Night Train

by Thom Jones

  A good pickpocket is very careful. I did very little time in the joint, relatively speaking, and I made incredible income. Never hurt a soul. Didn’t like jail. You know, joint chow is conducive to arterial occlusions. It’s all starch and fat. It’s garbage and then you lay around eating all that commissary candy. Smoking. I hate dead time in the joint. Idleness truly is the devil’s workshop. I was goin’ nuts watching fucking Jeopardy! up in my living room, no cigarettes, no action—just waiting for my stump to heal. Reading medical books. When doctors Banting and Best was up in Toronto processing insulin in 1922 they give what little they had to a vice president of Eastman Kodak’s kid, James Havens, and it brought James around and saved his life. Meanwhile everybody is going to Toronto where they are trying to make bathtub insulin as fast as possible. They can only produce just a couple of units a day and they give it to this one and that one while a thousand diabetics are dying each day. One thousand a day. The treatment then in vogue was a semistarvation diet which might give you a year, a couple of months, a few days. When you are a diabetic out of control and you get hungry, it ain’t like ordinary hunger. It’s a sick hunger—polyphagia. Put such a person in the hospital and they’ll eat toothpaste. Birdseed. I mean, I said I got connections and I could have gotten some of that 1922 insulin. After that there would come a phone call one day and somebody would want a favor and I would have to say yes to that favor, no matter what. That’s part of the life.

  Even now insulin isn’t cheap. It ain’t no giveaway. Shoot up four times a day. Syringes, test strips. They cost as much as three packs a day! Heh heh. But each day I get is a gift, okay? I should be dead. Before 1922, I am dead. The shortwave is an old fart’s pleasure, but then I am sixty-seven years old. Most criminals don’t live that long outside or in.

  Anyhow, I was down there in the basement when I blew a breaker with all my radio gear going, so I went into the little power shed and snapped on the light and seen a pack of Kool Filter Kings layin’ in there that I had forgotten all about. I didn’t want to smoke a cigarette. Didn’t need to. But you know, human nature is strange, so I fired up. I didn’t inhale. Face it, it’s scary the first time after you’ve been off. When you’re standing there on an artificial leg thinking about the ambiguity of life. Tomes have been written, I know. I’m just standing there when I spotted a skinny-ass spider hanging in its web. There was dust on the cobwebs. I blew smoke on it and the spider didn’t move. Looked like a shell. Dead, I figure. It’s the middle of winter. I mashed out the cigarette, snapped the breaker, and went back to the radio. Three nights later, I really get this craving for a cigarette. I had forgotten the spider, and I went back into the power shed and smoked a Kool all the way down to the filter. It was the greatest goddamn cigarette I ever smoked in my whole fuckin’ life! The one I had two nights later was almost as good. I torched up, took a big drag, and blew it all out, and the spider in the web moved like greased lightning. Jesus fuck! I seen a little red hourglass on its belly and Christ—Jesus fuck! Yow! Whew, man. But what the hell, it’s just a fucking spider, black widow or no. Still it gave me a thrill and I could identify with this little motherfucker. Your black widow is your outlaw.

  After I run through that pack of Kools I find that I’m still going into the room to check on the spider. It was always in the same spot. What is it eating? I wonder. It’s the middle of winter. There isn’t another bug in sight. That night in bed I am so worried the spider is going to starve that I get up, strap on my leg, take a little ball of hamburger out of the refrigerator, hobble down to the basement like old man Moses, and squeeze the hamburger around a web tentacle and give the string a little twing, like it was a guitar. The spider don’t move. Starved to death. I was too late. One day too late, like with my atomic clock transmissions and everything, I’m late. Chop-a-leg and all that shit. Always a day late and a fucking dollar short.

  Actually, the spider was planning her attack. I believe she had the sick hunger. When she smelled that meat, she made her move and then I seen the red hourglass flash on her belly again. Seeing that hourglass was like walking into a bank with a nine-millimeter. What a rush! The spider pounced on that hamburger and gave it a poison injection. I wiggled the web a little, so the spider would think she had a live one, you know. Then I realized that the light was on and conditions weren’t right for dinner. She was used to permanent dark. I shut off the light and closed the door. After Captain Berg’s Stamp Hour, I returned and the ball of hamburger was gone. Not only that, the spider seemed to intuit a message to me. The spider was used to having me come in there and blow smoke on her and I think, Aha! I get it, you got a cigarette jones. Fuckin’ A! Maybe you would like a cup of coffee, too, you nasty little cocksucker. Piece of chocolate cake with ice cream and some hot fudge. I would like some too. Heh heh.

