by Xavier Mayne
“I don’t mean to pry,” Sandler said, his voice dropping an octave as he leaned closer. “But if you two had been straight all your lives, how did you figure out all the bedroom stuff? Did you have to get a book or something?”
Donnelly laughed. “We were pretty innocent, looking back on it. After that first night, we woke up and hardly knew what to say to each other. And, given the amount we’d had to drink, we didn’t even remember what we had done once we’d gotten into bed together—if anything. We may have just passed out. But there we were, clearly on the other side of a pretty big boundary, and we had no idea what we’d gotten ourselves into, or what to do next.”
“I imagine typical straight dudes would have tried to laugh it off—‘I was so drunk, man, I don’t even remember last night!’—and then never spoken of it again.”
Donnelly nodded. “It was terrifying. But after the first few shocked seconds, I realized that what terrified me most was the possibility of losing whatever it was we’d started to build between us, and that possibility was worse than anything we’d face as partners. That much I knew, even the first morning. Ethan, though, seemed like he might be perfectly willing to pretend it had never happened. He’s always had a harder time finding his way around the ‘traditional masculinity’ thing than I have. In fact, to this day he describes himself as a straight man who fell in love with a guy.”
“Ouch,” Sandler said, wincing.
Donnelly, startled by Sandler’s reaction, shook his head in confusion. “Why do you say that?”
Sandler took a breath, as if he didn’t really want to say what came next. “Well, doesn’t that kind of mean he’s not completely committed?”
“No, it’s not like that,” Donnelly replied, searching for the right words. “To me it means that he loves me more than labels, or whatever abstract concepts of sexual identity he grew up with. It means what we have is unique. Though I’ve learned in the years we’ve been together that there are a lot of best friends in the world who might enjoy adding physical intimacy to their relationship, but they’re terrified to even admit the thought.”
“Huh. Hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“And it also means that I get to sleep with a straight guy every night. Every time feels like the first time, if you know what I mean.” He winked at Sandler.
“Okay, so that’s completely hot,” Sandler said, adjusting himself slightly in his seat. “You, Gabriel Donnelly, have the perfect life.”
“Yep. That’s exactly right. The perfect life is what stranded me on the way to my emergency destination wedding, relying on the kindness of strangers.” He put his hand on Sandler’s knee. “For which I am eternally grateful, of course.”
Sandler beamed. “I am deeply honored to be of service to you, sir.”
“As am I,” chimed in Freeman from the front seat.
Donnelly had completely forgotten about Freeman and how he could hear everything they were talking about in the backseat. He blushed.
“Oh, don’t worry about Freeman,” Sandler said with a laugh. “We go way back, don’t we?”
“We do, my friend, we do,” Freeman replied, then met Donnelly’s gaze in the rearview mirror. “And of all the men Sandler’s had in my backseat, you are the most handsome.”
Donnelly noticed they both were now blushing. They rode in silence for several miles. “So, what’s the back door to Buckingham Palace look like?” Donnelly asked with a grin.
They spent the next several hours trading anecdotes from their respective professional lives. Their arrival in Washington, DC, surprised them both.
“Is this the Liberian embassy?” Donnelly asked, surveying the corrugated iron building behind which the town car had pulled up.
“No, they actually have a beautiful building north of the Mall. This is a freight depot out back of Union Station.” Sandler opened the door of the town car and stepped out onto the dusty gravel.
Donnelly got out of the car as well and looked around at the graffiti-covered walls and rusted roll-up doors. “At the risk of sounding like I doubt your abilities, I cannot help but wonder what you have in mind.” He jumped as one of the doors screeched into reluctant motion. “Not that I don’t trust you, but I am intrigued.”
Sandler smiled broadly as Freeman opened the trunk of the town car. He grabbed up his duffel and handed Donnelly’s pack to him. “You’re going to love this.”
Freeman closed the trunk and turned to the voyagers. “Gentlemen, I wish you easy travels. And Gabriel, may you find every wedded happiness with your beloved.” He paused and smiled. “He sounds like a good man,” he said with a wink.
