On Time

by Paul Kozerski

  “Who is that? Jimmy? Jimmy Graczyk? Is that you? What’re you doing here? It’s after midnight and raining.”

  She scrutinized his gentle sway.

  “You’re getting wet. And . . . have you been drinking?”

  Her eyes flew wide in confirmation.

  “Why, you have! You’re sloppy drunk!”

  Jim replied with inebriated formality.

  “Yes, Missus Siwicki. Guilty as charged. But, still sober in heart. And I’d really like to talk with Lorraine. So, could you get her, please?”

  The woman rocked on her toes in a sway comically mirroring Jim’s, but stayed adamant.

  “Absolutely not! She’s already in bed for the night and you’re being crazy. Now, get out of here and go home, before I call your dad - or the cops!”

  Lorraine’s muffled voice sounded in the background.

  “It’s okay, Mom. I’ll see him.”

  The woman was aghast.

  “What?! Why on earth would you need to see him? Are you out of your mind, as well? Look! He’s stupid drunk! What would the neighbors think if they saw you out there this time of night?”

  Lorraine brushed through the string of protests, unlocking the door. Twisting its knob, she made no effort to mask her own irritation.

  “By now, they should certainly all be awake enough to watch.”

  Marianne Siwicki went rigid.

  “Don’t you dare talk to me that way, young lady! Who do you think you are?”

  Lorraine set her chin.

  “Mother, please step aside. This is my business.”

  “And just what kind of business would you have with him?”

  Lorraine patiently repeated.

  “Do as I ask. Please.”

  “If your father wakes up . . .”

  “Well, so far he’s the only one who hasn’t. But even if he does, I’d tell him the same thing. I’m a grown woman. And I ask you to please respect my wishes.”

  Her mother nodded emphatically.

  “Grown woman, yes. A grown woman who has a baby to care for inside this house and should be in there with her, not out in the rain, cavorting with drunks!”

  “I’m going to stand on the front porch of our home,” defended Lorraine, “wanting to have a civilized conversation with Jim Graczyk, someone we know; not sneaking off to a back-alley rendezvous with a stranger. Now - please GO!”

  The woman yanked her housecoat tightly about and stormed back through the darkened room.

  “Five minutes!” She warned. “That’s it! Five minutes! Then I get your father AND call the cops!”

  Lorraine disregarded the threat, stepping onto the damp porch and before Jim. They considered each other in the familiar silence of people who’d once ventured to a private place together. She then spoke first, her tone soft and accommodating.

  “Hello Jim.”

  He forced a light smile.

  “Lovely woman, your mom. Salt of the earth.”

  Lorraine spied the obvious injury to his face, reaching out in doleful examination.

  “Your cheek. And mouth. What happened?”

  Jim allowed her gentle fingers to pivot his chin. He answered pragmatically.

  “My dad.”

  Lorraine sank back in distress.

  “Oh no.”

  He gave a minimizing shrug.

  “It was a long time coming. But now I can . . . start fresh.”

  “Is that why - the drinking?”

  He was honest.

  “Partly. But, I think you know the bigger reason. Maybe I was totally at fault and out of line after the town party. Maybe then, a selfish part of me wrongly did just want something that was Mike’s. But way inside, I’ve always known better.”

  Lorraine breathed deep, looking down as she spoke.

  “What happened that night was something neither of us really meant to. But right now what you need most is to get home and dry off, before you catch pneumonia. Will you please do that?”

  He ignored her request, continuing in earnest.

  “You’re wrong, for my part of it, anyway. I won’t make excuses for me. Because I wanted that night, just as it was. I love you, Lorraine. And right now is the only way I’d ever have guts enough to tell you straight out.

  “So, I am. I say it again. I love you, Lorraine. Since I first laid eyes on you, I always have. Before Mike ever knew that you were alive, you owned my heart. And now I want you and Geri in my life, forever.”

  Her composure rattled.

  “Jim. Please. Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? It’s the truth! And even if it would mean me always being Mike in your eyes, then I’m ready for that, too.”

