Whitechurch

by Chris Lynch

  choo choo station

  She watches the goer

  and comer

  Will you be a singer

  or sad scared little

  hummer?

  She takes a step back from the counter and claps her hands three times. “Hah,” she says. “Cute. And, ah, number seven? You’re trying to tell me you perpetrated seven of those things on me?”

  He nods solemnly, bows.

  “So great, you’re a liar and a loon.”

  “Hey,” Pauly says, “don’t forget, liar plus loon equals poet.”

  He is backing away. He stops backing away, approaches the counter once more. “Fascination/Inspiration/The poet’s muse/the girl at the station. Why did you change your name, Mary Martha?” He asks sincerely.

  She has no intention of answering, or speaking at all, judging from the look on her face. Narrow-eyed. Blushing. Then, just as quickly, different. Opening. Ready …

  “No,” Pauly says, as if he too has had a very abrupt change of heart. “No, tell me later, when we meet again. And maybe I’ll trade you …‘Mary Martha #3,’ ‘Mary Martha #9 …’”

  “Nine,” she repeats dubiously.

  Then, as he suggested, she stops, but hangs there, on the edge of something. There is a kind of dewey look to her now, and I think, as I stand and get more of a full-on angle, that Mary Martha is not the least attractive person in Whitechurch. She’s not, in fact, unpretty at all.

  We back away, smiling, waving. We board the train and start heading to the rear.

  “What you doing that for, Pauly?” I ask. “All that with Mary Martha. Teasing her up like that. What’s she ever done to you?”

  “What are you talking about?” Pauly is distracted as he talks, looking all over the place. “I didn’t do anything bad.”

  “You did. You got a girlfriend. And you’re going to see her, and you’re gonna see her in Boston, even though you’re not even invited and it’s gonna make shitloads of trouble for all parties.”

  “You know, Oakley, did it ever occur to you that I wouldn’t be nuts if only you would show a little more faith in me, huh?”

  I pause. “You are not nuts,” I say.

  And the words ring and ring again in my lead like an echo of a scream in the valley of Whitechurch. I hear the words, and I think about everything, and I am suddenly, physically tired.

  And weary of selling this.

  “Well, nice try anyway. But thanks.”

  The train is about to go. Train noises come out of it. A bell rings, and some goof in a flat-leaded train-guy hat starts yelling. Pauly looks suddenly desperate.

  I smack him. “Dodo, don’t cry. I’m sure she got on the train already.”

  He then smacks himself. Lilly is never, ever, late for anything, trains, movies, walks in the park, nothing. We, on the other hand, are late all he time.

  Paul smacks me, once we are moving and he’s loosening up. “And don’t call me dodo,” he says.

  So here’s what we do. We crouch low and skulk all cloak-and-dagger trying not to be seen is we head for the rear car. Why?

  “Because she’s gonna just die from the surprise when we meet her there. The train would be too easy.”

  “And Lilly dying is what we want, is that it?”

  He pulls me by the arm, through three cars m the ugly old oily old Amtrak diesel as we head for the last seats in the last car. We pause, like a couple of criminals, each time we exit one car and are about to enter another. To take a quick peek. It’s a funny feeling, this hiding-from-somebody jazz, very foreign, very made-up and play-actish. Because, it occurs to me, Pauly and I slither and pound the streets of Whitechurch day after day, visible to all, but the feeling is nobody notices, cares, or half the time sees us. Now that we’re headed out, where we should be anonymous, it’s the other.

  We stop short before entering the rear car. We are standing on that steel-mesh grate above the apparatus linking the two cars, and we just hover there for a few seconds. Not because we have to—the car is absolutely empty—just because we do. The wind is hard and slashing. The train feels twitchy, as if it is bolting through a line of tacklers who keep trying to knock it off track from either side, like there is a force working against us getting to our destination, but that force is wasting its time. Fifty million trees shoot by at fifty million miles per hour and the clean biting north-country air mixes with the greasy Amtrak air and that’s what we breathe. Train-ride breathing.

  “I love this shit,” Pauly says, taking it in deep. He has stopped completely, and turns around to face me. His eyes are closed. I’m about to echo his statement when he decides to add another. “And I love you, cocksucker.”

