I know Morse because when I was a kid, me and another kid next door named Myron Brinton, only we always called him Puggy, pooled our junk money and sent away for one of those Learn-to-be-a-telegrapher layouts: two keys and some wire and dry cells and a code book. We rigged her up and sent stuff back and forth from each other’s bedrooms. Puggy was smart but in a low-down kind of way and I don’t know as I ever liked him exactly, but he was a couple of years older and always up to something and some ways I guess he was kind of a hero to me too. His call letters was MB and mine was TK, for Tom Knox, which is my name. And I reckon once you know Morse you never forget it, like swimming.
Well, these rattles on the train hit a Morse letter now and again — just V and some hash, then P and more hash, and so on. Then over and over again, like these things they shake in rumba orchestras, they started up: Da — daditda... Da — daditda... Da — daditda... And that’s Morse for TK.
That’s right, I thought it was the whiskey. I hadn’t had much, but a little bad booze sometimes goes a long way. But the more I listened, the queerer it got, because the rattle even sent that TK with a little slur, just like Puggy used to. I never got up to. a sending speed that would faze him, but he was always a sloppy sender compared to me.
Then I figured I was asleep and dreaming without knowing it, so I shook myself awake for sure, and the rattles kept right on sending. It seemed like the noise was back of the head of the bunk somehow. So I got into my pants and checked up, and what was back of the head of the bunk was the washroom wall and the steel closet where they keep sheets and towels.
I prowled the men’s room, and the only soul in it was the porter catching a nap. I was feeling kind of cool round my bare feet, but I stayed with it and woke him up and offered him a dollar to open up the closet, though it didn’t seem reasonable there was any room in it for a practical joker.
He did it, but it was pretty plain he thought I was drunk or nuts, and I wasn’t arguing the point; I just waved the dollar at him. And, like I expected, there wasn’t any little green men in there sending Morse. There was nothing but stacks of linen.
When I got back in the bunk, the TK business had quit. But naturally I sneezed as my cold feet warmed up and here it was again: Dadadit — dit — dididit — diditda — dadit — dadidit — didididit — dit — didit — da. And that’s Morse for Gesundheit.
That finished me. I reached over to the window sill and tapped back with my middle fingernail, like handling a key: Dada — dadididit, meaning MB.
Puggy come right back — it was him, all right — with a stream of Morse that swamped me, I had to break in and send how I was rusty as an old gate and he always was a lousy sender and slow down! Then I did one of those double-takes, like in the movies. Here I was, holding conversation with the rattles on a train!
He slowed and begun sending pretty clean code for him. First off, he made it clear he was dead. “But I ain’t in the other world,” he says. “Seems to be one but I ain’t there yet. I can’t go there till I get something off my mind.”
So I asked him where he was; I had to send it twice before he got it. I guess I was pretty jittery.
“Calm down, Tom,” he says. “I ain’t going to bite you. I’m too glad to see you. If you stay jumpy, I can’t read you and I got no time to waste. Where am I? I’m right here in the bunk with you. You need a shave and you got on an old-fashioned nightshirt, like the hayseed you always was. But you don’t feel crowded because I ain’t here in the flesh, like they say. And no squawks about its being your bunk because I been first citizen of this Lower Two for seven years, and if anybody’s an interloper it’s you, see.”
He said he’d died in 1921, when he was thirty. Seems he’d left home after I did and gone bad and turned professional gambler and done all right on long-distance trains sometimes and in joints sometimes and then when he was in France with the A.E.F., cleaning up on the boys paydays. He said he never asked for trouble with amateur stuff like marked cards but he never saw the beat of the second deal he developed.
Well, this car had been on a Florida run in 1921 and Puggy and his partner had quarreled over money in the washroom; the partner had knifed him and he’d staggered out and fell into Lower Two and died there. “I been here ever since,” he says. “When you’re dead and got something on your mind, you stay where you died till you get it off. That’s the rules. And that’s where you come in, chum.”
I said, “Why pick on me?” There must of been hundreds of people in that bunk in seven years.
“Ain’t you my friend?” he says. “You’re the first familiar face I seen since I got mine, boyhood pal.” He sent that with a kind of a sneer. “Besides, I ain’t the kind of spirit that can moan or holler or talk right out. Some can, but I’m the rapping kind, and the run of these passengers don’t know Morse. A couple of times I tried the regular spirit system, rapping the alphabet by numbers, five for E and thirteen for M and such, but it’s too monotonous to catch their notice. They’d just go to sleep on me. I don’t see how those uneducated spirits get anywhere with it.”
I asked if the train crews didn’t know Morse.
“They don’t sleep in Pullman berths,” he says. “Now, if I was haunting a house, maybe I’d get somewhere pounding and hammering, but nobody pays any attention to noises on trains. I been trying Morse on them all this time and I never found a one that knew code, barring an old fellow that begun to tumble five years ago and got so scared he threw himself off the train. They put it down to suicide. He never said yes or no, just skinned out of the bunk and out to the vestibule and wrestled the door open and dived out and broke his neck. Served him right,” he says. “He didn’t have no call to panic like that. I wasn’t going to hurt him.”
Well, about that point I got out my bottle, poison or not.
“I ain’t had a drink since I died,” Puggy says, sort of wistful. “But don’t you go getting plastered. I got a proposition for you.”
I asked him was it honest.
“Your end is,” he says. “Anyway, you got no choice. I’m asking polite, like one pal to another, but you try saying no and see what happens to you.”
His trouble was money and his wife. Seems he’d eloped with a Callao girl named Velma Burke in 1912 and she was kind of up against it after he got killed. She was working in a roadside place called Virgil’s outside Lansing and getting along the best she could and he wanted to see she was done right by. He wanted her to have a nest egg he’d stashed away that she didn’t know about, and I was to go lift it and take it to her.
I asked him how he knew where she was if he couldn’t leave Lower Two, and he blew up at me.
“Rot you,” he says, “I don’t want no questions. We got ways of knowing things. I never see her, but I know what her situation is. If I can just fix this up, I can have some peace,” he says with a kind of a sigh. “I sure can use some after doing sixty thousand miles a year in this old crummy. Just back and forth, back and forth. Now, dry up, and here’s your marching orders,” he says. And he give them to me.
The cash — ten thousand dollars in big bills — was in a couple of waxed flat-fifty cigarette tins nailed up inside a big hollow sycamore in the creek bottom on the Cass place outside Lebanon, Michigan. “Biggest tree anywheres along,” Puggy says. “Way high in the dark of the hollow.” And he sends “Dididitdadit — ditdit,” which is “30” and means a sign-off.