Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  She autographed her old out-of-prints but read from her new stories, all scheduled for publication, but this was the first time she had shared them. Though crowds were small, she never spoke to an empty house. The most alert, intelligent audience for the whole trip was in a tiny store and coffee stop in Wolf Point, Montana, where it seemed every member was anxious and ready to argue either with her or with one another over the issues raised in her fiction. They listened closely, seriously, and they related what they heard to their own experiences and perceptions. They were better than sophisticated. They showed no interest in her private life; they wanted no writing tips or publication advice. One elderly woman hated “Shadow,” the one about the hospital chapel and the river of suffering; another, who seemed to be her older sister, defended it with passion. The first, Betty, said the story made the suffering man out to be some kind of martyr. “What he’s going through is nothing unusual,” she said, and her sister said, “That’s exactly the point.” They all disliked the bus plunge story. She could tell, not because any of them said so, but because of their tolerant smiles. She decided she didn’t much like it either.

  After the reading, the older sister came up to Amy to apologize. “Betty always looks at the sunny side,” she said. “It’s a religion with her. With all of us up here, really. The nights are so long. Throw shadows at your peril.” They talked about The Old Curiosity Shop and Vanity Fair, and she admired Alphonse, who snored beneath the signing table. “He’s wearing some sort of outfit,” she said delicately. “He’s a service dog,” said Amy. She opened her mouth to explain about the HPD and how of course she didn’t really have it, then decided not to waste the lady’s time. Her name was Emily. Emily waved good-bye at the door. It was snowing, a full two weeks before Halloween. “Never seen anything like it,” said Emily, and went out to join Betty on the cold sidewalk.

  * * *

  On the train, most evenings Amy had eaten with Alphonse in the roomette, but since that energized crowd at Wolf Point had habituated her to conversation, she missed, just a little, the company of her own kind. That evening Amy decided to take supper in the dining car. The maître d’, a magenta-coiffed young woman whose job it apparently was to segregate diners according to age, seated her with Thelma Schoon, a hearty old dame who hailed from Lincoln, Nebraska and was thinking of writing a book about it. She recognized Amy from TV and asked where she got her ideas, but soon turned the conversation to her own story.

  Thelma could still remember things that had happened when she was barely two years old. She must have been born in the middle of the Depression, as she had clear memories of men coming to the back door of her house, asking her mother if she had any old shirts. “They were trying to get jobs, and they needed white shirts. We never threw out any of Daddy’s, in case someone could use them.” Thelma’s parents had been academics, teaching “at the U.” Tenure had fed and housed them. She talked about family sabbaticals, summers in Puget and Long Island Sound, and about her mother teaching Arapaho children before she got married. It was the mother who told Thelma she was a “born storyteller.” This was false. She had phenomenal recollection of detail—what any true writer could have done with that!—but no sense of what made a story worth telling. As they waded through baked trout, artichoke hearts, and a not-bad Chablis, Thelma rambled through a childhood recorded but not really taken in. Listening to her was like viewing someone’s vacation slides. Of course, Thelma had a story—everyone has a story—but she did not seem to know what it was, and didn’t know she didn’t know. Knowing what your story is, Amy was fond of telling her classes, was what separated writers from everybody else.

  Amy prodded her now again with questions. Did you ever attend your father’s lectures? Did your mother miss the Arapaho? But none touched off a true narrative. Amy found her mildly interesting despite the chaos, the one-damn-thing-after-anotherness, of her memory stores. Her hair was iron gray and collected at her nape in an intricate bun. She wore no wedding ring and never mentioned children, and as she spoke, her eyes took in the dining car, the diners, Amy, the crossing lights outside their window, filing it all away with care. When they finished, Thelma headed off to the observation deck and Amy back to her roomette. Perhaps, said Thelma, they could breakfast together. She was a hoarder, Amy thought as she bedded down. She never threw anything away. Amy would have suffocated in all that clutter. “Hoarding,” she wrote in her notebook, and instantly slept.

