Night Train

by Thom Jones

  “Geez, you sent me a postcard from Kinshasa, Zaire. What a great stamp. I got that card and I couldn’t believe it—the Congo. He’s in the Congo having an adventure and I’m stuck here. I used to wait for your letters, and the mailman, he was always so nice—when he came down the street—I’d be in the sun porch, he could see me—he’d give me the high sign when he had one of your letters. One week you were in Africa and the next week it was Finland. I thought, What is that boy doin’?”

  “That boy got fucked up on some bad dope in Africa actually. Pretty postage stamps is all they got in Kinshasha, believe me. Man, twenty lifetimes ago; but that’s how life tricks you. You’re thinking he’s in Africa having an adventure and it’s horrible in Africa—back home watching the Atlanta Braves by the air conditioner is where it’s at. Everybody always thinks they’re missing out. It’s an illusion.”

  She felt a surge of resolution and finished off the fourth handful. She could see that it was impossible to take all of them but at least the barbiturates were in, the methadone was in, most of the Valium. Her stomach felt like a bowling ball. But she didn’t feel that fucked up, only just a shade past mellow. When is it going to hit? Why hasn’t it hit? What happened? When is this fucking show going to end? She pulled a half pint of Gordon’s gin out of her nightstand drawer and grabbed another handful of poison. It was time to get serious. You could never be too sure. Then a big wave hit her and suddenly she felt like she was blowing out to sea. It was a good feeling. It involved a long expanse of time.

  She heard a voice. From far away. It was Bobby. Sounded like he was a million miles away. His voice rang with a subtle twang of desperation. “I said, ‘You really sound fucked up.’ What kind of downers did you say you had?”

  She said, “I didn’t say.”

  “I’m asking.”

  “Fifteen years’ worth,” she said.

  Shut up! Don’t let the cat out of the bag now. Medic I. Stomach pumped. Is that what she wanted? Was this just a hysterical gesture?

  “Fifteen years’ worth. Are you serious?”

  “Why?”

  “Just let me in alone in the pharmacy with a grocery bag and five minutes. That’s all I ever asked of God.”

  It was hard to judge, but Bobby sounded scared. Her head swirled.

  Bobby said, “I just called to say goodbye, darlin’. I’m about to shuffle off the mortal coil. I’m headed fo’ Boogalousa where all is ultimately bound and from whence none return.”

  “That’s why you scored?”

  “Yes. To get the nerve up. Ever since I committed to the idea, a curious sense of calm has descended on me and I have felt somethin’ like happiness for over a week or more, but now, however, the stark reality of the act has me alive with fear. If I take your meanin’, you on the same path over some damn man. That’s foolishness, abominable folly. I would not have announced my intentions. I was going to tell you I was headed for Chile but you let the cat out of the bag. I will not dissuade ya.”

  “It’s too bad about the refrigerator. No one’s going to use…it’s not Carl. It’s—”

  “It’s just a whole string of Carl, ain’t it, darlin’?” He lit yet another cigarette. She could hear ice cubes rattling in a glass. Bobby said, “I can’t hear you, darlin’.”

  Another wave swept over her, leaving her calm, unafraid. It seemed like a long time had passed. An eon. She weighed ten thousand pounds. “Are you on the nod?” she said.

  “Shot some scag. Mozart…” he said. “You paralyze the high cerebral processes and mortality ain’t such a biggie. No! Let me rephrase that: You paralyze the alligator brain and the higher cerebral processes engage in an ultimate clarity and then you can overcome the will to live which is seated right they-ah at the base of ya skull; you see the thing in itself in its true colors. Nay! Indeed, you feel it in the very core of your bein’. Forgive me, my thinkin’ is gettin’ sloppy. It’s all very simple. You anesthetize and the decision to live or die ain’t a whole lot harder than choosin’ between chocolate ice cream and butter pecan. I have been practicin’, but I must confess, I’m a trifle shaky whenevah I try shovin’ the barrel of this nine-millimeter in my mouth. Th’ taste of gun solvent an’ cold blue steel is rather vile. I wonder how those fellas in the classical literature and the history books could fall on they-ah swords without the benefit of narcotic. Was they valiant? Why, I hardly does think so.”

