City of Dark Corners

“Look, Gene, I’m a railroad bull.” This came after a full five minutes, with his cigarette turning to a long string of ash that finally tumbled into the glass tray on his desk. “I’m used to running bums and bindle punks off railroad property and looking for theft from freight cars. I’m no homicide detective. And this was…awful.”

“I understand. But what makes you think she fell from the Sunset Limited?”

“How else would that much damage be done to a person?”

“She didn’t have a ticket in her purse.”

He leaned back and forth in his chair, his hands out as if expecting some answer to fall from the ceiling. None did, for this or when I asked if he had questioned railroad personnel as to whether they had seen anything. I remembered that switch engine working the east end of the yard as we arrived. Did the engineer and fireman notice the body on the north side of the tracks? What about the conductor and Pullman porters on the Sunset—did a passenger go missing? Was anyone waiting here for a woman who didn’t arrive? I tried to keep my questions calm and conversational, but he became more and more agitated, lighting one cigarette after another, using the dying butt to start another. Each time, his answer was “No.”

“I walked those tracks, Jimmy. They were clean. If she’d been sliced up by the train, there would have been blood.”

More smoke blew toward the ceiling. “You know how many railroads are in receivership, how many railroad men are out of jobs? It’s a miracle the SP isn’t one of them. I’m lucky to have a job.”

“Did you walk those rails, Jimmy?”

He shook his head, and I tamped down my frustration.

“Maybe you’d do me a favor?”

“Sure, Gene,” he said, sounding relieved.

“Maybe you could get the word out across the railroad to other special agents, find out if they have encountered anything like this?”

He promised that he would. But I could see he didn’t like it.

Afterward, I walked down the marble stairs to the main waiting room thinking it would be a while before he would seek out my company at the Legion hall.

* * *

Wing Ong stood at the ticket counter, and I waited until he completed his business. He greeted me with a broad smile. He wore a blue sweater-vest under his sports jacket.

“I thought you’d left for China,” I said.

“I did,” he said. “It was a mistake. I thought I’d find a country on its way up, finally. But things are in chaos. Warlords and communists are fighting the Nationalist government, and I’m not sure Chiang Kai-shek is up to the task of unifying the nation. He’s no Sun Yat-sen.”

When he sensed I was interested, he continued: “Sun died too soon. Then there’s Japan. They’ve taken Manchuria, and it’s only a matter of time before there’s full-on war with China. So, I came back home last year. Even though I was born in China, I’m an American.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t stay in California, Los Angeles or San Francisco.”

He shook his head. “California has a bad history with the Chinese. And in the Chinatowns, it’s very clannish. Phoenix is home.”

I thought about the reasoning that brought me back here after the war.

“I bought a ticket for my sister to take the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles tomorrow,” he said. “I didn’t want to risk the train being full.”

“I’m not sure the railroad has that problem now,” I said as we walked out the east doors to the outdoor waiting room, shaded by the extended red-tile roof and open in three directions through open arches. We settled on a bench.

“True,” he said, “but this is the railroad’s flagship train, the most glamorous. So now she’s set with a Pullman ticket. Going to visit our aunt, but she’s not staying. Things are better for the Chinese here in Phoenix. Chinese children get to attend public schools with the whites. It’s not like with the Negroes, who have to go to colored schools and can’t get service at so many stores, restaurants, and hotels. Better for them than in the Deep South. At least that’s what they tell me. No lynchings. No ‘whites only’ waiting room here.”

He was right. Phoenix had been settled by many ex-Confederates, so it had the feel of both a Southern and a Western town. In the war, I had seen the 369th Infantry Regiment—the “Harlem Hellfighters”—in combat. That cured me of any notion that Negroes were inferior.

Mexicans, like the Negroes, couldn’t buy property north of Van Buren Street, but they didn’t face the worst of the color line. Some Mexican American families, such as Victoria’s, had been here for generations. She was part of Phoenix’s small Mexican American middle class. Most Mexicans lived in barrios south of the tracks or farmed outside the city limits. Nobody liked or trusted the small enclave of Japanese farmers—I suspected some of this was jealousy because they had succeeded in places where Anglo farmers had failed. The Alien Land Law kept them from owning property in the state, so they cultivated farms nominally owned by sympathetic Anglos.

Ong paused as the switcher, a squat black locomotive, rumbled past with two mail cars, its engine laboring, the sounds measured and distinct, as if angry steam monsters were chained to its insides and exhaling black curses. I braced myself, put my hands in the pockets of my slacks, ahead of what was coming. Out of sight, they coupled to more cars with a metallic boom. A pleasant breeze filled the space. I hardly flinched at all. After the two birds that were my hands stopped fluttering, I pulled them out and lit a cigarette. I was pretty good at concealing the little bag of shell shock I had brought home from France. Thunderstorms, car backfires, unexpected sharp noises—that was where I had to be careful. No one who has survived an artillery barrage can adequately explain it to a civilian—not only the sounds but the way it tears men to bits or buries them alive in shell holes. And the terrible helplessness.

My companion didn’t notice. “Chinese people here who built the railroads are spreading out from Chinatown. We own grocery stores and restaurants all over the city. That’s not to say things are perfect. Any time the city fathers want to please the chamber of commerce, they raid the opium and gambling houses in Chinatown. They don’t touch the east side, where the action is controlled by the whites, city commissioners, so-called respectable businessmen. Even though those Chinese owners pay off the cops like everybody else.” He shook his head. “Then things go back to normal, because there’s demand. Who comes to Chinatown to gamble, smoke opium, buy cocaine? The whites.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Don Hammons was probably the perfect example, especially when he worked vice. You can’t pick your family, but you can pick your friends. Wing Ong was one of the smartest people I knew. If he wasn’t a Chinaman, there was no telling how high he might rise.