Train I Ride

by Paul Mosier

  I don’t say anything. But I feel strangely happy. I feel proud of him.

  “And I’m gonna quit Amtrak and commit to my boyfriend.”

  This makes me stop walking and turn to him. “You are?”

  He takes off his hat and runs his fingers front to back though his hair. “It’s time. And you’re getting off in Chicago.” He reaches to my cheek. “Now that I’ve met you, I can’t picture myself working on the train without you on it.”

  “Wow.” That’s what I say, but it doesn’t really cover what I feel.

  Dorothea catches up with us.

  “Do you need your puffer?”

  “Don’t call it a puffer,” I say.

  Neal clears his throat.

  I look to Dorothea. “No, I don’t need my inhaler. And—thank you for waking me up to say good-bye to Tenderchunks.” I don’t know how much I mean it until I say it.

  Dorothea frowns. But it isn’t a real frown. “Did you have to run out here to tell me that?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You done running away?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She gives me a half hug, then raises her walkie-talkie to her mouth. “We’re good here. Walking back.”

  We turn and head down the gravel road together, Neal holding my left hand and Dorothea my right.

  I look to Dorothea. “Remember when I told you my father was a movie director in France?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “He might be,” I say. “But I sincerely doubt it. I’ve never met him.”

  “I know, honey.”

  “He probably died the same way as my mom.” I hate this, I hate it so much, but right now I’m hating it quietly and straight on.

  It feels good to come clean about that with Dorothea. She starts singing in a voice like she’s in church. It’s very pretty, something about trails of trouble and paths of victory. I squeeze both of their hands, hers and Neal’s, but it won’t be long before I have to let go.

  Back on the train, which still isn’t moving, I hide out in the bathroom, trying to be invisible. It’s one of the bigger bathrooms, and I sit on the little shelf seat instead of out in the coach even though it stinks in there, because it stinks less than being stared at by the other passengers.

  Finally I stand and look at the girl in the mirror.

  “Where did you think you were going?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Away.”

  She stares at me, silently ridiculing my lack of a plan. I stare back. It’s a stare-down, and I’m the first to break.

  “You look older,” I say. “When I look at you, I expect you to still be ten years old.”

  She nods. “Time keeps passing, even if life doesn’t go on.”

  I stare at her for a while. The face looking back at me at times seems hard, at times soft. But I look at her, and I let her look at me.

  “So, Dr. Lola . . .”

  I can’t finish what I start to say. She looks a little annoyed at me for being unable to. Dr. Lola encouraged me to practice telling the girl in the mirror that I love her, and said I should say it until I meant it. But I never did.

  “I love you,” she says, the girl in the mirror. I see her cherry ChapStick lips move, and I hear the words. I can’t say it back, but I think she understands. She looks like she needs to hear it, though. Someday soon I’ll say it.

  16

  WE GET WORD that the Mississippi has subsided enough for the train to be able to leave in an hour.

  A deadly sense of finality washes over me. I start biting my nails.

  I’ve been thinking of the box in the overhead luggage rack ever since I got back on the train after running from it.

  It’s not just a box. It’s her ashes. My mother’s ashes. I’m going to leave them behind because they’re weighing me down with their heaviness. And because she needs to rest.

  Saying this is easier than doing it.

  I stand up and retrieve my hearts-and-flowers bag. I get the brush and do my hair. I put on cherry ChapStick but I can’t taste it.

  The box is there beside the bag. I take it with both hands and sit down in the aisle seat, holding it on my lap.

  It’s made of hard black plastic and is heavier than one would think. It’s a little bigger than those old-fashioned recipe files, and the same shape. On top beneath clear plastic tape is my mother’s full name. Hanna Hope Hughes. It has her date of birth and the date of her death, and the name of the mortuary that burned her body.

  Dorothea walks up and finds me sitting in her seat on the aisle. I don’t look at her, but I can sense her twisting her neck to read the top of the box.

  “Oh, honey.” She puts her hand on my shoulder. “Is that your momma?”

