Rock Island Line
Page 31
“Yes. We’re less than four hours from Chicago, and between five and a half and six to Iowa City from there. I’m so nervous. It seems we couldn’t be there fast enough and at the same time we’re getting there too fast and I wish I had time to get ready. I’m really glad you’re awake.”
“Well, good.”
“I wonder if we should go to the house first thing.”
“What house?”
“My house, in Sharon Center, just across the street from the garage.”
“I don’t know.”
“I wonder if anyone’s living there now.”
“I’m sure I don’t know. What does it look like?”
“It’s white, and not too big. There’s a three-wire clothesline in the front yard and two big cottonwoods. It sits on the northeast corner of an intersection, the blacktop to Hills and old Highway 1. Three bird feeders, one up against a kitchen window in back. The porch has a swing and Dad used to sit in it even in winter and Mom would open the door and tell him to come in for dinner. Snow could come in through the screen and lie on the cement floor and it would blow when the door opened. My father had a red Ford, a real old one that used to sit in the shed in front, and on rainy Saturday afternoons I’d sit in it and pretend I was going somewhere. This must be terribly boring to you.”
“Not at all.”
“Think of it, each second we’re getting closer, a foot at a time, eighty miles an hour. It seems somehow amazing.”
“What does?”
“Things like old Sehr’s house. It’s probably still there, all of it. The summers feel the same probably. Soon the corn will be dead in the fields, the beans brown. The limbs from the cottonwoods are probably still falling off into the yard. The highway commission wanted them taken down. ‘Trash trees,’ they called them. ‘Too much trash falling off into the road.’
“ ‘When you see some,’ Dad told them, ‘come tell me and I’ll clean it up, because nobody’s going to touch those trees.’ He had a black walnut in back and someone from the lumber yard offered him five hundred dollars for it and he wouldn’t sell it. Mom gave him a little grief about that, but he argued that if the time ever came when we needed five hundred dollars and couldn’t get it any other way, then we could sell it—the price of lumber wasn’t likely to go down. So if we kept the tree, then we had it and the money, where if we sold it we had just the money.”
“And were they really killed in an accident?”
“Yes. Just outside of Iowa City.”
“Whose fault was it?”
“It was an accident.”
“I know, but who was to blame?”
“Some guy who was twenty-six and drunk . . . but it doesn’t matter.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Oh, I wish I could see out of this window!”
Without their having noticed him before, a conductor was standing beside them. “Keep it down here, folks,” he whispered, friendly. “People’s tryin’ to sleep,” then slipped on out of the car and they could hear the banging rails for a moment before the door closed.
“I wonder if we could go out there,” July said quietly.
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s just all so hard to believe. First I was in Iowa, then I was in Philadelphia and now I’m going back to Iowa—like three different people. And you’re with me. Only it seems like—no it doesn’t.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m just babbling. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait in Chicago.”
“You keep asking me questions I can’t answer. Just try to go to sleep. When you get to Iowa City you’ll be there. Thinking about it won’t bring it any closer. Is it Iowa City or Sharon Center you’re going to?”
“Sharon Center . . . but there’s nothing there. It’s just a little community I guess you’d call it. It’s about eight or ten miles from town.”
“Town being Iowa City.”
“Right.”
“How big’s that?”
“Not big. There’s a university there. That’s nearly as big as the whole town.”
“Oh. Well, let’s see, what time do you suppose it is?” She tried to distinguish the hands of her watch in the bluish darkness. “Nine thirty, I think.”
“Then we’ll be in Chicago by one.”
“These trains are nice, roaring through the countryside with one light, on its own track, away from busses and cars and people. Just this thing with us inside and everyone else safe.”
“Safe?”
“Yes. At this very second everyone’s safe. Don’t you think?”
“Well, I suppose. I wonder if anyone changed my old room around, or if the garage is being used, or if someone broke in and stole all the tools. It used to be that when Dad’d leave for lunch he’d just walk across the street and in the house without bothering to lock up and never lost anything to people stealing. He loaned out tools, of course, and sometimes it’d be months before he’d get ’em back—but that’s just laziness more’n anything else. Of course, things change. The men used to joke that there wouldn’t be any use to come there and steal ‘cause you could never find anything. The wind blowing through the cottonwoods! I can remember that sound. Mal, you should’ve heard it when blowing would come up in the night and Grandma and I’d sit on the front porch while Mom and Dad were asleep—it sounded like nothing else in this world. We sat with the lights out and those old branches’d wave and glitter . . . then the lonely sounds of the cars coming through and moving out of hearing, popping bits of gravel with their tires.”
“How old were you when you left?”
“About ten, why?”
“Just that your memory seems pretty good for it being that long ago.”
“I had occasion to go all over it quite a few times, and I guess it kind of made it clearer for that reason. Sometimes I’d lie at night and just try to remember as far back as I could.”
“I’ve done that. It doesn’t work very well.”
“I know. You have to use the memories to get at the time. It won’t work the other way around.”
“It must’ve been pretty terrible, your folks getting killed.”
