Big Boy: Strangers on a Train

by Ruthie Knox

  Me too.

  I get myself in order as best I can. My blouse doesn’t have enough buttons to make myself decent, and I feel swollen and bruised between my legs. Rode hard and put away wet.

  I sit beside him on the steps and wait for him to say something.

  He pulls a crumpled package of cigarettes out of his pocket and lights one up.

  I think he could get fired for smoking inside the building. But I suppose he could get fired for fornicating on the trains too, and I’ve never let that stop me. When he offers me a cigarette, I take one. I let him light it, and I take a drag off it that goes directly to my brain and makes everything sharp and too bright. I don’t like to smoke. I hold on to the cigarette, though, to keep him company.

  He smokes half of his and then pinches it out and puts the butt in his pocket, the gesture practiced but almost certainly faked. He never smells like smoke.

  “You ever think maybe you’re living the wrong life?” he asks me.

  “I did,” I tell him. “I used to.”

  “Sometimes,” he says slowly, “I think that if there’s one more thing I have to do, I’ll lose it.”

  Oh, honey, I think. You just did.

  But maybe he means something different. Maybe he means he’ll start screaming or crying. That he’ll walk into a public cafeteria and start shooting people.

  “They’re using me up.”

  He’s got his head down. The back of his neck is grimy. There’s coal dust in his curls.

  I can’t seem to separate him in my head, Tyler from Mack. He sounds like he’s talking about The Man, about oppression and hard work. He sounds like he means it, like he’s sick to the depths of his soul about it.

  I wonder what he’s really talking about. It seems impossible that this could be a conversation about photo archiving. I’m not sure it’s a conversation about anything.

  “Don’t let them.”

  I trail my fingers up and down his back, settling at the space between his shoulder blades. I want to take him home and clean him off, which is new. I want to take care of him.

  A long exhale. He turns his head. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry I did that.”

  All the answers that come to mind are so grotesque, I keep them to myself. You can do that whenever you want. I didn’t mind. I want to make you feel better.

  I’m supposed to be a feminist.

  “I said you could.” I scoot a little closer and put my arm around his waist.

  “I should’ve taken care of you. I wasn’t thinking straight, I—”

  “Next time.”

  He turns, urges me up by the hips, pulls me into his lap. “This is where I want you.”

  His blunt fingers toy with one of the two functioning buttons of my blouse. “I wrecked your shirt.”

  With his thumb, he finds the smooth wedge of fabric where the cups of my bra come together between my breasts, and he follows it beneath one cup, around toward the back. I’m wearing a peach bra with lace trim to match the panties. Stiff, reinforced. Practically a nuclear armament.

  “I’ll dock your pay,” I tease.

  “I don’t ever want to hurt you.”

  You’re going to break my heart.

  I hadn’t known, but I know now.

  Chapter Four

  We usually have a lot of fun. He tells hilarious stories, always in character. We crack period-appropriate jokes, and he tickles my rib cage until I’m helpless with laughter.

  One night, he brought a flask, and we sat on top of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe engine and drank gin as we watched the sun come up. It was 1934. We were both dirt-poor, our dreams shattered, our families broken apart. But we made each other laugh until we had to climb down because he was afraid I would fall off the train.

  That was the first time he kissed me. He leaned against the car and pulled me into his body, and I thought I was breathless afterward because of the laughing. Then he kissed me again, and I changed my mind.

  I’ve told him all my secrets, only they’ve been in disguise. I told him what happened to my sister, but I made it the story of how she went through the ice when her husband was driving her across the bay in the winter. People used to do that—cross the bay on the thick sheet of ice. Mostly, they survived it.

  They used to harvest the ice too. It was a big industry, back when families had iceboxes.

  I told him about being afraid I might lose my job. I was a clerk-typist that night, so I talked about layoffs and how one of the other girls in the secretarial pool was sleeping with our boss.

  I’ve described Lisa to him on three separate occasions, with three different names.

  I even told him about Josh once. How his parents were gone, and nobody could find them. How I was looking out for him in the meantime.

