Night Train

by Thom Jones

  The son-in-law understood. Of all the people to come through. It’s bad and it gets worse and so on until the worst of all. “I don’t know how you can handle this,” he’d say. “What does it feel like? Does it feel like a hangover? Worse than a hangover? Not like a hangover. Then what? Like drinking ten pots of boiled coffee? Like that? Really? Jittery! Oh, God, that must be awful. How can you stand it? Is it just like drinking too much coffee or is there some other aspect? Your fingers are numb? Blurred vision? It takes eight years to watch the second hand sweep from twelve to one? Well, if it’s like that, how did you handle five days? I couldn’t—I’d take a bottle of pills, shoot myself. Something. What about the second week? Drained? Washed out? Oh, brother! I had a three-day hangover once—I’d rather die than do that again. I couldn’t ride out that hangover again for money. I know I couldn’t handle chemo…”

  One afternoon after he left for work, she found a passage circled in his well-worn copy of Schopenhauer: In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theater before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Yeah! She gave up the crosswords and delved into The World As Will and Idea. This Schopenhauer was a genius! Why hadn’t anyone told her? She was a reader, she had waded through some philosophy in her time—you just couldn’t make any sense out of it. The problem was the terminology! She was a crossword ace, but words like eschatology—hey! Yet Schopenhauer got right into the heart of all the important things. The things that really mattered. With Schopenhauer she could take long excursions from the grim specter of impending death. In Schopenhauer, particularly in his aphorisms and reflections, she found an absolute satisfaction, for Schopenhauer spoke the truth and the rest of the world was disseminating lies!

  Her son-in-law helped her with unfinished business: will, mortgage, insurance, how shall we do this, that, and the other? Cremation, burial plot, et cetera. He told her the stuff that her daughter couldn’t tell her. He waited for the right moment and then got it all in—for instance, he told her that her daughter loved her very much but that it was hard for her to say so. She knew she cringed at this revelation, for it was ditto with her, and she knew that he could see it. Why couldn’t she say to her own daughter three simple words, “I love you”? She just couldn’t. Somehow it wasn’t possible. The son-in-law didn’t judge her. He had to be under pressure, too. Was she bringing everyone in the house down? Is that why he was reading Schopenhauer? No, Schopenhauer was his favorite. “Someone had to come out and tell it like it is,” he would say of the dour old man with muttonchops whose picture he had pasted on the refrigerator. From what she picked up from the son-in-law, Schopenhauer wrote his major work by his twenty-sixth birthday—a philosophy that was ignored almost entirely in his lifetime and even now, in this day and age, it was thought to be more of a work of art than philosophy in the truest sense. A work of art? Why, it seemed irrefutable! According to the son-in-law, Schopenhauer spent the majority of his life in shabby rooms in the old genteel section of Frankfurt, Germany, that he shared with successions of poodles to keep him company while he read, reflected, and wrote about life at his leisure. He had some kind of small inheritance, just enough to get by, take in the concerts, do a little traveling now and then. He was well versed in several languages. He read virtually everything written from the Greeks on, including the Eastern writers, a classical scholar, and had the mind to chew things over and make something of the puzzle of life. The son-in-law, eager to discourse, said Freud called Schopenhauer one of the six greatest men who ever lived. Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Richard Wagner all paid tribute to this genius who had been written off with one word—pessimist. The son-in-law lamented that his works were going out of print, becoming increasingly harder to find. He was planning a trip to Frankfurt, where he hoped to find a little bust of his hero. He had written to officials in Germany making inquiries. They had given him the brush-off. He’d have to fly over himself. And she, too, began to worry that the works of this writer would no longer be available…she, who would be worms’ meat any day.

  Why? Because the truth was worthwhile. It was more important than anything, really. She’d had ten years of peaceful retirement, time to think, wonder, contemplate, and had come up with nothing. But new vistas of thought had been opened by the curiously ignored genius with the white mutton-chops, whose books were harder and harder to get and whom the world would consider a mere footnote from the nineteenth century—a crank, a guy with an ax to grind, a hypochondriac, a misogynist, an alarmist who slept with pistols under his pillow, a man with many faults. Well, check anyone out and what do you find?

