Night Train

by Thom Jones

  “The kids,” he says. “You have to think of the kids.”

  Or: “A divorce would leave a psychic scar.”

  Clendon teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. Middlebury is really a beautiful place but it’s that old bullshit: Greenpeace. You know, I don’t want to overgeneralize but it’s a style I find hard to take. They really let you have it up there. Throw it right in your face. Self-righteous do-gooders. I mean, I think we ought to save the dolphins, too. Torpedo those Japanese fishing boats if they don’t lay off! But spare me the folksingers!

  Anyhow, I went out to see Clendon one summer expecting the weather to be cool, praying that it would be cool that summer, and it was atypically hot and there was some kind of mosquito convocation going on there—every mosquito in the world flew into Vermont that summer.

  Historically mosquitoes are among the deadliest enemies of man. Mosquitoes caused the downfall of ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean Sea—sleeping sickness, elephantiasis, dengue, malaria. Plus you know about all of that yellow-fever jive when we dug the Panama Canal, right?

  Well, great big monster mosquitoes from Siberia, the size of sparrows, made the trip to Vermont that summer, and there were little ones that were, in a way, worse because they had no fear of the blazing sun, thrived under it, and would attack at high noon like Mirage fighter jets. Aedis aegypti if you want to get technical. Aedis aegypti is completely dependent on human blood and will attack in the full light of day, like Dracula with sunglasses. I mean, they wouldn’t light on you and make preliminary moves to give you warning before they injected their hypodermic proboscis into your skin. They were like flying piranhas; they would practically bite you on the wing.

  You couldn’t buy, beg, or steal insect repellent. There was a run on it. It was more precious than a rhinoceros horn in an Asian bazaar. Clendon was so preoccupied with his marital problems that he scarcely noticed the mosquitoes, but they were all I could think of. There are nearly two thousand species of them and I think most blew in for the big convocation. Mosquito Woodstock.

  I hated to watch my brother grovel, the children irritated me, and so I holed up in the guest bedroom with the air conditioner on full blast and a satchel full of medical journals. Victoria had the gall to insist I confine my cigarette smoking to the bedroom. “What kind of doctor has a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit?” she says.

  “Smoking is good for you; it makes your heart merry,” I say.

  “Oh bullshit,” she says. “It’s such a juvenile habit.”

  If you were my wife, I thought, you would be a splat on the wall.

  Clendon had given me a number of literary magazines to read including stories of his own. I’m a reader, I read them but it was always some boring crap about a forty-five-year-old upper-level executive in boat shoes driving around Cape Cod in a Volvo. I mean you actually do finish some of them and admit that “technically” they were pretty good but I’d rather go to back-to-back operas than read another story like that. It was with relief that I returned to the medical journals.

  Boy, that Victoria was a cool one! Chilly. Even with the kids. I made a few points when obese little Jason fell and lacerated his knee. I numbed the knee with lidocaine, debrided the cut, and did a first-class job of suturing the wound. All jokes. No tears. The kids thought Uncle Bob or Doctor Bob was great and loved it when I took them out in the Jag V-12 convertible and drove them on the swervy back roads, cutting swaths through the dark clouds of mosquitoes. Victoria didn’t like the Jaguar. It was too ostentatious, too L.A., for her blue-blood sensibilities but, hey! I worked like hell to buy that car. And second gear in a V-12 Jag has got more juice than anything short of an Apollo 10. Va-rrroom!

  What really put a frost on the visit was the night I took the kids out to see The Exorcist III and they came home to vomit hot dogs and ice cream and then Jason woke up the whole house with a screaming nightmare. The “Bonecrusher” had been after him. “There, there, baby, Mommy’s here and everything is going to be just fine.” Fucking little Jason tells Victoria that Uncle Bob punched the V-12 up to 130 m.p.h. and the telephone poles were looking like a picket fence. Fucking little Jason tells Victoria how we fishtailed onto a gravel road, spun around, knocked over a mailbox, and blew out a rear tire.

