Night Train

by Thom Jones

  I rushed upstairs and asked my grandmother what Jack Buffmeir was doing a headstand in the rag bin for? She looked up from doing her bills. “Getting a stroke,” she said.

  A few days later I was sitting out on the back porch drinking chocolate milk and reading comic books with the Marzuki brothers when Jack asked us if we would like a boxing lesson. We demurred, but Jack insisted. Soon Butch Marzuki was standing in the gravel parking lot with a pair of sixteen-ounce pillows on his tiny fists. Jack Buffmeir was wearing the other pair. With a suddenness that verged on cheating he said, “Okay, box!” He was dressed in a glen plaid suit and wore a vest with a watch chain and that pair of two-toned brown-and-white shoes. He danced around Marzuki, cuffing his ears until they turned red. Marzuki, who barely came up to his waist, launched a right, and Buffmeir’s left hand cracked over it and bloodied Marzuki’s nose. Tears followed.

  “Defend yourself at all times, boy. You had that one coming,” Buffmeir said, dancing about the lot as he tossed his head side to side, keeping his neck loose. He looked very pleased with his victory, adding, “And quit that sniveling, you big sissy.”

  Buffmeir looked at me and said, “You’re next.”

  “I ain’t fighting,” I said.

  “Why not? Are you scared?”

  My grandmother came out to the back porch with a pail of dirty water and a mop. I noticed that Jack’s face flushed with color at the sight of her. “Just teaching the boys the manly art of self-defense, Mag.”

  “Leave them be,” she said. “They fight enough as it is.”

  “They asked me to show them,” he croaked.

  “No, you forced us,” David Marzuki exclaimed.

  “Did not.”

  “Yes, you did!” Marzuki said.

  “Ingrate!” Buffmeir said. “Liar.”

  “Am not,” Marzuki said.

  Shortly after this episode Jack Buffmeir fell into deep black moods. When they came upon him, he couldn’t even bear the companionship of his dog, Oyster. After the dog killed Jack’s rooster, a mean bird, and most likely Oyster could have claimed self-defense, Buffmeir took after him with a horsewhip. Some of the factory workers from the Durabilt were eating sandwiches on my grandmother’s front porch when he set upon the animal. A dark, muscular man with a cut of plug in his cheek set down his sandwich and snatched the whip out of the man’s hand. “No way to treat an animal. Shame on you.”

  Furious, Buffmeir walked though the front door, exited to the back, crossed the parking lot, and went into his shack. The dog was still waiting for him on the front porch late the next morning. My grandmother said, “The dog thinks Jack is in the store.”

  I coaxed the animal inside and he walked up and down the aisles, even went down into the basement looking for his master. When he could not find him, he waited for the next customer to come through the front door and returned to his post on the porch.

  That night Mag lured Oyster inside with some leftover pot roast. The dog followed us upstairs to bed, but he did nothing but pace and whine the entire night. Finally she had to let him out to wait on the porch for Jack, who showed up the next day and reconciled with his pet.

  A few days later Buffmeir abandoned the dog on the back porch. He walked through the store with a sack of carrots and didn’t return until dark. My grandmother was getting ready to close when Jack appeared and said, “I walked up to Batavia and swam naked in the gravel pit.” Batavia was seven miles away.

  When my grandmother recounted the story to Cousin Eustace and his father, Pug, Pug said, “Damn, he should have kept right on going until he got to Elgin.” Elgin was the city north of Batavia that housed the state mental institution, just one city beyond St. Charles, which housed the Boys’ Reformatory where Boy Cleatus was incarcerated.

  Cousin Eustace leaned against the pop machine, mimicking his father’s body language. He had a strained, high-pitched voice and a pasty complexion and too much weight. “He should have kept right on going to Elgin, Mag,” Cousin Eustace said.

  “Hell, yes,” Pug said, waving a sweaty bottle of Green River.

  “Hell, yes, he should,” Cousin Eustace said. “That man is full of bunk.”

  “He’s a damn nut!” Pug said.

  “Sure he is, Dad, a damn nut! Lock him up and throw away the key.”

