Night Train

by Thom Jones

  Susan still has those Jehovah’s Witnesses on her mind. As we sit on a bench, she pulls one of their booklets out of her coat and shows me scenes of cornucopias filled with fruit and bounty, rainbows, and vividly colored vistas of a heaven on earth. Vistas that I’ve seen in a way, however paradoxically, in these awful Third World places, and I’m thinking, Let them that have eyes see; and let them that have ears hear—that’s how it is, and I start telling Suz about Africa, maybe someday I can take her there, and she gets excited and asks me what it’s like. Can you see lions?

  And I tell her, “Yeah, baby, you’ll see lions, giraffes, zebras, monkeys, and parrots, and the Pygmies.” And she really wants to see Pygmies. So I tell her about a Pygmy chief who likes to trade monkey meat for tobacco, T-shirts, candy, and trinkets, and about how one time when I went manic and took to the bush I stayed with this tribe, and went on a hunt with them, and we found a honeycomb in the forest; one of the hunters climbed up the tree to knock it down, oblivious of all the bees that were biting him. There were about five of us in the party and maybe ten pounds of honey and we ate all of it on the spot, didn’t save an ounce, because we had the munchies from smoking dope. I don’t tell Suz how it feels to take an airplane to New York, wait four hours for a flight to London, spend six hours in a transient lounge, and then hop on a nine-hour flight to Nairobi, clear customs, and ride on the back of a feed truck driven by a kamikaze African over potholes, through thick red dust, mosquitoes, black flies, tsetse flies, or about river blindness, bone-break fever, bilharziasis, dumdum fever, tropical ulcers, AIDS, leprosy, etc. To go through all that to save somebody’s life and maybe have them spit in your eye for the favor—I don’t tell her about it, the way you don’t tell a little kid that Santa Claus is a fabrication. And anyhow if I had eyes and could see, and ears and could hear—it very well might be the Garden of Eden. I mean, I can fuck up a wet dream with my attitude. I don’t tell her that lions don’t eat straw, never have, and so she’s happy. And it’s a nice moment for me, too, in a funny-ass way. I’m beginning to feel that with her I might find another little island of stability.

  Another hospital visit: winter has given way to spring and the cherry blossoms are out. In two weeks it’s gone from ten below to sixty-five, my Elavil and lithium are kicking in, and I’m feeling fine, calm, feeling pretty good. (I’m ready to go back and rumble in the jungle, yeah! Sha-lah la-la-la-lah.) Susan tells me she had a prophetic dream. She’s unusually focused and articulate. She tells me she dreamed the two of us were driving around Heaven in a blue ’67 Dodge.

  “A ’67 Dodge. Baby, what were we, the losers of Heaven?”

  “Maybe, but it didn’t really matter because we were there and we were happy.”

  “What were the other people like? Who was there? Was Arthur Schopenhauer there?”

  “You silly! We didn’t see other people. Just the houses. We drove up this hill and everything was like in a Walt Disney cartoon and we looked at one another and smiled because we were in Heaven, because we made it, because there wasn’t any more shit.”

  “Now, let me get this straight. We were driving around in a beat-up car—”

  “Yes, Richard, but it didn’t matter.”

  “Let me finish. You say people lived in houses. That means people have to build houses. Paint them, clean them, and maintain them. Are you telling me that people in Heaven have jobs?”

  “Yes, but they like their jobs.”

  “Oh, God, does it never end? A job! What am I going to do? I’m a doctor. If people don’t get sick there, they’ll probably make me a coal miner or something.”

  “Yes, but you’ll love it.” She grabs my arm with both hands, pitches her forehead against my chest, and laughs. It’s the first time I’ve heard Susan laugh, ever—since we were kids, I mean.

  “Richard, it’s just like Earth but with none of the bad stuff. You were happy, too. So please don’t worry. Is Africa like the Garden of Eden, Richard?”

  “It’s lush all right, but there’s lots and lots of dead time,” I say. “It’s a good place to read Anna Karenina. Do you get to read novels in Heaven, hon? Have they got a library? After I pull my shift in the coal mine, do I get to take a nice little shower, hop in the Dodge, and drive over to the library?”

