by Barry, Mike
The government reckoned that if the railroad was part of the great and ongoing tradition of America, the spike that joined the continent and so on, then it was a pretty piss-poor idea to let the railroads slide into oblivion, lousy public relations and so on. Also a large percentage of commuters could vote and swung the balance of power in the suburbs that were beginning to control the country. So the government in its generosity conceived of a plan to subsidize the railroads, trying to bring them back into the passenger trade—the freight business was already pretty hopeless and besides the government was deep in hock to the teamsters union—by pouring large amounts of money into them to provide for more amenities, faster trains, better intercity connections and so on. Of course none of these improvements had much to do with the commuter trade but then again that was government for you.
They called this new program Am Track, short for American Track, Wulff supposed, a government program which partially subsidized the railroads, and their flagship liners were the huge, bright, new passenger trains that sped at a hundred miles an hour between the major cities. These trains not only had the usual historical amenities of railroad travel … porters, bar cars, sleeping compartments, shoeshine men, partitions and what-not … they had separate cars linked onto the trains which accommodated passenger cars so that aged, fearful or lazier drivers could put their cars right up on the ramp and have all of the advantages of car travel to a distant city and possession of the car at destination that was, without the narcoleptic experience of driving on the turnpikes, an experience which would eventually lead even the nonaged, nonfearful, energetic drivers right down the trap to insanity. It was the perfect mating of government and private enterprise; private enterprise having proven itself incompetent enough to leech onto government funds for its survival, the government cheerfully and uncompromisingly throwing the money in because it was easier to do that then to take a long look at the country which the post-railroad era had become. Bring back the railroads and restore, wholly, the past. The past was always better than the present, to say nothing of the unimaginable future. Everyone benefitted here.
The Amtrak train that went from Chicago to Miami was called the Floridian, and Wulff was on it, sitting alone now in the bar car, traveling through the American night at a one-hundred-and-five mile an hour clip.
The car that he had loaded on the Floridian was a 1964 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with cruise control, air conditioning and autotronic eye. Wulff had an affinity for ruined Cadillacs, that was for sure. It was the fourth or fifth, he had lost count, that he had picked up during his Odyssey. There was something about all of this spoiled grandeur, all of this marvelous, rotting junk which excited him in a way that no new Cadillac could: here, seven to ten years later, you got right down to the rotten guts of America itself and saw it clear. America was an old Cadillac, all right; it was gilt and plastic long past its time and now, in the empty spaces, one could see the thin, luminous edge of its demolition peeking through. He loved the ‘64 Coupe de Ville. He did not love it quite enough to drive it down to Miami; he put it on the train this time and hoped for the best. The trans was wrecked, wouldn’t downshift at all and slipped in high gear, the carburetor was plugged on at least one side and the power steering made noises even at idle … no, he could not drive this thing down to Miami. One trip to Los Angeles in a ‘64 Sedan de Ville had been as close as he wanted to get to the testing edge with an old Cadillac.
But the train was fine. Amtrak was fine. The car was behind him somewhere in the night, he was in the bar car putting a load on, the sack was locked up somewhere in a cubicle. He had stolen the Cadillac from a street on the South Side of Chicago; the moment he had seen its red glitter, the paint almost phosphorescent in the darkness, he had known that this was the one for him. But he knew the limits of his obsession; he wasn’t going to drive this damned thing to Miami. Not in one piece, he wasn’t.
Wulff sat in the bar car and listened to the sounds of the train and the night slowly overcoming him, an experience which two generations of Americans now had not known, the peace and isolation of a train at night. The bar car was deserted except for a heavy man toward the front who was slumped over in his chair looking meditatively at a glass of scotch. He had not moved in the thirty minutes that Wulff had been sitting in the car; drunk, probably, or contemplating that species of doom and possibility which trains in the night could bring upon one. Come to think of it, the incumbent President had once talked about listening to the trains at night when he was a young boy. Maybe that had given him the weary and contemplative frame of mind that had led him to declare the war on drugs at the Mexican border, to say nothing of his other many political innovations. Wulff sat with the gin glass in his hand, turning it absently, letting his mind drift away from modern-day politics and the disastrous war on drugs—which had merely escalated the graft changing hands at the border, that was the only difference, that and the uniforms of the men taking the payoffs—and onto his destination and what would happen then.
It was all drawing to a close. That sense of finality had begun to steal on him in the cab of the vast truck carrying him east, a feeling that this was one of the last times that he would be travelling the highways at night, clearly the last time that he would be going in this direction. It was coming to a close; he knew it during the second conversation with Calabrese when the certainty in the man’s voice had matched some certainty in Wulff’s; this was the clearly defined end that they were coming to. Then, saying goodbye to the trucker at the huge turnpike gateway to Chicago, all the roads merging at the airport at the great sign WELCOME TO CHICAGO: RICHARD J. DALEY, MAYOR (yes, it was Daley’s city all right, the largest civilized center in the history of the world that could be said to belong to one man no matter how corrupt and aged), pressing his hand into the trucker’s and passing on the two one-hundred-dollar bills that the trucker would look at in puzzlement some time later in a different light, not sure how they had gotten there or what he was riding with, seeing the trucker for the last time, then picking up an empty cab and getting into the South Side, appropriating the red coupe from a slum section … he had known then that he was grinding through the last series of an action. He was going to Miami; so was Calabrese.
