened into great bins and processors for juice, while boxcars carried the crates of Number One gift-grade fruit to wealthy homes and expensive restaurants up and down the eastern seaboard.
Dex was of medium height, trim and muscled like a pugilist, which he was. His hair, long on top and nearly shaved on the sides, was so black it shone with bluish highlights, and matched his waxed, pointy mustache. He wore a grey pinstripe suit with a matching vest and a derby hat, in excellent shape but a good ten years out of date.
That was all according to plan, as the young entrepreneur preferred not to draw attention to himself. He slid the car’s door shut and turned to Red with a smile. He put out a hand and they shook; both tried to crush the other’s hand, a game played by most young men at the time. Neither the railroad security guard who boxed on the side nor the young farmer who worked hard every day had any need to flinch; both had a solid grip indeed.
“Good to see you, Mr. Dedge. How is the cypress business going?” Right to the point, something Red liked about him, no beating around the bush.
“Got us a good haul this time” |
Dex didn’t mind. He could get nearly as much for the logs as sawn boards, and there was less fuss getting them on and off the train. Their little side business wasn’t exactly through the Florida East Coast Railroad; in fact, the upper management of the Company knew nothing about it, and Dex went to great lengths to keep it that way.
The number of empty cars that ran back to Jacksonville, where the train met other lines that took it on north, had been an obvious business opportunity to the enterprising Kluppelberg. He had taken Finny Frankenreiter into his confidence because Finny was his counterpart, making the runs when Kluppelberg was off, and it would have been extremely difficult to pull off his schemes without Finny catching wind of them.
They’d agreed to split the take, with whichever train guard making the run getting two-thirds of the profits when he made the deals and the other getting one-third. Being in each other’s pockets kept them honest, and they each contributed a small share to the bribes that had to be doled out to the conductors and engineers who could not be fooled about unscheduled stops and goods that never got listed in the manifests.
Finny was a little too cavalier in Dexter’s opinion, wearing clothes and driving cars no railroad bull’s salary could explain, but Finny claimed to have come from money. The way he lost at gambling convinced most folks he must have gotten it somewhere.
Like they were real tycoons |
Red thought it was amusing, and though he could hold his own with what he considered “city talk,” it also amused him to give Dex the full Georgia country-boy treatment when they spoke. “H’it shorely is,” he replied, laying it on thick as cold bacon grease. “But we’un’s got us another feller wants to get a pick-up too, about a quarter-mile before our hide. Local boys, we got us a understanding.”
Dex was interested; he could handle more cypress than the Dedge boys could provide, and his business went further than just contraband timber besides. He and Finny bought illicit hides and feathers, salted alligator, bear and sea cow meat used to feed migrant workers, and occasionally transported the migrants themselves, who were often used as strikebreakers. Salted fish, conchs and sea turtles. They had even hauled bootleg marl and shell-mound diggings used for roadbeds a time or two, but it was too bulky and hard to move.
They’d nearly been caught out with that one time, Dexter told him, when a Company suit had shown up at the switchyard in Jacksonville unannounced. Luckily, he had been hot on the trail of a slick high-rolling pickpocket who had clipped some serious swag off some seriously rich and now seriously pissed-off passengers. The suit hadn’t paid any mind to cars full of rubble being shunted onto a siding.
They dealt on the black market |
“So, in what location are we to on-load the merchandise? And of what does the merchandise consist?”
Red cleared his throat, enjoying their little game. Dex was a lot more fun than Finny, unless you wanted to go drinkin’ and whorin’; then Finny was your man. But he wasn’t as smart as Dex, didn’t pick up on as much nor as fast, and he wasted too much time in idle squawking. Red worried that he’d get a snoot full one night and spill his guts to one of Miss Lottie’s girls, and he knew just how fast that got around. Hell, Lottie had told him all about Guy, and hadn’t even wanted to get paid. He never doubted she would sell that sort of information as quick as she sold a pussy.
“Jus’ a quarter-mile ’fore y’all get to my cache, wes’ side. My marker’ll be there, then when you’re did with his load you c’n just idle on up and git mine.” He almost added “Massah,” like the travelling show comedians, mimicking what they thought black folk sounded like, but thought that might be going too far. “He’s got him a load like our’n, jus’ not as much.”
Awful young to be that mean |
“Well, inform them I will pay the going rate, no negotiations.”