  For God’s sake, how were you supposed to make any sense out of this crazy-ass shit called life? If only she could simply push a button and never have been born.

  The son-in-law took antidepressants and claimed to be a melancholiac, yet he always seemed upbeat, comical, ready with a laugh. He had a sense of the absurd that she had found annoying back in the old days when she liked to pretend that life was a stroll down Primrose Lane. If she wasn’t walking down the “sunny side of the street” at least she was “singin’ in the rain.” Those were the days.

  What a fool!

  She encouraged the son-in-law to clown and philosophize, and he flourished when she voiced a small dose of appreciation or barked out a laugh. There was more and more pain and discomfort, but she was laughing more, too. Schopenhauer: No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn and no rose. The son-in-law finessed all of the ugly details that were impossible for her. Of all the people to come through!

  With her lungs temporarily clear and mineral oil enemas to regulate her, she asked her daughter one last favor. Could they take her home just once more?

  They made an occasion of it and drove her up into the mountains for her granddaughter’s seventh birthday party. Almost everyone in the picturesque resort town was there, and if they were appalled by her deterioration they did not show it. She couldn’t go out on the sun porch, had to semi-recline on the couch, but everyone came in to say hello and all of the bad stuff fell away for…an entire afternoon! She was deeply touched by the warm affection of her friends. There were…so many of them. My God! They loved her, truly they did. She could see it. You couldn’t bullshit her anymore; she could see deep into the human heart; she knew what people were. What wonderful friends. What a perfect afternoon. It was the last…good thing.

  When she got back to her daughter’s she began to die in earnest. It was in the lungs and the bowel, much as the doctor said it would be. Hell, it was probably in the liver even. She was getting yellow, not just the skin but even the whites of her eyes. There was a week in the hospital, where they tormented her with tests. That wiped out the last of her physical and emotional stamina.

  She fouled her bed after a barium lower G.I. practically turned to cement and they had to give her a powerful enema. Diarrhea in the bed. The worst humiliation. “Happens all the time, don’t worry,” the orderly said.

  She was suffocating. She couldn’t get the least bit of air. All the main players were in the room. She knew this was it! Just like that. Bingo! There were whispered conferences outside her room. Suddenly the nurses, those heretofore angels of mercy, began acting mechanically. They could look you over and peg you, down to the last five minutes. She could see them give her that anytime now look. A minister dropped in. There! That was the tip-off—the fat lady was singing.

  When the son-in-law showed up instead of going to work she looked to him with panic. She’d been fighting it back but now…he was there, he would know what to do without being asked, and in a moment he was back with a nurse. They cranked up the morphine sulfate, flipped it on full-bore. Still her back hurt like hell. All that morphine and a backache…just give it a minute…ahhh! Cartoons.

  Someone went out to get hamburgers at McDonald’s. Her daughter sat next to her holding her hand. She felt sorry for
them. They were the ones who were going to have to stay behind and play out their appointed roles. Like Schopenhauer said, the best they would be able to do for themselves was to secure a little room as far away from the fire as possible, for Hell was surely in the here-and-now, not in the hereafter. Or was it?

  She began to nod. She was holding onto a carton of milk. It would spill. Like diarrhea-in-the-bed all over again. Another mess. The daughter tried to take the carton of milk away. She…held on defiantly. Forget the Schopenhauer—what a lot of crap that was! She did not want to cross over. She wanted to live! She wanted to live!

  The daughter wrenched the milk away. The nurse came back and cranked up the morphine again. They were going for “comfort.” Finally the backache…the cartoons…all of that was gone.