  Tyler is a good listener, a good friend. I think I’m a better person since I met him, and while that might not be all down to him, he’s helped. Getting away from my life and talking about it has made a difference. Playing with him has reminded me that I can be Josh’s mom and still be myself. I can be a new version of myself.

  The first time we had sex, on the floor of the Eisenhower, I was a little embarrassed afterward, when the high of the orgasm finally wore off. I’d kind of attacked him.

  But the next month, there was Big Band music playing over hidden loudspeakers. We danced on the wooden floor of the postal car. He’d put short, stubby candles in some of the mail sorting slots. He swung me around, twirled me and spun me, and then he took me to a narrow bed in one of the sleeper cars and made love to me for hours, so slow and thorough that I felt like he was branding me with his hands and his tongue, claiming me with every thick stroke into my body.

  I was Veronica Lake that night, until he took off my dress. Then I was me. When he’s inside me, I’ve never been anyone but myself.

  I think I’m in love with him, and I don’t know what to do.

  I google him.

  Tyler Janssen attended the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. He got his master’s in the Public History Program at Marquette University. He’s a part-time photo archivist at the National Railroad Museum who at one point spent a lot of his weekends wearing homespun and carrying a rifle, traveling around the state as an amateur Civil War re-enactor, though he doesn’t seem to do that anymore.

  He’s seven years younger than me.

  He lives in a house in Astor Park. I drove by it. It’s a pretty brick house in a solidly upper-middle-class neighborhood. His father might have owned a jewelry store once, though it could’ve been somebody else. There are a fair number of Janssens in Green Bay.

  His mother is dead, but his dad is still alive. The house where he lives is the house where he grew up.

  In high school, he was in the Key Club, the National Merit Society, the Drama Club.

  He posts in forums for re-enactors, railroad buffs, photo-restoration specialists. He is friendly and helpful. He never engages in bad Internet behavior.

  All eight of his original profiles are still up on the dating site, and there are a few others too, that I hadn’t found before. Carl Froch, the boxer. Yortuk Festrunk, who I recognize as one of the brothers from the old “wild and crazy guys” Saturday Night Live skits when I read his “likes”: Swinging, foxes, big American breasts.

  I’m in love with a very hot photo archivist. An ordinary Green Bay geek. An extraordinarily strange man.

  But I knew that already.

  He’s Mike Brady, but better looking, and with lighter hair. His shirt is white, open-necked, butterfly-collared. It’s printed with the most hideous chevrons, brown and orange and gold.

  He’s grown sideburns. Sideburns. I saw a picture of him online from a few years back where he had muttonchops at a Civil War encampment near Prairie du Chien.

  I’m officially cyber-stalking him now.

  It’s hot tonight for September, muggy in the empty car. We’re in one of the outdoor trains that sits alone at
the back end of the lot. We’re pretending to be passengers, strangers on a train. Pretending it’s daytime, pretending it’s 1977. The air of the train car is thick with his cheap cologne. Brut, I think. It smells awful. He’s reading Octopussy in the dim glow from the security arc light mounted outside.

  I’m a girl in a minidress. Tall black boots, short black skirt, hair teased up at the crown of my head, smoothed over, curled up at the ends like Mary Tyler Moore’s. I don’t even know who I’m supposed to be tonight. Some kind of working girl. Some Rhoda who believes in women’s lib and open relationships.

  He’s a used-car dealer in brown polyester pants, and I want him so bad I’m squirming.

  “You got a problem?” he asks me. He sounds kind of New York, kind of Jersey. Kind of arrogant and mean, like Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

  “I do. I need to get fucked.”

  Oh, yeesh. Now we’re in a porno. He shoots me a player’s grin, and I remember what he said that first night. You can be whoever you want to be. Just stay in character.

  Apparently, tonight my character is Cheap Floozy in a Trashy Movie.

  “I might be willing to help you out.”