  Each day as Jack Buffmeir took his carrot-fueled excursions, Oyster waited on the back porch. I tempted the dog with succulent cuts of beef from the meat locker, and while he would eat them, he refused to give in and play with me. He would not fetch. He would not wrestle. He tolerated my hugging him, and once when I got into a screaming and cussing rock fight with Carl Smith, Oyster leapt from the porch and chased Smith out of the yard and clear over to Bowditch Avenue to the Smith hovel. Shortly thereafter Carl Smith came back with reinforcements, the Tinsley and Calhoun brothers: big, tough, and mean-all. I was caught flat, but the dog sensed their sinister intentions immediately and soon had the entire pack racing for Bowditch Avenue. A few days later I saw Carl Smith at the playground and shoved him to the ground, pulling his arm up behind his back for the goose egg that one of his rocks had inflicted on my forehead a few days before. The playground supervisor quickly broke up the fight and not only sent me home for the afternoon, but kicked me off the junior softball squad. Dejected, I returned to the store. I parked my bike along the side of the garage, and when Oyster came off the back porch to greet me, I was mildly astonished. I sat near a pile of leaves that had blown alongside Pug and Vera’s place and hugged the dog, who let me cuddle next to him for warmth. A burst of sunlight broke through the clouds and warmed us and almost instantly I fell into a deep and wonderful slumber. It was cold and nearly dark when I awoke. Oyster had abandoned me for his position on the porch. I dusted off my clothes and went inside.

  Oyster would not fetch or wrestle, but he liked to play tug-of-war with a rope. It was virtually impossible to beat him at this game and Jack exploited the dog’s power in these demonstrations to help sell his canned produce. Oyster was eighty pounds of pure muscle. Another thing he liked to do at Jack Buffmeir’s behest was jump at inflated balloons, a comical sight that caused the customers to stop and watch in wonder. Oyster possessed incredible vertical leaping ability. It looked as if he were playing basketball. He timed his jumps so that each time his snout hit the balloon, he seemed to hang in the air a moment. Jack could sell several cartons of fertilized eggs whenever he put his wonder dog into action. But this seldom happened once the black moods befell him.

  The long, introspective, carrot-nibbling walks continued. The heels of Jack’s two-toned shoes were worn down. He stuffed them with cardboard, though the cheapest shoemaker in town had a shop just across the street.

  Jack was letting his dandy image slide. His skin was stiff and yellow. He looked like a cadaver. My grandmother asked him what was wrong, and Buffmeir shook his head gravely. “Cancer, Mag. It’s all in my liver. I just seen a doctor in Chicago. I got six weeks. Who’s going to take care of my dog? Who’s going to mind the trees?” Jack Buffmeir didn’t wait for an answer. We watched him walk down the back steps and cross the parking lot to his shack with his dog behind him. His right hand was pressed firmly under his ribs, an area which pained him greatly; his thin jaw was set hard.

  My grandmother had a huge medical reference book with illustrated pictures in her bedroom. I looked up liver diseases and saw a patient looking every bit as bad as Jack. Worse, I saw what cancer did to the liver. The human liver looked much like the liver in my grandmother’s meat cooler. With cancer, it was infiltrated by orange, unnatural-corded knots that sought to strangle it. I quickly slammed the book shut and prayed to God that never would such a fate fall upon me. Jack Buffmeir was a goner!

  The night crew at the Durabilt had thirty minutes for lunch. Mag would slice cold cuts for them and dish up salads. They liked to congregate around the pop cabinet, comb back their slick ducktails, smoke, and posture while the Italian girls from the neighborhood came in wearing their shorts i
n hot weather. Or, if the men weren’t scoping, they would sit out on the front porch talking sports or playing grab-ass.

  The factory was set along a trunk of the Burlington Railroad that supplied Aurora with industrial transport. Just beyond were the main rails for the fast Burlington Zephyrs that bolted from Seattle to Chicago and back. I liked to stand and wave at the passenger trains and catch glimpses of the dining cars or the sleepers that seemed like compartments of Pullman pleasure. This was particularly true at night when a passing tableau of scenes was presented by the illuminated compartments. With every need attended to, the passengers had the leisure to read, smoke, eat and drink, or converse. They were often finely dressed and had destinations—places to go and things to do; it was mysterious, romantic, and enchanting. I also loved counting freight cars and spotting hoboes. I most eagerly awaited the passage of the caboose, which would sometimes display a railman asleep in the upper loft while another was preparing coffee in a blue enamel pot, or sitting at a little table drinking it while reading a magazine by a kerosene lantern. I watched wistfully as the clacking and banging of the train receded, and the caboose disappeared; and suddenly I was back in my own world of Lutheran restrictions and sameness.

