Ticket Home

by James Michael Pratt

  Lucian felt like a no-good jerk, stripping the ring with the inscribed family motto off the finger of his twin brother. He wanted badly to make up, do something, be like old times when they would die for each other. There was never a dull moment growing up with Norman along the rail lines. Although he’d been the playful one, always able to bring reserved Norman into the fun he’d make up for them, Norman helped keep him in line.

  Meeting Mary Jane, then marrying her, put the two brothers into a hellish tailspin. He couldn’t deny his heart. He loved that girl like a heat-crazed man dying for a drink. He drank from a well of love he couldn’t have imagined, and left Norman hanging out to dry. They had shared everything, but this was where the best of brothers and friends drew the line.

  He kicked at the dirt, wondering if he was his brother’s keeper or his brother’s enemy. One thing he knew for sure. He’d look out for Norman, make it up somehow. He was going to do right by him.

  He spit out a cheek full of tobacco juice away from the crowd and looked up.

  “I’ll be,” he said, smiling, stunned. He shook his head and rubbed at his eyes. “Norman?” he mouthed with a questioning look. “I’ll be a son-of-a-gun.” He grinned, watching his brother and the young woman.

  CHAPTER 25

  Mary Jane settled into a support role for her grandfather, who was beginning to act his age. He had slowed and wasn’t the help he had wanted to be for Jason Parker and the shortline out of Warm Springs.

  She had never imagined returning here, not to a dull boring life in a town that couldn’t boast of a minimal social environment. Not a church, not a theater, not more than three seats at the soda fountain at Kelly’s Drugs.

  Marriage meant something though, and family needs meant she’d be obliged to care for Grandpa Harry and equally for the lonely father of the man—men—she loved.

  She considered the thought. She was guilty of the unintended heartbreak of her new husband’s equally handsome brother, Norman. I could have been happy married to either, she contemplated. What a mess I caused, she mused, biting at her lower lip. I should have said no to Lucian and could have avoided hurting Norman.

  Love has its own set of rules, though. She knew Norman couldn’t understand any better than she why she could feel so differently about men who looked identical. How some chemistry of the heart worked for one in one way and for the other in another way made no sense at all. There was chemistry for both of them, just different.

  She felt guilty of the crime of responding too well to the accidental kiss that day at the café in Santa Monica. There was absolutely no difference in the passion she felt kissing Norman while she thought she was kissing Lucian. Yes, I could have been happy with Norman too, she posed silently to her worried mind.

  The heart has a mind of its own, she concluded. What was she to do? Deny her stronger feelings for Lucian? Maybe it was the fun way he had about him, the boyishness over the more sober and serious Norman. Maybe that was why she was attracted differently to him.

  Let it go, another voice inside her urged. There was danger in playing with the mind too much. “Follow your heart, obey God, and let the rest sort itself out,” her father had wisely counseled back in California the day before she came back to Warm Springs. Her kin were practical and devoted people. That was what she needed to be now.

  She prayed a real prayer today. Not the daily ritual type where you say the same things, ask for the same things, like having a check-off list between you and the Almighty.

  No. Today’s was a real prayer.

  She looked over at tired Grandpa Harrison. He slept in the easy chair as soundly as a worn out puppy from too much play. He had loved the idea of working with Jason Parker on the shortline.

  The prayer she said today lingered in her mind like a pleasant memory. It was simple really. She had asked for strength and courage to give more than to receive. This place and Lucian’s deployment to some unknown destination meant she would have to forego any self-centered wants.

  So she prayed to find the way to become selfless, a servant to these two men at home that meant so much to her and to her two men abroad. Funny, she was only married to one of them, but felt they were both “her men.”

  Perhaps that would change when Lucian returned and Norman found someone. Perhaps Mr. Parker, her father-in-law, would find a widow or such to help him in his loneliness too. Grandpa would always have her until he was gone.

  She knelt by the sofa while the old man slumbered, and supplicated a God she had barely begun to understand, petitioning for patience, understanding, and for the safe return of her beloved Lucian … and Norman.

  CHAPTER 26

  August 1941, U.S.S. Coolidge

  “I don’t suppose we’ll all get to see these shores again.” A deeply pensive Johnny Mead spoke soberly as he and Norman leaned against the rail. The converted luxury liner, now troop ship, was headed past the Golden Gate bridge to open sea.

  “San Francisco sure is a pretty sight. I guess seeing the country from this view makes it all real. It’s been like playing army up until now,” Lucian spoke up. He came from behind them unexpectedly.

  “Didn’t think you’d ever show up,” Norman responded, moving aside, making room for his brother. “Johnny here thinks we are going to lose some men. He’s a bit touchy about them Japs out in China.”

  “All I said is I guess some of the boys won’t make it back. I don’t know why I feel that way. I just do. That’s all,” Johnny answered defensively.

  “I’m goin’ back, cousin. This is a one-year vacation. No Japs are gonna attack American bases. They aren’t that stupid.” He turned to Norman. “So you gonna write Luisa back in Albuquerque? That was some kissin’ goin’ on at the depot as we loaded the train. I was lookin’ all over for you, then bingo! There’s my brother with the prettiest señorita in Albuquerque in his arms.” Lucian smiled, changing the subject.