  Shameless, I stare at his package, lovingly outlined in brown polyester. His fly has orange topstitching with tiny little arrows that point inward, as if to say Here’s my jock. Seriously, where does he find these clothes? I think he must spend more time than I do, and I put an embarrassing amount of effort into it.

  Geek, I think, with affection.

  “You sayin’ you got what I need in there?” I ask.

  “I know I do, baby.”

  “Take it out.” If I had gum, I’d be snapping it. If I had long, manicured fingernails, I’d be buffing them. “I wanna see if you’re all talk before I make up my mind.”

  He takes it out. It looks pretty good, but he makes me inspect it closely. He suggests that I taste it, and I lick him like a lollipop and suck until he’s panting. When we swap places, he pushes my minidress up and makes me lose my mind with his tongue, my boots perched on his shoulders. The whole time, we’re teasing, talking in thick, terrible accents, saying, Oh, yeah, baby. You like that, sugar? You’re a dirty whore, aren’t you? You’re one foxy thing.

  There’s a smile behind every line, a sparkle in his eyes. Nobody has ever played with me the way he does, and the freedom of it is intoxicating. To be able to put on another self, a body, a persona. To be wearing the clothes, saying the words of an imaginary person, but to know he’s making love to me, to me, only to me. I think he must care about me, to be this way. He must.

  We flip positions again so he’s slouched on the seat beneath me. I sink down onto him, watching his face turn helpless and strained.

  I trust him enough to have sex with him bare, but not enough to tell him I have a son. I’m a freak and a coward.

  I don’t know what that makes him.

  Oh, mama, he says, smiling, and I laugh. I cup his face in my hand for a second, my forearm braced on top of the seat behind him. I look in his eyes as I ride him, letting his smile soak through my skin and lift me up, lighten me.

  I’m anchored by his cock, by the grunting, sweating reality of us, the slapping sounds and the firm grip of his hands at my hips, moving me the way he wants me to move, tilting my hips so his pubic hair rubs against my clit. He’s still wearing the pants. Those little arrows.

  I’m so happy. Incandescent.

  “Come on, foxy,” he drawls when I get close, and he rises up, wrapping his arms around my back to bring me closer. “Come for daddy. Lemme hear you.”

  He lowers his mouth to my breast and sucks, flicking with his tongue, and I’m laughing when I start to come, until the bright pulse of pleasure gets too big and I have to throw back my head and squeeze my eyes shut. I make a porn star noise, the loudest orgasm in the history of womankind.

  It sets him off. He lunges forward, and I’m suddenly on my back on the floor and he’s pumping into me. “Jesus, Mandy,” he says. “Jesus Christ.”

  His breath catches, holds. His hips pin me to the floor. I hear my own name, my real name, over and over again as he shudders and groans in my ear. In the silence afterward, the crickets chirping, the white shushing noises of the cars on the highway a few miles away.

  When a light flickers in the train window and a man shouts, I can’t make sense of it, but Tyler is much quicker on the uptake. “Fuck,” he says. “Get those boots off. We’re going to have to run.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Security guard.”

  “What security guard?” I’d always thought there was no security guard. Tyler unlocks the gate every month. I’d understood that the gate was all the security a bunch of old trains required.

  “Shh. He’s just supposed to drive by. He must’ve seen something weird. Or heard you come. You were pretty fucking loud.”

  He’s peeking out the windows as he says it, but he turns around and grins at me, and I choke, snorting my amusement into my fist like a girl.

  There’s a barefoot chase in the dark over damp grass. An escape from a uniformed rent-a-cop. My heart pounds. My thighs are wet.

  Tyler holds my hand, pulls me along, and all I can hear is the sound of his voice, saying my name.

  Chapter Five

  I can’t keep away from him. That’s what it all comes down to.

  Hitching Josh up higher on my hip, I pull open the glass door to the National Railroad Museum and pass through the entryway into the lobby. I’m headed for the gift shop, where they have a train table that Josh loves.

  We’ve been coming here for months. We have a membership, which isn’t as desperate as it sounds. It only cost twenty-five bucks, so it paid for itself after a few visits.