  But the trains came often. The day-and-night bump-and-rattle of trains was a given. The tracks also provided footpaths to the west end of town. One Friday night at about eight o’clock, Pug and Cousin Eustace were waiting for the dinner crew to disperse and for Vera to get off from the plant, where she worked as a bookkeeper. I was helping box up some groceries for a young Polish girl and her mother who lived on the far south end. The girl was a skinny blond with buckteeth, and, like others in this account, she was said to be a bit feebleminded. It seems that Boy Cleatus and a couple of his friends had taken advantage of her. My grandmother’s term for it was “molested.” I wasn’t at all sure what that meant. I did know that the girl, whose name was Lois, was very poor, but by all accounts her mother was honest and hardworking. Lois didn’t make eye contact much, but the more I looked at her, the more I was certain that I was in love with her. My grandmother was giving them food, which meant staples like bread, potatoes, and dried fish. I swiped a couple of Chunky bars, a Three Musketeers, and a Snickers, and put them in the box under a bunch of bananas when Vera came running up the front porch screaming, “Jack Buffmeir is out on the train tracks, and the train is coming!”

  “Well, hell, didn’t you pull him off?” Pug asked.

  “I tried that and he slugged me,” Vera said. “He just yelled, ‘Fuck all and leave me alone!’ Then he set that dog on me and I ran here.”

  I was out the front door like a shot. Away from the neon signs of the storefront, it was dark. I could hear shoes scuffling in the dark, heavy breathing, and men slipping and falling in the gravel as they raced to the tracks. I had fallen twice and my knees and palms stung with abrasions. My lower lip was swollen and bleeding, and I had chipped a tooth, but I got up running both times. Suddenly the Burlington rounded a curve as it crossed the Lake Street viaduct and straightened out. At that point the train’s mighty spotlight picked up Jack Buffmeir, who had laid himself directly on the main rails. He had walked north toward the curve so the engineer would have little time to see him, let alone stop. I bolted down the track bed in the direction of the blinding light. The train’s horn was blaring and the iron wheels started screeching as the engineer hit the brakes. Jack was now on his hands and knees trying to push Oyster away from him. For once the dog refused to obey—he seemed to realize that his master was bent on suicide and he couldn’t let that happen. I didn’t care about Jack Buffmeir, but I had come to think of Oyster as my dog. I ran the tracks as fast as possible and could hear heavy breathing behind me. Just as the train hit Buffmeir one of the factory workers grabbed me and pulled me to safety. I heard two quick thunks and saw Oyster flying through the air like he was shot from a cannon. It was a freight train with over seventy cars.

  I ran down to the viaduct, crossed underneath it, and came back to the point of the collision and began searching for the dog. I found Buffmeir’s right forearm and hand severed almost bloodlessly. Then at the bottom of a sloping grass hill, I spotted Oyster. He was unmarked, but dead just the same. I lifted his head to my lap and talked to him, but his body was limp. I thought that maybe if I could get him back to the store, somebody there could do something to revive him. As I said, he seemed unmarked. I tried to lift him but he weighed more than eighty pounds. I tried pulling him up the grassy slope by his rear feet, but I kept slipping and falling down. I dragged him for a ways across the gravel, but that was undignified and unbefitting to such a fine animal.

  I heard frantic voices, police sirens, and saw a good number of flashlight beams combing the area under the train. And then I heard even more frantic voices calling my name. I was the subject of an intense manhunt. I said nothing in reply and, instead, wrapped my body alongside that of the dog, holding him much the way I had held him months ago on the patch of oak leaves that had blown along the side of Pug and Vera’s bungalow.

  The accident drew a banner headline in the Aurora Beacon-News. People who never heard of Jack Buffmeir attended his funeral. You would have thought Rudolph Valentino had died. To add to the pathos, the engineer insisted that he saw Oyster spending his last moment on earth trying to drag his master to safety and paying with his life.

