Vapors: The Essential G. Wayne Miller Fiction Vol. 2

by G. Wayne Miller

  When I returned, I had caught it! I could hardly believe my luck! I could not look at the infernal things for long, either. Still in its cage, I locked it into an old freezer down cellar, certain it could not escape those confines.

  I did not look at it again — truly, did not but only occasionally think of it — until after the funeral.

  By then, thank the Lord, it had died. Considering the bizarre circumstances of all this, I did not feel I could risk burying it. And so I tossed it into the blazing fire I had built.

  I still have told no one of my discoveries, by the way, not even Dr. Morton. Nor do I intend to. I suspect the undertaker was relatively new at his work, for there were no questions raised during the time he had Mother’s body. And, of course, there was no autopsy, as there was no ostensible reason for one.

  I understand the reading of the will shall be a week from Thursday. Do I expect you then?

  Ruth

  May 24

  Herbert,

  I greet your decision to sell the place with great disappointment and sadness. Certainly it is your right to do what you want with the property, as Mother’s will made clear, but surely you have some fondness for the place...

  And as for me ... It’s all have, all I have ever had.

  You say you will be up before the end of the month for an overnight to arrange disposition of the furnishings. I would hope, at the very least, that you not put her oils on the auction block. They have very little value beyond the sentimental.

  Ruth

  June 28

  Herbert,

  The movers arrived today. Perhaps in years to come, I shall be able to put all of this in its proper perspective. But as I look out at the roses, fresh with their first bloom of the season...

  You mentioned over the phone your recent headaches and — you did not use the word, but I do believe I recognize the symptom — the gnawing sensation in your head.

  For days now, I have been pondering how best to tell you.

  Herbert, I lied about the fate of that wretched creature. My poor overloaded and stressed brain just spit out a mistruth. That thing did not die that night in the trap, as I have indicated. It stayed alive, but by next morning it had shrunk to half its size. By the next day, it had reduced itself by half again, and it became necessary to transfer it to a jar with airtight cover. Whatever the nature of its strange metabolism, I believe it was responding to lack of food by consuming itself, much as I have read the human body will do, although without similarly dramatic shrinkage.

  By the night of your May 19 stayover (with your power of attorney and as executor of the estate, which Mother granted you, you were meeting the next morning with the realtor and assessor), it had shriveled to the size of a Japanese beetle, which would explain, I suppose, how it had been able to burrow unnoticed into poor Mother.

  How shamefully careless I was the night you visited!

  How unforgivably idiotic!

  After you were asleep, I happened to find myself (out of the most morbid curiosity) examining that thing again. As I was about to recap the jar, I clumsily dropped it. The creature was tiny by then, but able to move with an unbelievable speed. Before I could respond, it had disappeared under the door to your room.

  That room, you may recall, was Mother’s.

  And before her, Father’s.

  Herbert, you can’t possibly imagine the depths of my despair! Please believe me when I say not an hour does not go by that I do not soundly chastise myself for my clumsiness and stupidity. If there is anything I can do, anything at all, do not hesitate a single second to contact me at my new apartment.

  God willing, I take up residence there this afternoon.

  Love,

  Sis

  Death Train

  From across the Iowa cornfields, sneaking through the early September night, Luke can hear it coming closer, closer, louder: The death train, starting to slow, easing up on the throttle, going to be a stop tonight.

  Cat-like, he goes to his bedroom window, peers through the screen, the outside smells rich and sweet, harvest can’t be but a week off.

  He shivers and his upper body is getting a case of the chills again and at first he can’t look.

  Then he looks and...

  ...nothing.

  ‘Course there’s nothing. Can’t see the death train, no sir. Death train don’t run with lights. Don’t have no switchmen with kerosene lanterns, don’t have no friendly caboose rip-rollin’ along, a big old pot belly stove burning.

  Can hear it, though, sure you can, the clackety-clack of its wheels, the breathing heaving fire of its steam-engine belly, the laughter of its death engineer as he gets ready to pull down on the death whistle.

  Matthew said:

  (Listen to it, but don’t listen to it for very long, Lukey my boy. Them that listens to it too long is as good as —-

  (Don’t say that word.