  Josh toddles over to the table and begins moving the cars around the track, over the bridge, into the roundhouse. The trains have weird gray faces that I used to find eerie and disturbing. They’ve ceased to bother me. I no longer find it strange to personify trains. Everything for children is personified.

  Josh has his own words for Thomas, Percy, Henry, Gordon. I tell him in the deep voice of Sir Topham Hatt, “You have caused confusion and delay,” and he giggles every time. He’s a sucker for Sir Topham Hatt.

  We usually play with the train table for forty minutes or so and then wander through the big hall where the indoor trains are. Josh likes to climb the steep iron staircases, to toddle down the carpeted hallways on board and touch things he’s not supposed to.

  I like to think about Tyler.

  I’ve never seen him here, but I always anticipate the possibility. Now that I know his job, I know which office is his. It’s all by itself in the corridor that connects the exhibit area to the indoor trains.

  His office door is closed when Josh and I pass by. It always is.

  We walk through the Pullman car and poke at the multimedia consoles outside the train. There’s a brass railing around the exhibit, and Josh ducks under it over and over again, squealing and running away when I try to stop him.

  I know I shouldn’t be letting him turn it into a game, since he’s doing something I don’t want him to do, but I’m too lazy today to care. If I stop him, he’ll scream, and I’ll have to parent him intensively. I’d rather drift, running my fingers over the cool brass and living in my memories of this place. Living in anticipation of my next date.

  Josh slips under, and I make a pretend grab at him, just to hear him shriek with laughter. This time, instead of running back around and up onto the platform again, he runs away, looking back over his shoulder and inviting me to chase after him.

  I oblige. I chase him down along the length of the Big Boy to the birthday train, which Josh always insists we climb on. He likes the streamers inside, and he makes me tell him all about how he can have his party here when he turns two. How we’ll invite Lisa and both of his babysitters and all his little friends.

  When we walk off the car, he wants to hang from the metal railing along the steps—another thing
I let him do one time and shouldn’t have. It was months ago, but he’s never forgotten. I spot him so he doesn’t fall and get hurt.

  That’s when I hear Tyler talking behind me.

  “Little brats,” he says. I hear the words distinctly, though I miss the sentence they’re embedded in. I hear because he says “brats” with the sort of venom that attracts notice.

  I keep my hands hovering over Josh’s hips but turn my head. Tyler is bending over a table, cleaning up what looks like the remnants of a birthday party alongside a female colleague I recognize from the gift shop.

  “They’re not that bad,” she says.

  “They steal the toy trains and make a mess.”

  “That’s true, but they pay for the privilege.”

  “Not enough,” he says. “And the screaming gives me a headache.”

  He’s throwing paper plates into a plastic garbage bag, but he stops to rub at the space between his eyes. I think of Josh, shrieking just moments ago. He spilled his Cheez-Its in the Pullman car, and I had to go down on my knees and pick them up. I’m sure I missed a few. I can never get anything all the way clean. I have frosting smeared on my jeans from the cupcake I let him eat at lunchtime.

  Josh is a good sort of baby, but if he ever had a party here, he’d make a mess, and he’d definitely try to steal the trains. He’d shriek, he’d play, he’d have a wonderful time.

  And Tyler would hate him for it.

  “Come on, sweetie,” I whisper, planting a kiss behind Josh’s ear and holding him tighter than I ought to, tight to match my clenched teeth. “Let’s go outside and play on the wooden engine.”

  I carry him away, unwilling to hear more.

  I’ve made a mistake coming here. It’s not the worst mistake I’ve made.

  “But that’s just stupid,” Lisa tells me.

  “Thanks.”

  She’s leaning in the doorway of my office, having crashed my office hours for the purpose of lecturing me about my life. “No, seriously. You heard him make a couple of offhand remarks to a colleague. He was cleaning up a bunch of kid shit, and he said something callous about kids. That doesn’t mean he’s an asshole. I bet you said stuff like that all the time before you had Josh.”