Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

In room 17, Dave Brown cleans out his thermos.

In room 27, J. Sutter sleeps and dreams of a blizzard of receipts, a million fluttering tallies that he captures on his tongue.

Benny looks at his rack of room keys, remembers screwing the hooks into the plasterboard. Each hook is a room and all the people who will stay there for a time. Lives converge on those hooks.

This weekend is going to be good for the town: that phrase is the going rate. Before his retirement, Josie’s father had been a station man in Hinton for thirty years. They are railroad towns, Hinton and Talcott, and everybody who lives here has railroad in their bloodline. Not so Benny, whose family moved to Talcott when he was a teenager for reasons he still does not understand. He feels out of place when confronted with the railroad nostalgia of the two towns, that is to say nearly every waking moment. But as he waits for the next guest to arrive, he thinks perhaps he is learning to understand the mythology of his adopted home. He is learning what it is to wait for a train.

No one, it seems, wants to go to West Virginia. West Virginia contains many natural wonders. The New River Gorge is spectacular. A number of the bituminous coal concerns have informative tours and dioramas for the curious visitor. The historic stand at Harpers Ferry, to name another thing. And yet. Just last week at a bar on M Street in Washington, D.C., an inquisitive patron could have overheard this conversation between two postal employees:

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Pittsburgh I wouldn’t mind. It’s a big city. I have a college roommate in Pittsburgh.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

I don’t know why they picked John Henry in the first place.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

You know. They got three white ones, you gotta mix it up these days. Nothing against John Henry. I just wish he was from somewhere else.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan — who’s the other guy?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Mighty Casey.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

(sipping lager)

“Casey at the Bat.” I don’t even know who Pecos Bill is.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

(gritting his teeth)

Nobody knows who the fuck Pecos Bill is. He wrestled a rattlesnake.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

You got Babe the Blue Ox in the Paul Bunyan one?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

That’s exactly what I said. What’s Paul Bunyan withouAt Babe the Blue Ox? But we just did an animal series a few months ago.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

(nodding ruefully)

To take care of the animal lovers. We don’t want to alienate that segment of stamp consumers. Not in Marvin Runyon’s Post Office. Whose idea was this anyway for a Folk Hero series?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Who do you think?

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Yeah.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

(shaking his head)

And he wants some target marketing people to go along. You know his big thing now. I don’t know why it has to be me, but there you have it. I know the beds are going to kill me. I can feel that already. My back is fucking killing me already. It’s enough to make me go—

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

(looking over his shoulder)

Don’t say it!

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say, go nuts. I actually talked to the son of a bitch mayor of the town. We got a registered letter from the Chamber of Commerce. They sent a registered letter to the Post Office like it’s some kind of threat. The Post Office! They go, “Pittsburgh may be Steeltown U.S.A., but John Henry is Talcott’s native son.” So he gave in, canceled all the Pittsburgh plans that had already been planned out. Christ, this city is a fucking sewer in the summertime.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

It’ll be good for you to get out of the city. Get some good country air.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Why does everyone keep saying that? Country air, country air, everywhere I go. Watch me get a call from some guy in Minnesota saying we got to do the same thing there for Paul Bunyan. “An office of the United States Government can’t show unfair treatment blah blah.”

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

I have some “relations” as they say, in West Virginia.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

(rubbing a cigarette burn on the bar’s surface)

They’re trying to use the John Henry thing to make the town into a tourist trap. The stamp gave them the idea apparently. All sorts of big fun.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Tractor pull. Hayride.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

They got Ben Vereen coming.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

(grinning)

Pulling out all the stops. Look at it this way — you get to hang out with the stamp collectors.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

That’s a pleasure.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

You can look forward to that.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

They always got those moist lips.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

They’re always licking their lips because they got all those stamps but they can’t lick ’em.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Turns my stomach.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

They always try to be your best friend.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

Like I’m going to give them free stamps.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Like we got stamps in our pockets that we’re going to give them. Maybe the Weirdo is going.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #1:

If the Weirdo is there, fuck Runyon, I’m turning back.

POSTAL EMPLOYEE #2:

Shit yeah.

(gesturing)

Can we get another round?

Everything on him is free. His black Calvin Klein jeans hard won two years prior at a party celebrating the famous designer’s spring line. Stacks and stacks of the jeans, up to the ceiling, but more pertinent than the company’s publicity budget was the fear they might not have brought your size, or another journalist might beat you to your size, thus the resultant frenzy described the next day in Page Six of the New York Post. His T-shirt arrived in the mail one day with an advance copy of Public Enemy’s latest release. Mickey Mouse heads festooned his socks, Goofy his boxer shorts. His shoes bounty from a Michael Jordan-Nike charity event, intended for the disadvantaged kids but everybody helped themselves so J. figured why not. They are a little tight, and pinch.

J. rummages through his canvas bag for some new clothes. They had been washed by Laundry in the hotel he’d stayed at the night before and charged to his hotel bill, which was in turn picked up by the record company that had invited him there. There is always an entity at the top who pays for things. While sifting through his bag, J. notices a log of tissue paper and opens it up. He remembers: at the end of the night he’d wrapped up a small ham sandwich from the food table to save for breakfast. One time he woke up with dozens of cocktail napkins in his pockets, all stuffed down in there. He pulled out the dingy bouquets from his trousers like a hobo magician. The sandwich still looks edible. J. picks off the dried brown edges from the ham, considers for a moment the wilted iceberg lettuce, and sticks the sandwich in his maw. He starts to feel better.

Strung out from the gin and tonic and the nap dream, which was antic and enervating and which he cannot recall, he wonders what time it is, how long he slept. The desk man at the motel gave him a press packet when he registered, checking his name off a list, but J. hasn’t bothered to look at it so he doesn’t know what time dinner is. It is still light out. Someone will come fetch him. Out of boredom he picks up the glossy folder of the press material. In a golden circle, John Henry pounds a railroad spike with a gigantic hammer. He has a big grin on his face. Behind him the other workers are bent over the track, small and human compared to the black titan in the foreground. Building the country mile by mile. This is the forging of a nation. This is some real hokey shit.