by Paul Mosier
I turn away from him. I have experience dealing with people like this. It’s best to only answer with your feet, whether it’s running or kicking. But I’m not in a great position to do either one.
“Hey, you priddy thing, I’m-a talkin’ t’yoo.”
“I’m not a thing.”
“You don’t know how to take a complimentsss.” He sprays me with spit.
Dorothea appears and grabs his arm. She pulls him into the aisle while he fights back, and I push him away with my feet. Dorothea shouts for help and the drunk guy uses a very bad word. I close my eyes, which is the last option that you hope you never arrive at. More people come to help, passengers and the Amtrak guy who walks like a penguin. They pull the drunk guy away. Someone suggests they shut him in a bathroom. Finally everything is quiet.
The police come on in a town called Needles and take the drunk people from the train. You’re not allowed to bring booze on, and they did plenty of other things that were against the law.
We’re there for three hours while they’re getting them off the train and taking statements from all the people who were involved and who saw it. Including me.
Dorothea finally returns and sits heavily in the aisle seat. I look over to her but she doesn’t look back. She puts her face in her hands.
I wish I could say thank you for saving me from the drunk guy, but I can’t. I’m too busy being mad at myself for needing to be saved. Needing to be saved is a dangerous spot to find myself in. So I pull the window curtain closed and lean against it, eyes shut. In a while the train starts moving again, and I drift into sleep.
I dream of laundry machines tumbling clothes all night. We never had our own laundry machines in New Orleans, so Mom would take me to the Laundromat. I’d read books from the library and Mom would bite her nails and watch the people under the fluorescent lights.
I used to like to hide behind the dryers where the air was warm and lavender-scented. I’d sit back there and read and nobody could see me. I was only six and seven years old, so I could fit behind them easily. Then one time I saw a rat back there and I screamed and banged my head on the machine as I got out quick. I never sat back there again.
3
I WAKE UP with a sore neck, early light soaking through the window. The train makes a tumbling noise like the laundry machines in my dream, but there’s no lavender smell, and it’s cold from the air-conditioning.
I go to the dining car. It’s filled with tables covered with white tablecloths and nice silverware and glasses. The smell of food cooking makes me ache with hunger.
A woman in an Amtrak uniform comes toward me, smiling. “Good morning! What time is your reservation for?” She holds menus against her chest.
“Reservation?”
“Yes, you need a reservation for the dining car. But if you can’t wait that long there’s a snack bar downstairs from the observation lounge.”
“Oh. Okay.”
I walk back into the observation lounge and take the stairs down to the snack counter. The food smell here isn’t as appetizing, but I don’t care.
“Good morning.”
I look to the voice and see a guy wearing the train uniform, a long-sleeve white shirt with a black vest and conductor’s cap. He’s ridiculously good-looking. He has a cleft chin and everything.
“Hey.” I look away and back to the snacks. The veggie burger wrapped in plastic looks good. So do the doughnut holes.
“Let me know if you have any questions,” he says.
I nod, and walk out and go back up to the observation lounge. I sit at a table and look out the window.
We’re moving so slow, and I have so far to go.
“Mind if I join you?”
It’s a man with a neatly trimmed gray beard. I shake my head. He sits across the table from me. He’s got a cardboard tray with a steaming cup of coffee and a container of doughnut holes.
The coffee smells good. Gramma always made coffee and I got into the habit of drinking it when I stayed with her. I look away.
I hear him peel the wrapper off the container of doughnut holes as I watch some cows get left behind in the morning light. Then I smell them. Cinnamon. He opens a journal of some sort, and I hear his pencil marking the page. I see stacks of railroad ties piled up alongside the tracks.
I hear my stomach growl. So does he.
“Did you say something?” he asks, looking up.
“How are those?” I ask.
“They’re not bad. Wanna try one?”
“No thanks.”
“Here,” he says, and drops one on a napkin in front of me. I stare at it before putting it in my mouth, and the taste almost makes me cry. But I never cry.