  Susan laughs for the second time. “We will travel from glory to glory, Richard, and you won’t be asking existential questions all the time. You won’t have to anymore. And Mom and Dad will be there. You and me, all of us in perfect health. No coal mining. No wars, no fighting, no discontent. Satan will be in the Big Pit. He’s on the Earth now tormenting us, but these are his last days. Why do you think we are here?”

  “I often ask myself that question.”

  “Just hold on for a little while longer, Richard. Can you do that? Will you do it for me, Richard? What good would Heaven be if you’re not there? Please, Richard, tell me you’ll come.”

  I said, “Okay, baby, anything for you. I repent.”

  “No more Fyodor Dostoyevsky?”

  “I’ll be non-Dostoyevsky. It’s just that, in the meantime, we’re just sitting around here—waiting for Godot?”

  “No, Richard, don’t be a smart-ass. In the meantime we eat lunch. What did you bring?”

  I opened up a deli bag and laid out chicken-salad-sandwich halves on homemade bread wrapped in white butcher paper. The sandwiches were stuffed with alfalfa sprouts and grated cheese, impaled with toothpicks with red, blue, and green cellophane ribbons on them, and there were two large, perfect, crunchy garlic pickles on the side. And a couple of cartons of strawberry Yoplait, two tubs of fruit salad with fresh whipped cream and little wooden spoons, and two large cardboard cups of aromatic, steaming, fresh black coffee.

  It begins to rain, and we have to haul ass into the front seat of my Olds, where Suz and I finish the best little lunch of a lifetime and suddenly the Shirelles are singing, “This is dedicated to the one I love,” and I’m thinking that I’m gonna be all right, and in the meantime what can be better than a cool, breezy, fragrant day, rain-splatter diamonds on the wraparound windshield of a Ninety-eight Olds with a view of cherry trees blooming in the light spring rain?

  Superman, My Son

  WILHELM BLAINE PULLED his red Volvo wagon under the lone, stubby fig tree in front of his son Walter’s California-beige stucco home. Somebody needed to get off their rear, get out here, and do a little landscaping. But Blaine knew it wasn’t so bad behind the large cedar fence. It was a little enclave, really, with the pool, the Jacuzzi, the barbecue setup, and the rattan chairs. You could do a Winston Churchill—sit under lofty palms, sip a little brandy, smoke an expensive cigar, and discuss the weighty matters of the world.

  Blaine ran down his electric windows and the hefty scent of gardenia from the backyard hit him in the face. Behind the fence, Walter’s wife Zona pruned, watered, and fertilized—but out front, nothing. The fig tree was in need of serious medical attention, and in general the whole neighborhood was taking a precipitous slide. Blaine saw lots of “For Rent” signs. Almost every driveway seemed overloaded. If it wasn’t a pickup truck with jacked-up monster wheels, it was a pin-striped van or a Harley low rider amid broken bicycles and rusty automobile transmissions. When the subdivision was new, Walter had paid $240K for his place, but Blaine had just seen a chicken prancing across a sun-torched lawn before he hung the left on Millpine Drive.

  Blaine inched a few feet farther as he anticipated the amount of time he would spend inside. The Volvo would be an oven when he came out. Would Walter be laid out in a sluggish, torpid depression—insensible to reason or to the comforting reassurance of a father’s voice? Or would he be mad as Saul, spewing poison and virulent accusations? Then there was Freddy, just back from Africa. Freddy could bullshit for hours. Blaine pondered these various intangibles. It would either be a lion’s den or a morgue in there. He wanted to park the car so that it would be in at least partial shade. He looked back over his shoulder to the east, calculating, and caught a face
ful of the 8:30 A.M. sun.

  Poor Walter. He was a manic-depressive, and on this most recent flipout, according to Zona, he had somehow got buck-naked outside one of their supermarkets and dropped into the position of a Greek Olympian about to launch the discus. Zona said he locked up like a coiled spring. There was no discus to hurl but rather the Revised Standard Bible that he carried with him everywhere. And he would not let go. No amount of persuasion did any good. Walter became a statue, and they had to pick him up and take him to the emergency room just like that. The paramedics were furniture movers on that run. The incident did not have the feel of Walter’s routine flipouts, either. Maybe this was a big one. Too bad Walter hadn’t let the book sail. There was such a thing as religious toxicity. It was the worst poison of all. But Blaine wasn’t going to go inside and say so. He wasn’t going to get heavy-handed or come on too strong. He had done enough of that in the old days. He was just going to listen.