  He’s banging me in the chest with his pointer finger as he says it.

  I’m really mad now, though I cannot quite figure what is setting me off. I think I’m going to scream at him and throw him off the train, but I can’t decide in which order.

  “I paid for these tickets,” I scream into the wind, and all he can do is laugh at me before turning and sliding open the door to the rear car. I let the door slice between us rather than follow. Giving myself a few seconds before going on. Pauly knows I’m doing this, probably already knew I would, and does not wait. He heads straight for the back, and sits in the bench that faces me.

  I let the wind beat me this way and that, close my eyes like Pauly did, suck it all up. Feel like I could ride like this for a while. But then without warning, it starts pissing down rain. Like it seems to do every damn day around here unless it snows.

  I take the seat facing Pauly, as the seats are all face-to-face, like Amtrak has some kind of investment in people getting to know each other.

  He’s looking out the window, and I know what he’s thinking. “I read it rains every day in Hawaii,” I say, pleasantly enough to sound plausibly optimistic, but not so much I sound like a dimwit.

  He turns on me. “You see any goddamn palm trees out that window?”

  I do not look out the window. I know what is and is not out the window. “Don’t say love and cocksucker to me in the same sentence, all right?” I finally say.

  “Oh, Christ,” he says, looking over my shoulder.

  Again, I don’t need to look. “Guess we shouldn’t be rushing into the private-eye business, huh Pauly?”

  He continues staring, tries smiling without looking guilty, does not. I can feel her hovering over my shoulder. And I am not displeased. Not displeased that she’s here, that she’s found us, and not displeased that Pauly’s squirming.

  “Have a seat, Mary Martha,” he says.

  Okay then, this is different.

  “Jesus,” I say.

  “What’s up with you?” Mary Martha asks, smiling. “I thought this was a party.”

  “Who’s watching the station?” I ask her, as if that’s really my problem.

  “Lilly,” she says with a giggle.

  “Lilly?” Pauly and I both gasp. We scramble to the window as if we can catch a last glimpse of her at the station, which we can’t. We can imagine Lilly laughing at us, waving, flipping a finger, perhaps.

  Pauly throws himself back into his seat and mounts a major pouting campaign.

  I sit once again across from him. “Hey, don’t be antisocial,” I say, finding myself suddenly, uncharitably cheery.

  “Ya, it’s a party, remember?” Mary Martha says.

  “Ya, well who invited you?” Paul wants to know.

  “Duh,” Mary Martha says.

  “You told Lilly,” he says.

  “Duh,” she says.

  “Good for you, Mary Martha. Take no prisoners. Take no shit.”

  “Take a hike,” Paul says to me, and it feels more like a party every minute. I could like this. Lilly’s out of the picture, so I can stop sweating that and I can admit how much that was eating at me. Mary Martha has called Pauly’s bluff and now he’s got to deal with it. He’s going to have a make up eight more poems pretty quick.

  For once, Pauly’s made to
reap what Pauly has sown. For once, I am free and clear.

  Mary Martha means business too. “You were so nice a few minutes ago. Are people right about you, psycho boy?”

  Pauly cuts such a look at her now, I’m myself taken aback, which ain’t good. He’s dark here, head pointed down, eyes turned up, so the effect is like he’s lighted from below, eye whites scary white set in dark dark socket holes.

  “Who calls me psycho boy? Tell me who, and I’ll go to their house and gouge out their hearts. I am not psycho.”

  Points for ol’ Mary Martha. She gets the joke even before I do.

  “Knew you were going to say that,” she says.

  The lights come back on all over his face which, when you are here close up and liking him, you can see, is about the most open and touchable face you could find. He loves it when people are not worried by him. Even better than when they are.

  “How come you changed your own name?” Pauly.

  “How come you cut your own hair?” Mary Martha.

  “Hah.” Me.

  “I didn’t do this,” Paul says. “It was him.”

  Mary Martha looks at me. “I thought you two were friends.”

