(Originally found in a bureau at the Colorado Railroad Museum, June 23, 2007)
David Haskell, 29, stood on the platform in the gathering dusk and looked back for the final time at his steadfast companion. His wife was being executed tomorrow.
His wife’s name was Suzy and she had never committed any crime, had never once failed in her duty to the world, yet here she was all the same- to be slaughtered by the same system which had brought her into being all those years ago. Murdered by a world concerned with higher ideals like modernity and efficiency, with no thought given to sentimentality. What kind of a world is that? Haskell asked himself as he lingered on the gleaming track.
They hated Suzy because she had a soul, he realized, and that was what they couldn’t reckon with- that she had life and energy and acted up sometimes, that she represented spontaneity and carefree whimsy, that only he knew how to treat her right and that if she was treated right, she could work better than the new gas-powered buses, whiz you right down from Golden to Union Station in no time flat, half an hour at the most, fifty or sixty miles, faster than the cars used to be capable of going.
He brushed off his coat and removed his cap, both were covered in the dust gathering around the high wooden beams of the Arapahoe barn. Won’t be needing this anymore. Won’t be needing anything anymore.
It was June 4, 1950, at the Central Loop. The last day, the end of an era. An era to which Haskell had been witness, and an era to which no children born that day would know, save in mementos and posters and perhaps as part of their model railway set. Maybe, some day, there would be a model of the Central Loop, a constructed model which functioned almost as good as the real thing. But it wouldn’t be the same.
He had arrived in Denver a decade earlier, at the beginning of the war, and had seen the Tramway Company’s involvement throughout- their encouragement of war bonds, the campaign by which the starving millions were donated meals, half a decade of turbulence and half of peace. He had shuttled thousands across the Metro area during his time as Suzy’s conductor, under the direction of the Company, on all the major routes. And now it was over.
His superior, Reginald Purdue, had been gifted a watch last week for his service to the cause. And he had been given nothing. Not a scrap of gratitude for his efforts. He had tried, had come very close. But he had failed, and that son of a bitch took all the credit.
“We need to keep them, Reggie!” he remembered shouting, pounding his hand into his palm with righteous fury. “Sure, we can’t afford the rail lines now- sure- but why can’t we keep a few of the electric cars? Store them in a warehouse or something! Rent a place! ‘Till we need them again, they can come out of retirement!”
“I’m sorry, David,” Reg had murmured under his thick heavyset mustache. “I’ve spoken to the higher-ups about this. There’s no interest in it. We’re going out and we have no funds and that’s all there is to it..” He tried placating David, put a warm comforting hand on his shoulder, but David knew better, he knew what a weasel Purdue was and always had been.
“Sightseeing tours!” David offered, grasping at straws. “We can do like they have in San Francisco- you know. They’re a novelty there, just as much as here, but they work! They bring in money! People love a good ride on the trolley! Two or three, just enough to maintain a healthy interest in public transit- a PRESENCE-”
“No, David. This is it. Make peace with yourself.”
That had been a month ago. A month, and nothing had been done. So here he was, bathed in the shadows, a wisp, a ghost at his young age, made obsolete by the grinding colossal power of the modern age. He had bet on the wrong horse, a horse that clanged and whistled its way up Larimer and Wazee in the prime of its life, in the golden years of reckless optimism. He and Suzy, kindred spirits, one and the same.
She was adorned with the same poster in front as they all were, on this special day.
“Good-bye, old friends.”
He had never thought of her that way before, in that the piercing light on her front was a nose and the two windows, sectioned vertically in half, were eyes. But now he saw it. Twenty minutes earlier, he had wheeled her into the barn, and tomorrow she was to be hauled away to the scrapyards. He’d never see her again. This was good-bye.
He didn’t know why they had made the poster so damn sentimental, hadn’t considered the effect it would have on the conductors, to see their livelihoods removed in what seemed like an instant but had in fact been a long, slow, gradual decline. The end of Denver’s optimistic period. From here the city would settle into a lull, become placid and uniform, lose its rough edges. A period of relative calm. And then- well, then what?
There would be a generation, it dawned on Haskell, who didn’t know what a train was. Eventually, people would forget about the iron giants plowing their way down 16th and 17th St. and down Broadway like grazing cattle. They’d forget about the great United freighters cutting through the Midwestern grass to bellow their solemn whistle in the dead of night, the majestic mountain lines chugging breakneck in the depths of the pines, the zephyrs and the vistadomes and the yards with the industrial machinery and the boiling vats of smelted alloys.
There would be youth raised in the nation who saw only Space Age mechanisms, the highways and the airplanes, the nauseating airplanes with their sickening whistles, cutting across the skies and across sanity like a flexible bullet. It’d be akin to wartime, the sun blotted out by the approach of sonic jets, releasing their hideous steam into the air.
He sat down on the track, and his mind wandered.
