Bad Faith

by Theodore Wheeler

  Eventually she curls against the cargo she’s riding with and watches the dark countryside as she rattles into it. Amy is unwilling to jump. She wants to see where this train will take her.

  On the day her father arrived with the rental van, the day she moved to St. Paul, Chadron just kind of hung out and watched as Amy packed up her half of the house. He laid in bed as she filled cardboard boxes from the grocery store, then he sat on the couch eating cereal and watching baseball, then he stood with his back to the sink, slurping cans of Dr. Pepper until the furniture was loaded out and her clothes boxed up.

  “Don’t you have anything to tell me,” she asked when it was time to leave. Her father had already driven the moving van across town.

  “No,” Chadron said. “I knew this would happen. The kind of guy I am, the kind of girl you are. We both knew this would happen.”

  From the moment they first met Amy recognized him as a man she could take care of. She fell for him—sweet, malleable Chadron, her dumb-muscle beau. He adored her with such genuine affection and loyalty, a kind of simple gentility that was lost on most of the men and women Amy’s been with both before and since. It was so bizarre to her, the way she acted with him—this just months after dropping out of school in Lincoln—but she was a changed woman, no longer the type who promised things to herself. She took charge and told him the way things were going to be, that she was attracted to him, and what she was going to do with him. He listened, guileless Chadron.

  “You know it’s me who’s going to leave you,” she teased. Sometimes she whispered this to him when he held her too closely, if she felt like he really did love her. Amy knew she was running from something, being with him, and Chadron knew it too.

  A friend of her father’s found her work in St. Paul, as an assistant in the admissions department of Macalester College. She planned to finish the degree she’d begun at NU. Amy liked the job, but something was still missing. Some vital part of her life was deficient. Her initial months in the Twin Cities were wild, those first loose nights when Amy was let free on the lesser dives of University Avenue, often finding herself in the basement bedroom of some college boy or another, once in the backseat of a car with a woman she met at a dance club, and then there was the man with a red beard from the cigar bar. Even though there was a booster seat in the back of his car, and a wedding band in the ashtray, she still went down on him. Amy never learned the names of these acquaintances. She’d create an alias for the guy then repeat it unprompted throughout the night, refusing to hear his real name. It was a guardedness that nearly masked her melancholy—a mournfulness she transformed into a self-sufficiency of sorts.

  These encounters seemed incidental when they happened, forgettable indiscretions. Amy had to reconsider them. Things change, sure, she knew this. Life progresses. It’s just that the change you end up with isn’t always the one you need. You don’t have to accept it. She got to the point where she was an embarrassment to be around for the people who were trying to be her friends. Amy was trashy. That’s what happens when you sleep with every guy you know and then hate them afterwards. It’s okay to be sad, Amy learned, unless people know you are. Then it’s bad for everyone. It’s untenable.

  These were the reasons why Amy backtracked the weeks before Christmas, to reestablish a hold on herself. She found an apartment close to campus in St. Paul, curtailed her drinking, arranged for part-time admission to the college. With her father’s help Amy hired a lawyer to draft papers dissolving her lingering marriage to Chadron and she returned to Aurora for the holiday with the intention of having those papers filed at the Hamilton County Courthouse.

  It could have been simpler, but Amy wanted to be with him one more time. She still found Chadron attractive, his rangy muscles, the way his face was always red, partly from sun-damage to his cheeks, partly because of capillaries burst from alcohol, partly from the country bashfulness he couldn’t suppress.

  Then the train rumbled out from the northern edge of town, blowing by as they pushed against its current. The train’s noise was stultifying, its sheer power electrified the very air she breathed. Its surging muscle infused itself in her, compelled her body to move on a parallel circuit. It was almost too easy, the way she pulled herself onto the railcar bed. She wasn’t thinking about divorce papers or doing the right thing or how her direction in life had been so long ago untracked. Amy didn’t even think about where she might be headed, to where these lines led. It was instinct to attach herself to the rumble, to loose her hair in an astounding wind. Even if the result was painful, she wanted to discover what awaited her at the end of the line.