  A few days after the funeral I followed my grandmother out to Jack’s shack. She seldom left the store, and when she did, she had to walk with a cane. She removed a key from her apron pocket and opened the door. There wasn’t much inside. A bed and a dresser. A small kitchen table. There was a pantry filled with canned vegetables and fruit. Jack Buffmeir did not have a refrigerator, but an icebox. There was a bottle of sour buttermilk inside. As I sniffed it, I saw a cushion on the floor, and above it, on the wall, two paint-worn footprints. I had located the site where Jack did his hour-long daily headstands that were meant to defeat the pernicious effects of gravity on the human body.

  There was a small closet filled with his dandy clothes, and, on the top, a box containing his birth certificate, a number of medical books, and an honorary discharge from the U.S. Army. In addition to this was a Purple Heart and Jack’s wallet, which contained four dollars. My grandmother handed me the box of papers, and after she locked the door, we walked back to the store together.

  The next afternoon my grandmother mailed Jack’s four dollars to his osteopath. A few days later the doctor called her. I could see consternation on my grandmother’s face, and I was shocked at the length of time she spent on the phone—some four or five minutes. When she hung up, I asked her what was going on. She said that Jack Buffmeir didn’t have cancer after all. His liver was fine. The doctor in Chicago said the reason Jack turned yellow was from all the carrots he was eating. He was healthy as a horse.

  Later that night, when I had finished sweeping up, I moved to the front of the store, where my grandmother sat in a folding chair, dozing. Once a week or so during this time, I would clip a few gray whiskers that grew on her chin. She was the least vain person I ever knew, but she always put on a show of being greatly pleased by this ritual. When she awoke I said, “Gram, are you sad about Jack Buffmeir?”

  “Sad? No. I’m not sad. He wasn’t really fit to live. He was not right. Never. They were drawing up papers to send him to Elgin,” she said.

  I thought those would be her last words on the subject, but as she looked at my yearning eyes she had one further pronouncement: “In the end the fool got what he really wanted—hit by a train and out with a great splash. And who was stuck paying for his funeral? Me!” She looked at the wall clock. It was eleven-thirty. She said, “Come on, now. Let’s lock up and go to bed.”

  It was a hot night. After I brushed my teeth, I lay in bed waiting for a car to zoom past on Lake Street to stir up a little breeze, but there was no traffic. My grandmother rubbed her legs with liniment and picked up her prayer book. I wanted to ask her if Oyster was in heaven. I was
pretty sure Jack Buffmeir was in hell, and I knew what her answer would be anyway. When you are dead, you are dead, unless you were very bad, in which case you were in hell. If by some off chance there was a heaven, less than ten souls inhabited the place.

  The blare of a distant night train resonated from the southeast. In less than an hour people from Washington, Utah, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and lowa would be disembarking at Union Station in Chicago—to do what? I guessed they would be tired and eager to get into the safe cars of relatives: either that or they would have to flag down cabs to find hotel rooms. Soon they would be ejected from the comfortable haven of the plush coach cars and scrambling for shelter in a big and mean city. As my grandmother shut off the night-light, I waited for the rattle of steel wheels on iron rails. It seemed the train would never come. But when it did, I began counting cars by the sound of wheels rocking over the spliced rails.

  Volcanoes from Hell

  SHE WAS A PETITE BRUNETTE with a high forehead, beautiful sparkling blue eyes, hair pulled back in a ponytail, waiting for a bus in the rain. I liked her from the get-go. Just the way she was standing there. She had those large warm eyes, plump rosy cheeks, and a nice nose, neither short nor long. Hers was a kind face but her eyes sparkled with mischief. It was raining fairly hard and her trench coat, made of cheap materials, was drenched. Something about that cheap coat broke my heart. No umbrella and that coat. She looked downtrodden, woebegone, in need of care. I felt like I needed to step into her life and help her out, inject a ray of sunshine. Christ, the rain! All about her was a bunch of bad boys in 211 nylon running suits. They were just hanging, nothing to do, nowhere to go, throwing gang signals, acting bad, making her nervous. Let me tell you, it was some real bad action. I knew this as Blackstone Ranger territory, a notorious crack cocaine zone, and you could see that these jungle bunnies were too hopped up to be affected by the weather. They had their chests puffed out, going about their bid’ness, putting on a show. I gave them a severe look to back them off and one of them says, “Man, who are you?”