Hi everybody. First off, thanks for clicking the link or opening the email. I appreciate everyone who comes by this site regardless if they like it or leave a comment.
The Substack is my principal way of sharing work these days, and for the time being I am not charging anyone for it. It’s sort of that “used paperback at a yard sale” mentality of publishing. For now it’s enough to have anyone read anything, and it keeps me honest.
The NYC Midnight contest comes around a few times a year, prompting me to write set-length stories from specific prompts. This one was a drama about relationships that featured a conductor. I wrote a couple different stories and wound up rejecting this one because I just didn’t feel that it had enough of an arc despite having some nice moments. I also felt that this is a perspective I am not really entitled to depict. If you read it you’ll see why.
Janine stands on the stoop trying to talk to Papa Joe when the pan catches fire.
By the time she can pull it off the stove, the apartment is choked with smoke and the pork chops are a charred ruin. She runs water over the mess, balls the dish towel in her mouth and screams into it as hard as she can.
It doesn't make her feel any better, so she busies herself trying to air out the living room, opening windows and fanning the towel at the hanging cloud. Lottie comes down the stairs then. "Mama? You all right?"
"Just having myself a nervous breakdown and trying to burn our house down."
Though only nine, Lottie is attuned to the tides of Mama's moods and can see that now is not the time for questions. She walks to the sink and turns off the water, takes the blackened pan and dumps the mess into the garbage.
"What we will have for supper now I don't know," Janine mutters.
"We got three jugs of winter pork in the pantry," says Lottie.
Janine turns to her, hands on hips. "I don't need cooking lessons from you. You want to help me, see if you can pull your Papa Joe out of his darkness. Lord knows we got enough of that already."
"Is Papa Joe going to live with us now?"
"Yes, child. He paid for this house, so he's welcome."
"Why ain't he lived here before?"
"Why hasn't he. Don't let me hear you trash talk."
"Why hasn't he lived here, then?"
"Who put you in charge, Miss Sass? You want to know about him, go on out and ask him yourself and quit itching at your mother."
"He can have my room if he wants."
Janine stares at her, feels her eyes sting. She opens her arms. "Come on here, baby. Come share some of that goodness with your mama. I can use it."
#
It has been a week of surprises. Sunday morning Janine came home from church to find Luther Junior sitting on the front stoop. After a tearful hello he told her he'd been released early from Rikers. "Good behavior," he smiled, and she could see in his haggard face the little boy, her first and only son, the love and trial of her life.
"This time there are conditions," she'd said, firming her heart against his charm. "Stay clean, get a job, help out with chores, and pay for groceries now and then."
If Luther Senior was alive there would be no welcome of any kind, hard man that he was. But he'd died of cancer just after Lottie was born and left his family neither pension nor insurance. It was typical.
After the funeral, Papa Joe offered Janine his narrow brownstone at 131st and Lenox. "Your mama always wanted you back home," he said. "It's been mostly empty since she passed, me gone all the time. Besides, I been thinking about applying for the Empire Builder run. Heard they have a spot opening up."
He said this with some pride. When he'd come back from the war, he had become one of the first Colored conductors on the railway. There had always been Colored porters and waiters, but the better-paying jobs––conductors, engineers, firemen––were for whites only. In 1948, Papa Joe used his service connections to land a job as a regional conductor on a New Jersey spur line. From there he moved on to conduct bigger trains, winding up on the PRR's New York to Cleveland run. For most of Janine's childhood he'd been an occasional presence at best, away from home some three-hundred days a year.
In the Lenox brownstone Alice, the eldest, and Lottie shared a bedroom, but Luther Junior had one all to himself. "A young man needs his privacy," Janine said. Her daughters knew better than to argue.
Empire Builder ran from Chicago to Los Angeles every day of the year, so Papa Joe was rarely home in Harlem, and even then only for a night or two. Even so, Janine kept his sheets fresh and his room clean, ready for him. She had an associate's degree from City College, but in 1966 nobody would hire a Black woman for any job that didn't involve a broom or mop. She started an improvised daycare in the living room to earn money for groceries and clothing without having to pay a babysitter. Many of the women in the neighborhood had some kind of job and needed help for a few hours in the morning or afternoon, so she had children all day.
