The Train of Small Mercies

by David Rowell

  “Okay, one room for two weary travelers,” he said, holding the car door open. He went back to the trunk and pulled out a leather suitcase. Though Michael had wondered about it in their first hundred miles, the idea came to him now with some alarm: he had no extra clothes. He had no toothbrush, no pajamas to sleep in, no change of underwear or socks. As he got out, he said, “I don’t have any luggage.”

  James Colvert smiled. “Well, that’s a temporary problem,” he said. “Nothing we can’t fix. I did pick up an extra toothbrush for you, and tomorrow, when we get to where we’re going, I know a department store where we can pick up what you’ll need.” He held the plastic key in the light of the sign. “Room seven.”

  They followed a pathway made of smoothed stones, and when he got the door open, James Colvert reached for a switch on the wall and, not finding one, crept to the shadowy outline of a lamp on a desk. A dim, orange light revealed two small beds with brown bedspreads and a painting between them of Indians on their horses, one with his tomahawk raised over his head. James Colvert put his suitcase down and closed the door. “Well, it’s not the Taj Mahal, but it will do,” he said. All these hours later, his voice still wasn’t entirely familiar to Michael.

  James Colvert flipped open his suitcase and retrieved a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush still in its clear packaging. “That’s for you,” he said.

  Michael took it in his hand and contemplated its particular shade of green. “Thank you.” He brushed with more effort than he could usually summon, since he didn’t want to appear ungrateful, and spit with a fierceness that surprised him. He sat on the corner of the other bed with more uncertainty than he had felt all day.

  “Well, go ahead and hit the hay,” James Colvert said. “You’re not used to being up this late, I guess.”

  “Sometimes,” Michael said, but he didn’t find the convincing note he had intended.

  He then unbuttoned his pants, suddenly self-conscious, and slipped off his socks, placing them neatly on top. He got under the rough sheet and blanket and turned to face the wall, studying the lines in the wooden slats. He knew it would be long after the lights were turned off before he fell asleep.

  Delaware

  Edwin was giving Ted and Georgia a tour of the pool. Ted had been a friend of Edwin and Lolly’s for five years, from when they lived in the same apartment complex. When they first met, Ted was married to a Chinese student named Mai; three years later they had an infant daughter named Ling-lee. This was during Ted’s “days of haze,” as he called them now, when he was often drunk or stoned. Ted was generally a happy drunk, but when he passed out, he slept through the better part of the next day. When the baby was asleep, Mai berated him for the groceries he had forgotten to pick up, the soiled diaper he hadn’t detected, the money he’d squandered, the nights he had failed to come home. A week after Ling-lee’s second birthday, Mai moved back to China with her.

  Edwin and Lolly didn’t know Georgia as well, and Georgia’s beauty—she had once worked in the Chicago Playboy Club as a cocktail waitress—made Lolly feel more reserved. Georgia had been seeing Ted for nearly six months; she worked as a beautician and was ten years younger than the rest of them, though she looked even younger.

  Edwin stood up on the last step of the ladder and narrated how he had put it all together. “And you, my fine friends, have the honor of helping us break it in.”

  “Groovy,” Ted said. He wore a T-shirt with a cobra sprung to life over snug-fitting jean cutoffs, with a red bandanna around his neck. His curly hair piled upward, and since growing out his sideburns, he liked to run his fingers down the length of them when he spoke. Georgia wore flip-flops underneath her red-painted toes and a tie-dyed T-shirt that she had tied above her belly button. Her blue jeans flared at the tops of her ankles.

  “Everyone in the neighborhood is going to want a piece of this,” Ted said.

  “With good reason,” Edwin said.

  Ted ran a finger through the water. “It’s like your own private oasis, the way it’s just here. When can we jump in?”

  Edwin nodded. He wanted to be the first one. “Anytime, I guess. Lolly’s in the kitchen. I’ll get her to take a picture.” He went to the back door, half singing the Doors song they had heard that morning. “Lol, company’s here. Party’s started.” He stuck his head in. “Hey, can you get my camera? Everyone’s ready to jump in, and I was thinking we would capture it on celluloid. Can you come out?”