“You’re right. That’s pretty good,” I say. “Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” he says. “Your name is Rider?”
“What?”
“Rider? Is that your name?”
He gestures to the lanyard around my neck. It has a picture of me, and my last name after the word rider. It’s how the train people keep track of who I am and how I need to be watched by their crew.
“Yep,” I lie. I think about how it sounds, my new name.
“That’s a cool name.”
“Thanks.”
“Are your parents hippies?”
“Huh?”
“You know, living in a van, wearing bell-bottom jeans, saying everything is ‘groovy’?”
“I know what a hippie is.”
“Flowers in their hair, traveling the land in search of truth?”
“I get it.”
“With the name Rider I was just guessing they’d be hippies. Which is a good thing, in my opinion.” He smiles. He has good teeth, straight and white.
I don’t mean to not answer his question. He was nice enough to give me a doughnut hole. But I can’t answer. So I just smile, and he goes back to his journal.
He probably thinks I’m a nonconversational kid. Or that I don’t really know what a hippie is.
“I’m gonna go down and get some of those,” I say. “Can you save my spot at the table?”
“Sure thing,” he says.
I breathe into my hand and smell it as I descend the stairs. My breath smells like cinnamon doughnut for the moment. There are a couple of people in the snack area, and I go in and revisit the doughnut holes. There are also candy bars, which sound good even for breakfast, and orange juice and bagels wrapped in plastic. I can smell the coffee.
“Back again,” the snack bar guy says. I don’t turn around. “What do you like to eat?”
“Everything. Except meat.”
“That veggie burger sounds better than it is,” he says. “But if you drown it in mayonnaise, you can get through it.”
It sounds better to me than he probably intends. I turn around.
“I have a question.” My heart is pounding, and I don’t know whether it’s because I’m embarrassed or something else. “When you have a train ticket do you also have to pay for the food?”
He smiles sympathetically. Just what I was afraid of.
“That’s a good question. Yes, sadly, there is an additional charge for the food, which becomes even sadder after you taste it.”
“I had a doughnut hole and it was good.”
He leans on the counter. “The doughnut holes are the pinnacle of our culinary experience here at the snack counter. The food in the dining car is better. Maybe your parents will take you in there sometime.” He says it, and then notices the lanyard around my neck. “Oh, you’re traveling alone.”
“Yeah, I’m headed to Disneyland to meet up with all my cousins for this big vacation thing.”
He smiles. “Sounds like a blast. What’s your name?”
“Rider,” I say without hesitation.
“You’re funny,” he says. “I’m Neal.” He holds out his hand. I wipe my hand on my jeans and shake his. I hadn’t noticed at any point in my life prior to this exactly how sweaty and pathetic my hand is.
“H
i, Neal.”
I get back to my seat in the coach and Dorothea isn’t there. She has other duties to attend to, like cleaning bathrooms, which I don’t envy her for. As I sit and look out the window it occurs to me I told Neal that I was headed to Disneyland, which is the opposite direction the train is traveling. Plus it makes me sound like such a kid to be going to an amusement park, though he probably noticed that while he isn’t old enough to be my father, he is old enough to be a youngish uncle. And he probably has noticed that I am still, in terms of the calendar and the law if not every other single aspect, a kid.
Then I think he may have missed the hole in my story about going to Disneyland. After all, if he’s going back and forth constantly for his job, he might lose track of which direction the train is headed at any given moment.
Also, while working for the train he very likely understands that every unaccompanied minor wears a lanyard that has their picture and the word rider followed by their last name. But it would only be a matter of time before one of these unaccompanied minors was actually named Rider, and it might as well be me.
It occurs to me that I’m allowing myself to think of Neal being my father. This is just the sort of thing that Dr. Lola, the school psychologist back in Palm Springs, talked about. But it’s never happened before. I never saw a man that could make me wish he was the guy coming home every evening. Handsome and always nice, giving me hugs and holding my hand when we’d go walking together. I never had anything like that—ever.