  There was another long pause. She punched the stereo remote a dozen times. It was becoming too much of an effort to speak. The CD changer clicked and suddenly the Moody Blues were doing “Nights in White Satin.” A very long time before it had been their song. Now he was back into the Doors and what did she have beyond The Best of the Doors? And how could she possibly find it in this kind of fucked-up condition? Or get to it? Even now she was still doing her whole ineradicable thing, running her game: trying to please someone other than herself. She let the phone drop next to a stereo speaker. Bobby was Wally the Walrus again.

  It took considerable effort but she was able to gulp down a last few swallows of gin and edge over away from the side of the bed. Some of the liquor rolled off her chin down her neck, over her satin pillowcase. Her special crystal nightcap goblet fell to the hardwood floor and smashed.

  Shit. Bobby spent half his life behind bars and what did he know really? She knew what it was like to fall back into the inner darkness of the self. To implode nights and come to every morning like reconstituted misery. Come crawling back in the day cell of the puny withering body. She knew all about the black holes of the self. She knew all about prison, about clocks and calendars. She knew single soul-crushing seconds that lasted months of Sundays. She knew sixty-second hand sweeps that were life plus ninety-nine; hours of agony like twenty lifetimes of Methuselah; weeks that tormented like furnace years on the surface of Mercury, months of frozen black solitude like lost ages on the icy black moons of Pluto. All the while thinking about “why me?” and “poor me.” She had heard the sound of the sun and the silence of the crystal moon reflected in still mountain lakes and that did not change a thing. Nothing was altered. It was a very bad deal and then on top of everything else, you had to die. Why has God done this thing to me?

  She was no Helen Keller. She had never been up for any of this. Thanks to all of the pills and booze there was, at last, that wonderful sense of detachment. She could take the scissors and cut the thread any time now. Should have done it years ago but finally…the sentence was almost completed. Some people work in that damn gold pit in Brazil, some people sharecrop, some go to jail and…some contract muscular dystrophy. That’s how it was. From the telephone receiver, Wally the Walrus was singing “Hookah tookah my soda cracker? Does your mama chaw tobacco?” Then his voice snapped sober and he said, “Oh, fuck all! Let us stop talkin’ falsely now, the hour’s getting late. Are you there, sugar? Or are you not there? Are you they-ah?”

  She was too fucked up to speak. It was getting difficult to breathe. That’s what happened when you OD’d. Your lungs filled up with water and you drowned. She thought you fell unconscious first. You were supposed to. Oh, well, at least it didn’t hurt.

  Bobby recited Bob Dylan, “Outside in the cold distance, a wildcat did growl; two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl!…Yeeowwww!”

  She heard the report of a gunshot. God! Bobby! She tried to call his name but was so stoned she was cross-eyed. Floating on the ceiling she was, looking down on the scene, looking at herself. She could hear her father, Corliss. Oh, Daddy, she thought. Daddy! My daddy!

  It was just a neurological illusion. A psychic defense against the ultimate fear. A Freudian defense mechanism—denial. Apparent reality.

  “Nights in White Satin” was still playing on the CD. She had hit the replay button at least a dozen times, so she couldn’t gauge time by counting the cuts on the disc. Her vision was too blurry to see the clock, but she could see the colors of the music stream out of the stereo speakers like streaks of red, white, yellow, a
nd blue neon. Each note shot out into the air like a colored needle that compressed itself as its flight was spent, and then crystallized into a bright filigreed atom before it popped with a sharp electric snap and disappeared. Electricity cost less today, you know, than it did twenty-five years ago! A little birdie told me so. What was electricity?

  The plan called for Mozart but…Bobby. Shit, Bobby. In the long run, take a friend, a really good friend over a lover any day. And if not a friend, then a dog. Maybe when she hit the other side, it would be like spirits and stuff and she and Bobby would meet and be together again with fresh, young healthy bodies. After all, they were checking out together. Practically within the same hour. She hoped he had the soul strength to hold it together and wait for her. Some of them just evaporated and disappeared and some others turned into angels. How did she know that? Suddenly she knew that. “Hiya, fancy meetin’ you here.” She and Bobby could walk hand in hand into the promised land. Not that physical bodies could reconstitute.

  God! What if she ended up in a horrible pile of shit on the other side? An eternal pile of shit. Another truth hit home. The only hell she would ever know was about to end. In fact, it was over. She felt warmth and love. She wondered if there was a heaven. Seemed very likely now, contrary to what common sense had previously deemed. Hey, you see all this shit through the glass darkly until checkout time. She felt light; soul on a string—a mere seven and one-half ounces. Truffles. Fluffy perfumed lace hankies. She felt warm. It was good. Bliss. Finally.