  * * *

  The crash impact did not wake her. Rather the sharp pain in her right side, pinned against the wall as she was by some fixture that had come loose and lodged in her ribcage. In the pitch dark, she knew she was no longer in bed but couldn’t tell where she was. The basset’s toenails clicked frantically—not a walking rhythm, but as though he were fumbling with some metal object, and then he slid into her lap. He was shivering. She felt him all over for bumps and wounds but could find none, and at her touch he quieted down and licked her hand, so assiduously that she wondered if she were bleeding, but no. Outside was dead quiet and then shouts, screams, and, from some distance, an explosion, and her window lit up yellow, so she could see the compartment interior and find the door latch. She stood, leashed Alphonse, and opened the door, expecting smoke and flames, but the narrow corridor was silent, the air still, and they found their way outside without incident.

  The second she stepped off the train Amy came to herself, fully understanding that they had somehow crashed, and she turned to go back in, to check the other roomettes, to call out to anybody trapped inside, but three men were already ahead of her. She recognized a porter; the other two looked like passengers. Again she checked Alphonse. He was fine, quite chipper, straining at the leash to move down the line, to follow the jumble of cars, a few, like hers, still more or less on the rails, others jackknifed, and one far up ahead horribly mounting the trailer of a semi which apparently had crossed its path. She could tell it was a semi only because the cab was not on fire. The rest of the truck and surrounding train was engulfed. She could not see beyond the fire to the front passenger cars and engines.

  People ran frantically from car to car, looking for a way back in, or huddled in clusters, or wandered along the embankment which sloped steeply down from the rails. They were in high frosted grass; she could not see beyond the firelight farther down. For all she knew they were hard by forest, farmland, water, or some life-threatening precipice. They were someplace in Montana. She really hadn’t been paying attention. Compared to this endless unknown, the mangled, burning train seemed the safer bet, marginally more hospitable. Alphonse yanked her on past quiet children and yelling adults. Her right side hurt—she had maybe broken a rib—but she was otherwise all right, certainly in better shape than the people being dragged from the cars now. A grown man struggled with his rescuers, called for his mama. “Poor man, he’s delirious,” she heard a woman say, and another answered, “No, he’s not. I saw him in the dining car. He’s traveling with his mother.” Everywhere she wandered, people called out names. Timothy! Carol-Ann! Daddy! Mrs. Carmen Lopez! Casualties were laid out in rows near enough to the fire so that those attending to them could see their injuries, which ranged from burns to head wounds to amputated limbs. The rows looked inordinately neat, as though someone had measured, trying to achieve a tidy grid. She knelt and pressed down hard on a silent man’s thigh while the magenta maître d’ tried to tighten a tourniquet, but beneath Amy’s palms she could feel the pump empty him out and quit. “He’s gone,” she said, and the young woman said, “We can’t know that,” and kept at it. Amy choked back a laugh. I must be hysterical, she thought, and then the idea of having this thought struck her as even more hilarious, and she had to turn away and pretend to cough and choke. We can’t know that. There was an article of faith for you.

  The sky to her right lit up as three helicopters landed in what turned out to be a rocky field, so there went that mystery, and rescue personnel streamed toward them. Some of them set up a command post next to the i
njury grid. She knew this because the apparent leader, who looked no older than Ricky Buzza, actually used the words “command post.” Amy and the other passengers who had been trying to help were supplanted by people who knew what they were doing, and after watching for a while she was about to wander away when a young man adorned with fluorescent straps and badges asked to borrow her dog.

  “There’s a missing child,” he said.

  Amy glanced at the nearby car, folded in on itself, flames dancing in the windows. Alphonse would die in that car. He would get himself pinned or blown up. “You want to take him in there?” she asked, pointing. Already she was frantically trying to imagine a decent excuse for not allowing them to do this. Already she knew there was none.

  “The kid isn’t on the train,” the man said. “She must have been thrown clear or wandered off.”