“It’s a horror that never seemed to realize itself. Just when I’d think I had it under control, bang, and I’d know it was worse than that. I kept getting it into my imagination—not consciously, understand—that they weren’t dead, they were just gone for a while. And let me tell you, you pay for those things.”
“What did you do then?”
“Lived alone. Do you remember that apartment I showed you?”
“The one in the office building?”
“Yes. Well, I never lived there.”
“I knew it! I just knew it!”
“Shhh,” came from somewhere in the car.
“I lived underneath City Hall, under a subway platform, there at the Broad Street terminal,” he whispered.
“Not really.”
“Yes. I lived there for four years, selling newspapers.”
“You told me you sold newspapers.”
“Then I worked for Franklin Carroll and lived in the furniture store—Carroll’s Furniture.”
“I remember that place. It’s not open any more.”
“I know. Carroll shot himself.”
“Really? . . . You didn’t see him do it, did you?”
“No.”
“He was your boss, huh?”
“Yep. What time is it now?”
“We’ll be there soon enough,” she whispered and touched his arm. “Why didn’t you ever tell me any of these things before?”
“I don’t know. It seems so melodramatic, I guess.”
They were quiet for a long way, July feeling the motion of the train through every inch of him. They held hands. An old woman wandered by and went to the bathroom.
“Mal,” he said softly.
“What?”
“If you want to go back, that’s OK.”
“Is it?”
“Well, you probably wouldn’t. Rich people don’t buy things like trains. They make investments. . . . I was thinking about going back.”
“I thought so. In Chicago?”
“I don’t know. But you have to promise that if I decide to, you won’t say anything.”
“Not even ‘Oh heck’?”
“Nothing. Promise that you’ll never say anything.”
“I promise.”
“Good. Now I’m going to take a nap.” And she closed her eyes and fell asleep, noticing that she was much more comfortable than she had been before, and that her mental image of July was now bigger than a peanut.
They got to Chicago and learned, much to July’s dismay, that the layover would be eight hours. The prospect of sitting in the transit station all that time wasn’t appealing. The dark walls and windows were gloomy. And July could tell Mal was very tired, despite all the sleep she’d had. The trip was taking her emotional strength away as fast as she could build it up. He wanted to leave quickly, because any moment she might decide to go back, march off into a black metal train and be gone forever.
“We’ll go to a hotel,” he said, “get something to eat, catch six hours of sleep and come back.” They walked uptown. At the first place, July wrote them down as man and wife to save money and was given a key. Mal was too tired to eat and they went right up to their room.
July had an unexpectedly pleasant sensation locking the door and hanging the chain. The little room was light green with a single window and Mal seemed to wake up as soon as they went into it.
“I’ll take a shower,” she announced on peeking into the bathroom, and hurried to open one of the suitcases for her nightgown and toothbrush and toothpaste and a bottle of perfume which she picked up so July couldn’t see it and dashed off into the bathroom, clicking the door shut behind her without locking it.
As soon as July heard the water turned on in the other room he realized what a spot he was in. He looked at the bed, which had a red cover and was only barely big enough to be called double, and wondered how it’d happened. There was nothing else in the room except one chair that looked as if it had never been sat on, and there was barely room for it to fit between the bed and the window. He was tired, his defenses were down and he had a strange sense that something was going to happen. His desire was beginning to rise. He took Butch out of the box and Butch immediately ran under the bed and wouldn’t be coaxed out. The shower was turned off and the shower curtain pulled open and he sat down on the bed. Fears of personal inadequacy were his last hold on the thinking world. He heard the sink faucet turned on and off, and on and off, then an indefinite period of absolute silence and muffled clothes sounds and the door swung open. Mal stepped out onto the carpet, her skin glowing from the heat of the shower, her hair wet and hanging over her shoulders, her nightgown holding her in like a cloud, and smiled self-consciously. From then until about an hour later, as he lay looking out the opened window listening to two o’clock being rung out of some cast-iron bell, Mal’s steady, deep breathing beside him, July never had a coherent thought. As the ability began to return to him he was simultaneously filled with dread and joy: dread because he might in some way be held accountable for having such weak ideals, and joy in feeling that he’d finally penetrated his own terrible isolation. Mal turned over, half woke and, speaking heavily through her throat, said, “Come to sleep,” closed her eyes and lapsed back away from him.
Naturally, there was no way he could do that. With the excited warmth he felt inside him, the memory of Mal Rourke saying “I love you” and the ever recurring realization that tomorrow he’d be in Iowa made sleeping impossible.
They made love once again in the morning and got Butch out from underneath the bed.
They boarded the Rock Island Line, heading west, and Mal said: “You worry too much. You shouldn’t worry so much.”
“Worrying keeps me safe,” he said. “I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t help any.”