Janine knew it wasn't any permanent thing because word would probably get out and city inspectors would shut her down, but her luck held until Lottie was old enough for school. After that, Janine got part-time work at the local library and helped her friend Frieda clean apartments from time to time. She made enough to get by.
#
Two days after Luther Junior moved back in, Papa Joe came home. He wasn't wearing his smart conductor's uniform and carried only a small valise. It had been months since Janine had seen him, but he looked years older. He walked into the living room and sat down in his worn-out armchair chair, sighing like an old bus.
"Daddy?" she said.
He held up his hand and sat a minute, then wiped his face and looked up at her. "My position has become untenable. That's what he said, the little Ofay bastard from the US Department of Transportation, now known as Amtrak. Untenable."
She sat down on the ottoman, aghast. In all her life she had never seen this much emotion from him, nor ever heard him curse. "What does that mean?"
"It means that two years shy of my thirty, they up and fired me. Fired. Me." He was shaking. "And the worst is that they covered their ass by saying there was cause. Cause!"
She felt herself getting mad along with him. "What does that mean?"
He glared at her. "It means they can cut my pension. Maybe deny it altogether, the goddamn sons of bitches. Cause." He stood up. "I believe I am going to take a walk."
Janine left the door unlocked, unsure if he had his key with him. She heard him come in sometime after midnight, going straight to his room.
Though Janine hadn't said anything, Lottie and Luther Junior seemed to sense the tension and ate their eggs without their usual morning bickering, and when she'd asked Luther to walk his sister to school, he'd done so without complaint.
She was washing the dishes when her father came silently down the stairs and stood behind her. "I want to apologize for yesterday. "
"You were upset," she said without turning around. "It's understandable."
He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table. "Who was here this morning? With Lottie?"
She took her dish rag and wiped down the counter. "You know who, Papa."
"You told me he was locked up, Janine."
She glared at him. "Well, not all surprises are bad. They let him go early. Good behavior."
"Overcrowding, more likely."
"Whatever. I told him could stay for a while if he kept off the drugs and got himself a job."
"And has he? Found a job, I mean. You wouldn't know about the other."
It was a sore subject.
#
When Luther Junior was arrested at fifteen, it coincided with one of the few weekends Papa Joe was back in New York. He was the one who took the call from the police, so he decided to go bail out the boy without telling Janine. Papa Joe knew about White authority figures and the assumptions they were apt to make about Black men and drugs. He never forgot the time when he was twenty, a junior Pullman porter on a one-day stopover in Detroit. He'd been looking for a cheap hotel, ignoring the advice from the head porter to stay on the goddamn train if you know what's good for you. A prowl car had cruised alongside him for three blocks, then pulled over and told him to put his hands up. The cops threw him in jail for the night but let him go without charges. He ran all the way to the station and barely made his train. When he told his story to the head porter, the man shook his head. "I told you to stay aboard, fool. This is Detroit."
Papa Joe knew he had to face these police with all the pride and gravity of a senior railway conductor. He debated wearing his uniform, but decided he didn't want to risk a poor reflection on his employer. Instead, he put on his best suit, set his Bailey hat squarely on his head, and walked to the station.
Papa Joe brought all his dignity into the precinct, walked straight to the desk sergeant and introducing himself before asking about his grandson. The sergeant told him Luther Junior had been picked up on a corner with some thugs well-known to the beat cops.
"Your boy didn't have anything on him," the sergeant said, "but that don't mean much. They usually throw their dope into a storm drain when they see us coming. We ain't seen him before so there isn't any charge. Make sure you tell him we won't be so forgiving next time we see him." His tone implied a certainty that they'd see Luther Junior again, and maybe not too long in the future either.