  I peg-legged it over to a deli and bought a package of cigarettes and when I get back, I’m standing there enjoying the smoke and watching the spider—you know, chop-a-leg can’t be that bad when you got eight legs—that’s when I get the cold, dead feeling in my good leg, the right one. My chest gets tight. My jaw hurts. My left arm hurts. I stagger upstairs and take an aspirin and two of my peptoglycerine tablets or whatever. Heart pills. Nitropep whatever. Put two under your tongue and they make your asshole tickle. Make it turn inside out.

  I laid in my bed consumed with fear. My heart was Cuban Pete and it was rumbling to the Congo beat. It took a long time to calm down. When I was finally calm, I said, “Okay, God, I’m ready. Take me out now. I’ve had it with this whole no-leg motherfucker.”

  The next thing you know the sun is up and fuckin’ birds are cheepin’. Comin’ on happy at six in the morning for Chrissakes. I pursued a life of crime because I hate daylight. It’s just about that simple. When you hate daylight, when you hate anything, you will develop a certain ambiguity about life and you get reckless in your habits. You overeat. You take dope. You fall in love with a bad person. You take a job you hate. You declare war against society. You do any number of things that don’t cut any ice when you try to explain your motivation in a court of law or to a doctor, to a dentist, or to the kids on your block who hate you for having a new car. God didn’t take me out when I was ready. I was ready but the next thing birds are cheepin’ and somehow you find that you just have to go on.

  I didn’t even think I was listening at the time but after chop-a-leg I was at the clinic. I heard this doctor say, yeah, yeah, he knew this intern who had high cholesterol. A young guy with a 344. So what this guy does is eats oatmeal three times a day. He puts some skim milk on it to make a complete protein and in three months his cholesterol drops down to 25. Twenty-five! I didn’t think I was listening but it registered later. Come back to me.

  I drove to the store and bought a large box of Old Fashioned Quaker Oats. I started eating oatmeal morning, noon, and night. I like looking at the Pilgrim on the box. What a happy guy, huh? I discovered that if you like your oatmeal to taste “beefy,” you only need to pour some hot water over it. You don’t boil it for five minutes. I mean you can, but nobody is going to come in and arrest you if you don’t. For a while I liked it beefy. I also liked it regular. Once I forgot and bought Quick Quaker Oats and discovered I liked them even better. Skim milk and oatmeal. Three times a day. My leg started feeling better. I lost that shortness-of-breath thing. How simple. How easy. On the night before Christmas I sat alone in my apartment and ate my oatmeal with a mashed banana in it. What more could a person want out of life, huh? I felt so good I put on a dark Brooks Brothers suit, a cashmere topcoat, and went to the shopping mall where I lifted three thousand in green. Just wanted to see if I still had the touch. Hah! Back in the saddle again. I even boosted a home cholesterol kit. You stick your finger and put a drop of blood on a strip. Fifteen minutes later I get a reading of 42. Can you believe? I can. I sincerely believe that the regression of arterial plaque is possible even in a brittle diabetic such as myself. When they autopsied Pritikin, his coronary vessels were cleaner than a w
histle. Already I have lost thirty pounds over and above the amputated leg. I take righteous dumps twice a day. I sleep like a baby. I’m a happy guy. I’m lifted from my deathbed and restored to acute good health. Sex might even be a possibility. I already tol’ you, I’m sixty-seven years old but now I’m feeling horny again for the first time in years.

  Every night after Captain Berg’s Stamp Hour I continued to go into the power shed and feed the spider. She’s my pal, see. I stacked all my empty oatmeal cartons in her direction with the Pilgrim smiling at her. It adds a little color to an otherwise drab decor. Heh heh.

  I come out of retirement. I go out and boost on a regular basis now. I don’t need the bread but I like being active. Ain’t you glad to hear of my comeback? I bet you are rightly delighted. I plan on living to be a hundred. For insulin discovery, they gave Dr. Fred Banting the Nobel Prize. To keep guys like me going. Heh heh.