  I swore the little bastard to secrecy!

  In the morning Clendon told me he knew Vickie was having an affair and while he hated her for it, it excited him to think of her making love to another man. Clendon told me he was dicking some of his students and that he couldn’t get it up for Victoria. I said, “Leave that nasty bitch. I can’t work up any sympathy for you, she’s runnin’ you, man.”

  “I don’t know what to do. You’re right. I’m torn. I feel like Hamlet. Good God, what are you doing?”

  “What?”

  “Put out that cigarette.”

  “Are you shittin’ me? What the fuck is the matter with you?”

  “Passive smoke, little brother. The kids. And Jesus! Don’t take them out in that goddamn toy anymore either. A hundred and thirty miles an hour?”

  “It’s not a toy, big brother, it’s pure pussy. You’re scared shitless, aren’t you?” I flipped him the keys to my Jaguar. “Go take it for a ride, motherfucker. Live a little. Go on, drive it; it’s good therapy. Primal Scream Therapy.”

  Clendon went out into the driveway and turned the engine over. He revved the motor and popped the clutch, spinning rubber out into the street. I spotted his reflection in the rearview mirror frozen in the rictus of fear. Not a good sign, I thought. How Clendon could not find satisfaction from the rich thrrraaaghh! of the dual exhaust system baffled me. It was that sound that made the car worth every bit of the $80-some thousand. I could have thrown the money into a Keogh account but, hey! it was the sound of pure balls.

  In a moment the kitchen door opened and Victoria walked in with a tanned young man in his late twenties; both were wearing tennis clothes. I was caught in the act of lighting another cigarette. Victoria introduced me to the young man, Larry, a tennis pro, and exchanged an intimate look with him before she ran upstairs to change. If they thought they were fooling me, and I think they did, they were both dead wrong.

  I offered Larry a cigarette and he declined in that particularly annoying Middlebury fashion so I said, “If you weren’t such a goddamn faggot, I’d bet you were screwing that bitch.”

  He began to puff up and I said, “Don’t even think about it, motherfucker.”

  When Victoria came down five minutes later, showered and in fresh sweats, if she missed Larry or was puzzled by his taking leave, she didn’t show it, didn’t miss a beat, but remained pleasantly aloof and began to whip together a Caesar salad for supper. I was in the mood to tear her head off. Maybe she knew that.

  Dinner was consumed with stiff formality, to my thinking, sea trout on a bed of lentils with a coconut crème caramel for dessert, espresso and brandy. Clendon took the edge off things when he spoke of Victoria’s forthcoming show that he had arranged, using his influence with the college art department. Victoria began to talk of her paintings, which were done in the expressionist style. “I like the realists,” I said. “What I really like is that trompe l’oeil style. And I always thought Andy Warhol was totally insane and crazy. Have you ever gotten totally insane and crazy, Jason? When your daddy was little, he used to act that way. Are you ever like that, dude?”

  “Yeah,” Jason said shyly.

  “Warhol,” Victoria said pompously, “the early Warhol, before he was shot—”

  “Where would America be without Andy Warhol?” I said. “He put his stamp on American culture. Think about it, Vickie. He invented superstars and all of that shit. It didn’t quit with the Tomato Soup Can. Andy Warhol was a genius. He—what he had, was this great radio antenna. Picked up on all of the cosmic vibrations. He just did it, I don’t think he knew the half of it. He was one of those idiot savants, I’m thinking. Your paintings are too goddamn vague, Vick. I can’t get a reading on them.”
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br />   After dinner, Jason and I went into Victoria’s studio and painted cans of Campbell’s Mushroom Soup. Made a super mess. Pissed her off royally.

  In the morning I sat in on a session of Clendon’s creative writing class. It didn’t take any real brainpower to figure out who his protégé was—a bright bohemian type in black leotards and a turtleneck. She read from a novel in progress in a confident low and sexy voice. She couldn’t write and she wasn’t really pretty. What she had going for her was the bloom of youth and a headful of platinum blond hair.

