Train I Ride

by Paul Mosier

  “I guess.”

  “Like it isn’t necessarily a picture of something recognizable.”

  “Right.”

  “But do you sometimes like looking at them anyway? Do you stand in front of abstract paintings and let them wash over you?”

  I think about a time at a museum in New Orleans with my mom when I was little. She held my hand as we walked past the big paintings. I remember staring at them, wide-eyed and curious. “Yes.”

  “If a poem is using words in a way that isn’t quite what you’re accustomed to, don’t think that there’s something wrong with you or your ability to understand them. They’re just art objects painted with words. Sometimes they look like things you recognize, and sometimes not.”

  I’m still thinking of a painting from that museum. It was a violin and a bottle on a table, but it wasn’t like looking at a violin and a bottle on a table. Even though my mom could only take me to the art museum on free admission days, going there made me feel like I was part of a species that could do something beautiful sometimes, even if it was only to cry beautifully.

  “Show me something I haven’t already seen.” I don’t know why I say it. I don’t know where it came from.

  The words seem to make Carlos very happy. “Exactly,” he says.

  I leave the observation lounge because being hungry makes the noise noisier and there are too many food smells driving me crazy.

  I sit in my seat looking out the window instead.

  I see some pronghorn antelope, a group of five, watching the train go by. Cows often run from the train, but the deer and now the antelope just watch it like it’s something new and interesting.

  The antelope have short horns and short tails, and they’re just short all the way around. Looking at them standing in the yellow grass that isn’t so tall, I decide that they’re short because the grass is short, and the grass is what hides them from the things that want to eat them.

  I decide this makes the antelope smart.

  The light dims, the picture out the window turns the color of lavender, and I drift off to sleep.

  I dream that I’m in Palm Springs at bingo night with Gramma. It’s something that happened that has become a dream I have now and then. I don’t know why I dream things from real life and then I dream them again. It’s like I’m taking a class that I’ve flunked over and over again. But I don’t think I flunked this thing.

  Gramma liked bingo, which is a game where everyone has a card with squares that have numbers on them, except at this place they had easily recognizable objects like an apple or a dog. It’s a bunch of old people, like a hundred on a busy night, and it’s the closest thing to excitement at the manufactured housing community we lived in.

  This particular night I sat at one of the long tables with Gramma on my left and an old man named Walter on my right. His wife, Betty, was on the other side of him.

  An old lady with bluish hair spoke into the microphone. “All right, is everyone ready for some excitement?” There were a few enthusiastic responses. Walter mumbled something and looked around.

  “Okay, you know the rules, winner gets half the pot, which tonight should be somewhere around forty dollars!”

  I looked at Gramma, who licked her lips. No doubt she was thinking about a carton of menthols if she won the game. So was The Chevalier, who barked and then sat, trembling in Gramma’s bag beneath the table.

  The woman at the podium took the first card from a deck. “Okay, the first picture is moon. Does everyone remember what the moon is?”

  There were some mumbled responses.

  “It’s that thing!” An old lady pointed at the ceiling. “That thing up in the sky!”

  An old guy with no teeth started singing. “Shine on, shine on, harvest moon . . .”

  Walter looked at me. A sound like Gramma’s weak air-conditioning escaped his lips.

  “There, Walter, there!” Betty shouted at him. She held a magnifying glass as big as a Ping-Pong paddle. “Right next to the hen, you fool!”

  I looked at my sheet. There was a moon shining brightly right in the middle of it. I took one of my markers and put it on the square.

  The blue-haired woman at the front drew another card. “Next picture is dog. Woof! Woof! Who’s got a doggy?”

  I had it, a nice-looking Dalmatian at lower left.

  Walter looked under the table. Maybe he expected to see a dog there.

  “Come on, Walter, look at your card!” his wife shouted. “I can’t do both of them!”

  “Gramma’s hot tonight,” Gramma said, and nudged me. Technically it wasn’t yet night as the sun was far from down, even though it was winter. But old people tend to turn in early, from what I’ve learned.