  “No.”

  She spoke the word as if more of a personal denial, one which he in turn, again refused.

  “Yes! I know there might be all kinds of problems that I’m not thinking of. But no matter what, believe me when I say that we’d work it out. And most of all, I would never treat you or Geri bad.”

  An indulgent light filled her eyes.

  “I believe it; every word. But I don’t know if I could truly offer the same. And that just wouldn’t be fair.”

  “I’ll take the risk,” Jim vowed. “And how can you know, if you don’t give it a chance?”

  He took her hands up in desperate petition.

  “Come with me, Lorraine. Right here and now. Grab Geri and nothing else. We’ll leave this burg tonight and find something new. A fresh start, for us all.”

  She shook her head and gently pulled away.

  “It can’t be, Jim. It just can’t. Now please go home. And for both of our sakes, don’t come back.”

  She turned aside and slowly retreated across the porch, leaving him alone to mouth a final protest.

  “Lorraine! At least think about it. Please!”

  The door gently closed and the porch light went out. Again, Jim was alone. He remained for a time in the dark, lost and forlorn. Then gathering the wreckage of his shattered heart, headed back toward the street and the only thing that still held any significance for him.

  Jim tramped up the freight yard embankment, toward its looming roundhouse and a last effort to find some sense of belonging. But on this unusually slack weekend night, the few graveyard trick guys were elsewhere.

  Only a pair of locomotives were on hand. One was the Pacific engine, 2105, simmering beneath a smoke jack within. The other was a tiny and decrepit, saddle tank switcher parked outside. Set in the drizzly fog, the switcher waited out its last fire, one more arrival for the growing scrap line.

  A distant rumble seeped into the yard behind Jim. It was a foreign road’s diesel passenger run and still out of sight. But the bustle of its nearing advance was magnetic; all that yet offered some kind of vague comfort to the distraught young man. Like a moth drawn to its fatal flame, he shuffled out to meet it.

  Jim stepped inside the drizzly fast track and stopped. What approached was the “Heartland,” a neighboring road’s late night passenger train. One of the few lines still trying to compete with the growing airlines threat, this overnighter originated downtown, for an early morning arrival back east. A trio of mighty Electro-Motive, F-8 units powered it. Generating several thousand horsepower each, they had a dozen streamlined, Budd passenger cars in tow and its crew kept their throttles fire-walled all the way.

  Jim heard distant air horns sound for the final street level intersection of Elmhurst and Devine. That set it a mere half-mile off. Now, it would begin a slight ascent for passage through the Mayhew yard

  The gauzy night soon began to shimmer. A dim glow of faint headlights sprouted, quickly swelling into an artificial dawn. Spears of light caught fire atop the yard’s fast-track rail crowns and raced toward the petty obstruction that was Jim Graczyk.

  A gr
owl of lathered diesels mounted inside the bitter light. Invisible until then, the actual train soon rose in the mist. Its lead engine’s number boards remained a blur. But the curt swings of its Mars warning light were unmistakable; a searing burst of air horns announcing the Heartland’s formal entrance onto Mayhew ground.

  Even as certain death now bore down, Jim Graczyk didn’t budge. Rather, he remained in place, making a detached study of the nearing train. Its grating air horns did have an effect on him, though, stiffening his shoulders and transforming the young man into a matador, insolent and taunting of his massive foe.

  “WHO ARE YOU HONKING AT! YOU WANT ME TO MOVE? THEN YOU MOVE ME!”

  That reality came in a seismic trembling beneath his feet. With it, his final moments of life quivered away. The raging diesels neared. 400 yards. 300. 200. Even if their crew were to now see him, there’d be no stopping in time. Yet he remained, steadfast and transfixed.

  Slowly, his arms unfurled. In a finale befitting of Greek theatre, Jim Graczyk offered himself in sacrifice to the altar of high iron.