Red shook his head and chuckled a little. “Tell ’im yerself, I’ll be down t’ my patch, mindin’ my own bidness. Just returnin’ a favor by lettin’ you know, all the rest is strictly ’tween you and him.”
He shook hands again with the railroad smuggler, again trying to get an advantage, maybe roll the boxer’s knuckles, but it did him no good. Dex just smiled and squeezed right back.
“A pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Dedge, as always.” He turned and slid the door open, where the afternoon sun blazed across the market square and right into their eyes.
Red quickly stepped out headed south, and Dexter went north to clue in the engineer on their new schedule, after securing the mail car door.
A long hour later, after loading the legitimate freight and passengers, the train squealed to a halt just in sight down the tracks from Red and Guy’s hide. Red’s marker, a red handkerchief, or bandana, as the Mexican migrants called them, was tied to a tree branch at about the level of the engineer’s windows, right where War and Floyd’s spot was.
A good place to get some shut-eye |
Before the cars finished bumpin’ each other up and down the line, a single sharp whistle was heard and men in work clothes swarmed out. That would be Dex. Red saw him pointing them into the woods. They vanished into the brush and re-emerged shortly with hefty cypress logs over their shoulders, two men to a log. Those logs in turn vanished, quicker’n you could say shit, into some open-top boxcars about a third of the way down the line of cars.
He had to hand it to Dexter Kluppelberg, the man was all business. Get it done and now. He liked that. He’d done deals with Dex for near two years now and he appreciated the man’s efficiency every time.
Wasn’t ten minutes till the train idled up his way, the engine passing him until the open boxes were about even with his path into the woods. A single high whistle, a swarm of men, and Red was hustling with them down to the woodpile.
He looked a holy fool |
The arrangement, having the railroad laborers haul their timber, made sense. It would have taken forever for just him and Guy to load it, and the train couldn’t wait. The problem was, they had to pay for the service. Dex and Finny had to pay the men to work, and to keep their traps shut besides; they passed that cost on to their sellers in the form of higher prices. Red saw there was nothing he could do about it, but it still chapped his ass.
So he’d come up with a compromise. What if he and Guy did the same work as the others, and got the same pay? That way, he could recoup some of his money, and it weren’t nothing they wasn’t already doing anyway. Dex readily agreed; he knew the Dedges would pull their weight and there was certainly no worry of them talking out of school. To Red Dedge, it was just another way for a young man to make money in tough times, using his muscles and his brains.
In another ten minutes, he had their money in his hand and the train was working up steam. The men threw the last few bundles of scrap wood for the boilers into an open box door and jumped for the landings as the great machine began to crawl away. Wasn’t much scrap this time, as they hadn’t done that much sawin’. Red didn’t mind. It was the least profitable of the things he could have hauled all the way from the Blue, the kind of thing you did for money when you had nothin’ better so’s you might as well.
He might be in the wrong business |
They’d parked the truck up the tracks a ways in the bushes, and hustled that way with grins and laughs. It was payday, and they had a social to go to tonight. And Amion William Dedge was eighteen years old.
At about nine o’clock Red and Guy were dressing for the social. They’d gone right back to the farm after selling off their timber by about four in the afternoon. The brothers had agreed to worry about shoppin’ Monday, as few stores were open Sunday. Instead they’d gone home, taken a few slashes of Guy’s excellent moonshine, and grabbed a few hours of shut-eye.
He didn’t think it looked too bad |
He’d rubbed down his boots with Redwing Heritage All-Natural Boot Oil. Guy had rinsed and brushed his new coat, a light natural cotton jacket with wide, pointed brown lapels and brown cuffs. Red thought it was damned foolish. It was more of a decoration than a real garment; all he needed was a wide-brimmed Panama hat and a pointy mustache and Guy would look like a down-on-his-luck Mississippi gambler. He smirked to see a small tear in the right shoulder, but he’d forgotten that Guy could sew. His brother pulled out a needle and thread and in no time the rip was gone, while the small resin stain still marked Red’s new shirt.
They pulled the high-top Ford up along the dirt road that uptown was called 20th Street. Out here it was Zeuch’s Grove Road. Cars lined the track for a quarter mile at least.
About two miles out of the village, Herman “Z” Zeuchs kept his townhouse. It was a dark, massive pile of cypress and oak, two wings at a wide angle that met in the middle, with a second floor over that area, probably the family’s living quarters, Red thought. Cypress shakes covered the roofs. Every ground floor blazed with electric light.
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
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