  I nod.

  “What a thing to have to carry.”

  “I wanted to ask you about that,” I say. “I was thinking maybe I could spread her ashes. Out here in the fields. So she can rest.”

  Dorothea is quiet for a moment. I’m sure she’s counting in her head how many regulations it would break. Then she raises the walkie-talkie to her mouth.

  “Neal. Meet me at your favorite passenger’s seat.”

  In a minute Neal comes through the vestibule into our coach, looking like he fears the worst. Dorothea meets him a couple of aisles away, and they have a quiet word together. Then they come to where I sit and Dorothea speaks.

  “Is there anything you’ll be needing other than the box?”

  I think briefly, then shake my head.

  “Okay, honey, let’s go.”

  Dorothea leads the way, with a heaviness in her steps. Neal is right behind me.

  We go down the stairs and to the exit from which I escaped not long ago. Dorothea pushes the lever to open the door and drops the yellow step into place. We step out into the day.

  Outside has grown warmer. It’s quieter, like the insects are being respectful. We stand there for a moment. Then Dorothea says, “You lead the way.”

  I turn toward the rear of the train, and retrace the steps of my escape, holding the box against me. We walk past the end of the train beside the rail bed, and then take the gravel road into the fields. I had been thinking of the corn, but as we come to higher ground I see a deep green wood ahead.

  “Not too far, honey.”

  “Those woods look nice,” I say.

  The woods grow more distinct as we draw nearer, dark and peaceful. They aren’t any bigger than the Hundred Acre Wood in the Winnie-the-Pooh books my mom read to me when I was very young and she was trying so hard.

  At the edge of the field and the beginning of the wood, there’s a sign that says No Hunting, which makes me glad. Mom was a vegetarian, and raised me the same.

  We walk into the shade. I hear a squirrel clamber up a tree.

  I count my steps to thirty-four, the age she died at, then fall to my knees in front of an oak tree. Dorothea and Neal halt behind me.

  I press the plastic tab and the box pops open. I take the plastic bag from inside and hold it in both hands.

  I don’t have pliers to open the metal clamp, so I put the top of the bag to my mouth and tear it open with my teeth. I spread the sandy gray remains of my mother on the ground.

  Without thinking I put my index finger into my mouth to wet it, and use it to pick up some of the ashes from the ground. Then I lift the bottom of my T-shirt and the scout shirt to put the ashes to my belly button, the place where we had once been connected. I do this like it’s a familiar ritual, like I do it every day, like it’s something my people have always done, or like I’m doing it for someone else, because I’m not ready to feel it completely.

  My hand finds a rock with a jagged edge.

  Some people’s merit badges are their names on libraries, museums, and universities.

  My mother’s merit badge is scratched in tear-blurred letters on the trunk of an oak tree, in a small Iowa wood lost to all but squirrels.

  “I want you to be proud of me,” I say. Only the bir
ds answer. I see her face, framed by pale blond hair. Pretty, melancholy, watching me like I was something beautiful that she couldn’t keep. I wait while my eyes water the oak tree.

  Finally I stand and turn to Dorothea and Neal. Their eyes are wet, and they search my face as I walk past them. They follow me back silently into the filtered sunlight, down the gravel road past the corn, to the tracks and the yellow step that lifts us back on the train.

  17

  WE’RE ROLLING AWAY. Rolling toward Chicago, rolling away from my mother.

  Dr. Lola suggested that when I was mad or sad about my mom, I should try to remember something positive about her. But every time I searched my memory for something nice, all I could come up with were reasons I was mad at her, and reasons I was sad about her, and reasons I was sorry for myself that she was my mother.

  Dr. Lola said I should do the same thing for Gramma, and I came up with the memory of watching her make pancakes. In my mind I’d see her measuring out the ingredients, the flour and sugar and salt and baking soda, and cracking the eggs, and mixing it up and pouring it on the heated skillet.

