The Streetcar

Eddie Morales rode the bus from Sparks to Reno on the first Monday in October, which was not unusual because Eddie had been riding the bus from Sparks to Reno for forty years, since before the war, since he was a young man with a casino cashier’s job on Center Street and a rented room near the railyard and a belief that the distance between the two towns was a thing that could be crossed without changing who you were on either side of it.

He was sixty-five. He had retired from the cab in June, thirty days ago, and the retirement was the reason he was on the bus today, because without the cab he had no way to get to Reno except the bus, and without a reason to get to Reno he had no reason to ride the bus, and without the bus he would sit in his house in Sparks and watch the television and wait for something, and Eddie Morales was not a man who waited for things. He was a man who went to where the things were.

The bus ran east on Fourth Street from downtown Reno, past the motels and the auto parts stores and the used car lots, past the old Nevada Transfer warehouse, past the point where the town ended and the open ground began, and then east along the highway into Sparks, three miles, the same route the streetcar had run when Eddie was a boy.

He remembered the streetcar. This was the thing about being sixty-five: you remembered things that no one else remembered, things that had been ordinary when they happened and were now history, and the streetcar was one of those things. His father Miguel had worked the roundhouse and his mother had taken Eddie on the streetcar into Reno on Saturdays, to the shops on Virginia Street, to the dry goods stores and the five-and-dime, and Eddie had sat on the wooden bench and watched the fields go by through the window, the alfalfa and the pasture between the two towns, green in summer, brown in fall, and the overhead wire humming above them, and the bell that the motorman rang at the crossings, a bright clean sound that Eddie could still hear if he closed his eyes, which he did now, on the bus, fifty-two years later, and the sound was there, clear and true, like a coin dropped on stone.

The streetcar had stopped running in 1927. Eddie was thirteen. The Reno Traction Company had replaced it with buses, and the buses were faster and did not need the overhead wire and could go places the tracks did not go, and everyone said it was progress, and it was progress, and Eddie’s mother had ridden the bus without complaint and never mentioned the streetcar again. She was a practical woman. The streetcar was gone and the bus was here and you rode what was here.

But Eddie remembered. He remembered the yellow cars, three of them at first, bought from San Francisco, and then two more from the factory in St. Louis. He remembered the motorman in his cap and his gloves, working the brake handle. He remembered that the fare was ten cents and the trip took thirty minutes and the fields between Reno and Sparks were so empty that you could see the mountains on both sides, the Sierra to the west and the Virginia Range to the east, and the valley floor was flat and open and the two towns were two towns, separate, distinct, connected by a single line of track and a wire and a bell.

Now the fields were gone. The bus drove through a continuous corridor of buildings, gas stations, shopping centers, car washes, storage units, the towns grown together until you could not tell where one ended and the other began, and Eddie watched it pass and tried to remember where the alfalfa had been and could not, because the buildings covered everything, the buildings and the asphalt and the signs.

The roundhouse was gone too. That was the harder thing. Eddie’s father had worked there, and his uncle Miguel had worked there, and the roundhouse had been the heart of Sparks, a forty-stall cathedral of iron and steam where the locomotives came in off the mainline and were serviced and turned and sent back out, and the men who worked there were the men who kept the railroad running, the men whose hands smelled of grease and coal smoke and hot metal, and the town had existed because of them. Sparks had been born in 1904 when the Southern Pacific moved its division point from Wadsworth, had literally loaded the houses onto flat cars and moved them east to a new site, and the roundhouse was the reason, the roundhouse and the shops and the men.

Two thousand men at its peak. Eddie remembered the shift change, the sound of two thousand men walking on the streets of a small town at the same time, the boots and the lunch pails and the voices, the town alive with the sound of work. Then the diesels came. The diesels did not need a roundhouse. The diesels did not need two thousand men. By 1956 the workforce was eighty-five. The roundhouse came down in 1959, a building that could hold forty-one locomotives at once, demolished in a week, and the men who had worked there went to the casinos or the construction crews or the highway department or nowhere, and Sparks became a town that had once had a reason and was looking for a new one.

Eddie’s uncle Miguel had died in 1963, still living in the house near the railyard, in a town that no longer had a working railyard, in a house that looked out at a flat empty lot where the roundhouse had stood. Eddie had driven past that lot in his cab a thousand times. He had picked up fares in Sparks and driven them to Reno, past the lot, past the place where his uncle’s work had been, past the absence of it, and he had never said anything about it to the passengers because the passengers did not want to hear about a roundhouse that was not there. The passengers wanted to get to the Riverside or the Mapes or Harrah’s, and Eddie took them there, and the meter ran, and the absence stayed where it was.

The bus stopped at B Street in Sparks and Eddie got off. He stood on the sidewalk and looked west toward Reno, toward the casino towers visible above the rooftops, the Sahara’s twenty-four stories and the old Mapes and Harrah’s neon, and he thought about the streetcar and the yellow cars and the fields and his mother’s hand on his shoulder on the wooden bench, and he thought about the roundhouse and the two thousand men and the sound of the shift change, and he thought about the cab and the thirty years of routes, Virginia to the depot, the depot to the Riverside, the Riverside to South Virginia, the slow circles at twenty-five miles an hour, and he thought about the bus he had just stepped off of, the same route, the same three miles, faster now, no bell, no wire, no fields to look at through the window.

He had nowhere in particular to go. This was the new fact of his life, the fact of retirement, the fact of not being needed by anyone to be anywhere at any particular time. He stood on the sidewalk in Sparks on a Monday in October and the bus pulled away and left him there, and the exhaust hung in the air for a moment and then the wind from the east, the desert wind, took it, and Eddie turned and walked home.

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