Dr. Lola told me it was dangerous to have that fantasy because some men old enough to be my father might have other terrible plans for me. Neal isn’t really old enough to be my father, and he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would hurt me or anyone else, but I’m still mad at myself for being weak, for being someone who can be hurt.
I think about these things, and his smile and his brown eyes and his warm voice as I nervously stuff doughnut holes into my mouth, which I accidentally stole from Neal and Amtrak. Apparently my hungry hands were looking out for my stomach while the rest of me was hypnotized by his charm. Then I think about the accidentally stolen doughnut holes, and how doughnut holes come and go to the point that gorgeous snack counter attendants probably completely lose track of them. I think of this and wonder if I can ever go back to the snack counter again.
Clearly I am going to need more money if I don’t want to starve to death on this train.
I wish I had my invisible monkey with me. He was the best money-making scheme I’ve ever dreamed up.
In Palm Springs there was a mall where Gramma would take me to get underwear, the one thing I wore that wasn’t from the Salvation Army. Every time I went to the mall there was an old man who had a monkey on a leash. The old man and the monkey both wore long-sleeve pink shirts with vertical black stripes, bright green pants, and a porkpie hat. I’m not sure why it’s called a porkpie hat, but it’s the type of hat old men wear, especially old men with monkey sidekicks.
The old man kept the monkey on a leash like he was afraid he’d run away with the money. Because the monkey, whose name was Jingles, would take a nickel from you, or anything bigger than a nickel, and put it in a little pouch. But Jingles refused pennies. If you tried to give him a penny he’d give you a dirty look and hand it back.
And that was the whole act. You’d give Jingles money, and he’d keep it. But for five cents you’d get to hand a monkey a nickel, and maybe feel his leathery little fingers touch your palm. It seemed like a pretty good racket, when I thought about it.
When I was ten, I thought it would be great to get into the monkey business. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a monkey. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me.
One Saturday morning I put on a crazy outfit with socks that didn’t match, one leg of my jeans rolled up, and my button-up shirt on backward, which was tricky to do without asking for help from Gramma.
I made a big sign out of poster board and marker that said Invisible Monkey Shakes Hand For Free. Tips Accepted. Then I made a small sign that said Monkey College Fund and put it on an empty coffee can.
I rode my skateboard to the mall, bringing the stuff with me, and found a planter near the hot-dog place to lean my sign against.
At first people didn’t notice me, and they didn’t notice my invisible monkey, either. So after scaring up my courage I said in a big voice, “Have you ever seen an invisible monkey? Well, neither have I.”
That got a man and woman to stop and smile.
“What’s the invisible monkey doing right now?” the man asked.
“He’s actually taking a break at the moment, but if you come back in five minutes you won’t be able to see him then.”
They laughed. I was pretty pleased with myself, especially after they put a whole paper dollar into my can. Jingles has to work for an hour to get that much money, I bet.
The woman who worked at the sunglasses cart came up and put a dollar in my can. She smiled at me. “Do I just put my hand out and he shakes it?”
My answer came quickly. “He doesn’t shake your hand. He shakes his hand. He’s shaking it right now, in fact.”
A few people laughed. A small crowd was gathering.
I couldn’t believe how well it was going. The dollars kept coming, and so did the jokes. People were gathered in a semicircle around me and my invisible monkey. We made a pretty great team.
“What’s the toughest thing about having an invisible monkey for a pet?” someone asked.
“I have to take his word for it that he’s brushed his teeth.”
The crowd laughed and another woman approached to put a dollar in my can.
Then the old man in the striped shirt and porkpie hat burst through the semicircle, holding Jingles, who looked furious.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the old man shouted. “This mall is only big enough for one monkey!”
I couldn’t think of anything to say, but someone from the crowd did.
