Night Train

by Thom Jones

  Blaine stepped under the fig tree and examined its leaves. It had once been lush and productive of fruit, and now it was barren. Did it suffer—actually suffer on some level? He studied the tree with wonder, stroking its rough trunk. Love could save this plant. Zona could get her ass out here and save this plant if she felt like it. But you couldn’t stay on top of everything. Blaine walked away from the fig tree. See you later. He was in up to his neck on several levels, and he realized now why he was stalling. He did not want to go inside.

  It was a relief to duck into the vestibule and get out of the blazing sun. Blaine was sweating in his seersucker suit. He pushed the doorbell, swept his fingers through his mane of chestnut brown hair, and then rammed both hands in his pockets as he rocked back and forth on his heels. The right words would be there for him.

  Zona Blaine clomped down the stairs wearing a short robe and a pair of her husband’s slip-ons. She still had nice legs, and, in spite of her pool-lounging in the hot valley sun, she had nice skin. She was cradling a basket full of laundry and talking to her bird, Boo Boo, who was perched high on her shoulder. She looked into the front room and said good morning to Walter’s cousin, Freddy, who was leaning forward on the couch with a cup of coffee so hot he was fanning it with a copy of a bird magazine. Freddy didn’t look so good. It had been a real shocker to Zona when she first got a load of him at the airport. He was beyond what one might term “a whiter shade of pale,” and he had dropped fifty pounds. He claimed it was malaria.

  Zona swung open the garage door and loaded the washer. She was back in a second and said, “This bird is crazy.”

  “Can it talk?” Freddy said.

  “You should hear him. I go out into the garage and he says, ‘Whacha doin’?’ I say, ‘I’m doing the laundry, Boo Boo.’ He says, ‘Need any help?’ ”

  “No!” Freddy declared.

  “I’m not kidding. ‘Need any help?’ ”

  “That’s wild. What else does he say?” Freddy cranked the footrest of the lounger down and made an assault on the hot cup of coffee. Zona wondered how he could drink it so hot.

  “He does a one-way telephone conversation: ‘Yeah…uh-huh…yeah?’ Then he’ll pause, you know. ‘Oh, yeah? Uh-huh. That’s right.’ Pause again. ‘Oh, yeah? Ah-ha-ha-ha!’ ”

  Freddy said, “Is it like parakeet chatter? Or is it like human?”

  “It’s just like human. Parakeets—” Zona screwed up her face and cocked her head to the side. “ ‘Pretta bird, chich chich chich. Pretta bird.’ That’s all you get from parakeets.”

  “Parakeets have got that tinny quality,” Freddy said. He picked up a bright blue butane lighter and shook a Kool from his pack. “What about Blaine’s parrot? That bird can talk.”

  “Roberto? ‘I ham joost hey line man for zee county.’ ”

  Freddy lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Roberto bit me on the cuticle last time I was out here. Took out a chunk of meat. I still got the scar.”

  “African grays,” Zona said. “They are mean, but they're the best talkers. ‘Hey, hey, pretty wooman. Wot harrh you wearing such hey sexy blouse for? You h’rr making me so hot, bébé.’ ”

  “He’s a smooth one, all right. He gets you to trust him and then he bites you. Does he bite Blaine?”

  “He bites them one and all. Roberto is a real card. He’s a character,” Zona said.

  “Who taught him all that Spanish? He must be a pre-owned bird. It’s always a sex trip or that stupid song.”

  “Bésame Mucho,” Zona said.

  “Yes. I hate that song. It makes me depressed. If I bought a pre-owned bird, I'd get it from a soul brother, not some bean head. It always starts in with that song at six in the morning. And, it’s like, loud.”

  Blaine remained in the porchway with his hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels, wondering if the doorbell had shorted out. But then he heard voices inside. He gave the door a little rap. He was thinking of the stickup, wondering if his insurance would cover it. Well, it would or it wouldn’t.

  He gave the door a second sharp rap and stepped inside. Blaine liked his entrances to seem like explosions. His voice was a rich baritone, and he liked to ham. “Is somebody in here badmouthing my parrot?”

  “Hey, hey, hey!” Freddy said. He got up to shake hands with his uncle, but they ended up in a tight, back-slapping embrace. It had been three years. The family had been dying out fast. Freddy was the last of the Blaine line, and, by the looks of him, Blaine wondered how long Freddy would last. He looked terrible.