  “Tickets, please” is what we hear now. The conductor comes to collect. We all give up our tickets, and the guy whips out his little doohickey that puts a million holes in the tickets. When he’s done with me and Pauly, he stares at Mary Martha like a disapproving father. Disapproving of us we can assume.

  “Hi, Chet,” she says pleasantly.

  “Hi,” he says, and punches her ticket so many times there’s more of it on the floor than in her hand.

  “So what happened?” Pauly wants to know.

  “Buy me a drink first and I’ll tell you.”

  Pauly laughs. He loves to be pushed around like this. Then he looks to me. The money, remember.

  “Fine,” I say, because I am truly getting in a party mood. I feel light, like there’s nothing on me. Pauly’s the one at work now. Think I might like the switch today, me playing Pauly troublemaker, while he tries to clean up his own mess. “Lemme just run to the dining car and see what I can do.” But before I can go I have one thing to do.

  “Hey, Paul,” I say, pointing at him. “Recite Mary Martha that poem you just told me. You know, ‘MM #23.’”

  I don’t wait for the reaction. Work like that is its own satisfaction.

  And off I go, even though what I can do is probably nothing more than grab a lemonade since I’m a few years short of legality yet. So what, thinks I, whatever it is will be fun enough. I feel an unusual lightness, a nothingness. And I’m liking it.

  Out the first car door I go, and there I pause because the rain has gone, quick as it came. Watching the ties hammer past through the grate beneath my feet. Feeling the wind, smelling the diesel pine. Nice. A few faces scattered throughout the next car, everybody sleepy, nobody friendly exactly, but nobody a bother either. Fair enough. Nothingness undisturbed. Outside the second car, same pause, same nice, through the door, into the dining car.

  Nothingness disturbed.

  Her. The flower girl of Whitechurch, the one I’ve never been able to talk to, with the eyes and the hair and the whiteness beyond belief and the big-eye stare. She recognizes me, I think, or she thinks I’m somebody else and I absolutely do not care which.

  She has snapdragons, real branches of honeysuckle and other wildflowers not indigenous to Whitechurch, tangled into the already nuts tangle of her peach-colored hair. She is like one colorized player walking through the black-and-white film I always seem to be watching, and living. And her every brief appearance makes me start to think, again, that I sure would like to step out of this film and into that one. I hardly feel my feet beneath me, a sensation made all the worse by the persistent side to side to side to side shimmy of the train every inch of the way. I have to look down at my sorry feet to even know that I have stopped dead.

  I think I’m smiling at her. I know she is smiling at me, and that is all the encouragement I should need. This is where I should step through, finally, into that world, even for just a small while, and see if it’s maybe a world I could love.

  But there is something else. There is a something that carves its way into this vision, that prevents this, and I know damn well what it is. And there is no way I can pull this off here and now without simultaneously ruining it.

  I must look like I’m going to cry as I wave to her and back away. I must look it because I feel it. I flee. Back, through the sliding doors, through the previous car and the previous doors and back to the party, which feels suddenly a lot less like one.

  Whatever did happen to that lightness I felt? How is it that things can turn so quickly, and on such small occurrences as a girl simply appearing on the same train to Boston?

  I am dizzy enough from it all that I am back with Paul and Mary Martha without feeling as if I’ve even moved. She is laughing hysterically.

  “You are so bad,” she says, slapping me on the arm, “making him do that filthy poem for me.” She looks to Pauly.

  He, of course, is beaming with pride. Chalk up another one.

  “Where are the drinks?” he says.

  I stare at him. That’s all I feel like doing. Not true. I am wishing I were a magnifying glass, and the sun was searing behind me, pinpointing Paul through my eyes.

  “To hell with the drinks,” Mary Martha says. “I got smoke. Why don’t we just smoke instead?”

  I never smoke. I do not like the way it makes me feel. The lightness without the well-being. The scary feeling of no control, even worse than the everyday feeling of no control.

  “Sure,” I say.

