The Fun Train

The dispatcher’s word for it was a landing, as if the thing coming down the hill out of the canyon were an airplane and not a train, and Eddie Morales had learned in three Saturdays to take the word seriously and be parked at the depot on Commercial Row with the engine running a half hour before it was due.

Every cab in Reno was there. Yellow, Checker, the independents, thirty of them nosed in along the curb and doubled up in the street, and the drivers standing in the cold in their jackets smoking and stamping and looking up the tracks toward the west, where the Sierra stood white against a sky that could not decide whether to snow. The railroad had started it that winter. A special, Saturdays only, out of Oakland at first light and into Reno by early afternoon, a whole train of people who had bought a ticket to ride over the mountains and drink and dance in the cars and get off at the other end with money in their pockets and two days to lose it. The Southern Pacific called it the Fun Train and had painted the name on a banner. The dispatcher called it a landing. Eddie, who had been driving a cab in this town since the end of the war and had met every kind of train there was, had not settled on what he called it.

At forty-nine he had driven soldiers from the bus station and divorce women from this same depot, in the years when the depot was where the money got off, and he had driven them to the Riverside and the Mapes and, if they were the other kind, to the motor courts out South Virginia, and he had thought for a while after the war that he understood the shape of the thing. Then the divorce women had thinned, and the airport had taken the people who could afford to fly, and for a few winters the depot had been a place where the train came through at night and nobody much got off. He had started working the airport stand. He had not liked it. You did not learn anything about a person at the airport. They came off the plane already tired of you.

The train came in from the west at ten past two with its bell going and stopped across Virginia Street the way trains always had, slow, the engine and then a string of cars longer than any he had seen stop here in years, and the thing that was different about it was the sound. A regular train pulled in quiet, the way a tired man sits down. This one pulled in with the windows open in February and a band playing somewhere in the middle of it, an actual band, horns, and people hanging out of the vestibules waving at the cabs as if the cabs were a crowd that had come to meet them, which, Eddie supposed, they were.

They came off in a flood. Couples. Groups of couples. Office girls in threes and fours holding each other up, men in sport coats with their ties already loosened, a woman in a fur that had been a good fur once carrying her shoes. They came down the steps into the cold with the look of people who had left the Bay at seven in the morning and had been drinking since Sacramento and had just now discovered that the air in Reno was thin and dry and full of light, and they stood on the platform blinking at the arch and the casino signs up the street as if the whole town were a thing they had ordered and it had arrived.

Eddie got four of them. Two couples from Alameda, the men in the front, the women in the back with a paper sack that clinked. They wanted Harolds Club. Everybody wanted Harolds Club. He took them the long way, down Center and up Second, so they could see it come at them, and the man beside him leaned forward and read every sign out loud in a voice that was proud of itself, Harolds, the Nevada Club, the Bank Club, the Mapes, and said to his wife that it was like Vegas but you could breathe.

“It is not like Vegas,” Eddie said.

“No?”

“No. Vegas is a town that was built for you. This one was here already.”

The man laughed and did not know what he was laughing at, and gave Eddie a dollar on a sixty-cent fare, and Eddie thanked him and meant it and turned the cab around in the middle of Virginia Street, which you could still do in 1963 if you were quick about it, and went back for more.

He made the depot nine times before the platform was empty. He drove a man who had ridden the train alone and did not want a casino, only a bar with a window, and Eddie took him to one. He drove a girl who was crying and would not say why and got out at the Riverside and gave him a quarter and said she was sorry. He drove three men who argued in the back about whether the mountains they had come over were the same mountains the Donner people had died in, and he told them yes, more or less, and they went quiet for a block and then started laughing again. He listened to all of it. That was what a cab was for. You sat in the front and the town came and sat behind you and told you what it was.

By four the train stood empty at the platform with its doors open and its banner slack, and a Southern Pacific man walked the length of it picking up bottles. Eddie parked across from it and lit a cigarette and looked at the thing. It would sit here tonight and tomorrow. Sunday evening it would load them all back on, poorer and louder, and take them down the hill to the Bay, and next Saturday it would come again with a fresh load, and the Saturday after that. He had been wrong, he decided, that the depot was finished. The money had not stopped getting off trains. It had only stopped getting off one at a time.

The dispatcher came on the radio asking if anybody was still at the depot.

“Morales,” Eddie said. “Nothing left. They landed.”

He liked the word after all. He put the cab in gear.

---