  “Yeah, I suppose. She is a pretty woman,” he answered, trying to convince himself that he’d put Mary Jane out of his heart. “Look at that skyline, will ya? And those rolling hills. It almost makes a man forget about Warm Springs,” he said wistfully. “You got California right all along, brother,” Norman added.

  “I guess we’ll be seein’ it about this time next year. Sure is a lot of water out there. Wonder how Pa is gonna make out. He turns fifty next year, you know. Sure is inconvenient, this training deployment,” Lucian observed.

  “Not much he can do but make out. He’s a tough old bird. He’s got them two young boys, Jimmy and Hank from Kelly’s, the drug store man. Those Kelly boys are eager to get out of town. I imagine they can shovel coal, load cars, handle the boiler tank as good as you and me with a bit of motivation.”

  “Still, with Mama gone. It’s a sad sight, I’ll tell ya, Norm. Sure glad I went back home. Sure glad I did,” Lucian said, thinking about his bride. He was comforted knowing she was there in Warm Springs for moral support to his pa. He was glad to see Norman getting over the anger, the jealousy, though he supposed he wouldn’ve felt the same.

  “So is Luisa a good kisser? I mean back at the station in Albuquerque, you two really had something going?” Lucian quizzed, breaking the silence.

  “As good as Mary Jane, I suppose,” he replied.

  “Hey, what do you mean by that?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “How would you know?”

  “How do you know I don’t?” he dug back.

  Silence.

  “Well boys, I think that was mess call. Chow lines are formin’. Do I have to eat your share?” Johnny had been silent, casually taking in the brotherly exchange until now.

  “Come on.” Lucian nodded.

  “I’ll be along. Save me some,” Norman replied quietly. “I want to think.”

  They left him there to ponder the California shoreline, now disappearing from the stern of the Coolidge. It was August 1941 and by August 1942 he’d be back watching an anxious Lucian see this shoreline come into view. He wa
s glad he was moving away from the pain—as far as the army would send him was fine by him. One year might do it, might help him forget his brother’s wife.

  He had a picture of Luisa with him and she promised to write. He could eat in the mess hall, save his money, and marry her when he got home. He could love her. He’d just be as cold as ice in the company of Lucian and Mary Jane. Guess he’d leave Warm Springs to them, maybe give them the Dearborn spread he bought with his Santa Fe earnings as a late wedding gift.

  He’d move on out to New Mexico and make a new life. One year reinforcing some army outpost in the Pacific should help him make up his mind.

  If the Japs ever attacked, if there ever was a war, he wasn’t going to hold anything back. He didn’t care enough about returning, not yet. Not that he had a death wish, just that whatever the pain was that lay ahead, it couldn’t possibly do to him what the girl from Warm Springs had done.

  They don’t make torture like that, he considered. They surely don’t.

  CHAPTER 27

  Present day, Warm Springs, Oklahoma

  Seventy-nine-year-old Lucian Parker covered years in minutes as he kicked at a knot in the creaky boards of the antiquated loading dock. The fiery noon sun baked the hardwood planks hot and white if left to themselves. It did the same to just about everything in this part of the country if left without tending to. Lucian must have applied a thousand gallons of linseed oil over the years to condition them—keep them from rotting away.

  Time for another coat, he thought to himself. The sun sweltered just like it did that day he and his brother had left from here for war so many years ago. There was never any forgetting that day.

  Yes sir, the same fireball in the sky looked down on me on this very loading dock—shone on my dear brother, too. Funny how it goes. The sun—just like an old reliable friend. Maybe it knew who he really was, had been, he mused.

  Odd that he should think that way. The sun had about killed him in the Philippines. That was then, he thought.

  It was his heritage to keep this small train station alive. Alive and telling its silent tale of the past glory days when train tracks meant survival because of a shortline rail to the outside world. At least the world outside this part of Oklahoma territory.

  The surviving brother pondered on what that meant now, and he felt the same pangs of guilt that had dogged him every hour of every day since the end of the war fifty-five years ago.

  Lucian Parker paced the planks today like a man looking for a precious lost coin hidden somewhere in the grains of the noisy squeaking timbers, or wedged between the heaviness of the joints that made up Warm Springs’ nearly one-hundred-year-old train depot loading dock.

  It was a shortline railroad because the sixty-five-mile track was a one-way rail run connecting the farming community with the mainline to the south.

  Shortline, he contemplated as he paced, waiting impatiently for his sweetheart to arrive so they could take the original 1907 Baldwin steam locomotive down the line to Redemption. Switchman too, he laughed self-consciously.

  He stopped and looked quizzically at a design in the grains of wood beneath his feet. He remembered this spot! It had been patched the day they both shipped out to join their National Guard unit down in New Mexico. They had been home for one week and needed to get back. It was the honeymoon train ride, he winced.

  Norman had put a pickax through the plank in anger, he said silently to himself. Norman, he whispered reverently as if he could bring him to life, stand him before him this very day and speak to him somehow.

  Funny how it goes. It seemed like yesterday and his life passed before him as if it were a dream.