On the walk home Luther Junior was doggedly silent. Papa Joe didn't know the boy well enough to tell if this was due to shame or sullenness. He was disappointed that his grandson was using drugs. Did he have no pride in himself, no ambition? Papa Joe had known drug addicts in the Army when he'd driven trucks on the Red Ball express, the Colored soldiers employed to keep Patton's supply lines flowing. A few of the Red Ball drivers stole the morphine syrettes issued to combat soldiers and used them to get high. Two of the boys were caught and got sent to military prison. Papa Joe didn't know them personally, but he was still angry. Whites thought all Colored were the same, and their behavior made everybody look bad.
Luther Junior was no different. That desk sergeant probably thought Papa Joe did dope too. He felt the fury grow in him. This boy's criminal behavior was putting everything at risk. His mama's job, his little sister's schooling, maybe even Papa Joe’s own position at the railroad. Thank god he hadn't worn his uniform.
But he bit down on his anger and said nothing to Luther Junior or Janine. The next morning he took the subway to Grand Central and boarded a train to Chicago. He didn't come back to New York for three years and by then, Luther Junior had been imprisoned on a narcotics charge.
#
"That boy is just a damned dope fiend."
"Daddy, you don't know him at all," Janine says. "He's changed."
"People don't change, Janine. I'm sixty-three years old and that's one thing I know for sure. A thief stays a thief, in jail or out."
"Luther Junior is not a thief."
"Dope fiends worse than thieves," he said.
"He's still your grandson. And he needs you."
"Hrumph."
"Maybe you need each other."
#
Luther Junior is no hurry to get home and see Papa Joe. The last time he saw the old man was the unlucky day when Curtis and Gadd invited him to smoke some reefer, the day the cops cuffed him like a criminal and threw him into the back of a wagon, fingerprinted him, questioned him, beat on him. At first he'd been relieved he didn't have to see his mother's disappointed face, but Papa Joe's scorn fell on him like a heavy blanket. The old man didn't say a damn word, just let Luther Junior stew in shame and guilt. He felt like crying and half wanted to ask for forgiveness or even help. But that seemed weak, so he kept his mouth shut.
His mother never found out about it, and a few weeks later when Gadd asked him to take a delivery downtown he did it. Soon Luther was running the drugs all over town. He had his own apartment, stylish clothes, a new Lincoln Continental. He figured the risk was low because he never touched the hard stuff, limiting himself to the occasional joint.
But without quite knowing how, he found heroin, first snorting it, then mainlining. Luther liked the cool detached feeling of life being in some far-out movie played out in slow motion. Then the arrest, the charges, and a five-year stretch at the overcrowded juvenile facility at Rikers Island.
Life at Rikers was endless boredom punctuated by moments of intense fear. The boys around him were his own age, but so hard and criminally violent that most were bound for federal prison or an early grave. Luther wanted no part of it. He knew that the city was desperate to ease the overcrowding, so he worked with a PO and managed to leave after only a year.
And now here he is, nineteen with no job, no money. He can see Papa Joe sitting on Mama's stoop. It occurs to him the old man is in the same boat as himself. He stops and looks up.
"Okay if I sit here, Papa Joe?"
"Suit yourself."
"I never thanked you for bailing me out that time."
"Seems I didn't do you no favors."
"I didn't do myself no favors. Maybe things would've worked out different if I'd asked you for help right then. You didn't say a word to me."
"I guess I was waiting for you to ask."
"I thought you were mad at me."
For the first time, Papa Joe smiles. "Damn right I was. But been sitting here thinking about how I spent half my life mad. Mad at the Army, mad at the passengers, mad at the railroads. Mad at your mama, your papa. Mad at you."
Papa Joe takes out his pipe. He fusses tobacco into it, fiddles out a match and lights up. He glances over at his grandson. The boy is thin as a post, but well-knit with an open face like his mother's. Funny he hadn't seen that before.
He clears his throat. "But I ain't got no more time for that, son. So here we sit, both of us side by side on your mama's front stoop. I'm at the end of my road, but you're at the beginning. So go ahead. Ask me for help."