  (Is goin’ for a ride.)

  “What is it, Luke?” The voice is old and stern, the voice of Uncle John. Luke starts, like he’s been caught touching himself where he oughtn’t to. He turns toward the light, a single 25-watt bulb hanging on a black cord from the hall ceiling. There he is now, Uncle John, his fat, doughy body filling the doorway to Luke’s room. He’s rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He’s sweating. Always sweating, Uncle John.

  “I asked you a question, boy, and I expect an answer. What is it?”

  “Nothing,” Luke says, thinking desperately there must be some way to explain everything without really explaining anything at all.

  “Gotta be somethin’, it bein’ past 1 in the ayem and you kneelin’ by your window, son, lookin’ out over a cornfield that’s as black as pitch. Gotta be somethin’. Nothin’ don’t look like this. Nothin’s nothin. This is somethin’.”

  “It was just, just a—-”

  “Train, Luke? You gonna say train?”

  “A crow, uncle. Eating on the corn. Honest, I heard it.”

  “Crows don’t fly by night. You know better than that, son.”

  “You leave him alone, you old fool. You hear me?”

  Now Aunt Edna is up. He listens to the softness of her slippers gliding across the upstairs hall floor. He can hear the rustle of her silk nightgown, disturbing the end-of-summer heat that hangs heavy and wet and still, like the YMCA pool on a busy Saturday, up here on the second story.

  “Stay out of it, Edna. Just stay out of it.”

  Great big hissing, the death train, its death wheels turning slower, the sound of metal brake on metal axle like fingernails on a grammar-school chalkboard.

  “What is it, Luke? A nightmare?” Her voice is soothing, cool, like the autumn that doesn’t seem to want to come this year. She never talks to John like that, only him. Only Luke, the child nature never let her have, the child her no-good sister left for her that day she packed her bags and left for California, goodbye and good riddance.

  “No, Auntie. It’s not a dream.”

  “What is it then, Luke?”

  “It’s the...”

  “What, Luke? What do you hear?”

  Should he say the word? Should he?

  Edna pushes past John. John grunts like a hungry old sow. On a Saturday night, after filling his body with bourbon and beer, he might have started in on her, his voice getting filthy and loud and his face turning redder than a freshly painted barn. Might have wished her stinking lousy soul to hell, and Luke’s right along with it, the two of them be damned forever.

  “Train,” Luke says.

  It’s more than John can take. “Now, you know there ain’t no train within 50 miles of here, son. Never has been. Never been no old tracks, no new tracks, no way, no how. County road, and that’s it. We been through all that before.”

  Aunt Edna has his arm around him. She is gazing out with him over the corn, dark and mysterious and speaking in hushed tones under a sluggish breeze that barely has the strength to reach the farmhouse. Whole summer’s been like that, hazy, humid, never-ending.
Overhead, there is a rind of moon, and it shines ghostly through the cornfields, over the barn, past the oak grove and beyond to where—-

  I can hear the death train grinding to a halt.

  Death whistle blowing, a low, shivering sound as might come echoing around and behind and through and off of the cracked marble stones in that graveyard out back of St. George’s Episcopal Church. Out in that graveyard alone on a late November afternoon, it could be, Uncle John’s corn crop long since in, the pumpkins going orange to brown, the air promising flurries, the daylight draining away into the trees, the shadows lengthening.

  That kind of day, Matthew said, you might hear it.

  Or on the sunniest most perfect day God ever did make — then, then you might hear it, too.

  Matthew said:

  (Heard it myself there more than once, Lukey boy. In the churchyard.

  (Heard what?

  (Why, the death train, death whistle blowin’ full away. And don’t it make sense, boy, hearin’ it there? Hearin it where it stops? Don’t it now?

  (I guess it does.

  (Sure it does. Sure.)

  Luke covers his ears. He starts to cry.

  “You make him stop that now,” John bellows to the woman who long since stopped sharing his bed, his room, his life. “You get him back in that bed, Edna, so’s we can have peace and quiet. A man can’t even get a good night’s sleep in his own house no more, all this horseshit goin’ on. Been goin’ on now two years, it has. I mean to put a stop to it.”