“Thank you, Freeman,” Donnelly replied, shaking Freeman’s hand warmly. “I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your help. I doubt the rest of the journey will be as pleasant as you have made the first part.”
“Your service to the Crown is recognized and appreciated,” Sandler said, taking Freeman’s hand after Donnelly released it. “Give my regards to his excellency.”
“Until we meet again.” Freeman bowed deeply and then turned to get back into the driver’s seat.
As the town car pulled smoothly away, Donnelly was struck by the quite bizarre situation he was in: he stood in a desolate, semi-industrial wasteland somewhere in the nation’s capital, waiting for a man he’d met only hours ago to tell him exactly how he would miraculously get to New York before his ship sailed.
He took a deep, calming breath and let it out slowly.
“Ready?” Sandler asked.
“I was born ready,” Donnelly replied, shouldering his bag and giving a confident nod. “Lead on, sir.”
Sandler smiled. “I like your style. Follow me.”
He led Donnelly through the doorway opened by the retraction of the roll-up door a moment before, and they stood before what looked like the shipping desk of a recently abandoned factory. It wasn’t decrepit, exactly, but it certainly didn’t look like it was in active use.
“Gunny?” Sandler called into the dark recesses of the building.
No answer.
“Gunny!” Sandler shouted. This was less a request than a military order.
“Sir!” came a voice from somewhere in the back of the building.
The sound of shuffling feet grew slowly but steadily louder in the succeeding minute and a half. Finally a stooped man in black-streaked overalls appeared, wiping his hands on a red kerchief. He appeared to be in his sixties, someone who would be more at home running a kiddie railroad at a third-rate amusement park than doing whatever he was doing in this warehouse.
“Behold what the cat dragged in,” the old man exclaimed as he neared the doorway. “Sandler, boy, let me look at you. How long has it been?” He extended a freshly wiped hand to Sandler.
“It’s been a week, Gunny. A week. But it’s great to see you too. Now, I’d like you to meet my friend Gabriel Donnelly. Gabriel, this is Gunnery Sergeant Tommy Maxwell.”
“Call me Gunny, son, everyone does,” Gunny said as he shook Donnelly’s hand. “Good to meet you.” He turned back to Sandler. “So, you have two articles to transport today, eh? The pouch and this strapping young man?” He winked broadly at both men.
“Exactly. Can you get us to New York by tomorrow before noon? We need to see Gabriel off to his wedding in England.”
“Hate to be the bearer of bad news, son, but there ain’t gonna be any planes leaving New York for London tomorrow, or for the next three or four days for that matter. One of my buddies knows a guy who knows a guy at the FAA, and they’re not letting anything even attempt to fly around that Icelandic ash cloud. One of the flights en route when the eruption happened didn’t get out the way soon enough, and they just barely made it to Shannon. Engines were destroyed—just ground down. They’re going to have to be replaced before that plane will fly again. So now they’re locking the whole north Atlantic down.” He turned to Gabriel. “Sorry, son.”
“We still have a shot, Gunny,” Sandler said. “Gabriel and his
fiancé are crossing on a ship. They’ll make it, as long as we can get him to the pier in time.”
“Well, that’s a horse of a different feather,” Gunny said with a wheezy laugh. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“You didn’t give me a chance, as usual!” Sandler protested.
But Gunny was already on his way around the shipping desk. From under the piles of paper and scraps of cardboard he pulled out a laptop, flipped it open, and began typing with startling speed. He pulled out a pair of lopsided cheater glasses and squinted at the screen. “Got it,” he grunted and unleashed another barrage of typing.
Suddenly an unseen printer rattled to life, and several sheets of paper slid out through a slot on the front of the desk. They glided across the floor, and Sandler stooped to pick them up.