  “Next picture. Flower. Like a pretty flower given to you by your beau.”

  “Yes!” Gramma shouted.

  “This card is blurry!” Betty shouted. “I want a new one!”

  Walter put one of the red game markers on his tongue.

  “It’s not candy!” Betty shouted, and fished it from his mouth.

  “Next picture. Cup. Please pour some more coffee in my cup!”

  There it was, with steam rising from it at the upper right of my card.

  Gramma shook her head, searching.

  Betty cursed. Her eyes looked terrifying, bulging behind her magnifying glass. “You’re hopeless, Walter!”

  I looked at him. He wore a light blue shirt with marlins on it. I wondered whether Betty picked it for him or whether he chose it himself before his brain went soft. I considered the possibility he might have liked marlins at some point in his life.

  “Chair,” the caller continued. It went on and on. Betty kept yelling at Walter. Someone had a bathroom accident and there was a brief commotion. But the hard-core bingo players, including Gramma, didn’t even look up from their cards.

  “Pencil.”

  “Monkey.”

  Bingo, I thought. I put the marker in place and looked around. Then I slipped my card in front of Walter, and pulled his in front of me.

  “Bingo!” I shouted. Everyone looked my way. “Walter got bingo!”

  Betty looked dubiously at Walter. “Don’t bother, he just covers everything with the markers since I won’t let him eat them.” She shouted it so everyone in the hall could hear.

  “Well, I do have to check his card.” The blue-haired woman got on her scooter chair and drove our way, bumping a couple of chairs as she did. She cleared the markers off Walter’s card and put them back on as she went through the deck.

  “We have a winner!” the blue-haired woman shouted, and reached into her pocket for a handful of confetti, which she threw into the air above Walter.

  “He wasn’t even paying attention,” Betty grumbled.

  Walter looked up with wonder as the confetti rained down on him.

  It felt good to make that happen for Walter. He was so old, maybe it’d be the last time in his life confetti fell on him. He could go out on a high note.

  7

  I BOLT AWAKE and look at my SpongeBob watch, but it’s still broken. I’m disoriented for a moment. There’s no confetti, no Walter, no Gramma. I feel like I’ve been asleep a while. Dorothea isn’t in the seat next to me, so I get up into the aisle.

  The penguin conductor comes toward me.

  “Do you know what time it is?” I ask.

  He has an old-fashioned pocket watch and he loves to show it off, so he’s happy when I ask him for the time.

  “Well, young lady, we’re somewhere near the end of New Mexico or the beginning of Colorado. Waiting on cattle trains to pass before we can move again.” He tugs the chain, pulling the watch from his pocket, and flips it open with dramatic flair. “And the time is three minutes before nine, which is true in both New Mexico and Colorado.”

  That means it’s time to play blackjack with the scouts—so I thank him and hurry toward the observation lounge, but slow down before I enter. Three scouts are sitting at a table, and I walk by, h
olding a magazine lent to me by another passenger.

  “There she is! Hey, you playing or what?”

  I stop and look at them over my shoulder. “Oh, right. I guess so.” I act like it hasn’t been on my mind, though I’ve been plotting to win their money all day. The boy who trapped me in the space between the coaches is conveniently sitting alone on one side, so I have to sit next to him. “What game are we playing again?”

  “Blackjack,” he says. “By the way, the name’s Caleb. And that’s Stinky, and that’s Tenderchunks.”

  “Rider,” I say, nodding at them.

  Caleb slides two dollars in quarters to me. “The ante is twenty-five cents per hand.”

  “Got it,” I say.

  “Don’t you wanna know why my name is Tenderchunks?” asks Tenderchunks.

  “No,” I say.

  Stinky snorts. Caleb laughs.

  Caleb shuffles the deck and deals the cards. I have a jack with a seven showing. Stinky has a two showing, and Tenderchunks has a queen showing.