  The spider, what it wants more than hamburger is that I should light a cigarette and blow smoke at her so she can suck it in through her spiracles and get some nicotine on her brain. Gets this look like, “Come on, baby, drive me crazy!” It’s just a tiny spider brain. Say, “Jes’ a little puff would do it, mah man.”

  But I look at the spider and say, “Suffer, darlin’! It’s for ya own good. Take it from a man who knows.”

  Pot Shack

  SHAKE AND BAKE​” was much more than what you might call a gung-ho Marine. Second Lieutenant Baker took it one step further. To another realm altogether. This man could drop down a “junk-on-the-bunk” faster than the legendary Sergeant Chesty Puller ever snapped a four-fingered salute off the brim of his Eisenhower piss-cutter. Lieutenant Baker could put out a “junk-on-the-bunk” faster than Doc Holliday slapped leather in the O.K. Corral and pumped hot lead at a half dozen or so of the Clanton Gang from the nickel-plated barrels of his single-action Colt .44’s. Dropped them Clanton boys like sacks of cement. This was how fast and emphatically Baker could lay out his gear. He could strip down his M-14 and reassemble it blindfolded faster than any other man in the company could complete the said feat with benefit of 20/20 vision.

  Baker’s boots and shoes were spit-shined like glass. The lieutenant could go through a tin of Kiwi dark brown shoe polish and a can of Brasso in a month whereas for most Marines said quantities of the above were quite enough for a four-year tour. Give Baker a compass and a topographical map and one could bear witness to—indeed, become a part of—the elusive, semimystical Tao of military science. Such were Baker’s leadership skills that his every thought, word, and action could propel a lesser personality into selfless, right actions in the service of the Big Green Machine. Under Baker’s influence a Marine no longer thought about himself and his personal woe or travail, that Marine gladly followed orders for God and country. Even misfit individualists such as myself were mesmerized by Baker.

  In garrison Baker always wore a fresh set of starched utilities with a blocked cap. Starched and ironed them himself. His creases were sharper than the standard issue Gillette Super Blue double-edged razor blades. Blake was not impressed with the laundry services available in Oceanside, California. But then when you wanted to be the most squared-away Marine that ever lived, how could you find satisfaction from a commercial laundry service? On a hot day after noon chow, Baker would take his second of three shaves, brush his teeth, shower, douse his armpits with Right Guard and change into a fresh uniform. Moreover, he passed the true test of a lifer in that Lieutenant Baker actually liked Marine Corps chow. He ate seconds of the grilled liver on Tuesdays, the fried rabbit that was served on Thursdays, and was the only man in the regiment known to eat the sliced carrot and raisin salad on a regular basis. I came to believe that if Lieutenant Baker had lived in ancient Greece and served the Spartan army in the most minor capacity, the Spartans would have won the Peloponnesian War and changed the subsequent course of Western civilization. A man austere enough to endorse grilled liver, fried rabbit, sliced carrot salad, or the ham and lima bean C-rats is capable of anything.

  The lieutenant often took his meals with the enlisted men. He got to know them and care about them. He committed none of the unforgivable sins of the typical second lieutenant. Baker was smart enough to know that when he didn’t know, he didn’t have to pretend otherwise. At these times he would defer to the advice of anyone with a brighter idea, even a common private such as myself. Baker had a broad, wholesome, and charitable worldview, and of course, all of the Marines loved this guy. He was almost everything an officer should be. So it was only natural that when he came up for promotion to first lieutenant, he was passed over. We were slowly gearing up for Vietnam and the Marine Corps, in their infinite wisdom, determined that an officer working in S-1 that couldn’t qualify at the rifle range would be better off selling refrigerators at the Sears store in Topeka, Kansas, than, say, maybe doing a shitload of paperwork in Saigon. On the other hand we had a captain who should have been selling refrigerators on the South Pole. Captain McQueen.