Gunny snapped the laptop shut and then reburied it under the random scraps of paper and packing material that littered the desk. He stowed the glasses again and turned to Sandler and Donnelly. “They’ve already got the car ready—you’ve been pulling some diamond-encrusted strings, my boy,” Gunny said with a wheezing laugh. “Now, it may be slow going today with the extra passenger service they’ve been trying to add. But you should hit New York in the early afternoon at the latest. The car is due to be shunted onto the main in an hour, and then Bob’s your uncle.”
“Thanks, Gunny. You’re the best,” Sandler said, folding the papers. “And enjoy your granddaughter’s birthday this weekend, okay?”
Gunny laughed, clearly delighted that Sandler remembered this detail. “I’ll give her your best.” He turned to Donnelly. “She’s turning four. Smart as a whip and cuter than shit.” He laughed raucously. “Best of luck to you, sir. Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials.”
“Thank you, Gunny,” Donnelly replied, shaking his hand again.
“Let’s roll,” Sandler said and led the way out of the warehouse and across the graveled expanse that separated Gunny’s domain from the endless complex of tracks and switches leading out of Union Station.
“I don’t want to question your plan,” Donnelly said as he fell into rapid step beside Sandler, “but if we’re taking the train, wouldn’t it have made sense to just buy tickets and get seats ourselves?”
“On any other day, yes. But when the planes can’t fly, trains take up the slack. If you think the airport was chaos this morning, it’s nothing compared to the Dantean scene you’d find at the passenger terminal in Union Station right now. It’ll be standing room only on every train heading for New York until this time tomorrow, and only those who got in line hours ago will even have a shot at being able to stand.”
“So what are we going to do? Hop a freight train like hoboes in a movie from the forties?”
Sandler laughed. “You’re actually not far wrong. Because diplomatic pouches can’t travel without an escort, the railroad keeps a couple of freight cars here that can carry couriers as well as cargo. We’ll get on one they’re holding here for us, and they’ll hook us up to a freight train that’s passing through on its way to New York.” He consulted the paperwork Gunny had given him. “That’ll put us in the city with plenty of time to get you to the pier.”
“This is amazing,” Donnelly said, astounded at what Sandler was able to accomplish.
“Well, I would reserve judgment until you see what the accommodations are like. We’ll be the only passengers, but the freight car isn’t exactly built for comfort. It’ll get us where we’re going, though.”
“Thank you,” Donnelly said. “I know I keep saying that, but you’ve just been so… thank you.”
“It’s my pleasure, Gabriel. This is the best way I can imagine to spend the day. If I hadn’t met you, I’d be just sitting in that airport lounge drinking too much, waiting for the embassy to figure out a way to get me to London. This is much more fun.”
Sandler launched himself onto a rusted, ancient stairway that led up to a pedestrian bridge; Donnelly could see that it ran over the dozens of crisscrossing tracks separating them from a grouping of sheds. The stairs groaned as Sandler climbed them, two at a time.
“Yeah, fun,” Donnelly said under his breath as he too began to climb.
The pedestrian bridge was barely wide enough for one man to pass, and Donnelly was sure he could feel it shake and start to tip as they hurried across. They reached the far end quickly, much to his relief, and then climbed down to earth.
“Diplomatic desk is over here,” Sandler said, pointing to a shed whose only distinguishing mark was a blob of what seemed to be splattered white paint.
As they approached, however, Donnelly could see that it was actually a collection of white stickers, each an oval that bore the abbreviation of a country’s name.
“When a diplomatic pouch moves by freight, one of those stickers goes on the outside of the container. Someone got the idea to peel them off of incoming containers and stick them there—kind of like a scrapbook.” Sandler rapped smartly at the big metal door.
Donnelly looked at the collected stickers, seeing countries he recognized, and some he didn’t—and some that didn’t seem to exist anymore. He was startled by the metal door squealing into motion and then was somewhat surprised that anything startled him anymore.