  Norman.

  Lucian.

  Twins.

  The same, yet so separated from each other by time. Time was now a blur. All a blur of events running together in a string. A string of memories so jumbled with the fateful days of war—as if the war had defined him and everything before or after it. And then there was Mary Jane. Indeed, they both had loved her.

  But the events of those days did feel like yesterday to him now. The anger between them on that day had been sharp and hot. The anger between the brothers was dead now, though. As dead as the wood he walked upon. Salty moisture found its way to his lips.

  His age-spotted hand swiped at his eyes as he blinked away the watery mirage. I loved him, he whispered in a deep and reflective voice to the repaired patch on the wooden boarding platform, as if he could redeem the day from the bitterness that had spilled over there so many years ago. “I loved him!” he announced convincingly to the fireball glaring down upon him.

  He and Mary Jane would go to Redemption now, make a stop to pick some folks up for the ride on this final train run into Albuquerque as soon as she arrived from the ranch house.

  They’d present the old steamer to the local railroad museum and park as a gift from the family. From there they’d head to the Philippines, but his mind would linger for a while in 1941.

  He stared at the spot where the pickax had angrily landed on the platform. It dissolved into that very hot day. A day that he confronted his pain. Pain and emotion that had been pent up inside him setting up this whole chain of events he had lived.

  Dear God in heaven, I loved him like life itself. His moist eyes reflected thoughtfully, ardently, as he gazed toward the noonday sun overhead. He hoped he had done honor to his brother … to his name.

  CHAPTER 28

  Present day, Manila City, the Philippines

  The jet landed in Manila a little more than one week from the day he had paced the Warm Springs loading dock. One week is all it took to get there, yet he had let so much time go by.

  It was the first time Lucian Parker had returned to the Philippines since the end of World War II. He always meant to come here, it’s just that he was always so busy with raising the family, the ranch, the depot, the myriad other things that kept a man preoccupied. And if he did come, then he knew he would be making a commitment to something that could change his life and that of his Mary Jane.

  He wasn’t sure he was ready for that, until now. Besides, he would have to remember many events that he would just as soon leave buried—forgotten. Mary Jane had probed once or twice, right after the war, but he couldn’t talk about it. He begged her not to remind him of his three years in hell. There were just no words that could be formed. None sufficient to describe it all. It caused too many painful memories of death, anger, jealousy, rage. She had honored his request for all these years.

  And he had always lacked a certain quality his brother had been full of. Coming here would remind him of that. He wished he had more confidence in himself and what Mary Jane felt for him, but he lacked it—plain and simple. That was a weakness that he just couldn’t live with anymore. His lack of confidence. Especially in himself, and the feelings of wronging his brother so long ago.

  So he was here at long last. But he forgot the new stone grave marker, a white stone marker to replace the one there. He had it made for this occasion. No matter. The shipping company said it would arrive within days on another flight. He would have to make arrangements with the caretakers of the cemetery. Then it would all be right.

  The marker he had fashioned and gotten permission to place at his brother’s burial site would reveal the truth. It would say all there was to say. The names, places, events … the brotherhood that was and is shared by twins.

  A much older man now, he hurried through the U.S. military cemetery outside of Manila. He was a man with a mission. With gaze wide, blinking away the stinging wetness that caused the whiteness of his eyes to redden, he rubbed the teeming moisture with the back of a time wrinkled hand, reading each tropically fungus-covered grave marker as he did.

  “F-125. This is row ‘F’. I’ve got to find plot 125,” he said aloud as his wife struggled to keep up with him. Row after row of white crosses bore names and symbols of men who once were young and filled with dreams. He had known so many of them.

  “Lucia
n,” she called out. “You’ve passed it. It’s the other way,” she yelled, cupping her hands to her mouth.

  “Oh,” he mumbled as he quickly turned about and started. with the same urgency in the opposite direction.

  His wife watched him as he passed her by, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she was even there. She had never seen him like this, although she should have known visiting this place would make him almost crazy with grief He had loved his brother so.

  “I’m back. I’ve come back, brother,” he whispered with deep respect as he hurriedly made his way to grave marker 125. He stopped. Legs frozen stiff. His hand moved mechanically to his trademark, and new for this occasion, dark brown fedora, removing it from his head and placing it over his rapid, rhythmic heartbeat.

  It was 1945 suddenly and he was twenty-five years old. A sudden chill swept through him. His head bent, immobile in one direction—toward the white cross. He gently swept his fingers across the fungus-covered grave marker seeking to erase the name, as if he could bring his brother back.

  The spot was soon cleansed by the intermittent moisture from the sky mixing with his own tears. This was a far more emotion-laden moment than he ever could have imagined. He had never allowed Mary Jane to see this side of him. Now he couldn’t stop. The dam bursting inside his soul crumbled to the power of the salty emotion welling in his eyes and he couldn’t plug the hole.

  Now bent with age, he watched as the drops fell against the simple stone marker. Then they would stop. He knelt next to it, moving his hand over each word gently, reverently, as if in touching the words he could bring them to life. He whispered them aloud again and again:

  Captain Norman B. Parker, 200th Coastal Artillery USA.