Six months ago, he had been talking with McCluskey, oldest of the conductors, going on 85, who had known a time before this, when Denver was a young place and the lines were being installed. He had told Haskell about the horse-drawn carts, the maintenance of the horses, the practice of pole-setting in the early days, how legions of workers had helped to set up an unfathomable network of wires through sheer will-power, wires under which rode the great carriages of yesterday.
“They don’t make ‘em like thet anymore,” McCluskey chuckled softly. “Even yer Suzy- she’s a might good thing, but nowhere near as good as the ones I had.”
They were sitting at Suzy’s side, both of them on break, which wasn’t so rare these days when nobody was around to ride. Haskell was eating an apple and McCluskey a ham sandwich, and they were gazing at the vacant wheat plains of Arvada, fields which would soon undergo rapid suburban development, cardboard homes erected within hours using state-of-the-art technology which in McCluskey’s era would have seemed like witchcraft.
“You’ve seen a lot,” Haskell noted. ‘More than most of us have. Have you written any of it down? So people will know about you, and what you achieved?”
“I ain’t much of a writer, Davy. Not everyone is. Takes a certain kind of talent. Takes investment. Never had much investment. Just did my job, is all. Did what I’s told and what was asked of me and there ain’t nothing notable about that.”
“Still, you really should write some of it down.”
“You could write it down, I’ve told you most of it, at least all the parts thet matter,” McCluskey replied, “But I know you won’t.”
The conversation ended there.
What was it about Denver? The thought swam around in his mind like a bolt of lightning. Why doesn’t anyone care, why doesn’t anyone do anything? Why can’t we learn from the past? Are we destined to erase ourselves again, and again, and again-
A hellish vision sprang to his mind, a vision so far removed from the warm confines of Arapahoe that it made his hair stand on end. An inferno- 21 white tents licking like flame up toward the stars, sickly pale, like the fangs of a vampire cutting across flesh, like knives tearing at the walls, towering over everything in that impenetrable dread. Twenty-one. The number flashed behind his eyes, registering for only a moment.
The noise of a jet engine, screaming in agony like a twisted bird, some ancient thing ripped from the ground by talons, a hungry sacrificial maw of fire and wanton desperation, a mockery of the human form, languid and ravenous, feeding on the bodies of the innocent.
He screamed so long and loud that his lungs gave out.
And then he was back in the temple, the calm night air of the Arapahoe barn, a testament to public transportation. He put his fingers to his forehead, found a thick shellac of sweat. Some kind of seizure, he told himself. His brain was falling into pieces, as the system was, because he was an instrument of the system, and if the system collapsed so did he. Down with the ship.
He checked his watch. It was 8:13 P.M. and all employees were meant to leave at 8.
He would be forgotten along with all of it, nobody in the Denver of the future would afford him or his existence or the existence of the Tramway Company so much as a second thought, it’d be a phantom entity, wholly inconsequential, having affected nothing. The big yellow cars would recede in all minds and rust away into scrap and he’d have nothing to do- his only applicable skill was as a conductor, he realized. He’s be spending the remainder of his years in a department store or on an assembly line-
No, there was one thing he could do, to ensure his permanent place in history. If nobody else was going to do it, he would.
“Time for one last ride, old gal,” he whispered under his breath, then before anyone could stop him, he sprinted forward headlong into Suzy’s berth, found himself amid the row of identical seats, positively giddy with delight, running his fingers over Suzy’s interior as if it was the first time he had felt them.
The first time, it had been ten years ago, in the tranquil summer, and she had been running for five years at that point- a considerable record, but she had been through a number of operators and only he had been able to temper her, to perfectly define her inner mechanisms and bring them to an exact science. Capacitor sheek, she had roared alongside the Platte, sizzling with current, she had brought her tidings to the residents of Five Points and the far reaches of Swansea, and she deserved better than to go out like this.
Not a moment to lose, or dispatch would catch on. He ran towards the cabin, flipped every switch to its maximum capacity, then dove out the right window. For an instant he figured he’d break every bone in his body, but he rolled on his shoulder and dashed toward the southern terminus, which had been bricked up a week earlier, his coat flapping in the summer breeze, his legs churning in frenzied haste.
He stood before the wall, motionless, as Suzy approached him with her one solid eye cutting through the shafts of dust. His bride, their marriage, together in death, neither one could exist in the world, they were strange and reckless entities and belonged only with each other.
“Come on, Suzy! Right here!”
She picked up, as the levers went into overdrive and the poster with the forlorn message tore off in the wind and she was free and naked, her wheels speeding at sixty, now seventy, now eighty, faster than she had ever gone alongside the banks of Clear Creek, a shrill whistle erupting from her bellows, clanging like a wild horse, she came down upon David Haskell, who had been through enough, rending his bones from his organs, turning him into a paste, unifying them in a mass of flesh and metal, bricks toppling over her rusted carcass as she slowed from the impact and came to a rest in the middle of 17th Street, amid the rushing traffic and blinking stoplights.
David Haskell was not remembered.