Saffire (22 page)

Harry was a cheerful tour guide as we took a passenger car from Empire back to Culebra.

He explained that the railroad history of the isthmus was a story in itself. It essentially began sixty years earlier, when Panama was a province of Colombia, and before rail crossed the continental United States. Investors in the newly formed Panama Railway Company, as it was called back then, hoped to take advantage of the potential for a much shorter travel route from New York to San Francisco. Passengers could disembark on the Atlantic side, cross Panama in a matter of hours, and on the other side, take a paddle ship north again. This would no longer require the arduous and much longer trip by boat around the tip of South America—forty days' transit compared to well over a hundred by curving around Cape Horn and then north again.

On the Atlantic side, the terminus was poorly chosen—a treacherous marshy island where Colón would eventually be built. While convenient for ships to shed passengers, it required a pile-driven causeway that led into a jungle of swamps and alligators. As a result, building the railway took the same toll of cholera, yellow fever, and malaria that defeated the French attempt to build a canal decades later.

Only eight miles of track made it inland, but this was enough for the original railroad, given the California gold rush. Thousands of desperate fortune seekers paid dearly for their supplies to go that short distance, where mules and canoes took over. This infusion of cash was enough to finally complete the near fifty miles to Panama, and the PRC became the most profitable railway company in the world.

The French bought it, in part for the tracks and stock and profits, but more for the right of way to dig a canal, and when that failed, the US government—more accurately, Theodore Roosevelt—purchased it for the same purposes.

Because the causal link between mosquitoes and malaria and mosquitoes and yellow fever had not been understood until recently, the French were doomed before they started. But that didn't stop them from profiting in the cadaver trade. Medical schools and teaching hospitals paid well for bodies pickled in barrels. The thousands of deaths during the building of the railway itself, and during the French attempt at the canal, provided an ample supply of bodies of anonymous workers. Ironically, during the French years, the income from cadavers was enough to support the Panama Railway hospital, where one doctor, it was said, had a habit of bleaching skeletons as he tried to compile a bone museum of all the different races who worked on the railroad.

When the Americans purchased the railroad, the original route through the Chagres valley had to be changed, and the new route was built with heavier gauge and double-tracked rails.

All told, the current rolling stock consisted of 115 of the most powerful locomotives that could be engineered, along with all the passenger cars. More important—in terms of the building of the canal—there were 2,300 railroad cars built to carry dirt, and 102 railroad-mounted steam shovels.

Massive.

By the time Harry finished the story, we had arrived at the station in Culebra, where—was it only two days earlier?—I had looked out at the digging of the canal from the observation deck and helped a woman to her feet after the explosion.

An even more devastating explosion that, I now knew, had recently killed the policeman whose badge I carried, along with six others.

As requested, Harry Franck took me directly to the dig, to the rock drills that thundered loud enough to drown out the steam engines of the mighty locomotives and the crash of falling boulders. It was a madness of machinery—pneumatic power drills, steam-powered cranes, rock crushers, steam shovels, cement mixers, and dredges.

Harry was happy to explain what was in front of my eyes.

Despite my earlier musings that love lifted mankind above a sense of puniness in a world full of the monumental, I did fight the sensation of insignificance in the midst of the activity around me.

I have no hesitation in declaring it was American ingenuity at its finest.

First, rock and dirt were loosened by explosions, such as the one that had rocked me on the observation deck. Steam shovels, mounted on the rail cars, moved along one set of tracks, scooped buckets of dirt from the excavation, and dropped each load on the flatbed rail cars on a second set of parallel tracks. These flatbeds had only one side, and dirt was piled against that side.

Each car lurched forward after it was filled, in strings of up to twenty. Then a locomotive pulled the cars away to a dumping ground.

Here, I could only shake my head in admiration at the engineer who had designed the system. For an angled plow was in place on the car at the rear and attached by a steel cable to a winch on the locomotive at the front. This cable stretched the length of all twenty cars and pulled the plow forward. There was a steel apron between each car, so the plow was able to scrape the dirt to the side in a continuous motion from car to car until it finally reached the car closest to the locomotive and all the cars were scraped clean.