  It’s close to morning by the time Amy hops off the train. She has a headache and needs coffee, so she positions herself at the edge of the railcar as it slows into another town, coasting into what looks like half timber yard, half salvage lot. There are long open stacks of lumber. On the other side of the tracks are great mounds of scrap, washers and dryers, the tore-out insides of buildings and wrecked cars ready to be compacted and bound together. Amy hops down, stumbles over rail rock as she lands, her legs shaky from a night of riding ill-spliced rails, then she follows the tracks until she’s on the other side of a chain-link fence that edges the rail yard off from the town. The sunlight is orange and yellow in rays that sneak over the horizon, which seems odd to her. The sky usually looks this way only in the evening, or during a storm, when dust rises into a tumultuous atmosphere to color the sky.

  Amy realizes that the town is called Valentine by the signs on its businesses. She finds a fisherman’s cafe, a small brick building with old men drinking coffee inside. They wear plaid shirts with red suspenders and ball caps with the names of feed companies over the bill. These men resemble her father and his friends from church. Amy orders coffee and sits at a table near the window. The men smell her, she notices, their noses bend in her direction. The odors of the train followed her in, the heavy grease smell, the biting tang of too-fresh winter air that trails those who spent the night outdoors. It doesn’t bother Amy if the men stare. She’s used to being stared at.

  When her coffee is finished Amy decides to call her father. She doesn’t really have any other options. The sooner she can get back to Aurora, the sooner she can take care of things and get her car and get back to the Twin Cities. There isn’t much waiting for her in Minnesota, but it’s what she has now.

  A skinny man in a tee shirt is waiting to snap a picture of her when she opens the door. There’s a flash from his digital camera, and then she sees the man behind it, standing in the street.

  “Don’t run,” he says, hiding the camera at his hip.

  Amy stops to look at him, her body twisted in the doorway, confused as to why anyone would take her picture just then.

  “Who are you?”

  “I noticed you walking across the street,” the man explains, circling as he moves closer. “My name’s Aaron Kleinhardt. I’m staying at the motel over there.” He points to a brown motor lodge down the block.

  “I wanted to take your picture,” he says. “You’re pretty.”

  “What are you? Crazy?”

  “No,” Aaron says. “Why would you say that? We don’t know each other.”

  Amy lets the door bang shut behind her, squaring her body to this man. He’s a little older than she is, Amy figures, but he dresses like he’s trying to look young, in a yellow Wyoming Cowboys tee shirt and tight jeans, his feet bare. His hair is stringy and needs trimming. The bangs hang over his eyes and, in order to see, he has to flip them to the side of his forehead. He’s friendly, has blue eyes, a big smile that projects his straight rows of teeth.

  “Listen,” Amy says. She turns away. “I have a call to make.”

  But she stops, nudges at her scalp where the wool cap makes her hair itch, and stares at him again, this man who’s still smiling at her, holding the camera at his side.

  “If you don’t mind my nerve,” Aaron says. He moves gingerly, with pantomime steps over the gravel on the si
dewalk. His feet must be freezing.

  “I wonder if you’d tell me what you’re running from.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You betrayed yourself.” That’s how he puts it. “It’s the smell, your clothes,” he explains. “I’ve learned a few things about being on the run, believe me, and you have the look of it.”

  “I have—really?” Amy flusters, turns back to this stranger. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I see what’s going on.” He slips the camera into the back pocket of his jeans and takes Amy by the arm, trying to shepherd her across the street.

  “Don’t touch me,” she says, pulling her arm away.

  “I’m sorry.” He takes an exaggerated step back, palms raised.

  “What I wanted to tell you,” he continues, “is that you can use my shower if you need to. That’s all I wanted to say. If you don’t have the money for your own room, you can use mine.”