  Even though she had a cigarette dangling from her lips, and subjected me to the smoke, remembering her I focus on the pancakes, their smell, the cold glass of milk, and the butter melting and the syrup flowing over the top of it all. She practically never said anything while she made them or while I ate them. But her making them, and making them the slow way, from scratch, said a lot, I think. She’d look through the window at the morning and smoke her menthols while I ate, but she really felt like my gramma on those mornings.

  With my mom I could never come up with anything. Just the scary things and the emergencies and the last stupid words I wrote in my journal.

  I won’t look in my journal, but sitting in my seat on the train as fields of soybeans roll by, they’re shouting at me, the last words. It was so long ago; my penmanship was so young. I won’t look in my journal but I can still see the words in my memory. And now I can hear them in my pathetic, naive ten-year-old voice:

  Mom is doing so well.

  I hate that girl, the stupid ten-year-old who allowed herself to believe that everything could turn out okay, who hoped her mom could stay clean, who let herself be hurt and disappointed again and again.

  I bolt from my seat. I hurry down the aisle. By the way people are looking at me, I must look like I’m crazy. I probably am.

  I rush down the stairs two at a time, push into the bathroom, and slam the door shut.

  The girl in the mirror looks as pissed off at me as I am at her.

  “‘Mom is doing so well,’” she says in a mocking tone. “You’re an idiot.”

  It hurts, but she’s just getting started.

  “Nobody’s ever gonna love you, because you’re an idiot. You’re a stupid, naive little baby with ugly green hair. Anybody you care about is gonna leave you, and if they can’t leave they’ll die just to get away from you.”

  She looks so filled with hate.

  “You can’t make me cry,” I say.

  “Right, because you’re the password! Mom must have really loved you because she used your name in her email password!”

  “Shut up!”

  “That’s soooo special to be the email password for a dead junkie!”

  “I hate you!”

  “Why don’t you just give up like she did?”

  My fists fly at her, and I smash at her until she falls in broken pieces onto the counter and into the sink. I kick the toilet, and I kick it again and again until it comes apart, the lid and the seat cracked and scattered. I push on the door but my hands are bleeding, so I kick the door with my heel, and my knockoff sneaker comes apart and the door comes off its hinges. There’s a scared-looking old lady standing on the other side, and I move past her up the stairs and limp on one shoe down the aisle to my seat.

  I grab my hearts-and-flowers bag and the journal inside, and riffle through it to the page with the words that are hurting me, and blood runs down my arms as I tear the page from the binding. I hobble down the aisle but Dorothea appears in front of me, so I head the other way. The penguin conductor is in that direction, but I rush at him and try to get past, so he grabs hold of my scout shirt and the buttons break, and he holds on to the tail of the shirt and then falls to the floor and hangs on to my leg, and I fall down face-first in the aisle.

  Looking at my hands in front of me I see that they really are bleeding a lot. I can hear Dorothea shouting but I don’t know what she is saying. I can hear the noise of myself trying to breathe but not being able to.

  I feel a strange calm. Pulled to my feet, I allow myself to be given the inhaler. I allow myself to be led into the observation lounge, where the penguin conductor sits with me at a table, blocking my access to the aisle, while Dorothea gets bandages. I allow myself to be a stupid thirteen-year-old who needs all this help.

  My breathing quiets, my limbs at rest. In a moment Carlos sits across from me. He has my pink sneaker, and he repairs it with duct tape while Dorothea wraps my hands in gauze. There’s blood on my scout shirt and soaking through the bandages, and a bloody handprint on the page torn from my journal.

  When he’s done fixing my shoe, Carlos picks up the page and examines it. The black ink is visible even through the blood. Mom is doing so well. He sets it down and rubs his eyes.

  “You can’t make me cry,” I say. I don’t know why I say it.

  I haven’t seen him look this way before. “If you want to be a poet, you’ll have to learn how to cry every now and then.”

  “What makes you think I want to be a poet?”

  He rubs his eyes again with his palms. “You see things others miss.” He says it with a weariness, like it’s a terrible prognosis. “You’ve got a light in your eyes.”