A small, birdlike man in impressively tidy dark-blue coveralls silently held out his hand, and into this Sandler placed the packet of paper that Gunny had given him. The birdman shuffled through it rapidly, eyes darting over the sheets as if he knew exactly where to look on each of the densely printed forms. He nodded—to himself as he hadn’t looked either Sandler or Donnelly in the face—and scurried to his desk, which bore no resemblance to Gunny’s piles of paper with a desk somewhere underneath. This desk had only three things on it: a self-inking stamper, a large plastic envelope, and a key ring with one huge key. The birdman picked up the stamper and, in a blur of motion that would have put an African secretary bird to shame, stamped no fewer than eleven times on various sheets in the bundle Sandler had given him. He then pulled two of the sheets off, slid them into a drawer, and placed the remaining paper into the clear plastic envelope. He sealed it by pulling off a long adhesive strip, carefully folding closed the plastic flap.
He stood, studied the envelope carefully, then picked up the large key and marched around the desk and to the doorway.
“Come.” It was the first word he’d said to either of them, and he didn’t wait to be sure they understood.
Sandler shrugged to Donnelly, who had watched these proceedings with fascination, and they followed. They had to jog to catch up with the birdman, who was already skittering down the yard between two lines of freight cars.
“We’re not going in one of these, are we?” Donnelly asked, looking into the dark, rusty interiors of the box cars they passed.
Sandler laughed. “No. Not really.” They jogged a bit farther. “Well, kind of, in a way.”
“You’re not making me feel any less claustrophobic,” Donnelly grumbled.
Ahead of them the birdman suddenly stopped his scurrying. They had arrived at a boxcar about half the length of the others. There was nothing else to distinguish it from those around it; it even had graffiti splotched across its brown corrugated skin.
The birdman used the large key to unlock the door of the boxcar. He shoved it with the vigor of a far larger man, and it slid open. A set of stairs extended from the opening. The birdman stood to the side and gestured for Sandler and Donnelly to enter. As they did so, he peeled a sheet of backing paper off the plastic envelope and pressed it to a flat area next to the door.
If from the outside the boxcar was almost indistinguishable from its brethren, on the inside it could not have been more different. It was light, for one thing, with small square skylights in the roof as well as small, rather dim light fixtures on the walls. To the left of the doorway was clearly a cargo area, with a flat floor and tie-downs spaced evenly across the floor and walls. To the right, two pairs of passenger seats faced each other over a table as if they had been
lifted directly from a 1940s Pullman coach.
While Donnelly was taking in these strange surroundings, Sandler stood by the doorway and nodded to the birdman, who handed him the big key. He then folded the stairway back up into the car and slammed the door shut. Sandler slid the key into the large, intricate lock and turned it several times until it stopped. Donnelly heard bolts slide into place with every turn.
“So, welcome to the red-eye to NYC. What do you think?”
“I think that the world is full of stuff I’ve never even imagined,” Donnelly replied. “This is completely James Bond.”
Sandler laughed. “I’d prefer to travel by rocket-powered Aston Martin myself, but this will do.” He stepped over to a low console Donnelly hadn’t noticed before and opened the door. “Let’s see what Mr. Happy put in here for the trip.” He pulled out a thermos, several cups, and a paper sack bearing the name of a deli Donnelly didn’t recognize. These Sandler brought over to the table, and then he sat in one of the seats and gestured to Donnelly to sit across from him.
“I just realized I haven’t eaten since those little sandwiches at the airport,” Donnelly said. “This was really nice of him.”
“Yeah, he’s an odd bird, but he comes through on the details.” He opened the deli bag and pulled out a startling number of containers with foods both everyday and exotic. “Nice,” Sandler pronounced and then opened the thermos bottle and sniffed. “Ah, that’s the stuff. Kenyan, unless I miss my guess.”
Donnelly jumped at this. He pulled the bottle to himself and took in the powerful aroma of fresh coffee. “That’s it,” he said, smiling broadly, “I’m only going to travel by freight car from now on.”
“If you’d like to wash up before dinner, there’s a bathroom behind you,” Sandler said, continuing to lay out the food. “Through that door.”
Through that door Donnelly found a small but tidy bathroom, far nicer than he had expected to find on a train—particularly a freight train. He returned to the table, refreshed and even hungrier.