“Come on, old man, she’s not hurting anyone.”
“Not hurting anyone? I’ll tell you who she’s hurting! Unlike her invisible monkey, my monkey costs real money to feed! And so do I!”
The old man had always seemed so sweet. It broke my heart to see him upset.
He made shooing motions to an empty space in front of his knees.
“Get out of here, invisible monkey! Beat it!”
A couple of people laughed, and a few more objected.
Then the old man put his hand to his head like he was dizzy. Someone helped him sit down on the planter. Jingles screeched.
I grabbed my skateboard and ran. I left behind my sign, my invisible monkey, and the can with all the money in it.
That was the end of my invisible monkey. I never saw the old man or Jingles again, either. I was worried they wouldn’t be able to eat after that, and afraid it was my fault.
4
IT’S STILL MORNING when we arrive in Williams Junction, Arizona. It’s been more than twenty-four hours since I got on the first train in Palm Springs, but I have a long way to go.
Some passengers get off the train to get on a bus to take them to another train that will take them to the Grand Canyon. I guess some people have enough time on their hands and little enough to care about that they can take a train just to look at a hole in the ground.
A nosy old woman with knitting needles has been trying to make conversation with me at a table in the observation lounge while I try not to think about food.
“Would you like a cookie, dear? It isn’t exactly breakfast food, but I won’t tell.”
“No thank you.”
Immediately I regret saying no. Being hungry is making me feel hopeless and edgy.
It’s also giving me strange thoughts. I think about how the train is moving two thousand miles or whatever down the track, and while it moves down the track people move back and forth, up and down the aisle that runs through the middle of the train and above the tracks. The same aisle that cuts through the passenger
coaches also goes through the observation lounge, where there are tables and side-facing seats on either side, and on into the dining car, where the tables are fancier. The same aisle probably goes on through the sleeper cars, but coach passengers aren’t allowed to go up there.
So while I can move back and forth on this short line that is the train, the train is on a long line that’s pointed toward Chicago, to some new life that everyone seems to think is best for me. But nobody ever asked me how I felt about it.
I look at my SpongeBob watch, which is still broken. We were supposed to be in Flagstaff, Arizona, around sunrise, but the fiasco with the drunk guys has set us way back.
“Are you eager to get where you’re going?” the old lady asks.
I shake my head. “I just don’t like being late.” In reality I’m thinking how there’ll be food for me in Chicago. But it’s so far away.
“Like I said, try not to think about time when you’re riding on a train,” Dorothea reminds me as she walks past.
“Crumbling infrastructure,” says the guy with the gray beard who shared his doughnut holes with me. “That’ll slow us down at some point too.” His name is Carlos, which I learn when he introduces himself to the old lady with the knitting needles. Her name is Dot. She talks a lot for a woman with such a short name. And she does it without saying much of anything. We’re all sitting together at the same table. Apparently everyone is all chummy on trains.
“What does ‘crumbling infrastructure’ mean?” I ask.
Carlos smiles. “That means everything is falling apart.”
I furrow my brow.
“Don’t make the girl sad, Carlos,” Dot says.
“He’s right.” I look out the window at Arizona. Everything here looks crazy, like it was drawn by Dr. Seuss. The plants and rocks, especially in the desert, look like they’re from beneath the sea. They look like they were drawn to be silly.
“Where are you headed, Dot?” Carlos asks.
“Kansas City, to visit my sister. I’m looking forward to exchanging some recipes with her and trying them out. Last time we saw each other she had this recipe for mayonnaise cake that sounded just terrible, but it was surprisingly good. I think part of the reason it sounded terrible is because I usually have a jar of salad dressing in the refrigerator instead of actual mayonnaise. And of course salad dressing wouldn’t make for a very nice cake, would it? She also had a Nilla wafer pudding surprise that was heavenly. I may just let her do all the cooking this time! Of course her rheumatism is acting up a bit. I should probably at least lend a hand.”