Nick

by Michael Farris Smith

  At the end of each episode, he would write about the woman in his journal. Give her a name, write a few sentences about where they sat for their picnic or something honest she had said to him in a moment of tenderness. He described each crippling goodbye. Each long and last embrace. And on his final day in Paris, in the last hour before his departure, as he sat in Gare du Nord and waited for the train that would carry him across the French countryside and deliver him to the ship waiting to take the scarred American home, he opened the journal and ripped the pages out and tossed them in a garbage can. Vowing to bury everything he was leaving in Paris as deep down as it would go.

  II

  19

  The American landscape was ablaze in the reds and golds of autumn as the train passed through afternoon and evening and finally into night like a lumbering dream. Nick had not slept and he held his right hand with his left to keep it from shaking. He walked the quiet length of the train to keep the shaking from his mind. Or held his hand in the sink and ran warm water over it as that somehow helped. Now he sat in the window seat and stared into the black, talking to his reflection in the muted light. It didn’t happen and it didn’t happen and it didn’t happen he whispered as he stared at himself. The rock of the train like the rock of the earth as he sat still in the tunnels and the war raged above. He spoke in low, fractured sentences, pieces of coherence that came and went as the train carried him away from the east and shoved him toward the setting of his youth. As the miles passed he felt as if there was a strong hand on the back of his neck forcing him to look at the faceless future before him. There should have been an excitement or a joy or a relief in returning to the safety of the Midwest and he looked for those emotions in the canvas of night. He thought they might be hiding in the dark.

  And then first light. He watched the world change methodically and could not deny the optimism of a rising sun as the light shimmered across the frosted, silver land. Home, he thought. The man sitting next to him awoke. Scratched at his mustache and yawned. He adjusted in his seat and looked out at the passing farmland with squinted eyes.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Getting close,” Nick said.

  “Close to what?”

  “Chicago.”

  In the cold and early morning the train stopped in Union Station in Chicago and Nick got off to smoke a cigarette. People moved everywhere. Boarding trains and getting off trains and loading and unloading suitcases and trunks and dragging children by the hand or coat sleeve and hurrying with briefcases and sometimes bouncing off one another and apologizing and trudging on. The porter walked back and forth along the platform and announced eight minutes until departure, eight minutes until departure. Nick smoked the cigarette down and felt for another but he was out. A newspaper and magazine kiosk and coffee stand were at the end of the platform and he stuck his hand in his coat pockets and manipulated his way through the busy crowd.

  He stood in line for coffee behind a handful of others and behind him a chorus of squeals broke out. A group of women, probably mother and grandmothers and aunts, mobbed a returning soldier, a palefaced young man wearing his uniform. They hugged and cried and touched his cheeks and pulled off his hat and felt his hair. He didn’t fight back and allowed himself to be embraced. Nick watched them over his shoulder. He had worn his uniform across the ocean and then left it in a pile in the corner of the bathroom of Penn Station, a thoughtless act he had regretted during the night but he was now relieved. The man behind him in line grunted and said it’s your turn and Nick stepped forward.

  Large, rectangular windows lined the upper walls of the depot and blocks of light shined out across the trains and travelers. Wisps of smoke and dust floated in the air. Engines clamored and hissed and the wheels of baggage carts clicked across the concrete and whistles sounded and porters shouted. Nick got his coffee and he moved away from the stand and sipped. He looked around for the welcomed soldier but he and his greeters were already gone. And then he looked up at the great board listing destinations and departure times and he didn’t see the list of cities and times. He saw a scramble of letters and numbers.

  He was getting closer. Closer to the hard winter. Closer to the place he had thought of a thousand times since his feet had stepped onto the soil of war. Closer to the familiar faces and streets and houses and clouds in the familiar sky.

  He looked back to his train and in minutes it would back out of the station. They moved all around him. The living with the places they had a reason to go to and the routine of life once they got there. The friends or lovers who were waiting for them to arrive. They darted back and forth as he seemed to be looking for someone or something to convince him he was going in the right direction. You are doing what you are supposed to do. All around him the living moved with intent and engines exhaled and Nick was held in place by a feeling he could not name.

  His bag was buried in the baggage car and he felt in his coat for his wallet and journal and existing ticket and he tried to think if there was anything he had left on the seat that he needed. Then the thought crossed his mind. I don’t need anything. Not a single damn thing.

  He skimmed the board. His train would leave him but he did not want to be left standing in the station, wondering if he had made the right decision. So he searched not only for a new destination but also for a quick departure and he was a third of the way down the schedule when he came across New Orleans. Departure 7:12 a.m. Gate 9.

  Next to the schedule board was a round clock and it read 7:06.

  He surveyed the station for the ticket window and it was across a vast hallway that was covered with hundreds of crossing bodies. There wouldn’t be time. But he did not panic and the cold chill seemed to fall from him as he remembered Ella saying I was in New Orleans once. As a child with my father. Nothing that I remember. He heard her voice and imagined her moving through the crowd as a small girl holding her father’s hand and then he raised his eyes toward gate 9 and this time he saw himself, walking confidently and leisurely through this sea of haste, scanning the passenger cars for an empty seat, and then stepping up into the open door, pausing at the top of the steps to turn around and look back to his mirrored image, waiting for him to come forward.