  A moment later those arms fell. Dripping with tears, his chin hit his chest. The whisky bottle slipped away, shattering glass and splashing liquor over his rain-soaked shoes. His last breath came in a ragged shudder and Jim felt himself melt before the blinding doom of his extinction. With death an irretrievable heartbeat away, the young man thought that he might somehow, still want his life.

  A brawny hand shot from the darkness and latched onto Jim’s collar. It yanked him backward as 5000 tons of hot steel boiled passed.

  Clickety-clack! Clickety-clack! Clickety-clack!

  A prestissimo beat of speeding wheels rattled the dank air. Hot diesel stink and peppery grit buffeted vacant rail joints where Jim had stood a moment prior. The lighted drumhead of its last car quickly dwindled in the night and the Heartland was gone; its crew never to suspect the near-fatal drama left in their wake.

  Now flat on his back, Jim struggled upright. He squinted at a dark silhouette standing ahead, one that issued some timely advice.

  “Shouldn’t be baitin’ no pass-trains, young Jim. They’s worse’n junkyard dogs.”

  He croaked in dazed wonder.

  “Ulees?”

  “In the flesh.”

  Even drunk, Jim was stunned by the impossible appearance of his old friend.

  “How - wha . . .’re you doing back here? You should be long gone!”

  “And just where’d you be right now, iffen I was? More important, why’s someone like you out late and alone on a unfit night like this?”

  The young man dismissed his presence with a limp gesture.

  “Getting some air.”

  “That so?” Noted Ulees. “Well, if you ain’t heard, the middle of a railroad track ain’t such a good place for doin’ that, neither. We best be gettin’ you on home.”

  Jim brushed at the weal on his face in evidence.

  “Got no more home. Got - nothing.”

  The laborer sighed and patiently hoisted his friend erect.

  “In that case, you come on with me. A night like this ain’t no time for someone to be wanderin’ about in a lovesick drunk.”

  Jim swayed at the man’s perception.

  “How’d you know?”

  Ulees hissed.

  “It don’t take no mind reader to see a man with a broke heart. He wears it on his sleeve, like a sorry medal.”

  “But just to find me . . .”

  Jim wobbled in the other man’s powerful grip. His words fell off with a swoon.

  “Ooooh. I’m going to be sick!”

  Ulees stopped and braced him.

  “First smart thing you done tonight. Go on now and dump that sour belly, so’s you can be right in the head again. Then we’ll get you someplace out of this nasty wet.”

  CHAPTER 48

  “Next time you look in the mirror, see if you even know who’s looking back.”

  Jim’s departing words rang iron hard as Joe Graczyk paused in his new day’s grooming. Sleep had been impossible for the man after yesterday’s fight and finally conceding the night, his mere act of rising was something of a relief.

  As one molded by hard times, Joe stayed mindful of not intentionally passing on the flagrant cruelty he’d once endured. Through necessity, he’d dusted his knuckles off, on a few hostile faces along the road of life. But, never had he thought the day might come, when he would raise a hand to his own offspring, as a child or man.

  Joe pinned himself in his own his reflection. Considering yesterday’s jagged aftermath, he sorted through his feelings and searched for some ray of truth.

  Dealing with Mike was just easier. He grasped the nature of things and took them at face value. Anything more Joe wasn’t personally geared to handle and dealing with Jim required an alien currency that he simply didn’t possess. But, as Sarah had said, there was more at work here. She’d touched on it while sitting in that wee-hours backyard. And it had a name.

  Nostalgia.

  It sure sounded innocent enough, like some harmless yardstick of what worked best. But, Joe now wondered, maybe if left unchained, could it turn feral and become a bitter, self-damning weapon?

  He clasped the cold sink with both hands, lowered his head, and braced himself in thought. Where then? When and how did it happen? At what point did a person’s tolerance for the world about him quit growing with it? Was it sown in the irritating little rubs that came in daily life with those younger, who, an elder felt, hadn’t yet properly paid their life’s dues?

  Or, was it rooted in all the tiny, compounding rituals that one took up as a personal ground wire over the years? Was the core of innocent nostalgia really an oldster’s earmark of growing intolerant; a subtle jaundice that sprouted unrecognized in its host, then grew like some emotional cancer, silently corroding them from the inside, out?