  Lolly retrieved the camera from the bedroom. “Do you want to take out some of this stuff?” she asked, pointing to the trays on the kitchen counter.

  “Not yet. Let’s just get in the water. It’s going to be unbelievable.”

  “Really, no one will believe it?”

  Edwin stepped all the way in. “Come on, Lol. Already you’re not making it fun.”

  “Okay, okay. I know you’re excited. All right, here comes the Pool Party Queen right now, ready to document this important moment in history.”

  When Edwin stepped back out, he was stunned to see Ted waist deep in the pool. Edwin jerked back so violently that he almost knocked the camera from Lolly’s hands.

  “Holy crap, Ted! You were supposed to wait. Shit, man. What the hell?”

  Ted’s smile drained from his face. “What’s wrong?”

  “You were supposed to wait,” Edwin said. As he approached the pool, the sight of Ted and his hairy chest bobbing in the water was so painful he had to look to Georgia, who quickly turned away in embarrassment. “Lolly was going to take a picture,” Edwin finally thought to say.

  “Let’s all get in, then,” said Ted. “Come on. Hey, bro, I didn’t mean to steal your thunder. But this pool is happening.”

  “It’s just, you know,” said Edwin. “I put the thing together. I kind of wanted to be the first one in.”

  “Everyone in the water,” Lolly said. “Let’s get this poor man wet before he has a breakdown.”

  Lolly winked at Georgia. “Hi, honey. Do you want to come in and get changed?”

  Georgia, still a bit unsettled by Edwin’s outburst, grabbed her canvas bag and stepped quickly inside.

  Lolly put the camera down. It was time to strip to her bathing suit, and as she looked at some distant point beyond their fence, she could feel Edwin and Ted watching her while pretending not to. The light coming through the trees was bright and unforgiving. When Lolly was done, Edwin took his glasses off and held them between his fingers while removing his shirt. In the sunlight his hairless, white chest looked like a giant egg. He climbed the steps of the ladder and paused for a moment.

  “No diving, remember,” Lolly said. This was a further irritation to Edwin, who knew exactly what the safety guidelines for his pool were. It was only five feet deep, and Edwin was six-foot-two. Of course he wasn’t going to dive. Instead, he inched his toes to the edge of the ladder, his arms firmly clutched to his sides, like a tin soldier, and fell cleanly through the water, making almost no splash at all. He collapsed his legs when he hit the cement bottom so that he could be fully submerged. But instead of pushing back up, he stayed in that position, knees bent, for so long that Ted and Lolly eventually locked eyes in concern. Ted pushed himself off from the side, and as he got within arm’s length Edwin rocketed violently upward. After he ran a hand across his face, he let out a raucous whoop of approval. “In my own backyard!” Edwin shouted.

  Ted laughed and gave Edwin a splash. “This is heaven, man,” Edwin said. Slowly he drifted around the perimeter of the pool. “Feel that beautiful water.”

  “It feels good, man,” Ted said. “Come on in, Lolly.”

  “Let me get a picture of King Neptune first,” she said. Edwin waded over to her and offered two peace signs, his eyes tiny slits in the sunlight.

  “What was that yelling?” Georgia called out. She let the screen door slam harder than she meant to, then put a finger to her lips as an apology. She was wearing a white bikini that featured three large silver rings, one that connected the fabri
c over her breastbone, and the other two joining the fabric at each hip. She walked toward them a little sheepishly, smiling but avoiding their gazes. Even Lolly couldn’t help staring so unabashedly. Georgia’s full breasts swung with the precision of windshield wipers, and the curve of her waist made both Edwin and Lolly think of a guitar. Georgia was used to being stared at like this, and when she went swimming in public she was relieved when the first seconds of stunned silence were over. She let out a small laugh, as if everyone was so silly, and went up the ladder and slid in before anyone had time to recover.