  (She was back on the farm in Battle Lake, Minnesota. She was nine years old and she could hear her little red rooster, Mr. Barnes, crowing at first light. Then came her brother’s heavy work boots clomping downstairs and the vacuum swoosh as he opened up the storm door, and then his boots crunch-crunching through the frozen snow. Yes, she was back on the farm all right. Her brother was making for the outhouse and presently Barnes would go after him, make a dive-bomb attack. You couldn’t discourage Mr. Barnes. She heard her brother curse him and the thwap of the tin feed pan hitting the bird. Mr. Barnes’s frontal assaults were predictable. From the sound of it, Fred walloped him good. As far as Mr. Barnes was concerned, it was his barnyard. In a moment she heard the outhouse door slam shut and another tin thwap. That Barnes—he was something. She should have taken a lesson. Puffed out her chest and walked through life—“I want the biggest and the best and the most of whatever you’ve got!” There were people who pulled it off. You really could do it if you had the attitude.

  Her little red rooster was a mean little scoundrel, but he had a soft spot for her in his heart of steel and he looked out for her, cooed for her and her alone. Later, when young men came to see her, they soon arranged to meet her thereafter at the drugstore soda fountain uptown. One confrontation with Barnes, even for experienced farm boys, was one too many. He was some kind of rooster all right, an eccentric. Yeah, she was back on the farm. She…could feel her sister shifting awake in the lower bunk. It was time to get up and milk the cows. Her sister always awoke in good humor. Not her. She was cozy under a feather comforter and milking the cows was the last thing she wanted to do. Downstairs she could hear her mother speaking cheerfully to her brother as he came back inside, cursing the damn rooster, threatening to kill it. Her mother laughed it off; she didn’t have a mean bone in her body.

  She…could smell bacon in the pan, the coffeepot was percolating, and her grandmother was up heating milk for her Ovaltine. She hated Ovaltine, particularly when her grandmother overheated the milk—burned it—but she pretended to like it, insisted that she needed it for her bones, and forced it down so she could save up enough labels to get a free decoder ring to get special messages from Captain Cody, that intrepid hero of the airwaves. She really wanted to have that ring, but there was a Great Depression and money was very dear, so she never got the decoder or the secret messages or the degree in pharmacology. Had she been more like that little banty rooster, had she been a real go-getter…Well—it was all but over now.)

  The main players were assembled in the room. She…was nodding in and out but she could hear. There she was, in this apparent stupor, but she was more aware than anyone could know. She heard someone say somebody at McDonald’s put “everything” on her hamburger instead of “cheese and ketchup only.” They were making an issue out of it. One day, when they were in her shoes, they would learn to ignore this kind of petty stuff, but you couldn’t blame them. That was how things were, that’s all. Life. That was it. That was what it was. And here she lay…dying.

  Suddenly she realized that the hard part was all over now. All she had to do was…let go. It really wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t…anything special. It just was. She was trying to bring back Barnes one last time—that little memory of him had been fun, why not go out with a little fun? She tried to remember his coloring—orange would be too bright, rust too drab, scarlet too vivid. His head was a combination of green, yellow, and gold, all blended, and his breast and wings a kind of carmine red? No, not carmine. He was just a little red rooster, overly pugnacious, an ingrate. He could have been a beautiful bird if he hadn’t gotten into so many fights. He got his comb ripped off by a raccoon he’d caught stealing eggs in the henhouse, a big bull raccoon that Barnes had fought tooth and nail until Fred ran into the henhouse with his .410 and killed the thieving intruder. Those eggs were precious. They were income. Mr. Barnes was a hero that day. She remembered how he used to strut around the barnyard. He always had his eye on all of the hens; they were his main priority, some thirty to forty of them, depending. They were his harem and he was the sheikh. Boy, was he ever. She remembered jotting down marks on a pad of paper one day when she was home sick with chickenpox. Each mark represented an act of rooster fornication. In less than a day, Mr. Barnes had committed the sexual act forty-seven times that she could see—and she didn’t have the whole lay of the land from her window by any means. Why, he often went out roving and carousing with hens on other farms. There were bitter complaints from the neighbors. Barnes really could stir things up. She had to go out on her bicycle and round him up. Mr. Barnes was a legend in the country. Mr. Barnes thought the whole world belonged to him and beyond that—the suns, the stars, and the Milky Way—all of it! Did it feel good or was it torment? It must have been a glorious feeling, she decided. Maybe that was what Arthur Schopenhauer was driving at in his theory about the Will to Live. Mr. Barnes was the very personification of it.