But his excitement was just beginning. It was late morning when they crossed the Mississippi River and he felt that if the windows were open he’d surely jump out into it and let its thick, muddy water carry him downstream. The Rock Island Line went on through Dubuque and into the flat plains beyond the rolling riverland, into Iowa. Farmers were in the fields picking yellow corn, inching along with dogs following beside the giant back wheels, and his soul seemed to be ripping from his body, trying to get out the window and into the air and dirt, let the dying leaves on the trees dry it up and the sweet sounds of the earth carry it on forever. Memories came flooding over him so fast that he couldn’t take time to tell them to Mal. He wanted to eat a watermelon, roast pumpkin seeds in the oven, lie in a white-clover field, have a pet crow, swing on a rope swing, go fishing along the English River and get his line snarled up in the bank weeds and yellowbirds, buy penny candy in a one-room store, fry up a mess of catfish, split rails out of oak and ash, listen to bullfrogs and spring peepers, lie out under the night sky and let Orion swirl above him, his sword slitting the membrane of reality, bleeding it into the surrealism of Iowa.
They stepped off the train in Iowa City and put their luggage in a quarter locker. Butch finally had his freedom and drank a half-carton of cold milk that July poured into a plastic dish he found in a wastebasket. Mal clung to his arm and spoke in a worried voice, looking around at their destination. “What are we going to do here, July? How are we going to live?”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Just wait. Everything will work out.” Then he added an aside to himself: “I’m finally here,” and half expected one of the few people they saw at the station to come running over and say Aren’t you July Montgomery from Sharon? My God, you’ve been gone a long time. Tell us, where’ve you been? What’ve you been doing? But he knew it wouldn’t happen. It was more likely no one’d remember him at all. Which would be OK, he reasoned.
They put Butch in a locker with another dish of milk and an apology, walked to Wardway Plaza and caught a ride down to the blacktop. Then they walked nearly a mile until they were given another ride in a blue van heading for the cheese factory.
“I always come this way,” the man explained. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s traffic. Where you kids heading?”
“Sharon Center,” said July. “Do you live around here?”
“About six or seven miles that way,” and he gestured off to the east.
“You a farmer?”
“Heavens, no. Do I look like one!” He laughed. “No, my family and I just live on an acreage. I work in Iowa City at P and G.”
“I used to live in Sharon Center,” announced July.
“Oh, you did. Hmmm. I take it you don’t live there any more.”
“Maybe yes and maybe no. Hard to say. Well, it depends on the house. By rights I think the house that used to belong to my father now belongs to me. Doesn’t that seem right to you?”
“Oh, no you don’t,” the man sang out cheerfully. “ You’re not about to get me involved in some family affair—some squabble over who gets what. I’ve seen too much of it myself.”
“It isn’t. I wouldn’t have anything to do with something like that. Besides, there’s nobody really to contest—The cottonwoods are down!” he cried as the van came up over the rise that brought the little cluster of houses into view.
“How long you been away?” asked the man.
“Twelve years,” said Mal.
“The bird feeders are gone, the walnut’s gone. The house was never repainted.”
They pulled up and the van stopped. “Here you go,” the man said. “Good luck.” He let them out and drove on. Five men stepped out of the garage and stared at them. Both the side door and the
front door were open and someone was welding inside with a loud pzzzz. July stood still and looked around.
Mal took hold of his arm and whispered under the inquisitive eyes of the men: “July, what are we going to do now? Somebody lives there.”
His parents’ house did look occupied.
“Don’t worry. Everything’ll be all right. Just because some of the things are different doesn’t really mean anything. . . . The garage is open. Come on, let’s go talk to them first.”
“No, let’s don’t go over there.”
“Sure, come on. They’ll be friendly. They’re just a little shy.”
“They don’t look shy to me. They’re staring!”
“Come on.” And July marched over to the garage with Mal walking gingerly behind him.
“Hello there,” he said.
“Hello,” said one of the men dryly, talking for them all. The man using the arc welder stopped and cocked back his hood.
“My name’s July Montgomery.” Recognition jumped into the faces of three of them, but before they could respond he went on, “My father, John Montgomery, used to own this, and the house across the street. Do you by any chance know who’s living there now?”
“You’re July Montgomery?”
“Yes.”
“What’d he say?” asked an old man who couldn’t hear very well, stooping over insistently.
“He said his name’s July Montgomery,” the man next to him shouted in his ear.
The old face wrinkled in thought, the brows knit together; then a toothless smile opened on his face and he turned his blue eyes on July in pure delight. “July, July Montgomery! You’re the grandson of Della and Wilson.”
“That’s right,” said July, then added, “That’s right.”
“You’re John’s boy, the one who run away.”
July nodded.
“And now you’re back. Ho ho,” he laughed. “And now you’re back. You’re John’s boy and now you’re back. Ain’t that something, Glen?” he said, turning to the man with the black hood above his head, and without any sense of what’s proper and polite, which had disappeared with his hearing, went on, “That’s July Montgomery. That’s prob’ly his welder you got there. This whole buildin’ prob’ly belongs to him. Ain’t that somethin! Old Frunt says you was dead. Your uncle he is, ain’t he? But the relation ain’t through him, is it? It’s through her.”