  After she swam to one side, Edwin turned his gaze from her and said to Lolly, “Everyone in, Lol.” Ted, Georgia, and Edwin watched as Lolly stood atop the little platform. Before she could jump, she saw the faces of the Pyle twins, Norma and Nadine, pressed against the chain-link fence.

  “Hey, you two,” she called out.

  “Hi,” they said in unison. “When did you get a pool?” Norma asked.

  “We just got it,” Lolly said. She could feel Edwin trying to get her attention, and she knew what he was thinking: Don’t invite them over. “We’ll have to have you over for a swim sometime.”

  “Today?” Norma asked.

  “Not today, honey,” Lolly said. “Today we have company.”

  Georgia waved at the girls, and the girls eagerly returned it.

  “So we’ll see you later,” Edwin said. But the girls didn’t move.

  “It’s fine, Ed,” Lolly said, and then made her splash, which, as far as she could tell, was the biggest one all day.

  Washington

  After a quick run-through of the Botanic Garden, Maeve took a bus to Union Station. The train was scheduled to arrive around four-thirty, but even now, inside the cavernous hall, underneath a shimmering, barrel-shaped ceiling that caused Maeve to fall into a neck-craning waggle, there was a steady line of people without luggage weaving in and out between a multitude of police officers and scampering down a flight of stairs; after recovering from her awe of the place, she quickly followed. Eventually the line came to a halt, and after a few minutes she tapped the man in front of her on the shoulder; he had an earplug connected to his transistor radio and took a moment to realize.

  “This is the line to see the funeral train, is it?” Maeve asked.

  “I hope so,” said the man. He chomped an unlit cigar.

  The line took a few steps forward and stopped again. Maeve fished out a postcard she had gotten that morning—of a Venus flytrap said to be one of the biggest in the world—to send to her sisters. She had never sent a postcard before and stared at the empty white space on the back with trepidation. In the picture the plant’s “teeth” were as long as nails and terrifying, its “mouth” deep crimson inside and sprung open like a bear trap. Seeing Mr. Hinton each morning had made her think of her father more frequently than usual that week, and she was remembering how he had encouraged her to write her stories down. Maeve gripped her pen until she could feel it press against the bones of her fingers. Finally she wrote: “I was at the U.S. Botanic Garden this morning—quite lovely!—until this horrid creature nearly swallowed me whole.”

  The girls would laugh at that—she could see their faces now, turning the postcard over after getting to the end of that first line and then shrieking at the insidious plant. They were all old enough not to believe it, of course, but they would be grateful for the joke all the same. “Maeve!” they would shout in gleeful surprise.

  “They say the train has just left New York,” the man said, and held up his radio to explain his source. He wasn’t quite ready to turn back around, but Maeve showed no interest in chatting. “What a train ride that must be,” he said before giving up.

  As stories went, the idea of a giant Venus flytrap seizing her up was a trifle; she was more imaginative than that when she was still learning to write her name. But she still tingled—how long had it been since she had even thought anything outlandish? She leaned against the wall and continued.

  “Luckily, I had my Polo mints, and nothing burns a Venus flytrap more than mints. Spit me out halfway down the hall, it did, before keeling over. All the ruckus forced the place to shut down, and now I’m wanted by the authorities for killing the bugger. If they try to contact you, tell them I’m back in Ireland as far as you know . . . and that my career killing the giant Venuses has just begun. Love, Maeve.”

  It was silly business, what she had written, but at that moment Maeve could feel herself shaking slightly. Was it relief? Anxiety? She wasn’t even sure, but she knew she liked the sensation. And she wondered if she could have even had such a thought if she was still in Massachusetts, where she had carried her grief around like a trunk. For the next few minutes she let a rush of emotions wash through her, and then she fell sad once more, thinking of how close she might have come to starting over here in Washington.

  The line trudged forward a few steps down toward one of the train platforms—and stalled again, then started up again and stopped, and everyone resigned themselves that this was how it would be for who knew how long.