  This throws Pauly nicely. He takes a good sharp look into me. The three of us are out the back now, on the small platform where the car we were riding would be attached to the car that was following, if there were more than ten or twelve people ever desiring to travel to or from Whitechurch by train. Pauly is staring at me, tilted, the way a dog does when you make an unfamiliar sound. The wind feels wild and screamy, the way it seems to rush from all sides, swarming us and whipping our hair onto our faces as we face out the back toward where we were. Somehow Mary Martha manages to light up, and she is pulling hard on the smoke.

  “Mary Martha here says Lilly didn’t get on the train because of me,” Pauly says as if he’s talking about the banner headline on the morning’s Whitechurch Spire. He takes the joint and sucks on it, then continues talking. “Says Lilly already made up her mind about school anyway. She’s gone, Oak. What do you think about that?”

  He passes me the joint as if he’s passing me the info. I take it, I stare at it. The flower girl is perhaps now in the dining car gifting somebody else with her smile. I take a minor hit of the joint.

  “So what, Pauly?” I say. “We knew this, I think. We knew Lilly was going. She wants a life, and she doesn’t need your permission. It would probably be a good time to stop playing stupid about it.” Normally this moment would be handle with care. Trouble is, at this moment, I don’t. Care.

  I stare at him, provoking. I hope he screams at me.

  “My favorite color is VCR blue,” Paul says evenly.

  Mary Martha snorts a laugh, grabs a smoke. “Recite another Mary Martha poem,” she says.

  “The color of the screen when the tape is finished but you leave the TV on. I watch that for hours sometimes.”

  I take the joint from Mary Martha before she offers it. I take another hit. What a chump I was not to go to her. I should go back to the bar and invite her back here, is what I should do.

  I’m thinking, I did it again.

  I’m thinking, He wasn’t even there, for Chrissake.

  I’m thinking, I can’t remember when it wasn’t like this.

  I’m thinking, Thinking is a start anyway.

  I’m thinking, I may well do it. I’m thinking hard on it when Pauly snatches the smoke from the pinch of my fingers, and Mary Martha works at sparking up a second one.

&nb
sp; “Mary Martha keeps making me offers I shouldn’t be able to refuse,” Pauly says, nervous-grinning. “And listen to this, she says that Lilly says it’s fine with her if I go for it.”

  Weird, I am glad to hear that Lilly said that. Go, Lilly.

  Run, Lilly.

  “Why did you change your name, Mary Martha?” I ask.

  “Why would Lilly say that?” Pauly asks. Suddenly adrift.

  Mary Martha looks at me. “How come you don’t have a girlfriend, Oakley? Good-looking guy like you, and nice, too, not like this psychopath Pauly.”

  “That’s not my name anymore,” Pauly says. “I want to be called Penelope.”

  “Shut up, Pauly,” she says, and hits him very sharply, very affectionately, on the shoulder. I feel bad for Mary Martha.

  “Okay, you can still call me Pauly, but it’s the other one, the one spelled P-o-l-l-y.”

  “How come, Oakley?” she persists.

  How come. How come? Why does that phrase mean “why”? Like, how did it come to this? Is that it? How, fucking, come?

  “Because he’s got me,” Pauly says.

  “Didn’t Mary Martha ask you for a poem a while back? Ya fake,” I say.

  I figure to catch him off guard, make him slip. As so many times before, I figure him wrong. He leans with his back against the rail, facing me head-on.

  Mary Martha — Epilogue

  Dear Miss Penelope

  This is all hell for me

  The color

  is VCR

  It’s not a bad haircut

  It’s a scar

  Now the death flower’s

  fading

  Love does not fucking last

  But say now

  This train’s trucking

  awfully fast

  Mary Martha is game, but also inexperienced and stoned. She does her best.

  “Was I in there someplace?” she asks, then chuckles.

  All I know at the moment is that I am not, in there. I don’t care what is, either. Pauly is right about me. If something requires an act of will, I won’t.

  That has to stop.

  I will ask the flower girl to join us.

  The conductor’s face appears in the window, and suddenly I am in a full panic. We will be arrested now. I know we will be, and I hate that feeling so much. We were arrested before, me and Pauly. I used my phone call to bring my dad down, and luckily he was home to do it and to not give a particular shit about it either which is not too bad a quality in a father I think. Pauly used his one call to call, as he said, the only person he had.