  20

  By the time the train reached Memphis he couldn’t take it anymore. Everything was too close. The windows, the seats, the people in the seats, the ceiling, the floor. It was all too close and getting closer. He had been traveling for days now, first on the ship across the Atlantic. Then on the train from New York to Chicago. Crowded trains and crowded train stations and not being able to sleep and the rhythmic clicking that he wished would stop and now he couldn’t manage the carriage door open and it was all closing in.

  He stood in the doorway as the train eased into the station and held his hands against its window. He pressed his nose against the glass and fogged the window with heavy and impatient sighs. His foot tapped and sweat gathered on his neck and the world moved slowly outside and more slowly behind his eyes and in the cramped space he heard the shrill of shellfire and he felt the fragments of rock rain down on his head and his mouth was dry and dusty. His foot tapped and then his leg began to shake and he wished he had something to fire. A woman holding a baby stood behind him and touched his shoulder and asked if he was all right. Nick ignored her and squeezed his eyes tightly and grabbed his leg and mumbled. Hold on, just hold on. It’ll go away. The woman took a step back from him just as the train finally rolled to a stop and the strain of steel and metal groaned through his feet and heart and he told himself that this will not last. And the train stopped and the door latch released. He shoved it open and leapt from the car as if it might explode, landing awkwardly and taking two stumbling steps before falling facedown onto the concrete.

  He lay there, his face resting against the wooden slats of the platform. Passengers exited the train and stepped around him. A woman stopped and patted his shoulder. Nick rolled over on his back with his eyes past her and she then
shrugged and moved along.

  He rose to his feet and paced back and forth on the platform and got his air. Then he found a water fountain and drank some water. Found the bathroom and washed his hands and face in the sink. Rubbed his eyes. Pulled it together and talked to himself in the mirror and returned to his seat moments before leaving Memphis. The car that he sat in had lost passengers and there was more air and he folded his arms. Rested his head against the window.

  The train moved deeper into the Southern landscape and he remembered that they would be expecting him at home. So he took out his journal and wrote a letter to his father:

  I’ve had the great fortune of stumbling upon some friends from my days at New Haven at Union Station in Chicago. There was Timothy Bolton of the Pittsburgh Boltons, standing right there next to the newspaper stand as I stepped off the train for some fresh air. You likely remember him as he accompanied me home one Thanksgiving. Or was it Christmas? Tall with a less than daunting strip of facial hair he calls a beard. Tim and several others who managed to avoid the vacation in France were elated to find me in one piece and begged me to accompany them to New Orleans. I will not be delayed for very long but simply could not say no to old friends.

  He read the explanation to himself in a whisper. Horseshit, he thought. Every word. But that is why it will work because those are all the things they want to hear. He tore the page from the journal and when the train made its stop in Jackson, Nick mailed the letter from the station. He bought a newspaper and smoked a cigarette and waited to the last second to board. No more stops before New Orleans.

  When he sat down again in the train car he read the headline: U.S. SUPREME COURT TO DECIDE ON LEGALITY OF WARTIME PROHIBITION.

  “Trouble,” said a voice behind Nick. A tall man leaned forward and pointed at the headline.

  “What?” Nick said.

  “Fight in a goddamn war and then come home to a dry country. Tell me that’s a good idea,” the man said and he flopped back in his seat and pouted. Nick folded the page and read.

  After nearly two years of challenges to the wartime prohibition law, the Supreme Court of the United States will be forced to decide if the law is constitutional. If upheld, the law destroys the last vestige of hope for a wet holiday season and the “interminable drought” will have begun.

  21

  He felt worse with every passing mile and every click of the rails and every shift and sway of the car and by the time Nick meandered out of Union Station in New Orleans he was someone else. Sunkeyed and deranged because he had not been in the confining train car but he had been in the muted tunnel and in the rat-infested trenches and in the attic and in the darkness of his boyhood home and in the barn where his legs would not work and he had been in a field with a bloodred sunset after a bloodsoaked day and his eyes were shadowed and his hair a mess and he had paced up and down the aisle of the train car mumbling to himself and pressing his hands against the windows and trying to ignore the storm of voices rushing through his mind, a chorus of chaos that drowned out any thoughts of normalcy. Do you want something to eat or do you want something to drink or do you want to read the newspaper, he asked himself again and again to try and settle his mind and his shaking hand and the chorus of voices answered no every time. No you don’t want anything and you will listen to us and you are stuck in this car and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. He sauntered out of the train station in a stupor and he had forgotten what city he was in and only knew that he was in some unfamiliar place, carrying the punishment of having survived.

  He hadn’t changed clothes since Le Havre, five days before. Rough beard and the smell of the sleepless. Wrinkled suit and a loose tie. He didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing and he turned in a catatonic state and watched a mother passing by with three small children at her heels. The women and children and other passengers leaving the station all seemed to be walking in the same direction so he followed.