  Blaine held his nephew at arm’s length and studied his face. “My God, Freddy, it’s good to see you again. Jesus! How are you feeling?”

  “Not too bad. How are you? Lucky to be alive, ain’t you? Stick ’em up, dude!”

  “Oh, Christ,” Blaine said dismissively. “I was just thinking about those cocksuckers. They got away clean. I’m lucky to be alive. Or not so lucky, when you consider the state of the world. A bullet between the eyes might have been a blessing. I’m seventy-two, for Christ’s sake. I am probably nourishing monstrous occlusions and tumors of which I’m not yet aware but will be presently. Ha! But what about you? What about this number you pulled on the airplane?”

  “I hate to go into that,” Freddy said. “I’ll just get riled up again.”

  “No, tell me.” Blaine said. He was an expert at drawing people out, and he loved lurid tales. Blaine winked at Zona, who ran upstairs to put on some clothes.

  “I haven’t done anything like that in years,” Freddy said. “I thought I was in control, that those days were over. But sometimes there is a black-and-white situation where anger seems completely justified.”

  “I want to hear the whole story. Don’t shortchange me,” Blaine said, as he selected a pipe from Walter’s pipe rack and began loading it from a canister of coarse tobacco.

  Freddy took a quick hit off his cigarette. “Well, imagine,” he said. “From Douala, in Cameroon, to Kinshasa, to Dar, to the Africa House in Zanzibar—party, party for a couple of days—and then on to Paris, customs at L.A., blah blah, and then here. Until the water bed in the guest bedroom last night, the last time I was in between sheets and really slept was at the Hotel Akwa on the Boulevard de la Liberté in fucking Douala—the armpit of Africa. That was just before the latest round with this fucking malaria. None of it was too bad, until I hit that airline strike in Los Angeles. I was supposed to be in business class, but they somehow had me in the last seat in the tail section—one of those seats that don’t tilt back. You can take that shit when you’re young, but I was having my—you know, my epileptic twitches, and I’m back there going off like a machine gun, rat-a-tat-tat, and in the meantime the steward is dishing shit out to everybody, like we’re in prison and he’s the yard boss. I got into it with him. I just let him have it, that’s all. Zona, is there any more coffee?”

  “How many cups have you had already?” Zona said. She had fixed her hair in a ponytail and had thrown on a cotton sundress.

  “Just two.”

  Zona looked to her father-in-law. “All he does is sit there, drink coffee, and smoke strong cigarettes. He won’t eat. I didn’t think doctors smoked anymore.”

  “Who said doctors had good sense?” Freddy said. “Doctors can be the craziest sumbitches in the world. Behind the bulwark of authority, self-assurance, and the seemingly judicious intelligence of the white coat, too often unrighteousness, lunacy, and sheer incompetence sit at the helm. Thus it is in medicine as in all walks of life; in medicine, more so. Drug addicts, suicides, desperate people. I mean, I publish in the journals. I have a certain renown. So you see what the world’s coming to.” Freddy presented Zona with the empty mug. “Please. More. I’ve got jet lag and a real bad case of the poontang blues.”

  Zona went into the kitchen, and Blaine leaned forward and whispered, “You get much pussy over there—you know, in Africa?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Freddy said nervously. “A little. Some one-night stands with the ever-circulating
network of aid workers. Some of the hard cases will go to the ground and marry natives. A lot of the Catholics sublimate. I can do that, too. I can sublimate.”

  “You mean you just don’t do it?” Blaine said.

  “Well, it’s pretty risky. AIDS is everywhere. It used to be bad just in the big cities, but now it’s all over. It puts the fear of God into you.”

  Zona returned with a coffee tray. “Tell Willy how you lost your shoe.”

  Freddy began to fan his mug as soon as Zona filled it. “I’m sure Uncle Willy would rather hear about Walter.”

  Blaine wiggled a little bag of NutraSweet, ripped off the top, and dumped the contents into his cup. “Zona filled me in about Walter late last night. You tell me about the flight from hell.”