  Amy still hated the idea, although Alphonse had not stopped pulling on her since they disembarked. “He’s not a bloodhound,” she said, but she let him take her dog away, because how could she not. She watched Alphonse trot past the helicopters and into the darkness of the field. He certainly looked purposeful. His long ears brushed the tops of the frosted grass. They were bred that way, to keep the scent in front of the nose. What would she do if they lost him? She started out after them but was interfered with by an officious young rescuer who shone a blinding flashlight in her face and took her elbow. “Why don’t you come over this way, ma’am?” he said, attempting to guide her back to the injury grid, and she said, “Because I have other plans.” She shook him off. “If you’ll excuse me, I have someplace to go.” “Ma’am,” he said, “who is the president of the United States?” “John Quincy Adams,” she said, and just then a naked man ran up, grabbed the rescuer, and demanded to talk to someone in authority. Amy slipped away.

  When she got beyond the helicopters and out and down into the field, all noise and light receded together. She felt her way forward until she could begin to see the moon and then the brighter stars emerge in a sky that was a perfect bowl of dark. Her feet were bare. Well, that was probably a good thing, she thought, or else she’d be tripping all over the place. She was beginning to be cold, the dark silence was waking up her senses, but she still had a little feeling in the soles of her feet, and she marveled at the relative smoothness of the rocks out there, Montana rocks, nothing like the sharp, unwelcoming rocks of Maine, and she dwelled on that hopeful thought as long as she could, all the while listening intently, and sure enough she heard him, very far off, woofing happily. Good. He was safe. She was trying to decide whether to stay there and wait or make her way back, and then she heard a ragged moan not far away, too low-pitched for a child, and then she found someone, a woman, Thelma Schoon, lying on her back, her face and hair shiny with thick blood, her eyes bright and darting, her remaining arm stretched out on the ground, her hand raised and waving like a metronome.

  “Thelma,” Amy said. “Here I am,” and tried to shrug off her coat and cover her, then realized she was wearing only a nightgown. “Over here!” she shouted back at the faraway lights. Thelma’s other arm had been torn away at the shoulder. Amy could not imagine how she might be saved. She called out again and then lay down beside Thelma and, resting most of her weight on one elbow, covered her with her body, her flannel gown instantly drenched. The smell of blood was almost intoxicating. “Here I am,” she kept saying. “It’s Amy.” “There you are,” said Thelma. “Dinner’s ready.” Her body pulsed, its rhythm regular but so faint. “Am I hurting you?” Amy asked. Thelma said she hadn’t stolen the candy, no matter what Janie said. Janie was a great big liar. Amy lifted her head and shouted again, “Over here!” but Thelma said hush-hush-hush. “Talk to me, Thelma,” Amy said. “I’m here.” Max had died without her, sending her down the hospital hall for a glass of milk. Now she attended hard to this dying stranger’s gasps and murmurs, at once conversational and unintelligible, and plainly narrative. She heard Harold and of course and never, I never did that. She said this over and over. “I know,” Amy said. “All the doors were wide open when I left them,” Thelma said, “and I laughed and you were right there rising.” The light left Thelma’s eyes.

  Amy kissed her forehead. “There’s your story, Thelma,” she said.

  * * *

  After that she got lost trying to find Alphonse and then a huge fluorescent man walked up and threw a blanket on her. She explained that the blood wasn’t hers, that there was a dead woman on the ground someplace, and that she had to find her dog.

  “You’re the lady with the dog?” asked the man, and then yelled toward the light, “Hey, I got the dog lady!”

  “Where have you taken him? What have you done with him?” She was so cold and shaking terribly. She couldn’t feel her feet.

  The man wrapped the blanket tight around her and picked her up as easily as if she were a child.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Amy. “I can walk, thank you very much.”

  “Your feet are all torn up, ma’am,” he said, trotting uphill toward the light, the train, the carnage.

  “I told you, that is not my blood.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “No it is not. Listen to me. I want my dog.”

  “Your dog’s a hero, ma’am. Hold on a minute and I’ll show you.”

