An Agent of Utopia by Andy Duncan

Author:Andy Duncan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2018-09-06T18:01:04+00:00

The Big Rock Candy Mountain

A railroad bull was in charge, of course, cane-tapping around the planks till he tripped the trap, feeling two-handed up the post to find the rope-notch, hissing to himself like a slow leak.

Under the planks, six coppers were planted in a circle like fenceposts. One had a bumble drilling into his shin, kicking the sawdust out behind, and another sprouted dandelions from his knobby knees. Everything grows in the Rock Candy country, even a copper’s dried-out joints. I once had a toothpick bloom halfway to my mouth, and that is true, as true as the average.

Penned inside the cop-ring, a little leather-faced woman in too-big overalls and a too-small porkpie hat sat in the grass, sharp chin on her knees and skinny arms wrapped around. She cussed a blue streak in a tired, raspy boy-voice, like she had wearied of it. “You withered-up hollowed-out skanktified old shits, old sons.”

Me, I’d been down to the lake for a bowl of stew and was feeling belly-warm and prideful. Some miracles get stale with use and others go bad quicker than a Baptist flounder, but friends, a bowl of Big Rock stew—whether scooped from a lake or poured from a falls or welling up out of a crack in the rocks—will stay a miracle till the world looks level. So I was full of stew and full of myself when I stumbled upon the scaffold in the making. I sat beneath a cigarette tree and picked a good one and fired it up by looking at it, and puffing I called from the side of my mouth: “What’s happening here, Muckle?”

The bull quit sniffing along the fat rope long enough to yell, “What’s it look like?”—not that he knew himself, all the railroad police being blind since birth, if birth they could claim. They were all just alike, but only one came around at any given time, and he always answered to Muckle, so whether Muckle was the full-time name of an individual or a sort of a migrating title like a Cherokee talking stick I’d given up wondering long before.

The setting sun flashed off Muckle’s dark glasses as he sniffed his way to just the right spot. “Ahhh,” he said, gnawed the rope to mark the place, and started threading it through the notch.

“What has the lady done?” I asked.

“It ain’t what Dula’s done, Railroad Pete,” Muckle replied. “It’s what Dula wants to do.”

“And that would be?”

“Dula wants to.” He shuddered. “Dula’s trying to.” He spat. “Dula’s hankering to, angling to, ootching and boosting to . . . work.”

“Work!” snorted the prisoner.

“Work!” groaned the coppers.

“Work!” rumbled the far-off Big Rock Candy, its glittery crystal slopes to the north for a change. The ground shimmied. The air cooled. Mr. Muckle’s dickey flew up out of his Sunday vest with a ping. A dark black cloud ate the sun and rained down on us a flock of roasted ducks, burnt on one side and raw on the other.

“I ain’t neither,” Dula said.

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