  Pennsylvania

  On the edge of town, Delores pulled into the parking lot for Weir Park. A week earlier she had read in the paper about a local soldier who was killed in Vietnam, and the man’s mother was quoted about what a good father he had been to his two little boys, and that one of his favorite things to do had been to walk with them down the street to Weir Park. The paper said he had stepped on a land mine.

  Generally Delores took Rebecca—and the boys, when they had become too restless—to the park a couple of blocks from their house, though increasingly it was becoming a hangout for teenagers who smoked and wore bright scarves in their hair and were perpetually barefoot. Delores had noticed how Brian and Greg would watch them, and then pretend to be looking at something else if they caught her noticing. Once, as the four of them were walking home, Brian said, “Those guys are hippies. I bet I could knock their teeth out.”

  “What in the world kind of talk is that?” Delores said. “You do not talk that violence.”

  “All they do is sit there and act weird,” Greg added; lately, a potential scolding from his mother did nothing to prevent him from speaking his mind.

  “Peace, man!” mocked Brian. He then took a puff on an invisible cigarette.

  “Who do you two think you are to make fun of somebody else? Do you think you’re better than those young people because they dress differently? Have they done something to you to make such a violent threat like that?”

  “Far out, man,” said Greg, though he had, if anything, voiced something closer to a foreign accent.

  “They’re hippies, Mom,” Brian said. “What do you care about hippies for?”

  “I’m trying to understand how you’ve decided that hippies are somehow unworthy of basic respect. What do you even know about hippies, anyway? What do you even know that makes you so informed?”

  “Dad doesn’t like hippies,” Greg said. “He says they’re lazy and all they do is do drugs and hang around doing nothing.”

  “Well, that may be true of some of them—some,” Delores said, “but you can’t make those kinds of sweeping statements about a whole group of people. That’s ignorant. Besides, we don’t make violent threats against anyone.”

  Now, as Delores and Rebecca took in the unfamiliar park, they saw there were just two mothers with their children—a boy and two girls. One woman wore cat-eye glasses in a shade of green and smoked as she talked to the other woman, who was heavyset but appeared younger. Both wore pale sundresses, and their faces looked damp in the stifling heat. Delores and Rebecca stood on the edge and contemplated the monkey bars, a once yellow balance beam, and the sandbox, which was framed with dull, rotting boards. There was also a modest slide with glistening aluminum that looked scalding to the touch, two toddler swings—one broken—and two regular-sized swings. The other women turned to them and smiled quickly before resuming their conversation.

  “Okay, Rebecca, what do you
want to do first? Do you want me to push you in the swing? It’s nice to be at a new park, isn’t it? Isn’t this fun?” Rebecca was watching the two older girls atop the monkey bars. They seemed about eight or nine years old, Delores thought. The blond girl was stroking the other girl’s ponytail. The ponytailed girl seemed to belong to the woman in the glasses, since both of their chins disappeared immediately from under their mouths. The girls were giggling, and the one stroking her friend’s hair was trying out an adult voice as she counseled the girl on what to do with her hair. Rebecca, who spent too much time in the company of boys punching one another on the arm and calling one another “idiot” and “retard” and generally expressing themselves in sudden barks of excitement or rage, was transfixed.

  Delores whispered, “You’re watching the big girls, aren’t you? They look like they’re having fun.” Delores gave her another moment, then scooted her along and swept her up into the one swing that fit her.

  The boy had worked up a respectable pile of sand in one corner of the sandbox, and his tongue stuck out one side of his mouth as he worked.

  “Big push,” Delores said. In the air Rebecca’s neck twisted so that she could keep watching the girls, who seemed not to notice. Delores pushed a dozen times until she felt slightly foolish. “Well, we can do something else,” she said. She let the swing come to a stop, then lifted Rebecca out and set her down. Rebecca continued watching the girls, and finally Delores said, “Let’s go see what they’re doing, then. Come on.” Rebecca moved in small, hesitant steps until she and her mother were at the bottom of the monkey bars.

  The girl whose hair was still being worked on was saying, “I’m going to keep growing it until it reaches my waist.”