  Maybe that was where they came from - those pontificating, grey beard know-it-alls; the bitter, property-line guarding senior citizens, pathetic geriatric drunks, and lost, bench warming souls. Were all of them not as much abandon-ees as abandon-ers - voluntarily detached and remote, nestling themselves backwards into an ever-narrowing and self-righteous universe, until they finally died hateful and alone, of booze and bottomless rancor, or were simply driven to step off a chair with a rope around their neck? Was that the same lot he had ignorantly ordained for himself?

  Joe so hated his vicious stepfather. But, in his own way, was he doomed to become a different version of the same type monster? And just what kind of man was it, who understood dumb machines better than his own flesh and blood?

  He bunched his lips to a prickly nip of grief, as a chair scraped outside the closed bathroom door. Not unexpectedly, he found Sarah seated at the darkened kitchen table. The woman studied her folded hands, speaking bluntly.

  “Jim didn’t come home last night.”

  Joe broke stride at the notion, but continued toward their bedroom.

  “A grown man is entitled to do whatever’s legal.”

  “You know he’s not the type,” Sarah answered.

  Joe didn’t reply. Parting the room’s drawn blinds, he peeked at a brittle grayness gathered beyond. The backyard was socked in with a tight fog; enough to obliterate any suggestion of his nearby garage. Worse, a taffy-like dew had condensed on the window frame. Too gluey to drip free, it told the man he could expect a whole lot worse awaiting on the downhill Rahl siding.

  From atop his dresser, Joe gathered up his watch, wallet, and comb. But today, he stopped, at raking in his lucky silver dollar. Nostalgia - in this modern world, was there really such a thing as luck? A place for it? That he still embraced such tatters of silly peasant superstition made Joe feel even more abject. Drawing his fingers back, he flicked the worn amulet away in a harsh ring of self-contempt.

  Joe paused in the kitchen, f
or a businesslike winding of his watch.

  “Just short work,” he announced, is if to convince himself. “A couple hours should do it.”

  Sarah’s reply was solemn.

  “That’s a bad fog out there. You be careful.”

  Started for the door, his reply was brooding.

  “Yeah.”

  Still contemplating her hands, Sarah added a final appeal.

  “And when you’re done, go find your son. No matter what it takes. Find him Joe and make things right.”

  His hand paused atop the doorknob. Then the engineer was gone. For the first time ever, the couple parted without their standard, Polish farewell.

  CHAPTER 49

  Spike greeted Joe with a terse swipe through the coarse air.

  “Damn! Don’t remember soup this thick ‘round here in years. Bad as the early spring stuff, down along the Mississippi.”

  Joe replied with an air of purpose.

  “Yeah. Well, let’s find our power and get this over with.”

  Even fogbound, the parked saddle-tanker was tough to miss. Joe recognized its weathered cab number of 202, as a Baldwin shuttle engine. Fed a diet of wood scraps, the tiny old timer had been kept about the downtown repair shops like a favored pet, conducting short order duties for a career longer than his own. But now, its federal boiler license was expired and it apparently had been sent out to join Mayhew’s dead steamer clan.

  Joe huffed in a weak bid at levity.

  “Look there. Maybe we lucked out and that old four wheeler’s our ride.”

  Spike and Vint shared an edgy chuckle. Though knowing what engine really awaited, the humor was fleeting.

  As did any rail line, the CC&S engine pool ran a diverse assortment of road power. Pacifics, light and heavy Mikados, robust Hudsons, and elegant Berkshires were all part of its roster. And like the people operating them, each engine had quirks that comprised their operational personalities. But every so often, among the varied makes and models, there came a true hard luck machine, which simply embodied evil.

  These certain locomotives were rare. Yet they were so troubled with impairments that it was almost as if foul spirits had been unearthed in the ore fields of their birth, were refined, assembled, and absorbed into the core of their very being; taking up a diabolical residence that slowly evolved into dispassionate killers.