Only one of them and possibly neither would get out of that place alive.
And Calabrese was right. When all was said and done the old fucker had taste after all, had a proper sense of destination and timing, for what better place now for all of it to end than Miami? Here was the final resting place of half of America, the other half wound up in Vegas but Miami was even more appropriate; it was a junk shop of the mind and heart where the pensioners lived in shacks and cheap rooming houses toward the north, while on the beaches themselves, rising layer upon layer, were the bright, pillared hotels of the damned, the sea eroding the beaches year after year, the beaches crawling up toward the hotels. And somewhere in those spaces, be it the landscape or in the cool, dead eaves of the hotels where the glittering people with faces like hammers looked for their fun as determinedly, with the same pulsing sense of vacancy that a junkie went from fix to fix … somewhere in there, if only you could get hold of it, was the answer to America itself, all of it there and no alternative, because America was dying; it was not only the Calabreses that were. Sometimes the death was just below the surface, other times it became manifest like the od that lurked beneath the habit of every junkie … but oh good Lord, good Lord, the death was there.
The man at the bar was looking at him now.
He was fixing Wulff with a stabbing gaze of great intensity and as Wulff returned it, looking into those eyes, he realized in the way that recovered information comes back only when tapped that this was not a brief glance, that the man, in fact, had been looking at him for a long time. Now, having caught Wulff’s attention the eyes, suddenly luminous in the shifting light, seemed to glow with knowledge. Then the man was digging into his pocket, his fingers clutching at something in the right outer jacket and Wulff saw the
shape of a gun faintly coming together there; then the man had turned fully, hand in pocket, and said to Wulff, “Let’s get out of here.”
The voice carried over the dim throbbing of the train above the rails, came at him with such casual intimacy that they might have been the only two people in the bar car, in the train itself … and then, sweeping the terrain, Wulff saw that this was so; the white-jacketed waiter who had been there to pick up the drink orders and deliver them, the small old bartender who had been standing behind the counter, flicking at it with a towel … both of them were gone, the car having narrowed to him and the heavy man. Looking at him now Wulff saw that he had misjudged this man severely, allowed fatigue and self-pity to overtake him past the point of alertness because this was no idle late-hour drunk confronting him but a hard, determined man in his late forties who looked like so many of the other men with whom he had struggled over the past months … except that if possible he looked even more competent than most of them.
The man came out of the pocket slowly with the gun, a Beretta, and said, “All right. Here it is. Now you start walking toward me and you do that slowly.”
Wulff got up from his seat carefully, feeling the weight of his own gun flapping within his pocket, the gun suspended a crucial six inches from his right hand. He could get it in less than a second … but the heavy man would need far less than that to discharge from that gun the bullet that would kill him. So there was nothing to do but close ground slowly. He had had half of the second drink; more than anything now he regretted that. Sitting in the bar car had been stupid enough but he had been lulled by the rocking of the train, the conversation with Calabrese, the feeling that Chicago at last was behind him. But that was excusable, drinking was not. Every bounty hunter, amateur and professional, in the country had his name and photograph in their hip pocket. What was he doing drinking? He kept on walking slowly and when he had come to within two feet of the man with the gun the man said with a little smile, “That’s enough.” Wulff stopped, the train rocking him slightly. “That’s good,” the man said, “that’s very good.”
He turned behind him and said, “All right,” and another man of roughly the same proportions but somewhat younger came from some hidden space of the car and stood, looking at Wulff with a little smile. Obviously he had come into the car while the others were clearing out, had been working in tandem with the first man but this did not explain, not quite, the absolute pleasure on this second man’s face, the profound look of joy which seemed to be oozing from its pores. Wulff thought that he had never seen so much pleasure of that sort in his life. “Well,” the second man said, seeming to rub his hands, “well, well, well.” He beamed. “It’s the wolf himself. As I live and breathe it’s the lone wolf.”
Wulff said nothing, holding his ground. The man holding the gun said, “Let’s get him out of here.”
“Oh, we’ll get him out of here. I’m counting on that. As a matter of fact you could say that there’s nothing I’m counting on more in the world than getting him out of here, but let me take a look at him if I may. Let me just take a look at him.” The man stared, his face bright yellow in the shrouded illumination of the bar car, his eyes rolling. He might, Wulff thought, be on uppers of some sort. Certainly it was more than good spirits which were giving this cast to his face. “I’m glad to see you, you son of a bitch,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”
“Let’s get out of here,” the first man said, gesturing with his gun. “Come on.”
“Oh we will, we definitely will. But there’s no rush, is there? I mean,” the second man said, rubbing his hands together, “there isn’t exactly anywhere we can go is there? I wouldn’t want to jump off a moving train, even the Floridian special at sixty miles an hour and it’s a pleasure to see the great man close up.” He walked toward Wulff then, coming rapidly and brushed by the man holding the gun and standing toe to toe with Wulff he reached up quickly and slapped Wulff across the face once, hard, the blow redounding through him. Wulff felt the bright slash of pain, then a slower lurch as that pain began to spread in thick rivulets into his gut but he held his ground. The man slapped him again.