  “You shut up, John. Just keep that trap of yours shut. Can’t you see he’s afraid?”

  “Nine years old, and afraid of the dark. It’s downright sinful, is what it is.”

  “I told you, shut up.”

  “Where’s he get all this nonsense, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  “Go back to your room, John. I’ll handle this. This is none of your concern.” She’s sounding angry now, Aunt Edna is, angry like the day she threw that young whippersnapper from the electric company right out of the front parlor.

  “Goin’ on like somebody fresh on the lam from the looney bin.”

  “Put a lid on it, John.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you where he gets this,” John goes on, the rage building in his voice. “From Matthew Dorfman, that’s where.”

  “Matthew Dorfman’s your best worker,” Edna says. “Anybody around here’s talkin’ nonsense, it’s you, John Johnson.”

  “Idiot, no-good, sonofabitch Matthew Dorfman. Sits on his brains, that one does. Tomorrow, gonna fire him. Don’t need no farmhand gettin’ this kid riled up like that. First light, gonna fire him. That’ll put an end to this midnight crap with the kid here.”

  “Matthew’s my friend,” Luke says, but John doesn’t hear him.

  Matthew said:

  (They laugh at me, Lukey, all the time. Call me names. Your own uncle’s ‘bout the worst.

  (Why, Matt?

  (Folks are like that, I guess. Mean, some of ‘em. Downright mean. You look a little different, talk a little slow, and they laugh at you. Human nature, I guess. The dark side of things.

  (But I like you, Matt.

  (I like you, too, Luke.

  (And I don’t think you look strange. Honest, I don’t.

  (You’re a good boy, Lukey. Gonna be a fine man. I’ll see to that. I’ll see you make it.)

  “It’s okay, Luke,” Edna says when John’s gone back to his room.

  Eleven stops the death train’s made in Carson’s Corners since Luke started hearing it two years ago, the same summer Uncle John brought a simple-minded out-of-towner named Matthew Dorfman onto the payroll. Eleven folks ticketed, boarded and taken away. Phyllis Smith, who died of a heart attack the evening of the day she had tea with Edna. Uncle John’s schoolhood buddy George Snyder, who put the barrel of a shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger the third night of a three-day drinking binge. Mr. and Mrs. Gerard and their two children, killed instantly in a car crash a mile down Route 16, right there by the end of Uncle John’s number-two cornfield. The three scouts from Troop 112, drowned when their canoe tipped over the afternoon of St. George’s annual parish picnic. Old Mrs. Wannamaker, the Sunday morning Bible teacher, whose house burned down Christmas Eve.

  Matthew said:

  (Trains run on schedule, Luke.

  (‘Course they do.

  (‘Specially this one.

  (‘Specially this.

  (‘Course, it ain’t no ordinary schedule. Comes and goes as it sees fit, if you get what I mean.

  (I do.

  (Ever wonder who makes up those funny schedules, Lukey, my boy?

  (Never did. Who, Matt? Who makes them up?

  (Folks that run ‘em, that’s who.

  (But who runs them, Matt?

  (Can’t tell you that, my boy. Don’t know myself. But it’s gonna be someone pretty important, right? Train that big?

  (Right.)

  They stay by the window, sitting, staring out, Edna’s arms around Luke.

  Death train’s stopped now. Baggage’s being unloaded. Taking on water. What’s that bang? Must be adding on a car. Must be that.

  In his room, John closes his eyes and is almost asleep when he swears he hears it, from across the moonlit fields: a sound like a train whistle, then the uncomfortable grating of metal spinning on metal, and then, as the death train gets traction, builds momentum, a steady chug-a-lug-a-lugging.

  He thinks of Luke, but only for a moment, because the aneurism that’s been quietly blowing up inside his brain finally bursts, flooding his skull and drowning out the scream starting to form on his lips.

  “On its way, ain’t it, Luke?” Edna whispers as the breeze suddenly freshens and the staleness begins to move out of the farmhouse.