  Amy turns and walks away from him as he speaks to her, but again she stops to look back. He’s kind of pitiful, the crummy clothes, his scrawny limbs. She laughs to herself at the very image of Aaron Kleinhardt, this pathetic man luring her back to his room.

  “How stupid do you think I am?”

  “You don’t get what I mean,” he says, pleased that she’s listening. “I’ll leave while you’re there and wait outside while you shower. If that’s what you want.”

  She can’t believe how this man’s approached her on the street, in Valentine, or the way his voice fluctuates, like he’s constantly defending himself. Amy knows it’s a bad idea to stick around, to associate with a man who acts like Aaron acts, but she can’t help herself.

  Aaron has her cornered in the room but Amy knows how to handle him. She guides him to the bed and goes to her knees in order to diffuse the situation. She won’t lie in the bed with him, not that, but she unzips his jeans and touches the cold damp tip of his prick with her tongue, then takes him into her mouth relentlessly so that it’s over quickly and she can get in the shower. He tries to thumb at her crotch after coming but she pushes him away. He won’t insist if he’s already had his. Amy understands these diversions.

  When she emerges from the shower, a long white towel wrapped around her body, Aaron is still on the bed. He’s stripped down to his boxers.

  “How was it?” he asks, grinning, brushing away the stringy hair that hangs over his eyes.

  “Mediocre,” she says. “But nice, still, after the night I had.”

  “Are we talking about the shower?”

  It’s the way Aaron asks this, a huckster’s smirk on his face, and that he’d even ask if giving head was good, that makes Amy feel again that she’s made a mistake. She knew this already, when he followed her into the room and wouldn’t leave her alone, and then in the moment she capitulated, Amy felt like what she was doing was wrong. But she’s been in situations like this before and understands it’s a zero-sum game. What can it hurt, that’s what she thought. Who will know the difference? If she gets a good shower, it would be worth it.

  And she did try calling her father before Aaron convinced her to come to his room, but the call went unanswered. It wasn’t her fault if events conspired against her. Standing there on the street, Aaron watching while it became clear that whoever she was calling wasn’t going to answer. She couldn’t think of another excuse for why she wouldn’t use his shower. That is, besides the most obvious, that she didn’t like him, that she knew what would happen once they were in his room, that she didn’t want to have sex with him.

  Amy didn’t feel like she could tell Aaron in plain words that she wasn’t interested. From the first moment they met she recognized the way he wanted her; she understood it would be easier to satisfy his desires than it would be to avoid them; she didn’t have anywhere else to go.

  “Listen,” she says, freshly resolved to shake him. “Thanks for the shower and everything, but I need to get going.”

  “Sure.” His eyebrows drop. “If you got to leave, I understand.”

  “It’s nothing personal.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it.” They both cringe as she says this, because words like those can only mean their opposite. “You’re on your own journey somewhere, I suppose, and I’m on mine. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  Sitting on the bed, hands in his lap, Aaron drops the smile and squints at Amy, as if he’s searching for something specific. It creeps her out, standing in a towel while he examines her, even though he isn’t looking at her body exactly, her bare shoulders or legs. It’s her face he’s watching, her hair made curly by the shower steam, the furious glare she feels overtaking her eyes, the way her chin inches back into itself because she’s nervous.

  It’s Aaron who breaks away first, his gaze darting to the door that leads to the street, to her puffy black coat that’s hung over the knob.

  “You were on a train, weren’t you?” The full dopey smile reemerges as his gaze returns to her body. “Not a passenger train, that’s not what I mean. They don’t run here. I can smell it, the oil, the ozone of dynamos. You hopped a freight.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No,” he says. “It’s okay to admit it. I know about the kinds of things that set folks off into this country up here. I even rode a train like that before. It’s a secret, that kind of thing. It’s free.”

  “Okay,” Amy says. She leans down to snatch her clothes off the carpet. “I’m leaving.”