  She appeared at Victoria’s art showing, which was sparsely attended by the faculty, public, and student body. I stuck it through to the bitter end wondering if Larry, from the tennis club, would make an appearance, and the deeper I got into the white wine, the more I hoped he would. He did not. I met a number of Clendon’s colleagues that night and began to understand why he had nearly broken down getting his Ph.D. I remembered people like that from medical school. The English faculty had its med school counterparts—the bunch that went into psychiatric residencies. It was those types, the counterpart of those types that considered surgeons to be assholes, but if I have an assholish aspect I can only say—you better go out and get whatever you want on this trip, because this is the trip, the only trip.

  On the second night of the showing I stayed at home and babysat the kids. The next morning Clendon told me there had been a light turnout. Then he asked me quite bluntly if I could wrap up the visit and leave. Victoria considered me an “invader,” he said. My presence was provoking migraine headaches. She was up in bed now, wasted with a headache because of me.

  “The invader. It’s your fucking house, man. And you’re telling me to go?”

  “I don’t remember—you never had such a filthy mouth. Is that how they talk in the hospital?”

  “Fucking-A. She’s got you pussy-whipped. I never figured you for a Ph.D. in English—”

  “It’s her house. Her parents’ money.”

  “Leave her.”

  “Right, live in a trailer court. Plastic curtains. Alimony. Child support.”

  “Well, it will be your trailer. Home sweet home.”

  “No can do—”

  “She looks at you and you wither.”

  “I can’t explain it. I need her.”

  My blood boiled. I didn’t know if I wanted to cock my fist and smash his teeth down his throat or write him a script for some Valium and Elavil.

  “Well, fuck it then,” I said. “I’m going back to Los Angeles.”

  I got a little loaded. It was late. The kids were in bed. Clendon was at some sort of university function. I went out into the kitchen to make a sandwich and caught Victoria standing over the sink, her platinum hair pinned up to keep her neck cool. I had startled her and when she turned to me, I realized she wasn’t altogether surprised. She was wearing an expensive sheer nightgown and her breasts, just bigger than medium and firm—I mean they were there—large erect pinkish-white nipples. They were just absolutely the most beautiful tits in the whole world.

  It was a matter of some ambivalence for both of us. Neither of us liked the other. Yet the physical attraction right then and there was incredible. After I kissed her, she led me into the bedroom. She said, “Oh, my God!”

  I really gave it to her. I really let her have it.

  You take the gorilla…I suppose there are probably only about forty of them left on the planet, if that many. Point of fact: the reason the gorilla has such a large brain is not because he has to figure out where to find food or how to make a little nest in the grass. In Gorilla Country food is plentiful; enemies, apart from man, are nonexistent. To find food, make the nest, and then migrate along to the next spot, the gorilla needs a brain the size of a Rice Krispie.

  The reason the gorilla has such a large brain and the reason it takes so long for the young to mature and develop is because in a gorilla society, in addition to understanding the various nuances of their vocal utterances, they are masters of reading body language. They are skilled psychologists and, in their roughshod way, they are far more diplomatic than a human can ever think of becoming.

  In a gorilla troop there is no violence. Everyone gets along. There’s a pecking order, true, but everyone has his place and accepts it. Gorillas are happy. They don’t need New Balance tennis shoes, or VCRs or Jaguar V-12 convertibles. They don’t need DKNY. They don’t need crack cocaine. They don’t need to write clever stories about some guy driving around Cape Cod with angst. You give a gorilla a banana and a piece of nookie and you’ve got a happy gorilla; you’ve got a gorilla that has no desire to commit rape or Murder One, or to paint the Sistine Chapel, or run for president, win a Nobel Prize—any of that. Gorillas don’t war upon one another or torture one another. It never happens.