  Caleb has an ace showing, and he looks at his other card and smiles. “You should all just give me your money now,” he says. “Stinky, you need a card?”

  “Duh.”

  Caleb deals him a ten, and Stinky groans. He turns his cards over, revealing a king to go with his ten and two. He’s busted.

  “What about you, Tenderchunks?”

  Tenderchunks looks at Caleb’s ace. “I know you have twenty-one,” he says.

  “Cheater. You want a card or not?”

  Tenderchunks grimaces and nods. Caleb throws down a seven. Tenderchunks curses and turns over his cards.

  “You had twenty and asked for a card?” Caleb asks, smirking.

  “I know you have twenty-one.”

  Caleb turns to face me. “Rider. Sweet little Rider. Seven showing. You need a card?”

  I shake my head. “I’m good.”

  He looks at me like I’m stupid. “Really? Seven showing against my ace?”

  “I’m good.”

  “Okay, then. Just so you know, when someone has an ace showing, there’s a really good chance they have twenty-one. There’s, like, sixteen cards that are worth ten. And four that are worth nine, and four that are worth eight, and four that are worth seven—”

  “I have one of the sevens.”

  “Are you counting cards?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  He smirks again. He’s big on smirking. “You feel lucky, do you?”

  “I don’t feel lucky at all.”

  “All right.” He makes like he’ll turn over his card, but doesn’t. He takes a gulp of orange soda. “Maybe I’ll just take another card.” He deals himself a two. It doesn’t seem to be what he was hoping for. He takes another card, a king. His lips move as he counts silently. He looks at me and turns over another card, a ten. He curses, busted at twenty-five. He turns over my cards.

  “Argh! I can’t believe you won with seventeen!”

  The game goes on like this for an hour. I pay back Caleb the two dollars he lent me when he runs out of money. He loses that, then borrows money from Stinky and quickly loses that, too.

  A scout leader in beige wearing a hat like Smokey Bear walks through the lounge, followed by a somber-looking blond kid holding a bugle.

  “Okay, troops, time for ‘Taps,’” the scout leader announces.

  “You guys remember your tap shoes?” I ask, smiling.

  “No,” Stinky says, “‘Taps’ is when the bugler plays a song on the bugle and everyone has to be quiet after that.”

  “I know, I was just trying to humiliate you idiots.” I get up to let Caleb out. As he tries to pass, he says quietly, “Maybe after ‘Taps’ I could meet you down by the luggage and play my guitar for you. No girl can resist my singing voice.”

  “Except me,” I say. “Instead I’m gonna spend all this money at the snack counter. I’m gonna pig out.”

  Caleb looks crestfallen. He turns and follows his friends out of the lounge car.

  “But thanks for asking,” I call out after him. The door opens and closes, and in a moment I hear the miserable strains of “Taps” on the bugle.

  I turn toward the stairs and Dorothea is standing there, blocking my way.

  She doesn’t look happy.

  “Honey, is there something you’d like to tell me?”

  I pause for a moment before I say, “Yes. Good night!”

  She folds her arms. “There are reports that you and some of the scout boys were playing cards for money. Real money.”

  “Really?”

  She doesn’t smile. “You can’t gamble on the train. That’s a violation of interstate commerce laws and federal gambling laws and I don’t know what else.”

  “But I won. . . .”

  “You need to give it back.”

  My shoulders sag. That keeps on happening with Dorothea. She’s a real shoulder-sagger.

  “You can’t make me cry,” I say.

  “I don’t wanna make you cry. I just want you to do what’s right. Gambling is a serious thing. My uncle Rufus wrecked his marriage gambling away his paychecks.”

  “Rufus? Is he a dog?”

  She shakes her head. “Just hand over what you won, and I’ll make sure it gets back to the scouts you won it from.” She holds out her hand, palm up.

  I sigh, then dig into my jeans pocket three times to get all the quarters. She seems impressed.

  “Now I gotta fill out a dang incident report,” she says, and trudges off.