  Freddy sipped his coffee. “Am I talking too fast?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I am now and was then all whacked-out on Mefloquine. I was not really lucid, but still it dawned on me that whenever anybody had a request that was within this steward’s power to fulfill, he just said, ‘Yeah, just a minute,’ and didn’t do anything. We were just sitting dead on the ground like for about an hour and a half, and the steward took that rude L.A. tone, ‘Everybody on the plane is a revenue-paying customer. If you want another seat you’ll have to trade with somebody once we get into the air.’ I just lost it. ‘Who in the hell do you think you are, jacking everybody around? Motherfucker, I have been out in the damn jungle in Cameroon. I have been on an airplane or in a transient lounge for two and a half days, and you think you got it bad ’cause you’re working a double shift. Well, how do you think I feel?’

  “He came right back. ‘Fuck you!’ he says, and then, bingo, we started wrestling in the aisle, and two cops grabbed me. ‘You’re under arrest!’ I’ve been three years in Central Africa and nothing happens to me until I get back to the imperialistic, fascist state!”

  Blaine had thought he would come into the house and have words for whatever hit him, but the spectacle of Freddy left him speechless.

  Freddy gulped down more coffee, lit another Kool, and, thus freshly armed, leaned forward and continued. “People were still trying to get on the plane, it was a big cluster fuck, and the police were dragging me away; I lost a shoe, and some little Greek lady got up and said, ‘Hold it right there! That man did nothing wrong! That man did nothing wrong. It was him, Mr. Sunny Jim there!’ and she’s pointing to the steward. ‘It was all his fault.’ So there is some justice in the universe. The cops stopped, like, ‘Oh, yeah?’ and the steward said, ‘Screw this job, who needs it?’ I mean, this is the kind of shit that happens on a cross-country Trailways bus ride when some maniac is stoked on fortified wine. And I never did find my shoe. Off to baggage claim wearing socks.” Freddy had a pencil-thin mustache and a short goatee, which he fingered nervously while he patted perspiration from his forehead with a folded linen tea napkin. Blaine stared at him.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” Freddy said. “I get crazy when I tell that story. I’m better now, really, if I could just—if God would just have mercy on me and let me get a little sleep.” He laughed nervously. “So tell us about the robbery. Four of them, with gunfire. Was dey blood? Was dey niggazzh?”

  “They were thugs,” Blaine said. “They just pumped a few shots into the ceiling, that’s all. Why do you denigrate them? You are over in Africa for three years, ostensibly saving African lives, dispensing care—”

  Freddy flicked his hand at a fly. Blaine took note of the limp wrist action and the way Freddy crossed his legs. In spite of a lifelong fondness for Freddy, Blaine felt himself disapproving of his nephew’s whole demeanor.

  “It’s just a term of speech, Uncle Willy. You yourself referred to them as ‘cocksuckers.’ Was this coin dealer insured?”

  “I still don’t know,” Blaine said. “My lawyer’s handling it. It’s depressing. I am down to selling paintings and coins so I can fix up that courtyard. In the morning, I’m importing a fountain from Italy, before lunch I am robbed, and in the afternoon I’m shopping for a double-wide.”

  “You’re such a kidder,” Freddy said. “Zona, did you hear that, babe? He’s getting a double-wide.”

  “I’m serious,” Blaine said. “I’ve got some scrub acreage. I’ll plop it down there. Pow!” Blaine slapped his hand on the coffee table. “Home, sweet home. I’ll sit there and call it good.” He relit his pipe. “Where is Walter, for God’s sake? How is he?”

  Zona gave Blaine a cup of coffee. “He’s up in the bedroom.”

  “Won’t come out?” Blaine said.

  “No,” Zona said. “I’ve been trying to baby him but…well, you know Walter. He’s the biggest and best manic depressive in the Golden State. When he’s up, fa-gam! The planet Krypton. He can fly there in an hour. But when he’s down, he’s really down. A major crash.”