  Amy was perilously close to crying with frustration and probably something deeper. Also, she was peeved. In her girlhood, she had daydreamed about moments just like this, being carried off by some brute in the woods. It wasn’t sexy at all. It was stupid. Now they were back in the light, ten times brighter than before, and he set her down gently on a gray blanket. The radiance began to warm her. “That was a total waste of energy on your part. I’m just going to get back up,” she said, but she couldn’t see him, the light was searing her eyes. “Back off,” he yelled. “Leave this woman alone! Have some respect!” She heard him ask someone for a hot washcloth, and then she felt it on her face, warm and rough, as he scrubbed at her mouth and cheeks. “Sorry,” he said, “but you look like hell, and I can’t keep these creeps away forever.” Why did this lummox care what she looked like? His familiarity was breathtaking. Had they known each other in an earlier life?

  When she managed to shield her eyes with a blanket corner, she saw she was in some infernal media arena, with two TV cameras right there in front of her and a hovering news helicopter shining down like God’s flashlight on all of them, the quick and the dead and Amy.

  She tried to rise and escape and found she could not. The lummox had been right about her feet—they were all scraped up raw and would have to be bandaged before she could walk. She tried to at least turn her back, but the news people were everywhere. One of them knelt down beside her and stuck a microphone in her face. “Amy Gallup—” he began.

  “How do you know my name? Buzz off! People are dying! Shame on you!”

  “It’s on your dog, ma’am,” said the lummox, somewhere to her left. He sounded like he was enjoying himself.

  “Where is my dog?”

  Someone thrust a leash into her hand, and at the end of it, there was the basset, safe and sound, in his brilliant blue-and-gold service dog outfit, which did, she now remembered, have her name embroidered on it, followed by “HPD.” Alphonse, not Amy, was the cynosure of all media. Apparently he had found a toddler freezing in a ditch. On either side of her, TV reporters broadcast identical fables about little miracles, answered prayers, and single rays of hope. Someone had given him a soup bone on which he crunched happily, stretched out on the ground and propped up on his elbows like a sphinx, holding it upright in his great front paws, his profile dancing in the strobe of flashing cameras. “Bassets are never used for search and rescue,” some expert was explaining. “This is most unusual.” Amy couldn’t figure it out either, unless the child had cookies in her pocket. That was probably it.

  She was still cold, deep in her bones, so she rolled herself tight in the blanket and curled up on her side, facing away from the commotion. After a lon
g while it died down. She called him to her and folded him into the blanket and nestled against him. He smelled like smoke and earth, and he warmed her. She had never been in shock before, and assumed that soon it would either set in or wear off. She waited for it, listening to cries and chatter and far-off wails and sirens and the rumble and whine of machines. Already she was losing Thelma’s bright eyes, her upturned face in the moonlight, already Thelma’s dying moments were turning into words, she could feel them slip away to join the rest of her own chaotic memory stores. What a shame that all of Thelma’s hoarded data, all those images she had categorized, dusted, and polished, every one of them was gone.

  A hand grabbed her shoulder. “Take me last,” she said, “it’s just a broken rib.” The lummox handed her a cell phone. “Somebody wants to talk to you,” he said.

  “Babe,” said Maxine.

  It must be at least three in the morning. How had she found her?

  “You look like something out of Titus Andronicus.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Am I on the TV?”

  “Not at the moment. Look, I booked you a flight from Helena.”

  “Why would you do that? You know I don’t fly.”

  “Seriously? What are you afraid of now?”

  “Flying!”

  “Amy,” Maxine said. Amy could not remember Maxine ever calling her by name. “You’ve just gotten yourself into a mass-fatality accident. It’s all over the news. They’re saying twenty-three dead. You’re alive. You got past it. Just fly the hell home and call me, because we’ve got a lot to talk about, let me tell you.”

  Amy noticed something odd: Maxine hadn’t coughed once during this speech. In fact, she hadn’t coughed, at least on the phone, for a while now. Was she really dying? Did she even have emphysema? Amy was afraid to ask. “You’ve seen too much bad TV. Knock it off with the profiling.”