  With the bathroom door locked behind her, Amy dresses quickly. She slips on her jeans as she sits at the edge of the bathtub, then refastens her bra, its wires bent out of shape after sleeping on the railcar. It’s when she’s holding her shirt that she hears Aaron move, noticing the sound of him walking across the old motel shag, his pressing a hand against the bathroom door. It’s dead quiet in the morning. Amy stands stock-still in the bathroom, listening. The door seems to hum, as if Aaron is sliding his fingertips over its surface, his nails imperceptibly scraping the veneer. She jumps when he speaks because she doesn’t know what’s going to happen.

  “Amy,” he says, his voice still earnest and unashamed, a hint of begging in it. “If you’re going to hop another train, I’d like to come.” She stands with her back to the door, a cold shiver running along her spine. She wishes her father had answered when she called him.

  “Would you let me go with you?” he asks. Amy hesitates, grips the edge of the sink. “I’m not going to jump a train.”

  “You can tell me,” he says. “I’d like to go on one, if you are.”

  Their agreement is to jump a southbound.

  Amy had left the room, she’d dressed quickly and hurried out the door, slipped around the corner and called her father, misdialing twice because her fingers were shaking. She needed to get out of Valentine and should have kept walking, that was her mistake, because Aaron emerged jogging behind her on the street, wearing only his boxer shorts. He jumped in front of her and Amy had to end the call before anyone answered, cutting off the dial tone as she snapped her phone shut. She stuffed the phone in her pocket because Aaron was standing there, practically naked on this small-town street where they both were strangers.

  Somehow he calmed her again and convinced her that they must catch a train together, his voice jumpy trying to make it sound like fun before he rushed upstairs to put his clothes back on. Amy should have run then, but she hadn’t. If she was someplace familiar, Aurora or the Twin Cities, or even Lincoln, where there were crowds of people, or folks she knew nearby, Amy would have run from him. But there wasn’t anywhere she could go here. What would she tell them, these people that lived in Valentine? That she’d hopped a train and was stuck here? That she went down on this man in a motel room? Nothing had happened that she hadn’t allowed to happen. That’s what it would look like—that’s what they would think—that she was seeking this weird man’s attention. She was a stranger too
. She couldn’t rely on anyone here to save her. So she agreed to hop a southerly, because at least then she would be headed in the direction of Aurora.

  When Aaron falls asleep within the first hour it seems like a real blessing, especially when her phone vibrates in her pocket, when Amy sees that Chadron is calling. He’s still her husband, she remembers, because they never signed the divorce papers. She left them in her car, then jumped the train and now she’s here, wherever this is, somewhere south of Valentine. Amy doesn’t answer the call, though, she presses the button on the side that stops the vibrating.

  They’re passing through another town when Amy notices that her phone is going to run out of battery, and it’s this juxtaposition of events that causes her to stand and lean toward the ground rushing by—she’s going through a town, her phone will soon die, Aaron’s asleep behind her. She nearly jumps. But then she pauses to rationalize with herself.

  It seems too simple, that she can jump off the train and walk to town, stop at the library and call her father, that she could escape from Aaron’s cloying presence while he’s sleeping. And it’s while she’s thinking these things—remembering the way her father would softly hum, “Oh, Amy, what has happened to you now?”—that she returns the phone to her pocket, sits back inside the boxcar, and decides to hang on a while longer. This is what I’m doing, she thinks. She’ll wait until they’re closer to Aurora before jumping, so she can walk back on her own.

  Aaron continues to sleep, curled in a back corner of the near-empty railcar. There’s just scrap metal in the car with them, segments of rusty I-beams. Who is this man? she thinks again, standing over Aaron as he sleeps, his skinny ankles showing out the bottom of his jeans. He’s not particularly attractive, Amy knows this. She’s embarrassed that she went down on him, although embarrassed before whom she couldn’t say. It doesn’t matter. Amy can’t think of anyone she’s slept with whose looks or personality were cause for bragging.