  Of course it was hard work being a rooster, but Barnes seemed the happiest creature she had ever known. Probably because when you’re doing what you really want to do, it isn’t work. No matter how dull things got on the farm, she could watch Barnes by the hour. Barnes could even redeem a hot, dog-day afternoon in August. He wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. Did he ever entertain a doubt? Some kind of rooster worry? Never! She tried to conjure up one last picture of him. He was just a little banty, couldn’t have weighed three pounds. Maybe Mr. Barnes would be waiting for her on the other side and would greet her there and be her friend again.

  She nodded in and out. In and out. The morphine was getting to be too much. Oh, please God. She hoped she wouldn’t puke…So much left unsaid, undone. Well, that was all part of it. If only she could see Barnes strut his stuff one last time. “Come on, Barnes. Strut your stuff for me.” Her brother, Fred, sitting there so sad with his hamburger. After a couple of beers, he could do a pretty good imitation of Mr. Barnes. Could he…would he…for old time’s sake? Her voice was too weak, she couldn’t speak. Nowhere near. Not even close. Was she dead already? Fading to black? It was hard to tell. “Don’t feel bad, my darling brother. Don’t mourn for me. I’m okay”…and…one last thing—“Sarah, I do love you, darling! Love you! Didn’t you know that? Didn’t it show? If not, I’m so, so very sorry.…” But the words wouldn’t come—couldn’t come. She…was so sick. You can only get so sick and then there was all that dope. Love! She should have shown it to her daughter instead of…assuming. She should have been more demonstrative, more forthcoming.…That’s what it was all about. Love your brother as yourself and love the Lord God almighty with all your heart and mind and soul. You were sent here to love your brother. Do your best. Be kind to animals, obey the Ten Commandments, stuff like that. Was that it? Huh? Or was that all a lot of horseshit?

  She…nodded in and out. Back and forth. In and out. She went back and forth. In and out. Back and forth…in and out. There wasn’t any tunnel or white light or any of that. She just…died.

  Silhouettes

  WINDOW FELL FOR Catherine his senior year in high school when both were given special education assignments in East High School’s laundry room. The job didn’t pay much but it gave them a little spending money, which Catherine sp
ent buying Marlboro cigarettes, Thunderbird wine, candy bars, blotter acid, and marijuana, and which Window spent on Catherine.

  Their boss, Meldrick, immediately saw potential in Window but found Catherine useless and had her transferred to lunch room duty. Meldrick was the custodian in charge of the washer, dryer, and the centrifugal extractor in the laundry room, a comfortable hideaway attached to the boiler room where he could sit and read while his bunch of “special ed” assistants washed and folded the P.E. towels. Meldrick expected little from the students but because there were so many, if they performed even minimally, most of his own work was done. When this was the case he permitted the students to clown around and indulge in a kind of Fagin’s Band brand of tomfoolery. Their antics were a welcome reprieve after a forty-five-minute dose of Spinoza or David Hume. Sometimes Meldrick would join in the fun and perform a rendition of “Hambone” by rhythmically slapping his chest and thighs with his palms and fingertips, and then when he was finished, he would imitate Ricky Ricardo from “I Love Lucy” and say, “Eet’s so ree-diculous!”

  A journeyman custodian, Meldrick owned the most advanced college degrees in the school and was working diligently on his doctorate although he was convinced he would never find a better job. This was especially true when he discovered Window, whose capacity for work amazed him. Window was trustworthy and responsible, so much so that Meldrick found that he could hand Window his keys and turn him loose in the shop area where he would do an A-number-one job without screwing up, so that all Meldrick had to do was a casual inspection afterward to make sure the paper towel dispensers were full, the glass was spotless, the floors properly mopped, and that all the lights were out and the doors were locked. On days when Window was focused and his powers of concentration were high, Meldrick didn’t even bother to check.