  I slink down the stairs to the snack counter, feeling bad about being disrespectful to Dorothea, asking if Rufus was a dog.

  “Hey, Nate. Are you still open?”

  He smiles. “It’s Neal. And no. But for you, yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. How’d it go?”

  “I won a bunch of money from them. Like ten dollars in quarters.”

  “You were playing for money?”

  “Of course! Why else would I hang out with those fools?”

  “Well, I don’t want to encourage you gambling. But, nice.”

  “You were right. I just trusted the formula. The scout boys made the mistakes you warned me against.”

  “A win for you is a win for all mankind,” he says.

  “I thought I’d celebrate with some M&M’s. And maybe a veggie burger. And a bottle of water.”

  “Comin’ right up.” He turns to put the veggie burger in the microwave, then back to me. He grabs a handful of mayonnaise and mustard packets.

  “Unfortunately, Dorothea made me give the money back.”

  He turns to me. “Really?”

  “Yeah, she said it was against interstate commerce laws and federal gambling laws and all kinds of other laws.”

  Neal sighed. “I’m sure she’s right. If there’s one thing Dorothea knows it’s rules.”

  I nod. “So I’m afraid I can’t have the veggie burger and M&M’s and water.”

  The microwave goes ding.

  The ghost of a smile appears on his lips. “Yet there is a freshly nuked veggie burger waiting for someone to eat it.”

  “Maybe someone will come along who wants it. Someone with money?”

  He turns and removes it from the microwave, and puts it on the tray. Then the M&M’s and water. He pushes it closer to me.

  I put my hand to my heart. “Really? You’re the best.”

  “No, you are. Now get out of here so I can finish up. See you in Kansas tomorrow?”

  I smile. “Is that where we’ll be?”

  “Yep. The Jayhawk State.”

  “See you in Kansas, then!” I grab my food and run up the stairs.

  Back at my seat I balance the cardboard tray on my lap and examine my veggie burger. The bun is steamy and sticks to the patty as I peel it off. I open the mustard and mayonnaise packets and slather them on, replace the bun, and take a bite. It doesn’t taste terrible, but the bun is hard at the edges and the patty is too chewy. I make quick work
of it anyway.

  The M&M’s for dessert are perfect. I eat them one at a time, cracking the candy shells and letting the chocolate melt on my tongue.

  As I eat them I think back to Palm Springs, where Dr. Lola would talk with me about how sometimes girls going through terrible times will get all boy crazy. Like, they’ll start trying to get boys to notice them and to say nice things about them so they can forget their troubles and feel good about themselves. I wondered about that back then, and I wonder about it now as I sit eating M&M’s one at a time, thinking about Neal and Caleb and letting the chocolate melt on my tongue.

  Chocolate is good. Chocolate is safer than boys.

  8

  DOROTHEA TELLS ME we’re almost in La Junta, Colorado, where we can get off the train and stretch our legs. This doesn’t happen very often, so I decide to stay awake for it.

  The cabin in the coach is dark except for the little lights that show on the aisle floor, and a couple of people that have their overhead lights on to read. I have my light on to keep me company.

  I’m looking out the window at the black night when suddenly I see the reflection of Tenderchunks standing in the aisle. I turn to him.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” I say. “Did you get your money back?”

  “Yeah. But I wanna give mine back to you.”

  “Really? Why?”

  He shrugs. “That woman is right about gambling. Some people are really hurt by it. But I think that’s a lesson for next time. If we all did something we shouldn’t have done, why are you the only one who gets punished? We get our money back and you have to give it. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  I think about this, looking at him.

  “So, here,” he says, and extends a hand full of quarters. “This is five dollars, which is about what you won from me, but certainly less than what you won from all of us.”

  I look at his hand, and his arm, which is kind of veiny. He looks skinny but strong, like maybe he ties a lot of knots with thick rope, or chops wood or whatever it is the scouts do to kill time in the woods.

  “Come on, take it,” he says.

  I make a cup of my hands and receive the coins, warm from his holding them.