  He shakes his head, Luke does. “Yes, Auntie. On its way.”

  On his forehead the new wind is cool, comforting, reminding. Outside, the cornfields are dark, quiet, asleep.

  Simon

  It was the morning of the day things got so crazy that Dad sat me down and started right into one of his Special Talks, which are his words for them, not mine. Dads are like that, I guess, always something on their minds.

  “Kathy,” he said, not sounding angry, only concerned in a big way, “Kathy, your mother has asked me to talk to you about your friend.”

  “What friend, Dad?” I asked, trying to sound like I didn’t know who he meant, even though I did, no question about it. This wasn’t the first time lately Mom or Dad had had one of their Special Talks about Simon.

  “This, ah, make-believe friend of yours.”

  “You mean Simon?”

  “I mean Simon.”

  “But he’s not make-believe, Dad. Honest. He talks to me all the time. He knows everything.”

  “Now, Kathy . . . “

  “He’s a neat guy, Dad.” And he was, too. Just because he wouldn’t let you see him, and he never did want to talk to anybody but me - well, to my way of thinking, none of that was good enough reason for Dad to be going on and on. It was unfair, is what it was, to me and Simon both. Especially considering how long the two of us had been friends, which was as far back as I could remember.

  “I’m sure he is a ‘neat’ guy,” Dad continued, “in your imagination.”

  “He helps me with my homework. Especially math. He’s great on math, Dad.”

  “Kathy . . . “

  “Billy says he has a friend like Simon.” That was a favorite trick of mine, always throwing Billy into the middle of things.

  “Your brother, Kathy, is five. Next year, you’ll be 12. Your mother’s right; You’re much too old for make-believe friends. I want you to cut it out.”

  “But Dad . . . “

  “No buts about it, young lady. I hope I won’t have to punish you, but if it comes to that, I will. Now, please, no more about . . . Simon. Okay? Okay.”

  And just like that, the Special Talk was over. I knew better than to push it - you push Dad too far, and then you
’ve got some kind of real trouble on your hands. No, I promised myself not to mention Simon anymore, not to Dad and Mom, at least, and let it go at that.

  So Dad went off to work the morning of the day things went cuckoo and I stayed home with Billy and Mom, ‘cause it was July and school was out for the summer and I was too young yet for a job, except for some baby-sitting Mom lined up for me around the neighborhood every now and again.

  ‘Long about 9:15, I decided to ride my bike over to Sue Parker’s. The sun was a hazy ball climbing into the sky and the air had that sticky feeling that reminds you of one of those old-fashioned movies about the South - you know, with plantations and moss hanging off trees and funny stuff like that. It was going to be one of those days, all right, probably a thunderstorm or two and maybe even some hail along toward evening. If it came, I hoped that storm wouldn’t knock down Dad’s corn, which was knee-high and growing like crazy.

  Mom was in the kitchen cleaning the oven, and Billy was out back climbing over the Jungle Gym like a monkey in a zoo when I left for Sue’s. On purpose, I took Kettle Road, which zigs and zags up Morton’s Hill and down to the trailer park, which is where Sue lives with her folks and big brother. Cold Spring’s one of the prettiest spots on God’s good green earth, least that’s what Dad always says, and Kettle Road has one of the best views going. Not that you’re liable to be passing through anytime soon. Chances are you wouldn’t even find us on a map, unless maybe it’s that neat bicentennial map of West Virginia, which has places even Grampa’s never heard of. If it helps, nearest town is Knob Fork, which isn’t anything but a one-whistle old town itself.

  Over the hill I went, stopping every so often to tie my shoelace, or pick up a strange-looking new rock for my collection, or take in the view, or whatever happened to suit my fancy. Like I said, Cold Spring is prettier than a National Geographic picture, mostly green mountains with fields and pastures tucked here and there and silvery streams where Dad and his lodge friends catch good-sized brook trout every time they go out. That morning, as I looked down into the valley, I could see the mist still clinging in patches to Cold Creek, which becomes a bigger creek and then a stream and finally a small river that empties into the Monongahela over there by Morgantown.