  All she had to do now was wait for the next wave, wait for it to heave her up and carry her away. Just let go and ride out that breaking white crest into eternity. She was waiting for the next wave. Emerald wave, surfer girl.

  Hang ten!

  Sonny Liston Was

  a Friend of Mine

  AS SOON AS the turquoise blue Impala pulled in the driveway, Kid Dynamite was out of the back seat, across the lawn, into the house, and dancing out of his wool pants and tie as he vaulted up to his room. Sunday services at St. Mark’s Lutheran, when communion was offered, were very long affairs. Sit down, get up, sit down again; up-and-down, down-and-up in a flesh-eating wool suit as voracious as a blanket of South American army ants. Out in the car, Cancer Frank had barely turned off the ignition switch. Kid Dynamite was already in his gray cotton sweatpants and boxing shoes. Church, man! If the boredom didn’t kill you, the everlasting sermon could have you snoring in a bolt-upright position. Add to that six or seven hymns where otherwise harmless old ladies howled like they were hell-bent on shattering more than nerves—they were out to break celestial crystal. So were the small babies who screamed protest against the stagnant oxygen-deficient air and the stupefaction of body heat. What a relief to be done with it. The only reason he consented to go at all was for the sake of his grandmother, Mag.

  As Kid Dynamite carefully taped his hands in his bedroom, he heard Cancer Frank’s heavy wingtips scraping up the front steps. There was the snap of his stepfather’s Zippo and the clatter of an ashtray being placed on the piano. In his gray sharkskin and brown felt snap-brim, with a Pall Mall draped from his lips, Cancer Frank was the Hoagy Carmichael of Aurora, Illinois. Kid Dynamite laughed to himself thinking that C.F. endured the services in nicotine withdrawal—served the chump right, too! As soon as his hands were wrapped, Kid Dynamite slipped a hooded sweatshirt over his head and was down the back stairs and out of the house. Out. Clean. Gone.

  Kid Dynamite stepped through the wet grass in his boxing shoes, threw his shoulder into the side door of the garage, and stepped inside. It was cold and damp, smelling of musk. He snapped on his transistor radio. WLS was running a shitload of Sunday advertisements cheerfully promulgating the American life of living death. Kid Dynamite peered out the window where he spotted his mother, “the Driver,” still sitting in the car preening in the rearview mirror. For the Driver (one trip to the Buy Right with her behind the wheel and you would get down on your knees and pray), church services were just another place, as all places were to her, where you went to show off your good looks and your latest outfit.

  Kid Dynamite slipped on his bag gloves. It was early March and the wind was blowing hard. It had been raining off and on. Three of the garage windows were broken and the roof leaked, but the floor was made of smooth wooden planks. As Kid Dynamite did some side twists to limber up, he looked through the window again and saw his mother finally get out of the Chevy and walk into the house where there were bigger mirrors. He wondered what she had been thinking looking in that rearview. “How did I go over today?” No doubt.

  Kid Dynamite spent a lot of time in front of a mirror himself, but only to examine his body alignment and his punching form. He was himself a good-looking young man but a realigned nose, a little scar tissue beneath the brows, and a cauliflower ear were beginning to make any comparisons with the Greek gods unlikely. Poker-faced, he threw a jab at the double-ended bolo bag and gave it a quick head slip when it bounced back. Slipping punches was the most accomplished means a boxer could employ to protect his face but also the riskiest. Kid Dynamite tattooed the bag and continued slipping punches until he began to sweat. Then he started moving in and out on the bag—started using his legs. In another few moments he was gliding around the greasy floor planks, the air so cold he could see his breath. Shadowboxing, he worked his legs, moving about the floor in a bob-and-weave style, watching himself in variously positioned mirrors. His Sunday afternoon workouts belonged to him alone and he used them to cover contingencies that had been skipped over in his regular gymnasium workouts. The old man once told him, “There are at least a thousand things that can go wrong in a fight, and how many of them can you think of—fifty?” As with most fighters, Kid Dynamite’s things going wrong invariably involved the problem of fear. As the old man had said, “Control your fear and you are cooking with gas, baby.”