  A friend of mine in the ER told me that the animal consciousness is one of the here-and-now and that the human being can approximate it by drinking five martinis while soaking in a hot tub. A Saturday evening condition, if then. The rest of the time…well, just read the newspapers and you’ll know what I mean. Human behavior, ninety-eight percent of it, is an abomination.

  The morning after I screwed Victoria, everyone at the breakfast table knew. Humans can read body language, skin color, flushed cheeks, eye pupil size, heads hung in shame, etc., just as well as any gorilla can.

  I finished my platter of buttermilk pancakes topped with pure maple syrup and then packed up my valise, gunned the V-12 Jaguar, and roared out of Clendon’s life forever. I couldn’t wait to get back to the Emergency Room at Valley General in Los Angeles, California, where I practice as a trauma surgeon and save human lives by the score, although I had to drive the Jaguar very carefully. The wheel alignment had been thrown out when I blew the tire and the frame shuddered behind all of that V-12 power.

  I knew that either Clendon would become so pissed that he would leave that nasty-ass bitch or he would weasel under and suffer worse than that alienated hero in the Russian novel Crime and Punishment, Clendon’s favorite character of all time. I believe the dude’s name is Raskolnikov.

  How Clendon ever married that pit viper is a mystery to me. In that summer of the mosquitoes, I saw that he had capitulated completely…for a Volvo, two overweight kids with “blah” for personalities, and a neurotic wife who took separate vacations to Florence, Italy, to look at artwork. Victoria was a good fuck but I kept thinking of those awful paintings she signed with her maiden name and how she made Clendon use his influence with the art department so she could have that pathetic show over there at Middlebury College.

  Beyond that, I knew she’d make him think it was his fault that she screwed the young guy at the tennis club, among others, me included.

  Well, Clendon is not the world’s first cuckold, and he won’t be the last. When I saw her turn around from the sink in that sheer nightie with those breasts made in Heaven, those long slim legs, etc., I can understand what must have happened to my big brother and can see how he got suckered in. Romantic love. Romeo and Juliet. No-fucking-body can look six months down the road. It just doesn’t last. How come they can’t see it? Why can’t they anticipate?

  Thus the two fat kids, both null and void. It was plain to see they aren’t Clendon’s. But he can’t leave now (“the kids, the psychic scar of divorce proceedings, plastic curtains in the trailer court”). Hey! I tried to do him a favor.

  I remember once when we were in high school and I went into a clothing store with him to buy a new suit and fell under the salesman’s spell and in no time I had six hundred dollars’ worth of garish clothes piled on the sales counter—clothes that were the antithesis of me, horrible clothes. Clendon dragged me outside into the sunlight. “Have you lost your mind?” he said. “You’re going to look like a pimp in all of that shit!” Laughing, we ran down the street out of that salesman’s life for all time.

  I hope by screwing Victoria I snapped him out of his trance. If not, then I’ve only made things worse.

  I had to do s
omething. I had to try.

  According to Darwin the species wants to go on and on, forever and forever, but we are diluting and degrading the species by letting the weaklings live. I am guilty of this more than anyone. I took the Hippocratic oath and vowed to patch up junkies, prostitutes, and violent criminals and send them back out on the streets to wreak more havoc and mayhem on themselves and on others. I try not to think of that. I like to hope for the best.

  I was just reading about the real Robinson Crusoe. He was this troublemaker that got kicked out of his hometown in Scotland and became a sailor in the Royal Navy and then on a trip off the coast of Chile, he started bitching about the ship and the conditions aboard and told the captain he wanted off and so they rowed him ashore with his sea chest, dropped him off, returned to the ship, and when they pulled up the dinghy and got ready to take off, Robinson Crusoe changed his mind and called to the captain, “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry!”

  The captain called back, “That’s too goddamn bad! Fuck you!”

  And off they went. Robinson Crusoe spent three months on the beach trying to stay awake, thinking that it had all been a bad dream and that they would come back for him. He lived on king crabs. Funny he didn’t develop gout or blow out his kidneys on that rich and monotonous diet.