  Zona had implied that Walter’s ineffectual psychiatrist was some sort of “Christian” therapist. He had talked Walter out of his contortions, given him some Xanax, joined his hands in prayer, and then let Zona and Freddy drive Walter home. Blaine was glad he had missed the whole scene. He was worried about Walter but had troubles of his own. There were many things to do. Deals to be made. You just couldn’t retire anymore. God almighty no! You had to work right up until the day you died.

  Blaine revved the motor for a second and then switched off the ignition. The Volvo was his only means of transportation now, and he had come to love the car, the way it automatically “found” all his destinations in town. He had sold his Ferrari for interest on taxes due—no principal paid off or anything, just penalties. The next thing to go would be the house. But before he did that he had to pour a small fortune into finishing his courtyard.

  One of the workers employed on that project, a cheerful green-card, had stolen his Patek Philippe. The guy had been dumb enough to “admire” the watch prior to the theft. Blaine had him figured but realized there was little he could do. The police certainly wouldn’t care. Not about a mere property crime. Okay, the poor bastard needed the money, and Blaine left valuables around. The temptation must have been incredible. In the old days, Blaine would have hardly cared, but the Shoprite Food Value Emporium empire was falling to pieces. It was getting impossible to compete with the bigger stores, and Blaine was literally getting taxed out of business—getting reamed to keep people like the green-card afloat in various social programs of dubious worth. The thanks he got was grand theft—grand theft one day and armed robbery the next. Almost immediately after the green-card incident, Blaine had made hot tracks to his bedroom safe for his coin collection—close to fifty thousand in value—and had driven the wagon to a coin shop in downtown Sacramento and then, oh, man—a chain of events ensued that still had him reeling.

  There were four black men inside the store when the proprietor buzzed him in through the security gate. Blaine’s pockets were laden with gold, and he could literally smell the trouble—on top of the alcohol there was a toxic smell of adrenaline coming from these thugs, and they were getting right into the proprietor’s face. “How much this one? How many Rolexes you got, man? You got some in the back? I don’t like these here.”

  It was a tremendous relief to see them go, but suddenly they were back—one of them claiming to have left a pair of sunglasses behind. The Vietnamese coin dealer, Phat H’at, or the Fat Hat, as he was known, buzzed them back in. You would have thought the old man had developed an instinct for trouble, but he acted like a complete fool. Blaine had his coins out on the counter by then, and the bandits quickly brandished little snub-nosed .38s. Hat went for his nickel-plated .45, but one of the men was over the counter faster than a cat. “Motherfucker! One more move out of you and you dead.”

  Blaine had been glad that the bandit had some agility. He didn’t want any shooting, although once the .45 was out of the way the robbers fired three shots into the security camera, Ka-Pow! Ka-Pow! Orange-and-blue flames burst out of the gun barrels. Ka-Pow! The harsh sound of the gunfire caused exquisite pain in his ears. One of the robbers scooped Blaine’s coins into a bag, then executed a deft pirouette and expertly snatched the Cartier off Blaine’s wrist and popped it into a pocket. Another man, wearing a ski mask, grabbed Blaine’s wallet and began to rifle through it.

  “You are welcome to all of it, gentlemen,” Blaine had said, hands up, suddenly giddy. The savoir-faire with which he delivered these words seemed to calm the gunmen a little. It took the tension down a couple of notches. The biggest one pulled most of the green out of Blaine’s wallet, but twelve bucks floated to the floor, and Blaine took a small satisfaction in stepping on the money. It was sort of a stupid thing to do, but Blaine felt possessed of a kind of Mel Gibson movie-house invulnerability. His left foot was on the ten, his right on the two singles, and he felt splendidly frozen in time, as if he were in a white tie and tails doing a kind of lithe Fred Astaire—as if he suddenly knew what life wanted of him.

  While the bandits fled the shop, Fat Hat ducked into the back room and emerged with a twelve-gauge. Blaine’s happy spell was broken. “Hey, there! Wait a minute! Those hoods will come back in here and shoot us both,” he said.

