The Railroad Man

1

Andy Koons was a good friend, and a source of many delightful days from my childhood in old Vancouver’s lower West Side. He was a retired tracks worker, disabled, with a mangled hand (memento of days when train cars were hitched manually), a bent up body, a shock of iron gray hair, and a face so sun beaten and wrinkled it resembled a paper bag someone had wadded up and attempted to flatten again. He inhabited a run down, one room shack, built of creosoted logs and planking for a porch, squatting on a hill by the warehouses, near Bower trucking and the railroad yard. It had only one window, which was broken out and covered with a big yellow sign, which read, “Slow”. This fit, as Andy always moved slowly. Sometimes that meant to the river to fish for carp with his friend, Silus, himself a retired porter from Ohio. Other times this was just out the door to the porch to sit in a broken rocker. Here he would sit staring of at nothing but memories. In his usual attire, faded striped coveralls, one strap torn, replaced by a short piece of hay rope, worn sneaker (black and white and dirty), sporting a hole where his toes came through and a torn t-shirt.2

Andy with his jug of cheap rose wine and a pint of Apple Jack, which he mixed and served to himself and Silus, (Nehi grape or Tab for me). Here the two of them listened to the radio and Andy accompanied some of the old songs with his harmonica. Andy played songs like Dixie, Little Brown Jug, and one thing I never recognized till one day when Silus, listening, with his forever grin splitting his ebony face to real ivory white false teeth, regaled us with a snippet of Come Along With Me Lucille, In our Merry Oldsmobile”. I didn’t know at the time that it was the jingle to an old commercial.3

Silus like to tell of days he spent fishing in the great lakes for carp and Lake Bass, while he and Andy fished. He carried the big carp home in the bucket that had once held tar. He had washed it out, kept it filled with clean water, drawn from the water spigot by the gas station under the railroad bridge underpass and hauled it home in an old children’s wagon. He lived with his niece and her children in a neatly kept little house by the tracks. They fried the fish in the backyard on a grill made from an old drum. Silus had a dog named Whiskers, a little Airedale, wire haired terrier mix with patches of brown and black scattered over dirty white hair. Whiskers were a fine friend to Silus. He liked to rest his head on Silus’ old, worn boot while he sat and smoked and drank and shot the bull, (his expression), with Andy each day.4

These two old friends rolled their cigarettes from pile of loose tobacco and Bugler cigarette papers, off a rusty cookie sheet. They lit them with kitchen matches, scratched on the porch or the seat of their britches.5

They quaffed their drinks and talked of good times, riding trains from the Midwest to the Great Lakes, to the west coast, in the war days, Here they rested, sharing their canned ham, mayonnaise, mustard and dried up Swiss cheese on sheep herder’s bread, piled in a wicker basket on the porch. The devoured this same fare while fishing by the Columbia River,6

(Toothless Andy eating his in slivers cut away from his sandwiches with a penknife). Daily, it was the same. Neither of these old gents seemed to see me as anything but another one of the boys. In fact, with Andy’s cataracts, I doubt he knew I was a kid, or that Silus was black. And, it’s doubtful he’d have cared. We were friends, plain and simple: Andy, Silus and me.7

Andy finally slipped away one day. His daughter, Elsie, found him in bed, as though asleep. Silus without his old friend, stayed home with his grandchildren, and from then on, I seldom saw him. He might have become one of the many fragments of life that drifted off on the winds of passing time, save for that unforgettable smile, those hours of stories and his soft tranquil singing voice, caressing those old tunes, to Andy’s lively harp playing. And, at times, on my meandering bicycle rides through the west side, I’ll still hear vague whispers on the winds, telling me to go back. Back to the warehouses, the railroad tracks and the long worn asphalt roadbed, where Andy’s shack once stood. A parking lot is to be found there these days, and the little hill little resembles the place I knew as a kid. Like Andy, it has all gone away. Slipped into the antiquity of the past, derelicts both of a lost time. But, that jingle, about riding with a sweetheart in a merry little Oldsmobile still runs through my head at times, bringing back those peaceful hours, long ago, in a boyhood that’s now nearly forgotten.8