  At 147 pounds, Kid Dynamite fought as a welterweight. He had recently advanced through the semifinals in the open class of the Chicago Golden Gloves, but made the finals only just barely. Two of these victories were split decisions. In his last fight on Friday, he suffered a slight cut under the left eye. The opponent had pushed him to the limit and he knew that from here on in the competition would get much rougher. Four of the boxers from the Steelworkers’ Hall had made it to the finals. They were all sky-high that night, driving back to Aurora on the Eisenhower Freeway in Juan’s junky-ass Cadillac. But after Juan dropped Kid Dynamite off and he came into the house with his gym bag, Cancer Frank was lying on the couch watching TV and didn’t bother to even look up at his stepson. The Driver was already in bed and it was too late to call his girlfriend, Melanie. So he went upstairs and woke up the Driver. “I won. I got him good,” he said.

  The Driver’s face was covered in a luminescent green mask. “Did you knock him out?” she said wearily. There was a bath towel on the Driver’s pillow and flecks of cracked green paste dropped from her face as she spoke.

  ‘Jesus. The creature from the Green Bog,” Kid Dynamite said.

  “It’s a wrinkle mask. Did you knock him out or what?”

  “My guy? No, I won on points. Chubby knocked his guy out. I won on points. Cuba and Eloise Greene won.”

  “What about your homework?” she said.

  “What about it? It’s Friday night. Man, I was feeling so right tonight. It was the best thing. I’m going to win the tournament,” Kid Dynamite said.

  “You’re just like your father and where is he now? He’s in the nuthouse. You’ve got to study. You’ve got geometry problems.”

  “I’m talking to a lima bean. Screw geometry. When was the last time you had to whip out a slide rule to solve one of life’s problems?”

  “You hang out with those lowlife boxers and you act crude. What will you do with your life? How can you hang out with such scrums?”

  “They’re my friends. Jesus! I come in here feeling great. Can’t you just say, ‘Good, I’m glad you won. You’ve made me a happy lima bean.’ Is that too much
to ask?”

  The Driver stuck her hand out groping for the alarm clock. “I’ve got to get up at the crack of dawn, what time is it?” she said.

  “Midnight. I’m going to take an aspirin. I’ve got a headache. Shit!”

  As he left the bedroom his mother said, “I don’t want to take the wind out of your sails, but you better pass or you’ll end up in the gutter.”

  Kid Dynamite stepped into the bathroom and closed the door. She said, “I am glad you won. But don’t stay up all night doing push-ups; I need quiet. My nerves are shot.”

  He didn’t bother to reply. Instead he leaned against the sink and examined the cut under his eye in the medicine cabinet mirror. It wasn’t that bad, but the tissue under his eye was swollen and tender. A couple of jabs, one good solid punch could easily burst it open. He went downstairs and got an ice cube, passing Cancer Frank on the stairs. Neither uttered a word in passing. Kid Dynamite wondered if C.F. even knew he was fighting. Suddenly the elation of reaching the finals returned to him full blown. His recent win was not merely a stay of execution. This time, one way or another, he would take it all the way. Back in bed he let the ice melt over his eye, feeling the water roll down his neck onto the pillow. He could hear Cancer Frank talking to the Driver. “He’ll never get past the next round. He drew Louie Reine, the redhead that nailed him last year. It was three days soaking in Epsom salts after that—”

  “Who knows,” his mother said. “Maybe he’s better now, he’s bigger. He sure thinks he’s going to win,” the Driver said.

  Cancer Frank said, “Not even if you tied one of Reine’s hands behind his back does he win.”

  Kid Dynamite waited in the silence of the night for this defense attorney to speak up for him. For a long time there was nothing, then came the familiar animal sounds. Christ! The two of them were having sex in spite of her stiff green wrinkle mask. Kid Dynamite rolled over on his stomach, covering his head with a pillow, but it was useless. He felt compelled to listen. When it was over he heard light feet squeaking on the linoleum tile, followed by intensive Listerine gargling, a hard scouring toothbrush, then footsteps back to the bed. Next Cancer Frank’s heavier feet could be heard padding into the bathroom. Kid Dynamite heard his stepfather take a long horse piss and do some Listerine gargling of his own. In a moment he was back in the master bedroom where body positions were assumed, covers were adjusted, and things finally became quiet. Then he heard the Driver say, “I don’t know. He was in the paper again, fifteen in a row. Knocking them out left and right.”