  “That’s what . . .”

  “Someone else said that already? Probably a poet. It takes one to know one.”

  “I’m going to buy one of your books when I get a chance,” I say. “And I’ll write to you to tell you how much I like it.”

  He doesn’t smile. He’s looking at my blood-soaked bandages. “Angry at the girl in the mirror?”

  It’s like he can read my mind. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  I think a moment. I hadn’t really thought about it before. “For . . . I don’t know.”

  “For feeling?”

  I nod.

  “For holding hope in her heart?”

  I nod again.

  Carlos folds and unfolds his hands. “The best kind of people are people who feel, and who hold hope in their hearts. Even if it sometimes means being hurt and disappointed. Even if it always means being hurt and disappointed.”

  I look away, and then down to Dorothea’s hands finishing up on mine.

  “You stay here with Carlos while I find an incident report,” she says, getting to her feet. “Somehow I’ve run out of them.” First she hands me my hearts-and-flowers bag. “So you won’t have any excuse to leave Carlos and try to run off again.”

  She walks away.

  Carlos examines the bag. “You don’t strike me as the hearts-and-flowers sort.”

  I reach inside it for my cherry ChapStick. It’s hard to take the cap off with my hands hurt and bandaged, and the pain is starting to get to me now that my anger is gone. I spread the cherry on my lips and offer it to him.

  He smiles a tiny smile. “No thanks.”

  I put it back.

  “On second thought, I’ll have some. Add it to my list of life experiences.”

  I give it to him. He takes the cap off, smells it, raises his eyebrows. “You don’t have leprosy or anything else I should know about?”

  “Leprosy?”

  “Never mind.” He spreads it on. “Tasty.” He licks his lips. “I don’t know how you can put this stuff down.”

  “I can’t.”

  He adjusts his collar. He’s worn a different shirt every day. “So, Rydr, to this point you’ve managed to avoid revealing
where you’re going. And practically everything else about yourself, for that matter.”

  “I’ve got an air of mystery to me, don’t I?”

  He smiles, shakes his head, and takes a sip of his coffee.

  “What about you?” I ask. “All I know about you is that you have kids that are grown, you like crosswords, and you change clothes every day somehow.”

  “That’s pretty much me in a nutshell.”

  “No, really. Where do you change clothes?”

  “They gave me a sleeper, so I get to travel in luxury. But I prefer the company of the masses such as yourself.”

  “Who do you mean, they?”

  “Amtrak. I’m getting a stipend and a free sleeper room to ride the train and write poems about it.”

  “Really? Wow.”

  “It’s pretty cool. That’s about as richly rewarded as poets ever are. I mean, there’s a reason I know how to repair shoes with duct tape.”

  He pushes my shoe across the table. I admire his duct-tape handiwork and then slip it on.

  “Speaking of poets.” I reach into my bag and pull out Howl. “Have you heard of this guy?”

  Carlos takes it. “Heck yeah. It’s probably my favorite volume ever.” He flips through it, then stops at the front and studies it carefully. His eyes meet mine. “Holy cow. How did you get a signed copy? Is this legit?”

  “Huh?”

  He shows me the title page, with two signatures in black ink.

  “That’s Ginsberg’s signature, and that one is Ferlinghetti’s. He’s the publisher, and a poet himself. A great poet. And you have both?”

  “Is that unusual?”

  Carlos just stares at me.

  I think of the expression on Tenderchunks’s face when I told him I was keeping Howl. A chill runs down my spine. “Tenderchunks gave it to me.”

  “Tenderchunks?”

  I tug at the lapel of my scout shirt to communicate it to Carlos.

  “Wow. His shirt and a signed copy of Howl.”

  “He said it would change my life. And I feel like it has. I feel like it was written just for me.”

  Carlos tilts his head a little as he regards me. “Yep. It took more than fifty years, and it probably had to change hands a few times. But I think it finally found the girl it was written for.”