  “Why you smiling? Why you smiling?” Hat said. “Taking sixteen Rolexes. Got alla my cold, hard cash. Got all your gold, man!”

  The Asian darted out into the parking lot, squatted, and leveled the gun from left to right. His movements resembled some ridiculous, partly forgotten foreign army-training maneuver—an action long ago imprinted in an Alzheimer’s-demented brain. The bandits were peeling rubber, fishtailing away in an old diesel-powered Oldsmobile Toronado. One of them leaned out the window and blasted a couple of shots back, causing Fat Hat to drop prone and hug the asphalt. Blaine saw the blue-and-orange muzzle flame a second before he heard the shots. He watched the car swing out onto the freeway until the only sign of it was the lingering, thick white smoke of the tail exhaust. And very soon that was gone. The entire incident had lasted no more than a minute or two.

  Fat Hat ran back inside and dialed 911. Then he turned on Blaine. “Them get away. Too fast for me. Getaway driver an’ shit. Piss on this whole damn country, anyhow. I’m packing up and could go back to Mauritius! No gun in your face alla time! Why you smiling? Stop that smiling, vexing me! Damn you, man. Why you smiling?”

  “I’m smiling because…I’m alive.” Blaine picked up his last twelve dollars. “And because I’ve got enough money to buy lunch.”

  In some perverse way, the robbery had been fun. It was an adventure. His gold was gone, but if thieves didn’t get it, Walter’s ineffectual psychiatrist would. Blaine returned to the thought of Wally frozen in a discus-thrower’s position. His track specialty in high school had been the discus throw. Zona had told Blaine that Walter had been convinced the Bible was a tiny spaceship containing a crew of three hundred and fourteen perversely evil, micro-sized men who were extorting pocket change from some street bum Walter had recently met during his manic space walk. Walter was going to uncoil and hurl the little bastards to the farthest reaches of the Milky Way. Or something. He never really let the thing fly. Should have, probably. A normal person might find comfort in the fundamental religions, with their laws, promises, and the so-called covenant with God. But why listen to a bunch of cockamamie? Wasn’t it better to pursue your own truths? Very few had the courage or the elasticity to go it alone, though. And to view Christianity through the lens of manic psychosis was dangerous. Blaine had shucked his own Bible in Germany just after the war. Blaine was a full-blooded German himself. He even took heat for it at the time (“You’re one of them, Blaine, a fuckin’ kraut”), but he saw what the Germans had done and he had hated them for it. He knew the tendencies. His personality was marred by them, but at least he knew them. You didn’t have to let a bug crawl up your ass and get all hellbent and mean or trample over people to make money. You could treat people right without fearing or trying to please God
. You could do it simply because it was human to do it, because love was a more ennobling tendency than hate, and if you were lucky, maybe you could live with yourself and sleep nights.

  But Walter didn’t have Blaine’s German genes. Blaine and his wife, Joanna, had adopted Wally. The boy was just three when they got him. This whole manic-psychosis business had to be genetic. He had been a happy kid back in Appleton, Wisconsin. Blaine had racked his brain trying to think of some way in which he had failed his son. There was nothing major. Blaine recalled the streams of dogs, birds, and rabbits, and Walter’s pals and girlfriends. Walter hadn’t been a very good student, but he had one stupendous season as an all-state catcher on the baseball team. Blaine could still remember the fastball Wally drove deep into the right-centerfield seats, breaking up a no-hitter in the state championship game. The opposing pitcher was brimming with confidence, and he challenged Walter with a fat one right down the middle. Boom! As soon as Wally made contact, everyone knew that ball was gone. It was one of those tape-measure jobs—four hundred and four feet. What a day that had been; probably the kid’s best day. The very next week, Walter came within a half inch of setting a state record in the discus throw. The first athlete at Appleton to double-letter in spring sports. Blaine bought Walter a brand-new Corvair a few days later, and in less than a month, Walter was in the hospital; he had experienced his first manic flipout and rolled the car. There were subsequent hospitalizations for psychiatric treatment. Successions of therapists. Years of nothing but pain and trouble, really. Hell, trouble was the one constant in life. Pain and trouble. They pervaded everything.