The dirt pushed from the rail cars to the side of the track was then moved by other steam shovels, and when the dumping ground grew too high, sets of tracks were relocated upward by cranes able to move a mile of track a day.

I was a simple cowboy. Truly. And wanted to be nothing more than that. My head hurt trying to comprehend what was happening around me.

One hundred and sixty loaded dirt trains went out daily and returned empty. Multiply that by twenty cars per train, and multiply that by the tons of dirt each flatbed car could carry, and it was possible to understand how American audaciousness could tear through the backbone of a continent in a matter of years.

Harry had to yell as he explained all this to me.

I wasn't in a mood to do the same.

I had a notebook in my back pocket. I pulled it out and wrote,
Where did the men get buried by the explosion?

Harry gave me an incredulous look, as if I were a five-year-old asking how Santa managed to squeeze down a chimney.

He grabbed the notebook and scrawled back as if he wanted my idiocy on permanent record,
They move entire hills in a day.

There was the proof that I was really that simple cowboy. I somehow believed that seeing a spot where men died would answer questions, and I still couldn't believe that each hour, enough dirt was removed to fill ten valleys of the meandering Badlands that I so craved to reach again.

Foreman?
I wrote.

His answer was to walk away. I did the only thing I could.

I followed.

“You look like the kind of man who can handle himself in a fight,” Harry said. “But it would have been pointless.”

He'd taken me back to the top of the hill, to the passenger tracks, where we waited for a scheduled stop.

“I'm open to an explanation.” I'd been a meek sheep, walking away from the dig behind him, more than happy to find a place where the noise didn't claw at my brain. Still, I couldn't understand why Harry had pulled me away so quickly, so I had asked.

“These crews measure the dirt. Week by week, they compete against all the other crews to set new records. There's not a foreman down there who would have taken a minute to answer anything you might ask. They wouldn't have been polite about refusing the second time you asked the same thing, and you seem to favor persistence.”

“When's a good time to find the foreman? And where? He doesn't work twenty-four-hour shifts.”

“You can ask me. I just didn't think there would be any sense in telling you that until you had a close-up look at the situation and saw how pointless it would be to talk to a foreman. I know just as much as anyone else. Two policemen died. You don't think we had our own questions the next day?”

“You told me that the explosion went off before the signal.”

“That's what happened. Signal man was too slow.”

“That unusual?”

“Yes.”

“Anyone ask the signal man why he missed giving the signal in time?” I said.

“Don't know.”

“Zone policemen show up the next day, and no one asks the signal man why he missed a countdown?” That didn't sound at all right.

“Couldn't. The man was dead. Killed in a barroom fight only hours after the explosion. Some friend of one of the dead workers wanted revenge for the signal man's stupidity.” Harry gave a pitiful chuckle. “Dead end to that accident inquiry.”

What else should I ask? “Man's name? Maybe his friends knew something.”

“See, that proves my point. These are rough-and-tumbles. They'd have no patience with questions. I have to ask, what exactly are you doing for Goethals?”

“Miskimon. He's the one who hired me.”

“You're not a good enough liar, Holt. And didn't I tell you already nothing happens on the isthmus that Goethals doesn't know? If Miskimon sent you, it's because Goethals is behind it. Except…”

Harry looked one way, then another, then one way, then another.

“Out with it,” I said.

“Sunday, when you dropped by, you mentioned Miskimon sent you to replace Badge 28. I had a few questions of my own but didn't say anything to you. The kicker was
no hablo español
—no speak the Spanish. There's not an enumerator on the isthmus doesn't speak Spanish. It's why I got the job. I didn't have a lick of police work or soldiering in my background. They wanted a white guy who could speak Spanish. So naturally I told my boss this. No Spanish, and Miskimon sent you. We both decided maybe you're a spy to keep an eye on us for Goethals.”

“If that's the case, why tell me now, guessing I'd go back to Goethals?”

Harry snorted. “Around here, everyone assumes everything gets back to Goethals and also to the National Police. You have those scabs on your ears. Looks like whatever I told my boss got to them quick enough, and they got to you. I'm half to blame, I suppose, but I didn't think I was throwing you to the wolves. Because Goethals's men, the National Police never touch 'em.”