  It was as if he had bled out of one perplexing and dreamlike sequence right into another. He was surrounded by street voices. Random shouts and obscenities and sweet callings from girls in doorways and cries from grocers and howling singsong tremolos from saloons. Children in the midst of excited games talked back and forth in some strange and meshed dialect and mumbled solicitations came from lowbrowed men on corners with bottles in their coat pockets. Beyond the voices was the rhythmic clap of hooves across the streets paved with rough, square Belgian stones. An odd chicken cluck. The strained shrill of a trumpet. The clatter of plates and knives and forks. A streetcar clicking along its line. From the Mississippi River ship horns and whistles echoed through the thin streets and alleyways.

  He made his way into Jackson Square. Stores and saloons flanked the square and rising above were shabby apartments with cast-iron railings and laundry hanging from sagging clotheslines. On each side of the square were the sellers—fruits, vegetables, flowers, coffee, breads, tobacco. They sat in the backs of small, makeshift wagons, hardlooking men and women and their hardlooking, skinny children, preaching you over to their stand, promising your money’s worth.

  The cathedral stood tall over it all. He stared up at the arched windows and the highreaching steeple with a small, simple cross sitting at its height. A group of nuns stood together in front and shared a baguette and pigeons milled beneath them picking up crumbs and he walked over and asked a nun where he was. He was hungry. Lightheaded. He wavered some and she took his arm.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Where am I?” he asked again.

  “Jackson Square.”

  “What town?”

  “Frenchtown.”

  “What is that?” he asked. But he did not wait for an answer. He pulled away from her. Rubbed at his eyes. He then walked into the park in the middle of the square. A fountain sparkled in the afternoon sun and a toddler leaned over and splashed his hands in the water while his mother sat on the concrete edge wrapped in a sweater and stared out toward the sky above the Mississippi as if waiting for someone to descend. Nick nodded to an elderly couple sitting on a bench, their wrinkled hands wrapped together. A man in an apron lay on his back in the grass with his hands across his face. Nick spotted a vacant bench and he sat down and the exhaustion came over him in a swoon. His head fell back. His mouth fell open. His arms fell to his sides. And he would have fallen into a deep sleep if it wasn’t for the hands that went into his pockets. Pulling out his wallet and his pocket watch and he raised his head and came alive in time to grab the thin arm. He grabbed the thin arm and twisted and the boy shrieked and handed off the wallet and watch to his friend who then turned to run.

  Nick rose from the bench and chased the gangly boy out of the park. Around the fruitsellers. Through a cluster of scattering pigeons. And he was heading for an alley alongside the cathedral when the nuns corralled him. Nick caught up and grabbed the young thief by the coat but one of the nuns slapped his hand away.

  “Give it back,” the nun said to the child.

  The boy held out a dirty hand and gave the wallet and watch back to Nick. The boy then crossed himself and rolled his eyes and turned and ran. Nick tucked his wallet and watch into his coat pocket and nodded to the nun. She looked him over. His wrinkled clothes. His slick and unkempt hair. The faraway look in his eyes.

  “Do you need a place to stay?” she asked. He yawned and then nodded. She whispered something to another nun and then she raised her finger for him to follow.

  She took him into the alley and opened the tall double doors of a brick building and they entered a wide room. A long table lined the back wall and on the table sat soup pots and a tray stacked with slices of salami and bologna. Several more nuns stood at the table and filled soup bowls and served plates and the room was an array of aromas. Beef broth and cigarettes and street people. Round tables filled the floor space and men and women, young and old, sat at the tables. Some heavyeyed, slurping at the soup with shaky hands. Others sleeping with their heads down a
nd untouched plates of food at their elbows.

  She handed Nick a plate of food and walked him through the room and into a tight passage that was hardly more than shoulderwidth. They passed the kitchen and came into a courtyard where large, lazy tropical trees reached over and brushed their heads as they passed across the brick patio.

  They went up a staircase and then across the second floor balcony where the strange and fakelike trees draped across the railing. The nun unlocked a rough wooden door and she said you can stay here. Nick looked inside but it was black and the nun stepped in and turned on a lamp that sat on a table next to the door. A patched quilt covered a narrow bed. Next to it was a desk and a chair and a Bible lay perfectly centered on the desktop. On a table in the back corner rested a porcelain wash basin.

  The nun explained that they served dinner each night and he could help if he wanted to but it wasn’t required and when he left the room he was to leave the door unlocked. Mass is Sunday. You can stay here a week. Maybe more if you’re quiet but not much more. He nodded as she spoke but was not listening as he stared into the dim room before him and realized there was no way to know where you would end up or what you would become and he felt both complacent and concerned for tomorrow. He didn’t hear her say goodbye and he didn’t respond when she touched his shoulder and he stood there with his arms by his sides and a lost, exhausted stare. And then as if summoned, he stepped inside and closed the door. He set the plate on the bed.

  The impulse struck him to leave again. To go back to the station and get on a train to somewhere else. Anywhere else. But his body did not listen and his mind quickly gave in. Sit down and eat, he thought. Then sleep. You cannot run from yourself.