“You like that?” the man said as if he were a salesman, say, demonstrating the capabilities of a high-performance car. “You like that now?” He turned toward the gun-holder. “He bleeds,” he said, “the son of a bitch bleeds.”
“For Christ’s sake, Al—”
“Don’t Christ’s sakes me,” the man named Al said. He placed the points of his long, elegant black shoes against Wulff’s, then looked up at him. There was a considerable difference in height, five feet seven to six four, magnified because Al was in a slight crouch. “Just don’t mess with me, Joe,” he said to the gun-holder. “What I do I do when I want to do it, you understand?”
“This can’t work,” the gun-holder said. “This is all bullshit.”
“Everything’s bullshit, Joe,” Al said almost conversationally. They might have been having a random debate somewhere in deck chairs, legs stretched across the sea. “Now you know that Joe, you know that as well as I do, everything’s a bullshit deal from way back. You just do the best you can, don’t you sweetheart?” Al said and hit Wulff across the face again, spotting the injured cheek, cracking the blow right down into that open web of pain and Wulff felt nausea, the nausea sifting through him in fine, light waves and this time he did give ground, swaying a little.
“See?” Al said, “he not only bleeds, he feels pain. He’s going to cry in a minute, aren’t you, you big bastard, you prick, you piece of filth. You know a man named Marasco?” Al said, “I knew a man named Marasco. The first one was for me and the second one was for him.”
Wulff felt the humming of the train, little intimations of power coming up through the balls of his feet, throbs and pulsations which wove their way into the pain so that it began to spread through him like a blanket … but he was thinking, Marasco, yes, that was where it had practically all started, the guy named Albert Marasco, the kingpin who lived in a mansion in Long Island and who Wulff had killed in the fire. He had tortured the truth out of Marasco, working the truth from his dying pain in the midst of the fire and this man was named Al too, now that was interesting. That was really interesting, Al one and Al two, both of the Als coming together on the Amtrack Floridian, this one with a gun, wreaking vengeance. Why there was absolutely no limit, Wulff thought, no limit at all to the kind of trouble that a man could get himself into once he started this kind of campaign … delirium, he thought with the colder center of his mind, the pain had wrecked him, had made him delirious.
“For Christ’s sake, Al,” the man named Joe was saying again, waving the gun now in little circles, “this can’t go on, we’ve got to get him out of here, someone’s going to come back—”
“No one’s going to come back,” Al said, “no one is going to come back until I’m good and ready to have them do it, so get off my ass—” and at that moment Wulff hit him. He brought his fist up from floor level, sucker-punched Al in the jaw, lifting the smaller man almost two feet off the floor and then, the train swaying, Al’s body pitched into the wall, his head hitting with a crack.
There was no conscious premeditation in this, it had all happened before; you reached a point finally where necessity and situation meshed at some level beneath consciousness, removed from calculation, and that was what had happened now because Wulff knew if he knew anything at all that things could only get worse, that whatever was happening was an ongoing situation where the odds would consistently diminish and finally he would find himself in a small, black tube of space with these men where there would be nothing for them to do, anymore, but kill him … and before they could enter that tube he had to take his chances, take them where they came.
Now, the man Al out of the picture, sagging almost comically into a padded chair against the wall, the other one, Joe, was bearing down upon Wulff with the gun, his eyes fixed with purpose, flicking his glance from
trigger finger to Wulff trying to estimate distances and Wulff came out with a foot, knocked the man off balance, then kicking into a wall. The sound of the impact was horrifying; the partitions of the car were thin steel reinforced only by another layer behind it and it seemed as if the side of the car had caved in.
The man rebounded out of the wall, the instability of the partition then giving him impetus to spring back unhurt, the gun still in his hand, still levelling, and Wulff was almost caught flatfooted by the man’s involuntary charge. He had not expected him to come off the wall in that way. A chair fell over and Wulff heard a thin screaming from the corridor; it seemed that a couple had come into the car, a young girl, now clinging to a man, her mouth in an o of distress, the man trying to pull her from the car but the girl paralyzed, shaking. They had wanted to come into the bar car for a quiet drink he supposed, well, more luck to them. The railroads were promoting themselves now as a different kind of trip; they could take this story home with them.
The man named Joe, still holding the gun, collapsed into Wulff’s arms with the force of the rebound and for a moment they struggled with one another in a complex, horrid embrace. He could smell the high, dense odors coming from the man’s body, odors both sweet and foul, excitement of course but more than excitement coming from him and for an instant they struggled that way in a parody of sexual embrace, Joe gasping and groaning, trying to get the gun up and against Wulff and Wulff, trying to free himself, establish some kind of distance, felt the man smothering him, swaddling him in that dense grip and then they stumbled over another cocktail table and into the wall of the car. Wulff felt himself beginning to slip then fall, the man tumbling over him.