  Blaine’s face became a mask of concern. “He’s back on the lithium, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Zona said, “and I could sue that damn psychiatrist! ‘Try the Tegretol a little longer.’ ‘He doesn’t need any damn Tegretol,’ I said. ‘You sit there real calm and say, “Try the Tegretol a little longer; check back in two weeks,” and Walter is running around in a three-piece wool suit and no underwear!’ He’s got the Samsonite out and he’s packing. I say, ‘Walter, where are you going?’ He says, ‘I’m blasting back to Krypton. To be among my own kind.’ And—fa-gam!—out the door he goes, wearing a damn three-piece wool suit, no underwear, a horrible tie, nine pounds of wing tips and no socks; he’s got huge blisters on his heels and doesn’t even seem to know. It has to be at least a hundred and twelve out and he’s wearing that ugly damn brown suit of his, copping a load of b.o.—when he finally ditched it, I burned the damn thing. When you get b.o. into wool, it never comes out. Pick it up with a pole. He says, ‘Where’s my brown suit?’ ‘Walter, that suit is out of style.’ ‘It’s so old it went out of style and came back in,’ he says. I said, ‘They never quite do, they never quite do, and every fool knows that.’ ”

  “But he’s on the lithium now?” Blaine asked. His focus was on Zona now. He was completely concentrating on her.

  “Finally,” Zona said. “I’m about ready to lose my mind. He packed up that Samsonite and was off. I’m not lying. The Eye of Horus and Rosicrucians. I’m serious.”

  “Can I go up and see him?” Blaine said.

  “I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” Zona said. “His remarks concerning his father have been kind of volatile lately.” She picked up one of Freddy’s Kools and lit it. “Damn, three months without a cigarette,” she said.

  “Well, I guess every son wants to kill his dad at some level,” Blaine said. “But I thought the Tegretol was doing him good.”

  “It was at first. His psoriasis cleared up entirely. He was going to his recovery meetings, to Bible study, to bird meetings. When Walter is straight, he’s totally on the ball. But this shrink had him on Prozac, too. Got him horny. Let me tell you. Five times a day! I said, ‘Walter, I’m not made out of steel. You may be Superman but I’m a forty-six-year-old woman with a hysterectomy last year. Give me a break.’ ”

  Freddy began to finger his goatee again. “Psoriasis. In terms of diseases, it’s a metaphor for rage.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Blaine said.

  “You are Walter’s father,” Freddy said. “You would have the insight. The skin is a very emotive organ. Don’t get so touchy.”

  Blaine leaned forward with his forearms balanced on his knees. He gave a little sigh and turned up his palms. “We adopted Wally when he was three,” he said. “Most of the psychic damage had to have been done long before. We were good parents. Who knows? Maybe manic psychosis is genetic. The psoriasis comes from the pills. Of course, what he says may be true. He may indeed come from Smallville. Perhaps he truly is Superman. He went through the windshield of a Corvair without a scratch.”

  “It’s a possibility we should consider,” Freddy said. “Superman.”

  Blaine t
urned to Zona. “What about Turkey? Can’t you go back there for the psoriasis?”

  “Turkey?” Freddy said, pinching his chin.

  “Yes,” Blaine said. “There’s this village in Turkey that has a kind of hot springs with these weird little fish in it, and what you do is sit in the springs and the fish come up and nibble your skin. There’s something in their saliva, or whatever, that causes the skin to heal over. Two weeks and you’re in remission.”

  “I’m not going back to damn Turkey,” Zona said. “They don’t have any magic carpets. What they got is buses with bald tires, nonexistent shock absorbers, and all the windows stuck shut! Damn! I’m a California girl. I like air conditioners, clean water, and a certain amount of oxygen in my atmosphere.” Zona shot a stream of smoke out of the side of her mouth. “And they’ve got laws from day one over there. They used to hang you for drinking coffee and smoking.”

  “Pretty soon they’ll be doing it here,” Freddy said. “Have you noticed that now you can’t offend with the sexist or racial remark, but smokers are open game? I mean every news broadcast, the front page of every paper. A cigarette was just a cigarette twenty years ago, but now the smoker is a pariah.”

  “That’s true,” Blaine said. “All that hate has to come out. The world needs scapegoats. No one will embrace the other—the inner dark man.”

  “And in another ten years coffee drinkers will be on the list,” Zona said, taking a measured drag on the cigarette. “Coffee makes people violent or something.”

  “They should tax it, if you want to know,” Blaine said. “I mean, if you get right down to it, how much would you pay for a Kool and a cup of rocket fuel before you had to get dressed and hit the road?”

  Freddy fiddled with his lighter. “Getting up in the morning, for coffee and a cigarette? I don’t know, considering my present financial circumstances, which are meager, every last dime…seven hundred.”