  McQueen nailed me with thirty days’ mess duty after he strolled through the barracks one fine morning and spotted my open wall locker. It was a mess and I got mess duty. Thirty days of mess duty per year was allowable for anyone under E-4, but the pot shack was a special hell reserved for the worst of the shitbirds. Captain McQueen believed I was of this species because I hadn’t been using enough Kiwi dark brown and Brasso. I wasn’t spending enough of my clothing allowance on starched utilities. Furthermore my rifle was in “disgraceful condition,” a special court-martial offense! Captain McQueen was of the opinion that the drill instructor that passed me through boot camp—Parris Island boot camp, mind you—was a moron. Captain McQueen said he must have been one “sorry-ass, piss-poor motherfucker” to let a “fucking shitbird” like me squeak through. What was the Corps coming to? And so forth. Furthermore, I was “the most piss-poor, sorry-ass excuse of a Marine” he had ever seen, and furthermore, if he wasn’t in such a good mood, he would court-martial my ass, have my single stripe removed and see if thirty days in the brig would motivate me along the lines of housekeeping matters. I had never heard quite so many motherfuckers come out of a gentleman’s mouth, delivered with such vituperation and in such a short period of time since boot camp.

  McQueen wasn’t through, however. Who was my D.I.? And what the fuck was I doing laying on my rack reading Ring magazine and Batman comic books at nine hundred hours?

  I stood at attention and barked off a lot of “yessirs” and “no sirs” and hoped that Captain McQueen would get a sore throat from screaming and just go away. I prayed he would not open my footlocker, which sat tantalizingly before him with my Master padlock hanging open on the footlocker’s hinge and clasp. McQueen was in an energetic mood and kept on screaming as he upended my footlocker and spilled its contents onto the concrete floor of the barracks. But instead of spotting my lid of grass which spilled into plain view, McQueen reached for my Gillette double-edged safety razor and ordered me to dry-shave. I do believe such an act of torture is against the Geneva Convention Rules, especially when your Super Blues have gone three steps beyond “dull”—I mean, it brought tears to my eyes to have to shave in such a fashion but I complied anyhow, artfully kicking a pair of dirty skivvies over the lid of grass as I finished the job. Then I commenced to explain to Captain McQueen that I was a boxer in special services and that the reason I hadn’t shaved was the fact that I had a fight coming up in three days. “A close shave will lead to a cut on my nineteen-year-old baby-pink face! Sir!” I said that the reasons I was reading Batman were both literary and psychological—I was about to go into battle, one-on-one with a Navy boxer name of Goliath. I said that Sergeant Wright, my D.I. back at Parris Island, had won the Navy Cross in Korea and never tolerated slackers. I was quite relieved to have the lid of grass concealed and confident that the boxing coach, Sergeant Myers, would take care of this Mickey Mouse hassle since Myers was tight with the colonel who himself happened to be a boxing buff. I was penciled in as the light heavyw
eight even though I had lost two of my last five fights. I smoked, drank, and had quite a gut going in addition to my grass habit. The team’s only possible winners figured to be the Menares brothers, Sammy and Flash—twins from the Philippines, a featherweight and lightweight respectively, and our best bet, the middleweight, Hector Greene, who was fifteen pounds lighter than me and my chief sparring partner. Hector could punch harder than me and he was all but impossible to hit. I hated working with him. I figured my own chances against the Navy fighter as pretty much nil, but as a member of the squad I was free to train and sleep as I pleased and to be relieved of all duties extraneous to boxing. I tried to explain this to McQueen.

  The captain understood my explanations to be altogether too much smart-mouthing and after a twenty-second phone call, I was over at the chow hall in white cotton mess clothes with a little fluffy white hat designed to prevent the quarter-inch hairs of my jarhead from falling into the massive pots and pans the cook’s assistants kept hauling over to the pot shack by the tens and twenties.

  The pot shack was a steam room barely big enough for two bantamweights, a box of Brillo pads, and the steady flow of pots and pans. It smelled of hot rancid grease and on the perimeter of the pot shack, where the heat fell from the 110 degree Fahrenheit core range to the 80s and lower, and where the whitish-yellow grease congealed and was smeared all about the floor, it got into your boots, into the cuffs of your pants, on your white apron, on your hands, hair, and face. Where I worked with the pressure washers, the grease atomized and I breathed so much of it through the course of a day I was seldom hungry. The other Marine in the pot shack with me was a grunt from Oxford, Mississippi, larger than myself, and for the first couple of hours all he said to me was “Watch out, goddamn it, and hurry the fuck up! We runnin’ nine mahls behind. Gait the cob oucher ass, boah.” Mississippi had three teeth in his head, the most prominent being the lower left canine, tooth #22 as it is known in the trade. Due to severe gum recession and lack of collateral support, Mississippi’s #22 tooth drifted to the center of his mouth like a tusk. It was about the size and shape of a Bolivian plantain.